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In this episode, I had the pleasure of having Justin Donald, a renowned expert in
lifestyle investing and a true embodiment of entrepreneurial success. Justin shared his incredible journey of multiplying his net worth to eight figures in under two years through strategic relationships and savvy investing.
Justin’s first significant step towards this goal was investing in a mobile home park, which within 21 months, generated enough passive income for him and his wife to leave their jobs. His investment acumen didn’t stop there; he has since negotiated deals with over 100 companies.
He shares insights into his investment strategies, including negotiating deals with over 100 companies, such as Orangetheory, and founding Stellar, a residential maintenance and rehab company that recently secured funding from S3 Ventures.
Justin’s dedication to helping others achieve financial freedom is evident throughout the episode, making it a must-listen for anyone seeking to break free from the traditional work-for-pay model and build lasting wealth.
Tune in to learn from Justin’s remarkable journey and discover how you too can break free from trading time for money and start building your own path to wealth and freedom.
In This Episode
- The pivotal first investment in a mobile home park and generating enough passive income to leave traditional jobs within 21 months
- Strategies for creating wealth without being tied to a conventional job
- His personal investment thesis and insights about alternative investment
- The importance of mentorship and community
Justin, welcome to the show.
Hey, thanks, great to be here.
Yeah, awesome to have you on the show, Justin, really looking forward to the conversation today. And I know the investors are going to get some new insights from you. If they haven’t had the opportunity to read your book and really kind of go deep today, right in some of your passive strategies, you know, what you’ve been up to at the love lifestyle investor. But for those who haven’t heard you, tell us about the journey, right?
I think there’s so much to kind of glean from the journey and you really have truly taken that journey, you know, 100%, right, where you’ve gotten to that financial independence level at an early age.
Yeah, you know, Dave, it was really fun talking off-air. Part of me is like, we should have just hit record right when we hopped on here. Cause we talked about some cool stuff and, you know, I’m excited to have you on my show, the lifestyle investor podcast, next after this, but, yeah, I’m just, I’m thrilled to speak with you and other people that are like-minded and, you know are going through the struggle or are trying to figure out what our next steps. And so I think the most important thing
For most people, it’s not a quick transition. It takes time. And most of my greatest learning lessons came from the mistakes I made along the way.
So if you just look at the results, you might say, wow, that’s really cool. It sounds so easy and it happened so fast. But the truth of the matter is that’s not the case. had many stumbling blocks along the way.
A lot of self doubt, you know, I had friends that were telling me, you know, the things I wanted to invest in were crazy. I had, you know, my mentors saying, you know, that that I shouldn’t pursue some of the things that I ultimately ended up pursuing. That really created a lot of wealth for our family. But I think oftentimes, as leaders, we have to take the road less traveled. We’ve got to go against, you know,
I guess the norm or, or against the herd and kind of pave our own way. So for me, I got started at sales at a young age, paid for my, my college. My parents didn’t have the funds to be able to send me to college. And at the time I was real bummed about it, but today it was one of the greatest gifts ever because I had to learn to be resourceful and figure out how to make money very young. I had to learn work ethic, which I gleaned from my dad.
I had to figure out how to work with people, which I learned from my mom. So I was able to graduate from the University of Illinois debt -free and then basically opened up my own business under the umbrella of another company. And so I did that for a period of time, sharpening my skills, working with people, learning management structures and building systems. And eventually I said, “Man, This is a lot of work”, especially early on.
There’s no blueprint for what to do. I have to figure out the systems and how to hire the right people all on my own. This is taking a ton of time,I don’t know if I’m committed to this amount of time when I’m married, when I have a family, when I have kids. And so I just remember thinking early on, I really need to start buying assets that produce income.
So I’m not always trading time for money. And that’s really what, what, you know, I guess catapulted me into investing in our first real estate endeavor, getting into mobile home parks. can tell you that whole story if you want, but we’ll come up for air and, but that’s kind how it all got started.
Yeah, no, it makes sense. I mean, was there a particular moment or did you learn from a mentor or read a book or something that inspired you to really kind of, you know, change, you know, and make that shift into the passive side?
Yeah, probably all the above. I mean, at that point in life, I was really living life on default, not life by design. It was just going from one thing to the next, putting out fires, problem solving, really not spending time for myself or even proactive. Like “what do I want life to look like?” And so, you know, I had a coach, I had a mentor. I’d been reading Robert Kiyosaki at that time. So I had just finished Rich Dad Poor Dad and Cash Flow Quadrant.
I read those back to back and, and my eyes were just kind of open cause I was, I remember sitting in, my office on a Friday night, my friends were reaching out, wanted to go out, you know, can I meet up with them? And I remember sitting here and this was early on in my business where it was just me and I didn’t have a team. I didn’t have any, I think I had one receptionist. and she was long gone for the day and it was just me at like 10 PM on a Friday night. And I remember thinking,
I’m okay doing this right now. This season of life, this grind, this is good for me. But I’m not okay if I’m in my 30s or 40s and I’m doing this and it’s at the sacrifice of spending time with my family and doing Friday night, family night or whatever it is. And so I just remember sitting on the floor in my back office preparing for a hard day of work the next morning.
Saturday morning, which I was in at probably 5:30 AM was kind of my normal time and, and just, you know, to prep. And so I remember thinking, okay, I’m going to do this different. And I remember reading something that Robert Kiyosaki said that basically, you know, I told all these people, you know, people like, what do you do? I’m like, “I’m a business owner. But the reality is I wasn’t a business owner.”
I was owned by my business. I was actually a slave to my business. My business owned me. My possessions owned me because I had, you know, payments that I had to make in order to keep them. And so the reality is I wasn’t really a business owner. I was more of a sole proprietor. I remember reading where it said like, hey, you’re not really a business owner until your business can run without you. You’ve got systems and people in place for a year or longer with the same output.
Or greater than if you were there. And I was like, “Wow, Okay. I miscategorize myself.” And then I started thinking, “Well, do I even want this?” So one, while I’m in this business, I better get better at working with people. I better get better at building out systems. But do I even want that? Do I actually want to be on the investor quadrant side of things where I invest in businesses? I invest in assets. And the light bulb just went off and I said, that’s it. That’s what I need to do. So I’m going to stay here and I’m going to figure it while I’m here, but my transition over time is I’m going to move to this investor quadrant and I’m going to move out of, you know, basically trading time for money.
Yeah, now that definitely resonates. I really credit Kiyosaki. He’s just changed so many people’s lives. And for me, it was the same thing. I really didn’t know anything about investing except that a fact that I wanted to save for the future. And I had read “The Purple Pill” as well when it just came out like in 99 and then Cash Flow Quadrant, and Cash Flow Quadrant to me was so right?
Because this is how the game is played. But the biggest shortfall that I saw in that was it didn’t tell there’s no blueprint. There’s no strategy. There’s no what’s next. It’s like, “well, okay, I like that.” You know, I want to be a business owner. I want to be a professional investor. But what does that even mean? You know, how do I really get there? Real estate seems like a great asset class. And I started chasing some single family rentals. And, you know, to your point.
Yes, that’s right.
You know, trading my time for money, just doing something else, chasing real estate deals. So it’s really fascinating, right? Because we’re 25 years, you know, past when that book really launched. And you’ve seen how many different people have taken this whole passive income theory and really taken it in different directions. And that’s what’s, I think, really unique about your story as well is how you’ve really taken this and how you’re trying to help.
People right now, right, using passive income, you know, kind of strategy, right? We all understand that we want our passive to exceed our expenses so that we can, you know, live a great life. But you know, what does that really mean? Right? So, so why don’t you break down maybe this is a good segue into your model, Justin, right? Because I know it is quite unique.
Yeah, sure. You know, and you bring up a good point, because I remember looking at, you know, cash flow quadrant, and I was like, “All right, this book, I would still say today, it’s the single most impactful book that I had ever read at that point time”, I would still say today was the most pivotal book. But I remember thinking, there’s nothing like now I know what I need to do, but I don’t know how to do it.
That was kind of my whole purpose in writing the lifestyle investor was to lay out the framework for how you actually transition, you know, from a W -2 to an investor or from a business owner to an investor. mean, that to me was really important.
But I did it in one specific asset class. remember I had friends that thought I was crazy because I started investing in mobile home parks. And they’re all like, this is a crazy idea. I had mentors that are like, this doesn’t make sense. This sounds like you’re just throwing money away.
I remember waking up in the middle of the night some nights in a cold sweat like, “Am I throwing money out the window?” Like, “Is this a bad decision?” But whenever I would let logic set in, I would say, “Well, other people have done it. If I follow their blueprint on how to do it, I should at least be, I don’t know, 60 to 70 % as good as they are.” Over time, I can get better. It just seems better to me that, you know, trading time for money for the rest of life.
And so I, you know, I took the leap and we bought our first mobile home park. you know, and again, I mean, my friends thought I was absolutely nuts, but this one park retired my wife. it was funny because what that produced in cashflow, was within a thousand dollars of what my wife was earning as a teacher at that point in time. and so my wife retired as a teacher.
And that’s when we had our daughter. So, you know, it was great. We bought her time back. I bought a second mobile home park and that one replaced our survival income. And so at that point we didn’t have to work. Now it wasn’t lifestyle, but it was all the main bills. But it does take a huge weight off to know you don’t have to work. You know, it’s transitioning from having to work to getting to work.
You get to be smarter about what you spend your time on.
You know, you’re not as afraid to delegate out certain responsibilities or things you don’t like to do. and so I got smarter about where I spent my time and then we bought a third mobile home park and that one replaced our lifestyle income. And then we did a 10 31 exchange on that, flipped into two others and that, replaced our earned income. So, the goal here, like I could have walked away a lot sooner from the business I was running,
My wife really appreciates safety and security. So instead of taking a big risk, it was, hey, we can methodically do this. We can do this over a period of time. We can replace the income. So that way it’s not like a, you know, a major life change. And for us, life just continued on the same. Nothing changed because the income was there.
And that was the safe way, the way got my wife on board. I mean, she at first thought I was crazy. But you know, as we slowly did this, she’s like, “Okay, I can see this working” because, you know, her parents grew up, you know, basically telling her find a safe job, you know, work for the government, get a pension, that’s what her parents did. And, and so I get that. And so I, know, but I also for me said, instead of like, “Hey, let’s live life, from this budget”, I’ve always looked at it as well.
If I want to live a certain life, why don’t I just figure out how to get the money to equal that life? I’m not going to live the life before I have the money, but if I know that it costs a certain amount to have an ideal life and I can break it down on a monthly basis, then I can achieve what that number is over time.
Yeah, makes perfect sense. And I’d love to really unpack this topic here with you because because I do think it’s pretty fascinating, right is we all really talk about passive income, right? mean, everyone in this space and what it’s going to kind of do for you. But you brought up a great point really around security, right? So if you think back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, right?
I find that based on people’s own investor DNA, their background, you know, their belief system, where they were raised, you know, all those different things, you know, lifestyle investing, security, all means different things, right, to different people, right?
So is passive income, right, if you do reach that place of having your passive income exceed your expenses, you know, have you really just achieved a level of financial security that provides you a certain security in life?
You know, or are you taking it up the next level too, like you say, maybe having a little bit more abundance in your life? Because I would actually be contrarian here for a moment and say that some people can actually get trapped in their goals. So I could achieve that goal and I have achieved that goal when my expenses were low, right? And you say, “Hey, this is great.”
And I, you know, I, what I would call that is actually abundant complacency. Right. And so how, now am I, how am going to move to the next level? Now you may not move to the level of let’s say Johnny Depp, who’s spending seven figures a month on his lifestyle, right? But what is really important to you and, and also thinking past the money, right? Cause at some point, right, you’ve hit the financial security, you’re doing what you want in life.
How are you going to get to, I would say, higher on Maslow’s hierarchy towards fulfillment?
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting because there are a lot of different, you know, categories that I think people fit into and there’s a lot of different like, you know, if I look, if I just laid everything out, I’d say it’s interesting because you know, too much of a good thing is not a good thing. Right. So it’s almost like I’ve seen so many people, they’re like, passive income.
This is great. I’m going to buy my first property. Now I’ve got passive income. Well, I’m just going to keep doing this. I’m going to buy a whole bunch of them. And then all of a sudden it’s like, wait a minute, I just bought myself another job. Now I have all these people to manage all this stuff to do. Like what just happened? So I do think we got to be careful there. We got to be careful of lifestyle creep, right? You make more.
Then you want to buy more things and do more things. And so that’s a real thing that can make people get trapped again. And then I think there’s the complacency thing where, you know, some people they’re able to, maybe life is just not expensive yet. You’re able to do this early on and then you become complacent with the way that life is. I think the way I look at it is there’s a few different tiers to hit. The first one is survival income.
Once you hit that, opens up a lot of opportunities. And I feel like it lifts the mental weight that is there, even for creativity, even for spontaneity. And it allows people to get out of the mindset of making decisions with finances at the top of the fulcrum. Like I make a decision because I can afford it or can’t afford it. It’s good for the business financially or it’s not, because that’s not always the most important question, right? What’s important?
To the business may, you know, if something’s really good for the business, they may not make sense financially, or it might make sense financially. And if you’re in a good place financially, then you can make different decisions and you can, you know, trial and error a little bit more. So you’ve got survival, you’ve got lifestyle, you’ve got ideal lifestyle. And I think you can even hit another pillar where you’re covering all your business expenses for those of that are entrepreneurs or you have passive income that truly covers the business.
Which allow it unlocks this ability to bring the right people in, to spend more money, to try different things, to delegate more responsibilities, to just take some calculated risks a little differently. And so those are kind of the tiers that I look at. But my belief is most people are going to find it really challenging to discover their purpose, their passion, what fulfills them.
When finances are still in play, when they have to make money. There’s some element of hustle to get by. I have found in our community and just for myself that when you can solve the financial equation and you don’t have to work, that’s generally where this time and space comes in. And yes, you can create it otherwise, it’s just harder to do. It might feel a little more manufactured than when you’ve really achieved financial freedom or at least financial survival.
Then you can start making decisions based on that and figure out what it is that you’re passionate about. What do you like doing? If you could design your ideal day, what does it look like? Who are the people you want to spend the most time with? Who’s your personal cabinet? And so I think if we can get intentional and find the time to solve for those things, we’re going to be able to live in this place of fulfillment and passion much more so than if we’re just living life by default.
Yeah, no, I would agree with that. And I think probably the most important characteristic is actually self -awareness and really understanding yourself, again, your background, your belief system, what’s really important to you, and then trying to create that target of where you want to go, right, to carving out that intentional life. Because everyone’s lifestyle design is going to kind of look a little bit differently.
So, yeah, it’s a very interesting topic because I think sometimes people don’t truly take it to the next level and really understand what that means. They feel as if all the pressure has going to be released. I mean, I know many entrepreneurs who’ve sold businesses for eight figure returns and they’re still miserable, you know, or people have nine figures and they’re miserable, right? So why is that, right? So money wasn’t necessarily the thing.
That got them to where they needed to be. So I think you can make steps at that regardless of where your passive income is today, where your net worth is today. But definitely agree with you that it does create, it removes some of that natural pressure that’s there, gives you a little bit of space to think more, be more creative.
And Dave, I’d love to double down on that because we’ve had a lot of people in our mastermind and the lifestyle investor community that have had eight and nine figure exits. And one of the things that we see constantly is these are individuals that now have more money than they ever thought they would have. It’s the most money they’ve ever had in their life, yet they’re most afraid because they don’t have the lifestyle income or the expenses.
The business to like cover what life looked like. So now all of a sudden you’ve got this lump sum of money. Let’s just call it, I don’t know, $20 million, right? But every single month or every single week you see it creeping down because you’re living life from it and you make a few bad investments and that money’s gone. And you, by the way, you pay taxes early on and so there’s a big drop off.
I know some people that have gotten divorced and so, you know, there’s a big drop off. You know, we have people in our community that had nine figures and you would say you are totally set except nine figures, a hundred thousand, you get divorced, you know, well, taxes 50 ,000 you get divorced 20, I’m sorry, 50 million, you get divorced 25 million, you make a few bad investments.
Now you’re down to 20, 15 million and you have a 1 to $2 million cost of living per year and you dwindle all that money away. And some of these people don’t want to change that lifestyle. Or it takes a lot of convincing to help them slow it down to get the passive income in play to then live that lifestyle. And so it is so interesting to me because I see this all the time, people with all this money, but they’re literally living in the scarcest, way that they ever have feeling thriftier than they ever have when they’ve got the most money sitting in their account than they ever.
Yeah, yeah, it is really all the underlying psychology to it. And then there’s some other, you know, interesting things we can glean from as well. Like, you know, take a look at the statistics from lottery winners, right? People playing the lottery shouldn’t be playing the lottery, right? And then when they do, you know, I think it’s over 90 % of them are actually worse off than after they had won it because, you know, to your point, the lifestyle creep starts happening.
And they really didn’t learn, you know, they didn’t really understand, you know, their purpose, their fulfillment, you know, what’s really driving them. So it doesn’t really help them, it actually hurts them. And then we can take that a step further, too, if you look at the statistics, you know, from, you know, legacy wealth, right, and almost 80% of G2 wealth is actually lost in generation two. And it goes up to 90% in G3. Right? So,
Yep.
That’s right.
Where is the mismatch there? What are people missing? What are they losing? What are they not passing on to those other generations about belief systems, about values, about goals?
Yeah. And I think that’s it. You hit the nail on the head. It is about values. It is about meaningful work, like some form of contribution. And by the way, that contribution doesn’t have to be like purely philanthropic. It can be, but I just think people need some sort of purpose and meaning in what they do. So you can be compensated.
In a way that that still has you doing something that that has purpose and meaning or impact, right? So I do think that those are important components and I would also say a community, know having like -minded people around you and I think
It’s important to have both people that pull you up, people that mentor you and people that you can pour into and pull them up.
I actually think being having both is really important, you need someone to pour into, and you need someone to pour into you.
Yeah, yeah, agree. Yeah, we’ve seen so much progress in our mastermind community as well of just just having that accountability. Being able to problem solve in a room of like minded people that are all going in the same direction. Wow, can you compress time? Right? I think it’s, you know, I think it’s really huge. And people often, you know, overlook that aspect, right of community of relationship capital. That’s so important in this game.
Well, that’s it. That’s the key. It’s exponential, right? You go from a coaching relationship that’s very linear and that person pours into you. And I’m not saying they’re not great. I love coaching relationships and I think there’s a time and a place for them. But you get into a community of like-minded people. You find the right mastermind where it’s your type of people that you can connect with, you can resonate with. Well, now you’ve got all these different degrees of connection and different degrees or lines of impact.
So now you’re not going linear, you’re going exponential and you have so many different ways to do it. And, you know, I try to remind people this all the time for me, I’m in a ton of masterminds. I’m in, well, I two of my own and then I’m in 14. So 16 total and I don’t attend everything because my mindset is I don’t have to consume every single thing to get the value. All I have to do is find the thing that is worth whatever the price point is.
And it generally comes from relationships, a connection. or some piece of education, some mindset shift, some idea, some partnership, but generally it’s like one thing or two things that I can derive the value from. And I think that also kind of like lowers the bar so you don’t go into every event feeling like you have to get so much out of this event to capitalize or get an ROI.
It’s such a great point, Justin. And I think, you know, many of us and frankly, you know, I think we’re kind of taught this and both you and I come from the corporate world also. So we’ve we’ve been in the grind and the hustle there, you know, and you’re always looking for that ROI.
There’s always got to be immediate numbers and results and stuff. So we’re kind of trained that. But it’s it’s really fascinating, right? If you can show up actually to a mastermind instead of always looking out for what’s in it for me.
The more that you can actually start serving other people and then creating value for other people. I mean, that is some real exponential impact, you know, and it is interesting, you know, is just how you approach that, right? In those types of communities versus just, you know, looking at it from my perspective.
Yeah. And also we’ve found that the people that want to contribute in that way are the better fit. I mean, for us, part of our on-boarding criteria and interview process is to figure out, know, what are the unique gifts that people have that they’re willing to share and how eager are they to share what they know? Because if someone is not willing to, or, or, you know, in some cases we have people that are very humble and maybe don’t feel like they have anything to share because they minimize their expertise looking at a group that maybe is bigger fish. But I think everyone has something of value.
Are you willing to do it? And how well of a subject matter expert or how strong of a subject matter expert are you? But we have found that the people that want to share and want to contribute, that’s who we want to build our community with. We’ve also found the people that don’t, they’re just not the right fit for us.
Yeah. Justin, do you have a particular investment thesis or there’s an investment asset class that you focus on?
Well, I invest in just about everything these days. I mean, I’m a huge fan of alternative investments. They’ve outperformed. If you look at the charts over the last 10, 15, 20, 25, I mean, I got charts out to 30 years plus that basically show the performance of alternative investments, you know, compared to the stock market and alts are outperforming by 50 % or greater in almost any timeframe. And so I’ve just spent most of my time in that space. I got started in real estate, I love real estate.
I moved quickly into private credit, I love that as well. Moved into private equity and all sorts of unique alternative investments in, you know, whether it be collectibles or spirits or wine, you know, business, AI, SaaS, music royalties, original content. I mean, I’m just, I’m a big fan first and foremost of building out the cashflow.
Portfolio. So number one, we’ve got to figure out and we study a lot of asset allocation by the wealthiest people. So we, you know, dig into it, like I geek out on reading these reports, the reports that JP Morgan puts out and Goldman Sachs and these aggregators of family office data.
I read these every year when they come out, there’s about, you know, seven to 10 major reports that come out that manage or outline 200 plus of the family offices, meaning the groups that manage the money of the wealthiest people, specifically in the US, but also worldwide. We just figure out what that asset allocation looks like.
So we want to model that we want to copy success, but we also at the same time want to get the cash flow there so that people can live life by design, not life by demand. So how do we help people to have asset income?
Not trading time for money. And then as we graduate from that, how do we get a nice asset allocation? Because most people make their wealth via concentration, you can lose it that way too. But once you have it, or along the way, the wealthiest people make the majority of their wealth over time by diversification. So how do you win in any economical season, right?
Most people make their wealth via concentration, but the wealthiest preserve it through diversification.
That you have a portfolio that performs well, whether there’s a recession, a depression, whether the economy’s climbing and growing leaps and bounds, it’s important to have something that performs in all circumstances. And so we try to model after that. And so my investments have very much been that. We have allocations very similar to what the wealthiest families in the US and in the world use.
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, we’ve had Michael Sonnenfeld on the show. We’ve talked about Tigers asset allocation and typically talk about that. It is interesting though at different tiers, people are looking for different things. We’ve had a lot of Cent of Millionaires in and obviously there’s more of a focus on wealth preservation, right? At that level, you know, versus accumulation.
Most certainly. Yeah, and Tiger 21 is great. I think I’ve been a member for seven or so years and Michael’s done a great job building an awesome community. It’s interesting though, because when you compare the data there, they’re very heavy real estate typically compared to the other allocations. So they’re often twice or three times the allocation to real estate. And that makes sense. It started as a real estate group.
To what a family office might have, to what UBS or Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan or KKR’s numbers look like that put out these reports where a lot of these groups real estate is 10 to 15 % whereas Tiger’s generally in the 25 to 35%.
Right, right. Yeah, I all types of different, I guess different, you know, lenses on it. Do you have any type of hedging strategies as well?
Yeah, I mean, certainly I think the way I look at it is it’s good to have exposure to most things, but it’s good to be smart about what that allocation looks like. So if you have something that it could be an outlier, there could be some pretty significant upside. But if you lose everything, it’s not going to destroy you, you 1 % of your portfolio. So for example, I do 1 in angel investments.
I do very little an early stage because it’s so risky. But if I lose 1 % of my portfolio, then it doesn’t change life. But if I hit it can be a massive win. I do the same thing with Bitcoin, where, you know, to have at least 1 % of your portfolio in that because that’s been, you know, it has outsized return potential, but if you lose 1%, it’s not the end of the world.
It doesn’t change your life materially. and so, you know, having a couple of those plays, maybe smaller percentage, you know, having some allocation of treasuries right now, we’re at some of the, you know, historical best, you know, rates that we’ve been at, and to keep some money liquid, I think is really nice.
I like private credit too though, I mean, we’re in a season where if you find the right groups that do their proper due diligence and homework and you know, their leverage is low, you can create some great returns in, you know, doubling or tripling what you’re getting in treasuries, but still really safe, know, collateralize it two or three or four times the money that is invested.
I think all those are really important and all those can help produce a great performance over the long haul, even if public equities or private equities aren’t, you know, aren’t slamming, right? Most family offices have somewhere between 15 and 25 % in public equities and generally 20 to 30 % in private equity. So you add that up with real estate, private credit.
Most family offices have at least half of their net worth in alternative investments, right? If you add that up. And so how do you allocate in a way that you’re earning a return no matter what, you’ve got cash flow to live life no matter what. You can cover your expenses no matter what. But if the economy goes up, you make good money. If the economy goes down, you make good money.
Yeah. What is your view on public equities?
Well, I try to model again off of what my experience has been of what the wealthiest people in the world and more specifically the data I look at is in the US what they do. And most of them, you know, the ones that are in it, it’s a small percentage. You know, most people think that the wealthiest people have all their money in the stock market. That’s actually not true. Most of them, it’s 15 to 25%. And the reason for it, you know, you can bank on long -term growth of US economy and all that
But I think most of the people I know that are in it, are doing that because they can borrow against it without having to sell anything and they can buy more alternative assets with that money So it’s so you’ve got to play where long term you’re pretty sure the US economy is going to increase But in the short term we can borrow against it at favorable rates especially depending on how much what your net worth is, what your backing is, who your bank is.
There are ways you can still get really good rates today, even though rates are at historic highs. And by the way, they’ve been higher than this before in history, but right now, it was the highest climb, the fastest climb, but there are still good rates that you can borrow against and buy other alternative investments. And so that’s really where I see the majority of my wealthy friends and the families that I study having their money and why they have it, where they have it.
Yeah. Justin, if you could give just one piece of advice to our listeners about how they could accelerate their own wealth trajectory, what would it be?
Well, I think it’s just getting around people that have actually done what it is that you want to do. So we live in a very interesting world where, when you survey high school students, the number one job that people want to have, the career they want to have is to be a social media influencer. And that’s really sad to me, because it’s, well, I’m not even gonna get into that. it’s scary to me because the social media, a lot of social media influencers represent themselves or misrepresent themselves to be experts in a certain thing, even though they haven’t had the years of experience to be an expert in that certain thing.
But because they have a following that is large, a lot of people say, they must be an expert. I’m going to listen to them. I’m going to put my money with them. And that to me is just it’s gambling. It’s really dangerous and it’s really high risk.
So my biggest advice is find coaches, find mentors, find a peer group that is playing at or at a higher level than what you are. And what that means is like higher level of health at, you know, higher level of business, higher level of wealth creation, a higher level of whatever it is that you want in life. Find the people that are actually experts at that specific thing and become a student of what they do. Spend as much time with them as you can.
Yeah. Sage advice for sure. Justin, really appreciate the time and insights today. It’s been a great conversation. I know we could continue this for quite a while, but do want to respect your time. If people would like to learn more about you, follow you, check out your book, what’s the best place?
Yeah, the best place to go is lifestyleinvestor.com. We’ve got everything there. We’ve got everything from the book to master classes to courses to the masterminds, really spend a lot of time and tons of free stuff, know, a blog, a podcast. You can get a free copy of the book there. But for those of you that do decide to get it on Amazon, the new book just came out, the updated and expanded edition of the Lifestyle Investor.
So the original book, is now a top 1 % of all books ever sold. Number one, Wall Street Journal bestseller. All the proceeds go to fight human trafficking. So just want to make sure that everyone knows when you buy the book, good things happen.
We’ve been able to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars on behalf of this book. I’m thankful for that, and the new edition literally just dropped. So I’m thrilled about that. But for your community, I thought it might be cool if anyone wants to figure out what next steps for them could look like.
We’ve got a team that does these strategy calls or usually $500 and they help people, you know get from point A to point B But I’d love to offer that to your community for free. So anyone that goes to lifestyle investor comm forward slash consultation You’ll get a free one -on -one strategy session that is geared towards you specifically on next steps that you can.
Awesome. Really appreciate that. We’ll make sure to link that in the show notes. Again, thanks for your time, Justin. Really appreciate it. And yeah, we’ll talk the next time.
Can’t wait. Thanks for having me on. So much fun, Dave.