One of the things that I've often told the members of Freedom Founders is that I've made the most increases to my net worth in my life during market downturns.

I was a dentist for many years, and that's an active income production mechanism. I loved it. It gave me the ability to acquire real estate outside of my practice, build that up, and have passive income. Dentistry was transactional income though. That's making money, which we all have to do, and that's where we all start in life.

But to really build real wealth, you have to invest in assets. Yes, your business and your practice is an asset. It's an asset that most people work in. It's the job that you do, and there's nothing wrong with that. But how can you transfer your money-making activities to investing in more assets?

Some people like to build more businesses, more practices, acquire more. That's one way to do it, and if that works for you, more power to you. 

I think the easiest way to invest in assets is to collaborate with other people, and I like to do it in real estate. In my opinion, real estate is hands down easier, has fewer moving parts, and has much less regulation than you have in most business sectors, especially in dentistry and the healthcare industry.

There’s so much regulation, and so many issues with staffing, employment, and labor issues today. With real estate, we just don't have that. Yes, there are still ups and downs; I'm not saying the grass is greener. I'm telling you, though, that investing in tangible assets, having access to those assets and understanding how to hedge the markets is invaluable. 

A big thing that people don't understand today is we've gone through a 40-year down cycle from 20% interest rates in 1980, all the way down to virtually zero today. The only direction they're going to go is up. Now, I'm not saying they're going back up to 20%, but they're going to go up. As interest rates go up and we have inflation gathering steam, everything's going to change in the investing model.

With tangible assets, I can ride the markets. I can make money when the markets are going up, and I can make money when the markets are stagnant. And I believe we're going to have economic stagnation here in the coming years while still having high inflation – i.e. stagflation. 

I can also hedge against downturns with the models we use. It's geographic and asset arbitrage. But you can't do that sitting on the sidelines, and you can't do that in the stock market. No way. You've got to have a network. You've got to have a community. You've got to have some educational aspects to understand how you can allocate your money to make your money work for you.

If you just put it in Wall Street, if you just put it in a 401(k), you're not doing your job. And I know that's what people tell you: “That's what you gotta do because it's too complex, the world's too complicated. You can't do this.” 

I'm telling you folks, you can. But you've got to decide you're going to do it.

The next decades ahead are going to be far different than where we came from. If you don't have your head up, looking for and understanding where the access points are and how you can hedge the markets the way we do in Freedom Founders, you're going to have a long, hard pull to get to where you want to go.

In fact, many of you won't get to where you want to go. You're going to live a life full of uncertainty, a life full of frustration, a life full of thinking “Why did this happen to me?” (because you know you worked hard). 

You worked hard, you did what you were supposed to do, but the markets didn't serve you the way they told you that they would. That’s just the way it's going to be, so understand that.