How can they start with their freedom number? What does that process look like?

Yeah, well, so taking me back to my investment advisor days, my goal was to convince you to give me your money, keep giving it to me like on a monthly basis, Get me to hold on to it for as long as I possibly could and then make it almost absolutely impossible for you to get it back, right? Because I would make money off of it the whole time.

And it was for your good, by the way.

Well, when I think about that, what is it that that person who's working right now is dealing with? They're working hard for money, right? That's what somebody who's an employee is doing.

And there's not enough time in the day usually to figure out all the things.

So kudos to you if you're listening to this podcast, trying to figure out how do you get out of that.

But also I know that the mistakes that we make early on is that we don't know where to put our money.

on, man.

How do you handle that?

Well, the thing that we have to know is that for it to be passive for someone, it has to be active for someone else, right? So people ask me, is there any true passive income? Well, there's very few things that you can do zero for, right? Like even investing in maybe your fund, right? And you and I were having a conversation about that, interesting.

I would still have to be active enough to understand the things that you're doing.

I need to be able to ask great questions, do due diligence, be able to follow up, right? That requires activity on their front end.

Now, your question is a little different saying, well, right now I don't have excess capital.

Yes, all my money is tied up in these accounts that I couldn't touch.

They have all these gates on them and I can't get access to that money.

And as a

[laughs]

And so I, I reached out to him and man, he took me under his wing.

He was really, uh, excited to have someone locally.

He traveled all over North America doing these conferences and teaching, but he said he never had anybody in Birmingham who had ever, like, started talking to him about this.

So I, I got the benefit of this, like, 75-year-old financial genius to be able to pour into me for 10 years before he passed.

And he, he was sharing with me all of these ideas, and one of the things he said was, "Russ, look, you should not be holding all the money in the business.

You need to pull the money out and get it privately held," right? And he talked about how to hold money in these things called specifically designed whole life contracts.

Mm.

No, I think it was just this whole Wall Street, right? So what exactly are you suggesting that people kind of get into for investment in order to become either financially free or what we deem just free?

Yeah.

So if what you're doing is not getting where you want to go, you have to make an adjustment.

Otherwise, you're going to get the same results.

Right.

So the idea of why are so many people not financially free? Well, they're following the same advice of everybody else is following.

And I understand that because I used to be in the world of giving the advice that didn't get people to be financially free.

How do you get them away from that in order to just follow down even into your community? Like how do you change somebody's mind?

And

that's where I feel like at that moment, I was definitely looking for answers.

And here's this 70-year-old man who was an economist, had been very successful in life and business.

And I happened to meet him at an event in Orlando, Florida.

And when I read his book on the plane ride home, I realized he lived in Birmingham, Alabama, where I live.

And so it was it was definitely I don't believe in chance.

I believe, you know, providence.

This is a little annoying.