The School Of Cash Flow

All of us are taught how to earn money but not how to grow it. When dabbling in real estate, you need alternative investing strategies to keep your cash flowing smoothly. Dale Corpus sits down with Dave Wolcott, CEO and Trusted Advisor of Pantheon Investments, to discuss creating legacy wealth on your passive income sources through alternative investing. He explains how infinite banking works, emphasizing its advantages in reducing tax cuts and minimizing financial risks. Dave also reveals the asset classes he favors today, particularly those that are still highly profitable in the middle of the pandemic.

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Achieving Legacy Wealth Through Alternative Investing With Dave Wolcott

I’ve got a great guest on this episode. His name is Dave Wolcott. He was introduced to me by my fellow podcaster and GoBundance colleague Eric Cabral. Eric, thank you for the introduction if you happen to be reading. Here’s a little bit more about my guest. Dave Wolcott is the CEO and Trusted Advisor of Pantheon Investments, focused on helping investors realize their vision through The Pantheon Advantage. Pantheon is in each private equity firm that invests in tangible real estate assets that provide cashflow, tax efficiency, and diversification from the stock market.

Prior to Pantheon, Dave earned his Bachelor’s degree from George Washington University, served as a Captain in the Marine Corps, and is a serial entrepreneur that has built three companies. He learned about investing in commercial real estate as a passive investor years ago and has experienced several market cycles. Dave is passionate about helping investors build wealth through providing exclusive access and curation of the best opportunities, operators, and markets. Pantheon is an equity partner in over 2,500 doors with a combined value of over $450 million. Without further ado, let’s begin.

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Welcome, Dave to the show. How are you?

Thanks, Dale. It’s great to be here to connect with you and your readers.

I appreciate it. For my audience that doesn’t know you, where are you based out of in the world?

I’ve been an East Coast guy all my life. I’ve lived outside of DC for years but it transitioned down to Sarasota, Florida to finally get away from the winters up North. Our kids are out of school now. I’m enjoying Florida and also seeing the growth down here, especially in real estate in the Southeast. It’s phenomenal to see it firsthand.

In part of your bio, you were in the military first and then you became an entrepreneur. What was that transition like? You also started some businesses. I’m curious to know what businesses you started.

Going into the military was a great opportunity to serve my country. You learn a lot of things that aren’t typically taught in the academic arena and things such as leadership, teamwork, and integrity. You test yourself to levels that and have to go so deep in doing that. It is great preparation for anyone in anything in life and what you do. I had a phenomenal experience there and then transitioned into the corporate world after that. It was a difficult transition. You’re in your young twenties. You’re responsible for millions of dollars of equipment and people’s lives.

You were in combat situations and now you’re working for a company doing a 9:00 to 5:00. After a few years of it, I got frustrated that there wasn’t that same sense of mission and purpose that was in the military. This was the beginning of my entrepreneurial career where I knew that I could do things faster, better and cheaper myself. Why am I working with all this bureaucracy red tape, and things? That was the beginning of my entrepreneurial rumblings.

You did a corporate thing for a little bit and then became an entrepreneur afterward. What work were you doing in the corporate?

I was on the sales side of things working for an international logistics company. I love to travel and I enjoyed figuring out international supply chains and things like that. Solving problems was always interesting to me. I did that for 4 or 5 years. I was on that sales side and then transitioned into tech. This was the late-’90s. I took that supply chain where the whole tech market was on fire. Things like ERP systems, supply chain, and getting into tech were all about solving problems as well on the consulting side. It’s using technology to solve problems and be an accelerator.

Your first business venture from there, was it tech-related? Was that when you got into real estate? Tell me more about that.

Having that need and passion to solve problems, I got into the consulting side of things. It was technology and business consulting. It was the first company that I started. We worked with primarily Fortune 500, Fortune 1000, and government-type clients where we would go in and solve a lot of process and architecture-type problems. The larger an organization is, the bigger the actual complexities that they had after multiple M&As and things. We would go in, consult, and do that. I wasn’t a key principal and owner of the company, so I wasn’t doing the actual consulting but I was working with the clients to solve the problems.

I enjoyed that aspect and that was good. Around the same time, my wife and I had triplets and another child as well. We had four kids while starting a business. I got so tired of meeting with financial planners saying, “The market is going to go up and down. You’re going to make 7% over the long haul. You’re going to pay taxes and fees. You’re going to build up this big-equity bucket, start pulling out 4% a year, and hope you don’t outlive your money.”

I did not subscribe to that. I knew there was a different way of how to build wealth and knew the pressure was on me to be able to provide. How am I going to get four kids through college, retirement, and everything else that we wanted to do in life? At that point, I also became obsessed with passive income theory, understanding the investment thesis to passive income, starting to look at different asset classes and invest into private equity and different types of real estate assets at the time, and starting a business. As Robert Kiyosaki taught us, you need to be a business owner and an investor to take advantage of putting yourself in the best situation.

Did you start in the real estate investing space? Did you already start investing in syndications? Were you doing anything else like single-family home rentals?

This was the early-2000s. Syndication wasn’t out. There was a lot of research. We were living in Denver at the time and looked at trying to do single-family rentals but could not make the numbers work. It was challenging to find properties like that but fortunately, I connected with someone who is in the private equity space and started doing deals in Dallas. We did retail.

I did some office buildings and an oil-producing well and invested in a number of things. I did some shale plays with raw land as well in Texas. I got versed in how private equity deals are structured and how to go after them. A lot of them did well, so I continued to double down on that strategy as I was building my business simultaneously.

As a business owner, this is an important lesson. Maybe if you’re an early entrepreneur, you don’t realize this. Having a need for alternative streams of income is so crucial. You might think everything is going great but it just takes that one quarter or one thing that you’re blindsided by, like legal implication or something and you can lose everything. You could lose your business, your home, and a lot of your net worth as well. In trying to have these alternative streams of income and things that are inversely correlated to the markets, you help insulate yourself and then secure your wealth as you move forward.

I find it interesting because of when you started investing in this. I started investing in passive investments much later on and there’s much more information available now. It sounds like you did networking yourself. How did you even make that connection to find somebody to introduce you to that private equity space?

Your network is worth everything. Luckily, being in a business development-type field, I was constantly talking to people and networking. I was always talking about investing. It was through a series of networking. I started with that.

There’s the fact that you had the triplets and the kid along the way. I wouldn’t even know what to do with triplets. Does the military training prepare you also to have triplets?

It’s to be a father. I love to tell that story because there are people with 1 or 2 young kids out there. You have three.

I have two boys. They were spaced out but having three at the same time, I don’t even know how I would handle that.

Alternative Investing: Taxes are the number one biggest expense you’re going to have in life. It makes sense to put together a comprehensive tax strategy to mitigate your expenses instead of always chasing a 12%-15% return.

It was pretty intense. The Marine Corps was good training.

Were you also looking at other vehicles besides real estate? Was it just real estate that you were looking at?

There are a lot of people in this space that are 100% focused on real estate, which is great. There’s active investing and there’s passive investing. As an active investor, that’s your business and it takes a lot of time to do that. What I became fascinated with were passive income theory and investment thesis. Real estate played a part.

That was one part in the toolbox that you could use but there are other things like infinite banking and leveraging whole life insurance policies. As I worked and created Pantheon, my vision was to help articulate to people what is this alternative theory that financial planners aren’t and no one is telling you about. It involves a lot of things, not just real estate.

Real estate is one great asset but let’s talk about tax. Taxes are the number one biggest expense that you’re going to have in your life. Wouldn’t it make sense to put together a comprehensive tax strategy to try to mitigate your taxes and start to align yourself to that? Instead, everyone is always chasing, “This one is a 12% return. That’s a 15% return. What is that?”

What if you could reduce your taxes by 20% permanently? That’s massive. When I put out my book, we created The Pantheon Holistic Wealth Framework. What we do is talk about key components and infrastructure to do that holistically. Real estate is one vehicle in there for you to invest in and support that but there are a lot of other components to it.

Commenting on what you said, a lot of people have financial advisors. A lot of my readers are in the tech space and some of them are newer to the idea of alternative investing and passive investing. Financial advisors don’t talk about this stuff. A lot of this education is not there. You almost remind me of a financial advisor as it relates to the alternative investing space. Why is it that financial advisors and whatnot don’t talk about this stuff in general or the stuff that you’re talking we’re talking about?

There are a few reasons. Number one is syndications and these types of investments were typically reserved for the wealthy previously. Until the JOBS Act came out and syndications became available to the masses, people didn’t even know this was going on unless you were ultra-wealthy. You didn’t realize that.

The second part is the financial services industry. The multi-trillions that are in that do not want you to think about another strategy. They want you all in on Wall Street. The products that they sell you are geared towards Wall Street. They don’t have products like this that can support it. Therefore, they’re not going to talk about it.

They might say, “If you want real estate and you want to diversify, here’s a REIT.” That’s buying retail. When you invest in the stock market, you’re completely buying retail. Another reason is that they’re not familiar with it themselves. We have a number of investors who are financial planners investing in our deals. That tells you something. We have other financial planners that say they’re transitioning out of Wall Street and trying to get into real estate because they have seen the light. Once you understand how money works, you will realize how much better this strategy is. Here’s a great and simple example for the readers.

If you took the average financial planner’s advice and let’s say you saved until retirement and had $4 million at age 65, then they’re going to advise you to withdraw a rate of 4%. The 4% of $4 million is $160,000 a year. You might have thought, “$4 million is not a bad number. I did pretty well. We saved and got to that.” They’re not talking about the taxes that you’re going to have to pay and the fees that have eaten into that all during that time. Now, that $160,000 is more like $120,000 that you’re living on. You have no deductions or things like that coming out at that point in your life. Therefore, you’re at $160,000, whereas if I took a portfolio of either single-family real estate or syndications, let’s take the same scenario, you got $4 million at 65.

If you’re making 8% cashflow, you’ve doubled that. That’s $320,000 that you’re living on. If you’re doing your taxes right, you’re not paying any taxes on that. You’ve doubled the amount of income that you have. The great thing is you’re also not killing your golden goose. You still have equity value that’s appreciating 10% a year. This is how you create legacy wealth. This is how the wealthy are doing it. They are always saying the rich get richer. It’s because they have spent time to educate themselves and understand how this works. When you can get your head around that different investment thesis and how that works, it’s extremely powerful.

One of the other key terms that you threw out was the idea of infinite banking, which I have some general knowledge about but you’re the first guest that talked about it. For those of my readers that are brand-new to it, can you explain what infinite banking is?

This is such a valuable tool. I’ve had such success with this over the years. Essentially, you’re leveraging a permanent whole life insurance policy and you’re able to put money into this insurance policy. The money compounds and grows tax-free. You’re able to pass it to your heirs completely tax-free with no probate. There’s inherent asset protection built into it. If you have any issues with creditors or things like that, this is completely insulated. One of the coolest things, especially for real estate entrepreneurs, business owners, things like that, is there’s this whole concept where you can borrow against the cash value of the policy.

You fund the policy over a predefined set amount of time and then you’re able to borrow up to 80% to 90% of the cash value of the policy. What this does is it creates you having your own banking system. Any income that I get or all of my passive income streams that come in, I dump them into this policy immediately. It’s like my own bank. When I want to go do something like make an investment in my business or maybe we want to buy a new investment property, I don’t need to go to the bank, fill out all of their forms, and wait to find out if I’m going to get secured or not. I have complete access to use my funds so I can use those funds to do that.

The way I came into this is sophisticated. This is a cornerstone of what family offices use for building true wealth for the ultra-wealthy. Many congressmen and senators are using this. It’s about as bulletproof as you get. It has been around for a long time. It’s just that a lot of people don’t know about it. Part of the reason is also you have to structure these things properly. It’s important that you work with the right folks to do that. I got my license so I could fulfill this for our clients because I believe so strongly in setting it up the right way. Being able to borrow and access that money is key. That last point that I was going to make that is nice is this.

Alternative Investing: The millionaires do not what you to think about another strategy. They want you all in on Wall Street, and the products they sell are usually just geared toward Wall Street.

Let’s say you take $100,000. You had funded it into the policy in that first year. You now find a syndication that you want to invest in. It could be a single-family property or something like that. I’m going to put $100,000 into the policy, take out $90,000, and use the $90,000 to invest in the property or my syndication that’s making a healthy double-digit return. You’re creating a spread. When you take the money out of the policy, it’s considered a loan, which is tax-free, but the money is still growing. Let’s say it’s 5.5% to 6% but you have a loan for 3.5%. You’re making money on the spread and you’re now able to use the same dollar twice. This is what I love about it. This is what is great about real estate as well.

We look at assets that are multidimensional. Instead of taking a stock that’s going to go up or down and you’re hoping it’s going to go up, real estate has all these inherent benefits to it that we understand. It’s the same thing with infinite banking. You can accelerate your real estate returns by using this. Also alternatively, I use all of the cashflow that comes off of the real estate and I dump it right back into the policy, so I have dry powder for the next thing. There’s a guaranteed floor on this, so you can never lose money. This is a great store of value for that 6 to 12 months of rainy day money that you want to conserve and protect your family. It’s a great place to store money as well.

It sounds like a great place to park your money. You will get your money parked out over there. I’m curious. How liquid is it? Is it easy to get your money out?

There’s a one-page form. You fill in a couple of lines of information, how much money you want, and everything. It’s wired to your account. You usually have funds within 48 hours.

It’s quick. You have the book, The Holistic Wealth Strategy. Tell me more about that. What does it entail? What is it about?

As I was going through this journey, maybe that was the consultant in me but I was trying to articulate how you build wealth and everything. We define this into four simple steps. The first one starts with you and setting your vision. If you don’t have a vision and target, you’re going to miss every time. It’s important to set your vision and where you want to go. That’s number one. Along those lines, it’s all about changing your mindset and increasing your financial IQ, mindset IQ and also health IQ.

Health is such an important aspect. I can tell right away that you’re conscientious about your health. You work out quite a bit though. Most folks, business owners, and entrepreneurs are focused on health because if you don’t have your health, you could have all the wealth in the world but it doesn’t mean anything. It’s critical to focus on health. It’s this focus on mindset. A lot of people talk about mindset but it’s critical, even my daughter’s boyfriend and some other folks that we talked to learn different ideas. Some of those ideas are from financial planners and things like that.

They start to get into scarcity mentality and some different assumptions from Wall Street that frankly aren’t true and limit their results. You would need to be able to expand your mindset, increase your financial IQ, and learn these concepts because they’re not taught anywhere. It’s fascinating. Everyone goes to college, all these academic schools, and everything but all we learn is how to make money. We’re never taught anywhere how to protect and grow your money. Where is that talk? There’s none besides a great show like this and some other folks. That’s critical. That’s number one. That’s the first phase that you get in place.

The second step is all about creating an infrastructure to set you up for building wealth. We talked about taxes and everything. When you create an infrastructure, you have to work with the right tax plan, not someone who files your taxes. It’s someone who understands the value of doing bonus depreciation and things like that and how you can use different strategies to receive money and spend money so that you can do that.

Tom Wheelwright is phenomenal at teaching that. Having a tax strategy is key. The infinite banking like we talked about, should be a cornerstone of what you’re doing for protection and growth. This is also about having a lot of control over your money, wealth and being able to do what you want. That’s important in estate planning as well.

We move into the third phase, which is asset positioning. I meet with a lot of investors who say, “This is great. I get the concept. It makes sense. I want to jump in but I don’t have any cash to jump into a deal yet.” Do you know how many people have equity sitting in their homes that are paying a rate of return of 0%? Equity in your primary home is trapped equity. How about repositioning that? That’s one place. The numbers are staggering of how many people have money tied up in their homes where you could be putting it to work.

Another thing is you’re able to use a self-directed IRA account. I’m sure you’ve talked about this on your show before but some people still aren’t aware that they can get into alternative assets with a self-directed IRA. That’s important as well. Look at trying to reposition your portfolio. The last step is going after achieving massive passive income. It’s understanding and getting into some of these deals, real estate syndications, self storage, direct investments into real estate rentals, and things that are going to increase your passive income while reducing your taxes and lowering your risk as well.

I find it interesting. I’m in the Bay Area. Since COVID appreciation, all those homes around the area skyrocketed and everybody has a ton of lazy equity. It’s interesting to hear your strategy and what you teach about the fact that there’s a lot of equity trapped in people’s homes. We’re taught to pay down the principal of the loan faster versus who would have ever thought of using a cash-out refinance to tap into that equity and invest it in higher return cashflowing investments elsewhere? That in itself is something that could change people’s lives if they switched the way they think about it.

It took me a while to understand that as well, being conservative and knowing what I know and what I was taught but I’m with you now. It’s interesting that you teach that. Another thing too is I love how you also talk about how health is a cornerstone or an important thing that you should have in your life. I like to work out every day because it energizes me as I’m building wealth. I’m going to be able to live long to enjoy it with my family. That’s another important thing. I wanted to switch gears a little bit and talk about asset classes because it sounds like you’re invested in a lot of different types of real estate asset classes. Are there any asset classes that you favor more and why?

My perspective is that I come at this as a limited partner investor. I’ve been investing for years myself and trying to figure out what is the optimal portfolio to have where you have downside protection, recession-resistant assets, cashflowing assets, tax-efficient assets, and some good potential for upside growth. That’s our investment thesis. We’re trying to bring those different asset classes to bear for our investors so that they can build diversification by different operators and geographic markets. I can imagine trying to invest in California. It’s challenging. You look at areas like the Southeast and Southwest that are on fire. We’re looking at areas like that.

Multifamily has been our core focus because that is one of the strongest and it has an asymmetric return profile. What I mean by that is it’s something where you have downside protection. We’re coming out of the pandemic. At the end of the day, when the market dropped 35% to 40% in March 2020, people needed a place to stay. That’s Maslow’s hierarchy. Where can you displace people? It’s one of the key things that people need in life. I find it is a stable asset class. That’s key. It provides steady cashflow. It’s a hedge against inflation. As we’re seeing huge inflation numbers tick up and everything, we’re able to increase rents by having that asset. That’s good.

If you’re doing renovations and value add to some of the deals, you have that upside potential to exit typically in about five years where you have that. Multifamily is strong. We have done Class A, Class B, and Class C. It’s having a nice mix of those between markets, different operators, and also different business models. In some cases, we might have a Class A project where we bought it directly from the developer.

The developer wanted to lease it up and get out of there so they could go and do the next property. They’re not in the business of operating something. We can come in, operate efficiently, and make money on the deal right out of the gate based on relationships, finding off-market deals, and things like that. Multifamily is a great asset that should be a strong predominance of the portfolio.

Also, self storage is a recession-resistant asset class. It has some of the same attributes that we talked about in multifamily as well. That’s good. There’s also further installation within multifamily and self storage where if you have single-family rentals and a vacancy, you don’t have any revenue coming in. There’s a lot more risk associated with that versus when you have a 400-unit property. You can handle some swings and vacancy changes.

Those are some good asset classes that we focus on. We’re also bullish on some other interesting things like in the crypto world. Bitcoin mining is coming up of late. That’s an interesting asset class that if structured properly, you can get similar benefits where you have tax depreciation and cashflow. It’s similar to real estate attributes that we’re talking about.

You’ve been an LP or limited partner investor for quite some time. It’s because of your experiences in that and some of the readers here that are getting started in LP investing that I wanted to ask you. Have there been any notable investments that went sideways, horror stories or anything that comes to mind?

Alternative Investing: You could pick whatever asset class there is and run with it. But if you are not with the right team, everything can go sideways and end up turning into a horror story.

Luckily, I haven’t seen anything that has gone sideways or a major issue. We had an office building that didn’t hit proforma numbers by half. That’s 50% of the projections on one deal. I had another small multifamily property that was off projections. For the most part, you spend the time doing the due diligence and this is what we like to do for our investors as well. Since we have that experience, then we can go through all that due diligence before we even present the deal to our investors so that they can look at it and say, “This makes sense.”

We have already looked at this but we have a broader team that’s looking at it. It’s not just the operator telling you, “This is the greatest deal.” Fortunately, we haven’t had anything blow up in the past. That is part of that due diligence. It’s important to note that real estate is a people industry. It’s all about the people. You see great numbers on a proforma or something that comes across your desk and it looks like the greatest deal. It’s all about the team. Can that team execute? Being a business owner for so many years, I understand how valuable it is to know. Can someone execute what they’re promising?

I’ve talked to a lot of folks that are in the space. You need to bet on the right jockey or team that’s running the show. You could pick whatever asset class there is and run with it but if you’re not with the right team, things can go sideways and end up turning into a horror story. You’ve made the transition from being a limited partner to having your own syndications. How did that happen? Did you know you wanted to do that?

I don’t know if you’re familiar with Strategic Coach or if you’ve heard of that. It’s the top entrepreneurial coaching program in the country. It’s based out of Canada by Dan Sullivan. It’s all about helping entrepreneurs create clarity by them giving you thinking tools to think about. You’re thinking to walk through different examples of how to get a different perspective on your business and things. Through that process, what I realized was your business should be a true focus on your unique ability, which is your innate skills, what you do well, and how you provide the most value to people.

For me, I love creating meaningful and trusting relationships. I like solving problems for people and helping people. That made a lot of sense there. I also wanted to have a bigger impact. Being in the corporate world and even in my last consulting business, we’re working for corporate customers all the time. This is so much more rewarding for me where I can truly impact someone’s financial future and their families. It’s extremely rewarding and has a great impact.

Much like you’re doing, educating people and helping other people is great. I want to live an exceptional life. It’s all about seizing what makes sense for you. For me, being able to focus on my unique ability and strengths, taking this passion that I loved about wealth building business, and then trying to translate that into creating value for investors is how I came up with the model. I came up with this all in my head before I knew people were even doing these different types of components. I said, “This is what I want my business to be.”

Knowing what you know now, if you were to start all over again, would you start in a similar way and be an LP investor in private equity? Would you have done it differently?

The only thing I would have done differently is I wish I had all of these learnings and advice that I’m creating. Had I learned that when I was coming out of college? I would have achieved goals in half the time. This is why I feel so passionate about this topic. You can’t start too early. My kids are in their twenties. We have family mastermind sessions and anyone we’re talking to. We like to talk about these concepts because if you think about the psychology of investing and wealth, it’s not about money. Money is a medium of exchange. It’s about living the life that you want to live, creating the right mindset, and setting your vision for what you want to live. The money is a vehicle to help you get there.

You’re a dad and you’ve made your kids financially literate. What are things parents should be doing? I have younger kids. What are the things that I should be doing with my kids to talk about similar things?

Young age is right for those little entrepreneurial things. Everyone sets up a lemonade stand or something with their kids and that could be their first trials and tribulations with entrepreneurship. Without a doubt in middle school, it’s all about teaching them these concepts. I would sit with my sons. We would go to the barber and then I would say, “How much money do you think this place makes? They’ve got this many chairs. They’re open eight hours a day and charging $20 a haircut.” It’s a different way of thinking for people to understand things.

Even when you’re traveling, talk to your kids about how things are running and what is the industry behind things. That’s important so they understand that big concept and figure out how money works. Also, the biggest gift you could give the kids is not to give them any of that baggage that we had, which is following Suze Orman‘s advice, “I need to pay off my house first. I can’t have any credit card debt.” It’s all of these things or things from Wall Street that are ingrained in people. They teach their kids. That’s what happens. You have an opportunity to create a different trajectory for your kids.

What is your favorite real estate investing strategy? Is it value add? Do you do something else as a favorite investing strategy?

It’s syndications that span across value add, Class C, Class A, and different things. Especially if you’re a passive investor and you love this and want this to be your business, then by all means go active. As a passive investor or someone who has limited time, because you know how to make money, you have a career doing something and you’re doing a great job at that. That’s great. Take the extra income that you have and then invest it into these other assets. You’re going to start to see exponential advancements in your wealth because they’re multidimensional assets. It’s not looking at the stocks and saying, “This one is up 10% a year.” You have to factor in these other things.

Here are some final questions for you. What are you excited about in your business?

I’m super excited for 2022. I’m grateful to have the opportunity to meet with other folks and help have an impact on them and my health. We are launching our podcast called Wealth Strategy Secrets of the Ultra Wealthy. That’s something we’re excited about. We have a new opportunity that’s coming out that looks very strong. It’s one of the best opportunities that I’ve seen in years. It’s exciting to be able to bring that to our investor base. I’m excited about that. I’m also relaunching our book in 2021. I’m working with a copywriter and trying to put that in place to relaunch the book and be able to reach more folks. We have a lot planned.

How can somebody get a copy of your book, The Holistic Wealth Strategy?

The best way is if you go to our website, PantheonInvest.com/Wealth-Strategy. You could get a free download of the book. We’re happy to send it to you. If you want a hard copy, we will send you a hard copy as well. I’m happy to share it.

You have a great life. It’s the way you talk and whatnot. Would you say a lot of it is attributed to real estate investing? I like to ask my folks. A lot of them are real estate investors. What has it done for your life?

It’s this overall strategy. You could be a great real estate investor but if you don’t have the right mindset, how are you leveling up? If you think about this a lot too, this is also the trajectory of Maslow’s hierarchy towards a level of self-actualization. There’s a lot of talk about this. We’re always talking about leveling up and living a better life. What does that mean? If you can spend more time being intentional about the things that you want to do and focus on this type of trajectory, then you’re going to find a lot more meaning in what you’re doing. A lot more success and fulfillment because it’s not just about doing one thing.

I could say, “You’re the best real estate investor or entrepreneur that there is.” What if you don’t have a great family life? You want to be a great dad or parent. What if you didn’t have that health? How much money do you think Steve Jobs would pay to get another twenty years? Could he have gotten another twenty years on his life? It would be massive.

All these things are important because money is just a medium of exchange. I think about it as oxygen. I’m always seeking to grow my wealth so I can have a bigger impact on more people. Also, we’re creating new experiences with our family and in my life. We all know this. Ninety percent of people are going to say, “You can’t do that. That’s too risky. You shouldn’t do that.”

My goal is to live to 116. That’s my number. It’s not only longevity but I also want to have vitality. I’m focusing on these things. On the weekends, I put away my real estate books and start reading about heart health, exercise and different things from guys like Peter Attia and people that are doing amazing stuff to continue to advance that. All in all, living a great life is my goal and what it’s all about. That’s what we talked about, which is setting your vision from the start because if you don’t have a great vision for yourself, you’re going to plateau right away.

The Holistic Wealth Strategy: Your Roadmap to Financial Freedom

What does success mean to you?

To me, it’s how can I serve other people? How can I be at my best and operate in peak performance to serve others and be fulfilled in what I do? I’m seeking fulfillment where I can have great relationships with my work relationships. There’s a great way to think about this as well for readers to encapsulate this. This is what truly struck me about Robert Kiyosaki’s book in the beginning. To me, it wasn’t about, “Real estate is a good asset class to go invest in.” This is all about freedom.

There are four components to freedom that are the measure of success. It’s having freedom of purpose to do what you want to do. It’s having freedom of relationship to work with who you want to work with. I’m so grateful for the partnerships I have with my investors and partners. It’s great. It’s also having freedom of time to work when you want to work and be able to take different experiences. Having those freedoms is super powerful to set you up to live a life of fulfillment.

Lastly, how can somebody get ahold of you?

Let me add one last point to that. How many great podcasts have you listened to or TED Talks where someone says, “I went through some massive transformational event, whether it was a loss of a loved one, a chronic illness, or something.” They came back with this huge success story. You think about those things and you’re like, “That was powerful and moving.” For folks out there, now is the time to create your destiny and vision.

Don’t wait until there’s some car accident or chronic illness that you’re afflicted with. Create a big vision for yourself and make it happen now because you’re the one who is in charge of your destiny. Make it happen. To get in touch with me, it’s PantheonInvest.com/Wealth-Strategy. Get a free copy of our book. We’re happy to connect with you there. If you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, I’m happy to connect there. Please reach out. I’m happy to help folks any way I can.

That’s a wrap, folks. Thanks, Dave, for joining me on this episode. I love your perspective as it relates to growing your wealth. Everything is so valuable. To my readers, feel free to reach out to Dave directly if you have any questions for him. Thanks for checking out this episode. Remember to leave me a review on iTunes as it helps me attract even more great guests like Dave. Until next time, live life abundantly.

Important Links

• GoBundance
• Eric Cabral
• The Pantheon Advantage
• Dave Wolcott
• The Holistic Wealth Strategy
• Tom Wheelwright
• Strategic Coach
• Suze Orman
• Peter Attia
• LinkedIn – Dave Wolcott
• iTunes – The School of Cash Flow