In this episode of The Same Day Podcast, host Yoni Schmidt is joined by Russ Morgan, Co-founder of Wealth Without Wall Street, to talk about land flipping, infinite banking, and how to identify your Investor DNA. Russ explains why passive income still requires active thinking, how to structure your cash flow for freedom, and why he targets 200% of monthly income. He also gives advice for people stuck in the 9-to-5 grind.
Land Flipping, Infinite Banking, and the Investor DNA: Russ Morgan’s Top Passive Income Strategies
Russ Morgan is the Co-founder of Wealth Without Wall Street, an online community and coaching platform that empowers individuals to achieve financial freedom through passive income strategies outside traditional investments. After beginning his career as an investment advisor in 2004, he co-founded Wealth Without Wall Street in 2015 to challenge conventional financial paradigms. Known as “The Idea Guy,” Russ is celebrated for his innovative problem-solving skills and passion for teaching. Beyond his professional endeavors, he is a dedicated family man and actively supports causes such as Campus Outreach and Young Business Leaders.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- [2:29] Russ Morgan shares how the 2008 financial crisis exposed the flaws in traditional financial planning
- [10:53] Why Russ aims for 200% of monthly needs in passive income as a financial freedom benchmark
- [17:32] Common myths about passive income and why it still requires involvement and understanding
- [23:49] Russ explains land flipping as a scalable and recession-resistant passive income strategy
- [26:28] Why land investing isn’t speculative when backed by market data and a 300% margin of safety
- [28:11] How to build a passive income operating system and take control of personal cash flow
- [31:47] The role of masterminds in breaking limiting beliefs and expanding financial possibilities
- [35:32] The first step to financial freedom for 9-to-5 workers stuck in the rat race
In this episode…
Are you stuck chasing financial freedom but unsure which path leads there fastest? Maybe you’ve heard about passive income, land flipping, or Infinite Banking, but the strategies sound either too complex or too risky. What if the key to unlocking consistent, recession-resistant cash flow is not just in the strategy but in knowing yourself?
According to Russ Morgan, a seasoned financial educator and investor, true passive income starts with understanding your “Investor DNA.” He highlights how many people fail with passive income strategies because they chase what works for others instead of aligning investments with their own strengths and preferences. This alignment creates clarity and momentum. Russ also shares how unconventional strategies like land flipping can yield consistent monthly income with minimal involvement. Combined with infinite banking to reclaim liquidity and control, these approaches empower individuals to build wealth outside of volatile markets.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Yonatan Schmidt on LinkedIn
- Mat Zalk on LinkedIn
- Keyrenter Property Management
- Keyrenter Property Management in Tulsa | Oklahoma City | Arkansas
- Keyrenter Property Management email address: [email protected]
- Russ Morgan on LinkedIn
- Wealth Without Wall Street
- Passive Income Mastermind
- “Exploring New Possibilities in Entrepreneurship” with Chip Gaberino on The Same Day Podcast
- “Revitalizing Communities Through Multi-Concept Restaurant Development” with Elliot Nelson on The Same Day Podcast
- “The Future of Financial Advising: Building Relationships Over Returns” with Morgan Martin on The Same Day Podcast
- “Beyond Traditional Buying: Exploring Creative Real Estate Financing Techniques” with Chris Prefontaine on The Same Day Podcast
- Becoming Your Own Banker: Unlock the Infinite Banking Concept by R. Nelson Nash
- The Purple Book, Updated Edition: Biblical Foundations for Building Strong Disciples by Rice Broocks and Steve Murrell
Quotable Moments
- “Control beats return. I thought, man, that’s really interesting. And at a time of lack of control…”
- “The biggest obstacle for keeping people from becoming financially free was their lack of access to cash.”
- “If you’re only half right, you’re still financially free. That’s the beauty of the 200% goal.”
- “Passive means uninvolved? No, you have to inspect what you expect. It’s your money, it’s on you.”
- “The first thing you should always invest in is your own financial education — sharpen your financial IQ.”
Action Steps
- Understand your Investor DNA before investing: Aligning investments with your natural tendencies increases satisfaction, confidence, and long-term success.
- Build a passive income operating system: Organizing your cash flow is essential to regain control and create sustainable wealth outside traditional models.
- Set a financial freedom target of 200% monthly needs: This buffer protects against volatility and enables generational wealth-building and greater lifestyle freedom.
- Start with small, cash-flowing investments like land flipping: Lowering risk entry points with recurring income can build confidence and momentum for more comprehensive strategies.
- Join a mastermind community: Surrounding yourself with high-achieving peers expands your vision, breaks limiting beliefs, and accelerates growth.
Sponsor for this episode…
Keyrenter Property Management:
This episode is brought to you by Keyrenter Property Management.
Keyrenter Property Management is a full-service property management company that helps clients buy, renovate, and operate real estate assets.
The team helps clients build wealth while taking the headache out of property management.
That’s why, no matter what rental you have — single-family homes, condos, townhomes, or apartments — they can give you the management solutions you need.
To learn more about their services, go to https://keyrenterpmc.com/ or send them an email at [email protected].
Episode Transcript
Intro: 00:05
Welcome to The Same Day Podcast, where we discuss driving incremental business growth and other topics related to real estate, property management and entrepreneurship. Now to the show at hand.
Yoni Schmidt 00:20
Hello. Yoni Schmidt here, hosting today’s episode of The Same Day Podcast, where I connect with top business and real estate leaders. Some of our past guests include Chip Gaberino, a local restaurateur, entrepreneur, Elliot Nelson, the CEO of the McNellie’s Group, and Morgan Martin of Merrill Lynch. Today’s episode is brought to you by Keyrenter Property Management. At Keyrenter Property Management, we are a full service property management company and we help our clients buy, renovate, operate real estate assets.
We help our clients build their wealth while taking the headache out of property management. That is why no matter what rental you have single family homes, condos, townhouses, apartments. We have the management solutions for you. Go to keyrenterpmc.com or email us at [email protected] for more information. Today on the podcast, we are joined by someone who is truly redefining how people think about money, freedom and financial independence.
Russ Morgan, Co-founder of Wealth Without Wall Street and the Passive Income Mastermind known affectionately as The Idea Guy, Russ is a financial visionary who has helped thousands of business owners and investors move beyond trading time for money and into the world of passive income. From building his own financial freedom through infinite banking strategies to leading a movement that challenges norms of the norms of Wall Street. Russ is on a mission to give people back control of their lives, their wealth, and their time. He’s a data teacher, a Lake Day kind of guy, which I am too.
And today, he’s the guest that we’re honored to have. Welcome to the show, Russ, and thank you for being here.
Russ Morgan 02:02
Yoni, I enjoyed meeting you prior to record, and I know we’re going to have a good conversation. Love it.
Yoni Schmidt 02:08
Yeah. So okay. Take us back to, you know, the founding story, the mindset shift. You know, the beginning. What led you to create Wealth Without Wall Street?
How did you, you know, obtain or get to your own financial freedom and independence and talk a bit about the journey that inspired the whole movement.
Russ Morgan 02:29
Yeah. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to do that. I’ll try to keep it interesting as it relates to the people at home. Right. Like as you’re listening to this, why why is this important for you?
I was an investment advisor, probably somebody that you would have been giving your money to, helping you set up a retirement accounts, if you will. A buddy on the golf course that was giving you, you know, stock tips. That was me. I was a certified financial planner. I thought that I had the market whipped because I started in 2004, and just the way we’ve experienced up until the last couple of months, the markets have been going up and I thought I was a financial expert, Yoni.
And all of a sudden this thing called the global financial crisis happened at the end of 2008, and things started going down, down and down. And I was sitting there pawns up to the sky, trying to figure out what had happened and what was going to prevent it from happening again. And unfortunately, the mentors and advisors that I had that I looked up to had been in the industry 20 or 30 years, who had gone through some cycles, had no answers for me. And as someone who really doesn’t like accepting, you know, I don’t know for an answer. I went and saw different ways that people were trying to build wealth.
And what I found is that true wealth was being built outside of the traditional Wall Street model. And that was news to me. And I got introduced to an idea you mentioned in my bio a concept called Infinite Banking. I got introduced to an idea called Infinite Banking through a book called Becoming Your Own Banker. Like a lot of people talk about The Purple Book, The Purple Bible, if you will.
You know, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Well, this is the black one. And in our industry, it’s called becoming your own banker. And I got to hear the author of this book. He was a 70 something year old economist.
He was teaching about 400 other advisors like myself at an event down in Orlando, Florida. And he was saying, hey, there’s a way to build wealth that has nothing to do with what happens in the stock markets or interest rates on a daily basis. Control beats return. I thought, man, that’s really interesting. And at a time of lack of control, it really resonated with me.
I didn’t understand what he was saying. I had to go and, you know, spend about six months trying to basically debunk it and yellow padded and Excel spreadsheet it for myself. But what he was teaching is that the biggest obstacle for keeping people from becoming financially free was their lack of access to cash. And I resonated with that because all of my cash had been put into equity and businesses, equity in homes and the markets, especially in retirement accounts that I couldn’t touch. And when markets and things started, you know, evaporating these supposed returns I had, it didn’t help me pay the day to day bills.
And I wanted to figure out what are other options. And he started teaching about that. So that kind of led me on a journey to one re redeveloping the way that I looked at money and getting my cash in a place that I could access it. And then I started trying to figure out how do I invest? What does that need to be?
Because I had always been a market space guy. I was, you know, I was tracking standard deviation and alpha. I was not looking at passive income. I wasn’t looking at, you know, panels and trying to figure out, you know, what is the cap rate on an investment property, if you will. And, and after a number of years of like doing this the hard way, I understood that there was a couple of things that I had to learn.
I had to understand what I, you know, my investor DNA. We can get into that at some point if you want to. What it was I need to understand what my investor buy box was. And all of these things just kept stacking on top of each other to us. Getting on a podcast one day just to have a conversation with our local audience, because that’s who we were trying to just have a conversation with our clients.
And next thing you know, our podcast blew up. People were calling us from all over the country saying, hey guys, can you help me do these things you’re talking about?
Yoni Schmidt 06:19
So that that conference in Orlando and I guess, like the presenter that you mentioned who’s still around, I’m guessing, or no.
Russ Morgan 06:29
I really wish he was. No, he he passed away about four years ago. He was in his mid 80s. So when I met him he was in his mid 70s and I did get ten years with him. I left this part out when I bought his book.
He had a book and I bought it after hearing him on stage. And I read it on the flight home from Orlando to Birmingham, Alabama. That’s my hometown. and I turned the book over and on the back of the book, it gave a phone number of all things, which is pretty crazy. You don’t ever see that on books.
And it gave an address and the address was Rocky Ridge Road, Birmingham, Alabama. So this man who I was listening to, that I was resonating with so much, lived in my hometown. So I got to spend ten years with him. And it was an amazing ten years. Yeah, I wish I still had now with ChatGPT, with all the stuff.
I do have conversations with him in a in a very artificial way, but I do get to connect in that way.
Yoni Schmidt 07:22
Yeah, yeah. That’s awesome. So that was the light bulb that basically that was the moment that the light bulb went off in your head. Was it the flight back home when you were reading the book? Was that a certain conversation with him that you were having?
Tell me a little bit about that.
Russ Morgan 07:36
Well, it’s a combination of things, right? You know, timing is everything. And your your ears, right, like, are wide open when opportunities happening. Usually it happens in crisis. And that’s kind of where I was at with the markets.
Not only had I lost 30 to 40% of my wealth. But I also was feeling the burden of the 30 to 40% of all the clients I had wealth being lost. So that that moment gave me an opportunity to be open to new ideas. And just the here’s the thing is that some people are going to be like, I’ve heard of an idea and I’ve never taken action on it. Well, I had heard this idea every January for the previous four years, by the way, so it wasn’t new to me, but it I it didn’t resonate because I didn’t need a new thing.
I didn’t have anything that was broken. And so I thought my plan was good. So it was one figuring out the markets were way more fragile than I anticipated, and they’re way more fragile today than they were 20 something years ago because of all the government stimulus that’s gone into them and that, you know, triggers lots of booms and bust cycles. But also, I learned that I thought, you know, the weight of wealth is just what everybody else was doing. And when I tried to do what everybody else did, I didn’t get the same results.
And I didn’t understand why that was right. Like, why can’t I just go buy a rental property like, you know, he only has and get the same results. Well, there’s different metrics and things. The way we see the world and the way that we operate will dictate how we’ll get results. So I had to learn that.
So there’s a culmination of many things along the way that started teaching me about what I needed to be focused on and what I didn’t need to focus on.
Yoni Schmidt 09:09
So let’s let’s talk a little bit about that. We talk about, you know, you’re talking about passive income investment philosophy. I think I read somewhere, somewhere that your your mission is to help people achieve what. 200% of their monthly needs and passive income, which is a very specific benchmark. This personally interests me a ton because I’m on a you know, I’m on a journey right now.
I’m 34 years old. I’m on a journey right now to accumulate as much cash as I can, because I recognize as well that, you know, cash is ultimately the truest of the truest passive income sources. Right? Money spits off money. And, you know, there’s nothing that’s more passive than that.
Even your real estate holdings or my real estate holdings are not as passive as, you know, the money that I’m generating off of money. Right? But my traditional Merrill Lynch, you know, broker or money manager will tell me, you know, we want to moderate, you know, to aggressive, you know, investment plan something that’s like invested in buckets of good your ETFs, your your your mutual funds. You know, the things that you know, we know won’t fluctuate too much. You know with with the market even though, you know, the last few weeks is probably not not true.
You know, you look at the S&P 500 and these 24 hour tariff wars or whatnot, there are tons of there’s tons of volatility and fluctuations in the market. Tell us a little bit about how do you help people, you know, achieve 200% of their monthly needs and passive income and and maybe not give away the secret sauce. Us. But I mean, if you if you can, then go for it. But I’m super curious to know.
Russ Morgan 10:53
Yeah. No, I’ll give away. I’ll give away all the secrets. Right? Like in today’s age, information is free.
Like there’s nothing that is not already out on the internet. So I want to give you as much as I can. Obviously, implementation is where the value is added. Everything you have to take action and you have to take the right action. Right.
Just because you’re you’re getting a car and start driving doesn’t mean you’re getting any closer to the destination. You may be going further away from it. So it’s definitely an implementation corrected. But I want to I want to push you and double click on what you said there, because what we will see and hear from the markets, specifically the stock markets. When I say the markets, that’s really what I’m referring to is that, oh, if we use this mix, we invest in these products, I won’t have that much volatility.
And all they’re doing, they’re looking in their rear view mirror and they’re looking at the best run Our country has ever had, and assuming that it’s going to continue that way. And that’s the same mistake I made from 2004 to 2008, assuming everything that was going on, just for some a history lesson. Some people know this, some people don’t. Our country over the last 100 and something years, our stock markets have average. Our economy has averaged a recession of like 10 to 20% every four and a half years.
The last one was 2008. So do the math. We’re we’re 17 years prior to that, it was the longest boom cycle had only been nine years. So we’ve been living in this kind of fantasyland. And it’s not necessarily because, oh, we’ve like figured it out.
It’s just that our country now has just gone into a, you know, a $2 trillion deficit every single year in order to pump money to the financial markets, propping them up. Right. They’re just they’re giving money to the market and that’s buying goods. And we’re thinking, oh, that’s what’s making things go up. Well, as soon as those money presses quit.
And right now, this administration seems to be hell bent on saying, hey, we’re going to stop some of the previous things. We’re seeing this pullback and that’s what’s create. People say it’s volatility. No it’s just a reverting to the mean. It’s like we’re way over spent.
So there is I used to use the the analogy oh if you put money in a mutual fund it’s like it’s like versus you know stock is a paint is a, you know, just one big glass window and a mutual fund is having different paints. So if a rock goes through it, you have to replace the whole window. You have to replace one piece. That’s just those are just lines. I’m just telling you those are lines.
I had a I had a gentleman that was in his late 70s in 2009. He’d been referred to me, and he was meticulous at keeping notes. He wrote down everything that he and I talked about, and he had done the same thing with the previous advisor he had. And on that page, Ronnie, he said he had written stocks risky bonds safe. He shows it to me and then he pulls out his statement where he was 100% in bonds and it was down 80%.
Well, and he’s he’s he he doesn’t understand. He’s like, this is what he said I wrote it. Yeah. How how how have I lost 80% of my wealth? So what what’s happened in the past does not dictate the future.
So I would say that when people are thinking about how do I protect my wealth, right? Depends on where you are. Are you in growth stage? Are you in stabilization stage? You know what’s more important?
Return on your principal or return off your principal, right? Like so. I always try to figure out, like, where am I putting myself in a position now moving forward, what we declare, and this is nothing more than repeating what we’ve heard from others. Robert Kiyosaki, probably most famously, financial freedom is not when you have $10 million in a 401 K, you know, $7 million in Merrill Lynch. It’s when your passive income, this money that comes in from things that you don’t actively go to work for, is greater than your monthly expenses.
That’s true financial freedom. I’ve read the Bible, you know, forward and backwards, and I’ve never seen anywhere, anywhere in the Bible where it talks about retirement. That is a new age concept that we’ve all tried to adopt in some shape or form. Know that my mentor was working all the way until he died in his mid 80s. Like he.
But he was serving. He was doing what he loved. And so I, I believe that. So I want to build up enough cash flow that comes in that exceeds my monthly expenses by such a great margin that not only it serves my needs, but it can start serving others needs. So 200% very specifically a couple of reasons behind that.
One, I want to think, how do I leave wealth to the next generation? Right. To my children’s children. Well, in order to do that, I got to start thinking way past my needs. I got to start thinking hundreds of years down the road, as well as if I’m only half right.
I’m still financially free, right? Like, there’s some there’s some assets that right now, like we’ve been publishing our personal passive income report for the last almost five years. Now you can go to street.com. You can scroll down and see our passive income report. We post it every single month.
This one that we’re recording this month was 52,000 and some change. Well, we’ve been doing that. Well, some of the assets on there have gone up in cash flow. Some of them have gone down, some have stopped paying altogether. Right.
I don’t you can’t always figure those things out. So you have to account for way more put margin in your life, create that that protection so that you know where you can go out and do what you want to. And a buddy of mine would call it like his moat around his castle. He said, you know, as long as I got more than what I need. I can go out, do things.
I may come back across that drawbridge with arrows in my back, but at least I’m safe when I get back in.
Yoni Schmidt 16:46
Yeah, I think it’s it was Warren Buffett who said, right, if you don’t make money when you sleep, you’ll work until the day that you die. You know, and and I think it touches a little bit about what you mentioned a moment ago. But, you know, let’s kind of drive in a little bit further and really dig in a little bit. You know, tell us a little bit about some common myths. People believe about passive income that might hold them back.
And then why don’t we after that talk about your favorite passive income strategies. You know, for someone who’s just getting started today. 25, 30, 35 years old, I’ve got some money in my pocket. Where do I begin? And how much money do I need to begin?
Russ Morgan 17:32
Yeah. So the common myth is that passive means uninvolved. It doesn’t mean uninvolved, right? Like you have to inspect what you expect. If you think you can just give money away and it’s just going to come back to you, all you’ve traded is one speculative asset for another, in my opinion. That’s my the reason we started Wealth Without Wall Street.
And we named it that. We were thinking about the mindset of just abdicating the responsibility. It doesn’t mean you have to do the job, but you need to understand it. Right? Like if I if I’m going to buy a rental property and hand it over to your team to manage it, I’m going to trust that your team is going to do the job.
But if I don’t even know what your job is, I don’t even know. Are you what metrics that I should be tracking that you should be tracking? How can I follow up and look and see if it’s working? How can I determine that your company is better than the the next one? Right.
So I need to know enough about what I’m doing. It’s my money. At the end of the day, it’s it’s on me. Right. It’s not on the people I give it to.
It’s on me. I have to be the best steward. So I think that the myth is that passive means I just am uninvolved and I hand it off. No, you have to be for it to be passive, for you. It has to be active for somebody else.
And you probably have to be active on the front end. You have to be active to earn the money to be able to invest, to create the passive income. But you might also have to be active on the front end to understand how things work. One of the biggest mistakes people make I’ve said this before, but I’ll go a little deeper in it, is that they believe just because it works for one person and work for another. And here’s an example here.
And you’re you guys manage a lot of rental properties. Single family homes mostly.
Yoni Schmidt 19:16
Predominantly.
Russ Morgan 19:17
Yeah, yeah. I had a buddy of mine. He had over 100 properties and most of them were single family. He had some mobile home parks, some commercial. He very successful. And I was like, hey, don’t reinvent the wheel, right?
You know, just do what he’s doing. So I went out and bought a property, got a property manager for it and thought, life’s going to be good. I’m just going to start acquiring these properties. Well, that first property, I didn’t like it. Well, why didn’t I like it?
Because it was, you know, two hours from where I lived. I, I thought, oh, it’s in my college town. All my nieces and nephews who are getting close to college, they’re going to want to start going down there. That never happened, right? Like all the things, I couldn’t influence his outcome.
And I didn’t understand why. But even though I was getting cash flow every month, I wasn’t happy. And so I didn’t go buy another one. I didn’t go buy 99 other ones like he had.
Russ Morgan 20:13
Well. So I was kind of saying, oh, you know, single family rental. Stupid. Well, it was because it didn’t match up with who I was. I didn’t I couldn’t have told you this then, but we there’s a thing called investor DNA that we all have. It’s the way we.
God built us a certain way to see things and to enjoy things differently, and we all do for that specific reason. Well, there’s all these different asset classes and ways that we can invest. And when they match up well with who we are, we find enjoyment, we have success, and we invest lots of money. And what I didn’t know that is that that individual, he loved the steady and predictability of single family rental properties. And he had just stacked them up.
He had no interest in being involved in them. He had no emotional attachment to it. None of that was inside of his investor DNA. For me, I wanted to be involved. I’d like to have some input and well, I couldn’t.
It was not my thing.
Russ Morgan 21:10
Yeah. And I didn’t understand why they did. So I think people say, oh, just because Johnny is having success here or I’m going to share an idea with you. Oh, just because Russ did that, I should do that. No, you should understand what your investor DNA is. And by the way, if you want to figure out what your investor DNA I have, like we create a whole e-book, you can go to Wall Street podcast or same day, and I think you’ll have that in show notes.
We had a whole book, free information about what investor DNA, DNA is and how it works. So whenever you start figuring out what that is for you. So one of the first things I did, I know, I think you guys have talked about this probably a number of times on the show. I was like, I don’t like long term rentals, but this whole short term rental thing is interesting to me, right? Because I like the influence of it.
And so my business partner and I took a long term rental, right? We owned the property, turned it into a short term rental, and started having some success. We hired an operator and we scaled to over 25 units in like less than 18 months. So for us, we didn’t want to run the business. We hired an operator.
We liked running businesses, buying businesses, building businesses. And then we could influence by telling people, hey, go to wake up in Birmingham right whenever on our websites, on our social media or whatever, we could talk about it. It was something that was exciting to us, and as a result, we you allowed an operator to do his thing? We got to have our influence without having to do the day to day operations. And we had a lot of success.
We grew it to 25, $30,000 a month after, you know, after expenses, income. And then we ended up selling the business to our operator, and now we owner financed it to him. He pays us every single month. So that’s one of my favorite, because I get paid every single month on the 15th of the month. And I don’t have any expenses.
I have no, no involvement in it. Probably one of my favorite things they’re doing right now.
Yoni Schmidt 22:59
Yeah I bet. Love that story. That’s great. Yeah. I mean owner financing to to the operator that was managing your short term rental.
Yeah. Portfolio, which is basically like running a hotel. I mean, you know that it’s it’s it’s a, it’s a different level of involvement, you know, from, from long term rentals, which are, you know, kind of set it and forget it almost. If you have a property manager, of course. Tell us, I guess a little bit more about some of your other, you know, favorite passive income strategies.
And and let’s talk about, you know, people who want to get started. What does that look like? You know, if again, 21, 20, 2530, 35, how much money do you have to have to get started? And, you know, what does it look like?
Russ Morgan 23:49
Yeah, the the other favorite and this is one that we still have today. And typically we average about $30,000 a month in passive income from it. And it is something we call we refer to it as land flipping. Our partners in the business, they call it land investing. But we buy as small parcels of land in the middle of nowhere, not land that you and I would want to go build a house on.
And most of them are out in the middle of the desert and in places that, you know, are not really attractive to us, to build homes, but people will use them for all sorts of things. We buy them from people who’ve owned them for years and years and years that basically have never built anything on them. So it’s vacant, raw land. And then we figure out what the market holds for it. It’s something that’s so small that real estate agents will not, you know, go sell it, because typically the average property we’re buying is somewhere between 5 and $10,000.
And we’re buying it directly from an individual. We’re buying it at $0.25 on the dollar of what other people are selling like properties in the area. So we have what Warren Buffett refers to as a 300% margin of safety. And then we turn around and we market those properties on Facebook, Craigslist and other marketplaces to people who will put down a down payment and then pay basically a car payment on it for the next 3 to 10 years, depending on the size of the property. And we have a land contract.
And so we just receive recurring monthly income on all of these properties every once in a while. Some of them doesn’t go to full term. Some for whatever reason, they can’t keep making the payments. And, you know, we try our best to help them when they can’t. We don’t have to go through all the eviction process, all the Dodd-Frank act, all the things that that that unfortunately, we have to deal with other properties.
And we could just go back and remarket it and then get a new down payment. Start collecting monthly payments. And I’ve seen now our cost basis have gone down significantly from the first one, and we keep doing it. So that’s something that we learned going back to 2019, 2020. And we started doing it ourselves.
And then we hired an operator who is really excellent at it. And again, we like businesses, so it just gave us an opportunity to partner with them. And it’s just been a fantastic thing. It’s one of those areas right now. And we like to you know, there’s a lot of people say things are recession resilient, recession resistant.
Well, land is land, right? Land only goes up in value, but most people have never figured out how to cashflow it. This is a very unique, cash flowing opportunity the way that we buy and sell it.
Yoni Schmidt 26:20
Interesting. So it’s an owner finance on a piece of land. But wouldn’t you say land is quite speculative.
Russ Morgan 26:28
Well, it depends on how you’re buying it, right? Like, if I were to go into downtown Tulsa and try to buy an infill lot. Right. And I would speculate on what’s going to happen. Right.
Will a building come here. Will they you know, will I be able to get the the return on the investment? For us, we are going in and knowing exactly what people are selling exact properties like that for, because we go to only where other land sellers are. So we’re not trying to go buy a piece of land and saying, I hope everything moves this way. We’re, we’re we’re looking for the person who’s making 50 to $100,000 a year and wants a place to get off the grid and wants to go shoot rattlesnakes, wants to drive their ATV, maybe wants to build a home there in the future.
That’s who we’re looking for. And because of that, we’re just gobbling up these pieces of property. And our partners in this business have done almost 10,000 transactions over the last 20 years. Wow. I have never lost.
Never lost $1 on any property that they bought. They’ve always sold the property. Now, the beauty of it is you don’t know what it’s going to sell. So it’s like what we are doing, we’re accumulating properties. It’s like a grocery store.
You don’t know which item. The person’s going to come in the grocery store and want to buy, but if you don’t have it on the shelf, they can’t buy it, right? So our job is to buy property in as many attractive places where other land investors are. So we know there’s an appetite for it. And we just constantly are selling these properties.
And because we’re building a note portfolio, it’s also something that we could sell if we wanted to because it’s it’s not just the land, it’s the cash flow from it.
Yoni Schmidt 28:05
So and that’s what you referred to as be your own bank, know or not necessarily.
Russ Morgan 28:11
Know be your own bank is a different thing. So you you ask the next question which was, okay, how much money does someone need and how do they do all of this. So there’s there’s steps to success, right. And you can’t skip steps. Well, I you know, we believe that there are steps to becoming financially free.
You know, when people see, hey, I spend $10,000 a month, that means in order to be financially free, I need 10,000 a month to passive income. That seems like climbing Mount Everest for someone, right? Like they think that is the mountain top. How am I going to get there? Well, you’re not going to do it all at once.
You got to take steps. So for us we say you need to get to base camp. What is base camp? Well, you got to organize cash flows. We build a process called the passive income operating system.
Most people just need a better system. They don’t have a system, right. So we teach them how to create a system that organizes their cash flow and directs the cash flow that they are normally unnecessarily given away, that they don’t have to and put it into their control. So then they can start investing. So once they set up that, then they learn how to become an investor.
So we teach people the next step. Like you have to be an excellent investor. Most people just have. Robert Kiyosaki said that there’s no good or bad investment. It’s just good or bad investors.
And for those people who are listening to this show for the very first time and never invested anything outside of maybe the markets. They’re like, okay, well, I’m probably a bad investor, I don’t know. Right. I have to learn. So we teach people how to do that.
There’s a process of how to become an investor. All these things we were talking about investor, DNA, investor, buy box, these you know, how to do right. Due diligence, how to be able to, you know, have a conversation with a property manager and ask them certain questions. How do you know if what they’re telling you is accurate? How do you how do you back it up?
Right. Like all those things we teach then and and only then are you going to find the investments and start making investments. How much money you need. It’s dependent. Like I see people all the time investing with zero money, right.
Like there’s so many ways to get into investing. You know, this. Like, I mean, there’s people who buy rental properties with little down or 3% down. I mean, like, or you could go buy a property subject to, but nobody in the deal or get a 100% owner financing. There’s ways to do everything.
And the beauty of it is, once you do it and you do it well, other people will start giving you money to do it for them. And so we have lots of, you know, people in our community that have become syndicators have started to become capital raisers and capital aggregators because they’ve learned how to invest personally and people are giving them money. So how much money do you need? It’s very specific to the things that you’re investing in. But the first thing you should always invest in is your own financial education.
Like you heard that old analogy, if you were going to cut down a tree and had five hours to do it, you’d spend the first 4.5 hours sharpening the axe. Well, in this relationship, your axe is your financial IQ. It’s your understanding of how things work. If you get that right, you’ll be way more efficient and you’ll get to your point way quicker.
Yoni Schmidt 31:03
Yeah, I think it was that was like an Albert Einstein original quote that was like revised or changed a little bit.
Russ Morgan 31:11
Yeah, I. Everything’s either Einstein or Abraham Lincoln I don’t know. Right. Like, I mean, it depends on who you’re listening to. Love it.
Yoni Schmidt 31:20
Love subject to’s. Those are great investment vehicles, especially for someone who doesn’t necessarily want to come in with a ton of cash or own or finance, of course. Let’s talk a little bit about mindset behavior. You know, you run a mastermind that focuses on challenging. You know, limits and beliefs or limiting beliefs.
What are some common limiting beliefs that around money that you’ve helped people overcome?
Russ Morgan 31:47
I think there’s always just a cap. We we hit a ceiling. The reason why someone wants to be in a mastermind is they’ve hit a ceiling and don’t know how to break through it. When I tell people, you know, you’re in the right room, when you’re aspirations, what you’re trying to shoot for are the daily accomplishments of the people around you, right? And when you can show up in a mastermind and you can share your idea with someone like Yoni, and he puts his arm around you and says, that’s cute, but let me show you what I see based upon my experiences.
Here’s what’s really available to you. That’s that’s what happens in masterminds, is that you get exposed to opportunities that you don’t know. There’s a great thing that we put in our book that we wrote, as one of my mentors taught me this. And it’s a great little thing. I don’t know if you have a pen sitting there in front of you, Yoni.
But if you’re not driving, do this. Draw a circle on a piece of paper. Doesn’t matter how big the circle is. Inside the circle is all of your knowledge. This is all the things that you know.
Everything that’s touching that line around the outside is all the information that you don’t know. Well, what happens as we get into rooms with people who have more insight and knowledge? Well, then we gain that knowledge. So then if you do drew a bigger circle around that, now your knowledge just got bigger, right? But Yoni, what also happened to the the the distance of that circle?
Did it not grow? So now everything that’s touching that line is all the information you don’t know. So what we what we find is that as we gain more information, we learn there’s more information that we don’t know. And it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And people need to get that.
So one of the biggest mindset shifts people have to have is that I have not arrived in knowledge. I have to always be learning. And when I’m in rooms that where people are and I should, I leave and I go, I learned something, I know I’m in the right room. If I leave and I’m like, there’s nothing new there either a I was in the wrong room or b I, I was being, you know, I was not listening well.
Yoni Schmidt 33:56
Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Being humble and confident in what you don’t know is very important. And having a growth mindset is that, you know, I think number one, number one driver of of my success, right.
I mean, I didn’t do subject twos until I interviewed Chris Prefontaine on this podcast. And, you know, he sent me his course and it was a game and two books. And though those the course and the two books were just like life changers and eye openers. And, and I came from the world of finance. So I had the financial acumen and the understanding, and it was easy for me to wrap my head around, you know, subject to’s or more complex vehicles like subject to’s with owner Carrybacks.
And so on and so forth. And until I didn’t really get into the nitty gritty of it and get into the stuff that I didn’t really know, I didn’t do it. And I was afraid of it too. Because it was a foreign concept for me. Then I started understanding it and it just became now it’s second nature and I can explain it to people.
You know, like like they’re in fifth grade and and go through a transaction. So I love it. I want to be conscious of your time because I know Big Boss has, you know, assigned you a task today to take your daughter to school here pretty soon. So just lastly, for someone that you know that’s listening, who’s stuck in the 9 to 5 grind the rat race and doesn’t know you know where to start, what’s the one thing that you know they should do today to change their financial future?
Russ Morgan 35:32
Yeah, I think without a goal, we never know if we’re obtaining it. Right. We talked about that at the very beginning. You can get in the car and start driving, but if you don’t know what the destination is. So one of the things I would say the simplest is sit down and create a goal.
Like, what are you trying to accomplish and why is it so important? We get on, we listen to podcasts. We, we, we have certain friend groups, and sometimes we adopt other people’s goals because we think they sound good. I would say, what is your goal and why is that so important to you? And is it big enough to force you to do things that maybe you’re uncomfortable with, to make sure you attain it.
And I think that people don’t spend enough time on that. Like if you came in our community, we have a free community. It’s in the App Store. What’s what, Wall Street. The first thing we tell people to do, we take this passport challenge.
It’s a total free course, but it’s all about building out a goal, a whole process. And how do we do that? Because we think that if you know exactly what you’re trying to accomplish and why it’s so important, you won’t stop. You will work as hard as you possibly can to obtain that specific thing. You know, I hear people say, oh, I want to, you know, grow my company and sell it for $50 million.
Great. But why? Why is that important to you? Right? Like, what is that going to do for you?
What? How is that going to change your life? What is life going to look like at that point? Did you need $50 billion? Was your your goal to get more time?
Okay. How are you tracking time? Right. So so often times we track things but we don’t track time. How are we tracking our time?
What is the thing that we want? Because not just because what I want for me and what you want for you doesn’t Does it mean for the person listening? It’s going to be the exact same thing. And I think that’s the key that people need to have is you need to know what’s your goal and why you want it. And then you can measure how close you are to there.
Right. Like I figured out that I needed more time and passive income was going to give me more time. It was going to give me freedom. Meaning, I didn’t feel like I had to sit in front of this computer screen from, you know, X time to X time, because I knew I had passive income. I wanted to, I could, but I also know that I can get up in just a second, drive my daughter to her homeschool co-op and not worry what’s happening.
I’m going to, you know, take off for a month this summer because I know I can. So I needed to track cash flow, passive income greater than monthly expenses. I needed to to back into that number as a percentage. How close was I? But for somebody else, maybe that’s not their thing.
They need to just understand what their goal is. So then they can figure out how close they are to it.
Yoni Schmidt 38:07
Yeah. Love it. Okay. Well, Russ Morgan, thank you so much for being here and letting us educating us to all of our listeners go to or visit, go without Wall Street. Com forward slash same day.
We’ll have that link in the comments below. You you have a couple of free resources there. You can take the quiz that he mentioned. Reach out to Russ and his team if you have any questions. And Russ, I think you and I should stay in touch and see how I also obtain that, you know, total financial freedom and take, take, take back my time.
That’s really the truth is like I think everyone wants that more than anything. Right. To take back their time.
Russ Morgan 38:50
Totally. Well, thank you so much for having me on the show.
Yoni Schmidt 38:54
Likewise. Thanks for being here. See you next time.
Outro 39:00
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