In this episode of Estate Professionals Mastermind, financial mentor Damion Lupo joins Chad Corbett to discuss why an eQRP provides the strongest opportunity for leverage and diversification compared to other retirement vehicles like 401ks and IRAs.
What is a Qualified Retirement Plan? In short, QRP is a type of pension plan that allows self-employed workers to plan for retirement and benefit from tax deferments. Qualified retirement plans can be used for real estate, as well as other asset classes that aren’t an option for traditional retirement plans.
To learn more about how QRPs work, how eQRP benefits compare to traditional investment vehicles, and how to set up an enhanced Qualified Retirement Plan to use in real estate investing, get the free book here.
- Where to Stream This Episode
- Episode Topics and Timestamps
- Transcript
- Links and Contact Info for Damion Lupo
Where to Stream: eQRP Ask the Expert with Damion Lupo
Ask The Expert Segments: Qualified Retirement Plans and Real Estate Investing with Damion Lupo, eQRP expert.
0:00 eQRP reviews: Chad Corbett
2:05 Damion Lupo, author of the QRP Book
6:32 Why you need to start planning your wealth strategy for financial independence
8:21 QRP vs. Self-directed IRA (SDIRA) vs. Solo 401k
12:13 How does the QRP work?
18:46 eQRP benefits for real estate investing
33:24 Who manages an eQRP?
35:02 Get the eQRP book free
TRANSCRIPT for Qualified Retirement Plans and Real Estate Investing with Damion Lupo, eQRP expert.
Qualified Retirement Plans and Real Estate Investing with Damion Lupo
eQRP reviews: Chad Corbett [00:00:01]
Chad Corbett: Welcome everybody to another of our ask the expert series. As you may or may not know my name is Chad Corbett, founder of Magnum Opus project and probate mastery. And with me today, I have a friend and a valued professional contact I’ve made through my mastermind, Damion Lupo.
And Damion is here because I use self banking. I use retirement products and insurance products for self banking as well as other advantages and why I eventually gravitated toward the patented version of a retirement plan called an eQRP. When I decided to change from being self-directed to self-managed through custodians, I went to find the nation’s leading expert in creative retirement strategies.
And that led me to Damion who wasn’t that far from me. He was actually in my mastermind and we shared a lot of mutual friends. So, with one phone call, a few simple questions were asked, and I became a customer instantly. The value that I see in them, we’ll discuss in this episode, but it’s a much different experience with his team.
One of the biggest reasons for me. And if you speak with Damion’s team you’ll immediately know what I’m talking about: I had the privilege of meeting Tony Shay and the Zappos office in Las Vegas. Zappos has an amazing customer experience. They claim to be a customer service company that happens to sell shoes, and their entire customer experience goal was wow.” And I’ve gotten that from your team. That was the big thing that made it so easy for me to say “great, get to work!”
And I said, guys, treat me like a fourth-grader. I’m traveling the country in my RV. I’m distracted. And I’ve got multiple companies including this one that I just started and they turned a painful transition into hey, we had fun.
They very quickly jumped in and provided a high level of service.
So I feel like I got more than I paid for but also have a lifetime relationship with a company that’s not afraid to answer my questions.
We’ve had Damion’s team pitch our investment club. A lot of the members, the close friends and family of mine, they’re moving in this direction after having exposure to it.
There are other people out there that do things similar to what EQRP.com does. However I’ve used all those, and we’ll get into that,
Damion Lupo, author of the QRP Book [00:02:06]
Chad Corbett: but I’m proud to introduce you guys to Damion Lupo, a friend of mine, and a critical part of my overall wealth strategy.
So Damion, welcome to the community.
Damion Lupo: Thanks Chad. It’s good to be here this evening.
Chad Corbett: You got an interesting story, Just share with them a little bit about who you are and what brought you here.
Your passion is as contagious, so
Click here to grab your copy of the eQRP book!
Damion Lupo: well it’s, it’s funny because it’s really interesting looking backward and going forwards. I just saw a picture of me with hair. I don’t know if you had that experience, but you start with no hair. You end up getting here and then it goes away.
And when I was 11, I had a lot of hair. And then I had this fro when I was in high school and I left there and went off into the wild and started starting companies, insurance companies, and things, and ended up doing some real estate. And in the middle of all this, I thought school was a good idea.
We talked about school offline a little bit. And in the school process, I went to college a few times. I got thrown out once because I started a bookstore on campus. And then I put the bookstore on campus out of business.
The President of the university got pissed off. And I said Hey, but you know what?
I’m giving everybody a better deal. And he’s like, yeah, but we need to have a place for people to buy pencils. And I thought this is a guy that just doesn’t get it. So I did that whole process and realized I wasn’t meant to be part of a system in the matrix. And then I found real estate by some infomercial at like two o’clock in the morning.
This is like very early days before Facebook before the internet was crazy and everything was online. And so I had that experience.
Went to an event and bought every tape that they had. And these were tapes. This was January 2000. And so I did all that. And I said, okay, I’ll do whatever they say.
I modeled. And when I modeled, what’s interesting. When you model, you cut through all of the mistakes, you just do everything that they tell you to. And I was dumb enough or smart enough, not sure which to do the older balder grayer guys, what they had done. And that led to going from zero to 150 houses over about five years and building up a $20 million portfolio.
And I thought I am so smart. And that was an interesting process in the middle of this. I was getting so arrogant and I think this is, they go hand in hand. I took up skydiving and while I was building this PR this portfolio, I went out and jumped. I had four jumps.
Three of them ended up in accidents. For the third one, my chute failed, and had to cut it loose and nearly died. I had to pull and I pulled when I could hear people on the ground. That’s how low meaning I cut my shoot loop. And hit the ground hard. And because I’m, I was so arrogant and making all this money, I thought I’m invincible.
So I went and jumped again and nothing happened except the space shuttle exploded over me. So in 2003, that’s when the Columbia exploded. And I just kept going on. And part of the reason I tell these stories is that my background is a series of warnings of red flags. And we learn things, and the universe, I think, taps us on the shoulder.
And if we don’t listen, eventually it comes up and kicks us in the ass. So 2008 ended up where I took on everything and everywhere, seven different states, different projects, and went from 20 million to negative 5 million, losing 25 million in 12 months.
And that’s where everything shifted, where I went and went swimming in denial for a while, did that for a couple of years, and then spent a couple of years in therapy, and on the other side, I had this conversation, this event with my dad where he called me and left a message right after Thanksgiving in 2013 and said, Hey Damion this is your dad.
Just had some tests come back. It looks like it’s stage four. I hope you had a good Thanksgiving. I and like that changed everything where I realize that. Holy crap. Like my life’s about to shift. And when I saw them a few days later flew up to Alaska. The one thing that sat with me changed everything.
That one moment he said, there were so many things I wanted to do. And I saw this hole. I saw it and I felt what it was to have regret. And that changed me at a core level to where I thought I gotta go forward without regret, and… and that’s not about making more money. That’s about fulfilling your purpose.
And so I started asking questions like, am I supposed to just go make more money? Is it a different way of making money? And then I realized it was about external, like the work that you do in helping other people. There’s all the money in the world we can make if you do the things you’re supposed to do and help the people that you’re supposed to help.
And that’s when the retirement stuff kicked in. And I started thinking about how I could help people become financially free because money is modern-day slavery. It shackles us and over the last decade, that’s what I’ve been working on. And we’re working with people like you and building a team and building relationships so people have a team that they can go to and relationships that matter that helps them to through that journey so that they’re not like my dad saying dang, there’s things I wanted to do instead. They’re going, man. And my life is awesome. It’s by design and I’m happy to be in it!
Why you need to start planning your wealth strategy [00:06:33]
Chad Corbett: It was a modest version. He didn’t even bring up that he’s like a sixth-degree black belt, and he’s got a very interesting story.
I am going to go back and go down one rabbit hole because I dug my father’s grave on my 40th birthday. When I had planned this bucket list trip to fly fishing and New Zealand, everything shifted. But I was able to get my father to go on two big trips with me.
And he went to the death bed, talking to the nurses about those experiences.
I challenge myself to get people to that realization faster. And Damien is one of those people that, he’s here as much to inspire as he is to educate you on a specific retirement strategy.
But it’s a big part of this community is, one of the big undertones is work less, earn more and do good in your community. And that’s, what I would refer to as this benevolent entrepreneurship and Damien is such a great example of that. So if any of you guys if you’re still saying to your kids or your parents “someday, we’re gonna, one day we will… If only I didn’t have so much work to do,” get your sh together.
Because someday it can change in an instant. And I’m so grateful that I held my father accountable. I learned that lesson at 29 Just like you said about the real estate guys I had guys who were farming, mentors, hunting mentors, and business mentors.
When they started passing away and I saw. In 2008, I managed a billion dollars worth of pre-sold real estate closings in Hawaii. And I got to know a lot of men who people thought were wealthy. And then I started to understand what is a real measure of wealth? I would argue that the experiences you collect are worth far more than the stuff you collect, but most people who appear wealthy are flat broke. They’re in debt to here or here. They have lots of nice stuff, but they don’t own it.
And that’s, why I’m excited to introduce people like you, who do things like you do to move the needle and made a difference in financial education and wealth, and lifestyle.
QRP vs. Self-directed IRA vs. Solo 401k [00:08:22]
Chad Corbett: When I first started in residential real estate, I came from that resort development field and luxury beach, front ski front. Knew nothing. And I heard about self-directed IRAs. So I interviewed a few custodians.
I think it was Equity Trust, Entrust, and Provident financial group, which were the three custodians I interviewed, I ended up choosing Provident out of Las Vegas because they had checkbook control. But when you have a question you’re on your own, there’s not much help itself.
‘We can’t touch that you better hire a tax attorney.’ So when I was doing simple things like just writing residential mortgages to third-party investors, I was never worried about being an unrelated party or breaking any rules. I didn’t need the oversight that the other custodians gave.
So I had checkbook control. And what that means guys is I had my IRA owned a hundred percent of the shares and an LLC, a holding company, which had a regular business checking account. And I could go to the courthouse steps, write a check, buy a house and flip it. There were a lot of intricacies in there that I wasn’t aware of like unrelated business income tax (UBIT).
If you flip a house within that type of vehicle, there are mistakes that you can make that can trigger a taxable event. So you have to be strongly self-educated, you have to be a detailed person, and you have to understand the law.
The other vehicle that I used later for the same purpose but that I could put more money into was a solo 401k.
I set that up to avoid taxes for one year. And I thought at that time I was ignorant. I thought I was avoiding taxes. I was just deferring tax. And I think Damion I know Damion he’s got a deep understanding of monetary policy and how money works.
And I think you would agree with me that anyone who is building wealth will be taxed more in the future than they ever have been in the past. We’ve written checks that we can’t cash. As the United States, we could pull every tax, every dollar of GDP could be applied, and the taxes wouldn’t cover the debt payments. So they’re coming. If you are building wealth and if you’re in this community, you’re pretty much guaranteed to be interested in that. When you surpass that $200,000 a year in income, mark, you got a big target on your forehead.
And it’s a lot of it is political gambits and theater. It’s been put on the table. It’s not policy yet, but it seems to be the direction we’re headed.
So knowing that I chose to go through the pain of restructuring, my accounts consolidating, I restated the solo K and the self-directed traditional IRA.
I restated both of those and consolidated them into the structure we’re about to discuss it’s a much more efficient vehicle.
What I want to get into with Damion is why he is designed the way it is, what specific benefits other than the people around this, and what are the specific benefits to the E QRP structure?
Damion Lupo: It’s one of the things that I haven’t shared. I don’t know if I’ve ever shared this publicly, but many years ago I was working with the first person that I hired for the company.
And I said, I’m thinking about having the name of the company being WCR Inc. And she looked at me and she said, what is that? And I said world-class relationship. And I met because that was to me, a way to create a blue ocean where there’s no competition to focus on that. And I know that’s a big deal for you.
And when we talk about that with an investment, and when you’re investing in a, in an investment, you start with the team and that’s a core tenant for anybody. That’s going to create wealth and keep it. If you just invest in the project, you’re gonna end up with bad operators. And I always thought that there’s something special about having the right people.
It’s what made Tony and the people at Zappos so powerful. It was them. And they had their rule that there’s no limit on how long they’ll be on a phone call with somebody. And I think there, the record was like 14 hours or something and they, and just in case
Chad Corbett: there was a mimosa station. Right.
But
Damion Lupo: found a call center it’s happy hour time. Like, let’s just keep going. And so we started that. And so really what, this is it is a, it’s a world-class relationship company that happens to set up retirement accounts and it’s mission-based. And I think a lot of times people say, yeah, we have a mission, we have values.
And it’s like, okay what are the, what are those. And the mission here is to break a million shackles it’s to free people from financial bondage.
The enhanced qualified retirement plan or eQRP structure [00:12:14]
Damion Lupo: And the reason that we focused on retirement accounts inside this thing is that most people have most of their net worth in their future, their freedom is tied up in IRAs and 401ks, and they have no idea what the deal is.
And so like your experience when you go and you’re like, okay, cool. I’ve got an IRA or a self-directed IRA. And then you still feel like I don’t have a team to help me with this thing. I got a company that set this, like these documents up and they may maybe file. The difference between EQRP and the company and the product.
It’s really about the people and how we treat our PR clients. And I say clients specifically because clients, there’s a relationship customer, there’s a transaction. And we look at everybody as a client. We look at them as we have a responsibility to say what needs to be said to have canned to take ownership with them, not just for.
And we have a focus that it’s about self-responsibility. So if somebody doesn’t come into us and vomit or puke or crap on us, they come in and say, okay, I want to do better. I want control. I want to design a future. And we do it with. And it’s, we don’t do it for them.
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And that’s one of the big it’s a big shift in thinking. So when somebody says, okay, I want to work with you guys. What they end up with are a tool and a team. And this tool is so much, it’s so much better in every way. And it’s not just because the tool is better and it is by itself.
It’s because there’s a team with it. It’s like having an assassin versus a special operations team. I’d take the team every day of the week. Like you think about a seal team. Would you rather have that one, that team with you, or just somebody that’s good at sharpshooting? You want the team cause they work it’s just better.
So the ERP specifically is built for people to go out there and run their investments to choose what they want to do. And when we think about self-directed options, most people default or think it’s the same thing as either the self-directed IRAs or the old solo 401ks.
and they all, they, they can serve a purpose. The difference here is that you do have the ability to go do things like real estate. And you’re not going to get hit with taxes because you leveraged real estate, you do in IRA, and you can grow so you can use leverage and growth.
And when you’re thinking about designing a future, one of the dangerous things is to say my design requires me to always be on my own. And for many people that are growing, they’re thinking, okay, I’m going to, I’m going to build a team! That may require having a part-time or full-time person or teams and things like all the solo 401ks, disallow, any type of team growth, you have to have everybody being contractors.
And so that doesn’t work sometimes. And the IRS is coming down. If you have employees they’re coming and saying, Hey, you can’t call these people contractors. In the big picture, the eQRP is set up to grow with you. It’s set up to have employees where everybody gets control. So it’s not just you as the owner.
And so you have these different tools, these different pieces. So all of a sudden you’re like, wait a second. So this isn’t the same thing, because I think a lot of times, if you Google, that’s not your friend. After all, Google will tell you what you want to hear. It’s an echo chamber. We don’t do echo chambers. We do the truth. So you come and do us and you say, here’s what I want to do. And we go, great. Here’s how you could do that. And if you do it that way, you’re going to get hammered by the IRS. We don’t tell you to go hire a tax attorney for some, we’re going to tell you the truth.
That’s a big part of the difference with what we are all in.
Chad Corbett: The huge part of the difference. And just for anyone who has never done this, Damien knows my frustrations with it. Like I was using the more advanced, self-directed checkbook control IRAs for real estate. I wasn’t using leverage because I was writing notes for the most part.
I did buy a few homes and, hold, but for me, it was pretty simple. Now had I been doing the, had I been actually. Holding it as I had, I applied leverage. I could have grown faster. It would have been a bigger portfolio and I’ll say that I started with a $12,000 balance in 2013.
And when I rolled it over and December of this year, that was 128,000 bucks. So I didn’t do too bad. 10 to one over a 10 X return over. What a seven, eight-year period being completely ignorant, they know just self-taught on it. It was like, so I was taking advantage of the benefits I was aware of as soon as I became aware of this, that all of a sudden, it was, it didn’t shine anymore.
It had a dark patina on it. I’m like the hell was that this one’s way better than mine. So I transitioned, and I saw the benefits and some of the things that we haven’t discussed. These are the types of assets you can acquire and hold such as cryptocurrency or physical precious metals. And I thought that was a unique benefit to the way that Damian is structured in the QRP.
If you are curious about crypto, if you want to hold physical gold in your home, or, even with the custodian, it’s an option that’s not available to you through other plans. Be sure to look in the show notes.
Damien has written and annually updates a really thorough book on this. And that’s something we’ll provide to you guys. You can get a free copy of that book by clicking the link in the show notes. if this is, we’re not going to cover it all in an hour, you’re not going to fully have your head wrapped around it.
But if this is, it’s striking a chord with you, be sure and get a copy of that book. I read it cover to cover as soon as it showed up. It probably took me four hours to get through the book. I was already pretty well versed in these and pretty much knew what I was getting into. So if it’s your first time through this, take your time, and don’t hesitate to call his team and ask questions.
But I think that book is probably the single best source of information. So you’ll have an opportunity to get Damian Lupo’s book and dig into the details of this.
Using qualified retirement plans for real estate investing and UBIT [00:17:30]
Chad Corbett: But I think, most folks here are real estate professionals. Maybe not from an IRS definition standpoint. Most of them are practitioners uh, in the eyes of the IRS. So we’ve got active investors, active realtors.
So let’s specifically like let’s shine a light on that part of it. So if someone, a typical entry point into brokerage or investment, a typical entry point is, Hey, I made some money doing this other thing, now I wanna, I want to, move toward financial freedom. So with that, a lot of times comes, an IRA or a 401k that was from a previous employer.
And that’s a great delineation point because when you leave that employer, there’s still a fence around your money. You can’t do what you want with it without penalty, but that delineation, creates a point of flexibility where you can take it from the company custodian, and you can take control of your damn finances.
As we were talking about earlier. So there’s a lot of folks in real estate that have built up let’s just say it’s a hundred thousand dollars traditional directed 401k is most people end up in that because they didn’t understand what they were setting up on day one when HR said, so what do we want to do here?
They’re like, ah, I don’t know, check that box. I was one of those people ask me how I know that’s how I ended up with a traditional 401k that I had to transition to a self-directed IRA, which I in turn transitioned to a QRP. So just like Damien said in the very beginning, as you can learn from your mistakes, you can cut the learning curve down.
How to use a QRP for investing in real estate [00:18:48]
Chad Corbett: So I want to shine a light on how this species can be used as a leverage tool in real estate to quickly build wealth through the asset class we all trust.
Damion Lupo: Something that’s important that we. Here and because I know this impacts a lot of people, you guys watching, and listening to the soft-directed IRA space changed radically in November of 2021.
And that was because the US tax court ruled that checkbook IRAs are illegal. And that doesn’t mean anybody’s going to jail. What it means is that you could potentially lose your retirement money because of taxes and penalties, that happened to somebody. The court just said you know what, IRAs, we’re not meant to have you in control and command.
You can decide what you want to invest in, but you can not command the assets. And they came down and hammered some people. And a lot of the IRA custodians just pretended this didn’t happen. And it was amazing to me. And I was thinking, have you guys read the case? And they said, oh yeah, there’s it doesn’t apply.
And I laugh. And I said I don’t think you read the case. And I read the case and it was, like many, it was big. It was it’s on our website. It’s my summary of the actual case. So, what this means is that these checkbook IRAs, like you, used to have a lot of people have them. Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people have them, they are not allowed.
They are disqualified. You can convert that. So you have command and control with an eQRP. And that gives you all this. Not only does it allow you to have command, but it also allows you to leverage, as you talked about. How you didn’t have leverage and you 10 X your account, and that’s cool.
And that’s, that’s awesome. Except with real estate, there’s a lot of people that are like, yeah, but isn’t the point of real estate to have leverage. And so it’s one of the only things that you can just get leveraged easily. So give people an example of why, how, and why this is so valuable.
When I first started 20 some odd years ago, I took $6,000 from a visa card and used it as a down payment for a piece of real estate. And then that snowballed into 150 houses over five years. It wasn’t even my money. So like, if you started with $6,000 in an ERP, you could leverage that 100 to 1 and grow that.
And you can do all this inside of a Roth account. And what that means is that there’s no tax ever. And a lot of people like we were talking earlier, people think they’ve been brainwashed by wall street to say, oh yeah, I get the tax deduction. Now don’t pay taxes today. And then when you’re older and you retire, you’ll be in a lower tax bracket.
Chad, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. That’s programming people to be broke when they’re getting older. I’m like, why would I want to be in the highest tax bracket regardless of depreciation and stuff, I want to be making so much money when I’m 60 years old, that there’s no way I’m going to be in the lowest.
And so the idea here. If you want to set yourself up for using a Roth account correctly, leverage it smartly. And then you end up at a moment in time where you’re like, okay, I am out of the tax game, like Peter Thiel. He’s got a Roth account with something like $5 billion in it. And he’s 56 years old. So then that’s one of the reasons IRAs are under attack by Congress in 2021 and these people that think that they’re so smart said we got it.
We got to make sure those rich people don’t get super-rich. They’re already super-rich and they’re just gonna keep getting richer. So can we, if we use the same techniques and that’s what they did, they used the leverage. Private equity-like we like, and they use real estate. And that’s what everybody can do.
You can invest in real estate, by yourself, in syndication with other people. You can use all the leverage you want. It can be a hundred to one, literally. That’s you think about the power of that? A few thousand dollars that you leveraged and that’s the value you have command. You can take possession, of cryptocurrency gold and in real estate, you can go out there and you can use the bank’s money and grow your account and you could keep all the profit, like not using that as is just because you don’t know anybody. Yep.
Chad Corbett: And as you guys get into, down this rabbit hole, you’ll find there are creative things you can do such as using life insurance plans or writing yourself loans. And you can begin to co-mingle that money into these passive investments. You can’t do this for a house you live in. The limitations are important to understand, but there are layers to this.
You can basically take tax-free money on top of tax-free money and create leverage and just explode returns. And we’ve all, I don’t say we’ve all, most people have been conditioned to think, oh yeah. Some pay returned 7% over the last historical return. When over the last 20 years, that’s good, that’s a good return.
And those people have their hands out at three different stages throughout the ETF or mutual fund you bought, collecting fees, whether you made money or lost money. There’s an un-indoctrination that, that needs to happen. And I think that’s what we’re pointing our careers that, I scream this from a mountaintop every chance I get: chances are most things you think you know about finance, taxation, and retirement accounts are heavily distorted because they want you to think like an industrial revolution factory worker.
And just like Damien said, most people’s advice, including up to registered investment advisors, you can wrap them around the axle in 10 seconds because they’ve been taught- they’ve been indoctrinated to say the same for 50. And it’s just making money flow back into equities markets for the most part, where a bunch of big fees can be taken off of it and they use your money as interest-free loans to blow up their portfolios.
And once you see through the looking glass you’ll be as pissed off and passionate about this as we are. So I encourage you to get them. And you guys should read two books that I’ll recommend here. One is the creature from Jekyll Island. If you can find a copy that is the terrifying story of the origin of the federal reserve. The other is a recently published book, principles of changing world order by Ray Dalio. It’s about 18 and a half hours. It’ll take, if it takes you less than three months to read, you need to go back and read it again because you didn’t digest it all.
But Ray, Dalio’s going back into, I think, 600 AD, And these following the cycles and currency geopolitics sociology, there’s, I think, 15 different variables that, that he’s looking at, but he draws conclusions based on where we are in the economic cycle, the geopolitical cycle.
It will open your eyes to what’s happening in front of you and what your parents thought was happening. And their parents thought was happening. What we’ve been told isn’t necessarily the truth. It’s a way to get you to behave in a certain way that benefits those who write the rules. I’ve found those things by following billionaires and politicians. If you look at what follows their money and you’ll find things like this that are well above board, Mary’s legal loopholes were leftover and opened by the policymakers for them, for their selfish interests.
There’s a much easier path than, probably what you’ve been told. It takes to be a multimillionaire.
I’m betting. Naming you’ve done it twice. Now you went you the first store you went to what? 20 million to negative. What.
Damion Lupo: You get a five and I’ve lost all my money three times. When people go, you lost all that money. It must be terrible. I’m like, look, I had all my money was 10,000.
The first time I did it saved up everything. And then I did a stock because I grabbed a tip from somebody and I went from 10,000 to 300 bucks and then it had a reverse merger. And I was like, what is that? Oh, that’s when it’s really bad. And then I did it again with the leverage to count margin. And when you said something that made me think about how people are being brainwashed.
You hear financial advisors and you hear wall street saying things like ” we need to keep you in conservative investments and it’s risky if you do real estate.” And they want us to focus on traditional investments. I’m like, what, when did equities become traditional? I’m pretty sure it’s small businesses and real estate has always been the conservative thing. And it’s just, it’s a marketing thing that’s been twisted. And then we think, oh yeah, it’s real estate or is scary and stocks making 7%. And it, one of the craziest things, and you probably know this back in 1929, when the markets crashed, it took 25 years for the em to break even.
So when these boneheads we’ll see. Oh, you know what? Over, a period of five or seven years, you’re going to be fine, even if there’s a recession. Yeah. What if you invested in 28 and 29, it took you until 1954 to break even. So I think when people do things blindly and they abdicate responsibility, that’s when they get into trouble.
When they say, okay, if it’s going to be it’s up to me and they spend the time, this is not, it’s not overly complicated, but it does take work. And I think a lot of times people say I’m so busy and so tired. I just rather hand my money over to somebody. But the problem is you’re never going to be free and you’re never going to be at peace because you’re always going to be worried.
That is hell on earth. And that’s what we want to help people avoid and get them into a different position where they feel confident. That’s like going to the gym, man, you gotta go build the muscle. It doesn’t just happen because you’re looking at the gym or cause you bought the membership, you got to go do the work.
You gotta lift the weights. And that’s what we’re all about. Empowering people and handing them a bar and saying, we’re going to help spot you.
Chad Corbett: always think even more than that, all this is a risk mitigation tactic. This is a low-risk portfolio allocation. That’s one thing, but then, when they’re like, oh, you gotta be diversified.
Like, this fund will help you be diversified. I’m like This is 100% bullshit stocks and bonds. How does that differ? Diversify me across asset classes. There’s no small business on here. There’s no private equity. There’s no precious metal. There are no commodities. Like there’s no real estate.
The funniest thing to me, it’s like, oh, this is a fully diversified portfolio. And if you listen to the Bogle heads and the ETF kids, it’s like, oh no we’re fully diversified. We buy index funds. I’m like, you’re in one asset class, public equities. And that’s a retail investment. All the big money that was ever going to be made was made on the private offering.
Before it ever became an IPO and no one made like a few banks, made money on the IPO with legal inside information. And by the time it gets to you in a mutual fund, there are three layers of fees attached as one asset class of public equity.
And they don’t know what to say because they weren’t trained to defend their product. So like that’s a unit. That’s okay to have that. If you guys disagree, that’s fine. You can have stocks, you can have ETFs, you can have mutual funds, you can have those things. But, shouldn’t you have some diversification because if you have exposure to stocks and bonds only, and you in your retirement accounts, which I would venture to say 95% of Americans are in that exact position.
They were given limited choices. They were given the illusion of choice and they were driven into a small selection of garbage. That’s in my opinion, they think they’re diversified. They think that they’ve got that their mix is good for this age and this earnings level. And then they’ll start to taper off equities and add bonds later in life.
And that all looks great. If you backed us that through the industrial level. Guess what? We’re in a different world and the federal reserve at $9 trillion of monopoly money on their balance sheet, this isn’t your grandpa’s retirement account. Things are changing and like you need to protect yourself.
So when is the last time you saw real estate values correct by 20 to 25% because the mob got pissed off on Reddit and went after it? Like we see that happen in public equities. All it takes is Jerome Powell to get behind a podium to suck 15% of the valuation out of the S and P 500, who says that’s a low-risk investment?
I’ve never seen that happen with real estate. I don’t care who says what? You can have a murder happen in your apartment building and the value doesn’t drop 15% overnight on an emotional swing. Even if you feel comfortable with your retirement account, I challenge you to listen to what we’re saying and consider maybe you’re not as diversified and maybe you’re not in such a low-risk profile as you’ve been told. And I would encourage you to look open your eyes and look like what if you could buy the house across from you? What, if you could buy the carwash down the street, what if you could use an SBA loan that has low to no money down and apply leverage using the money you already have trapped in these retirement accounts that are in these high-risk exposure positions, in my opinion…. what if you can get a farm bureau credit loan with 0% down payment, buy an operating farm, pay the farmer to stay there and run the damn thing. And you’re producing food and your community. Watch what billionaires are buying right now.
They’re controlling ag land and water. Why do you think that is? Because they read the creature from Jekyll island and they understand monetary policy and where we are in the cycle.
And in this space, in the retirement account space, don’t take things at face value. Always ask more questions until you’ve completely exhausted or exposed.
You’ve learned everything you needed to learn. And again, this is the kind of heavy conversation, especially if you don’t have exposure to this. But you’re going to click the link below and get Damien’s book. So you’ll have a really good summary of that, that you, and you’ll be highly, a lot better educated after that.
And you have me to ask questions to Damien and his team to ask questions too. This isn’t something you have to scramble to put in place right now, but I was, if this resonates with you, I would say. Part of your annual plan like this year, make this transition and start building real wealth, like start using this as, be your own bank.
Like you don’t have to go beg lenders all the time. If you have a hundred thousand dollars parked over in mutual funds with another custodian, you roll that over here. Make it rough directed, but low borrow your own. And go do the deal and then don’t pay taxes on the gains and you got more next time. There’s so much, so many creative things you can do with this instrument.
Damion Lupo: I, it just made me laugh when you mentioned the Bogle or heads or, the John Bogle, the founder of Vanguard and he was respected. He was the biggest S and P 500 index fund and a huge company. And one of the things that he said, he actually pissed off wall street in general, because he has a quote that we’ve shared oftentimes.
And he said, there’s something wrong in a system and an investment structure when the profits, where the person putting up all the risk capital that’s you, as the investor ends up with 20% of the actual return and 80% of the return goes to fees for the system. And so it’s not me making that up. It’s literally Bogle the founder of Vanguard.
And so when you think about that, Why would he say that? Because he understood it. Why did he piss wall street off? Cause they don’t want you to know that you’re being fed on. And when she, once you take the red pill, know, like the matrix you take it, you realize that the system is built to feed on you.
And if you talk to most financial advisors and you start asking them about how they’re making. It’s not because they’re doing amazing in their investments. It’s because they make money off of fees and commissions. And if you, that’s why I always like to ask people, okay, whatever you’re selling me, how are you making your money?
Are you making it? Oh, man. They hate that question. Like, no, that’s you’re not getting it. You’re going to make 8%. And it’s like, yeah. Okay. So I think the follow-up question
Chad Corbett: how much do, how much of your income do I get? If you lose money? It’s a
Damion Lupo: great question. No,
Chad Corbett: I’m like, wait if you have if you underperform like if you lose 50% of my money, you still make the same fees.
You get a gross on the gross account balance. Yeah. That’s, it’s an actively managed fund and I’m like, what if you’re doing a shitty job actively managing it, shouldn’t there be accountability for you. And then it stopped there. Boom. Script. There’s no script for that one.
Damion Lupo: No. And that’s one of the big shifts for people when you say, okay, I want to do something about it.
How Does the eQRP work? [00:33:25]
Damion Lupo: You’re you’re in charge. One of the questions Chad, people will ask us is what happens to my money when it’s transferred, when I have an ERP, what happens? You decide what happens because nobody’s babysitting your money anymore. You’re in charge. And for some people, quite frankly, they go that scares the living crap out of them because they have no experience and they don’t trust themselves.
And this is where the team and the masterminds and the group help because tribal support is such a big deal when you’re converting or con you know, just shifting and growing. And that’s a big thing for people, cause we’re not used to it. We’re not used to being told that you’re smart enough or were used to being told you’re too stupid to run your money.
So give it to us. And that’s called wall street, indoctrinating you with their theme of giving us your money and we’ll feed you to death. And then maybe you’ll have some money left when you retire. So you have a choice. That’s what I would say. You have a choice on how your assets grow, and what assets you have.
You have a choice, whether you’re going to pay taxes or not, taxes are optional and with strategy. It’s all these things that we’re not told at all by anybody, except for guys like you, that are out there sharing the truth. It’s important for us to look at alternative sources and the truth and ask the best question I ever asked a therapist told me to ask myself for two years after I lost everything.
He said that ask the question, what is true, and then keep going deeper and deeper, like with a creature from Jekyll Island, ask the question and then figure out the actual source of the truth and not just whatever’s being thrown at you. Yeah.
Chad Corbett: Sage advice. Damien, I know you’re a busy person. I value your time and contribution to our community.
I think the best thing at this point is that we’ve introduced the concept. We’ve given them ways that they can learn more. What I came to do is just give them access to you, to the concept, and then to you and your team.
Get the eQRP book free [00:35:04]
Chad Corbett: Guys, as we’ve mentioned, a couple of times throughout this episode, in the show notes, you’ll find the link where you can get Damian’s book delivered to you in hard copy, not some email that you’re going to get a 94 page PDF, but he’ll send you a real professionally printed book.
Uh, Updated for 2022, right? The new ones just came out. Yep. Yep. So you’ll have the most current based on the most current laws around this as he said, everything changed late last year. But the eQRP is unlikely to be manipulated by the politicians for some very strong reasons- their constituents- they can’t afford to manipulate this one. So it’s the, it’s the last safe ground for a creative strategic retirement account. So you’ll learn more about that in the book and then conversations with Damien’s team. So, Damion, thanks again, man. I appreciate it. Always a brilliant conversation with us. So thank you so much. Yeah. I hope you guys enjoyed this. Check out Damien in the show notes for contact information on your link to the free book. And have a great day.
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Grab the eQRP book:
QRP Book
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