Episode 43: How To Discover Your Path To Wealth

Announcer:

This is the WealthAbility® Show with Tom Wheelwright. Way more money, way less taxes.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

Welcome to the WealthAbility® Show. Where we're always discovering how to make way more money and pay way less taxes.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

Hi, this is Tom Wheelwright your host, founder and CEO of WealthAbility®. So here's the question of the day. What if you find that you're in the wrong business or the wrong investments? How do you decide what you should be doing, whether it's for a job, for a business, or as an investor? Today, you're going to discover how to find your path to building wealth and the path that best suits you. So the path for some people, is not the path for other people. And we have a terrific opportunity today because of have a very special guest who has been a client of mine personally for several years now, and I've watched his story unfold and I wanted him to share his story with you because I find it's just such an interesting story of where he's come from and where he's going and the whole journey through. And it's not been painless as you're going to find out. But I'd like to… A special welcome to my good friend and client Buck [Joffrey] . Buck, welcome to the show.

 

Buck Joffrey:

Thanks for having me Tom.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

So Buck, if you would… Your story is so interesting because of, of where you started and if you would normally I have guests just tell a little bit about their background. I actually like to know more and would like to pursue this story of yours because you've gone from a professional basically in one area to a professional in a completely different area over the last few years. So tell us where this whole journey started from and why you started to make these changes.

 

Buck Joffrey:

So yeah, it's obviously kind of a complicated story, but let me just start out by saying that I was, what you and Robert Kiyosaki talked about as the A student and obviously you are an A student too. And some of us get lucky and we reform our ways later on but bottom line is I was a good student, went to college and started studying biochemistry and molecular biology and started thinking about things I could do. And obviously one of the things that A students… One of the things they often consider is medicine. So I went into medicine.

 

Buck Joffrey:

I have always been, particularly back then, a pretty guy looking for the biggest challenge, the biggest… Frankly probably the thing that got me the most kudos back when I was younger, too. And so went to medical school and decided pretty early on, listen, I'm going to go to the top of the food chain. So I decided I was going to be a neurosurgeon. And I got the grades, got everything that I needed and got into one of the best neurosurgery programs. And I was on my way to being a brain surgeon.

 

Buck Joffrey:

I spent two years in neurosurgery and brain surgery at University of Michigan. And then I decided I didn't like the hours. And at this point in my life-

 

Tom Wheelwright:

Oh my heavens.

 

Buck Joffrey:

… I'm thinking to myself, this is the first time that I was starting to make decisions based on anything but pure ego. And it was really hard, frankly. But it was a good lesson because it continued to be a recurring theme in my life that if I could just really dig down and figure out what I really wanted to do, I'll be a lot happier and I have to be able to give things up.

 

Buck Joffrey:

So I actually ended up changing residencies, went to University of California, San Francisco, and still surgical but head and neck outside of the brain. And I did that and I can't say that I was really passionate about it.

 

Buck Joffrey:

I was very academic type, published a lot of papers, always thought I would be on the, I think everybody pretty much thought I'd be on the chairman track. But really what it was, it was again, this constant desire to be really good at what I do and get some accolades for that.

 

Buck Joffrey:

When I finished training, did fellowship in plastics and cosmetic surgery. All of this years later, now we're talking four years in college, four year medical school, seven years of training, and a year fellowship, all of that. I decided towards the end that, Hey, I'm not really that into this.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

Oh my heavens.

 

Buck Joffrey:

Bad timing. You only gave up a couple of decades, right? I wanted to start to… I was starting to be open to the idea there might be something else. I had some cosmetic surgery training and so I got a job in cosmetic surgery and here's a funny thing that happened and this, people talk about their blue book moment and I absolutely had one.

 

Buck Joffrey:

The day I finished my residency graduation, a week later, my wife and I are on our honeymoon and then we're coming back from the honeymoon from Mexico and I'm in Puerto Vallarta and I've never heard of Robert Kiyosaki. I've never heard of entrepreneurship. I don't even really understand entrepreneurship, nothing. And The Cashflow Quadrant was the only book that didn't have a man with long hair, no shirt on it in the bookstore. Okay.

 

Buck Joffrey:

The only reason I picked up the Kiyosaki book, because I had no really no interest in financial stuff. I considered myself a scientist. I read that book on the plane and I came off the plane, a different human being. And as you described it since then, I realized that I'm really an entrepreneur who happens to be a doctor. Okay. From that day forward, all I did was prior to create business out of what… I basically turned everything I did into an entrepreneurial endeavor.

 

Buck Joffrey:

So I decided to start a business that mimicked the business I was into. When the company found out about it, they rightly fired me, which was probably the best thing that could ever happen. It was a little bit of pain and struggle to try to get my own thing going. But within a couple of years. I mean, I was making more money than I would have ever made as an employed position ever. Right.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

So let me stop you just for a second there, Buck. So I also was fired from a position like that. And you talk a lot about, you've been talking a lot about ego. You say it's the best thing that could happen to you, but that's now, okay. Back then I suspect that was not the case. So how'd you work through that?

 

Buck Joffrey:

I think we just react to it. Right, Tom, and you probably know the same thing. You go through a myriad of different emotions, and part of it is that you feel like this is really the first failure in your life. Right? I mean, for me, being fired was the first time I was like feeling rejected.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

Well for sure, cause you'd always been a superstar.

 

Buck Joffrey:                

Oh yeah. Absolute superstar. Right. And so regardless of what the reasoning for it was, I think somebody rejected, said we don't want you. And so that was really painful and my reaction was really a lot of anger. Right? I was just really angry.

 

Buck Joffrey:                

And so at that point, but I didn't really have a choice in some respects because at this point I was fully aware of myself not being employable. I just did not think I could ever work for anybody. And so I said, okay, well I, right now at that point, I had just gotten married, well I'd been married for about a year and we just had a baby. I didn't have much to lose. I didn't own a house. It was pretty much, okay, well, my oldest daughter, I've got about 18 years before I need to pay for college and I'm renting a house. So what do I got to lose? So, all right, so I'm going to start this thing. All these ideas in my head, let's give him a shot. And let's not do this the way everybody does because I don't want to be like everybody else.

 

Buck Joffrey:                

And so at that point it was a very intense drive to get this done, right. And I think what happens with people who have that kind of intensity is they have to figure out how to put it to use. And for me, that's where it came. It was like, okay, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this. I didn't know if it would work or not. I really didn't. And it was scary, but I also knew that I really had no choice because I knew myself. I had this one ability and skill so far that I could create a business out of it work. And once it worked once, then it was an incredible amount of confidence that I could repeat in multiple different businesses. And as you know that's ultimately what ended up happening

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

Well and I think that's a really good point to really hit home here is that that first foray into it, that it just gives you confidence. I remember when I started my first CPA firm and I remember thinking… And I actually remember the conversation I had with my wife at the time saying, I don't care if I only make $30,000 a year for the rest of my life. I cannot go back to work for somebody else. This is so much better. And that was like my big moment and I'm just going, well this is who I am. And what was interesting is I actually found, I don't know if you found this, I had several people, several people I had been friends for years come up to me and say, it's about time that you started your own business because we always knew you would. What took you so long?

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

And a lot of it, it's like you say, it's getting out of our own ego and who we thought we were. And getting to think of who we really are. I was coaching one of the members of our WealthAbility® network, our CPA network yesterday. And I said, You know, business is a lot of personal development. We think it's all about numbers and money and techniques and all that kind of stuff. But when it comes down to it, we have to first decide who we are. And that's really what I'm hearing from your story does, I mean, am I reading that right?

 

Buck Joffrey:                

No, absolutely. And let me add one more layer to it, right? Because entrepreneurs, right? Entrepreneurs, there's entrepreneurs everywhere, right? But what's, what I think is something that people don't talk about is that for extremely successful students who've always got positive feedback and affirmation from success in the traditional sense, it is 10 times harder to break away from that and do something unconventional as entrepreneurship. And that's why I think when Robert talks about A students working C students and B students working for the government, I think it's where it comes back from because this, the C students never really got that affirmation. They didn't really have anything to lose. But if you're an A student-

 

Tom Wheelwright:                  

I like that.

 

Buck Joffrey:                

Right?

 

Tom Wheelwright:                  

Yeah. And nothing to lose. I'm going to use that the next time I talk to Robert and say, “You know, of course, that as a C student, you have nothing to lose, right? So what's the big deal?”

 

Buck Joffrey:                

Well there you go. I mean, but listen, as an A student, everybody's telling you you're the greatest thing since sliced bread and you're going to be a chairman or you're going to go to the highest firm and you've got everything. You have the ability to do that. Backing out from that is a lot.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

It is.

 

Buck Joffrey:                

I think, psychologically, there's a bigger step involved. And so I do think that that's why you see so many burned out doctors and burned out lawyers and stuff like that. I mean, some of the smartest people that I knew in high school and college, they're doing jobs that are really successful, but they're not very happy and they are terrified about trying to do anything else. And that's ultimately, I think the golden handcuffs problem.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

So short of getting fired, what do people do? Because people don't really want to go out and say, well, I'm going to go piss off my employer to get fired. How do you make that break?

 

Buck Joffrey:                

Well, I mean I think… Here's the thing is I actually, and I'll tell you, I don't, I don't really know that many people who made this decision on their own. So getting fired is the key. It's a good thing to do. But what I will say this, the other thing too…

 

Buck Joffrey:                

I always talk about with with my investor group and stuff, is that if you know that there's… Even if you like what you're doing, there's a possibility that you may not like it eventually. Right? So what we need to do in life is to prepare ourselves for that moment when we might want to break away. And so I don't recommend that most doctors who are making say a half million dollars or something like that, that they just walk away and start something brand new. It's probably not for everybody. It requires some substantially big coronary arteries to do that and some stupidity as well.

 

Buck Joffrey:                

And it's sometimes a better idea to start thinking and planning to do something and building things on the side on a smaller level. And not everybody's an entrepreneur, right? I mean that's the other thing. And so if you're not an entrepreneur but you don't really like what you're doing, what can you do? Well, the thing that you need to start thinking about is how can I as Robert says, you say, start having all this money you're making actually deployed in a way which is actually going to be able to help you and work for you at some point? I think that's really where I think the majority of people really need to focus.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

Yeah. I think you're right here, Buck, that there are a couple of things. One is there's an emotional side of this, right, is who I am and what I want to do? There's also a financial side of this. I mean, the thing about being fired is you really do have nothing to lose at that point because you have no job, you have nothing. And so starting you're just going well, okay. I mean, I've got nothing in any way, so why not do something? So what I'm hearing is, is, and this is what I see with really all of our clients, is that when you start building passive income, which is, you go to Robert and Kim's cashflow game where it talks about passive income in excess of expenses and that's how you, you become financially free.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

Then what it does is it gives you the freedom and maybe you can start thinking about it where you might not be willing to think about it if you have a lot to lose. And I think that that's a big issue here is that if you're making a good salary, you have a lot to lose by taking that leap. Whereas if you have passive income coming in to pay your expenses, you no longer have that big risk of loss that you would have otherwise. So I think that's a critical point for our listeners to remember.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

Buck, I want to go back to your story. So because we got a little off here. The last we heard, you're still a doctor, so you have your own practice, you have your own doctor. But that's actually where the story started from my standpoint. I'd like to hear the rest of that story.

 

Buck Joffrey:                

Yeah. So I was doing cosmetics and I did that for a couple of years and did well. I ran it like a business. Did TV, radio, internet. I mean, I wasn't waiting around like a lot of folks would wait 20 years to build a practice. I didn't take insurance from day one. So I really was in a situation where I was going to either make this work or not. It worked, right? So I did well with that.

 

Buck Joffrey:                

And then I think I did get a little bit, I did have a period in my life where I think I was starting to becoming that entrepreneur who's chasing too many things at once. I did start another medical business that was involved with a different type of procedure in Chicago and that was very successful.

 

Buck Joffrey:                

The initial cosmetic business. I was tired of doing cosmetic. So I walked away and I hired some people to do that. But from day one, I had set that business up so that it didn't require me, I never branded myself. I never wanted to be the famous guy. I wanted to have a famous brand in the area. And so that was successful. That allowed me to start another business.

 

Buck Joffrey:                

In the meantime, that was going really well and I got a little greedy. And with the initial cosmetic business, I said to myself, well, why can't I do this in four other markets? I do this in four other markets and I'm just going to finance the whole thing myself and I'm not going to go up there and raise capital. I'm not going to do anything. Well, that's where I got killed, right?

 

Buck Joffrey:                

I got killed there because I had no experience in scaling from one to four. I didn't, even though I'm an entrepreneur, I'm definitely not what I would call an operator. I'm not a guy who's probably skilled in… I'm not a field ho, right? And I think a lot of entrepreneurs have this problem where they have ideas and they learn the hard way what their weaknesses were. So that, that was really… I failed there. Luckily, a couple of the businesses were still doing well. So even though I had lost millions of dollars, I was still doing just fine. I mean, I wasn't doing great anymore, but I was doing fine.

 

Buck Joffrey:                

And that lost, though, got me thinking to myself, you know what? I really need to diversify outside of this whole medical thing. I had purchased some apartment buildings with money I had made relatively early after training and they were going really well. And I was like, well, why am I not doing more of that? And in fact, in my past, my dad is a real estate guy, has been for 50 years and, I mean, we never wanted for anything. I mean, and so I was like, well why don't I focus on this a little bit more? I really enjoy the process of looking at real estate and underwriting things. I read Kenny Mackeroy's books and I was convinced I could do it. So I bought a couple of apartment buildings and, frankly, the first one I did was went really badly because I thought the only thing I needed to do was read Ken's book and go to LoopNet. That didn't work.

 

Buck Joffrey:                

The other ones did work a lot better. I approached it with a team kind of approach where I had some experts looking at it from the right brokers, the right lenders, the right people who have got involved and the next several went really well. Things were going much better. And at that point I was getting a little burned out from medicine and I thought, you know what? I need to tell people about what I'm doing.

 

Buck Joffrey:                

So the next thing I did was to start a podcast. Now at this point I was practicing one day a week in one of the practices and the rest of it was sort of running with employees I had, so what was I doing outside of that? I was really focusing on real estate and I was thinking about starting this podcast, which I ultimately did.

 

Buck Joffrey:                

The podcast, I didn't really have any sort of agenda for starting that other than the fact that I like talking about the things I was learning and how they were applying to my life and that there didn't seem to be any voice that was sort of high paid professional interested in personal finance outside of stocks, bonds and mutual funds. It seemed like everything that I was listening to was talking to people who were in a much different situation than me that were trying to make their first a hundred thousand dollars or something like that. And I had made millions of dollars at this point over time.

 

Buck Joffrey:                

So I wanted to reach out to those high paid professionals are making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year at least, and were trying to get information for themselves. So that's where it started.

 

Buck Joffrey:                

And then like any entrepreneur, Tom, as you know, I figured out how to create a business around it. And it was very clear to me that the things that I was talking to resonated with listeners and the show got a great following, Wealth Formula.

 

Buck Joffrey:                

And I started an investor group because I had a lot of people saying, Hey, this is great, but how can I put this to work? I'm a full time doctor. I worked 50 hours a week. And so that's when we started to do the Wealth Formula Investor Group? And so ultimately my equity group became my next business, ultimately it morphed into something completely different.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

No, I think that's the reason I wanted to have you on was because I think a lot of people think, Oh, well, it's got to be an all or nothing type of thing. It's got to be something well, I have to be full time into investing. It's like Robert's first book was Before You Quit Your Job, right? So the, the [inaudible] before you quit your job. And going, well, what if you don't want to quit your job? I know a lot of doctors for example, I mean, you and I have common clients and, and I know a lot of doctors that they like what they do. They're good at what they do. They like what they do. They don't want to quit what they're doing. They would just like to have a safety net basically.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

They'd like to be using all this money they're making, they don't want it to just be sitting outside of their control. They want it to be sitting in something that will actually produce for them, that actually does something for them. And, and of course is as you well know, as you and I both well know , that there's a lot of tax benefits to doing that, too. So when you get involved in investing… This is something for our listeners that you know what, one of the things that I know you've discovered Buck, is that as you get out of that stocks, bonds and mutual funds world, all of a sudden the tax law starts working for you in a completely different way. And you're at a point where the tax law is working really working for you every single day.

 

Buck Joffrey:                

Oh, it's it. It's absolutely insane. So you said a lot of things there that I think are really important, Tom, and I think one is to understand a lot of people have this problem in the first place of about breaking away from conventional financial wisdom, which is stocks, bonds and mutual funds and the 4% rule and all of these things. Because again, I think that as good students, we are trained to listen to curriculum and when there's no curriculum, we substitute that with conventional wisdom. The problem is the conventional wisdom is often wrong and it's often influenced by special interest. In this case, within the case of investing, it's all wall street. So we kind of just follow what people tell us and do what everybody else is doing. And if we don't do that, we start to feel guilty about it, like we're doing something wrong.

 

Buck Joffrey:                

I think the first step is trying to understand where that comes from and then trying to be rational about your own investing and feeling like it's okay. So what we try to do is, on Wealth Formula, like you, I mean it's really about an educational approach right?

 

Buck Joffrey:                

Now, if you are the high paid professional and you are making a bunch of money, there's no reason why you have to just hand it over to somebody else. You're a smart person. But when you start hearing about real estate and tax benefits and stuff like that, you should actually get involved with it yourself. You should start thinking about it. Whether you do something about it or not, that's totally up to you. But the incredible power of the math of investing in real estate and using the tax laws to your advantage that Tom talks about, they're available to you and they can dramatically change your life. And it's really, really just important to do that.

 

Buck Joffrey:                

And in some ways that step into that world and accepting it and following it is not that dissimilar from stepping into an entrepreneurial world, right? You're actually going to do something that sounds a little scary, but it has tremendous benefit.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

No, I think that's true, Buck. And what I like hearing from you is here's somebody who's a doctor, been a doctor, has done this, your clients are, the people in your network are all doctors, and yet, what I keep hearing from people is they say, well, I'm a doctor so I don't get any of these tax benefits, which is by the way patently wrong. It just means you have the wrong tax advisor in my… That's what I see. And these benefits are available for everybody. So it doesn't matter. Like you said, a lot of the discussion is towards somebody who's just starting out and they're making 50 or $60,000 a year or $100,000 a year. These things apply equally to people who make three, four or $500,000 a year, but all across the board.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

The great thing is is that investment principles are the same for everyone and tax laws are the same for everyone. Everybody has the same choice. You and I are kind of, we're working together on this, you through Wealth Formula and me through WealthAbility® and that is to bring out this awareness that you don't have to do it through the conventional wisdom. That conventional wisdom you're talking about, Buck, is not the only thing that's available.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

That's what I love about Rich Dad, Poor Dad. When I travel with Robert around the world, he gets stopped literally 10 times a day and it doesn't matter where we are. We could be in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, and he gets stopped three times on the street while we're just walking down the street. People with stories like yours, Buck, where they just say, well, I just had no idea. I had no idea.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

So creating that awareness and letting people know that, look, there's another way to do this. You can choose, you don't have to do it. You can stay with conventional wisdom if that works for you. , I have a son-in-law, it absolutely works for him. He's an employee in a big company and he invested in stocks, bonds, mutual funds. That works for him. Okay, that's great. The idea, though, that there's another option I think is the big news and really something that what you and I are doing is really sharing. Okay. They're showing that it's possible. We're showing how to do it. And I love that you're doing, I love, Buck, of course, I love working with you and your members and I'm sure that there are a lot of our listeners that have similar stories or would like to even have similar stories. So I want to thank you, but tell us once again where we can find out more about what you're doing.

 

Buck Joffrey:                

I have a podcast and it's not just doctors. It's pretty much anybody who is a high paid professional or even small business people. People who are making more money. It tends to focus on accredited investors and it's called Wealth Formula Podcast.

 

Buck Joffrey:                

Obviously there's wealthformula.com as well. And yeah, I'd love to have new listeners and hopefully just continue to spread the message that you and I had been trying to spread.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

That's awesome. Thank you, Buck. And remember that when you really dig into what your path is, right, and your path may be right where you are, it absolutely may. If you think that maybe there's another possible path for you and you'd like to dig into that. When you do that and you start into that whole discovery, self-discovery process, and not just personal self-discovery but business and investing in self-discovery. Just remember there are lots of opportunities out there. There's great people to listen to like Robert and Buck and WealthAbility® and we're out there with a mission to help you and remember that when you get that kind of financial education, you're always going to make way more money and pay way less taxes.

 

Tom Wheelwright:       

Thanks. We'll see you next time.

 

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You've been listening to the WealthAbility® Show with Tom Wheelwright way more money, way less taxes to learn more. Go to wealthability.com .