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Welcome to the launch of Wealth Strategy Deep Dives, a new solo series where I break down powerful wealth-building concepts into quick, actionable insights. In this first episode, I revisit the Holistic Wealth Strategy—your roadmap to building tax-free wealth and living an optimized life.
We’ll cover how to create a long-term vision, why you are your greatest asset, and how strategies like infinite banking, alternative investing, and smart asset repositioning can fuel your financial freedom. I also highlight passive income strategies and the importance of intentional wealth planning that goes far beyond traditional investing.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to our new special solo series of Wealth Strategy Secrets Of The Ultra Wealthy. I’m your host, Dave Wolcott. In an effort to provide you with even more value from the show, we wanted to start breaking down some of the topics discussed on the show in an easy-to-digest format that you can implement. For these series, I recommend heading over to our YouTube channel, where you will also be able to see visual materials to support the episode. Whether you’re a long-time listener or just joining us, these episodes are designed to give you high-impact insights in just a few minutes.
Let’s dive in. In our first solo series, I wanted to bring us back to the holistic wealth strategy. What is it? What are the five phases? And how can it work for you?
Well, it all starts with creating a vision statement for yourself. If you don’t have a target, you’re gonna miss every time. So, when is the last time that you spent actually getting crystal clear on what your vision looks like for you, for your family? Where do you wanna be in the next twenty-five years? The only reason Google Maps works is because you have a destination in mind.
Right? And I think it’s important that we spend time actually crafting that vision, honing that vision, and creating clarity that we need to break through walls, move through the different volatility that’s out there, so we can actually achieve that vision. Then we move into phase one, which is all really understanding about the fact that you are your greatest asset. So, how can you actually invest in yourself? Investing in different things, such as your health, your mindset, and your relationships.
Right? How can you actually grow? I remember when I started getting into this space, and I started getting excited about my first real estate opportunities. And when I talked to my friends, when I talked to my family, you know, the first thing they told me was that I was crazy, trying to invest in real estate and alternatives outside of the stock market. They really just thought that, you know, I was, you know, it was too risky, and it was all because they just didn’t have that growth mindset.
They had a fixed mindset. So I’ve made it part of my purpose to surround myself with growth-oriented people who always have a growth mindset. You know, there can be contrarian views, and you can make your own decisions, but it all starts with asking questions. I began asking questions, for instance, such as, you know, does it really make sense to defer taxes? Right?
I think that is all predicated on the fact that you might retire poor. I actually plan on retiring, or really not retiring at all, in fact, but I plan on moving into my later years having more wealth than I do now. And the only thing that I’m likely certain of is that taxes will actually go up in the future. So for me, it makes sense to pay taxes on the seed rather than the harp than the harvest. Right?
So it’s important to start asking those questions, always being curious. And then as you do that, you can really start to refine goals that will support that growth mindset, always thinking bigger, starting to create habits that are going to support that, starting to actually manage your environment. Right? Are you in an environment that’s going to set you up for success, you know, from that perspective? And what are your beliefs?
Right? Especially right now, there’s a lot of, you know, conflicting beliefs in the world right now, but what are your beliefs and convictions that are going to help you achieve your vision statement? If you’re unwavering in your beliefs, you’re much more likely to succeed and meet that vision than if you have a belief system that’s really not, you know, not shaped yet. Right? And when you actually start to study, you know, neuroscience, right, it’s really interesting how it works.
Right? Because it really all starts with those beliefs. Right? Your thoughts become your beliefs. Those beliefs start to become your emotions, then your emotions actually start to take action.
Right? So, how is that set up for you? So that’s what, you know, how we define really the first phase of the holistic wealth strategy. And again, keeping in mind that this entire strategy is not just about one specific investment. It’s not about one specific return profile.
It’s really how you can live an optimal life, right, that will really take you to the next level and define wealth to what it means to you, right, what is actually most important to you, right? And so for me, always having a growth mindset, always be learning, always being curious, really sets the foundation before you can move into the other phases. Now, when we move into phase two, phase two is all about learning, right? We want to be increasing our financial IQ. We wanna be increasing our mindset IQ, and we wanna be increasing our health IQ.
These can also be formed in terms of other types of capital. Right? We also think about financial capital, for instance, but there’s these other dimensions that true wealth really sets apart, which is spiritual capital, emotional capital, physical capital, and intellectual capital. Those to me actually define true holistic wealth, right, not just the size of your bank account. So, how can we start to grow our IQ in those areas or get smarter?
Right? And a great example is, you know, for instance, you know, I didn’t realize that in oil and gas, you can offset all of your active income through an investment in energy. Right? Which is one of the reasons we’ve have refined that and put that into our investment thesis, because part of growing your wealth is all about reducing your taxes. But that required me to do a lot of research, spend a lot of time and understanding, you know, how oil and gas work, how you can invest in it, how you can do diligence on that, and really kind of looking into that.
I’ve also increased my financial IQ by understanding taxes and how you can constantly be, you know, being as efficient as possible every time you purchase something, every time you have a liquidity event, you know, always constantly thinking about taxes. Right? So all of these areas in the IQ space, we want to continually be building upon so that we can get smarter and smarter. Right? It’s oftentimes that people can say your net worth is actually a reflection of where you are mentally with what you’ve learned and what you know, and the people that you know.
Right? So the people at that next level that you’re trying to move up to, you have to move up there with additional capabilities, additional expertise, and additional relationships to get there. Moving on to phase three. Phase three is actually all about creating infrastructure around your wealth. Right?
The exciting part is growing our wealth, but it’s super important to know how to preserve and protect our wealth and really build a fortress around that. And part of that, in addition to learning, is actually creating a team around your wealth. Right? We like to call it creating a dream team. Right?
Which is why we set up our virtual family office so that you can have people that are very like-minded and understand private assets. They understand this holistic model, and you can start to work in these other areas such as risk management and life insurance, proper tax planning, asset protection, estate planning, you know, all of these core things that where you have a team around you and you have an entire holistic wealth strategy, right, that’s protecting that wealth for future generations and starting to take you to the next level. So if you have gaps in your team today, it’s a great place to look to start, you know, creating that ideal team that you want to have around you. As we move into phase four, phase four is all about asset repositioning. And in phase four, what we’re doing is we’re trying to find areas in our existing portfolio that we can optimize.
Right? How can we actually get a bigger yield as well as reducing our risk at the same time? So one of the big ones, for instance, is that most people have the majority of their capital tied up in qualified, you know, sponsored government plans. And these plans, for instance, tell you when you can access your money, how much you can take out, and effectively, we kind of know what the rate of return is and the tax efficiency on those. So can you reposition those, for instance, into a self-directed IRA?
So you can at least get into assets that might be noncorrelated to the volatility of the stock market. That could be a good play for you. Maybe you could be as bold as, like, I was, you know, about twenty years ago where I actually exited, exited, my four zero one k position, paid that penalty and the taxes because I I knew I was confident that I would be able to actually outpace, the results of what the stock market had done over time by putting that into real estate and alternatives, getting the tax efficiency actually ended up offsetting, a lot of those penalties and taxes through efficient investments in in the private assets space. So, asset repositioning is really key to doing that. Those are some good ones.
Another huge area that people have is either in their primary residence, a secondary residence, or even some of you who have, you know, multiple real estate properties, right? Investment properties that you’re doing for rental, you know, are you at a point in your LTV that, you know, let’s say your LTV is lower than 50%, and you’ve been playing it, you know, super safe there. You might wanna think about accessing some of that trapped equity because the rate of return on that equity is actually zero, and then transitioning some of that into something that’s higher performing. Maybe for instance, you put that into something like, you know, private credit, or debt or something that’s paying that you could actually have debt service. You also, by the way, if it’s your primary residence, are going to increase your deductible taxes from the mortgage interest.
And now you’re also sharing risk, right, with the lender because now the bank has more, more of a share in your primary residence than you if, let’s say, you had paid off the house, or you had a really low LTV on that. So, again, just some points to think about. That’s where most people have their assets tied up. If you’re a business owner, also most entrepreneurs have a huge over concentration risk where they’re keeping all of their eggs in that one basket because it’s their pride and joy, it’s their baby, they keep reinvesting inside of the business, but it’s important to also diversify, right, and be thinking about how can I actually, you know, create multiple income streams? How can I, you know, reduce risk, right, by not having everything, let’s say, tied to the business?
Because then you become single-threaded and have a single point of failure within your business. So that asset repositioning phase is really key. And finally, we move into the fun part, which is phase five, which is all about taking action. And this is all about building massive passive income. So, how can we now reallocate that capital or future capital that we have coming in, whether that’s through tax efficiency, or capital that we can put aside to actually invest in?
And we want to start investing in assets that are non-correlated to the stock market, that really have this trifecta of a return profile. Whereas you can drive passive income, you can drive tax efficiency, and you can drive forced appreciation inside of the asset. And notice that I said forced appreciation, not appreciation, right? Because the strategy is not just hoping that your asset value is gonna go up over time, but it’s that you have an active manager sponsor that’s driving value into the opportunity to create that additional upside to that. So I really love this trifecta type of return because, in one way, it’s actually protecting your downside.
Right? You’re getting tax efficiency. You’re creating that passive income. Right? And you have upside potential.
So you’ve limited your downside potential, and you’ve also increased your upside potential. And if I think about that as compared to, let’s say equities, for instance, you know, that’s much more of a linear growth path where all you’re doing is hoping it’s gonna go up over value over time. Now there’s a place for, you know, having liquid assets and doing that. But again, we wanna look at how can we drive as much of a higher yield, lower risk, not have too much over-concentration in any one asset class. So we do this by identifying these private assets.
And I think it’s important to note as well that when you do buy a private asset, it’s almost like you’re buying something at wholesale. Right? You are literally working one-on-one with that private sponsor, and that’s why the returns can be so much higher than if you purchase equities on a retail exchange, right? As a retail investor, it’s just like going to the mall, right? Where you’re purchasing the clothing at full retail price.
Well, by investing directly into these assets, that’s how you can get the tax benefits as a limited partner or a general partner in that. This is how you can create higher income streams into that. So there’s a lot of benefits to investing in private assets. And the other one, I think that I’ll point out here in phase five, that’s a huge opportunity for many people, especially nowadays, is, you know, if you’re short on actual capital to invest, how about creating that side hustle business? Right?
With AI and technology these days like, it just couldn’t be easier to create some additional source of income that you could use that capital to start investing in. So creating that side hustle business, and who knows, that could actually be your passion project that becomes something that you actually fall in love doing, and that becomes your new purpose in life. So that’s it. That’s the summary of the holistic wealth strategy. If you haven’t had an opportunity to read the book, I wanted to give you an opportunity to get a free copy.
If you go to www.holisticwealthstrategy.com. You can download a free copy of the book, and I hope this was helpful for you. Until next time.
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📘 Download your free copy of the book: www.holisticwealthstrategy.com
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