But here's what we do know: We live in market cycles. 

They’ve been going on for 170 years, back to 1854. We've had up markets and then down markets – some go higher and longer than others, and some drop more precipitously than others – but they always happen. Generally they’re every five to eight years; the one before Covid went on for a little over 10 years, so it's not a total aberration. My point is that we're going to have cycles, so get used to it.

The problem is that our traditional models of financial planning, retirement planning, and Wall Street investment models are not built to protect you as the individual investor. There's no way – it's too efficient of a marketplace. And by efficiency, I mean that there's real-time data so that bigger Wall Street conglomerates with high-speed computers can play the game. 

We don't have a chance. In fact, they leverage and arbitrage our money. Whenever we put it in the market, it gets arbitraged. Yes, we can make money or build wealth in an up market, but then big tranches of it just get wiped away when we have a downturn—and it takes too many years to build back up again.

So you can't keep investing in this market cycle and not playing the game by the new rules. (Well, these aren't new rules to me, but they are new rules for a lot of people). What I'm trying to say to you is quit putting your head in the sand.

Look, you can't just follow the majority and expect better results. If you do what your CPA and everybody else say – “Go put money in a 401(k) or a defined benefit plan or cash balance plan,” or “Buy cash value life insurance,” or “Buy this annuity,” you're going to get majority results. And that means average, mediocre results. Is that what you want?

You wouldn't be reading this right now if you didn't want to be in what I call the 2%. It doesn't mean we're better than other people, but it means we follow a different path—a different pathway to get to our real goals, which are not just to pile up money. 

We want to exchange money for a life of freedom, so we get to do what we want to do when we want to do it. It doesn't mean you quit work. It doesn't mean you have to retire. It just means you get to live a life with freedom and have those options and choices.

Far too many people never have those options in their life, or they don't have them until it’s too late – when their health is gone or their family is grown and gone. Then they can't live the way they wanted to, and it is truly a shame.

The traditional model is a construct that has been set up and passed on by generation after generation after generation. No matter how successful you are, if you're going to get to a point where you have freedom, security, and peace of mind from passive income – where you’re not worried about running out of money by the time you’re in your eighties or nineties – you've got to play by different rules. It's a different game. 

When people first come to Freedom Founders, one of the first things they find themselves wanting to do is go to their advisors and say, “Hey, I need to shut down those tax deferral plans that everybody told me to have.” Their advisors want to push back and say, “No, no. How could you do that? That's the way we've always done it. Don't worry about the markets. Just hang on for the long haul. It'll get you there.”

Times are different, and we'll never go back to the way things were 30 years ago. Even if those models worked then, we're in very volatile times right now with the massive debt that we are carrying – our country, individuals, and companies. The debt load has changed everything, and we're going to have more volatility, not less.

You've got to get in the game: The inefficient markets, where we can buy tangible assets (business or real estate) at price points that give us sustainable cash flows. It's all about the cash flow. It's not about how much money you make – it's what that money, capital, or equity is doing for you. 

If you don't ever learn how to orchestrate your wealth into cash flow, you really have no security—and that's where the problem lies.

My point is you’ve got to understand that we're going to have market cycles, and have a strategy that can withstand them. You don't have to be an economist or have an MBA in finance to be able to run the cycles. You just need to be part of a community who gets it. You need to be with guides who have already gone down this path and figured it out.

Your traditional advisors—they're still trading time for dollars. They're just selling you the investment product of the day. It’s what they believe in and what they know.

You've got to find people who have taken the steps to gain real freedom, and know how to play in markets with the cycles. Find those people who know the mechanics to gain through the inefficiencies of the markets. It’s what we do at Freedom Founders, and it's what I've done for 40 years. I know it works.

So my question for you is: