How Ordinary Investors Can Achieve Financial Freedom in Ten Years or Less Using Real Estate and Insurance the Way the Wealthy Do with Ryan D. Lee

0:01John Lee Dumas:Light that spark fire nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today we'll be breaking down how ordinary investors can achieve financial freedom in 10 years or less using real estate and insurance the way the wealthy do. To drop these value bombs, I brought to Ryan D. Lee into EO Fire Studios. Ryan is a personal finance leader helping people build massive passive income through alternative investing. founder of Wealth Outside Wall Street. He teaches simple strategies for freedom, purpose, and abundance. And today we'll talk about why the traditional retirement system is broken, a better path to financial freedom, a wake-up call for high achievers, and oh, so much more.

0:41John Lee Dumas:And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Ryan and our sponsors. Starting your own business can be really intimidating, and that's why I love tools that don't just help you do more, but actually make everything simpler. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing. Sign up for your$1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash on fire. Go to shopify.com slash on fire. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. High Level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments, and course hosting all on one platform, plus award-winning 24-7 support.

1:19John Lee Dumas:Get a 30-day free trial and my full bonus stack that includes a 15-minute private call with me and much more at highlevelfire.com, highlevelfire.com. Ryan, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:40Ryan D. Lee:Oh, John, what's up? Everyone at Fire Nation, I'm so honored and so grateful to be with you today. I think the first thing I would share, and I was just sharing this with my younger kids just a couple of days ago. I think the one thing to being successful is learning to get up after you get knocked down. That's all success really is, is learning how to fail and stand back up. I mean, over my life, I never knew how to get where I am today, but I knew how to get back up. And if you can just get back up and keep putting one foot in front of the other, at some point, you're gonna land at a point in your life and you're like, how did I get here?

2:16John Lee Dumas:I mean, that's why that song, I get knocked down, but I get up again. I mean, it's just a absolute anthem for entrepreneurs because that is the life that we live. I mean, we wake up one day, we think we're going to conquer the world. And by the end of the day, we couldn't feel lower. And then vice versa. You wake up, you're like, nothing's ever going to be right in the world again. And then one phone call, one email, one something literally changes everything. And I want to talk about why. Like why the traditional retirement system is broken, Ryan. You're the guy to talk to about this. So walk us through why the 401k model no longer works for most people and what actually does work in a modern cash flow driven world.

2:59Ryan D. Lee:I love that question. To kind of frame that question, John, here's what I would say. You know, money, in my opinion, it is a representation of our life and it's a receipt of our time. The majority of people trade the majority of their time for 40, 50 years and don't ever get what they thought would be at the end of that yellow brick road. And it all comes down to one answer to one question that should be on the back of everyone's mind if they are preparing for retirement. So let me ask you this question, John. How much money would you have to have in a 401k to give you the income that you want?

3:31John Lee Dumas:Ryan, I really understand what went wrong with traditional retirement system and why it's broken, but how would you really explain that to our listeners in layman's terms?

3:40Ryan D. Lee:Yeah, you know what? It really comes down to one fundamental answer to a question that everyone should have the answer to, but they don't, right? And I think it's conveniently hidden from us, but there was this idea that if you got up, went to school, got a degree, put money in the 401k that one day you'd have quote unquote enough money. And I think that was the path that almost everyone followed. And honestly, John, it worked for a period of time, but since the year 2000, there's been a lot of things that have changed in the economy that have caused that model to not work, but it's going to come down to one answer to one question.

4:14Ryan D. Lee:So anyone listening to this call right now, if you don't have the answer to this question and you're preparing for retirement, then you have to understand that this answer is being hidden from you. So how much would you have to have saved up, accumulated in your 401k, your IRA, or wherever you're saving money to give you the income that you desire, right? You would think that that question would be readily answerable because then people could know, oh, I'm 30 % of the way there. I'm 40 % of the way there. I'm making progress towards the target that I have to hit so I could retire. The reason that answer is never given is the number is astronomical.

4:50Ryan D. Lee:Whatever income you wants, whatever income you desire, you have to multiply that by 25. That's how much money you would have to have saved up if you use traditional systems. So John, if I want a hundred thousand or $120 ,000 in, uh, in desired retirement income, if I multiply that by 25, I've got to have$3 million in a 401k to make that work. And the reality of it is people aren't anywhere near close to that. So there's a lot of reasons why the model is broken, but the fact that the, the, the result, the target, the destination is hidden from you is the main reason that keeps people trapped.

5:25John Lee Dumas:So there's a better path to financial freedom. And I want to talk about that path because you, Ryan, you teach ordinary investors how to reach financial freedom in 10 years or less, which is powerful because some people listening right now, they're 55, they're 60. They're like, I need to get there not in 30, 40, 50 years, like 10 years or less. This is what you teach. And this is by using real estate and insurance. And by the way, this is what the wealthy do. So what does that blueprint look like in practice?

5:56Ryan D. Lee:Yeah, man, John, I love this question. You know, for me, I went down the traditional path, right? I graduated college. I started max funding IRAs. I started doing everything traditionally the way you were told to do it. And in 2008, I realized two very powerful lessons. Number one, I had no control over what I was doing. I couldn't figure out why my accounts were going down. I couldn't figure out how to stop them. And if I couldn't control what I was doing, I couldn't ever predict if and when I would be able to retire. But number two, I had a goal early on in my corporate career. I wanted to retire early.

6:28Ryan D. Lee:I felt trapped in the cubicle. I felt trapped in the grind. I had so many desires that I was putting on hold for one day. And I remember, you know, I was about five years out of college when 2008 happened. And I remember looking at all my coworkers. These were people who were 20, 30, 40 years ahead of me. And their entire future was melting before their eyes. And even though I lost a bunch of money, I was super grateful that I hadn't traded 40 years of my life only to realize the market was pulled out from under my feet right before I was ready to retire. And so that started me on a different path.

7:01Ryan D. Lee:And, John, when I went on this different path, I didn't know what to do. And like so many people who get into the game of money, the first book that I picked up was Rich Dad, Poor Dad. And honestly, when I picked that book up, it confirmed a lot of the suspicions that I already had. Savers were losers. The rich don't work for money. Debt is money. All of these big, new, controversial ideas, but I had no idea what to do about it. And so as my paradigm was shifting, I started looking for new answers. And I came across a book written by Robert Allen. And the subtitle of his book was using Alan's seven strategies or seven principles you could retire in 10 years.

7:40Ryan D. Lee:And I thought to myself, kind of going back to the first question, you know, I'm comfortable with failure. I can just get back up. I realized I could do anything for 10 years. And so I followed his pathway. And for the first time, I started realizing I had more control. I had more predictable outcomes. And I started investing in a way that reduced and minimized my tax. And that measured my success in a completely different way. No longer was I trying to measure my success based on my net worth, how much I had accumulated in a 401k. I was measuring success based on how much income assets could generate without having to sell the assets.

8:16Ryan D. Lee:And so this started me on a whole new path. And John, ultimately what comes from this path is combining two economic forces together in one system. I call it a passive income machine. You need a way, any entrepreneur needs a way to go from making money actively in your business or side hustle to protecting the money that you have so you never lose it and protecting it from inflation, taxes, markets, predators, creditors, all of, you have to have a place to protect it. That's life insurance. It's overfunded, high cash value life insurance. And the crazy part, when I learned about this, I had a very antiquated paradigm around life insurance.

8:57Ryan D. Lee:I thought it was a necessary evil. You know, buy term and invest the difference. But as I started looking into it, millionaires, billionaires, even Walt Disney, the guy who started Disneyland, they all started using these overfunded cash value policies. And the unique advantage that these accounts give you is number one, it eliminates taxes from your future forever. But number two, all of this excess cash that you build up in these unique policies, you can borrow against them. You can have your money compounding and you can leverage the value of your account. And so I started leveraging the value of insurance and buying real estate.

9:30Ryan D. Lee:I would take the profits of that real estate and pay back my line of credit, which was a private line of credit to the insurance company. And I just started repeating this process over and over and over again. And John, after 17 properties and four years later, now, mind you, this is four years after 2008, I lost almost everything I'd saved in the traditional sense. Four years later, I quit a six figure job, completely financially free, generating tax free income for the rest of my life. I still own the same assets. I still am generating tax-free cashflow. And that pathway opened up a doorway of opportunity to start choosing what I did with my life, to start choosing what I did with my time, instead of being dictated to that I have to wait until 65 with my fingers crossed, hoping that I have enough.

10:14John Lee Dumas:That is such a powerful story. And I can tell you, Ryan, one reason why I resonate with it so much is because, I mean, we're essentially the identical age. I mean, I was five years out of college when 2008 happened as well. I was actually working in a corporate finance for John Hancock. So I was actually talking to financial advisors. I was actually like working in the industry. I was looking out of my office window in Boston and I was seeing Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers employees walking out with boxes in their hands. Like I saw that happening in real time. And of course, you know, I saved up some money cause I was in the army for four years at a 13 month tour of duty.

10:48John Lee Dumas:I had some money in the bank account. And I was watching that, you know, quickly disintegrate as my, you know, S &P 500 index was, was, was cratering, et cetera, et cetera. And I was like, wow, that really sucks. But guess what? I knew that, you know, over time I had the time to recover. And I remember a lot of my parents' friends, actually, I remember talking to a couple of them like over the holidays and et cetera, they're like, I'm never going back to stocks. Like I'm going to keep my money in cash. Like I just can't go through this anymore. And what happens? Like, like 20 years almost now of like unbelievable up and to the right returns that they missed out on while their cash as a melting ice cube has just been inflated away and inflated away.

11:27John Lee Dumas:And it's just so sad to see because for so many just happened at completely the wrong time for you and I, luckily it happened at a great time. And we were early, we were in our twenties and I mean like we can recover from these situations and we can, you know, learn from it and realize that I mean, hey, this is maybe one step back, but I'm ready now to take 10 steps forward. Like, let's go. So we have a lot more to talk about around this, Ryan, when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Fire Nation, how many different systems does your business rely on just to operate day-to-day? Your CRM, accounting software, HR tools, spreadsheets, exports, endless back and forth, just to get one clear answer.

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13:44John Lee Dumas:Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash onfire. Go to shopify.com slash onfire. That's shopify.com slash onfire. Fire Nation, if you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. That is why High Level is Entrepreneur on Fire's featured partner. High Level gives you a website builder and hosting, funnels and landing pages, email marketing, appointment scheduling, payment processing, course and membership hosting, and so much more. Everything you need to succeed all under one roof.

14:22John Lee Dumas:No duct tape, no juggling five platforms, just one clean system for your business. And their award-winning 24-7 support has your back when you need it most. When you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you also get my exclusive bonus stack, a 30-day free trial, a private 15-minute call with me, JLD, access to my weekly live office hours, a digital copy of my book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, my 50 Days to Something Execution Roadmap, and more. Visit highlevelfire.com and start building your something today. All right, Ryan, we're back. And I want to keep talking about this better path to financial freedom.

15:00John Lee Dumas:And I want to talk about the wake up call for high achievers. You're a high achiever. I'm a high achiever. Fire Nation, my listeners, they're high achievers. And you like to challenge people like Fire Nation to stop trading time for money and start building a life they don't have to retire from. So what is the biggest mental shift that high performers must make to create real freedom without burnout?

15:23Ryan D. Lee:Yeah, man, I love I love this question, because I think this is the entrepreneur's dilemma, to be honest with you. You know, entrepreneurs are people who have this innate talents, right? They have these innate abilities, they have this gift to serve humanity and to create value, to solve problems. They are what they are the engine that drives the world. But honestly, you know, and I met you way back in the day in a Russell Brunson mastermind, you know, inner circle. And I was constantly amazed at that inner circle because, you know, I would talk to people and when I first got it in, I thought, man, everyone's made a million dollars, man, these guys are going to be ballers.

15:57Ryan D. Lee:But man, making money and keeping money are two fundamentally different concepts. And it was so crazy talking to all these entrepreneurs who lived launch to launch, product to product, year to year, you know, distribution to distribution, they were riding high. And then next, you know, next month, they were out of business starting something new. And I learned a very powerful lesson from being around these guys, making money, that's your superpower. And I really do think that your best investment as an individual, whether you're an employee or an entrepreneur, is to use your God-given gift skills, talents, and abilities in the service of humanity and trading your services to make money.

16:36Ryan D. Lee:But if you don't get care, or if you don't get, if you get comfortable with that, you're gonna get trapped in the entrepreneur's dilemma to where you are always on the red line. So you've gotta create a surplus in what you're making. You've gotta find a way to take money off the table, right not keep going all in and turn that delta turn that amount of money that you're willing to take off the table into passive income income that comes in without your time effort or energy and if you don't do that you will be making trade-offs for the rest of your life and so the real purpose of everything I do is to help people number one understand the tax code the tax code is written for entrepreneurs you do control how much money you pay in taxes you just have to raise your financial IQ.

17:20Ryan D. Lee:And if you can reduce your taxes on your active income, take some money off the table, pay taxes on it once, and then shift it into a system that will shield you from taxes for the rest of your life, and that is measured and based on cash flow, then you get to a point where you're free inside of your business. Now, that might sound kind of weird. I think a lot of entrepreneurs think they're free inside of their business. But if we're really honest, if we really look ourselves in the mirror, almost every entrepreneur out there knows that they're a slave to their business. If they don't show up, payroll doesn't get made.

17:51Ryan D. Lee:If they don't show up, problems don't get solved. If they don't show up, the business won't last very long without them. But it's a completely radically new feeling. If you get to show up in your business, yeah, you have a profit motive, but you're there because you want to be there, not because you have to be there. It changes fundamentally the way you serve, the way you think, the way you show up in your business, the team members you recruit, the culture that you build. And so my mission has always been to help people retire. And I only use that word because it's the word that most people associate with.

18:21Ryan D. Lee:I really like the idea of financial freedom more. Financial freedom is really using money's greatest intrinsic value, which is creating more options in your life and more control over your time. That's really all money is meant to do. Options and time, time and options. And if you can build a system that can create time and options for you where you don't have to trade your time, then you are free to choose what I want to do with my life. And so, John, that's always been my passion. And it started off out of pain for me, right? I followed the traditional path. I got stuck in the corporate grind.

18:52Ryan D. Lee:I realized I didn't want to do that. I had all these desires to start a business for myself. I never thought I'd be in the financial space. I started off in the health and wellness space. That's kind of where I started. But it wasn't until I had enough passive income coming in that I saw the doorways of opportunity that were always there. I just didn't give my permission. I didn't give myself permission to see them or walk through them because they were too risky with a wife and kids behind me. I just didn't know if I can take some of these big risks in life. And so that's what financial freedom is.

19:21Ryan D. Lee:More options, more control, more time.

19:23John Lee Dumas:This is really powerful stuff. And I totally remember, you know, the entire ClickFunnels industry. I mean, so many great people came out of there, so many hustling entrepreneurs doing great things. And then you mentioned what is so true is there's a lot of seven figure launches, but you dig into the numbers with some of these individuals and I was able to do it privately, like they're walking away with, you know, 10 ,000, 20 ,000, 25 ,000 in profit from like a million dollar, you know, launch, which by the way is$25 ,000. That's, that's, that's great profit. But I mean, that's, you know,$975 ,000 plus that's not going in your pocket, especially when you just go over everything like the ads, the team, uh, taxes, et cetera, et cetera.

20:01John Lee Dumas:I mean, that's one of the major reasons why back in 2016, I moved to Puerto Rico 10 years ago, I moved to Puerto Rico because my, my, my business was actually incredibly profitable. Like that was like net profit was always what I was focused on, but the taxes were just still, still just destroying what I was doing. So I'm like, I just need to get out of here and go to a place where I can keep the money that I make. And I've been here 10 years now. And that's just been obviously the biggest game changer financially that I could have taken. So, I mean, it's really important that you figure things out about your path, Fire Nation, to financial freedom.

20:32John Lee Dumas:So Ryan, take us home brother fire nation's really been enjoying what they've been hearing from you i mean you've been showing the path firsthand experience what would you say you would want fire nation to walk away with like if somebody's listening right now give us your final closing just overall thoughts on where fire nation is where they could be looking to go and how you can help that specifically.

20:59Ryan D. Lee:I love it. You know, right now, I think we're at a very interesting time in humanity, right? I mean, with AI coming out, with technology, the way it is with, you know, wars and conflicts and all the things going on in the world, there's a lot of uncertainty. But inside of that uncertainty is a very unique opportunity. I think a lot of people right now are feeling the pinch because of inflation. But I want you to imagine a world where inflation actually makes you wealthy, where the tax code, as you talk about, John, which is punitive for those who don't raise their financial intelligence actually works for you, where interest rates work for you, where everything in the economic system helps you get wealthy almost automatically.

21:36Ryan D. Lee:That's really the system that I bring to the table. And that's really what's possible. There are wealth forces in our world. And if you understand those wealth forces, you can make them work for you instead of against you. And again, kind of going back to the whole premise of this conversation, I really believe entrepreneurs are the answer to the modern day problems. They are the ones that are going to innovate and create jobs and create opportunities. And my biggest plea for you entrepreneurs out there is stay in business. Don't live launch to launch. Find a way to raise your financial IQ enough to know that your time, effort, and attention should be spent in your business.