The Mark Perlberg CPA Podcast
The Mark Perlberg CPA Podcast
EP 119 - Financial Freedom through Passive Investing w/ Joey Mure
Start Your Journey to Financial Freedom through passive income NOW! In this episode, I break down how to reduce your tax bill, grow passive income, and rethink what freedom with money really looks like.
Here’s what you’ll take away:
• How to stop overpaying taxes by adjusting W-4s and using smart tax planning.
• Simple ways to create passive income with real estate, land, and infinite banking.
• Why knowing your “Investor DNA” helps you pick the right investments.
• How to replace active income with passive streams that give you time and flexibility.
Ready to slash your tax bill? Schedule your free consultation and let's strategize your tax savings together! Book now at: https://www.prosperlcpa.com/apply Or, if you still need more time, here are some other ways to begin winning the tax game...
Take our free Tax Planning Checklist & learn about what tax savings may be available for you in our minicourse at https://taxplanningchecklist.com
You don’t need Wall Street to reach financial freedom. You need the right plan, the right tools, and the discipline to make your money work for you.
Build wealth on your terms. Keep more of your money. Start today.
For a free financial freedom score care, go to https://go.wealthwithoutwallstreet.com/markperlberg
Welcome. Today I want to challenge your beliefs and assumptions on what you should be doing with your cash and what financial freedom means, and it's time that we rethink what our sources of income are and what we do with our time. And the reason why I say this is because our guest today has had a chance to think deeply about these topics, has a chance to write a book on it right here Wealth Without Wall Street and he has helped many individuals achieve finance. First, it's not just about achieving financial freedom, but understanding what that is and how to look at your money and your time and how to align all of that with your purpose and how we can actually implement to create something special here. So I'm very excited to introduce Joey Murray. I remember you said last time it was like puree. Like puree, no, is that right?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1:Muret like puree you got it Muret like puree from Wealth Without Wall Street. I have his book as well, which I checked out, and we're going to talk about some of these concepts and also from this conversation, I want you guys to actually have some really great takeaways on how you can get further to your journey of financial freedom through passive investing and other wealth building vehicles. So, joey, can you introduce yourself in 60 seconds or less?
Speaker 2:Oh, wow, mark, good to be with you, my friend. Being in the room with like-minded individuals is always my favorite place to be. So I started my career in the mortgage business and after 11 years and having implemented some of the things that we're going to probably talk about here in the book over four years, I got really passionate about man more people need to know this and left my mortgage career to get into this idea of infinite banking. Sharing that message and that led both Russ and I, my business partner, into this idea of like man. We have all this capital now in one place. It's asking us what do you need to do with this? What can I do with this money? To then create financial freedom?
Speaker 2:We started to see that man, time is the value proposition that we're all looking for, and you can't do that by having a higher income. You have to actually start replacing your active income with passive income. So that's where Wealth Without Wall Street was born. And man. After almost 600 episodes, we've learned some things, we've invested some things and we're now sitting on over $50,000 a month in passive income and helping people walk through the same process we did, hopefully in a lot less time, because we've learned all the shortcuts along the way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think that's a really important question here is what do you want to do with your cash?
Speaker 1:And we have that same conversation with our clients, because when a lot of clients they have a major capital gain event or they're paying too much out of their W-2s and they want a tax strategy, one of the first things I want to know is what do you want to do with your cash? Because there's so many ways to drive down your taxes and build wealth and passive income, but you're never going to find a one-size-fits-all, blanket answer. Your wealth building strategy and your tax planning strategy has to be aligned with where are you going and what do you want to do with your cash? Yeah, right, so if you want to retire early and live on real estate, then we do all these real estate strategies and accelerate the depreciation and maybe short term rentals or rep status. Or if you are planning to maybe pursue some other type of lifestyle or pay for your children's college tuition, and there's all sorts of ways to do that creatively and resourcefully. So that's one of the most important questions we see.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. I think one of the biggest things that we uncover, mark, is when people come to us. They love the idea of financial freedom because they're like man. I've been in my career for a while, I'm making a lot of money, I'm income rich but cash poor. That's literally like one of the things that people will say, and they recognize man.
Speaker 2:The hours that I'm putting in, either at a business I own or the job that I'm highly paid at, continue to increase and my freedom keeps shrinking. The thing that I would have anticipated by having more income is more freedom, and it's just the opposite. It actually is taking and stealing your time for dollars, and so when they come, they want that, but they recognize that they've been doing things with money all along their path that are actually keeping them from financial freedom. They're actually like literally putting their money in jail and giving someone else the key, and that is the complete opposite. I know, like you and I, you're shaking, you're nodding your head because you know exactly what I'm talking about.
Speaker 2:But once we align man, all I really need to do, I don't need to keep abdicating this function of wealth building and creating passive income to somebody else Like Wall Street, my financial advisor. They are not going to help me get there. I have to take back the reins. As soon as we do that and we start recognizing I have to create more passive income than monthly expenses, I'm going to start doing different things with money than I've ever done before. I'm going to stop doing certain things that I thought were beneficial to me at one point, certain things that I thought were beneficial to me at one point, and I'm going to start doing things that will help me get more control with that cash. To your point. And it's amazing, when you align those things, what sort of results you can get in such a short time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and when you say and I remember you had a subsection in the book on just changing the way you think section in the book on just changing the way you think Because the default status is you let your employer take a 3% match and the money is in this account. You don't really know what they're doing with your money, but your hope is that this grows as you pay off your mortgage so that when the time you hit 65, you no longer can work because of this retirement account and your mortgage. That's a lot of people are very hopeful that that's going to give them what they want in life. That's right, right.
Speaker 2:But but you know, Mark, what you just said there is so funny, because we start our careers many times with the idea of retirement being the end, like, oh, because, just think about this for a second I'm going to defer life, I'm going to defer capital, I'm going to defer all these things until I quote unquote retire until I'm no longer in service that's what that word means. Right To be taken out of service. And when we look at that, we start doing things with money, to your point, putting money in qualified plans and other things, thinking and paying down my mortgage, sometimes more aggressively than even required, so that I'm prepared for retirement. But I think the new awakening is, mark, is when you have those smaller kids and you start looking around and you think these kids aren't going to be this age for very long. In fact it's flying by. The days are long but the years are short is what you hear. Right, and they don't want to hang out with you when they're 22, when they're 35. But right now, when they're eight, when they're 12, when they're six, whatever, they want time with mom and dad, and in fact you want to pour into them, you want to give them a legacy, and that's not just money, that's also knowledge, it's also time and memories and experiences.
Speaker 2:And your retirement can actually happen today, like I can actually create freedom in my time today if I can replace my active income with passive income when I can cover my expenses. And so the idea of retirement is actually always been a scam in my mind. I got to wait until I'm 65 to start having freedom of my time. I have to wait till I'm 65 and I don't have my health maybe at the tip top, peak performance that I'm at today. I have to give up the time with my loved ones until then when at that point, they are already having their own kids. Like. This is not. This is not the ideal situation, and we wake up to this and we say, okay, I'm going to start doing things differently and we can dive into what that looks like, what our passive income operating system has really developed into. But, man, we need a new system to have a new result. We can't keep thinking retirement and have more freedom today.
Speaker 1:When we think about you know. You reminded me of an interesting quote from Duke Ellington. He was being interviewed. He says when do you think you may retire from playing music? And his response was retire to what?
Speaker 1:Exactly freedom here and concepts of retiring. Sometimes, when I think about what one may define as retirement, it was interesting because you see people like right after they retire, like they die within six months, they have like nowhere to go, right, because we don't want to do that, obviously. And then the idea of just sitting around and doing nothing because you don't have to make money, that's not what financial freedom is to me, right, and that sounds kind of boring. So you know, to achieve financial freedom is, I think, it's not about just sitting on. Maybe to some people it may be going out surfing every day, but I can't do more than two beach days before I lose my mind and want to get out of the sun. So you know this is a question here. So what exactly is financial freedom?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think what it is is, mark, that we were all created for a purpose and we were all given unique capabilities and you know pros and cons to our personality and other things but we've been given the opportunity to impact the world in a unique way, the world in a unique way, and I think, if we're really honest with ourselves, if we didn't have to consider trading time for money today, we would be a lot more intentional about those hours. To your point, being on vacation is not the same as being retired. You're not going to want to just sit on a beach all day, every day. You might for a couple of days, to your point. But other than that, man, you're meant to actually contribute to the place that you're at, the people that you're around, the community that you've been given, the family and the legacy that you have to leave is not going to build itself right. You have a unique way that you can contribute and I think financial freedom gives you the ability to start dreaming about that again. In fact, mark, I just want to challenge, as you're listening to us right now, if you cannot, in one word or one sentence, explain to me what you would be doing if you were financially free. I want to challenge you to spend some time actually thinking about that Because, I'll be honest, most people that enter into our process, they have a hard time answering that question and I believe it's because they quit dreaming, they quit thinking about what's possible and they are only doing what do I have to put up with until this magical day of retirement? And I'll tell you this, it's impacted me.
Speaker 2:I was at the beach one time with my family. I have five girls, mark, I don't know if you remember that about me, but it's crazy. We're on the beach and we all have these matching water shirts, like the Sun Guards or whatever they call it, and it all has Wealth Without Wall Street on the chest. And this old lady older lady, I should say walks up and she says, hey, what's that on your shirt? And I was like, oh yeah, this is our company, wealth Without Wall Street. And she said, huh. She said what's that about? And I told her a little bit about it. She says, well, we just retired, my husband and I this past year, and I hope it's enough. That was literally her whole comment to me we retired last year. Comment to me we retired last year. I hope it's enough. And it really impacted me, mark, because the idea that she has climbed the summit. If you think about it right, she's arrived.
Speaker 2:This is what I've been trying to do is get to retirement. Get to retirement, get to retirement, because then I could start living right. Then I have this freedom, I could do whatever I want with my time, and the only thing she can say is I hope it's enough. Like that, does that sound like abundance? Does that sound like, all of a sudden, she's going to start living her dreams or doing what she's always wanted to do, or contributing at a high level? No, it says to me, this isn't what it's cracked up to be. Right, in fact, I'm probably going to live more scarce in retirement, worried that the money's going to run out. Right, like, think about it If the market goes up at the time of your retirement, you're like man, okay, sweet, maybe I could spend.
Speaker 2:Well, but what about next year? It might go down. And then what if I might need that money? So I don't want to overspend on things or experiences or whatever, but what if the market goes down right after I retire? All of a sudden, I'm thinking do I need to go back to work Right, like this mindset that Wall Street has produced in us, and this whole idea of retirement is for the birds. It is not going to produce the end result that you're looking for. Instead, you got to start shifting things, to take control of your finances today. Put your cash in the right location and become an investor. Don't abdicate it to somebody else. Become an investor and produce passive income today.
Speaker 1:That's the only way that you're going to get to your end goal that you're really trying to accomplish yeah, I, um, and I think about this when we think about, I mean, in the ideal situation, you have enough passive income not only to cover what you need, but it continues to grow and compound as you're retired. So you, let's say you're 75, you're not working, you're spending time with your grandkids. Let's say you're pulling in one year could be 300,000, next year could be 320, 330. You're not depleting your resources. If anything, you should have some form of I mean in the ideal world a self-perpetuating model, form of I mean in the ideal world a self-perpetuating model where your income continues to grow and compound and grow off.
Speaker 1:Your money continues to work for you, as opposed to worrying about oh, how much do I have left in these bank accounts before I die? You're going to potentially even leave some of that interest to your family as well, for sure. What do you think? So? Talk about be, do, have right. We're talking about thinking about this concept. Yeah, what we're doing with our money, the be do how and how we map out what's the outcome we're trying to get here.
Speaker 2:Well, what you're referring to is in the book we talked about really creating your vision of financial freedom, and this is where this is a framework like we were just talking about. If you can't really answer the question, what would I be doing if I was financially free? This is just a framework. Who would I need to be? What would I be doing and what would I have if I was financially free, right? So B is what sort of a person would I be? Would I be generous? Would I be, excuse me, would I be giving of my time I be giving of my time volunteering. Would I be more active in terms of my own health? Right? Would I be contributing within my family?
Speaker 2:In some ways, there's some unique thing that my family needs, that I need to become or I need to be present for. So there's a B component of financial freedom. There's a do what would I be doing, like? What sort of place would I be living in? Where would I be located in terms of geographically, like? These are just things that would potentially just prompt you, as the picture you're trying to accomplish and then have is this that last point Would I have a beach house? Would I have more time to give to my grandkids or to my kids, like what stage of life would I be financially free have could be? There might be a specific goal thing that you would love to have, like I'd love to have 16 rental properties, or I'd love to have, you know, a multifamily apartment that I own outright and I'm able to manage, or something like those sort of things can prompt you in this vision. So who do I want to be, what would I be doing and what would I have? That should hopefully help you as you're building out this picture.
Speaker 1:Very cool. Now let's talk about the pragmatics of it. So this might be some of the juicy details that we dive into with some of our audiences as well here. So this all sounds great. Now let's talk about the tools, where we're putting our money to do this. Now here's some of the things that I think that could get our audience very excited. Here.
Speaker 1:Our cash is trapped. The money comes out of your paycheck before you even get a chance to do with it. It goes to Uncle Sam. So it's like how am I even going to get ahead of this? I want to save money for taxes, but the money's already going for taxes. I don't have enough cash. You're in this cycle of just doom.
Speaker 1:So obviously we can start budgeting and setting aside funds, but here's another way where we can be really resourceful. We do this with our clients. Obviously, if you're a business owner, you have more flexibility on what you're doing with your cash and creating write offs, and you know when you pay your quarterly payments. We are helping our W-2 clients with adjusting their W-4s. So, once we've determined the tax plan that's optimal for our W-2 clients and we know the savings we will create, instead of waiting until April of the following year to get your interest free loan which we would call a tax refund back to the IRS. We can adjust your W-4s based on the tax savings we've created and you will immediately stop overpaying in taxes from your W-2 paychecks your W-2 paycheck. This gives you more liquidity to see the benefits of your tax savings sooner, to reinvest and compound your wealth through these passive vehicles at a faster rate.
Speaker 2:Yeah for sure. I think you're exactly right. In fact, I remember this this is not just blowing smoke here when I first started down this path I was making over $300,000 as a W-2 mortgage guy and I had no idea you could adjust your W-4. I just did not even know that was an option and at the time Russ and I now business partners. He was kind of coaching me on this. He was like dude, you're giving this interest-free loan to the government, what are you thinking? I'm like what other option do I have? We adjust those withholdings and all of a sudden I wasn't giving up. I wasn't getting a refund of like 25K a year or something. It was ridiculous almost 30K a year refund Because, especially when you're in some sort of commission role, they annualize that commission and so you just get just killed in terms of the amount of tax being withheld. And so 100% I agree with you and what I started doing with that money Mark as you probably know this from reading the book and having conversations with us, we started using the infinite banking concept as a storage facility for me to start parking that cash.
Speaker 2:I was no longer waiting on it to come to me and then putting in a savings account. I started optimizing it. We now call it the passive income operating system, but at the center of it is this infinite banking concept where we're overfunding whole life insurance in a way that gives us the maximum amount of cash value that we can then leverage and start buying passive income assets. Well, what have we done? You know we've really reversed the whole process. No longer is the IRS getting the money first, I'm getting the money first. I'm then telling that money to go earn more money by creating passive income, and the dollars in my system never stop compounding. To your point, they're constantly growing from now until I die with guarantees and dividends.
Speaker 2:And you want to talk about just reversing the polarity. I mean, that was a massive windfall of cash and interest and other things coming my way that were never being realized and I don't think most people understand that that's possible. But to your point, man, you start working with a actual tax strategist like Mark and you start to see that one, your CPA, is not going to help you with this and you can stop doing things like just putting money in qualified plans to save on taxes. That's not saving taxes, deferring taxes. You actually need a strategist like Mark's group to be able to help you say quit doing this deferral method and start actually saving taxes right? Stop overpaying the government and doing these things that are keeping your money at bay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and then there's all these ways where, if you're in a high bracket, we can reduce your taxes, but we don't have to wait until we're 59 and a half.
Speaker 2:And.
Speaker 1:I know you've talked about it and we've done this hundreds of times. We got short-term rentals, we have oil and gas. There's also some more advanced strategies with solar and charitable deductions, and you really got to collaborate with those top on those strategies to make sure you're doing it in a way that's going to create you the optimal amount of return and compliantly. But there's all these ways where you can permanently eliminate your taxes and put yourself in such a. When you do that, we're now putting gasoline on the fire here. We're now compounding your wealth at a much faster rate when we align these strategies.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you think about it. It is literally like a double whammy to your wealth building because before working with a strategist, right, you think you're doing the best you can because you're working with a CPA. Well, a CPA is awesome, but they're really looking in the rear view mirror. They're saying, what did you do last year? And you go to them and you say, well, yeah, but how do I keep writing this big check every year? How do I keep writing this big stinking tax check? And they say, well, I guess you could do this.
Speaker 2:They are not compensated to actively help you create the future, hoarding on activity that has already occurred. And you're asking them to do something they're not being compensated for. Versus, you work with Mark, his group, and they're actually helping you to create the future so that you quit paying so much in tax and that money now is found money Because, think about it, it's not eaten up in your lifestyle if you don't allow it to. You're able to then take that and start actively producing passive income as fast as possible. That is how you create the flywheel to again get out of the retirement mindset, get into the financial freedom mindset today, and all of a sudden, sudden, you have this new pool of money to do it with.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so yeah, and I mean this is the stuff most people are. Just they're going to stay on the hamster wheel, they're not going to see these opportunities. Now we talk all about these concepts and a lot about tax reduction strategies and we've held a lot of W2 folks, but I know that you've also had some. You know, you're in your community. You see people doing a lot of other interesting things here, Right? You're in your community. You see people doing a lot of other interesting things here, right? So, aside from just the things that I've listed, I know you know, like my buddy, Mark is doing land flipping, which is highly lucrative what are some other neat things that you see people doing to build their passive income?
Speaker 2:Well, I'll tell you. The first thing I always say is, when we start talking wealth without Wall Street, people are always like, well, what do you invest in? What's the best investment, what's the best passive income stream? And I'll tell you. The first step is not to answer that question, but to turn it around on you and say what sort of investor are you? Right, who are you as an investor? And most people look at me kind of puzzled, like what do you mean? Like what does that even mean? Don't you just tell me, hey, this is a better ROI than this, so I'm just going to go with that? And the answer is no, because you personally have a unique investor DNA profile. That's what we call it. Right, your personality will align with certain investments better than others. Your personality, your resources, your experiences lend themselves to certain passive income streams that are better and others are worse. And I'll give you a couple examples.
Speaker 2:My business partner, russ, is a high influencer type of personality. He wants to be talking about things. He wants to be actually advising and being more hands-on with the things that he's doing. He may not want to operate them on a day-to-day basis, but he wants to be in some way, shape or form able to increase the benefit of it. Well, you put him with a long-term rental and he's like bored to tears, because there's nothing he can do with that long-term rental other than put a renter in place or a management company in place. They rent it, they get a check every month and he gets whatever's left over.
Speaker 2:He's like somebody tell me that this is not what investing is, because this is boring as sin. But then you talk about somebody else, or you take that same long-term rental and you make it a short-term rental and now all of a sudden he's freaking out about it. He loves it because he can talk about it. He can build a website that will help drive traffic to it. He can get on social media and tell people hey, man, go check out my new condo down at the beach because it's going to do this or that or the other thing. He loves short-term rentals. But you'd get somebody who's a high, detail-oriented, conscientious, cautious investor and they want nothing to do with the short-term rental.
Speaker 1:It can be a headache at times.
Speaker 2:Right. Even though they love the fact that it's got a higher yield, potentially it's volatile. It changes with the seasons a lot of times. They don't want that. They want that steady monthly check coming in from that long-term rental nine times out of 10.
Speaker 2:And so my point is just because I get on here and tell you that I love land flipping and it's created $23,000 a month out of our $50,000 a month passive income, doesn't mean you should do it, because it could be a complete disaster for you. But you know, or hey, I've got cars on Turo that I have somebody operate and they're creating about five to $600 per vehicle that I buy for like seven or $8,000. That might be really good for you or it might be a just disaster train wreck. So start with your investor DNA, build your buy box and that way it tells you I'm going to say no to everything outside of the bounds of this buy box and then start investing. Quit thinking ROI. Quit thinking you know what's everybody else doing and going to the newest fad or the crypto coin that everybody's talking about. That stuff is garbage. You got to start with who you are, how God's created you to see the world, and then build your buy box and start investing from that point of confidence and that strength point of confidence and that strength.
Speaker 1:You know, joe, you make a really good point here, because we see this all the time, where our clients come to us and they're like, oh, the multifamily market isn't really working out that well, what do you think we should do? Where do you think we should invest? I hear that this guy is doing really good with alternative assets. Maybe the grass is greener here, right, and some people get seduced by the tax savings which can be incredible from short-term rentals, only to find that they are saving taxes on a money pit that is taking up all their time. And so when people ask me these questions, what I think to myself is it's not a matter of where the grass is greener, and that can change, because the profit, however lucrative one area investing is, it adjusts as people flood that market.
Speaker 1:There was a time where short-term rental investors were printing out money and it was like the easiest way to eliminate taxes and get rich. That's not the case anymore, but the people who were passionate and really wanted to treat this like a profession and an art and learn the business continued to thrive. The people who jumped on the bandwagon and thought that they figured things out and achieved financial freedom overnight are now going back to their W2 jobs, right. So a lot of this is it's not a matter of what is just. Like you said, maybe you can look at your stocks and how Fidelity Mutual is putting them in all these different buckets that you don't even know about.
Speaker 1:That's not how you're going to look at it when you're doing your passive investments in, certainly, real estate or other vehicles, because you're going to be more in control, and it's not about which type. It's about. Where can you master this type of investing? Where are you going to be the best and where's your skills? Where's your interest and where can you grow from your experiences and leverage that experience to get better and better and better every year, as opposed to, ah, double here a little this, a little that. Oh, I heard this is really good. Why isn't it really good? For me, that's not really the way we want to look at this when we're branching out and building these streams.
Speaker 2:Yeah, if I could just give like two points of advice around this. One you have to have a system that is reliable to build passive income. If you don't have a system, you're going to be driven from one thing to the next. You're going to buy the next financial product because so-and-so said it, you're going to follow this influence, or they're going to say do this. You're going to get nowhere and you're going to feel like you've done all the right things and you probably have. If you consider them each individually based on something. That's a positive. But if you don't have a system that helps you to align and say what am I really trying to accomplish and how can I then align everything according to that goal? As soon as you do that, you get all the clarity in the world. Okay, we call it the passive income operating system. We help hundreds and hundreds of people every single month do this.
Speaker 2:And then the second thing is you got to become an investor, because passive income does not mean uninvolved income. If you are not an investor, meaning you have not been trained to figure out your investor DNA, you haven't built a buy box If you don't know how to read a pitch deck and look for the red flags or the question behind the question, or read a PPM or know what questions to ask a operator or sponsor in their general partner deal that you're going to be an LP. If you haven't actually studied that and actually been trained on those things, don't put your money in it. Please do not, because you will be parted with your money. The Bible says a fool and his money are easily parted, and a fool is just somebody who's not taking the time to be educated.
Speaker 2:So create a system and then become an investor. You do those two things and it's just stacking cash on cash on cash and it becomes a perpetual way to get to financial freedom. We walk through people through this every day and it's possible. But if you don't take those steps, you're going to be frustrated. You're going to be disappointed. You're going to look up three years from now and be in the same spot, potentially doing different things, but ending up in the same place.
Speaker 1:Those are really wise words and I've seen it firsthand when people I mean, you see, these PPMs, you see, and even us, you know we have to evaluate tax and legal strategies from vendors and they have attorney letters and they have graphs and charts and it's like your brain plays a trick on you. You know, you know, you just want to believe it because it looks so professional and there's slide decks and the person looks smart. And we've seen this many times where these syndicators or operators of stuff that people invest in I've seen this with multifamily and crypto funds that folks wind up investing in it goes bankrupt. There was a huge Ponzi scheme that was this ATM. I'm sure you heard about that ATM. It was a crypto ATM machine or something. It turned out to be just a big Ponzi scheme or ATM syndicated fund. So it was like you really need to learn to think critically about these. If you're an entrepreneur or business owner, you are very successful because you're optimistic. Guess what?
Speaker 2:An investor is first pessimistic. An investor has a totally opposite framework. They need to say this investment is bad until proven otherwise. And so you go into every deal saying this thing is garbage and you start building the case for why it's not versus man, I like this idea, this sounds good, and then you can't hardly see the negatives, you can't see the things that are potential pitfalls or issues with it. So I say this to say people are optimistic because they're successful in business and then they lose all their money in passive deals because they don't think like an investor you have to be. It's like a muscle like you have to train it, you have to learn it and then you have to just keep building it so that you get better and better.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is really great insight, and we've been geeking out on taxes so much, so I'm really glad that we can have this conversation, because it's not just about the tax savings. It's about what are you going to do with the tax savings If you get a $100,000 refund. How are you going to do with the tax savings If you get a $100,000 refund? How are you going to grow this in a tax advantage manner? So the tax savings is deeply aligned with freeing up the capital that can be put into these vehicles, whether it's for passive income or it may even be for another asset, to grow your business even faster and further, which will eventually allow you to buy more passive vehicles. But it all has to be connected, and this is something that I think it's really easy to overlook these concepts For sure, and Mark, I'll just put you on the spot.
Speaker 2:I would tell anybody listening go and do your best to challenge Mark to figure out how to save you taxes next year.
Speaker 1:Right Build your Tom's accepted.
Speaker 2:I mean, if someone brings you that, Mark, are you not salivating? Or you're like dude, you did great. You're actually building passive income, You're building all these investments and say, hey, Mark, here's what I've been up to, and you're going to be like, okay, let's go to work, let's figure out how to keep as much of this as you've earned versus again. The backwards mindset is people will tell you to do things with your money, like qualified plans and other things, and define benefit plans and stuff because they think that they're helping you, but in actuality they're locking up your cash and deferring it for later to be taxed at potentially higher rates. We don't even know, like nobody can tell you what the tax rate will be when you're 65 or 70 or whenever you have to start taking money out of these things. And all this time you could have been using that money to create more passive income and then say, hey, Mark, solve my tax problem. That's the better way to think about this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, really great points here. So, joey, as we close this up, I want to know you're doing a lot of cool stuff here with Infinite Banking and the Wealth Without Wall Street. What are some of the projects that you are most excited about, and this could be in your personal life as well what are some of the things that you have going on that you are most excited about in the next coming months and years?
Speaker 2:Well, I'll tell you, we have, just this year, we've acquired two companies in the infinite banking space, and that's something that we're going to continue to do because we have a lot to gain and a lot to give to those folks in this space.
Speaker 2:We have an infrastructure, we have a process no-transcript and so we're constantly looking at our portfolio of different passive streams and gauging and saying, man, which ones are doing well, which ones do we need to put more money into? And, you know, fan the flame, so to speak, and other ones that we're cutting. We're saying, yeah, that one didn't work out as well as we thought, or didn't really produce what we thought it would. And, I'll be honest, a lot of them are in the syndication space, like the things we can't influence, we can't change the outcome, they haven't really come through at the highest levels. And so one thing we do you mentioned Mark Podolsky and the Land Geek. We have a very thriving land business. It continues to create more and more cash flow every single month. So we're going to do more of that and you know we're into that sort of thing to continue to grow our passive income.
Speaker 1:Very cool, very cool. You know, joe, I really enjoyed your conversation and it was nice to take a break from the pure tax stuff that I talked to, and this is very deeply aligned with what we do. Where can someone go? Can you give us a call to action on where they can join your community, talk about Infinite Baking or anything else, and learn from you.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. If you go to wealthwithoutwallstreetcom forward slash Mark Pearlberg. Wealthwithoutwallstreetcom forward slash Mark Pearlberg you can download some free resources. Forward slash Mark Pearlberg, you can download some free resources. We've got a quiz that tells you how close you are to financial freedom, and all my contact info and how to join our community is listed there as well. So please let me know that you heard Mark and I in this conversation on this podcast. I'd love to connect with you.
Speaker 1:Wonderful, Joey, thank you so much. And for those of you listening, if you also want to learn about how our concepts could apply to you, I have two opportunities. You can download a free tax planning checklist to introduce you to the foundational, to the advanced strategies, coupled with not only a downloadable checklist but case studies and a guide free mini course at taxplanningchecklistcom. And if you don't want to wait for that checklist and read through all the material and you're ready to get started as soon as possible, go to prosperalcpacom slash apply. That's prosper with an L cpacom slash apply. All right, Thank you for listening. Thank you for joining me, Joey, and happy tax savings.