2005 – Mastering Retirement: Effective Investment Strategies for Business Owners with Steve Selengut

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1:05With us right now, it's Steve Selengut. Steve, you are known as The Income Coach. Your website is theincomecoach.net. Your book is Retirement Money Secrets. Steve, it's great to have you. Nice to be here, Josh. All right. So listen, our audience tends to be a lot of business owners, a lot of folks in the B2B space. And I'm sure you work with a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of business executives and so forth. But I would love to hear, Steve, a bit about who you work with, what you typically do. Yeah, I do work with a lot of people who are either in a business now and are thinking about moving out of it and trying to turn their investment portfolio into a producer of the same level of income they are getting while they're working, which is pretty much what I did.

2:01When I sold my business last year, I was generating the same amount from my income portfolio than I was from the fees I was getting from the people I was managing money for. So it was an easy for me to transition, in other words. So the same thing when I left my first job. I left it because my goal in life was to have my own business. and I was fortunate enough to be able to develop an investment portfolio in my youth, so to speak. I was 25 and I started investing. By the time I was 34, I was able to leave my employer in New York. I didn't have to commute anymore because I was making about five times my salary.

2:49Admittedly, my salary wasn't all that great, but I was making five times as much running my own investment portfolio. And I decided that if I can do this for me, I can do it for other people, too. So I showed my portfolio to some friends. They said, yeah, I like that. And that's how it started back in 79. And when I sold my business last year, I had$110 million under personal management. And for about 135 different people, actually all over the world. Not a lot out of the country, but they were out there. So that's my story. Yeah. Well, Steve, so tell me about what it looks like when you're working with your clients.

3:36And very specifically, what I'm hoping for is to our friend that's listening, they might pick up on some ideas or clues of things that they might want to focus on in their own personal financial life. The first thing I look at and the first thing I tell them to look at is look at your portfolio and tell me how much income you are producing. I don't care first what's in it or how you invest it or who does it for you, but how much physical, spendable, reinvestable money are you generating with your portfolio? And most often, most often, it's less than 3%. So then I say, well, take a look at my portfolio and I show them a clip of my portfolio.

4:22And it's, you know, it's a seven figure portfolio and it's yielding 10%. Okay, so how do I get you from there to here? And in actuality, we're really using the exact same securities you own today for the most part. We're just using them in different packages that focus on income production instead of chasing market value. We make the market cycle our friend instead of letting the market cycle be the bear that it is to most people. You know, they sit in fear of the next market correction. They're probably all nervous today because, you know, the tech sector earnings aren't as great. The prices of the tech sector are going down.

5:13What am I going to do? What am I going to do? Nobody ever told me to sell this thing. I thought it was going up forever. We take that type of decision-making out of the process because we invest in closed-end funds, and they invest in everything that everybody else is investing now, but they do it with an eye to generating income, not growing market value. So that's in a nutshell. I say, this is what you got now. I'm going to transition you to a point where at current interest rates, I can get you making 10 % just in your distribution income. And then we start to talk about the second stream of income that we start to look at, and that's the profit taking.

6:02yeah and and i suspect that that's an issue that um i think probably comes up with you know when you're working with a business owner audience is they're they're quite interested in profit margin right and so you know there's a couple variables on that uh you know it's money in money out um and certainly some factors that can make that a little easier or a little bit more risky or less risky or whatever. And hopefully, you know, folks listening have some awareness of that. But do you want to address maybe profit margin for just a second? Sure, sure. I think the biggest, if you look at your investment portfolio, as I do, imagine a Walmart store where there's every conceivable type of product is on the shelves.

6:52you develop an investment portfolio that's pretty much the same thing where you have you have literally hundreds of different companies in the form of these closed-end funds on your shelves and you set a profit you set a profit margin i have a five percent target okay somebody wants to pay me more than five percent for any of these things i have on my shelf i sell it i don't say no no no the price is going higher i'm going to wait till tomorrow somebody's going to give me 47%. I take the 5%. I find another one, put it on my shelf. So not only do I have the profit margin, but I also have the acceleration of my profit because the shorter period of time it remains on my shelf, the higher my profit margin is when you annualize it.

7:40So I could make the argument that if I can repeatedly take a 3 % profit, you know, even on a security that's generating 10%, 10%. 3 % profit is, if you work out the math, that's like three months profit or three months distributions on it. If I can accelerate with my profit taking strategies, then I can do even more. For example, in my portfolio so far this year, I've generated almost four months worth of distributions in profits. And this hasn't even been a great year for the income purpose securities that I own. You know, at my age, you own more income purpose securities than you do equities as a matter of safety.

8:31Okay. Yeah. Yeah. How do you, Steve, you know, if a client says, listen, I've been doubling down and tripling down on my business. I, you know, again, just go back to old school cash flow quadrant. Right. And so, you know, they're really maximizing, getting out of E, going to B, you know, trying to really because they believe in themselves. Right. And they like investing on themselves. And it could be really, it could be, I don't know, but it could be really challenging for you to say, listen, why don't you start squirreling away some money into this I quadrant? You know, and they're like, ah, but I really, like a business always has an unquenchable appetite for dollars.

9:19Like there is an endless amount of things that you can invest in at all times. And how do you address that concern? Well, when I was in business, I was getting a flat fee on everything I managed. So looking at it over the long run, if I could make more money than that with the money I'm not spending from the income I'm making, I didn't spend every penny that I made, right? I was working for people. I was getting income based on their portfolios and so on. And I was producing for them. When they paid me, I always had enough that I could put it away into a portfolio that was then working. And I was making it work as hard as I was working.

10:07I mean, I was building up dollars. I was building up capital. think of it like it was a real estate investment I was buying apartment houses that were paying me 10 10 10 so when this when this gig when this business got to the point where somebody came to me and said we're going to give you an offer you can't refuse for your business I could say to them well that's fine oh you want to pay me in installments well you know most people would say well, I can't take installments. I won't have enough money to live on, but I didn't have to say that. I said, okay, that's fine. I'm making plenty of money on the outside.

10:47I don't need that. I could take the great offer and run. And I started a whole nother business because I could do that. Yeah. Multiple streams, I think. Multiple streams of income. Most people put it in real estate. I think when they do that secondary stream, they had that second house in New Hampshire or in a ski area somewhere like I did for a while. And it was a source of income when I wasn't using it. You know, so there's a lot of that going on. But building an investment portfolio that will allow you to replace your income should be on most executives' mind. It gives you the ability to say to your, if you don't get that promotion, you know, you know, you can tell your employer, hey, you just lost me.

11:37And you could have the luxury of finding another position and not lose any ground because your income from your investment portfolio is taking care of you. So there are lots and lots and lots of reasons to develop that income on the way up. I mean, I didn't, hey, I didn't stop working until I was 78 years old is when I sold my business. You know, so it wasn't as if I wasn't running a business the whole time that I was producing that income. So it can be done. And I just started doing it early. Yeah. All right. So, Steve, tell me a little bit about your book. It's called Retirement Money Secrets.

12:22You know, there's a lot of books on retirement. There's a lot of books on money. Tell me a bit about who this book is for and what you would expect the transformation that would take place for someone who embarks on the journey. Okay. It's really two things. It identifies four pillars of risk minimization so that you can be more comfortable with what you own in a portfolio. And then the rest of it is really on changing your mindset from focusing on growing market value to growing income. The tagline in the top of the book says, market value fuels the ego, income fuels the yacht. Okay. So that's, that's the idea.

13:12We talk about risk minimization by looking at your portfolio of investments, just like you do in your business. Quality is job one, just like at Ford. You know, the quality of security is your own, how well diversified you are, you know, never letting any of your positions in your portfolio, Do any of your business holdings be more than X percent of your total investment? So in case something happens to one part, it doesn't ruin it, right? That's diversification. Income generation is where I focus. After quality, income generation is my most important thing. And in the investment world, it's a good sign.

13:56It's the quality of the company you're investing in. And the final thing, which is ignored most widely by most investors and most investment professionals, is profit-taking. Profit-taking takes that risk away. If you've taken your reasonable profits, it doesn't matter when the market crashes. You've already taken the money off the table. So those are the four. That's part of the book. The second part, the income focus, introduces closed-end funds, which are really not anything new. They're new to you. But they were around before mutual funds were around. They were developed in the early 1800s in Europe.

14:41And what they are, are pass-through trusts. and most people when they start to have money and they start to develop an estate plan and stuff like that come up with trusts well these are pass-through trusts and the key is they don't pay any taxes on the money they earn so long as they pass through to their owners 95 of the income so that's what these things are they're income machines and they're designed they're not designed to grow in market value, to design to continue to produce a steady income so that you can grow your income and capital. So these are the two things that the book really focuses on.

15:27Risk minimization and income production. With those two things, you can develop an investment portfolio that'll get you through anything that comes up. Brilliant. Right. Steve, your website is theincomecoach.net. Just real quickly, someone goes there and what would you recommend they do? You have a button, this is get in touch. And anything else that you'd recommend they do? Yeah, they can talk to me. I offer some freebies. There's a freebie section where they can get a copy of my other book for free. They can get copies of some Q &As that I've done with Facebook group participants talking about investing and this stuff.

16:12But I also have, I talk about my coaching services. I can teach them individually and help them transition. Several people have taken me on like a retainer arrangement where I give them 10 meetings over the course of however they want to get them going and Q &As with them personally about their own investments and so on. And just plain portfolio review. Hey, Steve, how risky is this portfolio I have? I've got 20, you know, 35 % of my investments in one stock and so on. You know, that's the type of thing that they can see that I can do for them from the website. Steve Selengott, your website is theincomecoach.net.

17:01Your book, Retirement Money Secrets. Steve, thank you for joining us. My pleasure. Good talking to you, Josh.

17:34Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt-in or email required where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies.

18:17Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning, that's right, seven days a week, you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed. I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes every single day. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Movement.