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Today’s episode is packed with inspiration and practical 
strategies as we welcome Brandon Elliott, a self-made real estate investor with a journey unlike any other. Brandon is the founder of Credit Counsel Elite, and his story takes us from a childhood of scarcity, through dangerous setbacks, and ultimately to financial freedom. After surviving a life-altering explosion, Brandon transformed his mindset and set out to master the art of leveraging banks’ money—what he calls “OBM: Other Banks’ Money”—to build an impressive $14 million real estate portfolio and generate over $50,000 per month in income.
Brandon hasn’t followed a conventional path to wealth, and certainly not the Dave Ramsey approach. Instead, he’s used creative financing, strategic credit stacking, and under-the-radar banking strategies to make capital available and accelerate his investments—without relying solely on his own savings or high-interest options. His mission now is to help other business owners, real estate investors, and entrepreneurs learn the “rules of the game” that banks use, so they too can tap into life-changing funding opportunities.
In this episode, Brandon shares the real-life lessons that took him from financial rock bottom to thriving success. You’ll hear actionable insights and step-by-step advice for creating capital out of seemingly thin air.
In This Episode
- Brandon’s journey from hardship to financial independence
- Creative ways to leverage credit and bank relationships to generate investment capital
- The fundamentals of the BRRRR strategy and credit stacking
- Actionable tips for building strong credit profiles and accessing zero-percent bank funding
This is exactly what’s taking place in today’s society with us in America. Here we live in a country that gives out so much funding if you know how to talk to the banks properly, if you know the rules to the game. Right now, it wasn’t taught in school, so it’s only for the wealthy that know how to talk to the banks.
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 bestselling book The Holistic Wealth Strategy.
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Wealth Strategy Secrets of the Ultra Wealthy. Today’s guest has one of the most remarkable and unconventional journeys to financial freedom that you’ll ever hear. Brandon Elliot went from a childhood of scarcity and struggle, to some dangerous detours as a young adult, to literally surviving an explosion that became the turning point of his life. From that moment forward, he rebuilt not just his finances but his entire mindset. Brandon mastered the art of leveraging other banks’ money to build a $14 million real estate portfolio and generate over $50,000 a month in income. And he didn’t do it the Dave Ramsey way. He did it through creative financing, strategic credit stacking, and playing the wealth game by a completely different set of rules.
In this episode, Brandon reveals how you can create capital seemingly out of thin air, protect yourself from risk, and accelerate your investing through strategies that most people don’t even know exist. If you’ve ever wished you had more liquidity to invest or grow your business without touching your own savings, you want to listen closely to this one. And now, onto the show. Brandon, welcome to the show.
What’s up, Dave? Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Yeah, you bet. Great to see you, Brandon. And this is going to be a good one for the audience. So for those of you out there, this is not your Dave Ramsey approach. These are the things that we love about building wealth non-traditionally. Brandon is here to tell you a story about his journey and then how he’s helping other investors, real estate investors, entrepreneurs really think creatively around the whole challenge of creating capital. How can we create capital? He’s got a cool approach of pulling it out of thin air to multiply your wealth and start doing some strategy stacking—which is one of the things that we really love—using creative finance to propel your investing. So, Brandon, welcome to the show.
Why don’t we begin with telling the audience a bit about your origin story and how things really got off the ground for you?
Yeah, of course. And just to kind of highlight Dave Ramsey—for anybody that loves him out there—totally cool. Usually a different avatar than what we’re talking to normally, because I used to bash on him back in the day. And then I realized, you know, there is an avatar that really needs to hear what he’s preaching, for sure. Somebody that spends money they don’t have—that’s for them. For other business owners that are looking to leverage and build wealth, there’s ways that you can do it without using your own capital. Not OPM (other people’s money), because those are good strategies, but when you can use OBM (other banks’ money), that can get really fun. And so there are some cool, creative strategies that I’ve done over the years.
But going back to how I started everything—I grew up in New Jersey.
I grew up—I always say American poor, super blessed. But when you start traveling the world, you see what real poverty looks like in other countries, and you realize how good we really have it here in America—the greatest country in the world. We grew up with Section 8, food stamps, Social Security. Single-parent mom raised three misfits. I was the only son and the only man in the house. I was told at a very young age, like, “Hey, you’re the man of the house. You got to get your stuff together. You got to do this.”
But that was at like 8 or 9 years old. I met my father when I was 18 in court so he could stop paying child support. And you just don’t know what you don’t have or need. You don’t know what you don’t know. Now, the older I get and the more male figures, role models, and friends that pour into me, I’m like, man, having some male guidance at a younger age probably could have helped a lot or corrected some of the things that I started doing.
So, long story short, I was searching for my first job at 9 years old. I got my first job at 12 in a restaurant by the grace of God and an amazing woman at church. She owned the restaurant. I was supposed to be 18 to actually work there, but she got me in under the table, which was really cool.
But yeah, I ended up quickly after that—I think it was seventh grade—getting introduced to marijuana for the first time. Drugs were already in my house, but growing up young, you’re like, “Drugs are bad,” and they still are. I do encourage that belief. But I got into it by a good friend at the time and some older girls, and the peer pressure from that. I was like, okay, let’s do this. And I found out that I liked marijuana at a young age. I used it just to laugh and take the tension off my back and the pressure of, hey, is rent going to be paid this month? Are we going to be evicted? Are we going to have the lights on? Things like that. That pressure at a very young age I probably shouldn’t have carried, but it was just naturally some of the fears and frustrations I heard my mom saying.
Because she was diagnosed manic-depressive bipolar at a young age, there were a lot of issues in the house. Grace of God—amazing woman, by the way. I’m not bashing on my mom. She is incredible. We put her through the wringer with a bunch of things.
But I got addicted to marijuana. I used it for the good, the bad, the ugly—everything in between. And I quickly realized if I was going to smoke weed, I had to be the person in my circle of friends that supplied it so I could smoke for free. Not good stuff, but it was just one of those entrepreneurial instincts in me right away. Because I wasn’t used to spending money, I also just took whatever I got money-wise and went back to the person I was buying from, picked up more and more, and it turned into walking away with duffel bags of this stuff. It turned into goals at the time of getting as much money as I could, taking care of my family.
It wasn’t a good path. Not at all. I had guns to my head, knives to my throat. I’ve had best friends that hung out with me every single day for two years rob me a couple days before Christmas. I had cops knowing about me. I had friends down the street that were either going to prison or getting murdered. There were a few people. It was just one of those circumstances like, something’s got to give.
Luckily, I had a friend in California. So I went out there and started basically growing marijuana. Had my license. I was growing, buying, and then mailing things to the East Coast, cutting out a lot of the chaos—but still not changing my habits. I used marijuana for the good, bad, ugly, everything in between.
I smoked a lot, every day. I was depressed. I was unfulfilled. And then one day, September 24, 2013, I had an explosion in my apartment where everything changed. At this moment, I was literally on fire—making hash oil. Complete moron.
I always knew God had favor in my life, so I always pushed it to the edge. There were so many other times I shouldn’t be here or should have been in jail. And I’m like, man, so much favor. This time, he protected me as well. But it was also one of those situations that a little slap on the wrist, a little scare—it wouldn’t have changed my direction. With my personality type, I needed something drastic, like literally an explosion and being on fire, to change my life. And that’s what happened.
I got tossed into my living room. I ended up burning 40% of my body. I was on fire. My shirt burnt off me. I ripped off my basketball shorts, which melted like plastic. It was crazy. I started seeing my skin peeling off me, and I thought, “Oh, this isn’t good.”
We made the news for the first time—not the news you want to make. Helicopters, ambulance. Long story short, I went to the hospital, and they induced me into a coma for a week. I went through three surgeries. I had to learn how to walk again.
It was just a crazy circumstance that I personally needed. I don’t wish that on anybody, but I was young, dumb, misguided, and needed a strong correction to get off that path.
I know that’s a lot right there, but that’s what happened. It was kind of a crazy situation.
Yeah. So how did this kind of evolve you right into your current business practice?
Well, so in that moment, I was number one, I was embarrassed. I was just humiliated. I was like, man, I started thinking in the hospital, well, if I could be, and I don’t want to say successful, but if I could be making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year with one foot in, one foot out, because I was working in restaurants the whole time, but I just didn’t have any goals. So if I could do something half decent but just on the wrong side, what if I got on the correct side and I could feel morally good about myself? If I could, you know, keep my head up high and tell my family members or, you know, my nieces that were growing up, nephew and nieces about what I do for a living and be proud of it.
And so I ended up having a bunch of court charges coming over me and I was facing 12 years in prison. I ended up fighting it in court and went to trial, and instead of getting three years, which I was about to settle for, the judge gave me an opportunity to kind of tell my story. And I was prepped by a mentor at the time, and she gave me house arrest, she gave me two felonies, a misdemeanor, which just last year we were able to get changed around and totally cleaned up, which was awesome when they said it was impossible.
But that is where I started getting on the path when I was on house arrest. Like something had to give. And so I started studying all the books, podcasts, and YouTube on real estate, because at one point in 2011, I was doing door-to-door sales for Kirby vacuum cleaners for six months, and I was really good at it. I knocked on somebody’s door that was a real estate investor. He had a company and he was like, you got to work for me. And there were a lot of pre-foreclosures, notice of defaults back then. That’s where he brought me into the company, and I got so much motivation. They had systems in place, they were really making a difference. It was just incredible.
And so I remembered that feeling that I had, and I was like, man, real estate’s got to be the thing. And so I started studying it, and it was the first time in my life that I was really lighting up. I only read a couple books in my life at that point. And so when I started reading about real estate and the BRRRR strategy, that’s what I got gravitated towards.
It was something like, man, this is what it’s going like. This is the path. And lo and behold, I still had a poor mindset. I grew up that way. I didn’t have friends with money. I didn’t know. I was working a restaurant job, and on paper it showed $1,900 a month. You can’t really qualify for too much with that.
And so I was just determined to, well, how am I going to make this happen? And I figured out how to actually talk to the banks properly and that the banks do want to lend to you. They have to, right? That’s the business they’re in. But they’re looking for low risk and high risk. And so that’s where I’ve been able to talk to them properly and get affordable rates as low as 0% to be able to buy properties, complete renovations with it, protect myself with contractors, and do the whole BRRRR strategy.
And so for any of the listeners that don’t know, I’m sure a lot do, but the BRRRR strategy is Buy, Renovate, Rent, Refinance, Repeat. And so the whole goal is to have little to no money into each project.
And so that started changing my life. Over two years, I bought in 2015. I started buying real estate. Two years later, we had 10 income-producing properties. We were collecting about $10,000 a month from it. And that was where everything just started going in the right direction.
And what does your portfolio look like today?
Today we have $14 million in real estate assets. We collect about $50,000 a month off of that. I say passive, but there’s definitely things that need to get done to make it so. But it’s as hands-off as possible, and super blessed from it.
Yeah. No. What an amazing journey, Brandon. And this is exactly what gives me the motivation to do this show and a lot of the things that we’re doing, right? Because unfortunately, people have traumatic experiences in life, whether it be a health issue, a family issue, circumstances like, you know, you came from, to really have that deep, you know, light bulb moment where you know you need to make a massive shift in your life.
And so for those out there listening, right, you have the opportunity, if you haven’t had a big event in your life, to be able to change a trajectory if you’re on a trajectory that’s not serving you well or it’s misaligned to your values or your goals and things. Then change it now, right, before something significant happens like that. So I appreciate your transparency and, you know, sharing that story.
I’m sure it’s been very challenging, but I mean, what an amazing story. And how old are you today?
I’m 35 now.
35 and you have $14 million in assets. I mean, that’s amazing, right? And it also, it’s always amazing to me that people—if you’ve ever played the Rich Dad, Poor Dad board game, right—we got that out, and it was so funny. I remember it’s like a $250 board game, you know, when it first came out. But it still holds true to this day. And we have, you know, our families played it and everything like that. But you can learn certain things.
How, for instance, the person working at the restaurant, right, can actually get out of the rat race quicker than a high-paid lawyer, right? Because it’s all about being smart with your capital, understanding how to utilize different financially savvy techniques, such as what you’re going to really talk about today.
So why don’t we start to unpack some of your expertise there. So there’s a lot of people out there. We have a very sophisticated listener base. They probably have great credit, things like that. But people are at all kinds of different stages. Maybe people are thinking about setting up a side hustle business so there’s no credit associated to the business, or they just have maybe good credit just personally. But maybe they only have like two cards or, you know, something like that in place. Or you’re trying to help teach others, right, if you’re younger in your journey, you know, you’re trying to build things out of nothing from there.
Yeah. So number one, there’s just misinformation out there. There’s a lot of myths, and that all just comes from the lack of it being taught in school. And most likely a lot of, you know, when we grew up, it wasn’t taught around the kitchen table. So it’s hard to wrap your head around some of what’s true, what’s not, with a lot of the myths that we hear. Because a lot of us grew up believing that hey, you only can have a few credit cards, one, two credit cards, maybe a third one just in case for emergencies. When in fact they want to see that you can manage your finances, and they want to see that you have 21+ total accounts.
Of course not all just credit cards, but a mixture—a mixed use of personal loans, auto loans, mortgages, student loans, retail credit cards, regular credit cards. If you have a mixture of some of these things, it all helps. For me personally, I had that poor mindset. I was very cheap, if you will, and frugal, and I was looking for—I knew the BRRRR strategy was the play that I wanted to do for real estate. And I didn’t want to have any money into the deal. I knew it was going to take about 6 to 12 months to be able to stabilize and so forth. So I was just thinking, if I borrow this money, however, I didn’t think a person would lend it to me. I knew it would have to be from the bank. That was my way of thinking.
But I didn’t want to pay much interest. And I knew that I had certain credit cards at the time that were $60,000 and $80,000 limits because I just did all the right things every six months by asking for credit limit increases. I was always utilizing the cards and then paying it off at the end of the day so I wasn’t in debt. Those strategies helped me get high limits over time. And I was getting these offers in the mail for balance transfers or cash advance, but at 0%. And I was like, I want that, you know, because they’re offering it anywhere from 6 months to 24 months, on average 18 months. And to me I was like, great, that’s more than enough time.
And so what I did was start figuring out how to talk to the banks, ask them if there are any promotional rates going on behind the scenes where I can actually get this 0% funding. And sometimes it would be a flat fee, 1 to 3%. Nowadays they go up to 5%. But there are many different ways to liquidate cards like this into actual cash. And so when you do that, then it gives you the opportunity that you can literally buy real estate because it’s cash.
Or—there were mistakes that I’ve made in the past where I thought I was paying with credit cards to a contractor, but I was really liquidating cards into cash and then paying them, and then they ran off with the money. And it was very eye-opening, like, oh, well, I shouldn’t do that. I should just make sure that they can take and receive credit cards. This will give me protection. If they don’t do the work, if there’s some kind of issue, they’ll make it right. Or I can call up my credit card company. It’s like a mini court case.
What do you mean by liquidate a card into cash?
Yeah, so what I mean by that is if there is a credit limit, let’s just say one of these cards has $100,000 limit on it. It just one. I could actually there’s services online that you could utilize like plastic, Milo, Bill.com, there’s several of them. Zill money or what I did initially Was just call the back of the number on the credit card and asking them for, hey, I see that you have a promotional rate of 0% for 18 months for a balance transfer, or maybe it was a cash advance, 0%. But there may be a flat fee to be able to get that. But if I have a relationship with them, meaning a bank account with the same credit card company, say it was bank of America credit card with that high limit, 100k. And then I have a checking account with them, I’ll just ask them, hey, can you actually, I don’t have a credit card to pay off, but could you just put it into my checking account and they’ll liquidate that whole thing. Except the fee that, you know, the flat fee to do it.
Got it.
So for 18 months, it’s zero percent now. And now I have that liquid cash that I can go buy the real estate with. I can complete the renovation. I can use it for whatever to start a business, grow a business, scale a business inventory, you know, hire on the best of the best. You know, it really sets you up for tremendous leverage. With all that being said, again, Dave Ramsey approach, you need to be disciplined. And I don’t give anybody permission with my strategies to utilize this. To buy a $20,000 Gucci sweatshirt.
Yeah.
Or buy a Lamborghini if you can’t afford. Like, buy the asset that pays the dividends, gets the profit, that affords the Lamborghini.
Yeah.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, let’s start with, you know, let’s start with step one. Right. I mean, I’m assuming that there probably two levels of people. Let’s. Let’s talk through two different scenarios. Sure. So number one is let’s say you’re running a business, couple of businesses, but, you know, you’ve been, you’ve been over utilizing those.
Right. For whatever. Let’s say you’ve got a cyclical business. Right. So you’re kind of over utilizing those. What would be the best strategy to do some of those 0% kind of balance transfers? Right. That would be step one.
And then the scenario two would be, how can someone who’s wanting to create a side hustle, wanting to create some of that liquidity to go buy an asset. Right. But they don’t have anything yet.
Yeah. So when it comes down to first off, like, if you have balances on the personal side, a lot of people do this. A lot of people, when they’re trying to start a business, grow a business, they’re actually just leveraging the personal side and therefore they see their scores go up and down like a seesaw and it’s because of high utilization. If you’re doing business related activities, make sure you’re utilizing number one, a business product like a business credit card. And then if you can find the 0% introductory offers for 6 to 24 months, take advantage of that because that gives you leverage to be able to go all in and start the business, grow the business, scale it, make sure that this isn’t for like a 30 year fixed type of mortgage. This is for, or even just your skin in the game to do so. This is for something like a fix and flip or something that you believe you’re going to get your ROI within 3, 6, 9, 12 months. If you have 18 months to pay it off, get it done within 12 so that you have time for backup plans just in case.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
So we’ve broken it down. We broke it down to a four-step process that gets like—it’s the way. And so, number one is really understanding the training on how these banks and lenders are judging you. A lot of people out there think it’s just about their FICO score, and it’s not. There are six boxes that make up your credit profile, and there are 10 different metrics just on those six boxes that have a very high yes or no to these banks. And of course, yes, it represents the FICO score, but there are a lot of things that can be manipulated with that. So you just want to be very aware of the elementary stuff that should have been taught in school but isn’t. Of the six boxes, there are 45 different metrics on how these banks and lenders are judging us.
And so if you don’t know the rules to the game, this is like real-life Monopoly. When we’re playing Monopoly, we all know that when you pass Go, you collect $200. We all know this. It’s embedded into us, right—unless you’re playing with my family and you forget the rules. They might not be bumping your elbow to tell you. But this is exactly what’s taking place in today’s society with us in America. Here we live in a country that gives out so much funding if you know how to talk to the banks properly, if you know the rules to the game. Right now, it wasn’t taught in school, so it’s only for the wealthy who know how to talk to the banks, the business, bank relationship managers, and so forth. And so it’s important to realize there are rules to the game.
Right now we don’t know them, so we’re flying blind. And therefore nobody’s bumping our elbow saying, “Hey, don’t forget this.” So I’m that uncle that’s trying to help you win right here, saying, “Hey, don’t forget there are rules to how these banks are judging us. They need to lend to us. They’re just not looking for high risk. And right now, what you’re saying or how you’re positioning yourself is coming off high risk.” Okay? They want to lend to us.
Trust me. And so when you understand that it’s not just about your FICO score, it’s also about the 45 metrics, it’s about your six boxes. Next, it’s also about the banking relationship. Do you even have a bank account with them? A lot of people are applying to banks, but they don’t have a bank account with this bank. And there’s a know, like, and trust factor that comes into play. They want to see you, they want to see your activity. They want to track the data behind it and see if you align with one of their ideal members that they make money from.
But also are you a low risk, right? They want to track that data because they have a ton of data on us. And so when you know how to position yourself: do you have a bank account with them, what’s the internal rating, how many products and services are you taking advantage of from them? Is it just one checking account, or do you have multiple checking and savings accounts, a CD, for God’s sake, anything? They offer a ton of products and services—how many are we actually taking advantage of? And then the internal rating: how many transactions are taking place per month? Are you just using it as a side account, or are you actually moving some money through there? What is the average balance, how much money is going in versus going out over the last 30, 60, 90 days, or even six months? All of this stuff is super imperative to somebody’s success and whether or not the bank is going to consider them a low risk or high risk. And then what you’re saying on these applications—you know, I love teachers. They are some of the most amazing human beings on this earth because they have a heart to serve.
But let’s face it, in our society, they’re not really taking care of the teachers. And so financially, you could be making $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 a year as a teacher. And then if you say, “Well, I’m making $50,000 a year as a teacher, and I live in New York, and my rent is about that much,” then how can a bank label you as a low risk to actually give you funding?
Yeah, so interesting, right? So you’re saying that to create a relationship with your banker—even though you may not necessarily ask. So, I mean, this is a really fascinating topic. I’ve applied for many small business loans over the course of running different businesses over the years. I’ve had relationships with different bankers, kind of small, medium, and large. But most of that, when we’ve looked for capital, could be accessing a business line of credit or maybe long debt, right? You’re creating that relationship really to do that.
But what you’re advocating here, if I understand correctly, is to create that relationship, set yourself up the right way. And then you’re talking about saying, “Hey, what type of credit card offers do you have?”
Well, not just credit cards, but yes to everything else. Any financial products and services that the banks offer. With that being said, you’re not going to be able to get a loan at 0%. But there are tons of other financial products at very affordable interest rates. And to get the 0% type of funding, it’s going to be in the form of credit cards. Now, a lot of people get freaked out with that, like, “Well, Brandon, I don’t want that.” It’s very simple. You just stay organized in a spreadsheet.
So should people be looking for those offers in the mail that we typically throw in the garbage, or is there another consolidated way to really identify where some of those good low-interest or zero-interest options are?
You don’t need a big life event to wake you up, you have the opportunity right now to create the future you want.
Yeah, they should definitely be looking at that spam mail that you get. Don’t throw that stuff out. You should keep it to the side and just pile it up for the time when you are ready to apply to different banks and different products to verify what kind of offers are there. You should definitely have a bank relationship. The longer you’ve been with the bank, the better. The more products and services, the better. The stronger your internal balance is and money going in versus going out, the better. The stronger you have that relationship, the more it’s in your favor.
Now, you mentioned something. In the past, you were getting loans for certain things—loans specifically like SBA and other types of product loans at a certain dollar amount.
They’re going to require documentation. And this is a big thing that a lot of people get caught up on. They’re like, “Well, Brandon, I don’t qualify for any of that. I don’t have good tax returns. They’re going to deny me.”
Well, what I’m talking about is when I was broke—when I had no money. If you looked on paper, I was a felon. I did not have a good rap sheet. It didn’t look good.
I was working at a restaurant. So understanding that, I’m talking about getting the most favorable terms and conditions, the highest approval odds, and the best, highest limit by going for no or low-doc type of funding, where they’re just basing it off of what you’re saying on the application and what your FICO score looks like. Right? Like your six boxes. And then also the bank relationship as a whole.
And there’s going to be certain limits. Like Chase, for example, they have a limit of up to $150,000. You can get up to $150,000 in new funding from them and they’re not going to ask you for documentation unless it’s a loan.
Is that business or personal?
It’s either, or it’s both. Yeah, as a combination. And so of course you want to lean more on the business side if you plan on leveraging. If not, then you should still stack up and prioritize personal credit as well.
Because the more that you have very high limits, very good credit lines in general, and strong bank relationships on the personal side, new banks will see that and they’re going to say, “Oh, Dave knows how to treat his money. These banks trust him with $100,000. We need to match that or go even higher.”
Yeah, got it. Another huge issue, at least personally—and it’s probably industry-wide as well, Brandon—is that it’s friction. Okay, we’re talking about accessing short-term capital. Right? Whether that’s on the business or the personal side.
And in the real estate space, they call that hard money lending. On the business side—
We actually run a private credit fund where people are going to pay premiums for getting access to short-term capital. Yes. But what you’re talking about really sounds like getting your cake and eating it too.
If we can get really low-interest rates, we would be considered potentially high risk. Right? If it’s no documentation. But getting that low interest rate and just removing that friction—
Yeah, no documentation—by getting something in place. Because every time, I mean, trying to get lending from any type of institution is like having an IRS audit. So it’s easier to figure out other ways. Like, I’ll use my infinite banking policy, frankly, to come up with my own capital on the short-term side.
But this is still, I think, a really good option for creating that source of capital that we could do a lot of things to accelerate with.
Yeah, I totally agree. And you’re not the only one that feels like you’re going through surgery to try to just get a little bit of money from some of these banks. It doesn’t need to be like that, is the thing.
And we all have a bank in our mind right now that you’re like, “Man, I hate this bank. Chase sucks. Wells Fargo is the worst. Bank of America, they are my bank.” We all have that.
The simple truth is this:
It comes down to us simply not knowing the rules to the game. So we said the wrong thing. We positioned ourselves incorrectly. They’re not telling us the rules, so then it feels like bad service.
And while it definitely could be, they still are going off of algorithms and they’re going off of 45 different metrics on how they’re judging us. And if we don’t know the rules—if we don’t know how to position it properly as we are playing it—then we are shooting ourselves in the foot and making huge mistakes.
And therefore there’s frustration and denials and it feels very intensive when it doesn’t need to be. We show people how to get up to $500,000 with rates as low as 0%, getting up to 90% approval odds. And you can actually repeat this every six months per person. Cool.
How does your program work? Is it the training class that you guys do, or how does it work?
It’s more coaching. We have it in a course set up as well, but a majority of it is—I wouldn’t say reprogramming the brain—but there’s a lot of talking about the same product so many times and exactly how these banks and lenders are judging you. So you know how to play.
It takes a while to really soak it up. It’s not easy, truthfully, because there are so many moving pieces. But once you start getting it, the freedom that comes with it is amazing.
So we do a weekly free training. It’s an hour long, very simple, always live. We explain the truth behind it, expose the 45 different metrics, and teach you how to go about it.
And then once a month we even do a three-day virtual event that has been a huge blessing because we do it in a big group setting. Iron sharpens iron. There are great questions that come in that I can speak to, and for other people it will be like a huge “aha” moment. So I love that piece of it.
Yeah, no, that’s awesome. So basically what you’re saying is, if you can educate people and they understand how the system works…
And I will say that system is kind of like the point system on the credit cards—trying to maximize those. If you understand how to leverage it, it can be really beneficial. And I think that’s the lure for most people: “Sure, I’ll get that credit card because I’m going to get miles or whatever.” But then you go to try to use them and you’re like, “This is way too frustrating. I’m just going to bag out of this whole thing.”
Right?
Here’s a website to make it very simple for anybody that’s trying to travel hack: point.me. Okay, point.me. Go to that website. You can type in the different credit cards that you have.
There are really four banks out there for travel hacking that will get you the most points: Citi, Capital One, American Express, and Chase. Those are the four best banks.
There are a couple of other smaller ones, but those are the four best banks that you can get the most points from and that will convert with their travel portal to others.
But you said it perfectly: at the end of the day, you can literally get—instead of a one-for-one ratio on cashback—if you travel at all, which a lot of us do as business owners, or if you want to take the family and friends and you want to do it first class with just an amazing experience, you can have all of that and get 7x to 22x your return on those points instead of one-for-one. It’s incredible. I love it.
We haven’t paid for a flight in, I think, six or seven years, and it’s always first class. It’s just a nice experience. So now you have more money that goes towards your adventures when you’re traveling the world. It just makes it that much more fun.
Yeah, no, it’s such a more efficient way to do it. So Brandon, if you had just one piece of advice that you could share with the audience about how they could accelerate their own wealth trajectory, what would it be?
Well, I would say connect with you guys, number one. I think that would be a no-brainer. Right? If you guys are actually in business making good money, then it would be a no-brainer to sit down with Dave and your crew.
As far as if you haven’t considered leveraging and using OPM—other people’s money—then there are rules to the game. We all have to acknowledge that first.
There are people doing it on a very high level. When you understand that this should have been taught in school, it’s a foundational piece. And when you set up this foundation properly, the sky’s the limit. It feels very good.
You can sleep like a baby knowing that you’re not borrowing from Uncle John or whoever, and you’re not messing up their retirement. You can grow and scale and get funding more acceptably at the best terms and conditions very frequently—every six months.
So understanding that foundational piece with credit has changed my life. And I’ve seen it—we’ve helped over 3,700 members within Credit Counsel, our company. I’ve seen it time and time again. So I know if it could work for a misfit like me, making all the mistakes in the past, it could work for anybody.
If you give it the time that it deserves, it can be a huge blessing.
Credit is a foundational piece. When you set it up properly, the sky’s the limit.
Yeah, it’s a great hack for sure. So really appreciate your time and insights today, Brandon. If anyone wants to check out your program or join your workshop, what is the best place?
Yeah, you can check out creditcounselelite.com/start. I believe that’s a great resource. Otherwise, just check out our website, www.creditcounselelite.com
If you want to connect with me on social media, on Instagram, it’s @CreditCounselElite. Otherwise, my personal one is @BrandonElliottInvestments.
Awesome. Thanks again, Brandon. Appreciate it.
Thanks, Dave. I appreciate you. Thank you so much.
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.