(intro)

Welcome to The Gold Collar Investor Podcast, with your host Pancham Gupta. This podcast is dedicated to helping the high-paid professionals to break out of the Wall Street investments and create multiple income streams. Here’s your host Pancham Gupta.

Tom Burns

Hi. This is Tom Burns, author of Why Doctors Don’t Get Rich. You’re listening to The Gold Collar Investor Podcast with Pancham Gupta.

Pancham Gupta

Welcome to The Gold Collar Investor Podcast. This is your host Pancham. I really appreciate you for tuning in today. My guest is Joey Mure. He is the Founder and Partner at Wealth Without Wall Street, brings impact, integrity, and generosity to the company every day. He hopes to be remembered as a lover of Jesus, devoted husband, and a faithful father. Despite dreaming, around the age 10, of becoming an orthopedic surgeon, Joey was in the mortgage business for 11 years before moving to finance in 2014. His personal mentor, Nelson Nash — another man of integrity and impact — is someone Joey deeply admires. Joey’s strengths in building relationships, asking great questions, and influencing and empowering people with the Wealth Without Wall Street message make him invaluable to the company’s mission. Aside from Wealth Without Wall Street, Joey listens to Sharran Srivatsaa’s Business School Podcast and Donald Miller’s Building A StoryBrand Podcast.

(interview)

Pancham Gupta

Hey, Joey. Welcome to the show.

Joey Mure

Hey, so glad to be here, man. Anytime we can talk with like-minded people about passive income and financial freedom and no Wall Street, I’m in the right place.

Pancham Gupta

Yeah, exactly. Before we get started, are you ready to fire up my listeners break out of Wall Street investments?

Joey Mure

It would be my pleasure.

Pancham Gupta

Awesome. I love that energy. I love that passion. So, let’s get started, Joey. Why don’t we begin with your background, how you got started into what you’re doing today? Give us that background.

Joey Mure

Absolutely. Man, I was a mortgage loan officer for Wells Fargo Bank for almost nine years. It was 11 years total in the banking industry. Man, I was that guy. I was the guy working 60 hours a week. I was making great income, making well over $300,000 a year. I never felt like I was getting ahead. I don’t know if you can relate or if you have people on the show that can relate. But, man, the people I was working the hardest for, my family, were the ones that I was the furthest from. Because I was constantly having to keep up on the hamster wheel of creating income, active income.

It dawned on me. There was one time. It was at the beach with my five daughters. By the way, five daughters and one wife. I mean, six women in the house. It’s a tough day. It’s tough. I was at the beach with them. I’ll never forget. I sent them down to the beach and said, “Hey, I just have to take one more phone call. I’ll be right down right after you.” Three hours later, I’m walking down the boardwalk from the condo to the beach. There they are walking back towards me with just scowls on their face. You are such an idiot that you have given up our beach time together as a family to continue to work. You know what? It dawned on me. It’s like I don’t have any income coming in unless I produce it. So, something had to change. I didn’t have a real clear vision of what it was going to be, but I knew I couldn’t continue to live like this. I was going to lose the thing that was the most important to me, because I had to keep this hamster wheel running.

Fast forward. A couple years later, I had met my now business partner, Russ Morgan. He started coaching me on this concept of the Infinite Banking Concept. I started being able to put large amounts of cash into my control. I’m no longer putting money in Wall Street, 401Ks, IRAs, 529 plans, any of that garbage that separates you from your money. I started getting this money in one place. Then it was like now I can start deploying that into assets that create passive income. I got my passive income shirt on for you right now today, Pancham. Because I’m so fired up. Through that process, we were able to create Wealth Without Wall Street, a community that people can find their own path to financial freedom. It’s been an amazing ride from there.

Pancham Gupta

That’s awesome. Let’s peel the onion a little bit. You mentioned so many things, but I believe some of the listeners would have absolutely resonate with that — going on that hamster wheel, going nine to five. I know after COVID, not a lot of people work from the office, but they work from home. Some of that pain of commuting may have gone down. But still, they’re working nine to five and providing for the family and getting away from all the important things that they’re doing it for, all that hard work.

In your nine years, total 11 years, in mortgage banking business when you were at Wells Fargo, what was the thing that — I know you mentioned that your five daughters when they were coming down on that boardwalk, that dawned on you. But what happened after that? Can you talk about specifics? Did you suddenly find this person? Suddenly, it was like good happy days. Was there a struggle there? What did you do next? If someone’s listening and they have that moment right now, that exact moment that you had when you got that sort of walking down, and they’re like, oh, man, Joey is the guy who’s talking exactly that I want in my life. But what do I do next? What did you do next? How long did it take you from that point on to actually — I’m assuming you quit your job and you’re nine to five — to get to that place?

Joey Mure

Yeah, great question. Number one, it was an imperfect journey. It was just getting started with what we can see right in front of us. The benefit of where we’re at now is we’ve been able to look backwards and say, what did we do that we would have continued to do? What did we do that we would not have continued to do that didn’t give us the results that we were looking for, that didn’t give us the outcomes that we were expecting? We were able to really take that and truncate that into a process that anybody can follow, which is amazing. I’ll tell you what our first step was. Like I said, Russ gave me this book, the infinite banking, Becoming Your Own Banker by Nelson Nash — which is crazy because Nelson Nash lived in Birmingham, Alabama where we live now. We did not know at the time. We just knew that this great book, it was earth shattering to read it. It started to challenge the way we think about money, period. We turned it over on the back, and there it is. This guy lives in Birmingham, Alabama with us. We were just like, this is unbelievable.

He became a mentor to us, to Russ and I. Again, I was his client at the time. He started to teach me this. We started to set up this system of policies through infinite banking. I started putting over $60,000 a year away. To be honest, up to that point, I had never saved that much money in one place. It was like it unlocked something in my brain. As I mentioned, then I started to compile cash into the system that was begging me to do something with it.

I want to tell you this really quickly. People that have 401Ks and IRAs and things of that nature, I want you to ask yourself this one question. When was the last time you actually considered what you would invest in through those vehicles? When was the last time that you actually considered the end investment, or did you just turn off that creativity in your brain and say — it’s on autopilot — it’s going to be invested by this ETF, these mutual funds, whatever it may be, and I can’t affect the outcome”? That’s what I was doing. I had turned off the creativity of my brain. But once you start putting capital into a location that you own and control, now it’s asking you to go do something with it. It makes you become an investor. You have to start thinking about, what would I invest in? What are the things I’m looking for? What’s my buy box? What’s the opportunity if I invest in this? What’s the tax benefits if I invest in this? What’s the outcome, the end game plan of this syndication? Do I align with this business plan? To be honest, that was the beginning of my journey to being an investor.

Pancham Gupta

Got it. I have a bunch of questions there. But before that, to listeners, if you’re listening and you have never heard of Infinite Banking Concept, there is a podcast episode that we did. You can go to thegoldcollarinvestor.com/show5 and you can listen to all about it. Again, one hour is a short time to even scratch the surface, but you will get to hear the basics. Joey, you met with your partner, your business partner now, Russ. When you had that moment where you guys are working together, co-workers, and he gave you that book, suddenly you were investing and got yourself a mentor in Nelson Nash. Then you started basically having this, your own banking concept. Then you had this money sitting aside you wanted to invest. It kind of forced you to become an investor. I’m assuming you were still working full time at that time, right? You were investing on the side. Where did you start investing with that capital?

Joey Mure

Well, actually, the longer part of the story was, I was still in the mortgage business for four years while Russ and I work together. I really didn’t start investing until I chose to leave the mortgage business in 2014. Because I got so fired up about what we were doing with this infinite banking stuff, I was like, “Russ, I’m going to come help. I’m going to come work with you to get the word out about this.” Because there were so few people that even knew about it. If I went around to all the different VPs of Wells Fargo Bank and I told them, “Hey, this is a strategy that I’m using. What do you think about it,” almost without a doubt, 100% of them thought, “Man, putting money into whole life insurance, that’s the dumbest thing anybody’s ever told you to do.” Literally, these VPs of the bank, they would tell me that, that I would never put money into whole life insurance.

The funny thing was, Pancham, if you look at the balance sheet on fdic.gov of any bank, their largest tier one capital is found in whole life insurance. Isn’t that amazing? Cash value life insurance. They actually were ensuring the very VPs that were telling me that was the dumbest idea they’ve ever heard of. The bank that they work for was simultaneously putting their capital into policies on their lives, and they did not know that this existed. Anyways, for four years, I was doing this privately with as a client. I left the business. I left the mortgage business and started with him in 2014. We launched our podcast in 2017. That’s where we really started to figure out where can we start investing. Because we were asking people all across the country who are the best passive income sources? Where are they? How do we get involved in them? That’s when we started putting our capital to work that we had been building for roughly six years or seven years at that time.

Pancham Gupta

That’s great. Let me ask you this. The moment you quit your job, how hard was it for you? I had quit my job, and it was really hard for me. I don’t know about you. A lot of people have their own journeys and their own struggles and their own mindset. They’re given the paycheck and the benefits and all that. How hard was it for you to quit back in 2014? How did you overcome that?

Joey Mure

It was an immense step. My wife did not work at the time. She doesn’t work now. She homeschools our kids. To be honest, I was at a conference, and I got so fired up thinking about this. I came home. She was pregnant, actually, with one of our daughters at that time. I said, “You know what? I really feel like God’s telling me I need to get out here and do this. I need to get out and teach people what I’ve been learning.” Again, remember, I was making over $300,000 a year, and I was telling her I’m going to start a business from scratch. There’s no income for who knows how long. I’m expecting, Pancham. I’m literally expecting my wife to slap me or something, like, “What is wrong with you that you would think that this even makes sense?” But I literally felt like God was telling me, “You need to go and do this.” I told her. Her first words out of her mouth were, “You should absolutely do that.” I thought, holy cow. If my wife thinks that this is a good idea, I’m on board. And so, we did.

I will tell you this. The only way that I was able to make that transition was because I had been putting, like I said, 60k a year away into the system. I had not deployed it out into all these investments yet. So, I knew I had a couple $100,000 sitting there in case I needed it. That is a nugget that I want to share with the world. When you put yourself in a position of liquidity, you can make risky choices that could be far reaching down the road. I don’t know how many people right now that need to hear that, but there are people that have been putting money away into places they can’t touch until they’re in their 60s. That if the greatest opportunity came across their desk right now, they could not take advantage of it. If the trajectory of their life could be dramatically changed, if they could just go one year without a paycheck, they could not take advantage of it. That’s a problem. That’s something I want to call people into. Man, put money into your control. Quit playing this Wall Street nonsense in putting money away with a hope that you can maybe one day retire. Start living today.

Pancham Gupta

That’s awesome. We have a similar mindset when it comes to that. Given that it’s now eight years for you to actually quit your job — I’m sure it was not a straight line. All these eight years, it’s up and down as always for any business — since then, can we talk about how do you think about in the things that you want to invest in? If someone is listening right now, listening to you and fired up and all that, but they don’t have clarity on what can they invest in — if they don’t understand IBC, Infinite Banking Concept, they can listen to show number five. I’m sure they can go on your podcast, listen to that and learn about it — how can they really learn on what is their passion for investing?

Joey Mure

What a great question. Here’s the thing that I love about that question. You didn’t say, “What have you had the most success in investing in?” Because that’s what everybody wants to hear. That’s what everybody wants to know. Whenever people hear the name of our show — the name of our company is Wealth Without Wall Street — they say, what do you invest in? Because we have just been taught to be like mockingbirds, to go and just figure out what someone else is doing and try to mimic it and say, “Oh, it must work for you, so then it will also work for me.” It’s just not true.

You are an individual investor. God has created you with a very specific way you see the world, very specific experiences, very specific resources that are available to you — both time, energy and any sort of capital. Those things all meld together to create what we call an Investor DNA profile. You have a specific way that you need to look at your investing that doesn’t apply to everybody else. So, we created this assessment. It’s based off of the DISC assessment. Are you familiar with that?

Pancham Gupta

Yeah, I am. But can you talk about it real quick for the listeners?

Joey Mure

Yeah. DISC is D-I-S-C. D would be like somebody who’s more dominant, more direct. They’re much more fired up about going fast and not super detailed all the time. They’re just more direct. I would be somebody who’s more of the life of the party, somebody who wants to be the center of attention, and really a super high people person. S is somebody who’s more steady, loyal, committed to relationships, and things of that nature. Then a high C is somebody who’s going to be more detail-oriented, who’s very focused on due diligence and very risk averse, that sort of thing. Once you take this assessment, it starts to tell you now take that assessment and hold it up against our passive income matrix.

We have about 10 different passive income sources that are available on this matrix that you start to look at. If you’re a high D, what would you think about short-term rentals? What are the pros? What are the cons? What are the resources or key factors that you need to take in consideration as it relates to time, money, energy, salesmanship, any of those things? We have a whole matrix that explains both short-term rentals, long-term rentals as a turnkey option, e-commerce — I’m trying to think of all the things — syndications. Again, there’s about 10 of those things. What we want to do is help people to whittle it down from 10 down to picking 1 or 2. Then go and find the coach that can help you go deep into that one or two areas, and really get going fast. Because we know from experience. If you pick the wrong path, just because of the returns available or potential returns, it may be a terrible fit for who you are as an investor or the wrong time. It can dramatically stunt your growth as an investor if you go the wrong path. We found that it was necessary to build something like this to help people save time to get to financial freedom.

Pancham Gupta

That’s awesome. You mentioned before the show there is some page that you have set up where people can go and get this.

Joey Mure

Yeah, I’ll tell you. It’s wealthwithoutwallstreet.com/goldcollarinvestor. On that page, you’ll see that there’s a financial freedom analyzer quiz. Number one, there’s a chance to meet with a coach for 15-minute call for free. Then there’s also an application to our masterminds that we have available. If you want access to the Investor DNA, my guess would be you need to go ahead and go to one of our 15-minute calls, and talk that through with a coach because they can get you to the right location.

Pancham Gupta

Awesome. That’s great. Once they get that Investor DNA, they can figure out exactly what their DNA is made of and where they can invest, right?

Joey Mure

Absolutely, yeah. Our whole process, we call it the “right next thing.” Most people are all at different points in the journey. Some people have been investing for a while maybe in the wrong direction, and they need to go back and figure out where’s their capital. They need to figure out where they’re losing money along the way that they could have been using to get to their financial freedom number faster. Some people are just starting out, and they have no idea what their vision looks like. And so, we walk them through a process to figure out their vision first, and then where their capital is going, and then what sort of investor they are. There’s a multitude of different ways people can engage in the process, that we figure out what is your right next thing together, and then help you take those steps.

Pancham Gupta

Awesome. This is great, Joey. I’m sure anyone listening, they want to understand their DNA and want to really see the process and the time that Joey’s team have spent in the last 8 or 10 years to set up. If you feel you fall in that category, please go to that page and schedule that call. Let me know if you do, and how’s your experience. Cool, Joey. Great. This is awesome. Anything you would like to add before we move on to the second part of the show?

Joey Mure

Man, I can just tell you this. This is so much fun, right? Talking about the freedom that comes from getting this right. If you’ve been stuck, feeling like I don’t have a way out, I feel like there’s not really a whole lot I can do to affect the number, if you start looking ahead and you look at what’s in your Wall Street accounts, and you start really doing the math, you have $5 million, $10 million to have a satisfactory retirement, that number is insurmountable. But if you just look at your passive income greater than your monthly expenses, if you look at that formula, and you find out, “Man, I only need $6,000 a month to really be free of my job right now,” how much easier is it to create $6,000 a month coming to you passively than to find some way to make $5 to $10 million in some 401k that’s going to potentially lose value that same day that you retire? There’s no way we can control that. Anyways, I just get fired up talking about this stuff.

Pancham Gupta

Absolutely. It shows your passion for this. Keep up what you’re doing. You’re really helping people out. So, thanks, Joey. We’ll be back after this short message.

(break)

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Pancham Gupta

Let’s move on to the second part of the show which I call Taking the Leap Round. I ask these four questions to every guest on my show. My first question for you, Joey, is, when was the first time you invested outside of Wall Street?

Joey Mure

First time was, right as I was leaving my job in the mortgage business, I had two people randomly come to me and say, “Hey, I need a mortgage but the traditional bank will not do the mortgage for me.” They didn’t fit the box. Of course, I knew what the box was because I had done 11 years of looking at deals and helping people through the mortgage process. So, I chose to take some of the capital I built up in my policies and to lend them on an 80% loan-to-value. So, they had to put 20% down on two properties here in Birmingham. These are two separate individuals, by the way. I put them on 15-year notes. They have to pay me back in 15 years. They had to put down 20%. I really like the property. It was like, if something went really bad, I would be able to take these properties back and it’d be easy to resell them. I did those private mortgages. They lasted about two to three years before the people paid them off with a refinance. Because I charged them 10% interest because it was a private, almost like a hard money loan. It worked out really well.

Pancham Gupta

That’s awesome. Wow. The first deal, that’s pretty cool. Did you have any fears that you had to overcome to do those deals?

Joey Mure

I certainly did. Because it was just, you’re stepping into something new. But the best part was is, I was really comfortable with the collateral. I think that was the key for me. If I didn’t have the collateral, it would have been very, very difficult to part with that kind of capital. But my background with mortgage and then being able to literally I could go physically touch this property, and feel good about the investment definitely subsided those fears.

Pancham Gupta

Got it. I’m going to just do a little bit of a detour here. I’m just curious. What is your DNA, Joey? I’m sure you’ve taken your own test, and you’ve invested in many different things. What do you like investing in?

Joey Mure

I’m an SI. I’m really close on the two. Because I like people a lot, but I’m not always the one that wants to be the center of attention, if you can imagine that. S’s love steady, predictable loyal type of returns. Long-term things like private lending, shockingly, is something that I really enjoy because it just has a lot of — it’s been around forever. When you have a really good collateral, you feel good about it long term. One of the cons of private lending is if someone is not paying you back and they have a sob story, I have a really big heart. I don’t want to get caught up in the emotion of it. But that could definitely play into it.

We have done a lot of investing in other things. If you listen to our show when we do our our passive income report, we have a land flipping business, which I love. It’s super, super collateralized, and it is done for us. It’s really hands off. It’s really high returns. Sometimes we make 100% to 300% returns on those transactions. We have a short-term rental business which makes me super nervous, by the way. There are so many potential variables that can go wrong in a short-term loan business, which is not great for S’s. But it’s also been a very big producer for us. It makes us over $100,000 a year net. There are all sorts of other things, I’m sure I could tell you for days. But the S’s love long-term, steady, reliable returns.

But I’ll also say this. When you invest with a partner, you can borrow each other’s strengths. My partner is super high I. He’s like an ID. He likes things that are a little bit more — they would seem more variable to me. But I actually like being involved with him because he’s involved.

Pancham Gupta

Got it. Great. Thank you for sharing that. My third question for you is, can you share with us one investment that did not go as expected?

Joey Mure

Yes. In fact, one of the reasons why we developed the Investor DNA profile is because we learned. I bought a drop shipping company — 100unicorns.com, by the way, if you ever want to check it out. I bought it because I have five daughters. I thought, man, if I have a drop shipping company, I can teach my daughters how a business works. They’ll be excited about it. They’ll love these unicorns, the products, and all the colors and everything else. I got into it. I realized I am a terrible operator. I do not want to know all the technical things of running a website even though it’s simple. A drop shipping company, it’s a simple website.

Pancham Gupta

Can you explain that real quick?

Joey Mure

The drop shipping?

Pancham Gupta

Yeah, for people who don’t know.

Joey Mure

It’s a really simple business model. You work with suppliers, typically in China, through a platform called Ali Express. They put all their products on there. You just pick those products. You put them on a website, which is like to Shopify or one of those platforms. Then you drive traffic to your Shopify store. People click to purchase that particular product, and then you literally connect them with the people in China. They ship the product directly to the client, and you just make the money in between. Let’s say a product costs $50 to buy from China, and they pay me $85 on my website. This happened the other day on a rug that we sell. So, I make the $30 to $35 in between, which just sounds so easy, right?

But if you have to maintain and manage all the intricacies of that website, along with finding the right suppliers and all of the traffic that you have to drive, it’s super difficult for me. Because I don’t have any experience or expertise. So, it became I was spending more money to drive traffic to make less money. It was like I was upside down for almost a year and a half. Finally, I just said, okay, I need to partner with somebody to help me build this properly. Good news is it wasn’t very expensive. Bad news is it taught me that you have to also think about who you are and what your time restraints are, as it relates to that.

Pancham Gupta

Great. Thank you for sharing that. My last question for you is, what is one piece of advice would you give to people who are thinking of investing in Main Street that is outside of Wall Street?

Joey Mure

Oh, man. I hope I’ve made it very clear. Wall Street is an absolute casino that you cannot win. Main Street is what gives you the opportunity for freedom. The bigger question to me is, how long are you willing to put off being present at home with your family? How long are you willing to put off your own dreams? This is a challenge to anybody listening right now. If you cannot think of what you would do with all the free time if you did not have to clock into work tomorrow, then you need to start dreaming again. Because at some point, 5, 10, 15 years into your career, I believe people turn off the creativity of what could be possible for their lives. Because they just put up with whatever they’ve been given. They don’t have a clear path. They don’t have a vision, and they give up.

I want to challenge you. Do not give up. You have way too much to offer this world to just put up with whatever you’ve been given. Be clear on what your path can be. Create a plan and take action. I’m telling you, the returns in Main Street far outweigh what the Wall Street returns are. You can’t even imagine what it would be like on the other side.

Pancham Gupta

That’s awesome, man. I’m fired up. Let’s do some more deals.

Joey Mure

Let’s do it.

Pancham Gupta

Thanks so much for your time here, Joey. How can people connect with you if they want to know more about you and what you’re up to?

Joey Mure

Absolutely. I say go to that page we created, wealthwithoutwallstreet.com/goldcollarinvestor. Whenever you go there, you can also join our community. We have an app that is off of Facebook, off of the social media channels, just for the purpose of this is where people come together. We have almost 8,000 people in our community that are constantly talking about this stuff. So, if you feel alone, like I’m the only person thinking this way, this is where they all live. Come hit us up in there. You can DM me directly in our app, and I’d love to hear that you heard me on Pancham’s podcast.

Pancham Gupta

Awesome, man. Thank you so much for your time here.

Joey Mure

My pleasure.

Pancham Gupta

I hope you enjoyed the show with Joey. Really passionate about building passive income and investing outside of Wall Street. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to reach out to me at p@thegoldcollarinvestor.com. That’s p@thegoldcollarinvestor.com. This is Pancham, signing off. Until next time. Take care.

(outro)

Thank you for listening to The Gold Collar Investor Podcast. If you love what you’ve heard and you want more of Pancham Gupta, visit us at www.thegoldcollarinvestor.com and follow us on Facebook @thegoldcollarinvestor. The information on this podcast are opinions. As always, please consult your own financial team before investing.