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Today’s episode is packed with value for anyone thinking about
the daunting challenge of college costs. Our guest, Seth Greene, is the founder of HowToFindMoneyForCollege.com and a leading authority in helping families navigate the ever-increasing expenses of higher education. Drawing from his personal journey and years of experience, Seth’s company has helped families save over $30,000 per year, per child, through smart financial aid optimization and strategic planning.
Host Dave Wolcott dives deep with Seth, who shares not only his own story—starting with his family’s struggle to pay for Syracuse University—but also the surprising methods his firm uses to “game the system” and maximize college financial aid legally and intelligently. In a market where tuition is rising and the value of a degree is under constant debate, Seth’s advice offers hope and real solutions for parents, grandparents, and even future students themselves.
Listeners will find this episode especially useful, whether their children are toddlers or already in college. Seth’s straightforward strategies are designed to protect family wealth and open doors to significant college savings, sometimes well into six figures over four years.
In This Episode
- The biggest misconceptions about who qualifies for college financial aid
- How to legally manipulate your Expected Family Contribution (now called the Student Aid Index)
- Why 529 College Savings Plans might actually hurt your financial aid eligibility
- Creative structures like using cash value life insurance and business income planning to reduce college costs
If you’re investing in things that are non traditional assets that aren’t correlated, and you don’t have to worry about the tariffs or the pandemic or whatever affecting pricing, I think those alternative investments and tax reduction strategies give you a rate of return that’s geometrically better than anything you’re going to get anywhere else.
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 Wollcot, serial entrepreneur and author of the best-selling book The Holistic Wealth Strategy.
Hey everyone. Welcome back to Wealth Strategy Secrets of the Ultra Wealthy. Today’s conversation is a must-listen for any parent, grandparent, or future college student looking to protect and multiply their wealth while navigating one of the biggest financial hurdles facing families today, college education costs. My guest is Seth Green, founder of HowToFindMoneyForCollege.com, a firm that has helped families save over 30,000 per year per child on college tuition through financial aid optimization and strategic planning. In a time when the cost of college keeps climbing and the value is increasingly in question, Seth is here to show us how to game the system legally and intelligently.
We’ll explore the biggest misconceptions about who qualifies for aid, how to legally manipulate your expected family contribution, why 529 plans might actually hurt your financial aid eligibility, and creative structures like using cash value life insurance and business income planning to reduce your college costs. Plus, how to plan whether your kids are toddlers, juniors, in high school, or already in college. If you’re a business owner, high-income earner, or just someone who wants to stop overpaying for education, this episode could be worth six figures to your family.
Let’s jump in. Seth, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. I am super excited to be here.
Yeah, likewise. Appreciate you coming on today and talking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart as a father of four children, triplets that most of the listeners know college funding was a big hill to tackle and you’re here today to talk about some unique strategies around getting financial aid and really covering college education. Right. Which the costs just continually keep increasing and I’m not necessarily sure the value is actually there in this day and age, but really excited to kind of unpack what some of the latest strategies are and how people can put more of their capital to work, you know, to be able to unlock that savings. So welcome. And why don’t we kick things off with just, you know, tell us a little bit about your backstory, Seth, and how you really got into this space as well.
Absolutely. And this is all my dad’s fault. So I went to Syracuse University for undergrad a few decades ago. And it was packing my bag to come home for the first break, Thanksgiving break, my first freshman semester, and my dad called and said, “You know, you can’t stay there.” And I said, “Well, I know I’m coming home for Thanksgiving break.” Josh, my older brother, is coming to pick me up from Binghamton to take me home to Buffalo. We were coming both home for Thanksgiving break, and dad said, “No, you can’t stay at Syracuse. You have to transfer home to SUNY Buffalo. You have to live at home.”
You have to get a part-time job and work. You have to help your mother around the house and do chores. There’s no loud music and there are no girls over. See you for Thanksgiving. Click. And hung up on me. And I called my mother in tears, “What’s going on, Mom? What the heck is going on?” And she said, “Your father got the tuition bill. He’s freaking out.”
But you know, come home and we’ll figure it out. We’ll try and figure it out. And thankfully, they did not make me, my mother, calm my father down, and did not make me move back home. And every single semester, my dad would make the same phone call. And after like the third time, I’m like, “Oh, he’s just going to keep doing this.” And I stopped stressing about it. But by the time I graduated, in addition to the original reason I went to Syracuse, which was for musical theater, I wanted to be a Broadway star. At the age of 18, I put together a program that didn’t exist back then as a real degree in college financial aid negotiation.
And instead of going to starve on Broadway as a waiter, I opened how to find money for college.com, which is a college financial aid negotiation company where our claim to fame is that we are cutting the cost of tuition. $31,077 per year per kid.
Wow, that’s awesome. Quite a story. And I know all of us can really relate to that, right? Because you know, money wasn’t always flowing easily, especially back then, you know, for our parents’ generation, and trying to navigate the whole world of financial aid, and especially if you’re a higher-income earner. Right. You don’t necessarily qualify for certain things; it almost seemed like a full-time job, really trying to figure it out.
You are, it can be. You are absolutely right. I think you hit the nail on the head right there. So I think that’s really important to know. And there are a lot of misconceptions about college financial aid, about, hey, I make too much, I’m not. So I’m not even going to bother to fill out the forms. I’m not going to get anything. We hear that dozens of times a year.
And those parents, most of the time, are very pleasantly surprised to find out. Oops. I guess it’s a good thing I talk to you guys. Like, we get a lot of referrals from financial advisors who send their clients to us, saying, “I told them to put their money in a 529, and there’s nothing else they can do.” And magically, we find ways, some of which we’ll talk about obviously on this interview, to unlock the secret vaults of college financial aid that people don’t know exist.
Yeah, awesome. So, yeah, let’s dive in. And you know, I think why don’t we frame this for people, you know, wherever they are in the journey, right? If they’re, if their kids are, you know, younger, 5, 8, 10, and college is on the horizon, or there are certain people where the kids maybe are juniors and they’re in the thick of it right now, juniors or seniors. And they’re trying to scramble to figure out, you know, hey, how do we put something together? So let’s kind of take both approaches. So I think people can be level set.
Absolutely. So there are people who ask, “When should they start this process?” Right. You’re alluding to that right now. And I say, “It’s when you get the test results.” Not the sat, the ept, the pregnancy test results. Right. So we can talk about how we prevent them from making mistakes, about putting money in the wrong places that are going to count against them more when their kids are little. And then we can obviously dive into what everybody really wants to know, which is, hey, I got a kid in high school, what do I do now? Right? We get the call, is it too late? Junior year is perfect.
Freshman, sophomore, junior year is perfect. Senior year. If they’ve already been accepted, then again, you’re asked, we’ll talk about a Hail Mary pass. And then we’ve gotten at least one call a year of a family going, my kid’s a freshman or a sophomore at this school, and I just heard about you guys, and they didn’t give us any money. Can you fix it? And the school’s never going to refund money. They’re not going to go back in time. But there are times our Hail Mary pass gets caught in the end zone for a touchdown, and we’re able to get the school to give some money, give up more money for the remaining years of college. I think it’s important if we start with the first.
The most important number when it comes to college financial aid is what used to be known as your EFC, your expected family contribution. Now, thanks to the legislation that changed, it’s called the Student Aid Index, or SAI for short. And that’s the magic number. The government thinks you can afford to pay for college. It is always more than you think you can afford to pay for college. But what most parents don’t realize is no matter, that number is gameable. It’s a formula. And there are ways to manipulate the formula to make yourself qualify for more financial aid.
It depends on how you receive your income. Are you a business owner versus W2? It depends on how you’re holding assets, what type of investments you’re in, whose name they are, and what account type is that you hold your real estate. There’s a whole bunch of different factors that go into that formula. And I found back at the beginning of my career, it’s still on Amazon, there is a book, it’s a thousand pages that explains the entire formula. And I read, I think there’s only like 9 reviews on Amazon, and the book is decades old. I think I’m one of the nine people who read that book and said, “Build a business around.” Hey, there are ways to change these numbers to qualify for more money. And then there are other things you can do throughout the process to get more money to reduce the cost of college.
Yeah. And so let’s talk about the ROI for a second. I’m just doing the math over here in my head to think about the value for the listeners out there. So if you guys are saving 30 some odd thousand per year. Right. Let’s just call it 30. And that’s a four-year school. You’re talking 120 grand a savings.
Absolutely. And that is in comparison to our fees, the ROI is enormous. Right. You’ll get better returns by cutting the cost of college than you will. As we alluded to before we started the show, investing in the stock market and even some of which I know you’ve got strong opinions on, investing in things you can’t control. But even if you look at private equity and some of the other investments. Where else are you going to get a 10 to 1, 15 to 1 ROI in, like, less than four years?
Yeah, and it’s a cost that we all have to bear. Right, if we’re, if we’re going to send our kids there. So.
Yeah. And it’s exponential again, if you’ve got more than one. Like, you have four kids. I have three. You know, my son’s headed to Cornell in the fall, and their retail sticker price right now is $95,000. A year.
A year. Wow.
And if I paid retail sticker price for four kids, three kids, and they all went to Cornell, that’s one point. That’s $900,000.
Yeah.
No, actually it’s 1.2. It’s worse.
Yeah.
Thankfully, I own a college financial aid negotiation firm, so none of them are paying sticker price.
Yeah, exactly. Yet my wife’s actually from upstate New York, Albany as well, so they went through the whole thing. I swear, everyone in New York had it. You had to go to a state school, and then you try to transfer to something else after you’ve been there. Right. To just manage the cost from that standpoint. I’ve heard that story many times.
As I have. We have had that conversation. However, again, thankfully, we’re not paying sticker. So I’m okay with him going to Cornell for all four years and not trying to make him go somewhere cheaper and then transfer.
Yeah. Okay, so let’s, let’s go back a second. And we talked about, you know, when should you start planning? And you talked about the test. Right. Early on. And I remember doing that as well. And again, typical financial planners were saying, put money in 529 plans. I mean, the only good thing that came out of it was setting aside money the day that my kids were born, and I was systematically doing that.
The bad News is, after 18 years of contributing to those plans, it turned out to be about a five-and-a-half percent return. And I think the state tax benefit offsets were next to nothing after doing that. So I know I could have done a lot better. So if people are in those early stages with younger kids. Right. How should they be thinking about this before they get to the aid piece?
Absolutely. So you bring up an excellent point. I’m kind of controversial in our industry for my stance on 529. Exactly. Because of what you alluded to there. The benefit was supposed to be, again, you were getting that tax break for that money coming out for college. But the Problem one is the return. And two, most people aren’t going to put so much money away that the tax break makes up for the financial aid you lose by having money in a 529.
Because if the school sees that I got a couple hundred grand sitting at a 529, I’m going to lose the financial aid they were going to give me because they’re going to say every dollar of that should come to us for college. We don’t need to give you any money. Or if you even had a lower amount. Right. If you had 30 grand, 100 grand, they’re going to say, well, we don’t have to give them 30 grand or 100 grand because he’s already gotten it in a 529. So I’ve only, in 26 years of doing this, I’ve had one client who managed to get so much money in the 529 and have it grow so much that the tax breaks made up for the financial aid they lost. The reason is that they didn’t fund the 529. Grandma and Grandpa funded the 529 and did like 5 5-year forward gift averaging every single time.
So that kids started with a ton of money right when they were born, and then 18 years later had gone through a raging bull market, luckily in the stock market. So that’s the only time I’ve ever seen it actually work where the tax break and they were in a really high tax, the highest tax bracket. That’s the only time I’ve ever seen make up for the financial aid you lose. So I would much rather. No, I’m not telling anyone. If you have a 529, don’t go cash it in, don’t cancel it, don’t pull the money out, and pay the penalties. That’s not what I’m saying. I am saying that you are setting aside for college should most likely not go into a 529.
There are many better, more productive investment vehicles like the kinds Dave recommends that not only would get you a better bang for your buck, but depending on how those assets are held, can be protected against financial aid. I’m trying to make those assets disappear from the financial aid form so they don’t count against you, but you still own them.
Every dollar you save on college is a dollar you can reinvest in your family’s future.
Yeah, exactly. And if I had to do that over again, just, you know, quick level math for the listeners, and I think I wrote this in my book as well, is I mean I would take, let’s say your kids are born, I would put away, say 10,000 a year. You do that for five years, you’ve got 50,000. I would fund a cash value whole life insurance policy, put it in the policy, borrow against the policy, do the first 50k would go into a syndication. After 5 years, that would flip into the next syndication. So now you’re doubling your money. Now you have 100. And then I’d have another chance to flip it again for the third time.
So then your hundred would become 200 after 15 years. And now the kids actually have a whole life insurance policy. They have an asset themselves also, if they haven’t, if they’ve decided not to go to college, like I had two of mine decide not to go to college. And I’m not stuck with having to use funds for the 529 plan. They now have this asset of the life insurance that they can use to, you know, pay for their first house or, you know, kind of get themselves settled. Settled. It’s more like a, you know, a 401k that’s kind of portable. Right.
They have an asset there. They’ve generated passive income, right? Through the actual investments themselves, you know, and just really done exponentially better and had more flexibility. And then my guess is that would feed right into your strategy as well, where they’re probably not looking at life insurance really as an asset. You know, when they put together that calculation.
You are absolutely right. So, depending on how it’s structured. Right. We’re not giving any specific investment recommendations or college recommendations on this podcast. Talk to Dave or you’re so that, you know, you do things right. But yes, properly structured permanent life insurance is one of the assets that normally doesn’t count against you for financial aid. So, depending on how that bank-on-yourself infant banking type policy is set up, you can use that to quote, unquote, hide money for financial aid if you do it right.
Yeah, very nice. So, okay, now let’s move through the progression. We’ve kind of helped people who are in the earlier stages as they’re kind of thinking about, you know, college, kind of coming up. But let’s talk about if you are a junior, senior, or freshman, right? How did these, how does it work with you guys? How did they approach the financial aid? Where did they start?
Absolutely. And we recorded a special training specifically for your listeners. It’s at howtofindmoneyforcollege.com forward slash training. It’s a 90-minute training with myself, an accountant, and an admissions expert, all going through all three pieces of the college process. Now, if you’re talking about if we’ve got to crunch your numbers, right, you’ve got to know what your EFC or SAI is and what you’re looking at? Whether it’s one year from now, your kids, a freshman in high school, junior senior, I’ve got. I want you to know how much you are going to pay for college right now if nothing else changes, right? I can show you the before and the after. I can show you and say, here’s what you’re in for, depending on the school, right? Give me a list of schools and we’ll run them. And we’ll say, here’s what you’re going to pay if you don’t change anything.
And then we can show you in that college cost analysis, if you make these changes, here’s how much money it will save you. And then we guarantee our results, so there’s no risk. If we don’t achieve results, we give. We give money back. We’re not perfect, thankfully. We only have to write one or two refund checks a year out of thousands of families. Most of the time, it works. So what we’ll do is we’ll crunch those numbers and then we’ll look at the way those numbers are formed, right? We’ll say, if you own a business, what entity is that? How do you own the business? How are you paying yourself for those distributions? Is that W2 will look at all the assets and how they’re held, and then we’ll say, what of these can move or be restructured, and how much money will that save you? Now, the reason why we like working with freshmen, sophomores, and juniors in high school better is that we have more time, right? Because if you come to me and your kids a seniors, like, right, May 1st was decision day, right? They should have decided a couple of weeks ago.
There’s nothing else I can do right now. I can work on their sophomore year of college, but their freshman year package is already set. You come to me. Whatever changes we’ve got to make have to have enough time to show up differently on a tax return. So if you’re a freshman or a sophomore and we move money around, I have time for your next tax return to get issued before you have to report it to the college financial aid forms. So it moves the needle. Like we had clients who said, “We got divorced. Should we have a couple every year who come to us and say, “We just got divorced? Shouldn’t our income be cut in half? Shouldn’t the numbers be different for financial aid?” And I said, “When was the divorce decree final?” This year.
Your tax return isn’t going to show it. It’s got to wait till next year’s tax return, and then we can report to colleges. So we’ve got to have enough time that the changes show up on your tax return so that you qualify for more financial aid.
Wow. Oh, that’s really good advice. Right. So the tax return is the key that they’re using to base everything on.
They’re using the tax return to base everything on your income, the assets. It depends on how they’re, you know better than it a lot of people, it depends on how their held is to how they show up on your tax return. Right. Are you getting a K1? Are you getting a 1099? How is the money, the proceeds from that investment? How are you reporting the losses? Like, if you’re in an oil and gas deal, like, how are you reporting the first X number of years of losses? All of that gets reported affects financial aid, which is why we need enough time for the changes to show up, whether it’s on a tax return or an investment statement.
What are some of the key ways that people can gamify that number in terms of their assets?
So, without going too technical, it’s going to be, hey, do I have money that’s in my name, that’s in a non-qualified taxable account? Right. We’re going to need to move that money or change how it’s held into an asset that disappears, so to speak, from the financial aid forms. If you’re taking income from your business. The government has changed the law a lot in the last two or three years and has made a gigantic mess of the financial aid process. So it used to be if you owned a small business with fewer than 100 employees, it didn’t count against you for financial aid. So the loophole was to take all your money, put it into a loan, put it in the business, and then it didn’t count. But two years ago, the government changed the loophole, got rid of the small business and farm exclusion, and now you can own a sole proprietor business, and everything counts against you. But one of the biggest mistakes, and I saw someone make this the other day, that is literally a million-dollar mistake on their financial aid forms, is how do you report the value of your business? Well, the formula is supposed to be assets minus liabilities equals the net worth of your business.
Well, the problem is that there are a million different, there are tons of different formulas for valuing a Business. You know that, right? So people don’t know if you were trying to sell your business. You want the formula that makes your business worth the most. If you’re trying for financial aid, you want your business to look as poor as possible. So the way to use the formula would be physical assets minus physical liabilities equals the net worth of your business. And again, talk to your accountant, talk to your professional, talk to us or whomever. We’re not giving advice on this show. But for example, that gentleman came up with a valuation.
I said, “Where’d you get. What’s this $3 million in assets?” And he said, “Oh, that’s the value of my business.” I said, “Where’d you get the valuation?” He said, “We had a company that was interested in buying us for $3 million.” And I said, “Did they write you a check? Did you sell?” And he said, “No.” I said, “Then it’s not worth anything.” I said, in your head, it’s worth $3 million. But they never wrote you a check, so it’s only worth what someone will buy it for. And we’re trying to make it look less.
I said, “So what are the physical assets of your business? Any real estate, any physical property, any money in the bank minus what you owe.” And he came back and he’s like, “Oh My God, if I do that number, my business is worth like 70%. Way less. Like millions of millions of dollars less.” And I’m like, “Go edit and change your FAFSA and your forms. I just saved you like a couple of million dollars because you reported your ego number of what you thought someone would buy it for, who didn’t buy it.” Not what. It’s physics.
What you could physically sell the assets at a fire sale for.
Yeah, it’s the exact same when you’re trying to play that lending game and trying to make your balance sheet, your income look very strong. Lending for real estate or other types of loans. But then, when you’re trying to do your taxes, it’s the actual opposite. So I know it’s one challenge all of us on this show I know face very often is it’s always hard to get loans in place when you’re showing very low income, which helps the financial aid side.
Right. The less I show, the more free money I can get. Yeah, I’ve had that debate with my wife because she’s like, there was a time when this was our second house and we were looking for a third. And she said, “Hey, why can’t we have the money?” The cash flow to pay two more. She wanted to sell our house. She wanted to move first and then sell her house. She wanted to sell her house when it was empty and we weren’t there.
Right. So she didn’t want to deal with open houses and all that stuff. So she said, “We make enough money that we could pay two mortgages at once, no problem. Why won’t the bank let us do it?” I’m like, “Because we don’t report enough W2 income to qualify for the two loans.” Even if it’s for 30 days. Their rules won’t let it go because our debt to income would be ratio would be messed up. And she’s like, “That’s stupid. Why don’t we report more income?” And I said, “One, for financial aid purposes, and you’re welcome now that our son is headed to Cornell, one of the most expensive schools in the country, and two, so that we pay a whole lot less in taxes.”
Yeah, absolutely. No. And that’s something that we focus on a lot. And I think the big lesson here is, right, proactive planning and strategy so that if, you know, these things are coming up right, you can plan, you know, especially if you’re a business owner. Right. You can plan to change the way some of your assets are structured, change the way some of your income is structured for the right years to be able to make this, you know, work in your favor.
Absolutely. And again, you’ve got to know the rules. You’ve got to know what’s kosher, what’s not. You’ve got to know how many years they’re looking back on the financial aid forms, which tells you how long in advance you’ve got to do all this stuff. And we’ll cover all that in that training your folks can get at howtofindmoneyforcollege.com.
Training Now, Seth, do you guys also? Does your firm help with that process? Because I remember, yeah, looking at that FAFSA form and trying to fill out some of that stuff. And if you’re a high fact finder and into the details, that maybe that’s great. But if, like a lot of people I know, you know, doing lots of things, being very busy, it’s super time-consuming.
So, thank you for the question. The answer is yes, that is what we do. So one will crunch the numbers and find out where you are and let you know if we can move the needle and, if so, by how much. We normally charge $197 for that. If you mention that you came from, well, strategy secrets will waive that fee. It won’t cost you anything to find out. Then we can be involved as much or as little as you want. So we can literally do the financial aid forms for you, give you all the answers, fill out the ones we can fill out so that you don’t have to do any of the work, and then handle the appeals to the schools and the physical negotiation.
We’re the only college, there are a number of college financial aid firms that will do the forms for you. We’re the only one that physically calls every school to negotiate for more money. And we’ll handle the process from start to finish. We have clients who don’t want to touch any of it, and we have clients who want to be involved a little bit. So I mean, we can customize a package depending on what the family wants.
Yeah. Awesome. Seth, out of curiosity, where is the state of the market, right? With universities these days? Right. I know there’s been talk of, you know, should, you know, the forgiveness of student loans and you know, managing that debt. Right. You know, from that standpoint, as well as lots of disruption in that space. Right.
With the advent of things like Udemy and YouTube, and the ability to get top-notch training online, and also, you know, post-pandemic. Right. A lot of people are just, you know, frankly taking some non-traditional routes, maybe going into the gig economy and things like that. So you know, how are you seeing universities these days and age?
So you’re absolutely right about all of that. It depends. So, do I think we’re going to see more and more kids taking a non-traditional route? Yes. Depending on the profession. Right. There are professions where, for example, I don’t want a heart surgeon who said I watched some videos on YouTube. Right. For some of those professions where there’s some licensing required, like whether you’re a doctor, you’re a lawyer, there are things where, for the foreseeable future, they’re going to college and then a grad school route.
Right. My son is very ambitious, got his whole life planned out, going to Cornell for his undergrad, then wants to go to like MIT or Harvard for his PhD, and then wants to do research, knows exactly what he wants to do. And in his area, I highly doubt, I would imagine that, and I’m banking my own money on it. Right. That he walks into a job interview and has gone to let’s say Cornell and Harvard, and for this topic versus someone who comes in and goes, I self-taught myself and I watched a bunch of YouTube videos, he’s going to win every time. Right now, are there professions where that’s not necessarily the case? Sure. I know in the financial advisor space, there was, you know, a gentleman at the brokerage firm I was at when I started 20, 30 years ago. Back then, all you needed was a high school diploma.
Now there are lots of, you know, you’ve got to get your CFP and all these other things, but there are professions where I think it’s not going to make that big a difference, and college isn’t necessarily a requirement anymore, and you could learn enough to do the job. And then I think there are places, depending on what you want to do, that either aren’t going to go away anytime soon or may never go away. I don’t know that I want a doctor. I don’t know that I want a pilot. I don’t know that I want a lawyer who’s only been educated by watching online training. Right. I mean, there’s not. I don’t know that I could be totally wrong here.
I don’t think anything’s replacing medical school.
Yeah. I think for those folks who are just going for that, you know, a four-year bachelor of arts degree.
We need to rethink wealth, not just making money, but about preserving, multiplying, and passing it on intelligently.
Yeah.
Liberal arts anymore. Yeah, yeah. You know, because it becomes more of a social experiment for the kids. Get to learn how to become independent and things like that. But that’s a lot of money to be able to do that. And then, you know, nowadays, I mean, how can a university be teaching something like AI? I mean, it’s just so new, it’s so cutting edge. That seems to me like it’s got to be taught from, you know, the leading companies that are doing it in entrepreneurs. Right?
Yes. And this is right up my son’s alley because he’s going for statistical genomics. Like he wants to use data science and healthcare to cure diseases and has already coded a program that analyzes DNA and comes back with whether it’s benign or pathogenic, and is going to develop some type of condition, and has like over a 90% accuracy rate. And he built it himself. And then his science teacher said, “Oh my God, like, you need. This is good. Like, take this to the Western New York science fair.” And then they sent him to the state science fair, and then he went to talk to some serious people, like this should be in hospitals.
Right. So could he code that himself? Yes, but what does he want to learn? And he’s coded six different programs for us using code and AI for our business.
But does he still need to go to Cornell? Could he argue if he had said, “I don’t want to go to Cornell. It’s not my dream school.” We would have had a conversation, but I think arguably the professors doing research there are probably on the cutting edge. And do I think the connections that he will make and the opportunities he will get by going there make up for the price tag, in my opinion, I’m his dad, so I’m saying yes. But I understand people going the other way.
Yeah. Seth, if you could give the listeners just one piece of advice about how they could accelerate their wealth trajectory, what would it be go to?
I’m going to say the two biggest expenses in your life are going to be what you pay for your education or your kid’s education, and the amount of taxes that you pay over your lifetime. Which is why I think a show like, well, Strategy Secrets and the things that you guys do at your firm are so important because it’s about how do we shelter those assets, how do we pay less in taxes? Because that’s a direct dollar-for-dollar straight to your bottom line. If you’re cutting your taxes, if you’re investing in things that are non traditional assets that aren’t correlated and you don’t have to worry about the tariffs or the pandemic or whatever affecting pricing, I think those alternative investments and tax reduction strategies give you a rate of return that’s geometrically better than anything you’re going to get anywhere else.
Yeah. Awesome. And can you give us that link one more time, and anywhere else, if people want to, you know, connect with you or follow you?
Absolutely. So the training for Wealth Strategy Secrets listeners is how to find money for college.com forward/training. And after you watch that, if you’ve got questions we you’ll, you’ll learn a whole lot more about the process and a lot more of our secrets. And then if you shoot, give me an email. Seth, how to find money for college.co,m we’re happy to answer any questions you have.
Awesome. Really appreciate your time and wisdom today. Seth. Thanks for coming on the show.
Thanks so much for having me. It was a lot of fun.
You bet.
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. If you’d like to learn more about upcoming opportunities at Pantheon, please visit pantheoninvest.com.