Wealth Formula Podcast

At some point in a successful career, taxes quietly become your largest expense. Not housing. Not lifestyle. Not investing losses. Taxes. And unlike most expenses, they grow automatically as your income rises — unless you deliberately structure around them. You know that my favorite means of tax mitigation is through investing in real assets like real estate and operating businesses. That approach has been the backbone of my own strategy for years — taking active income and redirecting it into assets that generate cash flow while providing meaningful tax advantages. I've also recently explained how you can use Wealth Accelerator in conjunction with charitable pledges to potentially create a future stream of retirement income — essentially at no net cost — while also establishing a death benefit. It's a powerful framework when structured properly. That said, there are also more traditional tools in the tax code that are important to understand. They may not be flashy, but when layered together they can meaning

For most of my career, I've been focused on two things: Operating businesses and Multifamily real estate. The strategy has been pretty simple. Take money generated from higher-risk, active businesses… and move it into more stable, long-term assets like apartment buildings. That shift—from risk to stability—is how I've tried to build durability over time. Now, to be fair, the sharp rise in interest rates a few years ago put a dent in that model. But zooming out, it's still worked well for me overall. So I'm sticking with it. That said, there are other ways to think about real estate. In some cases, the real opportunity is when you combine real estate with an operating business. We've done that before in the Wealth Formula Investor Club (Hyperlink) with self-storage, and the results were excellent. Storage is operationally simple, relatively boring—and that's exactly why it works. But there's another category that sits at the opposite end of the spectrum. Hotels. They're sexier. They're more volatile. And yes—t

This week's episode of Wealth Formula features an interview with Claudia Sahm, and I want to share a quick takeaway before you listen — because she's often misunderstood in the headlines. First, a quick explanation of the Sahm Rule, in plain English. The rule looks at unemployment and asks a very simple question: Has the unemployment rate started rising meaningfully from its recent low? Specifically, if the three-month average unemployment rate rises by 0.5% or more above its lowest level over the past year, the Sahm Rule is triggered. Historically, that has happened early in every U.S. recession since World War II. That's why it gets cited so much. And to be clear — it's cited a lot. The Sahm Rule is tracked by the Federal Reserve, Treasury economists, Wall Street banks, macro funds, and economic research shops globally. When it triggers, it shows up everywhere. That's not by accident. Claudia built one of the cleanest early-warning indicators we have. But here's the part that often gets lost. The Sahm Rule

One of the biggest risks people face when trying to understand the economy, investing, or personal finance isn't a lack of information. It's the illusion of being informed—while quietly limiting the sources that shape your thinking. We live in a world where information is everywhere. Podcasts, X threads, YouTube clips, newsletters, reels. But abundance doesn't equal diversity. In fact, the algorithms behind social media are designed to do the opposite: they show you more of what you already agree with. Over time, your worldview narrows—not because you chose it to, but because it was curated for you. I noticed this years ago when I started listening to alternative asset podcasts. At first, it felt refreshing—new ideas, new language, new opportunities outside the mainstream. But after a while, something became obvious. Many of these shows were operating inside an echo chamber. Different hosts. Same conclusions. Same narratives. Same villains. Same heroes. It was as if they were all listening to one another and

The Wealth Formula Podcast is one of the longest-running personal finance podcasts still standing. For more than a decade, I've shown up every single week to talk about investing, markets, and the forces shaping the economy. What's interesting is how much my own thinking has evolved over that time. Early on, I was more rigid. I was—and still am—a real estate guy. But back then, I didn't give much thought to ideas outside that lane. I was dogmatic, and I didn't always challenge my own beliefs. Time has a way of doing that for you. I've now lived through multiple market cycles. I've watched the stock market melt up to valuations that felt absurd—and then keep going. I've seen gold go from flat for a decade to parabolic over a year. I've seen interest rates sit near zero for a decade and then snap higher at the fastest pace in modern history. And I've learned, sometimes the hard way, that diversification is about survival and that every asset class has its day. One lesson I learned that I am thinking a lot about

We all love winners. We love hearing about the big wins and the perfect track records. It feels good. It feels safe. It instills us with a sense of trust. But I've been in business long enough to know that virtually all individuals who are long-term winners have had profound moments of failure from which they learned invaluable lessons. Those are the people I really want to hear from. They have the kind of knowledge we all need as we navigate through life. It's called wisdom. Surgeons have a saying: "If you've never had a complication, you haven't done enough surgery." In my surgeon days, I had a handful of complications. Let me tell you—they are no fun. You stay up at night replaying things in your mind, trying to figure out how you could have done things differently—how you could have had a better outcome. Even when unavoidable, those complications teach you something you'll never get from textbooks. It's been no different for me when it comes to business and investing. But I take comfort in knowing that ev

First off — Happy New Year. To kick off the year, this week's episode of the Wealth Formula Podcast is a solo one from me. I spend the episode walking through my outlook for 2026 and sharing a few predictions for how I think this cycle is going to play out. Lately, I keep hearing the same question phrased in different ways. The economy feels tight, but markets are holding up. Growth is coming in stronger than expected, inflation is easing, and yet a lot of the signals people usually rely on just don't seem to be lining up. That disconnect is really the starting point for this episode. Rather than reacting to headlines or making short-term calls, I wanted to step back and talk through the mechanics of what's actually driving this environment — and why it looks so different from the cycles most of us learned about. A lot of it comes down to debt, policy constraints, how capital moves today, and the growing influence of technology. When you start looking at those pieces together, some of the things that feel con

It's been another interesting year in the world of personal finance and macroeconomics. As we look ahead to 2026… well, who really knows what's coming? I'll be sharing my own take—and making a few predictions—in an upcoming episode. What's hard to ignore is just how unusual this moment in history is. We're coming off COVID. We went through a rapid rise in interest rates, and now a pullback. Tariffs are back in the conversation. There are a lot of moving parts, and as usual, the consensus hasn't exactly nailed it. Almost every expert was convinced tariffs would push inflation higher. I expected at least a temporary bump—some transient inflation while markets adjusted. Then the CPI report came out at 2.7%. That's a lot closer to the Fed's 2% target, and nearly half a percentage point lower than expectations. Clearly, something else is going on. At the same time, GDP came in at around 4.3% growth. That's real strength. Inflation is coming down, growth is strong, and while the labor market is still a little murky

For years, gold was the asset nobody wanted to talk about. It sat there quietly while stocks and real estate continued to rip. Gold was for pessimists. For doomsayers and perma-bears. And then suddenly… gold didn't just wake up. It launched. As of mid-December 2025, spot gold is trading around $4,300–$4,400 an ounce, depending on the market, marking a gain of roughly 60% over the past year and pushing decisively into record territory. The obvious question is: why now? The short answer is that gold isn't reacting to one thing. It's responding to a stacking of pressures that have been quietly building for years and are now impossible to ignore. Start with central banks. For the better part of the last decade, central banks were net sellers or indifferent holders of gold. That changed dramatically after 2022. According to the World Gold Council, central banks have been buying gold at more than double the pace of the pre-COVID years, and 2025 continues that trend, with hundreds of tonnes added to reserves year-to

You know, the longer I've been an investor, the more I realize this simple truth: the biggest threat to your wealth isn't the market… it's your own brain. We're all wired the same way—with instincts that were fantastic for avoiding saber-toothed tigers but are absolutely terrible for making good financial decisions. Take something simple like a marathon. If I asked you to predict next year's top finishers, you'd look at last year's results. That works. Human performance doesn't flip upside down in twelve months. The best runners tend to stay the best runners. There aren't that many variables to consider. When we try to apply that same logic to investing, it often blows up in our faces. There are way too many variables to consider when it comes to market behavior to make simple assumptions. Entire sectors rotate from darling to disaster in a heartbeat. Yet our brains keep telling us, "Hey, this worked last year, surely it'll work again." In my view, nowhere is that psychological mismatch more obvious than in r

Homeownership has been baked into the American Dream for nearly a century. Politicians, parents, and banks all tell you the same thing: "Buy a house as soon as you can. It's your biggest asset." But as a real estate guy who actually understands how wealth is created… I'm not convinced it makes sense for everyone—especially early in your career. Let me explain. Say you finally start making some real money—maybe you're a doctor fresh out of residency. The cultural script kicks in immediately: Buy a house. Build equity. Feel responsible. But here's the part most people forget: your primary home is not an asset. As Robert Kiyosaki puts it, if something takes money out of your pocket, it's not an asset—it's a liability. According to Bankrate and the Census Bureau, U.S. homeowners spend around $17,000 per year just to maintain and operate their homes—and that's before you make a single mortgage payment. That's property taxes, insurance, utilities, landscaping, repair bills, HOA fees… the list goes on. If your house

It's that time of the year again—Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Everyone loves a deal. If you've been investing long enough, you know one important fact: there is always something on sale. The problem is the herd never sees it. They're too busy chasing whatever feels safe because it's setting new records. And right now? That's the stock market. That's gold. Everyone's piling into the most expensive things they can find and patting themselves on the back for being "prudent." But smart investors don't chase what's already expensive. They look for the thing sitting quietly on the clearance rack, the thing nobody wants yet. And today, that thing is real estate—particularly apartments. We've seen this movie before. Think back to the early 2000s. After the dot-com crash, everybody ran to gold and Treasuries. Meanwhile, the very companies that would define the next two decades—Amazon, Apple, Microsoft—were sitting there marked down 75%. You didn't need to be a genius to buy them. You just needed the stomach. Then there

This week's Wealth Formula Podcast is about the economics of sports—if you are a sports fan like me, you will love it. But before we get to that, I want to give you my two cents on one of the most important elements to financial success in anything: conviction. As I write this, Bitcoin sold off from a high of $126K to under $90K. Other cryptos have lost 50-90 percent of their value in the same time. It's been called a blood bath. Some are even saying it's over for Bitcoin. I might even believe them if I hadn't seen the same story at least 5 times before over the past decade. True bitcoiners have tremendous belief in what bitcoin means to the world. Someone who bought $1,000 of Bitcoin in 2010 and simply refused to sell would now be sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars. That is the reward for true conviction. The irony of this bitcoin cycle is that many of those individuals with high conviction are finally cashing in on the fruit of their patience. Almost every day, another wallet that hasn't been active

When you invest in real estate, you're not buying what it is today—you're buying what it will become a few years from now. That's especially true in multifamily, which, despite all the noise, remains one of the most compelling long-term plays out there. Unlike stocks, you don't get a live ticker reminding you every five seconds what your property is "worth." And that's a good thing. Real estate moves slowly, and that patience rewards people who can see the story before it unfolds. The national headlines are confusing right now—depending on who you read, the sky is either falling or it's never been brighter. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between. Mortgage rates are still above six percent, affordability is strained, and national price growth has flattened. But beneath the surface, there's an entirely different story playing out—one that favors multifamily investors who understand that real estate is always, always, about location. Some markets are clearly soft. A few urban centers built too much too fas

A few years back, I bought some very expensive sports coats. I wore them at first and enjoyed them. But over time, they kind of lost their luster. As I have found often to be the case in my life, I don't tend to care that much about fancy stuff—fancy jackets, fancy shoes. My true self regresses to a fairly simple jeans and flannel circa 1992 style—not expensive. Realizing that these fancy clothes were just rotting in my closet, I recently sold them on a well-known second-hand site with only designer stuff. And I was shocked when I realized I was only getting 10 cents on the dollar for what I paid! But then again, I guess I shouldn't have been. Buying new fancy clothes has an extremely low likelihood of being a good investment. It reminded me of my good friend in town here who's made millions of dollars in his life. He only buys nice stuff. But he almost never buys new things. The furniture in his house is incredible. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of mid-century modern gems. And he buys vintage cars rather

I grew up with a very different perspective on personal finance and investing than most. My parents were immigrants, and when they arrived in this country, they didn't come with any preconceived notions of conventional financial wisdom. My father grew up dirt poor in India—that's really poor and he had never even heard of investing as a kid. But he was blessed with a tremendous intellect and used it to rise from nothing to truly live the American dream. He came to the U.S. in the 1960s on an engineering scholarship and started working as a bridge engineer in Minnesota. When he finally began making a little money, he was confronted with the idea of investing for the first time. Until then, life had always been hand-to-mouth. So he was approaching investing like an alien coming to this planet for the first time with an unbiased view on anything financial. With that perspective, the stock market didn't make sense to him. He wanted cash flow that would immediately improve his quality of life. Intuitively, it felt

This week's Wealth Formula Podcast features an interview with a tax attorney. While I'm not a tax professional myself, I want to drill down on something we touched on briefly that is incredibly relevant to many of you: the so-called short-term rental loophole. If I were a high-earning W-2 wage earner, this would be at the top of my list to implement—and I know many of you are already doing it. The short-term rental loophole is one of those quirks in the tax code that most people don't even know exists, but once you do, it can be a total game-changer. Here's why. Normally, when you buy a rental property, depreciation losses can't offset your W-2 income. They're considered passive, and they stay stuck in that bucket. But short-term rentals—Airbnb, VRBO, whatever—work differently. If the average stay is seven days or less and you materially participate, the IRS doesn't classify it as passive. It becomes an active business. That means the paper losses you generate can offset your ordinary income, even from your d

Bitcoin is definitely volatile. If you told me it was going to go down by 50 percent next year, I would hesitantly believe you. However, there is no way you can convince me that Bitcoin will not hit $500,000 at some point within the next five years. Think about what’s happening: ETFs are everywhere, treasury companies are holding Bitcoin, there are rumors of central banks buying it, and even an American Bitcoin reserve. It is an asset that will go up. But it may go down before that, and that is unnerving. You should not put money into Bitcoin unless you commit to not touching it for 5–10 years. But then you face another problem—Bitcoin is like gold. Unlike apartment buildings, there is no rent, no cashflow. Other coins like Ethereum and Solana have mechanisms called staking that allow for yield. Bitcoin does not. Its beauty is that there are not a lot of moving parts. It’s a vault of security, and that’s pretty much it. Again, just like gold. There have been companies like BlockFi and Celsius—which are, indee

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about Wealth Formula Banking in detail, and I know we have a lot of new listeners who may not have heard about it yet. So today, I want to share a webinar that explains why I think this strategy is such a no-brainer. First off—what is ? You may have heard of something called “infinite banking.” It’s a similar concept, but instead of focusing on paying your bills, Wealth Formula Banking is specifically designed to amplify your investments. My introduction to this idea came the same way you’re hearing it now—through a podcast. I kept hearing the phrase “be your own bank.” Honestly, I didn’t know what that meant, and I tuned it out until a friend finally broke it down for me. That’s when I had my aha moment. Here’s why. Normally, when you want to invest in a cash-flowing asset, you park money in a checking or savings account first. The problem? Those accounts pay you almost nothing—well under 1 percent. Meanwhile, inflation is running at 2–3 percent, so you’re guaranteed to l

Most people picture investing as a game of chess. Everything is visible on the board, the rules are clear, and if you’re sharp enough, you can see ten moves ahead. But markets don’t work like that. They shift in real time—rates change, policies flip, black swan events crash the party. That’s why I think investing looks a lot more like poker. In poker, you never know all the cards. You play with incomplete information, and even the best players lose hands. What separates them isn’t luck—it’s process. Over time, making slightly better decisions than everyone else compounds into big wins. That’s the same discipline great investors use. They don’t wait for certainty—it never comes. They weigh probabilities, manage risk, and swing hard when the odds line up. Risk isn’t the enemy. Fold every hand and you’ll bleed out. To win, you’ve got to put chips in the pot—wisely. Wealthy investors do the same. They protect the downside, but when they see an asymmetric bet—small risk, huge upside—they lean in. That’s what early