Wealth Formula by Buck Joffrey

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537: Markets Do Not Behave Like Saber-Toothed Tigers Dec 15, 2025

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You know, the longer I’ve been an investor, the more I realize this simple truth: the biggest threat to your wealth isn’t the market… it’s your own brain. We’re all wired the same way—with instincts that were fantastic for avoiding saber-toothed tigers but are absolutely terrible for making good financial decisions. Take something simple like a marathon. If I asked you to predict next year’s top finishers, you’d look at last year’s results. That works. Human performance doesn’t flip upside down in twelve months. The best runners tend to stay the best runners. There aren’t that many variables to consider. When we try to apply that same logic to investing, it often blows up in our faces. There are way too many variables to consider when it comes to market behavior to make simple assumptions. Entire sectors rotate from darling to disaster in a heartbeat. Yet our brains keep telling us, “Hey, this worked last year, surely it’ll work again.” In my view, nowhere is that psychological mismatch more obvious than in real estate right now. A few years ago, when real estate was on fire—cheap debt, rising rents, deals getting snapped up before lunch—everybody wanted in. Fast-forward to today. We’ve had a rate shock. Values have reset. Properties are selling at steep discounts. And Construction starts have fallen off a cliff. Real estate got slaughtered. But look around now. The market has reset. Assets are selling 30 percent below where they did just after Covid. Jobs and population growth in places like the Carolinas, Texas, and Arizona look fantastic, and interest rates are falling quickly. Every macro indicator you can name is pointing to a major buying opportunity—one of the best in the last 15 years. So naturally… few people are paying attention. Markets that are bottomed out are not sexy. If it’s not frothy, it’s not newsworthy. This is human nature in a nutshell. When assets are expensive and risk is quietly rising, people feel brave. When assets are attractively priced, and future returns look great, people get scared. It’s recency bias: assuming whatever just happened will keep happening. It’s loss aversion: we fear losing a buck more than we enjoy making one. It’s herd behavior: we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than right by ourselves. And of course, it’s confirmation bias—where people seek out whatever headlines validate the emotions they’re already feeling. It’s not logical. It’s not strategic. But it is human. And that’s why this week’s guest on Wealth Formula Podcast is of value to listen to. He’s one of the leading experts in the world on investor psychology—someone who can explain, with real data, why even intelligent investors consistently jump into markets late, bail out early, misread risk, and miss the best opportunities… especially the ones sitting right in front of them. If you’ve ever wondered why you sometimes make brilliant decisions and other times do the financial equivalent of touching a hot stove twice, this conversation is going to hit home. Transcript Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI and may not be 100% accurate. If you notice any errors or corrections, please email us at phil@wealthformula.com. There’s too many variables when it comes to market behavior to make simple assumptions. You know, you got entire sectors that can rotate, uh, from being the darling to the disaster in, in a heartbeat, right? You get our brains keep telling us, Hey, this worked last year, and surely it’ll work again, right? Welcome everybody. This is Buck Joffrey with the Wealth Formula Podcast. Coming to you from Montecito, California. Before we begin today, I wanna remind you that there is a website associated with this podcast, it’s wealthformula.com. And uh, if you would like to get more in the community, get involved with our, uh, credit Investor Group, investor club, uh, visit wealthformula.com and uh. Become part of the, uh, community rather than just, uh, uh, somebody who’s listening on the sideline. Again, that is wealth formula.com. Let’s talk a little bit about today’s show. Um, you know, the longer I’ve been an investor. The more I realize, uh, that there is a simple truth that, you know, sometimes the biggest threat to your wealth isn’t the market, it’s your own brain. And when I say your own brain, I’m not talking about just you. I mean, I have made some mistakes and a lot of it is really just, you know, uh, emotional or psychological traps and things like that. We’re all wired the same way. And you know, we have instincts. That we’re really, really good at saving us from the things that we evolved to avoid, like saber doth, tigers. But those same things are not great when it comes to. Financial decisions. You know, let’s just take the example, and we talked about this in the show today a little bit, but the example of a marathon, right? And if you ask someone to predict who, um, the top finishers would be, the first thing you’d do is you just go back and you look at, well, who were the top five finishers? Uh, or, or so be last year? Because human performance, it doesn’t really flip upside down in 12 months. I mean, the reality is that. The best runners stay. The best runners typically, um, there isn’t a lot of variables to consider. The problem is that when we try to apply that same kind of logic to investing, it often blows up in our faces and. And the reason for that is that it’s not a single variable issue. It’s not like, oh, how’s this runner doing? The runner’s feeling good this year not doing so good this year. Um, there’s too many variables when it comes to market behavior to make simple assumptions. You know, you got entire sectors that can rotate, uh, from being the darling to the disaster in, in a heartbeat, right? Get our brains keep telling us, Hey, this worked last year and surely it’ll work again. Right? You know, I’ll, I’ll say this again, in my view, there’s nowhere where the psychological mismatch is more obvious right now in multifamily real estate in particular. A few years ago when real estate was on fire, right? I mean, it was going crazy. It was frothy, cheap debt, rising rents, deals getting snapped up so quickly. Everybody wanted in right? Fast forward today, we had a bloodbath. We had a rate shock, values reset, property selling at steep discounts, 30%. Often is what we’re seeing through our investor group. Um, construction starts have, have fallen off of a cliff, but look around the market has actually reset. As I mentioned, assets that we’re seeing are selling 30% below where they did just after COVID jobs and population growth and places like. The Carolinas, Texas and Arizona, they look fantastic. And guess what? Interest rates they’re falling. They are. I mean, um, by the time, uh, this comes out, you’ll probably have your, um, your next announcement this December announcement for the rate cut. And you know, some people are like, well, I don’t know about the bond markets and how are they gonna follow guess? They stopped quantitative tightening last week. And guess what happens after that? Well, they start quantitative easing again. Go, you know, basically you’ve got the, uh, you’re gonna have government buying of bonds and that is going to, uh, drive yields down there as well. That’s my belief. And every macro indicator you can name is pointing in that direction. Um, so in my opinion. Again, it is my opinion. I do believe that a setup, this is a one of the best setups in 15 years, right? Since the whole 2008, 2009 debacle and everybody got crushed and across the board. I mean, this is the best setup for multifamily real estate since then. So of course. Few people are paying attention. Why? Because markets that are bottomed out are not sexy. And if it’s not frothy, it’s not newsworthy. No one’s paying attention. You’re paying attention to things like shiny things like gold even. It’s funny to say that because gold for so many years was just sitting there doing nothing, and that just exploded. Now everybody’s paying attention to gold, right? Um, it’s human nature in a nutshell. When assets are expensive. Uh, and, and risk is actually rising. People feel brave and, and when assets are attractively priced in, future returns look great. People are scared. What is behind the fact that that market is 30%, uh, discounted from just a few years ago? You know, and you look at something that’s up 50%, 60%, and you’re like, eh, I want a little bit of that, right? So there’s lots of things that at play when it comes to our psychology. You know, there’s things called recency bias, assuming whatever just happened will keep happening. Well, that’s what I’m talking about with frothy markets and stuff. There’s loss aversion. We fear losing a buck more than we enjoy making one. I think that’s, uh, very reasonable thing to do. I have, uh, I’m there myself, and then there’s herd behavior. We’d rather be wrong with the crowd than right by ourselves. And of course. There’s confirmation bias and that’s where people seek out whatever headlines validate the emotions they’re already feeling. It’s not logical. It’s not logical at all, but it is human and that’s why this week’s guest on Wealth Farm Meal podcast is, uh, going to be interesting for you to listen to. He’s one of the leading experts in the world. On investor psychology, someone who can explain with real data why even intelligent investors consistently jump into markets, laid bailout early, misread risk, and miss the best opportunities, uh, and also kind of why and how the whole system is ultimately sort of kind of rigged against us, the retail investor. Anyway, hope you enjoy the show. We’ll have that conversation right after these messages. Wealth formula banking is an ingenious concept powered by whole life insurance, but instead of acting just as a safety net, the strategy supercharges your investments. First, you create a personal financial reservoir that grows at a compounding interest rate much higher than any bank savings account. As your money accumulates, you borrow from your own. Bank to invest in other cash flowing investments. Here’s the key. Even though you’ve borrowed money at a simple interest rate, your insurance company keeps paying. You compound interest on that money even though you’ve borrowed it at result, you make money in two places at the same time. That’s why your investments get supercharged. This isn’t a new technique, it’s a refined strategy used by some of the wealthiest families in history, and it uses century old rock solid insurance companies as its back. Turbo Charge your investments. Visit wealthformulabanking.com. Again, that’s wealthformulabanking.com. Welcome back to the show everyone. Today. My guest on Wealth Formula podcast is Terrance Odean. He’s uh, Rudd Family Foundation, professor and former chair of the finance group at the Haas School of Business, university of California Berkeley. He’s a pioneer of behavioral finance, uh, famous for research showing how human psychology not rational markets, often drive individual investors poor performance. Uh, welcome to the show. How are you? I’m good, thank you. Great. Well, you know, let’s kind of just jump right into it, if you don’t mind. Um, let’s start at the core. What do you mean when you say investors aren’t rational? Exactly. And, and specifically how? Has Wall Street built an entire system that quietly profits from that irrationality? Well, I think in my earlier papers I used the word rationality, and I don’t use it now because I think it’s confusing. So economists, uh. Have a very specific definition of rationality built on, sort of on these axioms of rational decision making that Dr. Spock would use. And sometimes the behavior that looks rational to an economist, most of us would shake our heads and say, what’s wrong with that guy? So I, but I do think it’s fair to say that. Human beings often make decisions, uh, in ways that are biased, in ways that, um, don’t properly assess probabilities or are influenced in predictable, but not necessarily beneficial, um, ways from, uh, emo by emotions. So most of the work I’ve done has taken a look at, uh. Biases, ways of making decisions that, that my mentor and his, uh, research partner, Danny Kaman, I studied with and his research partner, Amos Diversity, they documented in the seventies and eighties. For example. Uh, people estimate probabilities based on how easily examples come to mind and sometimes. Sometimes that can be a bit biased. Like if I were to ask you to name five companies that went public and were wildly successful, you could rattle ’em off in no time. And then if I asked you to name five companies that went public and subsequently failed and became bankrupt, and were delisted. You might have a harder time, even though we know that more companies fail than end up like, uh, Google and Microsoft and Amazon. So if you are an individual investor thinking of buying an IPO and asking yourself, well, how likely is this thing to be successful? And you started judging the probability by the examples that came to mind, you would overestimate the probability of success. So then that would be one example. I also look at overconfidence. There’s a strong human tendency. It doesn’t affect everyone equally, but to have these self-serving biases where we think we’re a little better than we are, we think, uh, we have more ability than we have, and these are not entirely bad things. It’s easier to get up in the morning if you think you’re a good person with a little bit more ability than you have. But for an individual investor that can lead the investor to make trades that maybe they shouldn’t be making, maybe the individual investor says, oh, I have a great idea. And then doesn’t stop to say, but my idea is based on very public information that the Wall Street professionals had way before I had that information. So, uh, that overconfidence could lead to overtrading. Uh. These are the type of things I’ve, I’ve been interested in. When you talk about Wall Street sort of building an entire system that kind of quietly profits from that irrationality, can you tell us a little bit about that? Well, I don’t study so much how Wall Street exploits the biases, though obviously that happens. I do have a recent, uh, paper. Wrote with some co-authors about traders on Robinhood, and we look at the Robinhood environment. This was a few years ago, and the environment was quite simple, so they listed a lot less information about companies than some other brokerage firms. So that would make a novice investor perhaps feel like, oh, this isn’t so complicated. It was really easy to trade. I mean, I was sort of shocked. I opened up an account because I wanted to understand the thing I was studying, uh, through data, and it took a couple minutes to open up an account. I transferred some money in from my bank account. I thought, well, in a few days when the transfer clears, I’ll be able to trade. But no, I was able to trade immediately. This was still back in the days of digital confetti. I placed a trade and the digital confetti sort of rained on my, my phone screen. It was like, yes, celebrate. So I think that Robinhood is not alone in this, but they. They encourage lot trading. I mean, they make money through trading, so they make it easier. Uh, they make it feel like fun people. Uh, there’s research in psychology that shows that people are more spontaneous and less critical decision makers when they’re feeling happy and in a good mood. Uh, so I think there’s a lot of encouraging. Retail investors to trade very actively. And that of course is where a lot of that money is made. Yeah. It’s almost sort of like a gamification of the whole thing, right? Well, that, that exactly. I mean, that’s the term that, that we use and others use. It was like a gamification of trading and as you know, like, you know, games can be addicting. So if, if, because games can be a big thing, right? And then, uh, t…

Full show notes at the publisher

536: Should You Own a Home? Dec 07, 2025

Show notes

Homeownership has been baked into the American Dream for nearly a century. Politicians, parents, and banks all tell you the same thing: “Buy a house as soon as you can. It’s your biggest asset.”

But as a real estate guy who actually understands how wealth is created… I’m not convinced it makes sense for everyone—especially early in your career. Let me explain.

Say you finally start making some real money—maybe you’re a doctor fresh out of residency. The cultural script kicks in immediately: Buy a house. Build equity. Feel responsible.

But here’s the part most people forget: your primary home is not an asset. As Robert Kiyosaki puts it, if something takes money out of your pocket, it’s not an asset—it’s a liability.

According to Bankrate and the Census Bureau, U.S. homeowners spend around $17,000 per year just to maintain and operate their homes—and that’s before you make a single mortgage payment.

That’s property taxes, insurance, utilities, landscaping, repair bills, HOA fees… the list goes on. If your house is worth $1.5M, even the bare-minimum 1% annual maintenance rule hits you with $15,000 a year just to keep the place from deteriorating.

Add insurance, taxes, utilities, and everything else, and you’re looking at $30,000–$40,000 per year in unavoidable, non-negotiable carrying costs.

And that still doesn’t cover the roof that fails, the appliances that die, or the curveballs Mother Nature throws at you. None of that feels like an “asset” to me.

Now, to be fair, people don’t usually buy homes as investments. They buy them for stability, a place to raise kids, a sense of being “settled.” It’s emotional. It’s psychological. And it’s real.

But if you’re young—and especially if you haven’t hit your first million—it’s worth asking yourself a tough question:

Is buying a home right now the best financial move… or just the most familiar one?

Because historically, U.S. home prices appreciate around 4.3% a year (Case-Shiller). Meanwhile, the S&P 500 averages closer to 10%.

And if you’re in real estate investing? A solid multifamily value-add deal often targets 16–20% IRR—plus tax advantages your primary home will never give you.

So if you’re just getting started, it might make sense to delay that home purchase. Invest first. Build your passive income. Let your assets—not your salary—pay for your lifestyle.

Then when you do buy a home, you’ll be doing it from a position of strength, not strain.

The irony is this: waiting often gets you to the dream home faster because your capital compounds instead of being trapped in drywall, windows, and a backyard you barely have time to enjoy.

This Week on Wealth Formula Podcast, I interview expert Dr. Ken Johnson, who digs even deeper into this question—and lays out why homeownership isn’t the golden ticket people think it is, especially for high earners early in their wealth-building years.

Linked mentioned:

Beracha and Johnson Housing Ranking Index:

https://www.ares.org/page/beracha-johnson-housing-ranking-index

Waller, Weeks and Johnson Rental Index:

https://www.ares.org/page/waller-weeks-johnson-rental-index

Price-to-Rent Ratio Report:

https://therealestateinitiative.com/price-to-rent-ratios/

Top 100 Housing Markets – Inflation Adjusted:

https://therealestateinitiative.com/housing-top-100/

Learn more about Dr. Ken Johnson:

https://olemiss.edu/profiles/khjohns3

535: Apartment Buildings Are Having a Holiday Type Sale Nov 30, 2025

Show notes

It’s that time of the year again—Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Everyone loves a deal.

If you’ve been investing long enough, you know one important fact: there is always something on sale.

The problem is the herd never sees it. They’re too busy chasing whatever feels safe because it’s setting new records.

And right now? That’s the stock market. That’s gold. Everyone’s piling into the most expensive things they can find and patting themselves on the back for being “prudent.”

But smart investors don’t chase what’s already expensive.
They look for the thing sitting quietly on the clearance rack, the thing nobody wants yet.

And today, that thing is real estate—particularly apartments.

We’ve seen this movie before.

Think back to the early 2000s. After the dot-com crash, everybody ran to gold and Treasuries. Meanwhile, the very companies that would define the next two decades—Amazon, Apple, Microsoft—were sitting there marked down 75%. You didn’t need to be a genius to buy them. You just needed the stomach.

Then there was 2009–2011. Real estate was radioactive. The media made it sound like apartment buildings were going to fall into sinkholes. But if you bought during that window?

Values didn’t take ten years to recover. They snapped back within three. And then they kept running for another decade.

And remember 2020—oil going negative? That’s the kind of insanity that only happens once in a generation. People were literally joking that Exxon would pay you to take barrels off their hands.

It was absurd… and it was the greatest energy buying opportunity in modern history. But most people sat on the sidelines in fear.

Different cycles, different assets, same principle:
If you want outsized returns, you have to be willing to buy what everyone else is mispricing.

And right now, the only major asset class not making all-time highs is real estate. In fact, our Investor Club is still finding deals discounted 30–40 percent from just a few years ago.

Apartments, specifically, are in this bizarre sweet spot where pricing is still beaten up from the rate shock, yet the fundamentals underneath are quietly strengthening.

Sellers who bought with floating debt are fatigued.
Buyers with dry powder are getting real discounts.
Construction has collapsed—meaning supply will be razor-thin in 18–24 months.

And the interest-rate environment is shifting in exactly the direction apartments benefit from.

This is why rates matter.
This is why liquidity matters.
This is why cycles matter.

When financing costs come down and supply is constrained, prices don’t grind higher—they launch.

This Is Exactly What the Bottom Feels Like

Bottoms never feel like bottoms. They feel confusing. Uneasy. Contradictory.

And that is precisely why it’s the opportunity.

Every big wealth-building moment looks like this in real time. Everyone’s distracted by what’s hot while the discount sits in plain sight.

Make no mistake—if the Fed keeps cutting and liquidity continues loosening, apartments aren’t going to stay discounted. They’ll do what they did after 2009. They’ll do what oil did after 2020. They’ll do what tech did after the dot-com crash.

They’ll reprice fast.

And years from now, people will look back at this exact moment and say the thing they always say after missing the obvious:

“It was right there. Why didn’t I buy more?”

Well… it is right here. Apartments are on sale.

No one has been beating the drum more on this than my guest on Wealth Formula Podcast this week.

534: The Economics of Professional Sports Nov 23, 2025

Show notes

This week’s Wealth Formula Podcast is about the economics of sports—if you are a sports fan like me, you will love it. But before we get to that, I want to give you my two cents on one of the most important elements to financial success in anything: conviction. As I write this, Bitcoin sold off from a high of $126K to under $90K. Other cryptos have lost 50-90 percent of their value in the same time. It’s been called a blood bath. Some are even saying it’s over for Bitcoin. I might even believe them if I hadn’t seen the same story at least 5 times before over the past decade. True bitcoiners have tremendous belief in what bitcoin means to the world. Someone who bought $1,000 of Bitcoin in 2010 and simply refused to sell would now be sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars. That is the reward for true conviction. The irony of this bitcoin cycle is that many of those individuals with high conviction are finally cashing in on the fruit of their patience. Almost every day, another wallet that hasn’t been active since 2011 is selling off a billion dollars into the market into the hands of Wall Street and governments. That’s why prices are tumbling. But don’t be fooled into thinking that these buyers are the dumb money holding the bag. The story does not end here. Nor is the Bitcoin story a one-off either. History repeats itself as the story of investments unfolds over time. In December 1999, Amazon stock traded at $106. After the dot-com crash, it fell to $5.97. Every talking head had a eulogy written for the company. But if you were crazy enough to hold through the storm, your conviction paid off spectacularly: $10,000 invested in Amazon in 2001 is worth over $20 million today. Now, moving on to the topics of sports. One of my favorite examples of conviction is from 1920, when George Halas bought the Chicago Bears franchise for $100. The Halas family could’ve “taken profits” countless times. They lived through multiple depressions, a world war, a dozen recessions, five or six league restructurings, labor disputes, player strikes, and decades of bad seasons. Anybody else would’ve bailed. But they didn’t, and today, the Chicago Bears are valued at over $6.3 billion. These stories have different time periods and different industries, but they all teach the same lesson: Conviction is one of the most profitable assets you can own. That’s the message I want to leave you before we move into a perhaps more entertaining topic: the economics of professional sports. Most people think of sports in terms of touchdowns, rivalries, and Super Bowl rings. But the truth is… professional sports is one of the greatest wealth-creation machines in American history. Few people understand those engines better than our guest this week. He’s one of the clearest, most respected voices in sports economics today, and he’s going to break it all down for us: salary caps, streaming deals, and team valuations. If you are a sports fan, you are going to love this week’s episode of Wealth Formula Podcast! Transcript Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI and may not be 100% accurate. If you notice any errors or corrections, please email us at phil@wealthformula.com. Donald Trump pretty much bankrupted the USFL by saying we’re gonna go head to head, uh, with the NFL instead of trying to build a a Spring Sports League. Welcome everybody. This is Buck Joffrey with the Wealth Formula podcast. Happy, uh, Thanksgiving week, uh, and uh, this week because it is a holiday week in, you know, football and all that kind of stuff that goes along with it. We’re gonna talk. About the economics of sports. And if you’re a sports fan like me, you’re gonna really like this. I really had fun with this interview actually. It was just like me asking a bunch of questions I always had. But anyway, before we get to that, I want to give you my 2 cents. One of the most important elements that I think there is give financial success in anything, and that is conviction. And I bring this up to you in part because Bitcoin sold off. Um, and well at least all the time, I’m recording this from a high of 126,000 and then it, it plunged actually below 90,000. And then of course, there were other cryptos that lost 50 to 90% of their value in the same time. Uh, yeah, it was a bit of a bloodbath. It’s been called a bloodbath and it is a blood bath. And of course, there are some who are declaring Bitcoin dead Again. Um, and you know what? I might even believe them if I hadn’t seen, uh, the same story, at least I’d say, I don’t know, maybe four or five times over the past I, eight years, nine years, whatever. True Bitcoiners though, have a tremendous belief in what Bitcoin means to the world and where this is headed. And some of them, well before I ever got in, right? I mean. That serious conviction because, you know, the people who were buying, you know, back in 2012, 13, I mean, this was completely outta nowhere, had no one’s, uh, no one’s support, nothing. In fact, in 2010, uh, you know, if, if you bought Bitcoin back then simply refuse to sell up until now, um, say you bought a thousand dollars of Bitcoin. You’d be sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin, right? That’s the reward for true conviction. And those people, frankly deserve it. Because can you imagine if you just bought a thousand bucks or something and it was already up to a million, it was already up to 10 million and all the way up to 20 million, you still didn’t sell. I mean, I don’t even know if I could, I don’t know if I could do that. I don’t think I could. I mean, at some point I would be like, take the money and run. Right. Um. You know, it’s a funny thing though. The irony of this Bitcoin cycle that we have right now is that many of those individuals with, you know, super high conviction, um, the ones that were in way before any of us and before me, well, they’re actually, a lot of them are actually cashing out sort of the fruit of their patients. Right. Almost every day right now, you’re seeing a another wallet that’s been dormant since like 2011. And all of a sudden it sells. It’s something that has done nothing, but just sit there in storage, selling off a billion dollars into the market, probably, you know, started out as like 10 grand. Right? And where’s that money going? It’s going to the hands of Wall Street’s, going in the hands of, uh, governments. That’s actually the ironic part here. That’s why prices are tumbling. Because I think people are saying, well, gosh, we’re at a hundred grand. I’m sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars. I’m sitting on a billion dollars. Uh, I think it’s time to get out, right? But don’t be fooled, in my opinion, to think that these buyers are, uh, you know, they’re the dumb people holding the bag. I mean the, the people holding the bag, it’s Wall Street, right? They’re governments and reserves. And, uh, you know, big treasury companies, the story doesn’t end here. And the other thing is that Bitcoin story is not a one-off in history at all, right? In fact, you know, it, Bitcoin gets a lot of attention. But you even look at something like Amazon, right? December, 1999, Amazon stock trading at $106. Then the.com crash comes, and guess what? It fell down to $5 and 97 cents. That’s a Bitcoin like crash, right? And every talking had a eulogy written for the company. And if you were crazy enough to hold through that storm, your conviction paid off spectacularly. If you had $10,000 invested in Amazon in 2001, it’s worth over $20 million today. So anyway, that’s the point I have though. You know, it’s, the point is about conviction. Uh, and, and I’m not saying that you should just be dumb, buy something and be dumb about it, but especially on these asymmetric things where you think something could be really big, give yourself a time, a period, right? I mean. The only thing other than Bitcoin that I think I, I’m really interested in, in the crypto space is something called Solana. Solana is down like 50% from its ties, and I still think that, you know, when the dust settles, I think this is going to be something that’s gonna pay, pay off. Now if I were to watch it day by day, uh. It’s demoralizing, right? But, but I think the point is, if you have some conviction in something, give it some time. You know, say, I’m gonna watch this for at least five years if I can, if I don’t absolutely get into a situation where I need that money, which hopefully you don’t, because this is not where that kind of money belongs. Right? But give it some time and don’t look, there’s lots of noise, and, and, and then just give it some time and see what happens. Right? Now speaking of giving it some time, you know, a similar story in the sports arena in 1920, George Halas, I think it was Papa Bear, right? George Papa Bear. Halas bought the Chicago Bears franchise for a hundred bucks. Yep, a hundred bucks. Now the Halas family could have taken profits countless times, and they lived through lots of, uh, bad times. Depressions, uh, you know, world War, uh, a dozen recessions, five or six, uh, league restructurings, labor disputes, player strikes, decades of bad seasons. And maybe anybody else would’ve billed at some point if they’d made, you know, millions of dollars from the a hundred bucks. But they didn’t. And the Chicago Bears, as much as I don’t like the Chicago Bears, are valued over $6.3 billion. Now these stories, ultimately, they’re, you know, different time periods, different industries, but same lesson conviction, it’s one of the most profitable assets you can own or attributes at least. Maybe it’s not an asset, I don’t know. That’s a message I wanna leave you before we get into the topic of today, which is the economics of professional sports. Now, most people think of sports in terms of touchdowns, rivalries, super Bowl rings, all that kind of thing. But the truth is professional sports is one of the greatest wealth creation machines in American history, and few people understand those engines better than our guest this week. He’s one of the clearest, most respected voices of sports economics today. And he is gonna break it all down for us. We talk salary caps, streaming deals, team valuations. We talk about the Green Bay Packers and why they’re owned by the city of Green Bay instead of owners. All that kind of stuff that you might have wondered about but you never really knew. So if you’re a sports fan, enjoy it and happy Thanksgiving. We’ll have that interview for you right after these messages. Wealth formula banking is an ingenious concept powered by whole life insurance, but instead of acting just as a safety net, the strategy supercharges your investments. First, you create a personal financial reservoir that grows at a compounding interest rate much higher than any bank savings account. As your money accumulates, you borrow from your own. Bank to invest in other cash flowing investments. Here’s the key. Even though you’ve borrowed money at a simple interest rate, your insurance company keeps paying you compound interest on that money even though you’ve borrowed it. At result, you make money in two places at the same time. That’s why your investments get supercharged. This isn’t a new technique. It’s a refined strategy used by some of the wealthiest families in history, and it uses century old rock solid insurance companies as its backbone. Turbocharge your investments. Visit Wealth formula banking.com. Again, that’s wealth formula banking.com. Welcome back to the show everyone. Today. My guest on Wealth Formula podcast is, uh, Dr. Victor Matheson, professor of Economics and Accounting at College of Holy Cross. He’s a leading authority on sports economics, studying everything from the financial impact of mega events like the Olympics and World Cup, to the inner workings of professional sports leagues, lotteries, and public finance. Uh, welcome to the show. How are you? Well, thanks for having me. Great. Always happy to talk some sports economics. Oh gosh, this is interesting. I’m a huge, uh, I’m a huge sports fan, especially NFL and, uh, so, you know, instead of talking personal finance, you know, without, uh, without any, uh, uh, sports in it, this is definitely a, uh, welcome for me. So, um, well, vigor, let’s start, start with this, you know, um. Most of us who are big sports fans, you know, we’re really driven by the idea of the, the, you know, the, the emotion, the entertainment. Taking a step back from your perspective, how should we look at this whole ecosystem of sports as an economic system? Well, uh, first of all, it’s. It’s both bigger and smaller than, uh, than you would imagine. So if we think of the NFL, the NFL ha generat more revenue than any, uh, sports league in the world. Uh, this year it’ll come in somewhere around 22 ish billion dollars. Uh, that certainly seems like a lot of money. On the other hand, a Sherwin Williams paint store comes in at about that same sort of, uh, revenue, you know. On many podcasts talking about talking about paint, right? Um, if we talk worldwide, all the sports leagues all put together, uh, we’re talking about maybe a hundred billion or so, maybe 120 billion, roughly the same size as Johnson and Johnson. So, uh, you know, it’s a big industry. It’s a, you know, billions in with a B, but it’s also a tiny percentage of, of the total amount of economic. Being generated every year, and, and so we can easily get, uh, um, we can easily get ahead of ourselves and say, well, you know, uh, it’s the biggest company in the world, the NFL, it’s, it’s not even 500. Interesting. Um, so let’s talk a little bit about this, um, uh, how value is created in these leagues. So, so, you know, you said professional leagues are built on the economics of controlled scarcity. So talk a little bit about that, if you would, how this scarcity model drives value and, and, and protects, uh, uh, profitability. Right. So let’s compare, you know, let’s compare a Walmart. To the NFL, right? Uh, so Walmart takes a look at all these potential places that you could put a Walmart and they say, oh, this would be a good one. And a Walmart goes in. And now that Walmart’s generating economic impact and generating revenues for the, for the. For the company and all these sort of things. Now let’s look at the NFL, right? Uh, the NFL does the same thing. They said, Hey, uh, let’s look at Las Vegas. Would that be a good place for a, for a team? Uh, is is London gonna be a good place for a team? Uh, and they look at those. Uh, but here’s the deal. If Walmart looks at 50 places and says, Hey, these 35 would be good places. They’re not gonna just pick the best one for a franchise. They’re gonna put. Walmart’s in all of those, right? Uh, the NFL on the other hand, very specifically saying, you know, we actually don’t wanna put an NFL franchise in every place that we could, uh, make a profit in because we want to be in the, in a world where there are fewer NFL franchises than there are cities that want them, and that generates demand for this. Um, Walmart can’t do that because if Walmart doesn’t put in a franchise somewhere, uh, you know, Target’s gonna come in instead. Uh, that’s not gonna happen in the NFL, uh, because there’s no other competitor to that. So they can actually restrict the number of franchises they have, which means that every franchise is selling at a, a super premium price. These are, you know, at the lowest end, we’re talking five, six, $7 billion franchises. Now, uh, they could sell multiple new expansion franchises, but they choose not to. To maximize the value of those existing franchises. It’s been a while actually since the NFL expanded, um, the league. And I’m curious, what are, you know, what is it that drives them ultimately to do that? I mean, again, you just mentioned there’s this whole scarcity issue. I mean, what do you think are sort of the limitations or sort of the. You know, the, the, the points at which they say,…

Full show notes at the publisher

533: What’s Really Going On in Real Estate Right Now with Prof Norm Miller Nov 16, 2025

Show notes

When you invest in real estate, you’re not buying what it is today—you’re buying what it will become a few years from now.

That’s especially true in multifamily, which, despite all the noise, remains one of the most compelling long-term plays out there.

Unlike stocks, you don’t get a live ticker reminding you every five seconds what your property is “worth.” And that’s a good thing. Real estate moves slowly, and that patience rewards people who can see the story before it unfolds.

The national headlines are confusing right now—depending on who you read, the sky is either falling or it’s never been brighter. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between.

Mortgage rates are still above six percent, affordability is strained, and national price growth has flattened. But beneath the surface, there’s an entirely different story playing out—one that favors multifamily investors who understand that real estate is always, always, about location.

Some markets are clearly soft. A few urban centers built too much too fast, and it’s showing up in higher vacancy and flattened rents. But other regions—think the Carolinas, Texas, parts of Florida—continue to thrive because people are still moving there in droves.

Jobs, climate, taxes, and lifestyle continue to pull migration south and inland, and those people need somewhere to live.

When you combine growing populations with a shrinking construction pipeline—new multifamily starts are down roughly 40% from their 2023 peak—you’re setting the stage for tightening supply and rent growth in the right markets over the next few years.

That’s the part that separates pros from spectators. Anyone can read a national report and call it a trend. But the investors who win are the ones who know their markets intimately—who’s building what, where the jobs are moving, and how local policies are shaping demand. In that sense, real estate offers the only kind of “insider trading” that’s perfectly legal. The better you know the ground, the better your odds.

For passive investors, that means something simple but crucial: partner with operators who live and breathe their markets. You want people who are plugged in at the street level, not just reading spreadsheets. Because in multifamily, the difference between a mediocre investment and a great one can be a single zip code.

Real estate, especially multifamily, rewards patience, perspective, and proximity. You can’t control interest rates or the national narrative, but you can choose where—and with whom—you invest. And if history is any guide, those who make smart, localized bets while everyone else is sitting on the sidelines tend to be the ones who look like geniuses a few years down the road.

This week on the Wealth Formula Podcast, I talk with a former professor and renowned real estate analyst who’s been studying these patterns for decades. We break down which markets are setting up for real opportunity, where caution is warranted, and what the next chapter of multifamily investing really looks like.

532: Pejman Ghadimi – A New Paradigm for Buying Nice Stuff Nov 09, 2025

Show notes

A few years back, I bought some very expensive sports coats. I wore them at first and enjoyed them. But over time, they kind of lost their luster.

As I have found often to be the case in my life, I don’t tend to care that much about fancy stuff—fancy jackets, fancy shoes. My true self regresses to a fairly simple jeans and flannel circa 1992 style—not expensive.

Realizing that these fancy clothes were just rotting in my closet, I recently sold them on a well-known second-hand site with only designer stuff. And I was shocked when I realized I was only getting 10 cents on the dollar for what I paid!

But then again, I guess I shouldn’t have been. Buying new fancy clothes has an extremely low likelihood of being a good investment. It reminded me of my good friend in town here who’s made millions of dollars in his life. He only buys nice stuff. But he almost never buys new things.

The furniture in his house is incredible. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of mid-century modern gems. And he buys vintage cars rather than new supercars off the lot. He also has a 7-figure collection of rare watches. It’s all really nice stuff.

The difference between what he is doing and what I did with those clothes is that he was investing while I was spending. While he’s bought millions of dollars of cars and watches, he’s always made money with them because he has focused on their future value.

Maybe I’m a bit dense, but I never thought about stuff this way before meeting him. And I still have to remind myself of this paradigm. It’s a different way to look at luxury and one that is certainly smarter when it comes to your pocketbook.

My guest on today’s Wealth Formula Podcast teaches people how to live this kind of lifestyle with cars and watches. I’ve interviewed him before, and I’m doing so again because so many of you have engaged in this way of buying nice stuff that I get regular requests to have him back on the show.

531: How to Identify a Good Real Estate Deal Nov 02, 2025

Show notes

I grew up with a very different perspective on personal finance and investing than most. My parents were immigrants, and when they arrived in this country, they didn’t come with any preconceived notions of conventional financial wisdom.

My father grew up dirt poor in India—that’s really poor and he had never even heard of investing as a kid. But he was blessed with a tremendous intellect and used it to rise from nothing to truly live the American dream.

He came to the U.S. in the 1960s on an engineering scholarship and started working as a bridge engineer in Minnesota. When he finally began making a little money, he was confronted with the idea of investing for the first time.

Until then, life had always been hand-to-mouth. So he was approaching investing like an alien coming to this planet for the first time with an unbiased view on anything financial.

With that perspective, the stock market didn’t make sense to him. He wanted cash flow that would immediately improve his quality of life. Intuitively, it felt smarter to buy “streams of cash” than to “gamble” on stocks.

So with whatever money he could scrape together, he bought small rental properties. Nothing glamorous—mostly low-income houses and duplexes in Minneapolis. But guess what? It worked.

Before long, he started making real money and quit engineering altogether. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree, I guess. Years later, I would also walk away from my career as a doctor to become a full-time investor.

My father did really well. By the 1980s, he was having million-dollar years—that’s a lot now, but back then it was a lot more!

But then came the ’90s. Like many others in the dot-com era, he got in over his skis. It seemed like everyone was making easy money in the stock market, and he got greedy.

Unfortunately, he sold a large chunk of his real estate portfolio and went all in on tech. And of course, we all know how that story ended—the bubble burst and so did his brokerage account.

So there he was, in his 50s, starting over again after being obliterated by the dotcom bubble. He was terrified. But he knew what he had to do. He had to rebuild the same way he had built wealth the first time: cash-flowing real estate. Today, in his 80s, he’s still at it.

To be clear, his real estate career wasn’t all smooth sailing either. This isn’t a fairy tale. It’s real life.

For example, in the late ’90s, Alan Greenspan suddenly cranked up interest rates, creating a situation not unlike what investors faced post-COVID when the Fed raised rates at record speed.

That hurt him, but each setback brought lessons, and he kept moving forward with an asset class that he trusted. Eventually, he recovered. We were always comfortable, and my dad made enough to pay for 3 kids’ college tuition and medical school for me while still living comfortably, traveling, and enjoying his life. He’ll be the first one to tell you that he only ever made money in real estate and that’s what he believes in.

Now, why am I telling you all this? I’m telling you this story because it shaped the way I see investing. Unlike most, I grew up hearing that the stock market was risky and that real estate was the safer, smarter path—pretty much the opposite of what everyone around me grew up with.

And despite my own challenges from the post-COVID rate hikes, I can still say without hesitation that focusing on real estate has served me better than following the traditional investing playbook.

Still, no one wins all the time. Every investor loses money sometimes. Surgeons have a saying: “If you haven’t had a complication, you haven’t done enough surgery.” That’s as true for the best surgeons in the world as it is for the best investors.

So what do you do? Sitting on cash guarantees you’ll lose purchasing power to inflation. Money markets barely keep up.

For me, the answer is to keep investing with discipline. Real estate is my medium, and like my father, I learn from my mistakes and keep moving forward.

I still see it as the greatest wealth-building asset in the world—just look at how many billionaire real estate investors there are.

But wealth doesn’t build blindly. Every project I invest in has to have underwriting I believe in. Beyond that, I pay close attention to macroeconomic shifts and form my own view on what comes next.

Right now, I believe in the right markets, real estate has bottomed out. I think we’re on the buyer’s side of the cycle.

I also believe interest rates are headed lower—both because the Fed has signaled it and because the Trump administration will do everything possible to keep them moving in that direction. And for real estate investors, investing in a descending interest rate environment is nothing short of a gift.

So now I look at the deals in the right market. That involves underwriting and understanding what all those numbers mean. In this week’s episode of Wealth Formula Podcast, my guest and I break down how you—even as a passive investor—can do your own due diligence.

530: A Tax Attorney Talks Tax Mitigation with Buck Oct 26, 2025

Show notes

This week’s Wealth Formula Podcast features an interview with a tax attorney. While I’m not a tax professional myself, I want to drill down on something we touched on briefly that is incredibly relevant to many of you: the so-called short-term rental loophole.

If I were a high-earning W-2 wage earner, this would be at the top of my list to implement—and I know many of you are already doing it. The short-term rental loophole is one of those quirks in the tax code that most people don’t even know exists, but once you do, it can be a total game-changer.

Here’s why. Normally, when you buy a rental property, depreciation losses can’t offset your W-2 income. They’re considered passive, and they stay stuck in that bucket.

But short-term rentals—Airbnb, VRBO, whatever—work differently. If the average stay is seven days or less and you materially participate, the IRS doesn’t classify it as passive. It becomes an active business.

That means the paper losses you generate can offset your ordinary income, even from your day job. Normally, you’d need a real estate professional status to get that benefit. This is the one situation where you don’t.

So let’s walk through how it works. When you buy a residential property, the IRS requires you to depreciate the structure—the walls, roof, foundation—over 27½ years. On a million-dollar property, that’s about $36,000 a year. It’s a slow drip.

A cost segregation study changes that. Instead of treating the property as one block of concrete and wood, it carves out the parts that don’t last 27 years. Furniture, carpet, appliances, cabinets, and even ceiling fans—those are considered 5-year property. In other words, you can depreciate them much faster.

Now add bonus depreciation. Instead of spreading those 5-year assets out over five years, the current rules let you write off most of them all at once in year one.

Here’s the example. You buy a $1,000,000 short-term rental and finance it at 70 percent loan-to-value. That means you put in $300,000 cash and borrow $700,000. A cost seg often shows about 30 percent of the property—roughly $300,000—is 5-year personal property. Thanks to bonus depreciation, you deduct that entire $300,000 immediately.

So you put in $300,000 cash, and you got a $300,000 paper loss in the same year. In practical terms, you just deducted your entire down payment against your taxable income. This is what real estate professionals do all the time and why they often end up with no tax liability at all.

In this case, it works for you as a W2 wage earner. And for that reason, I think its one of the most powerful tools out there for high paid professionals that is grossly underutilized.

Remember, the biggest expense for most people is the amount of tax they pay—especially W2 wage earners. This strategy lets you use money you would otherwise pay the IRS to build a cash-flowing asset for yourself.

Listen to this week’s Wealth Formula Podcast to learn other ways to legally pay less tax!

529: How to Get Yield from Bitcoin Safely Oct 19, 2025

Show notes

Bitcoin is definitely volatile. If you told me it was going to go down by 50 percent next year, I would hesitantly believe you.

However, there is no way you can convince me that Bitcoin will not hit $500,000 at some point within the next five years.

Think about what’s happening: ETFs are everywhere, treasury companies are holding Bitcoin, there are rumors of central banks buying it, and even an American Bitcoin reserve. It is an asset that will go up. But it may go down before that, and that is unnerving.

You should not put money into Bitcoin unless you commit to not touching it for 5–10 years.

But then you face another problem—Bitcoin is like gold. Unlike apartment buildings, there is no rent, no cashflow. Other coins like Ethereum and Solana have mechanisms called staking that allow for yield. Bitcoin does not. Its beauty is that there are not a lot of moving parts. It’s a vault of security, and that’s pretty much it. Again, just like gold.

There have been companies like BlockFi and Celsius—which are, indeed, traditional finance companies—that lost people’s Bitcoin when they went insolvent.

But now there may be a way to get yield from Bitcoin while keeping it in your custody.

That’s what we talk about on this week’s Wealth Formula Podcast, in addition to covering recent news and making predictions about Bitcoin’s price.

No-Brainer Strategy to Start TODAY: Why Wealth Formula Banking Makes All the Sense in the World Oct 14, 2025

Show notes

It’s been a while since I’ve talked about Wealth Formula Banking in detail, and I know we have a lot of new listeners who may not have heard about it yet. So today, I want to share a webinar that explains why I think this strategy is such a no-brainer.

First off—what is Wealth Formula Banking? You may have heard of something called “infinite banking.” It’s a similar concept, but instead of focusing on paying your bills, Wealth Formula Banking is specifically designed to amplify your investments.

My introduction to this idea came the same way you’re hearing it now—through a podcast. I kept hearing the phrase “be your own bank.” Honestly, I didn’t know what that meant, and I tuned it out until a friend finally broke it down for me. That’s when I had my aha moment.

Here’s why. Normally, when you want to invest in a cash-flowing asset, you park money in a checking or savings account first. The problem? Those accounts pay you almost nothing—well under 1 percent. Meanwhile, inflation is running at 2–3 percent, so you’re guaranteed to lose money. That’s why my friend Robert Kiyosaki always says, “savers are losers.”

Wealth Formula Banking flips that script. You’re essentially creating a special kind of cash value life insurance policy, where the money you put in grows at a virtually bulletproof 5–6 percent compounding rate per year. Not that sexy on its own, BUT…here’s the kicker: you don’t have to pull that money out to invest in your deal. Instead, you borrow against it from the insurance company’s general ledger at a simple interest rate.

That means your original money keeps compounding inside the policy at 5–6 percent—even while you’ve borrowed against it to invest in cash-flowing assets like real estate. That’s the key. With a HELOC, when you borrow, your money stops working for you. With Wealth Formula Banking, your money never stops growing.

So now you’ve got the same dollars doing two jobs at once: earning safe, compounding growth inside your policy and generating income from your investments outside of it. By simply routing your money through Wealth Formula Banking, you’re supercharging your returns.

And here’s what makes it even more powerful: tax-free growth within the insurance account, real asset protection to shield your wealth from lawsuits and creditors. Plus, it includes a permanent death benefit, which means that in addition to building wealth today, you’re also creating a lasting legacy for your family tomorrow.

It’s not magic—it’s math. And it’s the kind of smart arbitrage that can turn ordinary investments into extraordinary ones.

Schedule a FREE consultation:

https://wealthformulabanking.com

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