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Building Financial Resilience | Joe Withrow
80 Plays21 hours ago
Joe Withrow has two decades of experience in finance. He started his career in corporate banking. Then he became an investment analyst within the largest financial research network on the planet. Joe’s an expert investor, the author of three books, and the founder of the Phoenician League Investment Strategy Group.
Connect with Joe:
Sign up to the next session on 8th October (The Secret of Mortgage Notes): https://phoenicianleague.com/session
Phoenician League: https://phoenicianleague.com/
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:01
Christian Yordanov
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Christian Yordanov here. Today we have a special guest. His name is Joe Withrow. Joe is um a reformed corporate banker and he is the founder of the Phoenician League Investment Strategy Group.
00:00:18
Christian Yordanov
So we're going to talk macro finances, investing, um but he's also a client of mine. So he we did, I can't remember when we did your assessment. It was like three, four months ago, Joe.
00:00:29
Joe Withrow
So earlier this year, I think. Yeah.
00:00:30
Christian Yordanov
Yeah, yeah. So he was like, that like we did that metabolomics urine test and like, I don't know where you like top top, but you were definitely like the top one, two, or maybe even three at most, but like the top two best sort of healthiest looking metabolomics tests.
00:00:49
Christian Yordanov
So pretty impressive.
00:00:49
Joe Withrow
You said the major league pitcher was better than me. And I'm like, what's his name?
00:00:53
Christian Yordanov
So, yeah, it's it's probably you, him, and Charlie Robinson, you guys, um like, killing it. oh So it's really awesome to, like, work with, like, in terms of just optimizing.
00:01:06
Christian Yordanov
That's also fun for me as well as obviously helping folks with their health. um But yeah, so like really, really awesome to connect with you and to to kind of, you know, just build a relationship with you, man.
00:01:16
Christian Yordanov
So I just wanted to share your work with my audience a little bit to see who you are and
Joe's Career Transition
00:01:22
Christian Yordanov
what you do. So maybe for the listeners, can you just give us a little bit of background and what drove you to kind of become the, you know, the Felician League founder?
00:01:31
Joe Withrow
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I'm just thrilled to be here, man. I really appreciate it. And as I've said before, I love the work that you're doing. You did a session for us at the Phoenician League.
00:01:42
Joe Withrow
think was last week. And I've gotten such good feedback from that. And I've, you know, I've, I'm a believer having gone through your program and I'm implementing these things and I just feel better. And that's what I'm telling people. i'm like, you Trust me on this.
00:01:55
Joe Withrow
So thank you for all the work that you do.
00:01:56
Christian Yordanov
you. Love you, bro. Thank you.
00:01:59
Joe Withrow
And I'll just point out, I've learned to point this out on every call. So i'm I'm broadcasting here from my solar shed way up in the mountains of Virginia. So I know, you know, I was going to call one time and the guy's kind of like squinting and looking forward. He's like, Joe, are are you in an unfinished basement?
00:02:13
Joe Withrow
You know, got the exposed beams and everything. But this is a little office we put out, put up. I've got five acres up in the mountains here. So we put up this little building and it's running completely off grid.
00:02:24
Joe Withrow
We've got a little solar power system that powers everything.
00:02:25
Christian Yordanov
Yeah. Yeah.
00:02:27
Joe Withrow
um And having having the solar power system, it's great for this because I'm just running lights in a computer.
00:02:32
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:02:32
Joe Withrow
But seeing what it looks like, there's no way we are ever going to run our power grid on solar energy or wind energy and none of that stuff. So I can tell you that firsthand. But anyways, this is a this is my my solar shed.
00:02:42
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:02:45
Joe Withrow
um For my background, I always like to say I'm a reformed corporate banker because my my you know I came from just a complete mainstream upbringing as far as you know public education here in the U.S., public university here in the U.S.,
00:03:01
Joe Withrow
And I got a degree in finance. And so, you know, that that whole system, you know, you get, yeah we were taught, you just got to get your degree. That degree means everything. You got to have the degree and then you'll be able to get a job.
00:03:13
Joe Withrow
So that's what I did. You know, and I didn't
Understanding Banking System Flaws
00:03:15
Joe Withrow
think anything more about it. So I get the degree and I'm like, all right, I got this degree. And then I just would apply to all these different companies. I had no idea what they did or what I wanted to do or anything.
00:03:24
Joe Withrow
And I got hired as I got hired part-time. In the corporate banking world, like working nights. i think I think the shift was like 6 to 1230 at night or something, or 6 to 1130, 6 to 10, I don't know, something like that.
00:03:37
Joe Withrow
Working 20, 25 hours a week, just just doing just not mindless administrative stuff that nobody else wanted to do. Like they hired young people. There a handful of us. We come in at night as the other people are leaving and we're just doing grunt work, basically.
00:03:51
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:03:52
Joe Withrow
um But I was fortunate in a sense because that gave me an end to get hired full time when the mortgage crisis hit. in 2008, 2009 in the US.
00:04:04
Joe Withrow
um And so if you remember, if you think back to those days, Wells Fargo got in trouble for robo stamping foreclosure authorizations. And so the crisis hits and Wells Fargo, just somebody's at the desk, just foreclose, foreclose, foreclose.
00:04:20
Joe Withrow
They weren't reviewing documents or doing anything. They were just sending everything to foreclosure. So that gets out, gets in the news, and then there's a big backlash. And so then that the US government comes in, they're like, oh, no, no, no, no we can't do this. we can't we We can't have foreclosures in the news. Like we've already got, you know, they had so many other things that they were trying to just hold the dam together and maintain, you know, consumer confidence in the banking system and all these things.
00:04:46
Joe Withrow
And so they came in and they made this deal with the big banks. where instead of sending loans to mortgages to foreclosure, if the banks would modify those loans to make them current, the government would pay them a fixed fee for every single modification they did.
00:05:02
Joe Withrow
And so all of a sudden, the incentive completely flipped because now the banks, they don't want to send a foreclosure because they're going to get paid by the government to modify that loan. So what happened was Wells Fargo fired almost everybody in the foreclosure department And then they hired a lot of people in the loss mitigation department.
00:05:19
Joe Withrow
And I was one of those people. So I got my my full-time job in the corporate banking arena.
00:05:22
Christian Yordanov
Whoa. Whoa.
00:05:24
Joe Withrow
And we come in and our job's just to modify loans, which means a loan's past due. Somebody hasn't paid their mortgage. And instead of sending it to foreclosure, the modification process would allow you to stretch that term back out to 30 years.
00:05:39
Joe Withrow
Now, it didn't matter how many years. They might have six years left. It's still going out 30 years. And then it would take the past due balance and basically put it at the end of the loan to bring the loan current. And then we could fix the rate at whatever the government said the floor rate was for that day.
00:05:54
Joe Withrow
And so a lot of times we could get the rate down a little bit because the if if you remember the Federal Reserve, just just that's when the the period of zero interest rate policy began, ZERP, as they called it.
00:06:06
Joe Withrow
And so the governments had manipulated rates lower. So it seemed benevolent at first, you know, oh you don't have to lose your house, you can get current. But i as I was getting in there, I noticed, but hold hold on.
00:06:21
Joe Withrow
we're not really doing a lot of qualifications to see if people, number one, can still afford even the modified payment. Can they afford it? And number two, I started to realize if you think back to that time period, you know, real estate values in the U.S. on average fell by like 30 percent.
00:06:38
Joe Withrow
And in some places they fell a lot more than that. And so I started to to look at something, you know, when a loan goes into default, a mortgage goes into default, we know there's there's late payment fees that hit, right?
00:06:50
Joe Withrow
And they just build up. They just build up. Every every month you you don't pay the mortgage, another fee hits. Well, then after so many months, the banks send it initiate for the full foreclosure process with an attorney.
00:07:03
Joe Withrow
And once that happens, the attorney starts billing for fees and costs too.
00:07:07
Christian Yordanov
geez
00:07:07
Joe Withrow
And so I started to see there's just these massive amount of fees that are building up on these mortgages. Now, the modification seemed really benevolent at first, but then I started, as I'm getting into it, i realized, hold up, like the banks were not forgiving those fees.
00:07:22
Joe Withrow
They were just going right back into the mortgage. And so people were coming out of this process with a mortgage balance that was
Founding the Phoenician League
00:07:30
Joe Withrow
much, much bigger. than what their mortgage was before.
00:07:34
Christian Yordanov
Jesus.
00:07:34
Joe Withrow
And that was happening at the same time that the prices of real estate were falling.
00:07:38
Joe Withrow
So I went into a morning meeting one day and I raised my hand. I'm just a young kid in my twenties. And most of us were, that's who they hired were young, young people like me in the twenties who didn't really know much, didn't have much experience.
00:07:49
Joe Withrow
So I raised my hand in the morning meeting. I'm like, Hey, um is anybody tracking, you know, the loan to value for these modifications we're doing. And that means loan to value is just, you know if you buy a house in the US, it's supposed to, if you'd get a mortgage, it's supposed to be 80% loan to value or less, which means you put down 20% down payment and then the mortgage you can finance 80%.
00:08:08
Christian Yordanov
Damn.
00:08:11
Joe Withrow
And so the mortgage is 80% or less of the home's value. So that's what I ask, is anybody tracking loan to value? Cause I started to see, I think some of the loans I did, the modification, I'm pretty sure that the loan to value was over a hundred percent.
00:08:24
Joe Withrow
um And I got shut down real quick. You know, like the the boss at the front, like, wait, no, no, that's not for you to worry about. Don't just do your job, man. Keep your head down. You know, and, and that's when I realized, oh, okay.
00:08:34
Christian Yordanov
who bro
00:08:37
Joe Withrow
So this isn't, this isn't about trying to be diligent. It's not about really trying to help people. It started to, and that's when people started, you know, I started to hear people coming there like, hey, don't you know that we're getting paid for this? Like they're making bank.
00:08:50
Joe Withrow
because the government's paying them every time we do a modification. So what I started to see after that, oh, this was just a new revenue stream. And they're just thinking, okay, we're going to be able to hit our bonus this year, even though everything's crashing, this is going to save us.
00:09:04
Joe Withrow
And so it's just about do those modifications get paid by the government through, you know, which of course, the government doesn't have any money to give, they have to tax, tax or inflate the currency.
00:09:13
Christian Yordanov
Yeah, yeah. yeah
00:09:14
Joe Withrow
So then I started to see that symbiotic relationship. And that's when my eyes opened. Um, And at at the same time this was happening, there was a gentleman by the name of Dr. Ron Paul that was running for president in the US.
00:09:26
Joe Withrow
And the media wouldn't give him any attention because he was out there saying things, talking about, you know, the monetary policy, monetary system, the Federal Reserve, sound money, you know, free market economics and all these things that I'd never heard before.
00:09:39
Joe Withrow
And hed he would name on the campaign trail, he'd start to name like these old dead economists. yeah like Ludwig von Mises F.A. Hayek or Murray Rothbard or Henry Hazlitt or, you know, on and on.
00:09:49
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:09:50
Joe Withrow
And so every time he du this guy caught my attention because like, huh, Everybody, like they're trying to make him out to be crazy, but this stuff makes a lot of sense to me and I've never heard it. So I just, he'd name an economist. I just go out and buy the books, you know, and I started to read.
00:10:04
Joe Withrow
And the more i I read, the more I realized I did not learn anything of value in school. You know, 16 years of public education, I'd learned nothing of importance.
00:10:11
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:10:14
Joe Withrow
And so then I just started to read all the all kinds of other books too, you know, history and political philosophy and all these other things. So, yeah. Going through that, I had no choice but to quit my job in banking. I couldn't do that anymore.
00:10:26
Joe Withrow
So that's why I refer to myself as a reformed corporate banker, because I saw the corruption from the inside.
00:10:30
Christian Yordanov
You know what's funny?
00:10:34
Christian Yordanov
Yeah man, that's...
00:10:34
Joe Withrow
and And just at a surface level, but I saw enough to realize, okay, this that's that's how it is.
00:10:37
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:10:39
Joe Withrow
this This is not what they portray it as.
00:10:39
Christian Yordanov
Yeah. what What's crazy to me is that we're I think we're the same age.
00:10:42
Joe Withrow
Thank you.
00:10:46
Christian Yordanov
And when you were going like when these thought processes were going through your head, I was like working in a bar. i was like getting wasted, you know, smoking cigarettes, smoking weed, just doing nothing with my life.
00:11:01
Christian Yordanov
And like if like just to know that at the same time people my age were out there like understanding like macro. Like I knew there was a ah great financial crisis.
00:11:13
Christian Yordanov
Literally nothing nothing changed in my life. I was still a broke ass piece of crap.
00:11:16
Joe Withrow
Yeah.
00:11:19
Christian Yordanov
So it's it really just it amazes me that, you know, you had a lot of drive from a very very early stage, clearly.
00:11:19
Joe Withrow
me
00:11:26
Joe Withrow
Yeah. Well, you know, I don't want to give you the wrong impression. Cause we were going out to happy hour after, after work was over, like, and they were not paying like the first one, I guess the administrative job I took, I think they were paying me $13 an hour.
00:11:39
Christian Yordanov
Oh, geez.
00:11:39
Joe Withrow
And I got a very small raise to come in to the loss mitigation.
00:11:42
Joe Withrow
You know, That's why they hired all the young people, because they didn't pay us hardly anything so that their profit was high.
00:11:44
Christian Yordanov
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
00:11:47
Joe Withrow
So don't I. So my awakening didn't happen in the banking space. It was when I started to read all these books and listen to what what Dr. Paul was saying. So, yeah, I mean, we were out doing the same same stuff, too, until until I started to wake up and realize, oh, OK, there's you know, there's there's more to more to this life than than what I thought.
00:12:00
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:12:07
Christian Yordanov
So what did you do after you quit the banking job?
00:12:10
Joe Withrow
Yeah, so first I sold my house and in the city and made a little bit of money. I'd bought a foreclosure on the last, like the outskirts of town that hadn't been developed yet.
00:12:22
Joe Withrow
Made a little bit of money on that. And that's how I bought this property up here in the mountains of Virginia. I took the money I made there, put a down payment on this property and kind of struggled through some things.
00:12:25
Christian Yordanov
Oh, nice.
00:12:31
Joe Withrow
For a couple of years, I started producing some courses on the the financial side based on the the things that I was learning and trying to sell those courses independently. And through that process, I ended up linking up with a large investment research outfit.
00:12:41
Christian Yordanov
Sweet.
00:12:46
Joe Withrow
And and in fact, I was a customer. So I was getting these these ah investment reports every month. And in one of them, there was an advertisement looking for analyst to join the team. So I responded to that as a customer and ended up going down to this outfit in South Florida and linking up with those guys.
00:13:05
Joe Withrow
And so they ended up offering me a job there and worked there in South Florida for about a year and then came back here and worked remote with this group for a number of years and just learned a ton of information.
00:13:08
Christian Yordanov
sweet
00:13:17
Joe Withrow
And that that kind of also enabled me to kind of create my own philosophy, my own investment strategy. You know, I saw within the industry, they do great work and I was very proud of everything we did, but it was not comprehensive.
00:13:30
Joe Withrow
You know, it was, well, this month we're talking about this one type of investment. And then next month, oh, here's this other type of investment's really good, but there was no process to it. And so if you just do one type of one thing,
00:13:43
Joe Withrow
You know that's that's not very resilient, especially if it's not the most, you know, sometimes I mean if you're in the market and you're exposed to volatility and things like that, you know, you need to have.
00:13:51
Christian Yordanov
Mm-hmm.
00:13:53
Joe Withrow
yeah just I think you need to have a more comprehensive approach and so that's what led me to develop definition was kind of trying to create a comprehensive program where. We've got it mapped out, you know, from the most basic to some very advanced investment strategies across a range of assets with some advanced tax strategies too.
00:14:13
Joe Withrow
Because, you know, we're we're not that thrilled about giving our money to the government because we, number one, it's our money. We work for it. Number two, look at what these people are doing with it.
00:14:23
Joe Withrow
Like some of it just abhors me, you know. So anyway, that's that's the
00:14:26
Christian Yordanov
But dude, dude, they're saving lives with vaccines. Come on. Don't you get it?
00:14:30
Joe Withrow
Yeah.
00:14:31
Christian Yordanov
Don't you get it?
00:14:31
Joe Withrow
Yeah. I mean, how many millions of lives did that save or and the or did the opposite happen?
00:14:34
Christian Yordanov
We've saved so many lives, bro. Yeah. Yeah, man. Totally, totally agree. So how long ah how long how long ago did you start the Funition League?
00:14:46
Joe Withrow
We launched in September of 2023. And I probably spent a couple of years before that just kind of building out the program.
00:14:49
Christian Yordanov
Okay.
00:14:53
Joe Withrow
At first it wasn't, you know, the idea was I didn't have the, ah we're going to do the Phoenician League. That's what I'm going to build. It was just, I was doing these little things, building these little components.
00:14:59
Christian Yordanov
Yeah, man.
00:15:03
Joe Withrow
And then ah as I did that, I realized, huh, I've got something pretty comprehensive here. And so that's, that was the process of putting it into a single, program And we've expanded beyond just, I mean, we do, we've got a Rolodex of financial professionals. We do ongoing ah research and we do we do monthly calls, which you joined us this month and and shared with us which you know what you're doing, which I it's just really appreciate.
00:15:28
Christian Yordanov
yeah and
00:15:28
Joe Withrow
um And then we've got a Rolodex of professionals. We get people connected. So we help people implement. the the strategies that that we we advocate. And these are all things that I've done myself. You know, i wouldn' I'm not talking about anything that I'm not doing or haven't done personally.
00:15:38
Christian Yordanov
Mm-hmm.
00:15:43
Joe Withrow
um And I'll just share the Phoenician League, the name is a play on
00:15:43
Christian Yordanov
Okay. Mm-hmm.
00:15:48
Joe Withrow
both the ancient Phoenician civilization and the Hanseatic League, old Hanseatic League. So the ancient Phoenicians were, it was during biblical times, roughly where modern day Lebanon is today.
00:16:00
Joe Withrow
They were a commercial civilization. So they were the guys going around creating the trade routes throughout the Mediterranean. They linked like Asia to the Mediterranean and to Western Europe. And they were just facilitating trade.
00:16:11
Joe Withrow
And, you know, meanwhile, everybody else is kind of running around trying to conquer their neighbor and take their stuff and, you know, enslave their men and all this. And the Phoenicians were a commercial society. And so that that's something I really value, especially, you know, given what they were, you know, surrounded by barbarians and Hanseatic League of the Middle Ages was very similar. You know, this was mostly northern Germany. Um,
00:16:35
Joe Withrow
today, though it kind of extended out as it grew, but it was a and network of independent city states that entered into commercial agreements where they would have free trade and among the states and they created their own code of law called the law, law mercatoria.
00:16:51
Joe Withrow
um And that law is the foundation fund foundation of international commercial law today. But they had this code of between them to where, you know, you had to honor your contracts, they had it very clearly spelled out, you know, what were the repercussions were for breach of contracts, and they had protection as well.
00:17:09
Joe Withrow
You know, meanwhile, the kings and the nobles of Europe were doing the same thing that they were doing in the big biblical times, and that's going around trying to conquer people and take their land and take their stuff.
00:17:17
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:17:18
Joe Withrow
So we want to create, you know we strive to be a network that embodies those principles of free markets, free commerce, mutual collaboration, you know, the free flow of ideas and insight.
00:17:30
Joe Withrow
And so that's, that's another thing I'm really proud of. We've got, we've attracted a very high caliber ah group of people who, you know, we share ideas with each other and everybody has their different experiences and different expertise and all those things.
00:17:43
Joe Withrow
So that's that's what we try to be. It's not just a investment program. It's also a network that we try to embody.
00:17:49
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:17:49
Joe Withrow
Thank you.
00:17:50
Christian Yordanov
And so far, I've had the pleasure, we like i was telling you before we started recording, that just today alone, i onboarded ah couple of folks, a couple in in Australia, another gentleman earlier just before we started talking.
00:18:04
Christian Yordanov
And then i i just enrolled another couple in in the U.S., ah just before we started as well. And yesterday, another another gentleman and his wife kind of, you know I started with the dude, gonna do the health assessment
Phoenician League Details and Offerings
00:18:20
Christian Yordanov
for the wife next week.
00:18:21
Christian Yordanov
But just super awesome, like super switched on people. And like these these guys are like, they have an e-commerce, two e-commerce business, just like, really switched out people.
00:18:30
Joe Withrow
Yeah.
00:18:31
Christian Yordanov
And it's also really amazing that they don't have a lot of health problems per se. They're just like, they understand the value of, okay, you have investments, but you can also invest in your health because you know that's the driver of of your reality. and um
00:18:46
Joe Withrow
Yeah.
00:18:46
Christian Yordanov
I'm just curious, just for when you say, like when you kind of join as a member, like what what can you expect in the Phoenician League, bro?
00:18:56
Christian Yordanov
What kind of stuff do you?
00:18:56
Joe Withrow
Yeah, that's...
00:18:58
Joe Withrow
That's a great question. And so we've got a very robust, the kind of the core of the program is this massive financial training program. And it starts very basic. And in fact, it starts with understanding money in the monetary system.
00:19:11
Joe Withrow
Because until you understand that, you you are not, like nothing you do is going to be secure. And, you know, I take it for granted that I think a lot of people today do understand, you know, we're we're operating on a system with fake money.
00:19:24
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:19:24
Joe Withrow
You know, we've had a fiat monetary, purely fiat monetary system since 1971, which is when President Nixon cut dollar's final link to gold.
00:19:32
Joe Withrow
But the dollar was only partially backed by gold from 1933 to 71. Prior to that, you know, and silver were you know gold and silver were money you know the bank know The paper money that we had here in the US, s it said on that that banknote, there is deposited at the US Treasury a certain amount of gold or silver backing this dollar. And you could exchange that paper for the gold or silver, for the precious metal. They called it specie at the time.
00:19:56
Joe Withrow
And so at one point in our history, we understood that paper is not money. Paper is a representation and a claim on money. And they've really pulled the wool over people's eyes and crafted this monetary system to where today, you know, just by default, I didn't understand any of this stuff till I heard Dr. Paul starting to talk about it. I'm like, huh, I need to learn about this. That's I've never heard this before.
00:20:18
Joe Withrow
um And so it starts there, understanding that this is fake money. And, yeah know, there's a really good hint in the classic board game Monopoly. And I suspect a lot of people, probably most people,
00:20:29
Joe Withrow
know that game and have played that game. And it's, you know, you got the the bank has the paper of monopoly money. We understand it's worthless. And the name of the game is to go around and use the money you can earn.
00:20:40
Joe Withrow
You earn money and you you'd go buy assets. And those assets are productive assets that create more money for you. But the name of the game isn't to hoard the paper money. It's to acquire the best assets that you can.
00:20:52
Joe Withrow
um And so that's that's the the world we live in today is no different from that. The money is no different than monopoly money. And so because it does not has does not maintain value.
00:21:00
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:21:03
Joe Withrow
And so we could I could ramble on about this for for as long as we wanted to, but I don't want to bore people. But that's where it starts. That's the foundation of our program. And then we walk through how to create an asset allocation model across a range of assets, gold, Bitcoin.
00:21:19
Joe Withrow
we We do have an equity portfolio. Some people are into that. Some people are leery of it. And it's not as important as the others. Gold and Bitcoin are the foundation.
00:21:26
Christian Yordanov
what do you mean by equity portfolio like u.s stocks okay
00:21:28
Joe Withrow
Stocks. Yeah, US stocks.
00:21:31
Christian Yordanov
Okay.
00:21:31
Joe Withrow
Yeah. um max We talk about max-funded life insurance too, building cash value in life insurance policies, which is a robust way of kind of hiding money within the system because it's it's a really niche corner of the U.S. markets. And this can work in other countries too. I'm just not as familiar with with other you know other systems. But there's no database tracking cash value of life insurance. It's not treated as money. Legally, it is equity in a policy. So it's kind of a way to hide money But you can build a guaranteed rate of return within that policy as well. So we talk about these ways of kind of creating financial security across a range of these assets.
00:22:10
Joe Withrow
And then we get into how to create extra streams of income. And so we talk about investment real estate. We talk about mortgage notes. We talk about how to invest in things like ah music royalties, television royalties, or you know kind of unique commercial real estate opportunities, which is kind of, I have not done those, but we do have an expert who who has done things like boating marinas and things like that, which actually is a great business, believe it or not, because there's so many different income streams.
00:22:29
Christian Yordanov
Hmm. Hmm.
00:22:36
Joe Withrow
But um but so anyway, we walked through just kind of an asset allocation model. And the the idea... is, you know, to number one, to create financial security. And so that's not saving money in a bank. It's saving in things like gold and Bitcoin. There's some alternative cryptocurrencies like Monero that I think are worth considering as well. I don't see those as investments.
00:22:58
Joe Withrow
I see those as savings. I see those as as money. um And then we talk about, you know, the other ways to to kind of build a sustainable financial foundation for yourself in a way that's not just put your money in a 401k, you know, every month, which is what kind of the mainstream U.S.
00:23:12
Christian Yordanov
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
00:23:15
Joe Withrow
message is. um So that's the core of it. We also we do a monthly ah newsletter where we that's where we I kind of dive into my macroeconomic analysis.
00:23:26
Joe Withrow
as well as a number of other things. We do some historical insights and various other things in the monthly newsletter. We do monthly calls. We do investment reports from time to time. And then we've got, you know, it's, it's, we've got an open line of communication where people who come in whatever their situation is, we can do strategy calls together.
00:23:46
Joe Withrow
um We have a connection, a membership, community membership within the group where, we're all connected to each other. We can ask questions, share insights, all these things. And so um we kind of have an email series for new members when they join that kind of walks through every aspect of the program. it's, you know, it shares a, hey, start here, you know, check this out. And by the way, we've got a couple of special reports over here about, and I've got an report, one report that I i really was was proud of called America's Great Reorganization.
00:24:15
Joe Withrow
And it was kind of tracking the major changes that have happened since 2022, we're going through a massive economic reorganization right now. For better or worse, it's happening. You know, there's there's things about it that I'm not comfortable with.
00:24:26
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:24:28
Joe Withrow
There's other things about it that I i think are are moving in a better direction than where we were. So it's, you know, so anyway, we've got a lot, there's a lot of layers that we walk people through.
00:24:37
Christian Yordanov
yeah i'm I'm getting FOMO that I'm not a member of of your group but when you talk about it bro are you taking members on right now
00:24:44
Joe Withrow
i mean yeah well, I appreciate that.
00:24:50
Joe Withrow
So the way we normally do it is we'll, um we we open the membership up membership up several times throughout the year. And typically I'll go do a webinar, kind of a presentation, kind of, you know, walking through and sharing this philosophy and this perspective.
00:24:58
Christian Yordanov
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
00:25:05
Joe Withrow
And that way we, because I also, one of the first things that you get when you join as a new member is my online scheduler, you know similar to to the work you do, Christian. yeah the first thing you get is if you want to schedule a call with me, you can.
00:25:18
Joe Withrow
And so, you know, I don't want to,
00:25:18
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:25:20
Joe Withrow
I want to make sure that we provide full onboarding service to everybody where we can do individual calls, if you like. And some people aren't ready yet, and that's fine. There's no timetable in the thing. um But I just try not to open it up ah except for a couple of times throughout the year so I can make sure that I block off the time.
00:25:37
Christian Yordanov
Gotcha.
00:25:38
Joe Withrow
But we will, well we will open our doors again in October. And in fact, we're going to do a strategy session in a couple of weeks. And we'll we'll open the doors at that point. So I ah can get you more information on that.
00:25:50
Joe Withrow
We can talk about that.
00:25:51
Christian Yordanov
Sweet. Yeah, yeah.
00:25:52
Joe Withrow
If anybody's interested, we'll do, I've got a, we'll do a strategy session and kind of get into it more.
00:25:53
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:25:56
Christian Yordanov
So we go to PhoenicianLeague.com. Link will be in the description. And we just put our email to join the waitlist. Is that right?
00:26:04
Joe Withrow
You can do that. Yep. And you can also go to PhoenicianLeague.com slash session, S-E-S-S-I-O-N. And that that's the landing page for the next strategy session that we're going to do I think it's October 8th, if remember correctly.
00:26:18
Joe Withrow
It's probably less, i guess it's less than two weeks now.
00:26:19
Christian Yordanov
yeah october 8th yeah so should we include that link in the description as well yeah
00:26:26
Joe Withrow
Sure. Yeah. If anybody's interested, that's that's going to be kind of a specialized session, but we will cover kind of the kind of the comprehensive nature too. and but And that will also, anybody who signs up for that, well they'll get on the email list too.
00:26:41
Joe Withrow
So we in every time we we open our doors, you know we send that invitation out to everybody in the membership. So that's that'd be a great way for people
Macroeconomic Trends and Investment Strategies
00:26:50
Joe Withrow
to get kind of get on the distribution list.
00:26:50
Christian Yordanov
Awesome.
00:26:53
Christian Yordanov
Awesome, man. Awesome. Cool. um Definitely going to have those links in the description. So talking about macro, I'd love to get your take on... do you do you I'm sure you're aware of most of these things that... like um I'm like probably a kindergartner when it comes to these things, but...
00:27:10
Christian Yordanov
ah you You kind of know like the 18 and a half year real estate cycle. like Do you subscribe to that? like so Some guys that do that analysis, they think that next year could be like a big, huge correction, crash.
00:27:18
Joe Withrow
So...
00:27:24
Joe Withrow
It's really, really funny you bring that up. So I'm not familiar with this, but we actually had a member in the Phoenician League just a couple weeks ago, I think it was, asked me the same question. And i I have seen that out there before, but I've not taken the time to research it.
00:27:38
Joe Withrow
So this the member, he brought it to me. was like, hey, here's... He named the guy... I forget the guy's name off the top of my head, but he said, this guy's an expert in it. You know, you ought to have him do come to a call with us. So this guy's... That's going to be our December call.
00:27:51
Joe Withrow
This guy who...
00:27:51
Christian Yordanov
Jason Pitino maybe in Australia.
00:27:53
Joe Withrow
but I'm not sure. Off the top of my head, I'm not sure.
00:27:56
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:27:56
Joe Withrow
Because I just, I had not, I wasn't familiar.
00:27:59
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:28:00
Joe Withrow
And I sent the guy an email and we scheduled this thing for, we haven't set a date yet. We just, I just, we got the confirmation. Hey, would you like to come in September?
00:28:07
Christian Yordanov
Nice.
00:28:07
Joe Withrow
I'm sorry, in December.
00:28:09
Christian Yordanov
Nice.
00:28:09
Joe Withrow
um So I'm going to learn more about this. And those of us in the Phoenician League, we're going to learn a lot more about this in in a couple of months. It's going to be a call just like the one you did where everybody just pops in and
00:28:17
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:28:20
Joe Withrow
Anybody who wants to ask a question can, and this, you know, this gentleman will share with us exactly what that is.
00:28:24
Christian Yordanov
Yeah, yeah. well
00:28:25
Joe Withrow
Yeah.
00:28:26
Christian Yordanov
What's interesting about it, is the the way kind of... i don't know much about it, but the the last time, obviously, there was a big crash, was yeah the 2008, 2009 sort of period.
00:28:37
Christian Yordanov
And if you if you do 18 years, it kind of juxtaposes to next year being a huge correction. And when you look at, like, stock stock market... is at all-time highs it kind of it's been roaring for quite a while so maybe maybe that has some validity and it's going to be massive two three year bear market so but what's your take on macro at the moment how's it looking for the next few years
00:28:47
Joe Withrow
Yeah. Yeah.
00:28:54
Joe Withrow
Yeah.
00:29:01
Joe Withrow
Yeah. So there's a nuance with stocks are the stock of U.S. stock markets at all time highs when measured in dollars. If you were to measure stock prices in gold, it's not at all time highs.
00:29:07
Christian Yordanov
hmm
00:29:11
Joe Withrow
You know, so the real purchasing power of those stocks that people hold has actually is still down from what the all time highs. I forget what year it hit the all time high. when measured in gold.
00:29:22
Joe Withrow
So I look at it that way. I also look at the fact that there's been a very small handful of stocks that have basically been responsible for the massive majority of the overall index gains.
00:29:34
Joe Withrow
you know We talk about the S&P 500 or the the the NASDAQ.
00:29:34
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:29:37
Joe Withrow
It's only a handful of stocks that are driving those things higher. There are still certain stocks that really haven't done much since you know since the the markets correct yeah really kind of fell down. very handily in 2022 when interest rates started to rise.
00:29:52
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:29:53
Joe Withrow
So my my thing is, though, I don't look at it from the perspective of trying to time the market. I recognize that yeah any any individual investment you make, you need to understand the valuation.
00:30:04
Joe Withrow
yeah know If you're going to invest in stocks, you're you're taking partial ownership in a company. And so you need to understand, well, if I invest in this company today, what what value am I getting for your money? So you need to look at, well, what's the company's enterprise value relative to its yearly revenue? What's the enterprise value relative to its yearly earnings?
00:30:25
Joe Withrow
And then you also have to you know analyze the company from the perspective of, is it doing business that I think should be done and will exist into the future? So just to give you an example, I love the the property and casualty insurance industry.
00:30:38
Joe Withrow
Because these companies, these are some of the best companies in the world. Did you know one of the oldest companies in the US is a company called Philadelphia Contribuship, which was founded in 1752 by Benjamin Franklin. 1752. It predated the American Revolution.
00:30:52
Joe Withrow
good
00:30:52
Christian Yordanov
Whoa.
00:30:52
Joe Withrow
seventeen fifty two it predated the american revolution And it still operates today and it's still operating out of the same darn business that building it's been running out of since the 1800s.
00:31:03
Christian Yordanov
Insurance.
00:31:03
Joe Withrow
It's just, yeah, it's just an incredible business. And it's it's necessary for a functioning economy because every, you know, it's you know just like when you buy a house or a car, you need to have insurance on it just in case.
00:31:15
Joe Withrow
Well, you know, commercial buildings, the same thing, any commercial equipment, you know, any business, any business of sufficient size has to take out policies to ensure, you know, like workman's comp and all these other things.
00:31:23
Christian Yordanov
Mm-mm.
00:31:28
Joe Withrow
um It's just a fantastic business, but these guys invest their money. so well. They don't invest in stocks. They invest in a number of other assets. And i we model the Phoenician League after what the best insurance companies do. We just use better assets because they're not yet investing in gold and Bitcoin.
00:31:44
Joe Withrow
I think they will, but they're not doing that yet. But anyway, not to ramble too much. um So I don't worry as much about
00:31:49
Christian Yordanov
o
00:31:52
Joe Withrow
ah we Are we at all time highs or not? Or is there going to be a massive crash? Because if you structure your money, I would not have any more than eight to 10% of my money in the stock market at any given time.
00:32:04
Joe Withrow
And I don't see it as as necessary. I'd much rather be invested more allocated towards gold and Bitcoin as an anchor and then have these cash flow assets that are paying me extra income every month.
00:32:16
Joe Withrow
um Because at the end of the day, isn't that really all we're trying to do anyway is create the income we need. So maybe we don't have to work so hard one day. You know, the whole concept of retirement.
00:32:27
Joe Withrow
in the US certainly is silly to me because it's like they tell people, all right, you just got to build up your 401k and your IRA. And if you can get up to this number, then you can start selling off these things and you can just live on that money.
00:32:41
Joe Withrow
And of course, what happens when you sell off these things? Number one, you lose the thing. So you don't have the asset anymore. Your asset value comes down. Number two, you got to pay taxes. you know, and all you're trying to do is just have money to live on anyway.
00:32:50
Christian Yordanov
Yeah. Yeah.
00:32:53
Joe Withrow
And they're like, yeah, just work real hard for 30 years and do this.
00:32:53
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:32:55
Joe Withrow
And then you can sell your stuff. But it's like, if you make these cashflow investments, um yeah you just start, you know you can start creating extra streams of income today. Then we can implement some advanced tax strategies so that we're going to mini minimize our taxes on that income. In some cases, especially getting started, we're going to more than minimize our taxes on that income. We're going to create a situation where we can offset Other sources of income with taxes as well.
00:33:22
Joe Withrow
um So that's a roundabout way of saying, i do think the U.S. equity market is the valuations are stretched for a lot of companies. There's still some companies where the valuations are okay.
00:33:34
Joe Withrow
But this the fact is, it's like, you know, there's how much money is in the U.S. equity market? I mean, it's, is it a hundred trillion dollars? It's a massive amount of money. You know, it's in the institutions still believe in this stuff.
00:33:47
Joe Withrow
And they're still creating money out of nothing. You know, we're getting back into a cycle to where they're going to start lowering short term interest rates dramatically in the US. And there's a lot of money, institutional money and money market funds right now, collecting, they they were collecting four and a half percent, maybe 5% a couple years ago.
00:34:05
Joe Withrow
Now they're down to 4%. When they get down to 3%, what are they going to do? I mean, are they going to move back into the U.S. equity market, U.S. stocks? Maybe, because these guys don't think the way we think. They, you know, they think this money's real. They think that's what you do.
00:34:18
Joe Withrow
So I'm always very hesitant to say that I think things are going to crash because they they this this could can keep going for longer than we think it should or we think it could. But we don't know.
00:34:30
Joe Withrow
So my thing is, put yourself in a situation where it doesn't matter. And that's, then then you don't have to worry about it, unless you want to. if If it's fun for you, then by all means, you
00:34:38
Christian Yordanov
Yeah. got yeah Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, like, I think everybody instinctively, you want to have cash flowing assets, but like, just personally, when I look at, let's say you have a Airbnb or a rental property here in Portugal, i'm just looking at the the rental tax on that rental income.
00:34:41
Joe Withrow
Yeah. Yeah.
00:35:02
Joe Withrow
yeah
00:35:03
Christian Yordanov
It's like 30%. I'm thinking, all right, I'm going to have to obviously pay someone to clean and maintain the thing. going have to buy like a refrigerator and blah, every once in a while, ah insurance, et cetera.
00:35:14
Christian Yordanov
And like how much, if you make it, i don't know, like a thousand bucks a month and you're taxed 30%, how much can, and you might spend, i don't know, to two, three hundred thousand to acquire that property or get yourself into a mortgage, which, you know, is going to be worth even more.
00:35:14
Joe Withrow
Yeah.
00:35:32
Christian Yordanov
So I'm like, I've always like, it seems to me like that if you can dial in the the the that piece, a lot of doors can open for you, or at least a lot of peace of mind can start happening for you.
00:35:45
Joe Withrow
Yeah. Yeah. it's It's probably harder. You know, I think the real estate markets are probably easier in the U.S. I don't I'm not familiar with international systems, but in the U.S. in its infinite wisdom, the Internal Revenue Service, the IRS, says that you can depreciate three point six three percent of a property's value every year.
00:36:05
Joe Withrow
And so with the types of properties that we focus on, that depreciation, that's a phantom expense. They're saying the property has a useful life of 27 and a half years and you can write off that percentage every year. And you it's an expense on your tax return, but you didn't lose money.
00:36:21
Joe Withrow
it's It's just a phantom loss. So with that in the US, that wipes out for the properties we focus on.
00:36:24
Christian Yordanov
Phantom Loth.
00:36:26
Joe Withrow
It are completely offsets your rental income. So we don't have the tax problem on the income side. The challenge is the property tax. So there's, and certain, you know the certain markets are not good for taxes, you know, so we're investing primarily in very boring markets.
00:36:42
Joe Withrow
If you're familiar with the U S like the Midwest kind of this, you know, the Southern markets, like these places where not much happens and taxes are still not unreasonable. i won't say they're reasonable because we could make the case that property taxes, like, you know, perpetual serfdom, like either you own it or you don't, but if you own it, you shouldn't have to pay somebody else, but.
00:37:02
Joe Withrow
Anyway, that's aside from the point.
00:37:02
Christian Yordanov
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
00:37:03
Joe Withrow
there's There's markets where the numbers still work. My benchmark for that, for assessing ah investment properties, is can they generate 10% cash on cash returns? if If they can, then I think they could be a good investment as long as it's the right market, because that gives you a little bit of a cushion. Because as you mentioned, you do need to build a reserve to be able to cover repairs and maintenance and those things.
00:37:26
Joe Withrow
But the the benefit of real estate there is you you have the hard asset, you have the cash flow, and then you've got, if you finance it, you've got when the rent comes in, the rent is what's paying down.
00:37:37
Joe Withrow
the mortgage, so it builds equity in the property.
00:37:38
Christian Yordanov
Yeah. Yeah.
00:37:40
Joe Withrow
But I only invest looking at cash flow. I don't care. i mean, I do care, but I'm not trying to, I don't really concern myself, is the property going to go up or down in value?
00:37:51
Joe Withrow
Because as long as it makes cash flow, it really doesn't matter. It's helpful if it goes up, because then you might be able to sell it and buy two more properties instead.
00:37:58
Christian Yordanov
e
00:37:59
Joe Withrow
So it is nice when it goes up, but I mean, i mean the prices are stretched right now in the US, s but there are there are plenty homes and places
00:37:59
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:38:07
Joe Withrow
in these boring markets where you can still, you know, finance a townhouse that's, you know, you finance 80% of a townhouse at maybe $200,000 or maybe You know, they're, they're not outrageous.
Alternative Investments and Tax Strategies
00:38:20
Joe Withrow
They're still within reach for,
00:38:21
Joe Withrow
for regular people in certain markets.
00:38:23
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:38:24
Christian Yordanov
Just...
00:38:24
Joe Withrow
And so then you just have to have 20% of that.
00:38:26
Joe Withrow
So, you know, 30, 40, 50, 50 K to get started for real estate. That's investment real estate.
00:38:32
Christian Yordanov
but yeah
00:38:33
Joe Withrow
The other side of the coin, we could, we also invest in mortgage notes, which you can find those for trading for just several thousand dollars or not.
00:38:40
Christian Yordanov
just
00:38:40
Joe Withrow
The range is very big, but that's buying mortgages on people's property.
00:38:42
Christian Yordanov
yeah just just yeah Just give us an overview of what that...
00:38:45
Joe Withrow
Yeah.
00:38:47
Christian Yordanov
I'm not sure if that can be done in any country, but what what does that look like in the USA? by buying What the process of buying a note?
00:38:54
Joe Withrow
Yeah. And if any people in other countries, I'm not familiar with every dish jurisdiction, but it's very easy to set up a LLC in the U.S., if as long as you can set up an LLC in the US, you can invest in US real estate, you can invest in ah mortgage notes in the US.
00:39:11
Joe Withrow
And the US tax law is very favorable, as long as you understand it and implement the right strategies. The challenge is, and this is where we've run into situations, the challenge is in some countries, they don't recognize the US LLC as a pass through entity.
00:39:27
Joe Withrow
And so i that I can't speak to what the tax treatment is.
00:39:29
Christian Yordanov
Oh, it has to be a pass-through entity in in the the jurisdiction where the parent company of the US LLC is registered, right?
00:39:40
Joe Withrow
Maybe. I mean, it it gets a little complicated with cross-border taxes. I know it's not much of a problem in Canada. um I'm not sure about certain other countries. But in the U.S., we like to use the LLC because it's they're very cheap to set up and they're very flexible.
00:39:49
Christian Yordanov
Yeah, yeah.
00:39:55
Joe Withrow
And then we implement a whole – yeah, sorry.
00:39:55
Christian Yordanov
Delaware. Yeah, you you set up in Delaware?
00:39:58
Joe Withrow
Yeah.
00:39:59
Christian Yordanov
Is that the best place?
00:40:00
Joe Withrow
So it can be anywhere. i like Wyoming because Wyoming does not tell people who owns LLCs in Wyoming.
00:40:04
Christian Yordanov
Okay.
00:40:08
Joe Withrow
ah You can't. It's really, really hard to find out. and I'm pretty sure unless you have like a law enforcement came with a ah warrant or something, you know, so they they respect privacy and they're cheap. It's like a hundred they charge 100 bucks a year for that. So I like Wyoming.
00:40:21
Joe Withrow
But it's it just you know there's a handful of states.
00:40:22
Christian Yordanov
Cool, man.
00:40:24
Joe Withrow
Delaware, I know, is good. Texas is good. Alabama is good. um And you can you know, you can do this anywhere. It doesn't have to be in the same state in which your your investment is.
00:40:35
Joe Withrow
And in fact, when you buy a mortgage, it's not tied to the location anyway, because it's treated as a financial asset.
00:40:39
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:40:41
Christian Yordanov
And you said you can buy them for several thousand? Is that right?
00:40:44
Joe Withrow
There are some mortgages trading that low. Now they might only have a year or two or three left. So it's just a trade-off. And then there's some mortgages. Now I think the sweet spot with mortgages is anywhere between 10,000 and 60,000. And you can find mortgages that are going to yield anywhere from you know, right, right around 10% a year, some up to 12 or 15% a year and produce anywhere between maybe 400 and $800 a month per mortgage. Some of them I've seen some that are higher than that, but you know, it just depends on what's on the market today because you're buying the mortgage outright.
00:41:16
Joe Withrow
And so it's, you know only one person can buy it.
00:41:17
Christian Yordanov
But...
00:41:18
Joe Withrow
So it just depends on what's available.
00:41:19
Christian Yordanov
Gosh. I'm just curious. Like, why would they want to sell... Why would the bank want to sell it?
00:41:24
Joe Withrow
Oh, that's so,
00:41:25
Christian Yordanov
The mortgage.
00:41:26
Joe Withrow
Yeah, they they sell 80% of the mortgages they create. I'm sorry, not eighty that's not entirely accurate. They do sell the vast majority of the mortgages that they create, but the 80% of the mortgages, they securitize them.
00:41:38
Joe Withrow
So they package these things up into mortgage-backed securities and sell those. And that's the same stuff that blew up everything in 2008. They're not, you know, the same fraud isn't happening today. So that's not a concern.
00:41:49
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:41:50
Joe Withrow
But um the other 20%, though, of the mortgages that banks sell, and they want to sell most of them because if they hold the mortgage, that reduces their capital. They've got to hold higher capital reserves so they can do less loans.
00:42:03
Joe Withrow
So they're making their money more on that origination fee rather than the monthly interest and income.
00:42:09
Christian Yordanov
to
00:42:09
Joe Withrow
So they make the mortgage, then they try to sell it. So by 20%, they'll sell the individual mortgage as it exists. And a lot of times these things will find their way, like insurance companies buy mortgages, pension funds, hedge funds.
00:42:22
Joe Withrow
um There's numerous other institutions. but there's no accreditation requirement. And so a lot of times those, like and ah and like the hedge fund or the insurance company might buy, you know hundred million dollars worth of mortgages.
00:42:34
Joe Withrow
And then they'll go through and they'll just keep You know, we want to have so much, so many with five year left, so many with 10 years left, so many with 15 and so on. And then they'll sell the rest into secondary markets.
00:42:45
Joe Withrow
um And so that's how some of them can come to regular investors. The other angle is seller finance. In the U.S. seller financing is still fairly prominent where somebody might, and it happens a lot, people make this their business.
00:42:59
Joe Withrow
And like some of these towns or cities, there'll be somebody who goes around, they buy homes in foreclosure. for fairly cheap. They do a little bit of work on them. And then they will basically sell the home to somebody who will live in it with seller financing to where they create the documents, the same you know do just like a bank would, you create the but promissory note that you know gives the the lender, the person who's selling the house, security interest in that home. So if the they don't make the payment, then the home can be you know basically revert ownership back to the the person who is the lender.
00:43:34
Joe Withrow
and And so they'll they'll do this and then they can collect that monthly mortgage payment for a while, or they can sell that mortgage into a secondary market. And so there's it's kind of a secret world, but there are the mortgages are floating around out there at any given time.
00:43:44
Christian Yordanov
wow
00:43:49
Joe Withrow
there i can't put a number on it, but you know scores of these things, 100, 150, know number, the exact number but And so you might find property, like I'm looking at one little while back, there was this land up in Vermont, like in ski country Vermont.
00:44:03
Joe Withrow
And I think it was, the mortgage was like $7,000, something like that. But it was doing like $800 a month for the next four or five years, something like that. And it's, Vermont's a little bit iffy as to whether you should buy a mortgage there.
00:44:16
Joe Withrow
It's not the worst thing, but you know, it's just raw land near a ski resort.
00:44:20
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:44:20
Joe Withrow
And so somebody had bought it ah at one point and they were selling it.
00:44:20
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:44:24
Joe Withrow
So you can find notes on land, you can find notes on little homes all over the place. you know There's some larger notes that come up too, like notes on mortgages on commercial buildings. And those are the ones that you know might cost $100,000.
00:44:36
Joe Withrow
That's out of the range for most of us, but there's just lots.
00:44:38
Christian Yordanov
And Joe, so so when you buy the note, that that that means you own the properties, right? that's It's your thing.
00:44:45
Joe Withrow
No. So, so whoever owns the property or owns the property.
00:44:46
Christian Yordanov
No.
00:44:50
Christian Yordanov
Okay.
00:44:50
Joe Withrow
So all you're doing is buying the mortgage. So whoever owned that property financed it and they're paying a monthly mortgage payment and that mortgage payment most of the time, unless it's seller financing, it's a professional loan servicing company that handles it.
00:45:05
Joe Withrow
And so they're just making their payment online or sending it in a check, whatever they're doing. And all you're doing is buying the mortgage. And you can, if it's already being professionally serviced, you just keep the servicer as it is.
00:45:17
Joe Withrow
The homeowner has no idea that you exist. And all that happens is the servicer does their thing. you know They make the send out the monthly statements, collect the mortgage payment every month. They have phone phone numbers for customer homeowners to call, all those things.
00:45:33
Joe Withrow
and they just they And you pay them a small fee. And in fact, they just withhold a small fee from the mortgage and they send you the rest. And so, yeah, you're just buying the mortgage.
00:45:40
Christian Yordanov
Amazing.
00:45:41
Joe Withrow
So when somebody makes their mortgage payment, it comes to you. The principal and interest part, you know, the taxes insurance goes to, you know, where they go. But principal and interest, that comes to you. So it's lower risk compared to owning a rental property as long as you focus on properties where the home or the property is worth considerably more than the mortgage value.
00:46:03
Joe Withrow
Because if that's the case, they're not gonna default on it. They're not gonna let it go. If they had to, they'd just sell it and pay you off and put money in their own pocket.
00:46:10
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:46:10
Joe Withrow
Or if the worst should happen, like if they were to pass away, you know and then you have to take over the property and foreclosure, well, you can sell it and put money in your pocket too. So you can mitigate your risk by focusing on mortgages where the home or the property's worth a lot more.
00:46:25
Joe Withrow
Then you just get the payment that people make.
00:46:27
Christian Yordanov
This is absolutely genius, but I'm just curious. So let's let's say you get a mortgage that has thats five five years left on it and God forbid the person passes away.
00:46:34
Joe Withrow
Yeah. Yeah.
00:46:38
Christian Yordanov
You don't own, like you what recourse do you have to to to make your money back?
00:46:38
Joe Withrow
yeah
00:46:44
Joe Withrow
yeah So you you own a security interest in the home. The way that's treated depends on the type of document. there's i will I won't muddy the water, but it depends on how it's written in the notes.
00:46:55
Joe Withrow
And it depends on the state that you're in. In some cases, the the state itself would basically sell that property in foreclosure and then pay you off. And then other cases, depending on how it's structured, you would take ownership of that property through through the legal process.
00:47:12
Joe Withrow
um And then you could decide, well, do I want to sell it or do I want to do something else with it? It just kind of depends on how the the original note is structured. But there's a process in which if the the person defaults on the mortgage and number one, if somebody defaults and they they're not dead, you the first the first step isn't foreclosure.
00:47:19
Christian Yordanov
Yeah. Yeah.
00:47:29
Joe Withrow
The first step is you the loan servicer calls them and they said find out what's going on.
00:47:29
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:47:33
Joe Withrow
Hey, maybe they got him into an accident. They've been in the hospital for ah you know three weeks or something or whatever, you can do a modification just like I was doing at the banks. This is why I'm kind of a natural fit. Like I, I learned this from the banking side, except that side was very underhanded, but as an individual owner of the mortgage, you can do a modification however you want.
00:47:47
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:47:51
Joe Withrow
You know, if somebody just fell behind because they lost their job or had an emergency, you could say, Hey, okay, we you need three months to catch up. Fine. You know, we'll work up a modification document where you don't have to make another mortgage payment until three months from now.
00:48:04
Joe Withrow
So use that time to catch up, do what you have to do. And then we'll, you know, it just kicks that mortgage term back out three months. So you'll be getting payments, you know, three months after you originally planned to.
00:48:12
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:48:13
Joe Withrow
um Or if, you know, if they need a lower payment, you could potentially look at stretching the term back out. Maybe you stretch it out another two or three years or whatever it is to get their payment down. It's up to you.
00:48:24
Joe Withrow
It's whatever, if you can work out something that works for both of you. But if if they can't work something out or if somebody passes away, then you have the foreclosure process and it depends on the state, but it's a very specific process and you would have the loan servicer and then there'd be an attorney or or perhaps an escrow agent, depending that would kind of help you through that process.
00:48:35
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:48:46
Christian Yordanov
And I'm guessing you advise your clients on all of this, like on your members. If they're going through something, you can kind of, yeah.
00:48:52
Joe Withrow
Yeah, we've,
00:48:53
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:48:54
Joe Withrow
Absolutely. And our core program, the core training program, this is all spelled out. And then we also, yeah I've got, I'm an open line of communication from my experience. And I learned this from a guy who's been doing more, buying mortgage notes for like 20 years.
00:49:07
Joe Withrow
So I learned it from a guy who's, who's got more experience from me. He's a member of the Phoenician League too. And he offers to do ah consultations with people as well, free consultations, you know, so I'm happy to chat with people. We've, I mean, number one, we've got a lot of training, so you're going to learn these things, you know, as you go through the program, but then you can talk to me about it or members.
00:49:24
Christian Yordanov
Awesome. Yeah.
00:49:27
Joe Withrow
I'm happy to kind connect them with this gentleman, whose name's Jerry, and he'll talk too.
00:49:30
Christian Yordanov
also
00:49:30
Joe Withrow
And a lot of times Jerry's a good resource because you might find something, you know, there's a due diligence process. We go through, we don't buy anything until we've looked at all the documents. And with AI now it's easy because you can really quickly parse it out, but we do our due diligence.
00:49:42
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:49:44
Joe Withrow
But if we see something unique, that, you know, maybe I haven't seen a lot of times, Jerry's a great resource. And the flip side of the coin is true too, because I've had a case where there was a member who actually inherited a couple of mortgage notes and he had no idea what they were, but he had these things. And it was because his uncle or his dad, somebody did what we talked about earlier, where they bought some property locally and they did seller financing.
00:50:09
Joe Withrow
So he had the note that said they had the right to the the the payment. and he's like, Hey, what do i do with these? And like, you know what Talk with Jerry. And I think Jerry worked through his network, you know, having done this 20 years, and I think helped the guy sell those those notes because he was like, don't want to I don't want these things, man.
00:50:22
Christian Yordanov
Sweet.
00:50:25
Joe Withrow
I'll sell them and take the money. So anyway, yeah, and people are going to be that's my goal with the Phoenician leagues.
00:50:27
Christian Yordanov
Yeah, yeah. That's awesome.
00:50:31
Joe Withrow
Everybody going through this, people are going to become very, very savvy with, you know, every aspect of the investment arena, at least the investment arena that I'm familiar with and and believe in.
00:50:43
Christian Yordanov
Yeah, and it looks like just at a cursory glance, it looks you need less capital than like buying property and probably there's probably less risk involved here, right?
00:50:53
Joe Withrow
Yeah, as long as you do it right, I do see it as less risky. And you can find notes trading at much, much lower prices. You know, it it depends. know, it's still I haven't seen any trading at less than $7,000.
00:51:04
Joe Withrow
um But you can, you know, it's not like if I if you say, hey, I'm going to buy mortgages, somebody's like, man, my mortgage, $235,000, this guy must be loaded. It's not like that. It's within range.
00:51:13
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:51:13
Joe Withrow
You don't need as much in some cases as um now. There are plenty of notes that are selling for higher than what it would cost to acquire a property.
00:51:21
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:51:22
Joe Withrow
But for the ones that we focus on, that's not the case.
00:51:26
Christian Yordanov
That's so cool, man. um Man, I never even knew such a thing exists.
00:51:29
Joe Withrow
And then i'll I'll just add one thing to that because I know it's, I talk about it and it's, I understand it's kind of a new concept for for a lot of people. There's, we implement tax strategies too, to where, especially when you're just getting started and you don't have a lot of the passive income, we're goingnna we're going to try really hard to create a passive loss.
00:51:47
Joe Withrow
You can probably, just using the us tax code as it's written. And this is funny because people think that the tax code is about
00:51:51
Christian Yordanov
Mm-hmm.
00:51:54
Joe Withrow
collecting revenue for the government. And it's not. ninety five So of the U.S. tax code is like pages long, give or take ninety i'm sorry five percent of it is about what taxes people owe And when they owe and all those things.
00:52:12
Joe Withrow
95% of the U.S. tax code is about how to not pay the taxes that that first 5% you owe. And so it's just this mangled, massive, complex mess. And it's so corrupt because they I mean, they create this for the insiders. So they know what it says.
00:52:27
Joe Withrow
But it it is fair in the sense that we can do it, too. We just got to learn what it says. And so that's what we do. Now, I don't like the U.S. tax code. I don't believe in the income tax.
00:52:36
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:52:37
Joe Withrow
And 1913 was one of the worst years in U.S. history, which created the income tax and the Federal Reserve System and the direct election of senators, too, which is but something that created all kinds of other problems.
00:52:47
Christian Yordanov
wait there was no in there was no income tax before 1913 right yeah
00:52:47
Joe Withrow
But anyway.
00:52:52
Joe Withrow
That's right. No income tax in the U.S. s before 1913. And no Federal Reserve either. No central bank money back fully backed by gold.
00:52:58
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:53:00
Joe Withrow
And guess what happened? prices did not go up. They tended to go down. And so if you look at the numbers, like people who, um you know, if you wanted to buy a home, it was so easy to live a middle-class life in this country because home prices were like twice as much as the average annual salary or median annual salary.
00:53:18
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:53:19
Joe Withrow
Not exactly. i don't know about 1913, but I've run these numbers back to 1940. And if you think about that, The median median salary in U.S. today is like $70,000 or $80,000 a year. if If properties, the home values were proportionate, the median home value in the U.S. would be $160,000.
00:53:36
Joe Withrow
So it's easier for that person earning the median salary to buy his home, get started, have a family, all that. Well, median home values in the US today are like $430,000.
00:53:41
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:53:45
Joe Withrow
It is very hard for someone. i Me, when I was getting started, when I was doing that clerk work in the corporate banking world, I was making enough. I said had to save, but um I was able to come up with enough money to buy my own house.
00:53:56
Joe Withrow
I would never be able to do that today. Never. like they ah The system has been so financialized and distorted. So anyway, yeah, they've I mean, they've wrecked this country. But in 1913, no, like we didn't have inflation.
00:54:05
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:54:08
Christian Yordanov
Crazy.
00:54:08
Joe Withrow
We had sound money, no income tax.
00:54:11
Christian Yordanov
So you were talking just before I cut you off, you were talking about using the tax code to create, was it passive losses?
00:54:20
Joe Withrow
Yeah, so we're going to implement strategies to where legitimately we're going to shift... it personal expenses we already have to the business by the tax code. So I'll just give you an example of some things that are that are fairly common that most people can probably use.
00:54:35
Joe Withrow
And I don't advocate doing anything other than right by the letter. you know We're not stretching anything.
00:54:39
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:54:41
Joe Withrow
We're not being like, if this is here's what the tax code says. And if you're gonna claim this deduction, here's what you need to have. You need to have certain documentation. you need Here's what you need to be doing. So this is all legitimate.
00:54:52
Joe Withrow
It holds up. It would hold up if if somebody were audited. um There's a much lower chance of audit now because 25% of the IRS was just axed. But ah not not just now, but earlier this year.
00:55:01
Christian Yordanov
Just now? Wow.
00:55:05
Joe Withrow
um and When the the Trump people came in and basically put out, I guess they offered to, how'd they put it?
00:55:09
Christian Yordanov
wow
00:55:11
Joe Withrow
They offered to pay people out if people would just resign. They pay them out for six months or something. So like 25% of the IRS took them up on that. So, um and the point was to reduce the, the,
00:55:23
Joe Withrow
you know, employee count of the u S government.
00:55:24
Christian Yordanov
Yeah, yeah.
00:55:25
Joe Withrow
Now they were supposed to follow that up with cutting a trillion dollars in spending too. They didn't do that. I'm disappointed. They didn't do that. Cause I, when I saw them do the head count reduction, like, huh, maybe they're serious. Well, they didn't do that, but anyway.
00:55:37
Joe Withrow
um So common tax strategies, for example, um any personal expense you have already, for example, the Phoenician league memberships one, if anybody has any investment,
00:55:51
Joe Withrow
subscriptions that they have or financial period publications that they subscribe to or any business thing or anything related to self-improvement, that can be moved to a business expense.
00:56:03
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:56:03
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
00:56:03
Joe Withrow
Because as the owner of that business, you need to be constantly improving yourself and growing and learning
00:56:08
Joe Withrow
to run your business better.
00:56:09
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:56:09
Joe Withrow
So personal expenses like that, um if you're gonna run ah business out of your LLC, out of your home office, and most likely you are, well now you can start deducting home office expenses, which includes a portion of your ah cable and internet expense, your utility bills, if do any home improvement,
00:56:28
Joe Withrow
you do any um any any home improvement that also benefits the home office. So for example, we put in a whole home generator and a 500 gallon propane tank here to to power the house if the power goes out.
00:56:41
Christian Yordanov
Nice. Oh yeah.
00:56:43
Joe Withrow
um Well, that impacts the home office too. That home office can still run if the power goes out. So I was able to deduct a percentage of that. you know If you did other any other home improvement that benefits the home office, Those become business expenses.
00:56:55
Joe Withrow
um You set up an accountables plan and all of a sudden you can start to ah reimburse for health related wellness related expenses. For example, my my consultation with you, Christian, um that that was a business expense for me because the rule is if a business is going to it can reimburse for anything it wants.
00:57:09
Christian Yordanov
oh yeah
00:57:14
Joe Withrow
but it must reimburse for everybody.
00:57:15
Christian Yordanov
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:57:16
Joe Withrow
if it's So it has to have a clear policy. So any larger company is not gonna reimburse for health, wellness related things, but my company is just me and my wife.
00:57:24
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:57:24
Joe Withrow
And it says, yeah, we're gonna reimburse 100% for all health and wellness related things. And that is by the book because we need to be, you know is it ordinary and is it necessary? Well, we need to be healthy to run the business.
00:57:36
Joe Withrow
And so it is, it's the legitimate business expense Because we have a policy that lays lays out exactly what the business reimburses for.
00:57:44
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:57:44
Joe Withrow
um And so that can apply to all kinds of other things in the health and wellness related field. And so you just start thinking right there, there's probably all kinds of things that you're already paying for out of pocket that you can move to a business expense.
00:57:49
Christian Yordanov
Oh yeah. Yeah.
00:57:56
Joe Withrow
Now, all of a sudden, you've got cash flow coming in from that business. yeah you buy, even if you buy one little mortgage note, and in fact, you can do this before you buy anything. if If you set up a company and it's it's just ah exploring,
00:58:08
Joe Withrow
mortgage notes. You can do this right away. But you think about all those expenses you have, and then we look at, can we move them ah over here to the business?
00:58:10
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:58:15
Joe Withrow
Now in the US, we can take it a step farther to this. I don't know that this works for people who are outside the US, but one of those things in that 70,000 pages buried somewhere in that 70,000 pages of the tax code, it says that individuals can rent out their home for 14 days a year as for any purpose they want, and that income will not be taxable to them personally.
00:58:38
Joe Withrow
Why? Why is that? Well, it turns out there's this ah golf course and in down in Augusta, South Carolina. Like, it's a big event. I'm not a golf guy. But every, I think, April, there's the Augusta or the Masters term Tournament. It's like the glow the like Super Bowl for golf.
00:58:53
Joe Withrow
Well, the people who own their houses down there, I think some wealthy, like... yeah you know lawyers or whoever lobbied the government because this is years ago. They said, i'm what you know, they they figured they could rent their house out and make a killing every every year for the Augusta tournament. So they got this thing passed.
00:59:09
Joe Withrow
But we can do the same thing. So you rent, you have the your LLC, rent meeting space from you personally, if you own your home, and you can charge a market rate. So it's the equivalent of if they went to the resort and wanted to rent on a resume ah room at the resort, what would that cost?
00:59:24
Joe Withrow
Well, you can charge that.
00:59:25
Christian Yordanov
Yeah. he's
00:59:26
Joe Withrow
So you do that 14 times a year, and that is a phantom, or it creates a business expense, and the business then pays you that money, but it's tax-free to you. So you can just start to chalk up these these losses that aren't really losses, and then that offsets your income.
00:59:40
Christian Yordanov
yeah
00:59:43
Joe Withrow
And in the first stage, this where I was going with it after I started rambling, so I apologize. but
00:59:47
Christian Yordanov
he's good to
00:59:47
Joe Withrow
In the first years, when you don't have a lot of extra income, you can create these large passive losses and you can offset ah income from a job or for a business or you know other income you have, and you can create much larger tax
Libertarian Beliefs and Societal Change
01:00:00
Joe Withrow
refunds. And again, this is US centric.
01:00:02
Joe Withrow
yeah Other countries, I can't speak as well to the tax situation, but you create massive tax refunds here in the US, then take that refund and what do?
01:00:02
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
01:00:09
Joe Withrow
you do We'll go buy another one. Go buy another one. And now just that's how you can kind of build this thing up. And so it's just using the system almost against itself, you know, because I do not I do not like what they're doing.
01:00:21
Joe Withrow
But I, you know, and I don't like the tax code.
01:00:21
Christian Yordanov
yeah
01:00:23
Joe Withrow
But if I can, I don't like it all. But I'm going to use it to make sure they have to, you know, not get as much money, my my money as possible.
01:00:29
Christian Yordanov
Of course, of course.
01:00:31
Joe Withrow
Ideally, send me money every year.
01:00:32
Christian Yordanov
I mean, exactly. exactly but The less they get, the less funds they have for, you know, certain interventions.
01:00:41
Joe Withrow
Yeah, for all the crap they're doing.
01:00:43
Christian Yordanov
And yeah, just more admin and just making people's lives harder and, you know, wasting, wasting.
01:00:43
Joe Withrow
Yeah.
01:00:48
Joe Withrow
that's it. The tax advisor that I learned this from, and he's our guy in the Phoenician League, and we've got a lot of stuff that he did in the Phoenician League that he's you know sharing his stuff. He's got his own practice, right? He's got a business card. You know what it says?
01:01:01
Joe Withrow
says defund the government.
01:01:02
Christian Yordanov
I love it, man.
01:01:03
Joe Withrow
that's That's his business card. And so and he's like, yeah, you know I want to make sure I'm working with people who are yeah know on the same, kind of on the same philosophic and and ethical level. So it's like, If you don't want to defund the government yet, go find another tax guy. you know I'm not for you.
01:01:18
Christian Yordanov
Yeah, that's my kind of guy. be like, yo, you're hired.
01:01:20
Joe Withrow
like like
01:01:20
Christian Yordanov
You're hired. Where do I sign, bro? But yeah, that that's it, man. ah you You sound obviously like talking about Austrian economics. So ah you would you consider yourself more a libertarian or an anarchist? Where do you see yourself more as...
01:01:34
Joe Withrow
Yeah. So I think there's, you know, there's, there's a nuance with there. And I've, I've thought about this a lot. You had, you asked me this question 10 years ago, you know, I'd be, oh man, I'm an cap baby. one hundred percent 100% philosophically, morally, and ethically.
01:01:47
Joe Withrow
I subscribe to the end cap principles, but I recognize an end cap. That means anarcho-capitalist. So it's,
01:01:51
Christian Yordanov
Yeah. Yeah.
01:01:51
Joe Withrow
You know, we don't need a government to have an orderly, civilized society. You know, we believe in the the code of law. We believe in contract law. We believe in property rights. We believe in all these things. And we don't need, if if it were instituted correctly, we wouldn't need a government to enforce these things. You know government's just a monopoly on violence.
01:02:07
Christian Yordanov
yeah
01:02:08
Joe Withrow
Philosophically, 100%. However, practically, I recognize that in the world we live in today, we're not going to go from where we are today to that.
01:02:16
Christian Yordanov
yeah
01:02:16
Joe Withrow
And so I very much, I think, and so I don't automatically, what's right and this is part of my growth. um You know, the old saying, don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
01:02:25
Christian Yordanov
Yes.
01:02:28
Joe Withrow
You know, when I look at things, development, especially in the macroeconomic space, you know, I've kind of developed this thing, well, don't let better be the enemy of ideals.
01:02:28
Christian Yordanov
yes
01:02:37
Joe Withrow
And so I don't harp as much when I see things happening and we can look at, I look at it, was this going in a better direction than we were going? Because in 2020, you know, the World Economic Forum announced the Great Reset and they laid out, I read their paper, they laid out their academic paper and they had all these pillars.
01:02:51
Christian Yordanov
a
01:02:54
Joe Withrow
And it was basically the over, you know, it was all about overturning the whatever's left of the capitalist system um and basically subsuming the U.S. into the globalist structure and, you know, making the central banks tied to the globalist institutions, all the the total arbiter of money and credit.
01:03:11
Joe Withrow
And what I think a lot of people miss, like there was a massive backlash against the central bank digital currency. CBDC push from people who are concerned about privacy and individual liberty. And that's great. You know, I 100% support that.
01:03:24
Joe Withrow
What people missed was that CBDC, I don't think that was ah an attack on individuals. That was an attack at the commercial banking system. Because if you think about it, what, you know, if you take the pot, if you take money and say, okay, everybody's going have a CBDC now at the central bank, not a bank account.
01:03:40
Joe Withrow
What's left of the commercial banks. And here's the big thing with that, right? It's, it's not just that they could program the money and say, well, you've got seven days to spend this money. Or if you say something bad about Joe's talking about the fund, the government again.
01:03:52
Joe Withrow
So we're going to tax him 50%, you know, there's an element that could be created, but I think the ultimate goal there was to control, to remove
01:03:53
Christian Yordanov
Yeah. Yeah.
01:04:01
Joe Withrow
the consequences for financing unsustainable, unproductive projects. Because their whole thing was going carbon zero and let's get rid of yeah oil and get rid of you know all the traditional energy sources and all these things.
01:04:13
Joe Withrow
The banks can't do that. The banks are not going to finance. like the Bank of America is a lackey for the globalists. They went along with it and they're good luck to Bank of America. I think they're to have some tough years ahead.
01:04:21
Christian Yordanov
yeah
01:04:23
Joe Withrow
But you know JP, you notice around 2021, 2022, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan, changed his tune. He started talking about, no, we need to finance traditional energy, all these things.
01:04:34
Joe Withrow
And so as long as there's competition within the commercial banking space, they can choose what they finance. And if a bank finances, you know, all windmills and solar powers and they go bankrupt, well, the bank's going to go down too.
01:04:46
Joe Withrow
And all these other banks who didn't make those bad decisions, they're still there. So I think that was the big thing with the CBDC push. They wanted to get rid of that competition and financing. So now well what what happens if they finance bad stuff? Well, the There's no competition. That's the way the end of the road.
01:05:02
Joe Withrow
um So we've been moving in better directions from that recently.
01:05:06
Christian Yordanov
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
01:05:07
Joe Withrow
Not the ideal direction that I want to be in but better. And so that's my thing is I recognize that there is, you know, if we want to get into a a world that is more principled,
01:05:19
Joe Withrow
you follows the morality. And we talk about the end cap morality. It's just a golden rule. That's all it is. You know, treat people the way you want to be treated.
01:05:24
Christian Yordanov
yeah
01:05:25
Christian Yordanov
yeah
01:05:25
Joe Withrow
um We there's going to be, and we're going to have to have a process to get there.
01:05:30
Joe Withrow
And rather than railing against everything, if it's not perfect, I'm willing to look at it and say, is this a better direction we're moving in? And if it is, I'm not going to get worked up about it. I'm just going to keep my
Financial Independence and Health
01:05:40
Joe Withrow
head down where I am trying to, you know, be the change you want to see in the world, try to create in our thing with the Phoenician league.
01:05:45
Joe Withrow
If we can help people become financially secure,
01:05:47
Christian Yordanov
Yeah. Yeah.
01:05:48
Joe Withrow
And if we can help people build extra income and become financially independent, well, those people will then have the ability to wherever they are in their community, they can impact things. You they'll have more free up their time, free up their energy, give them more resources to impact whatever it is they see.
01:05:58
Christian Yordanov
yeah
01:06:05
Joe Withrow
And I think that's how we change the world is from the ground up, you know. And so we just create, let's create the world we want.
01:06:08
Christian Yordanov
yeah
01:06:11
Joe Withrow
And, you know, the you know, the political people, like, you know, they they're just going to gradually fall in relevance if we do that, just like the mainstream news in the U.S. is today. Nobody watches the news anymore.
01:06:21
Joe Withrow
well I mean, they might get 30,000 people for the nightly news.
01:06:22
Christian Yordanov
yeah
01:06:25
Joe Withrow
And Joe Rogan gets, what, 20 million, you know, on a podcast? It's like, you know, I mean, it's, there they're, they're becoming irrelevant.
01:06:32
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
01:06:32
Joe Withrow
And I think they realize that and they're getting desperate. But that's it, man.
01:06:36
Christian Yordanov
I like ah like your mission.
01:06:37
Joe Withrow
So,
01:06:38
Christian Yordanov
You're a man on a mission, kind of like me, except you know it's it's really you know how the they talk about the three basic needs. like If you're in business, you're either helping people improve their health, you know financial stuff, improve their finances, or something with relationships.
01:06:48
Joe Withrow
Yeah. Yeah.
01:06:56
Christian Yordanov
And um so I think when you think about it, right imagine you have a ah person.
01:06:56
Joe Withrow
Yeah.
01:07:01
Christian Yordanov
It could be a man or a woman. and they're financially free, right? You don't have to slave ah at a job. They're healthy, so they're not at you know at the mercy of you know certain companies peddling chemicals that suppress symptoms.
01:07:12
Joe Withrow
yeah yeah
01:07:17
Joe Withrow
Absolutely.
01:07:17
Christian Yordanov
And you know they're married or whatever. They're they're happy with their their wife. They have kids and stuff. like How difficult would it be to control that person? you know
01:07:27
Joe Withrow
Very, very.
01:07:28
Christian Yordanov
That's the thing.
01:07:29
Joe Withrow
That's it.
01:07:29
Christian Yordanov
That's what we need.
01:07:30
Joe Withrow
make Let's make ourselves ungovernable. You know, that's the thing.
01:07:32
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
01:07:33
Joe Withrow
And I say that not no not not in the the, you know, what not in the sense of what they're trying to push on the kids, you know, left-wing kids. I don't mean ungovernable. And that's, I mean, like, we don't need it. Like, we're good.
01:07:45
Joe Withrow
We'll take care of ourself here and we're going to live according to our own principles here.
01:07:46
Christian Yordanov
Yeah. Yeah.
01:07:49
Joe Withrow
You know, we're not, so you know, you're not dependent on this.
01:07:49
Christian Yordanov
yeah
01:07:52
Joe Withrow
And that's, that's the thing. you know, mean, we saw the big thing was the the vaccine requirements, you know, vaccine mandates couple years ago where some, you know, I know one of my good friends called me and he 100% against him. And he's like, man, I, you know, this is like railing against everything, but it came and he waited, like he was hoping like that the mandates would lift, but it came down to like his company was one of these big companies that was supporting some of the work stuff.
01:08:17
Joe Withrow
And he, like, he wasn't doing that and his unit wasn't doing that either. it's just a massive company. And they called me up and he's like, man, think have to take one. Cause I was like, I don't have any, like, I got two, two little kids.
01:08:29
Joe Withrow
My wife is, you know, we homeschool. My wife stays at home. Like she, she can't make any, you know, right. She can't make much money. You know, she doesn't have, So he's like, I'm going to have bite the bullet. And I think he ended up getting, was it the Johnson and Johnson one that was wasn't mRNA or something like that?
01:08:45
Joe Withrow
was one he researched that he told me was was supposed to be maybe less bad than the others.
01:08:46
Christian Yordanov
Possibly, yeah.
01:08:50
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
01:08:51
Joe Withrow
But you think about that. If somebody, know, he only made that decision because- they I mean, they forced it upon him And they said, basically, we are going to destroy your livelihood and make you have to make some really tough decisions for your family, for your two little kids, if you don't do what we're telling you you have to do.
01:09:08
Joe Withrow
So let's create a world where they can't even do that.
01:09:08
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
01:09:10
Joe Withrow
you know that's That's the thing.
01:09:12
Christian Yordanov
That's it, brother.
01:09:12
Joe Withrow
And health is – like, you look at the World Economic Forum. Who are the big guys pushing all this stuff? It's it's the big big pharma people. Like, that guy, had um head of Pfizer, is an absolute creep, man.
01:09:19
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
01:09:23
Joe Withrow
That guy is an absolute creep.
01:09:23
Christian Yordanov
Oh, yeah.
01:09:24
Joe Withrow
i mean these are some of the most sinister people in the world. Let's get people healthy. Let's get like, you don't need their stuff. You know, let's let's that just defund that whole system. It all goes hand in hand.
01:09:34
Christian Yordanov
Yeah, man.
01:09:36
Joe Withrow
And so you're right, man.
01:09:36
Christian Yordanov
Yes.
01:09:37
Joe Withrow
that's but we're We're on the same, butre we're rolling this boat in the same direction on that. that's
01:09:43
Christian Yordanov
Exactly, brother.
01:09:43
Joe Withrow
And we're healthy. So we're going to keep on rolling rolling for for a while, for a long time.
01:09:46
Christian Yordanov
That's it, man. Until the day we die.
01:09:47
Joe Withrow
Thank you.
01:09:47
Christian Yordanov
That's it. Well, as we wrap up, Joe, any other any other stuff you want to discuss? um Anything on your mind, bro?
01:09:56
Joe Withrow
Man, I just really want to thank you so much for for the work you're doing. As I mentioned before, it's it's had a really big impact on me. And I wasn't even in a tough spot before, but you helped me clear up some things and helped me get to a better spot.
01:10:08
Joe Withrow
So I know that the people who come to you, I know that therere yeah I really can yeah know really speak your speak your praises, man.
01:10:08
Christian Yordanov
it.
01:10:16
Joe Withrow
So I'm really thankful for what you're doing.
01:10:17
Christian Yordanov
Appreciate that.
01:10:18
Christian Yordanov
Thank you so much.
01:10:18
Joe Withrow
um Thanks for having me here today.
01:10:20
Joe Withrow
And if if anything that we talked about, if anybody wants to learn more, PhoenicianLeague.com is where you can can get on our our mailing list, PhoenicianLeague.com slash session. If you want to sign up for the strategy session we'll do in a couple of weeks, it's a free free online thing we'll do over Zoom.
01:10:36
Joe Withrow
and um And then I'm available ah if if anybody has you know anybody want has any questions with any of this um at JayWithrow at PhoenicianLeague.com. I'm happy. Happy to chat. Because what, you know, same as you, man, this is this is a labor of love for me.
01:10:49
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
01:10:49
Joe Withrow
and And so I'm just happy happy to to have the opportunity to to do this work.
01:10:53
Joe Withrow
So really appreciate it.
01:10:54
Christian Yordanov
Yeah, man. Yeah, Joe, thank you so much. Really appreciate you, brother. And I'm looking forward to, you know, ah so just, you know, um looking forward to a wonderful friendship together in the future, brother.
01:11:04
Joe Withrow
Yeah, man, we we got a great thing going.
01:11:05
Christian Yordanov
Thank you so much.
01:11:06
Joe Withrow
I'm so so glad that I met you, man. We're going
Joe's Books and Closing Remarks
01:11:09
Christian Yordanov
Yeah. That's it. exactly That's how it happens, man. I used to have all these sort of grand visions, like when I was writing my first book.
01:11:09
Joe Withrow
to keep this going and we're to change the world one one person at a time.
01:11:20
Joe Withrow
Me too, yeah. Yeah.
01:11:21
Christian Yordanov
and By the way, folks, ah Joe, you didn't mention you have books. i Actually, one of my clients ah had had seen that you're going to have me in your group. So during one of our client group calls,
01:11:33
Christian Yordanov
He's like, oh, you're going to be in Joe's s thing. That's awesome. Did you know he writes books? Because my that client is like a big, he loves books, read reads, writes, et cetera.
01:11:40
Joe Withrow
Yeah.
01:11:41
Christian Yordanov
So we were like looking at your books on Amazon during our call on the shared screen. So do you want actually ah tell folks about your books? um I know you have a few actually.
01:11:49
Joe Withrow
yeah Yeah, I do. I don't think the the only one that's still in print, I think, is the latest one. It's called Beyond the Nest Egg, How to be Financially Independent Outside of a Broken System.
01:11:56
Christian Yordanov
Mm-hmm.
01:11:58
Joe Withrow
um
01:11:59
Christian Yordanov
Mm-hmm.
01:11:59
Joe Withrow
we've We've got a fair amount of macroeconomic commentary in there. And that's a little bit dated today because the book was published, I think, in I think and maybe around this time in 2023. And I was writing it earlier in 2023.
01:12:09
Christian Yordanov
Okay. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
01:12:12
Joe Withrow
Not that it's out, not that it's wrong or anything. It's just a little bit dated.
01:12:14
Christian Yordanov
yeah
01:12:15
Joe Withrow
lot's happened since then. ah But the the second half of the book is all about the kind of the investment ah philosophy. so that's beyond the nest egg. And it's funny, i you know i i hired a um an editor um for the book. And I always, always wonder, cause I, you know, I don't censor, I don't self-censor. So I'm talking about the macro as I see it.
01:12:33
Joe Withrow
And I could tell it probably a little uneasy because it was not, you know, somebody to just well edit any type of book just for, not for content, but like for grammatical errors, catch typos, those things. So, so we put this on somebody unsuspectingly, but anyway, that's beyond the nest egg.
01:12:48
Joe Withrow
Written a couple other books before that. The Individual is Rising and Musings of the way look Wayward Philosopher. But there was those were like 10 years ago or more. And I don't think they're in print anymore.
01:12:59
Joe Withrow
Although apparently I've seen with Amazon. So when it goes out of print, people then apparently, there are people who will come in and like sell the if they bought the book.
01:13:05
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
01:13:06
Joe Withrow
But I noticed that somebody was trying to sell, somebody was reselling one of my books for like 500 bucks or something because it was out of print. I'm like, huh, wonder if anybody bought it.
01:13:12
Christian Yordanov
That's... ah
01:13:14
Joe Withrow
Yeah, I'm looking for sure to be sold.
01:13:14
Christian Yordanov
that That could be like one of those sort of, ah you know, strategies to earn passive income.
01:13:20
Joe Withrow
It could.
01:13:20
Christian Yordanov
Just buy a bunch of books, stock up the house and then just float them back the price, 10x the price, whatever.
01:13:24
Joe Withrow
Yeah.
01:13:26
Christian Yordanov
Yeah.
01:13:27
Joe Withrow
Yeah, I don't know how you track when something goes out ah at of print, but if you could figure that out, that's but pretty neat.
01:13:34
Christian Yordanov
Well, Joe, thank you so much. um I'm sure we'll have you in the future to talk more macro. Love your ideas, love your analysis. And thank you so much for sharing some of these insights.
01:13:45
Christian Yordanov
I'm sure some listeners might be or oh also like me, feeling a little bit of FOMO, wanting to get into your group.
01:13:45
Joe Withrow
Yeah.
01:13:51
Christian Yordanov
So again, thank you so much for the work you do, brother.
01:13:55
Joe Withrow
Oh, man. Thank you. Really appreciate a partner. We'll do it again soon. Christian, thanks very much, partner.