Financial Friday: Going from Rags to Riches Legally

0:00Welcome to the Real Power Family Radio Show, brought to you by Family Success Triangle. Where we talk about how we achieved financial freedom in two years, by the time we were 30. If we can do it, so can you. We will bring you the people who can help you achieve financial freedom, time freedom, and location freedom. Learn how we integrated our business, investing and homeschooling into everyday life. Now, here is the Real Power Family, Eric, Lila, Devon, and Ethan. Welcome to the Real Power Family Radio Show, I'm your host, Eric Wilman, whole family here. Lila, Devon, and Ethan, and Devon is going to be leaving us. We only have a couple more episodes with him before he goes to Greece. Yeah, well, and hopefully nobody looks at my social media on the way there. That's all I'm going to say. Yeah, because you might end up in a jail somewhere in Europe for telling the truth. They're not allowed to do that there.

1:01I would like to welcome everybody to this wonderful Friday the 13th episode. I am reading the New American, and some people might call this an ultra-right wing. It's not even close to the right wing. It's certainly not a left wing. This is a constitutional publication. If anything, it's a libertarian publication. But it is absolutely a political publication. They talk a lot about world politics. They talk a lot about a lot of things. They've had episodes on the Epstein files or magazines, tire issues. They've had it on global warming and all these things. You know what they never have in there? A significant amount of the magazine dedicated towards money, because it's not a financial magazine. The cover of this month's New American magazine, which I highly recommend, a dollar sign sinking under the water.

2:03One of the quotes in the very first and main article in the magazine is from Peter Schiff, who is a known gold bug. He talks a lot. He's got a Euro-Pacific capital as a hedge fund and a gold dealer. He's very much a gold guy. He's very, very brilliant. And I really like everything except for his stance on Bitcoin. He is absolutely emotional. We have talked about him fighting with Lawrence the Pard. I think yes. They literally got out rock him, sock him, robots at the New Orleans Investment Conference. So he's totally irrational when it comes to Bitcoin. But very good when it comes to gold. But very good when it comes to gold. And I'm not saying that he won't end up being proved right. That is absolutely possible. It's also possible that the value of gold could go to zero. And fiat currencies would take over the world because they're the best currency out there. I don't think that could ever happen. But I'm not going to give it a zero percent chance.

3:06Just like 0.000001. I mean, I think to have something like that happen, it would take us going and mining in Asteroid so full of gold that there is so much gold out there that it becomes basically worthless. That's the only way I see that happening, which I believe that is way more likely for Elon in his lifetime and mine to shoot a rocket landed on an asteroid. Have robots come out in mine, the gold out of the asteroid, load up the rocket, shoot it back to earth and have it land safely on one of those landing pads. Now that you've given him that idea, which we just flew over those. If you listen to the gyro episode, we flew right over like two days before SpaceX was going to launch. It still says NASA. I don't know why it's not like NASA does anything. It's all SpaceX. But yeah, I believe that it is more likely for Elon to do that than to run a fictitious

4:09agency in the government. I don't know. I'll just make up a weird name like Doge and actually cut government spending. I can't believe all the things that he found and we were so just just one year ago. We were so excited about how great the cuts were going to be and how much I was going to help America. And then we passed the big, bowdacious bill who liked that better and who was it? Maybe Ron Paul said that if you really want to know what your taxes are, just look at government spending. Maybe it was Murray Rothbard. It was some brilliant economist like that. Peter Schiff would probably agree with that at least mostly if not all the way. It's not a matter of how much does he say or how much do you pay in taxes? If you want to know what you really pay in taxes, you have to add the inflation tax. So it's really easy to see, oh, golly, this hurts.

5:11One I have to write a $3,000 check to pay my property taxes. This hurts when I'm writing a $50 or $100,000 check to pay my income taxes. This hurts when I'm paying the quarterly income taxes. But you don't notice it at all when you're buying gas. You complain about the price of gas. Yes. And what percent? I mean, there's a huge amount of that that is road tax or what a gas tax wherever they use it. Hopefully it goes to the roads. You don't realize how much you're paying in sales tax because you just get the bill and you know you ordered lunch for a $99.99 lunch. But then you get the bill and it's well over $10. And you don't even think about it. It's just ingrained into us to pay it. But it's incredibly hard, even more so than the sales tax that you're just kind of a custom to see the inflation tax. I would say not one out of a hundred people truly understands the inflation tax. So it doesn't matter what the big bill said about how we lock it.

6:11We didn't really get tax cuts. We locked in the stuff that Trump passed before. And yeah, I'm very happy with that. That doesn't mean that we actually are paying less than taxes. And if you look at this, I have said so many times, I still have Trump signs hanging up. I'm still supporting the president. And if you look, it's not the amount of taxes that I have to write a check for. It's every time I go grocery stopping. It's time I try and buy a new pickup truck. Every time I try and go on vacation, how much more does that cost me than it did? And he started out, oh, yeah, gas was down to $1.99. Lyla, it's normally pretty cheap to buy gas here. It's actually cheaper in Tennessee. But have you seen gas at $1.99? Devon, you're much more into this. I was happy about $2.30. Yeah, we got down into the mid-toes, but not down to $1.99, at least not here. And if you add in California, I'm certain that's not the average.

7:13So maybe some place got to $1.99, but it wasn't most places. So I'm looking at what Trump says and comparing it to the absolute, the actual outcome. And if you look, he's bragging about passing the biggest tax cut in history and all of time, whatever he says, but they didn't cut any government spending they added to it. We have the largest amount of military spending we've ever had. Well, for one up, we have not defunded Israel. We have not defunded the proxy war against Russia. We increased the military industrial complex handouts. We haven't decreased any of the corporate handouts we're giving to the big drug companies. All the stuff they're bragging about with the doge counter, show me where our deficit is going down. It's not. It's going up. They simply took it out. We're still funding the quality leering center. They just painted over it. And now it has a new sign that says learning because they were caught.

8:15And if it's not that building and that fraudster, then it's somebody else getting the money. It's just being channeled somewhere else. If you want to know your true taxes, look at how much the government spent. And as I'm ran would say, an honest man knows he cannot consume more than he produces. Think about that over this break. I'm Eric from the Real Power Family Radio Show on the Brushwood Media Network. I'm here with my lovely wife, Alilah, who is known as the mom of the power family. And I got to tell you, just 25 years ago, we were sleeping on a mattress on a warehouse floor. Then we learned to buy more hard assets faster. Like, Real Power Family Silver Rounds from American Gold Exchange. If you want to get your own Real Power Family Silver Rounds, you can call American Gold Exchange at 1-800-613-9323 or you can visit their website at AMERgold.com.

9:20Welcome back to the Real Power Family Radio Show. Before we went to break, Dad, you actually brought up a good quote. I haven't heard that before. It was on your calendar, Ethan. It was? Yeah. Last January, almost exactly one year ago. I know, because I'm using the same calendar a year later. Yeah, the Einran calendar, which Alilah specifically made for us. So no, I don't believe you can buy one of those. No. It was just really cool. She does that every year. I tried really hard to find that one, but you can't buy that anywhere, so I had to create it. So, whomever owns the rights to all of her sayings and works, you should make a calendar. I would absolutely buy it. Yes. I agree. Well, then, we'll just go with our own personal lilas quotes that she takes and what was your one? It was sung Sue the year before and then Einran and what's next year's inspirational quotes. So it's a whole bunch of different people. A whole bunch of people. All right. Back to finances, which is where we started.

10:20If you spent, if the military spends more, if the interest we pay on our debt goes up, if the military deficit or excuse me, the government deficit increases, then it's me and my children and my grandchildren that have to pay for that. And if you're one of the people out there that are working under the table and not hanging your fair share of taxes, by the way, I don't actually have too much against that. It sucks that I have to pay more to cover for you, but I wish we could all not pay tax. So if you're one of those, guess what? You're also probably not declaring taxes, so you don't have tax returns, which means you can't get alone. If you can't get alone, you can't buy nearly as many hard assets. You're actually shooting yourself in the foot to try and save 10 or 20% in income tax and not be able to dip into bank lending and get this ridiculously cheap money, the fiat

11:21currency to buy hard assets. If you did that, they're inflating away your debt. It is meant that every time we have inflation, you are going to pay more, and my inflation is going to be significantly different than somebody living paycheck to paycheck. One inflation do the people, you are turning more people down for income, Lila, that will be ever. That's a big question that's been coming in from a lot of the prospects, you know, how much do they need to make in order to qualify income wise? And our website, at least, goes over all of that for them, but so many people think that 50% is okay, and that's just, one thing goes wrong and their life is going to be turned upside down. Forget about that. 50%. If you spend 50% of your income on housing, I don't care how nice your house is, you have no life. Yes. I mean, you still have to buy clothes and diapers and at least food. You have no life if you spend 50%.

12:23And so I believe the way that people are going to, even if they can't see the inflation, they feel the problems. If you're 30 years old and living in your mom's basement, that didn't happen when I was a kid. Not for, I mean, I moved out, I was joined the army at 19, but I never considered coming home after four years and living with my parents again. It never crossed my mind. How old were you when you moved out, Lila? 20. And I got an apartment in Wentz College. And who paid for your college, your daddy? I did. Who paid for your apartment, your mommy? I did. Who paid for your utilities, your boyfriend? I did. Well, okay. When I moved it with you, we did split. We split you after you moved it, but not when you had your own apartment and I had my own apartment. Correct. Me and my little brother, he moved out and moved in with me and we've paid everything 50, 50. So wow, I had taken, he was about five years younger, is about five years younger, still

13:24I guess. That doesn't change. Yeah. But after four years in the army, so that means he moved out roughly the same age as me. It was right there, you know, 18, 19, 20. This was kind of what we were all doing. And now, there were people that helped, we even had things called mother-in-law suites, which is kind of like an extra bedroom and bathroom. And we have those at some of our houses. I don't know if it's illegal to even call it that anymore. But when, you know, your mother-in-law was widowed and needed a place to stay, you would move the older generation back in with you to help them out after retirement age generally. So it wasn't unheard of, but it wasn't a common thing to have three generations living in a house. And now, I know our longest tenant who has just been spectacular, but he had young kids and he moved in. Well, guess what? Now those young kids are, wow, she's got to be 30. Because they've been there for, oh my gosh, since 2004, maybe three or four, it's been

14:29over 20 years, she's been in her mid-30s, has her own children that might be teenage on, maybe not quite that old, but they're not little babies anymore. And he went from, you know, the teenager living and the downstairs room that had private access to, he's like, no, I'm a truck driver, I'm not home that much. I'm going to live there and they can have the big part of the house. And that's how we're seeing if you want to call it shrink-flation. People are putting multiple generations into one home, so they can afford the bills. And you are getting people to realizing, I just can't pay this. Look at the people that are just a little lower than you, Devon, that they don't know how they'll ever get out of their parents' home. It just, the math doesn't add up. If we really had the greatest economy in history, wouldn't there be plenty of jobs that paid enough for you to pay 25% of your income and have the house, probably not that an 18-year-old wants to live in? But you could at least get yourself a cheap apartment, doesn't that mean you would think that would be easy enough to do in, what was it, the greatest economy or whatever they

15:35called it? Derek, did you know that we currently had, in December, a higher percentage of deals that fell apart right before closing? Yes, I actually did. Wow. Did you read the whole article? Why? There were over 40,000 home purchase agreements canceled just in December. And it wasn't because of a bad appraisal. No. It wasn't because of, you know, that you, boys, you have bought so many properties, you literally know. And I loved Beacon Title. They had, I wish I would have taken a picture. They had a thing hanging out. Maybe I'll go see if there's still in there somewhere, you get a picture. And it's like a bunch of people rowing a boat. And they're crawling roll. And it's like, okay, title, all clear, lender, clear to close, underwriter, good to go. And it's like, and then you get down to the last man in the boat. And everything falls apart and they all dive in or something like that. There are so many ways that deal can fall apart.

16:36Yeah, but these are deals that like they'd already agreed upon the price. They started the closing process. They had locked in financing and they still walked away. And that, yeah, this, none of those rowers of the boat, if you will, caused the deal to blow up. Yes. Okay. It was because they just didn't believe, the buyers just didn't believe. And it was almost always the buyers backing out. Yes. They don't believe that they could continue to make the payments in the future. They wised up. They said, yeah, I want this and I'll pay that. And they realized I can't handle that. So that's not the sign of a good economy or a good housing market. And it's really hard for me to say, you need, well, it's not hard at all. I want you to all go out and buy more hard assets faster. And if you're the right person and you absolutely, it's, you've got to do it right. Something debt can dramatically help you and never forget debts at double at a short. It can kill you. So you do not get debt at a really high interest rate.

17:38You don't get debt that the asset doesn't cover the holding cost. And if you're like, wow, I, you know, I got to get a 50 year loan. Don't get a 50 year loan. You will pay interest for the rest of your life and still not own it. Yes. If you can't figure out how to do it with a 20 year loan and put a big enough down payment or find a cheap enough deal and put in some sweat equity, there's so many ways it can be done. But it's not easy like it has been for the last 15 years. And I got a lot harder a few years ago to buy real estate as a hard asset, didn't it? Well, the good news is there's a lot of education out there on how to learn, how to evaluate a deal, how to learn how to, you know, buy all these different assets, how to do some of this math and figure out, is it a good deal? Is it not a good deal? There's so much out there because schools haven't been teaching this. So those that haven't learned it really have a great opportunity to learn all about the finances and the money and all of that. Hey, mom, everything you just brought up, how to evaluate a deal and how all that stuff

18:40is available at realpowerfamily.com on our store page. We have a lot of resources there. And obviously, there's more people than just us, but we also have that. So make sure you go check out realpowerfamily.com. We also have a bunch of books and our free newsletter, also on realpowerfamily.com. Yeah, I could give you a lifelong education or less than it costs for less than the school system spends teaching your child for one year, just one. I could give you the tools to become a millionaire and three to five years. There's never been anybody that worked with me for five years that didn't become a millionaire, I don't think. Yes, I agree. It's easy to do. It's not easy. It's simple to do. It's easy for me to teach. It's hard to do. And if you want to know about some of the stumbling box, go back and listen to Paul and Stacy. I love that interview. One of my favorite ones, definitely this year because it's only February, but it absolutely.

19:44One of my favorite interviews, everybody loved listening to Paul. How I got started. So if you're wondering, how can I do this? How can I get started? One of the interviews from him from season two. And if you want to hear him and his wife, now his wife is taking a significantly larger role and she's really helping out with the business and driving him to do better and buy him more faster and it's so much easier when you have the support of your spouse. So you get to hear her on and talking about what was it like when your husband had his business and his real estate. And now it's really, you're taking ownership and I'm talking mentally and emotionally. I'm talking about the paperwork. Of course, they both own everything just like Lila and I. But when you mentally take ownership, things significantly changed, don't they, Lila? Absolutely. Because we did that in the beginning. I called it your real estate and yet by the time I took ownership and got involved, it became an us thing and that's why we were so good working together.

20:48And that's how we grew so fast and bought more faster. We will tell you about how you can use this inflation to make your life better or if you try to ignore it, how it will use you. We'll be right back. Have you ever loved one benefacted by inflation? Yes. We have the product for you. Hard assets that hold their value like the real power family still around are available at American Gold Exchange. You can visit American Gold Exchange at AMERgold.com or by calling 1-800-613-9323. Welcome back to the real power family radio show. We were just talking about inflation and Eric, you said that you are going to go over how to use inflation to make your life better because if you try to ignore it, it will use you. And absolutely will. We are already brought up loans, how if you pay back debt with cheaper money, right?

21:51Absolutely. Go ahead and explain that a little bit more. Let me try and simplify this. If you get a loan to say buy a house or something, buy a piece of real estate, that's what we do. Then once inflation goes up and the value of the dollars go down, then you're still paying the same amount of money on that loan for interest, assuming you have a fixed rate interest loan, interest rate, then you're paying that back with dollars that are less valuable. It'll be easier to get that those dollars in the future, and that is why we say inflation helps debtors. All right. And every single month that you make a loan payment, Devon, yep, does the amount of interest that you pay go up or down? The amount of interest goes down. The amount of principal goes up on a fully interest loan. So every month you owe less than you did the month before, and it's not just that you owe less, you owe even more or less, you're paying more principal every month than you

22:55did the month before. And so you get to the end of the loan, and the last payment is almost all principal. So the longer the life of the loan, the more interest you pay, the worse it is for you. That's why I say, if you look at the hockey stick formation, if you look at the exponential curve, it just doesn't make any sense to borrow from more than 20 years. If you can do it in 15 awesome, that's how violent I started. We worked our butts off with sweat equity, working 18 hours a day, 500 days without a day off, no birthdays, no Christmas, and we'd take a half a day off, you know, we only put in 10 or 12 hours that day, so we could celebrate Christmas with my mom, and then go work until midnight, and that's how we got these properties and could afford to not only get a 15 year loan, but the rent totally covered the payment on the 15 year loan. And this is pre-financial crisis. This is not after they dropped, and you can buy them way cheaper. Then when everybody was afraid, because the prices dropped, we bought way, and that's

23:59I think we're set. I started saying no, buy more faster. Because when prices were cratering, like, oh no, we went from real estate can never go down, to it'll never come back. And people were just emotional, I said, no, you cannot, as long as I can buy this house, for more than it costs to build it, and I can borrow 80 or 90% of the money, sometimes 100% of the money, and I can rent it out and cover the mortgage cost, the taxes, insurance, and repairs. Why wouldn't I buy as many of these as I possibly could? And right now, there's another one of those no-brainer scenarios going on. I forget somebody on X-Sedit or on YouTube said, if I could run a counterfeit machine, if I could just print dollar bills and trade them for gold, I'd be a buyer of gold at any price. Think about that. Isn't that exactly what the federal government is doing? Isn't that exactly what every central bank on earth is doing?

25:00They are running the printing press, they are running up debts, they're spending way more than they have, central banks are the largest buyers of gold in the world. They were net sellers just a handful of years ago, and now they're the biggest buyers. They're even, you've got these big banks like JP, more than they're even buying silver. I think Russia was buying some silver. If you can print your own fake currency and trade it for something of real value, I believe that that real value has to go up. And looking at housing, I'm still, I need to call that guy, figure out, does he really want to sell these 200 units? Because I don't have any side of paper. I thought we had a good deal, and I haven't heard from him in a month. I'm done sitting, having my cash in the bank and do nothing. I can go on and pay cash, you know, get 10 more houses. And I'd rather use that as a down payment and get 200 apartments and, you know, whatever. But just paying cash for a handful of houses makes life much simpler and easier.

26:02And we'll actually get more cash flow immediately, whereas if we took on this 200 unit with a bunch of leverage, it would be really rough and a lot of work for about five years. Yes. Five years to now. Our life would be massively better forever. Just five more years. Exactly. I'm willing to do that. And I also, after going on my rant yesterday about how you need to take money off the table. Once again, we don't give financial advice. I simply talk about what we do. And I physically picked up the phone. I called American Gold Exchange and I ordered two more ounces of gold. I said, it looks like maple leaves are your cheapest markup. So what he is, well, we have some random dates. I don't care if they're old. I don't care if they're scratched up. All I care about is their pure gold. All right? Or, you know, there's a full ounce of gold in it like the, I think maple leaves are pure gold. I can't remember. I know the buffalo is, but I buy a lot of its eagles if I'm buying the American.

27:05Well, the US, the markup is just far, far too much. And I don't care about who minced the coin. I only care about the amount of bullion in it. So when, and I paid for everybody out there, I paid just under $5,100. I was trying to buy it at five grand, but I'm like, this is close enough. I'll buy it now. Now, by the time you listen to this, it might be $4,500 again. It might be $5,500. I don't know. I don't care. I am putting more money into hard assets and right now since it's so hard to buy cash flowing real estate or even real estate that breaks even. I'm throwing more into gold, silver and Bitcoin. And as the ratio is close to 50, I'm buying more gold than I'm buying silver. And I promise you, I will be telling you, buy more real power family silver rounds or any silver you can get ahold of if that ratio goes up over 62 again. If you don't have any silver or if you can't afford the gold or they're sold out of the smaller pieces of gold, then yeah, at least get silver.

28:05It's not a terrible thing. And with a ratio of 50 to one, I like gold better. And that's what I'm buying. And like I said, once it goes up 70 or 80, I'll be buying silver. And over 100, I'll be selling gold to buy silver. When we get down around 40, I'll be selling silver to buy gold. It's always about the ratio. How much money do I want to put into these alternative assets? And then which one is better at the time? And contrary to what Peter Schiff says, I think Bitcoin should absolutely be in everyone's portfolio. No other, I can't stress enough when I say Bitcoin, I don't mean any of the crappy cryptos. I only mean Bitcoin, Bitcoin and nothing else. And unless you think you're really smart and spend a lot of time studying this, I would never buy anything. And I have a little teeny bit of Ethereum. Ethereum is nothing like Bitcoin. It has one central point of failure. Everything has a central point of failure. Gold does not have a central point of failure. Bitcoin does not have a central point of failure.

29:07And silver does not have a central point of failure. That's why I buy those. It's not for speculation. It's not for making capital gains. It's for long-term storage of wealth. And I think the riskiest thing to me, having a central point of failure, that's why I don't like the dollar. Because they're not even trying. They're literally passing big bodacious bills and saying we're lowering your taxes. But they're guaranteed to massively increase inflation. And we're seeing that. But they drag it out. And we're going to take a quick break. And Lila's going to tell you how efficient the government is. Thanks to the Department of Government efficiency. Right after this break. Brushwood, Media Network. Ethan, you're known for being the youngest teenager on the real power family radio show on the Brushwood Media Network. You're also known for being quite successful and you're only 15. How'd you do that? Well, you've always taught me to buy more hard assets faster. And one of those hard assets that I've bought is the real power family silver round from

30:08American Gold Exchange. Get your real power family silver rounds by going to AMERgold.com or calling 800-613-9323. Welcome back to the real power family radio show. And Mom, how about you tell us just how efficient is the government after the Department of Government efficiency did whatever it did? I don't think that it really made any difference. Our government hasn't been efficient my entire lifetime. And I don't, it's getting worse if you haven't want my opinion on it. But is that one of the 10? I don't deal with opinions. True. I don't care about feelings and I don't care what you think. Give me facts. Pull up the debt clock, Ethan. I got that. Let me know. What does the doge clock on the debt clock say we say? I'd like to know who does that? I would really like to talk to them. They removed that a while ago. So they're honest at least. Yeah. And congratulations to the US debt clock dot org, I think it is and is our deficit still

31:13spiraling up? Yes. Yep. Is our debt still spiraling up? Yes. Yep. So we not only didn't save anything, I don't even know that we slowed it down. In fact, by my metrics, we increase. We are spending money faster, which means we are printing the United States government and every other government is worse off than us pretty much. They are all printing more faster than they ever have reprinted. And that's why we have to have inflation. And if we have inflation holding our hard assets, as long as you're not losing money to own the real estate, holding hard assets, it's going to make the dollar value of that real estate go up. It's going to make the dollar value of the gold and silver go up and of the Bitcoin go up. Now, you have to factor in a lot of other cycles. So we might have crashes in different cities where they're deporting a lot of illegals. We just don't need that housing. Look at Springfield. We have all those Asians. I bet the rents come down because when we were down there, Ethan, what were all of the

32:18people, the workers, the blue color workers that we talked to, what were they all complaining about? Went up because we kept giving all of these, these Haitians a bunch of free, quote, free money. And so they could just spend all of that on their rent. And there was like no competition for them. And people could jack rate stuff and all of these immigrants. And they went up 50 to 100% for rents. That was an artificial bump. I don't consider that as absolutely not the free market. That is government intervention. The government was funding NGOs and they were paying ridiculous amounts for rent and the people that were working at the dollar store and the Walmart and, you know, the restaurants we went to everywhere normal people go on a daily basis. We tried to stop at and talk to the people working there, the people shopping there. And like, yeah, I can't afford to live here anymore. When my lease is up, my landlord already said he's going to raise my rent by almost 100%. I can't afford that. I'm going to move out at the end of this term because of the government.

33:19Our tax dollars are going to pay for illegals living in Springfield, Ohio. And it's pushing the native American citizens from cities of Springfield out of their own city. And there's one religious group, if you want to get into that, who is busing all of these people up to Ohio because the guy's probably making a fortune and he's getting all this government money. So yeah, I really don't feel bad if that well dries up. But judging by the debt clock, it's not drying up at all. It might be transferred from one city to another where they haven't been caught yet. We're still, the federal government is still spending the money. So if they actually do, I think Trump is doing a good job on immigration, at least closing the border. We don't have massive care of hands coming this way. But the debt is what's affecting the general population the most. And nobody would even be talking about this. If we didn't have X, if we didn't have this radio station, if we didn't have rumble,

34:21I mean, YouTube is not nearly as bad as they were, but they still throw through us off when we were talking about COVID. Yep. So hopefully we're a little bit better there. But without, I mean, Fox News isn't talking about any of this. They had Peter Schiff on and he said, mean things about Trump and Trump called him a jerk. It was really spectacular. I just want to know where is the money? If we have the greatest economy, then why can't people buy a home? If we have the highest jobs number, why is it that, what was, what did he call Joe Biden? Sleepy Joe. Oh, yeah. Sleepy Joe is ruining the economy and all of these numbers are lies, fake news, fake news. Well, he was absolutely right. I don't know if Joe Biden ruined the economy because Trump signed the first CARES Act and then Biden made it worse. And guess what, Trump 2.0 is spending more money with the big, beautiful bill. So it got worse if it were really fake news.

35:22All of these numbers are lies. The CPI is a lie. I don't know. Let's look at the CPI, Lila. Okay. CPI, what do they say the consumer price inflation is? They say it was 2.7% for 2025. I don't for a second believe it was under 3%. I mean, 6% is significantly closer. Yes. Maybe 5 and a half to 6. Yeah, I like shadow stats, at least measures everything the way it started. And when you look at their charts, it's usually about double whatever the government reports. Yeah. And if these numbers were all fake news when Trump was running against Kamala and Biden ruined everything, why is he using them to tell us how great the economy is now? Did they change the formulas so it's no longer fake news? It's true. No, you can't have it both ways. That's all I'm saying, the Biden administration lied to us. I think the Trump administration lied to us. I think the Obama administration lied to us.

36:23I think the Bush administration lied to us. My question is has there ever been one that hasn't? Well, that's a good question. If Reagan came, I think it was the 1980s era. They actually came up with the CPI, but let's pretend like of course they were trying to make themselves like better. Even under Reagan, back then, is that really when the CPI started? But it's been non-stop substitutions and hedononic adjustments and other ways to transform what it was supposed to measure into today. And that's where you have people that one of these things is made up of basically a third of your money should be spent on food. But over the last 50, 60 years, we grow an incredible amount of food with no labor cost. Sure, it costs a million-dollar tractor. But you get one tractor that just goes from field to field to field and replaces how much cheaper is that? I mean, you had your brand new secretaries.

37:24You should have only been there for a couple of days already called off sick today. Yep. You don't have to worry about that when you have a machine doing it. And some of these drive themselves. I didn't even know that. The farmer was telling me that it is incredible what they have for farming nowadays. But yeah, we can produce so much more food per acre with so much less labor cost. It's unbelievable. So to compare the price of food and say it should be one-third of your budget and that is a true, is that the CPI? I forget what it is, but that's some measure. And some guy tore that apart and said, no, that's the poverty line. That's what they used it for. Oh, yeah. He said, that's not the real poverty line, but they say it's the total lie. To be at the poverty line, it's $140,000 a year. If you're below that, you're below the poverty line. Well, I don't, he made some good arguments. He had a release to a really nice page. It's worth reading. I think that that's pretty high, but I don't make a 140 grain. I make a little more than that.

38:25In another thing that he said, you're literally better off making $40,000 a year than you are 80. That 40 grand, you get all the government handouts, but they go away faster than your, you can earn money going from 40 grand to $100,000 a year. You literally lose more. You have to break 100 to be better off than when you were making 40. And we've had multiple, how many people did you try and hire and they're like, oh, I, no, I just realized that will put me over and I won't get this free money from the government. Yep. So they wouldn't take the job. They were perfectly capable of working. They couldn't wait to hire them or we thought they'd be so great at the job. And they might have worked one or two days and I love it, but I just realized when I got my check, this is going to put me over and I can't afford health care for my kid. Yep. That instead of structure, it's horrible. So I do believe that well, why would they do that? Why do they, it's not an accident. You have to realize somebody put this there. It's to keep the status quo.

39:25It's to keep the people who are in charge now. They don't want to change them on how horrible and broken it is. They're on top. Why would you want to change if you were on top? They've got to keep it there. So think about we're trying to give you the tools that you need so you can make that jump. If you happen to be living below 40,000 right now, we need to get you above 100,000 and I'll give you very specific ways you can do that right after this spring. Hi, this is Eric Wohen from the Real Power Family and best selling author of Family Success Trangle. Learning how my wife and I became financially free by the time we were only 30 and how we taught these secrets to our kids so they could do the same without any of our money or credit when they were just teenagers. Pick up a copy of our book, Family Success Trangle, available on Amazon today. And don't forget to tune in to the Real Power Family Radio Show, weekdays at 7 a.m. Eastern on the Brushwood Media Network. Welcome back to the Real Power Family Radio Show and then you were just talking about the poverty in line and how that like perhaps should be much higher than they're currently

40:32stating that it is, which is I guess not exactly what I had thought about previously, but it's at least interesting and then you were going to tell us some very specific and I'm going to hold you to that ways that you can help or that people can increase that for themselves. Keep me in line. If anybody can do it, it's you boys because your mom lost me a ramble. I do. Let's say here is the game plan. Let us say that you are making less than $40,000 or right, you have 40, 50, 30, 40, 50 somewhere in there, right? And you might be getting food stamps. You are almost certainly getting government subsidies for your health care and if you have a sick child, I mean let's face it, who wouldn't do anything and give up everything to take care of their child? I mean, look at the guy, a good friend of mine, incredibly, you know, he was in the Air Force, he was in the NSA, he's working for me.

41:33He had a great corporate job and called me up when he was like, I can't do this anymore. He said, I've already worked my way up to the absolute top that I can be and he was around 30 or just over 30. He has been, I'll never get for the, I'm as high as I can be in my job. I'll never get another raise other than cost of living or, you know, inflation. I got to do something different and he was brilliant to see that. So early on when I'm sure a lot of the people working to be signing him and different cubicles said, no, you, uh, you're already at the top. That's all I'm just working my whole life to get to the top. And if you look at him, he has a very sick daughter. She has multiple brain surgeries and there's no way anybody can afford to pay for that. And I don't know about the insurance, but I am certain, I don't know how they deal with it, but I'm certain that the government is paying for a lot of that in some way. So how do you go? Now I honestly don't have an answer for him. Uh, as long as he has to pay for this, which now she's over 18, I don't know how things

42:37are working financially, didn't ask and I certainly wouldn't share it over the radio. If you're in that mode, I honestly don't have an answer for you. But let's talk about your average healthy family of four. Let's say you're marrying, you got two little kids, uh, maybe a 30 years old and you're making a under 40,000 or maybe you and your wife are both making, what do we do? Well, what we need to do is we need to bridge that gap and I don't know exactly what the numbers are. Where is the cut off? Where do you start losing stuff? I'm sure it depends on, you know, how many children you have, the state that you live in. But basically we need to make money and not pay taxes because the more you make, the more taxes you pay and the more you're adjusted gross income is the more you lose. So there's literally two ways you can do it. You can either lie or you can be honest. Well, let's forget about the line that's any type of under the table job. Let's just not even do that because if you start doing that, then you can keep your income

43:40down. Well, let's just use the number 40,000. You can keep that number down and get another 20,000 income by not declaring it because you're getting paid cash. Throw that out because then it can never help you if you really want to start investing. You've got to declare it all. So how do we declare money, Devon, without paying taxes and do it all absolutely legally? We have write offs or depreciation that offsets the income is one of the ways. Not just the write off. You need a phantom loss. We need a legal way to take a loss without actually losing money. And what is the absolute number one best way that I have taught you boys to lose money on paper legitimately and legally and not actually lose money depreciation from real state. And Ethan, can you give us a 10 second wrap up of what depreciation is? If I'm wrong, but isn't depreciation because the house is like wear down and you'll

44:43need to replace things over time, that is considered, I don't know, the house getting older or whatever. So the value would go down. And while in reality, it doesn't affect you at all except for actually making those repairs, the government or the IRS decides that your house is worth less. You don't have to pay as much in taxes, right? Because you're going to have to. Right. And the IRS, there are no all agency with their thousands of auditors. They are certain that if people live in it, it's going to wear out in 27 and a half years. But if it's a commercial building, it wears out in 39 years. So just it doesn't matter if it's right, logical or anything. All that matters is this is absolutely legal. This is the truth according to the law as it is written today. So you cannot take the full write off of the purchase price of the house, which you probably should be able to, especially if you're paying cash.

45:43But as it turns out, most people finance their homes and they probably finance them over 30 years. And I'm sure nobody used that to figure out the 27 and a half year depreciation schedule. It is just a total coincidence. But let's pretend like it really happens. It doesn't matter. If I go in and I pay $100,000 for a home, I cannot write off the land because even the IRS is smart enough to know that dirt doesn't depreciate. It doesn't, you know, it turns into mud and then it dries out when the sun comes out. It freezes and then the snow melts and it's, but the house you can depreciate. So more or less for every $100,000 that you spend, you get about $3,000 in depreciation. And once again, don't believe a word I say I'm not your accountant. I'm not a anybody's accountant. I don't have that license. Talk to your accountant. But if you are buying residential real estate to rent to others, you get about a $3,000 depreciation loss every year for every $100,000 you spend.

46:48You might be a hair under that. So if you go out and buy your average $400,000 home, that's 12 grand, you don't have to pay in taxes. So now I'm declaring the same $40,000 that came in. But I bring in my rents and I make $5,000 in rent. I pay all the bills and even if I'm breaking even, the inflation is making the house worth more dollars, not less. And rents go up, our rents went up 2% this year on average, 2 to 2 and a half percent. So they are going up. They're not quite keeping up with inflation, but at least it's going up. And if I've got a 4 and a half percent loan and the rents went up 2 and a half percent, my mortgage payment didn't go up. The value of my house went up 3 or 4% and the value of the mortgage went down. So what do I do? I get to earn a couple thousand more. Now I'm not making $40,000, I'm making $45,000, but I take a $12,000 right off because of the depreciation.

47:49So I literally and legitimately make less on my adjusted gross income on my taxes. I pay less. Even though I put an extra 5 grand into my pocket and you need to do enough of those and you need to set it up so you're not actually losing money. And then you pay these off over, really it's going to take you 5 years to really see a difference. But if you keep doing enough of these, you can bridge that gap and you're really, we went for at least 10 years. Most people will go at least 10 years without paying any income tax or like ridiculously small amounts of income tax because if you buy fast and we were buying 20 a year. So this is not for the faint of heart. It's not like, oh, I'll buy one now and buy one in a couple of years. That's not going to help you at all. We were buying and we were also buying a $30,000 property on average. Here were 30 or 35 grand. So you can do the math for yourself. Your numbers will be wildly different than ours. It's a different market. It's a different time frame, but that's how we got started and went from more than 10 years and never really paid any significant income tax in that 10 years.

48:53Sure, we paid a pile of property taxes and that was all factored in. We knew those were going to have to be paid anyways. That was part of the operating expenses. But if you can use something that cash flows and maybe it's lending, but you don't get depreciation from lending on the other hand, lending does give you passive income. So ask your accountant, what's the difference between earned income and passive income? If you own the real estate, maybe it's farmland. I mean, we're just store and money there, but then it appreciates. And in some play, I wouldn't do that in the Midwest, but there are some places appreciating a lot more. I would be leery of flipping and waiting for appreciation and today's market. And I think in the next two years, there will be good, much, much better deals out there than there are today. I think there's cracks in the financial market and the real estate market and all kinds of markets that are going to make hard assets much cheaper over the next few years. And that doesn't mean you'll be able to buy them for less dollars than today,

49:55but the amount of value the dollars could buy you will be less than it is today because they might, I don't think we're going into hyperinflation in America, but I'm not ruling it out. So yeah, that is one way that you can go from that 40,000 to 100,000 in income without paying taxes and still declared do everything legitimately. And the bankers, if you find a good one, you'll need a commercial banker. Your average Joe at Chase Bank isn't going to make alone to you probably because you don't check the boxes. You're going to have to find a smaller bank and somebody that understands investment if you want to get alone from them again. And we went for 10 years not being able to get alone from because it was 2000 to 2017. And so our situation and the great financial crisis kind of made it a lot harder. So we did that and we found a lot of retirees that wanted to loan us money because the banks weren't giving him any interest on their deposit. That's how we grew our real estate. And once you got over that 100 or 140,000 dollars in income a year,

50:59now you're significantly better off than you were when you had the government help. But I didn't, I don't know the numbers, but everything this guy said when I read and listened to him, he's pretty on, he's got a lot of good. Maybe the numbers are slightly off. Maybe it's 50 and 90 instead of 40 and 100, but it is really difficult. It is the whole system is meant to keep you stuck where you can't improve your life and people always try and take the cheater way and not paying taxes. And they don't realize if you just follow the rules, you can make so much more without paying taxes legally and never worry about going to jail. So while I despise the paperwork, I have a three inch binder sitting behind me and I doubt I could fit 20 more pages in it. It is absolutely stacked up almost to the full top. Then I'm going to give to my accountant and I'm going to pay him a lot of money. But I'd rather pay it to him than give 10 times more to the government.

52:03And that is what we are doing because we follow the rules and we use what people call loopholes. They're not loopholes. They're incentives to make your life better. And so the politician, they're really not there to make your life better. They're married to get the politicians elected to get Arte Laila. Absolutely. And if you want to learn, it's about time to wrap up. So if you want to learn more financial education, please visit our website at realpowerfamily.com. We've got lots of free education on there. We've got our list of favorite books and favorite videos. You need to learn. So you are ready to take the next step in your life, Devon. Taxes, to me, they seem like just another crazy game. And while I may not like the rules, it is winnable and you can end up better than at least most people. So learn about it from people that are better at it than even we are and then use that. The government is the thing that costs us the most money as business owners. So make sure you go out and learn ways to, well, not pay them as much money legally.

53:07And again, nothing we said in this show was legal or accounting advice. Absolutely. Use everything you can go out and we're trying to abolish all property taxes in Ohio. Sign our petition, find a signing location at OHX Ohio tax, AXOHtax.com. And until that passes until we can make serious reform, because it's not like any of the politicians on either side are doing anything to save us in tax dollars. They're just spending more faster than we've got to find a way. I talked you through what we did in real estate. Did I stay on track enough, Devon? Yeah, I'd say those there was some pretty good information in there. And when you start making money in real estate, then you pull it off. And like I said, this is just what I did. And just yesterday I called in an order and ordered two more ounces of gold from American gold exchange. I am practicing what I preach.

54:08It's what we talk about every day. And that is how we're buying more harnesses faster to make our life better. So we have time freedom, location freedom, because of our financial freedom. Why do we have that? Because of the decisions we made, taking responsibility and deciding for the long term, rather than needing instant gratification. I can't say it any other ways. Hope you learned a lot this week. Make sure you go back, listen to Paul and Stacy's interview. If you're interested in getting started, you can hear about what they went through. And until next week, spend more time with your family and have fun. We will talk to you then. We hope you enjoyed the Real Power Family Radio Show brought to you by Family Success Triangle. We want you and your family to be financially free so you can go where you want, when you want, with whomever you want. Learn how we can help you live the life you've always dreamed of at realpowerfamily.com. To hear more, subscribe to Real Power Family on YouTube.

55:08Until next time, go out and make the world a better place.