I Left Wall Street to Build Real Wealth | What I Discovered Changed Everything…

Speaker 0 | 00:00.280

The 2008 crash changed everything for Russ Morgan. He was a CFP who was completely bought into Wall Street until the people he trusted the most had no answers when the market tanked. That crisis led him to meeting Nelson Nash and learning about infinite banking. This led him down a further path to find wealth outside of Wall Street. In this interview, Russ shares the turning points, the painful mistakes, and the powerful frameworks he now uses to build over $50,000 and counting per month in passive income. Let's dive in. Infinite banking is a hot topic. Alternative investing is a hot topic. You are a co-founder of Wealth About Wall Street. You guys have communities of people that want to build wealth outside of Wall Street, want to understand passive income, look at alternative investing, and then also use life insurance. Now, life insurance and alternative investing have some bad raps tied to it, and you can be a train wreck if you do it improperly. So with all that set up, I would love to hear your framework of like number one, like. how you got into infinite banking because like you were personal friends with nelson nash i i met our nelson nash through you and so that that that is a piece and then what may what was the epiphany that's like infinite banking might be the foundation but it doesn't doesn't necessarily it's not the mechanism that's going to make you wealthy and so i know i like that's like i essentially did your whole talk but i want you to fill it in and you let me know if there's anything else that you want to talk about well i'm going to correct you and say i don't think many people necessarily want to invest.

Speaker 1 | 01:29.364

and whole life insurance or saving like whole life insurance and do infinite banking i don't think people want to invest outside of wall street interesting okay reason i say that is because people just want to solve problems okay that's right they have goals and objectives and they won't put that in a box right like if whatever they were doing was working they would never have come across infinite banking i would have never come across infinite bank as you know i was an investment advisor right like whole life insurance was the furthest from the things that i would have ever recommended to someone much less buy and own Right. But it wasn't until the market crash in 08 and I realized how backwards that model was. And all the mentors I had at the time that I'd been listening to for five years of all these financial strategies and models and why things work over 40, 50 years. Right. All of them were hands up to the sky. I had no idea what was going on or why I wouldn't do it again. And that left me uneasy. Right. When the people that I trusted, I mean, the average clients who given their their financial advisor, their buddies, whoever. money, they're anticipating and expecting them to know what's going on. And when I realized that, you know, Hey, I was five years in the business. Yeah. Maybe I haven't figured it all out. I knew some things. I was certified financial planner, yada, yada, yada. But yet the people that were 25 years in the business, 30 years in the business, and they didn't know that was super scary to me. And that's what sent me on a path. That's, you know, God's providence that, you know, my path and Nelson Nash's path crossed paths. And I was not. too, you know, like proud to say, Hey, I want to learn. I want to learn any strategy that can help me avoid ever going through this pain that I just dealt with personally, much less my clients. And I think the same thing's true with investing is that when the markets were going crazy and nobody knew what to do, people are seeking ways to become financially free. They want to spend more time with family. They want to do things that bring them joy. And the traditional markets are just not a fit. It's a great way for the investment world to make. fees is not a great way for people to have freedom.

Speaker 0 | 03:30.161

Yeah. Yeah. When you were, you started off as a CFP, you know, and you're doing the typical way of helping people. What was the epiphany that you had that you were like, there might be something better. And then what was the epiphany for life insurance? I was, I'm assuming that they may have been two separate or is it the same thing.

Speaker 1 | 03:48.157

Yeah. So January, 2009, I'm at an event. very similar to this, you know, it's four or 500 CPAs, financial advisors, CFPs in the room, and everybody's kind of on their heels because the market just dropped 40%. And that was a little bit shocking. And all of a sudden this guy,

Speaker 0 | 04:06.820

Nelson Nash gets on the stage and he's talking about how you let him on the stage and that's this event. Wow. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 04:12.617

They were like talking about how simple it is with life when your money is in a... an asset that only goes up and you can use that asset to finance the needs of your life. And I thought, this is sort of stupid, but, you know, I don't have anything else to lose. And so I read his book on the flight home from Orlando to Birmingham. I finished his book. I turned it over on the back. He has his address, which is Birmingham, Alabama. And I thought, this is crazy. And so I spent the next six months trying to disprove it. And a lot like C.S. Lewis with the Bible, like every, you know, iteration I went deeper, it just was proving the fact. that I needed this sort of thing in my life. And so that was really my entree into it. My wife has started a dental practice December 28th of 2008. So just before I left on this trip to go down to Orlando, Florida. She had borrowed $700,000 from Bank of America. That's the number one leading dental provider out there. My father-in-law, who I was his investment advisor back in 2006, 2007, we had put in several million dollars in stocks that he had. His father had passed down to him when he passed, and we'd set some stop losses on those, and obviously those all triggered in 2007, early 2008. He's sitting on seven figures of cash. We're both scared to death. And I read this book called Becoming Your Banker, How Banks Lend Your Money to Other People, and they live off the gap. And I thought, we should apply this immediately. So the first thing we did is my father-in-law took the money from cash, paid off my wife's $700,000 dental loan, and she started paying him back 8.95% that she was paying Bank of America. And that was the launch of what we were doing.

Speaker 0 | 05:51.315

Now, Nelson has passed away, but you've known him for how long?

Speaker 1 | 05:57.335

So yeah, that was 2009 when I met him and he passed, I believe in 2019. Is that correct? So 10 years.

Speaker 0 | 06:05.280

The world's worst, no, let me rephrase that. The world's hardest interview is trying to interview Nelson and get him to answer a direct question. Okay. So I remember going out to lunch with you and him and I'm like this eager kid. I got like my checklist of questions and we're on question number one and we're like going through Exodus in the Bible. I'm like Nelson, we don't got all day here. Like I need, and, and, but there was something like beautiful as I reflect back on that to be like, he, he, he wasn't into, how would you explain it? He just wasn't into the hype that like, he just, he, it seemed like everything was just simpler for him and how he viewed things. What were some of the, like, what is your thoughts on that? And then what were some of the things that you learned from Nelson just as, you know, he. pop by the office and hang out with you guys. There's not a lot of people that could say that.

Speaker 1 | 06:56.625

Yeah. Nelson was all about learning. He's a constant learner, most well-read person I've ever met. Every time he stopped by the office, which was every two weeks, usually he would be bringing a new book by that he had just finished reading. And I'm like, Nelson, I've got 20 books that you've given me. And I'm on like page 10 of the first one. And he would ask me questions that would always make me feel dumber. Like he would be like, Russ, what do you know about the Boers War? And I'm like, nothing. And this was before ChatGPT. So I couldn't have figured it out and summarized it in seconds. But what I realized is that Nelson wanted you to think. And it was all about if you just give someone the answer, they don't think. And I apply that now. And I know you have a small daughter. My son constantly asks me, Dad, how do you spell this? What's the answer to that? I go, what do you think? And that's just a reflection back to the way Nelson would treat us is that if he just gave us the answer, we wouldn't have been able to grow in what we've been able to do. I just think that his legacy is that he wanted to give like you want to give, Caleb. And I see a lot of you in him, you know, like just the fact of you want to bring people together. Your challenge is that we would all level up as a result of that. And, you know, his legacy is definitely far exceeded. what most people out there would know. But in the circles that we're in, there's hundreds of thousands, not millions of lives are impacted because of Nelson Ash.

Speaker 0 | 08:18.682

The biggest pro that you see in the infinite banking space and the biggest con that you see right now in the infinite banking space?

Speaker 1 | 08:26.260

Man, the biggest pro is that you get access to cash that most people otherwise wouldn't. The biggest obstacle to becoming financially free is lack of access to cash. Most people have just trapped money in places they can't touch it. So they go, oh, Russ, I don't understand where I'm supposed to invest. How do you invest in all these deals? How do you see all these deals? Well, I have access to cash. When I have access to cash, deals find me, right? Most people don't, right? Those deals find somebody else. The cons, you know, it's just like anything. I mean, there's bad apples in every industry. I would just say, you know.

Speaker 0 | 08:55.071

Stay off of TikTok.

Speaker 1 | 08:55.789

There's a lot of people learning it, right? And, of course, they want to get out there. They want to try to get a new client. They probably misrepresent what it is and what it's not. Yeah. It's a tool to save cash. If you understand how to use that tool, it can be successful. All tools can be used for good or bad. I think some people just need to learn a lot more.

Speaker 0 | 09:13.035

Okay. Let's talk about alternative investing, your mastermind. I know that there's even something special that you have to offer our audience as well. Hey, it's Caleb Williams here.

Speaker 2 | 09:22.497

I'm just interrupting this video quickly to invite you to check out our Ann Nesset Vault. You may have been there. We've actually revamping it. And if you are somebody that wants to learn more about is life insurance the right fit for me, Like, does this and asset make sense? Like, does this actually help me be more efficient? We've put together a 10 minute documentary style video that I think does a really, really good job giving the history, why the and asset, different setups and designs that we use. And then we have an and asset vault that gives like case studies, calculators, handbooks, and so much more. We are here to serve you, whether it's a conversation, whether it's education or the video. So make sure to go check out andasset.com slash vault. Learn more.

Speaker 0 | 10:01.815

How did you, so you're learning about the power of life insurance, was that that same time that you're like, I want nothing to do with Wall Street? Or was it kind of like a slow fade where you're learning about this and you're becoming less and less interested? Or since 2008 where you're like, I want nothing to do with these Wall Street assets?

Speaker 1 | 10:18.147

Yeah. For the first probably five years, man, all I did was just stack cash and life insurance because I didn't know any better, but I knew I didn't want to put in a Wall Street. It wasn't until we started our podcast in 2017 that I really started to go, okay, what is it that we do with this money? Because clients were asking me, what next? The simple things that we had learned early on, oh, you can use it to buy cars or pay off debts or whatever. But people were like, but what next? What am I supposed to do? And I was like, I don't know. So I had to learn, man. I needed to start seeking that information out. So we started doing tons and tons of podcasts. and then I started investing for myself. And what I learned over time is that we all have this thing called investor DNA. It's how we're trained, the way that we're built. God designed us a specific way to see the world from a specific lens. And certain investments that we make, we will enjoy more because it aligns. Others that we don't. Example, first quote unquote passive income thing I ever invested in was a single family property in my college town. I did it in 2007. I hated it. I had no idea why I hated it. But later on, when I figured out what investor DNA was, I'm an influencer. I'm somebody who likes to be hands-on. I couldn't influence this property that's two hours away from me. And so I didn't end up buying hundreds of properties like all my friends who are successful in real estate. Well, the first deal that we did where we actually did a short-term rental, and we could get on a podcast. We could get on our social media and say, hey, by the way, if you're staying in Birmingham, Alabama, stop by, wake up in Birmingham. We've got a short-term rental that you can stay in. And we had somebody stay and it was like, oh, that's pretty cool. Yeah. So we scaled that from zero units over 25 units in 18 months.

Speaker 0 | 12:00.308

Wow.

Speaker 1 | 12:01.152

I was like, man, this is it. And so that connection of how I was wired and then applying that to investing strategies. So, yes, we built over $50,000 a month in passive income by leaning into investor DNA, teaching other people. Just because I do it doesn't mean you should. You should only invest from your investor DNA and then develop your own investor buy box so that you can be. investing objectively, not subjectively and emotionally.

Speaker 0 | 12:26.568

I know that you go deep in when people come to your events or go through your courses, but how would you explain investor DNA over the microphone? How could someone listening or watching this get a glimpse of what their investor DNA is?

Speaker 1 | 12:39.419

Most people have taken a personality assessment, say like DISC, right? Either you're a D, driver, I, influencer, S, like steady, dependable, C, analytical, right? So that profile is going to really look at different investments and and you're going to say, oh, these are pros to me, or these are going to be cons to me. So as an I, investing in something like long-term rentals, that's pretty boring. It's super stable, right? There's no excitement in it. It's not going to fluctuate. Well, the person who's listening who's an S or a C is like, that's exactly what I want, right? That sounds amazing. That would be pros. Well, for the I profile, that's going to be a con. So whenever I start investing in short-term rentals, there's some excitement to that. There's ability to add a business element to it. That was exciting. I could put my hands on a D and I were like, yeah, I like that element of it. Now the S and Cs are like, well, but wait a second, where did you guys create that from scratch? It wasn't a model that you were like, that was a franchise that you followed. No, I don't want to do that. That's a con. So the investor DNA is just taking our personality assessments, looking at investments and knowing the pros, the cons and the key factors. So what we did is took all of these different investments that we were making and interviewing people from. And then we took all the assessment and started layering them over top of it. So then we could help people in our community say, oh, if I'm a influencer, if I'm a driver, if I'm an analytical, how would I look at these 15 or 20 different elements on the passive income matrix?

Speaker 0 | 14:05.639

What would you say to the person that is an entrepreneur? And a lot of times entrepreneurs are terrible investors because they look through the lens of wanting to optimize everything like what they did in their business. And so they end up investing in alternative assets that are not great. But they're taking their strength over here and trying to put it over here. Is there a counter argument to be made that diversification means like, if you're an I over here in your business, you should invest in S and Cs? I'm just trying to play devil's advocate with you around that.

Speaker 1 | 14:39.037

I think you're making a point of, if I am a I, meaning I'm low process oriented, high risk taker, see one deal, do one deal. like, yes, you need to understand that there's things that you need to learn. Most people that start investing early on make mistakes because they don't see enough deals. They assume there's only one good deal. And so they make an investment in it. Maybe it works out. Maybe it doesn't. So I would tell people that you need to learn how to become a good investor. You know, Kiyosaki has a great quote. It says, no good about investments. There's only good about investors.

Speaker 0 | 15:08.498

That's great.

Speaker 1 | 15:09.185

And so few people are good investors. They've never trained themselves. Like to be a great business owner, you trained yourself. You took, You went to masterminds. You took sales courses. You learned operation courses. You implemented EOS or whatever in your business. But they've never learned how to become a good investor. And so that was the thing that we realized early on is that we have to start training people how to be good investors. We have to shape the expectations that they have. And if you will invest not emotionally, but from a framework, the odds of success go way up.

Speaker 0 | 15:40.456

That's good. When it comes to some of your best investments and worst investments, we'd love to know some of your best. Best wins and some of your losers rest.

Speaker 1 | 15:51.237

Man, lots of losers, right? I don't think we get enough time in this podcast to talk about all the losers. One, I would just disclaimer, don't follow what I'm telling you. Because the reality is that your investor DNA is probably different than mine. Just because I can do it doesn't mean you can. And not because I'm better than you. I just have different resources. I've never networks in different personality assessment. Yours are different and will apply differently. We, you know, I think our gifting is understanding business and finding investments that we could turn into businesses. And we did that with the short-term rental space. We grew it to $25,000, $30,000 a month for a regular probably 18 to 20 months. We turned around and sold that business, sold it owner finance. I still get paid even though I don't even own it anymore. The other thing is that we learned this concept called investing land flipping. And it was an amazing strategy. We learned the business and then we partnered with an operator who was doing it. And we just got into business with them. that produces a little over 30 something thousand a month, every single month for us. And, you know, obviously that's huge success. It runs like a business. It's also in our eyes, one of the, you know, more stable assets when it comes to what's going on in the markets.

Speaker 0 | 17:01.323

Yeah. They're not printing land, you know,

Speaker 1 | 17:03.744

but most people don't know that it's not about buying land, like going into San Francisco or Miami or wherever downtown, uh, you know, Nashville and trying to buy a piece of property and flip it. No, we're buying raw vacant land in the middle of nowhere. It turned around and it's selling on Craigslist. We buy it for two grand. We sell it for 10 grand for a couple hundred dollars down, a couple hundred dollars a month. And that's cash flowing. Worst investments, man, tons, right? I was talking to somebody out there about, they were talking about Bitcoin. So one of the things we did is we took $175,000. We invested in a Bitcoin mining fund, right? We had a friend of ours that was an expert in that space. We'd had a lot of success with him mining Ethereum up until Ethereum could no longer be mined. He's like, hey. I'm going to take 10 investors. We're going to do a big, huge Bitcoin farm. I've got all the technology. You've got all the energy. We're going to turn this money into 10X. So it took $175,000 four years ago. And today it's worth 35 grand. Had I just bought Bitcoin, it would be worth almost 700 grand. So I look at little things. There's elements about that. I probably jumped too quickly. I try to use past experience from something smaller that I was doing with these little $10,000 computers that I was mining Ethereum to a... bigger kind of fund model. Anytime you get outside of investing through your knowledge base, investing in direct operators that already have experience doing that very thing over and over and over again, that's where I can look back and go, that loss, that loss. I mean, I've lost millions of dollars at this point.

Speaker 0 | 18:34.901

But even with the L's, you're doing quite well on it overall. Like just if you compare it to Wall Street, Russ, you compare it to Wall Street and all the money that you've made. Yeah. And you put it into the Wall Street deal or in what you're up to. I know that you and Joey, your business partner, you talk about each month your passive income and what you guys get. And so how has that journey been?

Speaker 1 | 18:59.781

Yeah, so in 2020, we decided to start publishing our passive income report to the world. And at the time, we had $2,500 a month between the two of us. It was pretty laughable. And the majority of that came from that first short-term rental that we did that month before. We had a couple of long-term rentals and it wasn't producing a lot. But what you track and measure grows and what you track and measure and report on grows exponentially. And what we learned and experienced through that gave us the ability to teach and create mastery. And yeah, we're a little over $50,000 a month right now.

Speaker 0 | 19:33.679

Passive income.

Speaker 1 | 19:34.304

And passive income every month. And this is from businesses that, again,

Speaker 0 | 19:37.258

we don't- And that only took five years?

Speaker 1 | 19:39.926

Yeah, we started five years ago. And it's just been one of those areas that is, you know, we think we define passive income greater than monthly expenses is financial freedom. And so our goal is to keep growing that we don't need that money. We don't use that money. But that's, that's kind of our safety. That's our patient, our parachute, right? Like, as business owner, entrepreneur type, so we're going to keep driving, going to keep building businesses. But we need a little bit of a parachute to lean back on to go, hey, if all this stuff crashed and burn, am I good? And so that's kind of what that was for us. Definitely lots of lessons along the way, but I think that that's why people get attracted to us. They go, Oh, I need that. I want to keep building, but I need that parachute. How do I do that?

Speaker 0 | 20:20.458

So talk to me about life insurance and how it integrates with what you're doing on the... passive income investing alternative. Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 20:27.771

One of the things that we did is we said, okay, how do we turn active income into passive income while we sleep? How do we automate that process? Because as business owners, entrepreneur types, we're kind of squirrels, right? It's hard to keep us on track for anything for some long period of time. So we created a framework that literally took the income that we were making, separated what we were not using and got it over to what we say. the financial freedom side of the equation. We put it in a hub. So that hub for us is life insurance. We're sticking in cash-free life insurance. But then we use the frameworks of investor DNA, investor buybacks to start buying assets. And we only flow that cash flow back into that hub. So now it starts replicating itself. Now it starts growing. Most people make the mistake of one, not getting the money out of their hands. And so they spend it, right? Or they take the money of where they're investing. And they allow that to somehow creep back into their personal side of the equation. And so it never grows. So for us, building what we call the passive income operating system, which has been probably the thing that most people grasp to, they go, oh, I want to build that operating system for building passive income. How do I do that?

Speaker 0 | 21:36.368

Yeah, I love it. Russ, is there anything else on your mind as we wrap this thing up that you're like, hey, this is something I've learned. This can help your audience. I know that, again, there's... some really exciting things that you guys are working on that you're going to share on how people can just get more involved in what you guys are doing as a community. But this is your time. Is there anything else that as your process that you want to share?

Speaker 1 | 22:00.762

I think we have to be able to inspect what we expect in everything that we do. If it's in business, we have to be able to know when I delegate something to somebody, is it being done well?

Speaker 0 | 22:10.989

That's good.

Speaker 1 | 22:11.473

Same thing with investing. Do I understand the investments? Do I understand what the greatest questions are to ask the operators that I'm investing in so I can inspect what I expect? And maybe with taxes, with our tax professionals, do we understand how to read our tax return? Have we been giving ourselves that knowledge so that we can ask better questions? Better questions on all three of those areas levels us up. I think that people have to be challenged in that, that we can't put our head in the sand. We can't advocate that responsibility to somebody else. People hear the words passive income and they assume it's uninvolved. That's not true. Passive income is... I've pre-funded it, right? Like I pre-funded it with money. I pre-funded it with effort. I pre-funded it with knowledge. Then it creates some passivity in the future, but it doesn't mean that you won't be involved.

Speaker 0 | 22:56.373

Leverage has a dirty term to it, but isn't it more like leverage income? Like you're leveraging your dollars, your input, and you're creating income streams not based on your time or your direct input, but what is your thoughts on calling it leverage income?

Speaker 1 | 23:12.744

I like leverage and I'm not afraid of leverage, right? I think a leverage is just a tool. And the people who get in trouble with leverage is the ones that never learned how to use the tool.

Speaker 0 | 23:21.336

But leverage is not just financial leverage, just one piece, but leverage could be- People leverage, right? We're having a conversation that more than one person's going to see. Right. Exactly. Hundreds of people, if not thousands of people are going to watch this. That's a form of us having one conversation and these microphones and cameras are a form of leverage. And so that's kind of the lens I look through everything. 100%. and it's a passive income has such a dirty connotation because there's people that are selling the beach vacations and blah. But I like it because it's something to aspire to that you don't have to work. You don't have to work to earn. And to be honest, I have not found a better name because even leveraged cashflow or income doesn't hit the same way passive does. But if you find a better name, or if you guys have another way of saying it, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

Speaker 1 | 24:10.684

I would say this too is like, you know, yes, passive income, the people who are selling the dream lifestyle, you know, the laptop lifestyle, you can make tens of thousands of dollars in two months with no money down, you know, with just buying a $5,000 course kind of thing. They're not too different though, than the people who are like, Hey, pay off all your debts and you're debt free. Like they're, they're, they're playing on emotion and financial decisions made emotionally are never well, right? Like you have to have education. You need to learn things, But then you need to start experiencing them slowly. so that you can start teaching your friends around you. And a lot of times people just need to level up. Most people are surrounded around people who are no further along than they are. And so then they bring their ideas to their friend group. I always say, you know, you're in the right room, right? When your aspirations are the daily accomplishments of the people around you.

Speaker 0 | 24:56.596

That's good. That's really good. That's good. Russ, how do you want to land the plane?

Speaker 1 | 25:01.220

Man, this is great. Thank you for the platform opportunity. And if people are interested in this, I would say go to what what wall street.com forward slash P I O S. There's an ebook on how to get that passive income operating system installed. It will lead you to our community, which is free. We've got 10,000 people in there who are learning how to become financially free through building passive income exceeds monthly expenses. And man support this guy. Like this is an amazing platform. I love you to death and just what you're accomplishing. I just wish I was half as smart as you and could have done it half as early as you are.

Speaker 0 | 25:32.597

Well, I'm grateful and I'm doing what I'm doing because of people like you. So thank you for opening up your home, shadowing me or letting me shadow you early on. And it's been fun to follow you. And it's also been fun to like, as I have questions, I know I can always go to you. And it's been fun vice versa, where we're able to collaborate on things and talk through ideas and even share with me an idea today that I'm going to think a lot about. and I think could very much... be a game changer for me and even taking this event to the next level. So thank you for that. And I appreciate you making it.

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