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Welcome to another episode of Wealth Strategy Secrets of the Ultra Wealthy, today I am honored to bring you a conversation that dives deep into the core of holistic wealth-building strategies. Joining me are Josh McCallen and John Edwin, as we explore the pillars of success that can help you achieve financial freedom and stability.
In this episode, I share the transformative insights I’ve gained over the years, from investing in alternative assets like oil, gas, and real estate, to founding Pantheon Investments. You will also learn about my bestselling book, “The Holistic Wealth Strategy: A Framework for Building Legacy Wealth and Unlimited Freedom to Live an Extraordinary Life,” which distills these experiences into actionable strategies.
Join us as we go beyond the numbers and delve into holistic strategies that encompass financial, intellectual, human, social, and emotional capital. Learn how you can achieve unprecedented freedom to live an extraordinary life. Don’t miss this opportunity to elevate your wealth-building journey.
To access more insights and exclusive resources, visit pantheoninvest.com and get your free copy of my book at holisticwealthstrategy.com. Thank you for tuning in and let’s unlock the secrets to building legacy wealth together!
In This Episode
- My transition from the Marine Corps to discovering alternative investments
- Core principles of the Holistic Wealth Strategy that can guide you towards financial freedom
- Innovative investment methods, such as infinite banking, that provide financial resilience
- The Virtual Family Office concept, designed to offer high-net-worth services at accessible levels
What I can do right now is invest in myself, with education, with relationship capital, right? Social capital, all these things. I can keep getting smarter, and that’s really what I did until I built up some capital at different times, and then I was able to invest and then keep the process going. Welcome to the wealth strategy Secrets of the Ultra wealthy podcast, where we help.
Entrepreneurs like you exponentially build wealth through.
Passive income to live a life of freedom and prosperity. Are you tired of paying too much in taxes, gambling your future on the stock market, and want to learn about hidden strategies for making your money work for you? And now your host, Dave Wolcott, serial entrepreneur and author of the best selling book the Holistic Wealth Strategy.
It is exciting to have Dave Walcott here. John, I’ve been looking forward to introducing the two of you. So today’s the day.
Yeah, man, thank you. I’ve already got to know him a little bit before the show started, but, Dave, can you give us a little background on who you are?
Yeah, absolutely, John. So, you know, my journey really started back in 2000, right when I got out of the Marine Corps. I did the ROTC program and had an amazing opportunity to serve my country and learn things you just don’t learn anywhere else in the world. Things such as leadership, teamwork, and integrity and then after that experience, I transitioned into corporate America, got to experience the grind, and after about four or five years, there quickly became really dismayed with losing that sense of purpose and mission that so drove me in the marines. And then at the same time, my wife and I were raising a family. We had an 18 month old toddler running around, driving our lives, and we were just trying to figure that out and then on October 24, 2000, John, we actually had triplets.
Wow.
So we quadrupled the size of our family. I don’t have as many as Josh does with ten, but we went from one to four pretty much overnight. But, you know, as I’m sure a lot of listeners out there can relate to, I mean, the first thing that was really on my mind is how am I going to provide for financial security for my family? I mean, it’s a million dollars to raise a kid, and I’m young in my career.
You know, I’m in my mid twenties here, just trying to figure things out and so the first thing I did was go to see my financial planner, and he said what, you know, all the others said before him, which was, “oh, don’t worry about that. Just max out your 401K. There’s 529 plans for your kids. And you’ll get some state tax deductions.”
Right and so it was at that point that I just got so frustrated with this typical conventional wisdom, and I knew that the top 1% weren’t really building their wealth that way. So I set out on this mission to understand how the top 1% were really building wealth. From then, I started investing in alternative assets.
Everything from oil and gas to office to retail, self storage, multifamily, single family, all kinds of different assets through the years. And then so, fast forward to today and I created Pantheon to really help with all of those learnings that I went through to really share that with other people so they can understand what is the blueprint? What is the next step? What do I do? How can I take this strategy and put it into action? Because I know people can get there a lot faster than I did.
Love it. So tell us specifically what pantheon is and then we also want to talk about this amazing book that you wrote to.
Yeah. So my book is called the holistic Wealth Strategy and that’s what I really. That’s really how the lens with which I view wealth and I know that’s why I love talking to you guys and Josh, right? Because we believe the same thing. It’s not about becoming rich, it’s about wealth, and that means so many different things. Right? It’s talking about not only financial capital, but your intellectual capital, your human capital, social capital, emotional capital, and spiritual capital. Those are so important.
Right? So our business is really focused on solutions for that LP investor or, you know, high income earner or business owner that is trying to figure out this alternative way to reduce their taxes to outperform stock market returns, diversify from the stock market into real assets, things like resorts, for instance, or multifamily buildings, or different real assets that we like to invest in. And we have all kinds of different solutions that we think of.
For instance, infinite banking when it comes around, trying to add more velocity to your money, trying to make your money work in multiple places at the same time. That’s part of our holistic wealth strategy. We also provide deal flow, because as an investor, it can be a full time job to try to identify where are great deals. What do good deals look like? We have a full time portfolio manager on our team that conducts extensive due diligence on different assets and operators that we create relationships with and we can uncover.
So we can really try to cherry pick the best deals out there that we see and bring those to other people. And then on top of it, we have a done for you model, which is a virtual family office that really helps pull all this dream team of advisors, deal flow, and these different strategies all together for those people who just don’t have the time to do it all on their own or are really looking to level up their game.
It’s not about becoming rich and it’s about wealth.. it’s about not only financial capital, but intellectual, human, social, emotional and spiritual capital. Those are so important
Wow. All right.
Can I jump in first, Josh, because I know you’re loaded. I’m loaded, too and we’ve talked about infinite banking and other podcasts, but for somebody that’s listening for maybe the first time, could you explain what infinite banking is, because it sounds so cool.
Yeah.
Happy to do that, John and there’s a lot of confusion in the market, and let me just make it really simple. It’s a cash value whole life insurance policy. People call it all kinds of fancy things. That’s all it is. Right. But it’s the way in which you use it and how you actually structure it that provides you with multiple things. And that’s one of the things that I’ve learned about how the ultra wealthy invest so well, is instead of just taking $1 and deploying it, looking for a yield, it’s how can we get multiplier out of that same investment? So in this case, you’re actually able to put money into this cash value life insurance policy, and that money can start to compound tax free.
Right. Which is very strong. It does not. It’s not correlated to the stock market at all. So you get to diversify from that standpoint. You can actually use it as collateral for, let’s say you’re taking out a loan to start a new business or something like that. And one of the great things for investors or business owners is you can actually borrow against the policy and use that capital to, again, start your own business. Or maybe it’s an emergency fund for you.
Right. Something like that. Right. So go ahead, Josh.
Yeah, no, that’s. You did a great job with that. I want to answer the question, too, by the way. I think you did it quicker and better than most people. So whole life insurance, and it’s a whole life insurance that because of the power of collateral, you can use it in more than one space. At the same time, we’re not going to be able to get into it.
I have a lot I’d like to talk about with that, but unless you have a better clarifying statement, it is very interesting, and it’s a kind of a mind blower, almost like rich dad, poor dad. You have to hear it a few times, and then there’ll be a day when you actually want to hear it for real.
And we’ll all be here for you when that day comes. Dave’s good at it. We can do it. There’s other friends. But for right now, we just teased it. What do you think, Dave? What else do you have to add to it? To the tease?
Yeah, I think that’s perfect. I mean, some people get into paralysis by analysis when they look at this. But when you start to value, and I think people get hung up on the return, the return is just about 6%. So they say, oh, well, I can do better in the stock market. I can even do 8%. Right. But what you have to do is value these things. Like I can, you know, my wife right now knows that if something were to happen to me, there’s also a life insurance benefit that we didn’t even really talk about.
Okay, what kind of value would you put in on that? And then, you know, just think about the psychology and this is where so many people, I think, get, you know, just don’t have the investing game, right. There’s so much around the psychology of investing, okay. There’s so much noise right now about the upcoming campaign. Are we in a recession? The impending, you know, what’s happening.
The stock market, the VLX is going up and down, down. There’s all this uncertainty. Well, if uncertainty is your issue and you can’t really sleep at night, wouldn’t it be great to say, I have twelve months of Runway? So if, you know, the shit really hits the fan, I have twelve months of operating income from myself and my family. And at least in that time, I could find another job, I could get another deal, whatever could happen. And let’s take uncertainty off the table. What’s that worth to you now?
I like that. And yet, by the way, recently we were able to secure key man insurance, or key person insurance, for the company’s sizable amount of policy to protect our investors. We put that on our businesses and we did that through a whole life. No, we actually did it through a life insurance, of course, with the ability to convert to whole life later if we have the resources. Because obviously whole life costs more. Folks, life insurance is out there is because you can get, let’s say, a million dollars for $30 a month. But if it was whole life, it would be a million dollars.
Might be five, $600 a month, Dave, whatever the difference is, it’s more expensive, but it has cash value. All right. That’s not what we had you on here, though, Dave. Here’s why we had you on. We’re going to do a dissection or dissect the work you’re doing in your community and is the community called Pantheon as well as the business, or is the community called something? Okay, so people from Pantheon who’ve joined forces with you, you brought up that one of your services is done for you. Multifamily office.
I think we have to dig into that. Does that mean you have like, special credentials on your team, like registered investment advisor, RIA, or tell us what you mean by multifamily office.
Yeah, sure and I’ll first explain what the challenge is. Right. I believe that you don’t have to have 100 million in net worth to have a full time staff of a traditional family office, which would consist of a dedicated RIA, dedicated tax team, maybe administration and lifestyle support. You’ve got legal staff on support that you have payroll for.
The idea with a virtual family office is to create access to these types of exclusive advisors and you just pay for them on an as needed basis so that we can keep the, the costs down. So let’s talk about asset protection as an example. You’re likely going to set up maybe one asset protection plan right in your career and then just be tweaking that as you go, depending on how your life really changes.
Well, we’ve already vetted have a relationship with one of the top tax attorney, you know, tax and asset protection attorneys in the country, especially as it relates to being an entrepreneur, being an investor, being someone who invests in alternative assets and doesn’t have everything in 401s or the stock market, we really have a really unique set of advisors that we can bring in.
Then we do have a financial advisor who was not only trained in traditional means, right, with stocks, bonds, mutual funds, but also really understands the private markets as well. So they understand alternative assets. If they were to invest in something with learn and grow, how do you factor that in the sophisticated tax strategies you guys are employing? How does that fit into my overall strategy? How am I planning for, let’s say, liquidity events in the future and things like that?
You know, that that role is shared by our advisor who really quarterbacks your wealth with you, because you may, number one, not really have the time to meet with all these advisors to be actively managing things. You also, we also hit people that are, you know, let’s say 810 million in net worth. And the complexity just really starts growing. You’ve got eight different entities adding on new investments all the time. You know, even the administration of all of that is really difficult.
So every time you purchase a new asset, are you keeping in mind asset protection? Is that violating your compliance around the structure for your asset protection? Things like that. And then, of course, the other key component, and again, I know this will resonate with you guys, is you’re really trying to set up your own family office and we help you set up a family constitution and so that you’re creating a legacy for your family because it’s not just money you’re passing under your heirs. You know, It’s values. Right. It’s beliefs, It’s compliance. Because the statistics is that, you know, by G2 80 percent of all wealth is lost, and by G3, it’s up to 90%.
Yeah.
Right, So can we minimize that and really, truly create a legacy for people?
Wow.
By the way, I absolutely love that.
You’ve created this virtual family office, because when I think of family offices, I do think of people with net worths over $100 million. And God willing, we’ll get there at some point, but it’s like this far off idea. What gave you the idea that you would start it? That’s amazing in itself.
Well, John, as an entrepreneur and an investor myself, these are solutions that I have. My complexity has just grown to a scale that I just can’t manage. Even though I’m teaching these concepts, I just don’t have the bandwidth right to do this and to me, I see everything that we’re doing is really trying to provide a solution for that investor and entrepreneur that is going to have at some point in their trajectory.
Right, whether, again, it’s having tax issues, maybe it’s on the growth side, maybe it’s on the preservation side, maybe it’s more on some of those softer things, on the legacy side, all of those things. But we’ve had hundreds and hundreds of investors and we’ve seen so many different things. We’ve worked with so many different advisors, and so we’re able to synthesize all of this to create maximum value at a really cost effective price for investors.
And not only. I’m sorry, Josh, I’m sorry. I’m going to give you the mic in 1 second.
Go ahead.
The one thing, though, that you didn’t hit on that I think is really important, it should be highlighted, is that you’re also offering vetted deals.
Right.
Because, you know, people don’t necessarily have time to vet all these deals and go through it and all that. So you’re off. You’re saying, “hey, this fund, this indication, this, you know, that we vetted these, these people,” is that right?
Correct. So a lot of the private equity game, it’s all about relationships and it’s, you know, who do you know? Right. And so, you know, with our credibility and our access, we’re able to partner with very sophisticated family offices, private equity groups that are also doing PE deals for other RIAs, other family offices.
And if we can get access to those opportunities, those are really invisible opportunities that no one else is seeing in the market. And they become, they’re highly vetted as well. Right. There’s third party due diligence by legal firms and everything. So we can bring some of those opportunities to our investor base, such as an oil and gas investment opportunity.
Our next one has up to 92% and year one active income tax offset. Well, that’s pretty good for our high income earners or people who are having liquidity events.
Dave, really compelling stuff. I want to break into some of the structure. By the way, great work. Lets talk about your entree. I listened to your podcast. We’ve been on your podcast, Ive read your book. Well get to your book.
I want to break down the strategies and the holistic wealth strategy, a framework for building legacy wealth and unlimited freedom to live an extraordinary life. That book, but lets go back to the origin story for a moment. I understand the why the children, the triplets, the awesome, compelling life changes. What was the first, let’s say, tangible thing that you did within this world of stepping into the alternative? How did you find out about, let’s say, real estate syndications? What was that first entree for you?
So, remember, Josh, this is back in 2000. Rich dad, poor dad just came out, I think like 99, right? I mean, so this was, that book came out. When it came out, I read it and I thought the biggest insight I had there was it was the paradigm shift of realizing that, hey, we were all taught that the recipe for success was to go to school, get good grades, you’d get a career, and then just work that grind. And that’s the recipe for success.
Right? So that gave me the insight to realize that, hey, there’s a different way to do it, right? And understanding leverage, understanding these different things. And then when I read cash flow quadrant, you know, that was the next really big insight to say, if you’re going to be set up anywhere for success, you have to be a business owner and an investor on the right hand side of the quadrant, which I know all of your listeners understand that. So I tried to start making that shift, as we all know it’s not that easy to become an entrepreneur or stay an entrepreneur. It takes a lot of work.
So I started to make some transitions in there and then on the investment side. And at the time, I had absolutely no money. Josh and I love to share this story with investors, because what I did was I didn’t have money to invest, but I looked under every possible rock to find new people that I could meet, networking opportunities. How can I learn about different assets?
I read every possible book I could find my hands on, and I was connecting, and I eventually got connected with someone who was doing private placement opportunities. And that was my first foray. And I think it was, you know, 2025 grand was, like my first, you know, deal size. I was able to get into something that was smaller, but they didn’t. I don’t even think there were syndications really, back then.
Right.
And this is the power in my book of the holistic wealth strategy that I really try to share with people is that, number one, you have to have your mindset, right? Because if you have a growth mindset, then anything is absolutely possible. The money will come. But what I can do right now is invest in myself, with education, with relationship capital, right? Social capital, all these things. I can keep getting smarter, and that’s really what I did until I built up some capital at different times, and then I was able to invest and then keep the process going.
You have to have your mindset right. If you have a growth mindset then anything is absolutely possible, the money will come.
I think the first thing is mindset, the second thing in your hierarchy probably is community or access to the next.
It’s really that intellectual capital and the way I really think about it, right, is there’s a few different dimensions. And number one is actually health, because you could have all the dreams in the world, but if you don’t have your health, you’re only going to have one. And Steve Jobs couldn’t even buy himself one more day. So I work on my health every day. My goal is to live to 146, and I work on that every day. In fact, I have a nutrition coach, a doctor, a high performance, like, concierge doctor team. It’s amazing.
Some of the things that are possible, especially with technology these days, is so important. So I think people should really think about that. We talked about Mindset IQ. We’re all developing our mindsets all the time. Every day I work on myself and continuing to grow my mind what is possible.
Think about where Elon Musk is and the amazing things that he can think about that are possible. It’s all because he’s got that mindset. He’s able to develop that, then, of course, we want to get smarter around your financial iq and thinking about alternative assets.
I never thought I could invest in a resort. Wow, that’s pretty interesting and you actually have weddings booked out for the next two years. That sounds like a great investment. And I can reduce my taxes. I never even thought that was possible. Right. But when you attend things like learn and grow, you listen to great podcasts like this.
You can learn these things. So there’s lots of opportunities for people, I think, to learn at this stage. And then when they’re ready, you have to get in the game and take action. And you may not win, you likely won’t win on every investment that’s investing, but you learn from that experience till you go on to the next one.
Now you you have a great teacher’s mind and the way you lay things out, I’ve been taking pretty copious notes here, so I broke it down. You know, why do people find these, this type of community and access important? Because of tax. They’re the target consumer of your content and of your community is probably business owners, high earners. Are those your two people that, that should be paying close attention, or is there a third?
Yeah, that’s it.
That’s it. So then once they find you, then the concerns they probably have are mitigating taxes, outperforming the traditional and diversification. But I love that you qualify that as real diversification. And there’s a double meaning for real. Real is also real asset. It’s where a lot of power comes from. And then you talked about the multiplier of infinite banking and collateralization. I love that.
And we used to call it capital hacking. That was one of the concepts we were talking about is how over here, you’re trying to. You can achieve multiple positive effects if you choose the right first domino to hit. Or it’s like I used to call it, daisy chain. Like, if we do this, it’ll create more value in that, which will create more value in that, which will create more value in that. And I think that mindset of multiplier that you share with your audience, I do think that’s a core principle of the ultra wealthy. They don’t even know. They do it all the time.
But, you know, this is the people that buy classic cars and you’re like, well, what are they buying a classic car for? Well, because once you have an aggregated portfolio of classic cars, they become worth even more. Oh, and by the way, you can enjoy them. Oh, and by the way, you can use them as a trophy inside your restaurant and have people go to the restaurant. It’s like, what?
So you collected cars for the sake of appreciation and fun, then you used them as a marketing technique for something else, and then it became a business, and then you became a broker of classic cars, and, like, six different wins happened. And that’s just how the wealthy think. They think, oh, if I do this, it’ll create that. I’ll create that.
And infinite banking is one of the ultimate ways to. That’s where this kind of comes from, is your money went into life insurance, but then you never have to pull the money out necessarily. You can borrow against it or collateralize it and get a second win with the same dollar. And then if you’re doing that to create a business, you’ll get a third win because your business will create valuation. I don’t know how to describe.
And then you can borrow against it to get your fourth win.
Exactly. And I don’t even know how to, you know, like, I’ve been trying, Dave, I’ve been seeking again, we called it capital hacking. You know, where you can achieve so many more things with one effort. If you. If you deploy the right human and mental capital, as well as financial capital, you can achieve many things. But that being said, I don’t know if I like the word multiplier, too. So let’s go with that for today. While we’re wrapping here, I want to ask you to share the powerful book you wrote.
I know it took years of your life, and your journey is capsulated really well in the book. I just got through it this week. I think you’ve done really well. It’s been the Amazon bestseller. It’s available right now. The holistic wealth strategy, a framework for building legacy wealth and unlimited freedom to live an extraordinary life. Can I ask you to give us a salient point out of the book and help us attract more people to get that book today?
Yeah, I appreciate that, Josh and I will just put out for the listeners who’ve made it through here. You can actually get a free copy of the [email protected]. and then also, if you purchase it on Amazon, 100% of the proceeds are going to thefund.org, which is our charity for veterans.
Wow.
So the book really is a framework, a how to framework to really become ultra wealthy yourself, right? And be, like, the top 1% in terms of wealth growth, wealth preservation, and really more than that, when I talk about living an extraordinary life, one of my favorite topics is just really, it’s investor psychology. And what does all this mean anyway? Because wealth, true wealth, is not measured by the size of your bank account. Financial capital is important. We’re all really working on this, but it’s so much more. It’s trying to get closer to consciousness. It’s creating impact. It’s the values that you have. It’s the legacy that you live.
It’s the depth of your relationships. I mean, all of these things are just so important, but we all get consumed with just kind of chasing the dollar and more. More. Right. And so I really encourage people in the book to just think about, you know, what does that mean for you? Wherever you are in your stage, whether you’re a young family kind of starting out or your middle of your career, you want to have really these freedoms in your life.
It’s about not just freedom of money, but freedom of purpose, where you wake up every day being fascinated and motivated by the work you do. You know, you have freedom of relationship. To spend time like this with like minded people where you’re learning and growing every day, versus being an environment where people are pulling you backwards, you know, and you’ve got freedom of time, right? To spend your time like you want to live that intentional life.
That’s what this is really all about. The money is just kind of a means of to get there. But what I’ve tried to do is succinctly and flexibly put this into a framework that people can really take action and see results.
We appreciate you, Dave, and now that we know that’s how we get the book. But can we also reach out to you and follow your work? I know, I love being on your podcast. How should our audience reach back out to you after this?
Yeah, sure. You could check out our podcast as well, wealth strategy secrets of the ultra wealthy. And definitely check out the interviews. We’ve had two interviews now with Josh, which has been excellent and a lot of other good ones. Or check us out at pantheoninvest.com
Yeah, I can’t wait. Soon we’ll have you come and give a presentation to the audience at learning grow someday. I think you would be received very well at our community.
Look forward to that for sure.
Thanks so much, Dave.
Thanks, Dave.
Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Wealth Strategy Secrets. If you’d like to get a free copy of the book, go to holisticwealthstrategy.com. that’s holisticwealthstrategy.com. if you’d like to learn more about upcoming opportunities at pantheon, please visit pantheoninvest.com. that’s pantheoninvest.com