Flipping America 579, Practical Wealth

Curtis May

Coming up today on Flipping America, Curtis May from the Practical Wealth Show.

Curtis May is the creator and owner of Practical Wealth Advisors (PWA) and host of The Practical Wealth Show Podcast. The primary focus of his financial planning firm is to help individuals and families become financially free by following the principles of wealth creation that have endured for centuries around the world

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Quote of the Day

“You can’t expect to hit the Jackpot if you don’t put a few nickels in the machine.” Flip Wilson

Expected Air Date: Fri 1/13/23

Guest: Curtis May

Transcript

[0:01] Coming up today on the Flipping America show, Curtis May is going to join me and talk about practical wealth solutions.

We’re gonna talk about how money works.

[0:09] Music.

[0:27] The show that teaches you how to make money in real estate. Wherever you are, whatever your situation, there is an opportunity for you.

[0:32] Music.

[0:39] Thank you, Kathy Curtis, and hello America. Curtis May is the creator and owner of Practical Wealth Advisors and host of the Practical Wealth Show podcast.

The primary focus of his financial planning firm is to help individuals and families,

become financially free by following the principles of wealth creation that have endured centuries around the world. He joins us in just a few minutes and we’re going to talk about some very practical solutions and how you might get in touch with,

with Curtis and retain his firm to do some work with you.

[1:09] All right, first a little housekeeping. Please, whatever platform you’re listening to us on, subscribe and like the content and share it with one friend. That’s the only favor I ask of you today, besides patronizing our sponsors.

Share with one friend.

If you want to find us out on social media, we’re on Facebook, Flipping America Media, facebook.com slash Flipping America Media, on Twitter, Instagram, at Flipping America, youtube.com slash Flipping America,

and we have live operators standing by at 877-55-ROJER, 877-557-6437.

[1:44] To help you on your real estate journey.

If you want to talk with me, we’re doing something, we’ve been doing it for a while, but we haven’t been talking about it for a while.

You can go to flippingamerica.net and scroll to the bottom of any page and you can schedule a strategy call with me,

or go to the link bit.ly slash talk to Roger, all one word, all lowercase, bit.ly slash talk to Roger.

And that will set you up into my calendar and I will give you 30 minutes of my time to help you figure out what to do next.

If you wanna get our weekly newsletter, text the word WIT, W-I-T, to 205-858-FLIP, that’s 205-858-3547, and you’ll get our newsletter, a five to seven minute read. Here’s the news.

Well, I don’t know if you know about the Flipping America RIA, but as of today, we are 43,000, 43 chapters from Maine to Honolulu, from Boston to Corpus Christi, with over 23,000 members,

nationwide in our meetup groups.

[2:54] And if you want to attend one of our group or one of our local chapter meetings, just drop us a line questions at flippingamerica.net. Let us know where you are. We’ll direct you to the nearest local chapter.

And if there isn’t one near you, we can show you how to set one up.

Can be a money-making opportunity. Now, I don’t know if you have noticed that there is a growing concern among some governors across the United States to limit the ownership of Chinese investments from the Chinese government,

buying property in the United States.

Now here’s a question I want to ask you. If the Chinese really believed in the tenets of Marxism, why would they even want to buy land in other countries.

That one’s making me think a little bit. We’ve got a link in the notes today about this.

And I’d like to know what you think. Is China truly, are they truly a communist country? Do they really believe what they’re talking about?

Or what’s going on here? And do you think that the Chinese should be allowed, the Chinese government should be allowed to buy land in the United States?

[4:04] Hmm. All right. I’ve got another article that’s in the notes today. It talks about what’s on the mind of investors and home occupiers in 2023. I thought, okay, maybe they’ve done some research, and

let’s see what’s on their minds. How many of you said, net zero living? Yeah, me neither.

You know this article, all it does is it achieves a loss of credibility for the authors, JLL. You can reference that in the show notes as well.

I’ve got an article also from DS News, and the headline is, Real Estate Market Confidence remains high.

And you go through the article and they have surveyed some actual people and there are a lot of real estate investors that are confident about 2023. I’m one of them. But my comment to this is,

I don’t think that’s the sign of a slumping real estate market. Now, it is true that the hedge funds are backing off a little bit and they’re stopping their buying and iBuyers have stopped their buying.

That’s because they don’t buy the properties right. But those of us who buy them one at a time, and we honestly, we know what we’re doing.

We’re not discouraged by any kind of a real estate market.

[5:22] I don’t think that the market’s gonna crash. If it did, it would be an opportunity for us, but we’re not rooting for it.

Okay, and speaking of iBuyers, I’ve got an article from South Florida Agent Magazine, and this is also in the notes.

Another iBuyer bites the dust. Now, this is not one of the big ones that you have heard of probably, but it’s Anywhere Real Estate, Inc.

They’ve cut their workforce and ending their iBuyers operation. Now you probably haven’t heard of Anywhere Real Estate, Inc., but you may have heard of some of their subsidiaries, including Century 21, Callwell Banker, the Corcoran Group, and South Davis International.

And they call this a meaningful workforce reduction. And they cut their staff by 11%.

Their iBuyers service was called RealSure.

And maybe you’ve heard of RealSure, but I don’t know.

They’re not one of the big ones. But they’re following in the footsteps of Zillow and Redfin. And I think, I’ve got a video out on my YouTube channel.

If you want to go check it out that talks about the certain demise of all of the iBuyers, they’re going to go out of business because they don’t have, well, I’ll give you a bunch of reasons.

But one of the things is they’re just not making any money and they’re not set up to make money I’m throwing it now to the interview with Curtis May.

[6:45] Music.

[6:58] Curtis May, welcome to the Flipping America Show. Thanks for having me.

Yep. Glad you’re here. All right. Let’s dive right in. Your company is Practical Wealth Solutions.

What is a practical wealth solution? Assume we’re on a elevator somewhere. Give me the 30-second pitch. Yeah.

So, I teach people how money works, right? So, it’s our belief that what you know today will determine where you’ll be five or 10 years from now.

So I teach financial principles that help our clients become and remain financially free. So we’re kind of like, our theme is kind of wealth outside of Wall Street.

Ah, all right. Yeah, you know, there is a whole podcast called Wealth Without Wall Street, and those guys are good friends of mine.

They’re friends of mine too. All right. Yeah, I’ve been on their show. Yeah, I know them.

Yeah, okay. They’re my guys. Yeah, we do the same thing. Similar things. All right. All right. So if somebody comes to you and says, all right, Curtis, I’m interested in what you have to say. I’ve read some of your stuff and we’re going to tell people how to get to some of your stuff in just a minute.

[8:03] What do I do to get started? I’ve got a W-2 job. I make $90,000 a year. My spouse makes $45,000. So between us, we got $135,000. What do we do? Ready, set, go.

[8:17] Well, you can is one we we we got our website we said like apply to work with us because we want to do is we want to get to know you like what do you want and why right and then we’re going to do a space your strategy sessions like all right you know we teach something called five principles of personal finance so we don’t do that in strategy session but I want to know is what do you want why because most people think the key to growing wealth is investing ie define better investment that pay a higher rate return I I approach it differently.

I want to help, if you want to create maximum wealth, you have to create maximum efficiency first.

So most people give most of your money away. So one of the things that we do differently is I help people find money that they’re losing unknowingly and unnecessarily, right?

And so there’s six areas where we, when we walk through that we help you look at is what we call wealth transfer. So the six top wealth transfers are How do you manage cashflow?

[9:16] How you pay your mortgages, taxes, how you fund qualified plans, how you pay for educational expenses and how you pay for big ticket items. So there’s more money lost in those four things,

than you’ll ever make trying to pick winning investments. So the first thing that we do is get you organized work to help you improve current cashflow and just have a just a sounder picture,

of your personal economy and then we talk about next steps. But let’s find you some money first.

Okay. All right. Well, I was going to ask about that, but you actually covered the question before I asked about it. So it starts with a strategy call. Yes. All right. I think I’ve got a website here we could put up here. Are we talking about that yet? No. Well, that’s part of it. I mean,

that one and then the private reserve. One of the things, so here’s my framework. So there’s.

[10:11] Principles drive strategies. So the other side- Most people are listening to this. So let me interrupt you and just say, what I’ve got on screen here is bit.ly slash practical wealth and make sure you capitalize,

the P and the W. So it’s bit.ly slash capital P for practical, capital W for wealth, no space in in between.

And that’s gonna take you to a page where you can listen to a lot more from Curtis.

Excuse me for interrupting, now go buddy. Right, right, right. Cause you get more of the, what I call the madness that is Curtis.

And then so we’re principals, right? So we teach five principles, principles drive strategies. So the other one, the private reserve strategy is we call it that.

I teach what I call infinite banking. Some of you may have heard of that.

And so I just put kind of a planning wrapper around it, because I think a lot of times people skip steps and they’re planning and planning.

For business owners and investor is different, you know, because you need liquidity, use control of your capital.

We need to be sending money to other people and then strategy drives tactics. Tactics are products that you buy for implementation, but you never lead with that. That’s, that’s, that’s just a, that’s the last thing, right?

It’s, it’s, it’s like the, uh, Simon Sinek, why, how, what products are what’s right.

But you can start with why I teach the how and the what is implementation.

Okay, let’s come back to the private reserve thing in a little while. We got five things. You said there’s five somethings.

[11:39] Five principles of personal finance that we teach. Five principles of personal finance. Okay, without going into any detail on them, can you just tick them off for us?

Yes, principle one, save 15% of your gross income.

Nice. Or more. Okay. Safe, safe liquid accessible guarantee, just so 401k doesn’t count.

Principle two is maximum protection. So those are insurance, asset protection, that type of thing, what I call playing defense, right? Defense wins championships.

Three is legacy, full replacement of assets at death, or what I call creating a legacy of wealth and wisdom.

The fourth principle is liquidity, right?

So you’re saving, not just to be saving, you’re saving so you wanna have, you know, we teach six to 12 months of your income liquid, and various things.

And then the fifth principle is velocity of money. So we call it velocity over accumulation.

And so we want you to focus on cashflow, building and growing, buying or building cash flowing assets versus hoping markets go up.

And so that’s kind of our thing.

[12:48] Okay. Do you ever, do you think there’s ever a time and place for something that’s a little bit more speculative, hoping on a big appreciation hit?

Hope is not a good strategy. Okay. So, so yes, once you like, if you’re going to speculate, needs to be with money. It’s the same money, like we’re in Philly, right? It’s the same money you you go to Lang city with.

So, you know, cause you’re gambling. So you’re, you’re, you’re taking edge. It should be educated guests. Right. And so, but if you can’t lose it.

No.

[13:24] So you guys, cause you don’t have your foundation. See too many people are trying to hit a dag on home run and, uh, you know, I don’t. Yeah.

So you can’t, you kind of build. So that’s where the liquidity comes in because in that, so here’s the other thing we teach, I’ll throw this in there is the three rules of investing, right.

Invest in what you know or invest in knowing, right?

Cause you know when asset is you, okay? Invest in what you can control or influence the outcome. Does it cashflow? An asset generates cashflow. So if you’re not cash flowing, it’s either not an asset or not a good one, okay?

And third is don’t chase returns, right? So if you’re going to chase returns, speculate, then I want you to have a solid foundation which goes back to the five principles, then you’ve got time to, you can speculate,

but if you invest in knowing as your knowledge goes up,

your risk comes down.

Okay. Are you a certified financial planner? I am not. Because I, so I don’t give advice. I teach people, I’m a financial educator. So I really- A financial educator.

A financial educator. So because that’s a designation and.

[14:37] Financial planning when it was found is five parts helping at this is the definition of financial planning helping average people. I’ve learned that guys is like three like nineteen sixty nine seventy of helping average people average people not rich people spend save invest ensure.

And plan for financial independence so somehow that’s morphed into.

Wealth management and it’s all about investing in Wall Street. So I don’t agree with, subscribe to that. So I couldn’t like, it’s a test. I mean, so it’s not a big deal, but it’s like, I, I couldn’t do CE every two years on stuff I disagree with.

So that’s why.

[15:18] Got it. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. And so what people are hiring you to do is to educate them and sort of give them, point them in the general direction.

Well, I implement, no, no, we implement things. I just, so what happens is on maximum protection, a lot of this stuff we do is risk-based or insurance-based.

So I implement that infinite banking is we help people implement, but, um, right. So I do that. So that it’s a, it’s, you know, it’s a proper maximum protection.

Uh, so I’m licensed in all things. Insurance. What I do is I try to direct people to smart people like you or, you know, syndications to let them explore that.

Look, there’s other ways that, that things you can do outside of just blindly given to somebody money you’ve, you’ve never met.

And so, and then we teach people to focus on cashflow, but I’m the guide, right? So I’m, I’m the defensive coordinator, right?

And, uh, so the saving, the protecting the legacy, the liquidity, that’s defense offense is your job, right?

Your job is to figure out, okay, out of the four asset classes, business, real estate, paper assets and commodities.

What do you like? What are you willing to learn about? What do you want to do? That’s your job.

[16:30] And so now if some, and if you don’t want that job and you just want to give it, you know, I like things like syndications, but if you just want to put it your 401k and not think, don’t call me,

because I can’t help you. Yeah. I want to work nine to five, maybe nine to three of my government job with great insurance and just put the money somewhere and come home and watch TV and be wealthy.

Can you help me? No, actually I can help you a little bit, but you know, you’re not going to get the results you want, but I’ll make sure that, you know, because what happens is defense is why you’re building this, what could happen? You could die, you get sick, you could get laid off,

you have a fire, you could get sued. So that’s an important step. Even like successful business owners I work with, they skip that and they’re not liquid enough and they haven’t made.

[17:19] Haven’t burned into their, to their, to their forehead. Part of all I earn is mine’s the key, which is the first lesson from the richest man in Babylon. So I want people saving,

always building up liquidity. So it starts with that. See, velocity starts with saving. You got to build assets, you’ve got to save it, you got to find assets, that cash flow, you buy more other assets, and the flow is cash, asset, cash, right? And you want to get yourself in that pattern,

but you’ve got to either learn how to do stuff or you could work with smart operators and, you know,

with your cash. Because you might be good at your business. I’ve got a law firm, I’ve got this and that and I want to, uh, I don’t want to take my eye off the ball.

So now I’m interviewing good operators and all right, I’ll, I’ll let them, I’ll loan them money so they can make me money, you know, it goes back to who, not how so because I, my number one investment is my business. I don’t, you know, I, if you put a dollar in your business, you make $2.

That’s a hundred percent return.

[18:15] Right. And you know, I’m a real estate operator, but some asset classes in real estate, I don’t operate.

I put my money into other real estate asset classes because it just makes sense. Hey, I’ve got the website up there on screen for those of you that are watching this.

It’s bit.ly slash practical wealth, capitalize the P and the W. But now I want to shift gears a little bit because we alluded to this and I hit the wrong button a little while ago.

But let’s talk about the private reserve strategy, bit.ly slash private reserve strategy. Again, capitalize private reserve and strategy.

Going to take you to another page and Curtis is going to be able to help you.

[18:55] I’m guessing using whole life insurance and protecting yourself, protecting your future, take it from here. Yeah, I mean, basically, it’s a saving strategy, right? So what happens is.

[19:08] So the magic question is, where do you store your cash, right? So we call the private reserve as being your own bank, becoming your own banker. I studied with Nelson Nash, so I mean, I do it like that, okay, just to be clear. We only use whole life. And so it’s creating, all banking is creating,

a pool of capital that you control to move at cost to meet some needs you have.

So we show you how to, the economics behind doing that. It’s real basic.

It’s so simple. People overthink it, right? Save money, store it somewhere where you don’t have to liquidate to use the money so you can borrow against your savings, use the insurance company’s money.

And then our clients use that stored money for emergencies and for opportunities, right? So for enough for not remember and also for big ticket items.

So anything you can’t pay for in full within monthly cashflow, because you, you have to understand the economics of, okay, you finance everything you buy.

So even when you pay cash, all that means is you finance it, right?

And you’re giving up interest. You could be earned. So if you will capitalize and then leverage that money, then what if you could use the money to buy an asset or an expense or a vacation or taxes is one of the things that we use it for, but still have your money making money and always moving forward.

So every year, if you lay the foundation, you can have your personal economy be better off.

[20:32] Than you were the year before. We call it being a wealth creator, which you’ll see in the talk. Here’s a word, guaranteed. Okay, now I came out securities business, right? You can’t even play,

you couldn’t get me to play a word game that said guaranteed. But what I like about whole life,

everything in it is guaranteed. And so you want to build your foundation on certainty. There’s an article out there by Les McGuire, The Economic Value of Certainty. You want to build your house on rock, right? And not on sand, which is what a lot of people do. So that’s why we integrate,

your money’s going into somebody’s bank, why not yours?

[21:11] All right. If you want to talk with Curtis about this, and there is a lot more to unpack on this strategy. We’ve done entire shows on it, but it’s worthy of repeating and working with good people who are putting it into place. It’s bit.ly slash private reserve strategy, and it’s capital P,

capital R and capital S. Just capitalize all the words and no spaces. Bit.ly slash private reserve strategy. Okay now,

I want to switch gears in just a minute, but first we got to take just a moment for some words from our sponsors.

We’ll be right back.

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[22:25] We’re back. I’m Roger. He is Curtis May and he is the practical wealth solutions guy. Did I say that right? Yes.

Practical wealth advisors and practical wealth solutions and his website, if you want to go visit it, is bit.ly slash practical wealth, capitalize the practical and the wealth, bit.ly slash practical wealth. All right.

Right. Now, I am just guessing, Curtis. This is just a wild guess on my part, but I am imagining that you probably did not plan to do this when you grew up. I would like to know and all of our listeners would like to know, all of our regular listeners know what,

I’m about to ask you. When you were like 10 or 11 years old and you first started thinking about what you wanted to be when you grew up, what was it?

[23:13] I wanted to be a pro basketball player. Really? Well at 10, I well no I didn’t really get those visions I wanted to play college basketball at not at ninth grade when I first saw the NCAAs for the first time and.

[23:28] Uh, the, uh, I went to the hospital McDonald’s high school game. Oh, and I was like, I, you know, I saw Mark. I met Mark Aguirre back in the day.

And I was like, I want to do that.

Maybe you’re older than you look. If you know who Mark Aguirre is, right. Right. Exactly. I still work with him. Yeah. Oh, he was the man.

And, uh, so I, I, uh, no. So I back long story short, my background, my family had always been self-employed. So I’m a third generation.

Uh, my grandfather was self-employed. my family owned a supermarket growing up in Philly. And so I never got that go get a good job talk. So I thought even when I went to school, I thought you majored in business to go into business. So it didn’t even encourage me to get a job. I thought that’s what you’re supposed to do. I didn’t really,

want to be in the supermarket business. But in my mind, I remember having this dream. I was like 13,

to 14 with like a map of the United States with little dots in them of all the maze markets across country is like, we’re going to do this. We’re going to go big. I don’t want to go to the store every day.

[24:29] And that was my vision of something like that. And then I realized in my junior year, the NBA was not looking for 511-2 guards. Okay. And I got my insurance license in school, you know, and I pretty

much since 85 been doing this, doing it differently. So at the day, back in the day, I was like a Dave,

Ramsey on steroids by term investor difference max out your 401k and then I read a little book called called Wrist Dad Poor Dad.

And I kind of- book.

I’ve, you know, and just going through that stuff. And then I discovered Nelson’s book, becoming your own banker, or that introduced me to Austrian economics.

I didn’t know what to do with all this stuff for a few years, but I had to get out of securities because I didn’t believe in it. So I lost my religion, you know, with the equity market.

And so it was kind of figuring my way out, but that’s, that’s kind of what I do. So I’ve really been doing this all my adult life. Um, okay.

[25:26] All right. What’s the basketball thing? Now, I want to throw four or five more questions at you real quick, and you got to limit your answers 30 seconds because we’re almost out of time.

Okay? You ready? How does the economy in general affect your business in particular? It doesn’t.

Matter of fact, it gets better because I’m the safe money person and I understand I’m in a marketing business, so it doesn’t matter with the economy. It’s all about your personal economy.

Next question.

That’s on control. Yep. with any person from history, who would it be?

[26:02] HG, no, not him. What is his name?

HG Gaston and, oh, it’s another guy. He’s my favorite African American millionaire.

And I have his book. I can’t think of his name right now, but those are two millionaires I studied that back in the day that were in the 20s, 30s, and 50s created.

African-American millionaires that create a lot of money.

[26:27] Very interesting, good answer. All right, next question. What business or economic trends do you pay most attention to?

[26:36] I like, I really study marketing and I like to.

[26:46] That’s a good question. I focus on, to me business is business, you just gotta be a good marketer.

And that’s what I think about.

[26:58] Yeah, we all have our things that we’re tuned into, you know, as a real estate investor that buys distressed properties. Like for example, one of the things that I’m tracking constantly,

is the foreclosure and default rate across the country. Just to see if we’re going to have another meltdown of 2008. See, I expect that. So, I want to have people have dry powder and then,

when they see something they like, they have a position to do their thing.

Oh yeah. Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret, Curtis. Those of us that really pay attention and watch these stats every day. We’re all expecting a market correction in 23,

but it’s not going to be a collapse. The fundamentals of the market are too strong and there’s too much still pent up demand for housing. But this is not that show.

Next question, this is your last question. He is Curtis May, everyone. And I’m going to put his name back on the screen so you can see Curtis May. And now I’m also going to put the website back up there so you can see it bit.ly slash practicalwealth. And here is your question.

And believe it or not, we ask a lot of our guests this question. How do you define true wealth, Curtis? I want to be able to do what I want when I want without, we call it in our system,

getting to a position of FU, which is the first level, which I don’t have to, I can do what I want,

and provide for my family without working. So we call financial freedom, I want to be able to live.

[28:24] Of like, I want to live from the income from my personal invested assets, which is what we, uh, cause the income is not well.

So I focus on wealth, uh, having great kids, uh, building, uh, being able to provide them with opportunities.

And then, you know, it says in the Bible, I want to, you want to, I want to think three generations you want to leave in her for your children’s children’s children. And uh, so I want to have, I want my kids to make money to really old fashioned way. I want to inherit it.

Okay, and so that’s what I want, you know.

Probably is no great creator of character, right? So let’s, let’s, you know, let me build it right and give him the good foundation.

He’s Curtis May, everybody. And Curtis, thank you for joining us today on the show. We appreciate your time very much.

[29:10] The late great comedian, Flip Wilson said, you can’t expect to hit the jackpot if you don’t put a few nickels in the machine.

And you know what I say to you, my friends? Opportunities are truly everywhere.

Keep your eyes open.