← Travis Makes Money
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- [00:01]
Grainger Announcer
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- [00:30]
Travis
You are listening to the Travis Makes Money podcast presented by gohighlevel.com for a
- [00:35]
Ad Voice
free 30 day trial of the best
- [00:37]
Travis
all in one digital marketing software tool on the planet, just go to gohighlevel.com travis what is going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Travis Makes Money podcast where it's our mission to help you make more money. On this episode of the show, I have a friend of mine, Joey Muray. He is the co founder of Wealth Without Wall street. His partner, Russ Morgan, who's also a friend of mine and hosts one of the top financial freedom podcasts in the country. Together they've helped thousands of families ditch conventional financial thinking and build real lasting wealth through alternative strategies like the infinite banking concept. With backgrounds in finance and mortgage lending, Rust and Joey combined straight talking expertise with a passion for helping people become their own bank and live a life of purpose, freedom and legacy. Joey, what's up dude? Welcome to the show.
- [01:24]
Joey Muray
Oh man, so good to be with you again for sure. Thanks for having me.
- [01:27]
Travis
Yes, sir. It's been a long time coming, man. I can't. And then it took us like three weeks to figure out these things on the back end somehow. Leave it to two podcasters to not be able to figure this out.
- [01:40]
Joey Muray
Where would we be without our teams like that? Let's shout out to the teams here.
- [01:44]
Travis
Yeah. Literally nowhere. Yeah. Is the answer no, but I appreciate you taking the time, man. Let's go back in time. A little bit of context here. For those listening, tell me the first time you ever made a dollar that excited you or surprised you in some way.
- [02:00]
Joey Muray
Great question. And I would, I would bring it back to. I went from being in the mortgage industry, I was just a retail loan officer, if you will, or branch manager for Wells Fargo. And I transitioned out of that to now what we do at Wealth Without Wall street and had this kind of unique opportunity where people were still calling me for mortgage stuff and. But I wasn't doing it any longer. But this one Case this guy was like, hey, I have a client, she's trying to buy a house and she doesn't quite fit the mold of like a conventional mortgage, but she's got a good bit of a down payment. She's willing to make payments like she's open to owner financing or like a, like a traditional, like a non traditional off market type loan. Would you write the loan for her personally? And I was like, interesting. I hadn't really thought of it, you know, but all my experience was in mortgage underwriting deals, looking at borrowers, the whole thing. And so I look, took a look at it, I recognized the house was local to me. So I could go and drive by and take a look at like I could see the collateral. So I ended up having access to some cash I didn't need. I went ahead and lent it to her. She bought the house, she paid me 10% on a 15 year note. So it was a much higher. And this was back when rates were like, you know, 4%. So it was really good deal for me. And guess what? She paid every single month. And you say what surprised me? It was like, dude, this is money I'm not working for. It's just coming in. And it was super nice. It was like my first taste of passive income and I was like, I gotta do more of this. This is, this is where it's at.
- [03:44]
Travis
Yeah, no kidding. And now people literally do that for a living, like shopping real estate deals to try to do creative financing with them. Absolutely. Accidented into it a little bit. Was that, was that an inception point at all for any of the things that you guys are working on now? Was it sort of like an aha moment?
- [04:06]
Joey Muray
It was an aha moment. And it was a definite like, you know, I think about things a lot of times and think of like a tunnel, you know what I'm saying? Like you're at one of the tunnel and you look at the other end and you might be able to see a little bit of light, you know, and you kind of start walking towards it. As you get closer, it opens up. It was like that was always there, but you could only see a little bit to begin with. This was kind of that first step in the tunnels. Like, oh man, passive income. I like this. This is. How do we do more of this? What could we do more of? And why did this work so well? Why? It was kind of like acts like you said. You said accidented, which we. I don't know if that's a word, but we could call it that.
- [04:49]
Travis
It is now. It was in the glossary of the. Of the podcast, you know, but it
- [04:56]
Joey Muray
definitely led me to say, okay, there's something to this, and how can we do more of it? So, for sure,
- [05:04]
Travis
what was the main thing that caused you to leave the lending industry, the banking industry?
- [05:09]
Joey Muray
Well, I'll tell you. It was. I was compelled because the more I learned about. I think you mentioned it in the intro. Is like this infinite banking concept. I had been implementing it for four years as a client, and I was attending different seminars.
- [05:25]
Travis
Sorry, you'd been implementing it for yourself?
- [05:28]
Joey Muray
For me.
- [05:29]
Travis
Okay.
- [05:29]
Joey Muray
Yeah. Just. Just for my family. And. And to be honest, it made such a difference in the, one, the way I think about money, and number two, the progress that we were making. I just really, to be honest, I mean, I'm a. I'm a believer. I feel like God directs our paths. And it was one of those moments. I was sitting at a conference. It was like he put his thumb in my back and said, why don't you go teach more people about this? That. I mean, it was a weird scenario. Like, I never. I was making over 300,000 in the mortgage industry, and I'm in my late 20s. I had no reason. I live in Alabama, dude. Like, 300,000 might as well be a million dollars, you know, in. In California, you know, but it was. It was just, like, I didn't need to do it. I just. I was like, I. I need to go and, you know, make a difference in people's lives and impact them.
- [06:19]
Travis
Yeah, but you had to do it.
- [06:22]
Joey Muray
Yeah, exactly. Great way to say it.
- [06:25]
Travis
Yeah. When you were eyeballing this, like, as an opportunity to say, like, hey, why don't we do this? Did you have to. I assume you had to go get different certifications, different licensures that you did not have as a. As a banker, Just.
- [06:40]
Joey Muray
Just a simple life insurance license, fairly easy to get. It wasn't hard, but it was definitely, like, new to me. I mean, I didn't know the industry. I just knew my experience. And I would. I would tell you I'm still not to this day, you know, 12, 13 years later. I'm not a life insurance guy. I'm like a personal freedom guy. And I want to share people, like, the shortcuts to get there, and this just happens to be one of them.
- [07:07]
Travis
Yeah, this is the vehicle.
- [07:08]
Joey Muray
Yeah, exactly.
- [07:09]
Travis
Where. Where did Russ come in? How did you guys know each other? What made you want to partner?
- [07:14]
Joey Muray
So we were actually friends from church, and he. You know, we had a Love, hate relationship. We were, like, really cool with each other at church, but he would be like, he would never refer clients to me. He was a traditional financial advisor, and I was a mortgage guy. So, like, that's just a natural relationship, you know? Like, hey, just refer your clients over to me. He never would. And it was because they had an internal mortgage guy at their office. So I was like, I'm never gonna get any referrals from this guy. Well, one day he hands me this book, and he's like, dude, our mortgage guy, we had to get rid of. So I'm going to start sending you referrals, but you have to read this book first. And I'm like, okay. He's like, because I don't want you to mess up anything I'm doing with clients. And he says, but it'll be $20. Mike. Wait, you're. You're asking me to read a book and you're charging me 20? But I'm thinking to myself, like, does this guy have any clients? Like, what kind of cheapskate charges me 20 bucks for a book and then says, hey, I need you to read it? So, anyway, we still laugh about that. But, yeah, I became a client first because once I read the book, I was like, this makes all the sense in the world. Like, why aren't more people doing this? And he started helping me implement it. And that was four years later is when we made the. I made the move over to when
- [08:32]
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- [09:01]
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- [09:04]
Joey Muray
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- [09:05]
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- [09:30]
Joey Muray
Help him.
- [09:32]
Travis
Is there. Is there a wealth level that you should be at before you start thinking about some of these, you know, alternative Investment strategies
- [09:45]
Joey Muray
in terms of just anything in the passive income side of things
- [09:48]
Travis
or what, not necessarily in the passive income side, just like infinite banking in general can be. And I know you guys help simplify it, obviously walk people through the process, teach them how it works and things like that. But I have, I have now on this show because we've been doing, we've been doing daily interviews on this show for a year and a half now. We've talked to no shortage of financial advisors. In fact, I had to tell my team to stop accepting financial advisors to come on the show. You're a friend obviously, so it's a little bit different. But yeah, for the most part we're just like, okay, we gotta start talking about other stuff. But I, I, I feel like there's this sort of like inner conflict inside of that space for people that are just like, just keep it simple. Don't wor about infinite banking or whole life or Iuls. Don't worry about all this other stuff until you have reached, you know, this sort of net worth. Like then you can, then it's, it's beneficial for you to start thinking about it in these terms. And I'm curious to what your thoughts.
- [10:45]
Joey Muray
Okay, I get where you're going with it. For me, infinite banking is not a net worth driver. Like there's no like hurdle to get over net worth wise. What it really boils down to is, you know, people that are living kind of hand to fist, they're kind of paycheck to paycheck and they don't have things that they're naturally putting money into place we would call money traps. Then this isn't for you. Like you, you have to have some disposable income that you're trying to then steward. Well, you know, if you're in the rat race which Robert Kiyosaki talks about, like, you know, poor folks are income comes in, it goes out in expenses, income, expenses, income. There's nothing left over. If you have money that's left over, but it maybe is going in the wrong directions. And those are the things that we uncover the most, Travis, is that, I mean if you had asked me, I'm just going to use myself as an example. When I first learned this, I'm making $300,000 a year and I'm thinking, oh man. And they teach me those concepts. I'm thinking I might could do 20,000 a year, 24,000 a year. And you think, whoa man, that's, that's not a big number Based on your income at the time. Well, what I wasn't thinking about is I was funding things like 401ks IRAs. I was paying cash for everything. I was paying down debt as fast as possible. I was doing all these things that I thought were really good with money, but they weren't really moving the needle. And after kind of changing the way, I think I started doing well over 60,000 a year through infinite banking. And that is when the game changer happened. But it didn't happen. Like I said, it's kind of that tunnel vision I had. Just a little bit, I could just see a little bit. I start walking down the path and all of a sudden I can see a lot bigger opportunity. And so I don't know if the answers your question directly, but it's kind of like you got to have some disposable income and you got to be trying to do something bigger than just survive.
- [12:54]
Travis
You got to be in the investor chair essentially. Like you can't be in a bunch of debt and in, like you said, paycheck to paycheck, more month at the end of your money type of a situation. Yeah. So we've been dancing around this obviously for the duration of our conversation so far. Tell me what infinite banking is as a strategy.
- [13:15]
Joey Muray
So at the simplest level, you're replacing your savings component in your life with a different type of account that actually gives you more characteristics of what you want your money to do.
- [13:29]
Travis
Okay.
- [13:29]
Joey Muray
And the chosen vehicle, which is in the book Become youe Own Banker by Nelson Nash, is a dividend paying whole life insurance policy with a mutual insurance company. And the reason that he gives in the book, and you can read this, you can research it yourself, is he. It's called becoming your own banker. And if you think about it, banks actually put in more money into cash value life insurance than they do in real estate. Like this is no joke, Wells Fargo's balance sheet. When I learned about this, I was working at Wells Fargo, I went around to the EVPs, the, the business bankers, all the, like the higher ups in our local area here in Birmingham, Alabama. And I said, hey, this guy is in the books talking about like people using cash value life insurance as like a savings vehicle instead of a death benefit kind of focus thing, which is the only way I'd ever been taught about life insurance. And every one of those people told me that's a dumb thing. Like nobody puts money in life insurance. And I literally simultaneously look at their, the balance sheet. They have $19.3 billion in cash value and only 11 billion in real estate. And, and the most ironic part of the conversation, Travis, is each one of the guys I was talking to were high enough up in the bank that they were actually insured with the bank. Like the bank used their life for the life insurance.
- [15:03]
Travis
Pulls out life insurance policies for, from, for employees.
- [15:06]
Joey Muray
Exactly.
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Ad Voice
Yeah.
- [15:07]
Joey Muray
And, and I was just like, wow, man, this is ironic. But, but he's onto something. Like the book was actually. Right. And even the bank that I worked for was doing it at a ridiculously high level. And, and so anyways, the, the point is, is when you save through a vehicle like this, you're actually getting liquidity. Like I can access the money. I'm growing between 3 to 5% tax free. So there's tax benefits of it. I'm also obviously getting a death benefit that I didn't have in my savings account. And there's all these other additional benefits that you get. It always compounds. There's a contractual, you know, guarantee it's not based on market. Like there's all these things we could get into. But the point is, is you're just replacing the component of your savings. You're not actually investing in a life insurance policy. Yeah, that's a, that's a bad analogy. Yeah, you're actually using the life insurance to then invest in something else. And we can get into that. But, but that's really at the crux of the concept. You are, you're taking and storing cash in these life insurance policies and then you're using leverage from those life insurance policies into assets that produce passive income. At least that's how we apply it within our passive income lab and everything.
- [16:30]
Travis
So basically you can deploy capital without actually removing it from compound interest in the markets.
- [16:36]
Joey Muray
A hundred percent. Yeah, you're not giving up the opportunity cost of those dollars. You're getting both whatever the asset produces and the 3 to 5% guaranteed, you know, tax free growth. So you're not giving up one to get for the other. You're getting both.
- [16:55]
Travis
So this is not an alternative to putting your money in the S P500. No, this is a compound effect of personally investing the money somewhere else. So that, so I guess that's, that's one reason I think that some people would, would say that it's for people who are more sophisticated investors. Because you like, you want to have some sort of a stretch. Like if you're just putting your money away in this and resting on 3,5% compounding like that is a bad idea.
- [17:23]
Joey Muray
You're, you're not going to grow wealth this way, it's just, just like Robert Kiyosaki, he says savers are losers. That's his, his term. And he's right. Because savings in and of itself doesn't make anybody wealthy. It's just a, it's a holding place before it's deployed. And, and so I, to be honest, I think infinite banking has a bad name because some people try to make. Well, the life insurance is going to do all this magical stuff and it's going to make you, you know, wealthy. When you buy a car and all this kind, that's garbage. Like it is just a holding place that is better than your savings account. Think about it like if I went toe to toe with your savings account, you're really kind of rooting for me, right? Because you're like, my savings account sucks. It's, if you look at the last 20 years, it's average, probably paying me 0.2%. Yeah, it is getting nowhere fast. When you compare it to this life insurance, it's light years ahead. But if I start trying to compare it to a piece of real estate or the S and P or any of those other things, those are actually investments. So these are, you gotta be comparing apples to apples. And at that point it becomes a pretty easy, easy thing to compare.
- [18:41]
Travis
So how does it work when you want to go deploy capital? What do you actually have to do to get access to it?
- [18:47]
Joey Muray
So a couple of different ways you could do it, you could just withdraw funds, but then it would just be like putting it in a savings account and pulling it out. It wouldn't really get you anywhere. So the, the critical thing is that a bank, or excuse me, the life insurance company allows you to take a loan against your cash value that's been accruing from their general fund.
- [19:09]
Travis
And real quick, real quick, the cash value would be all of the money that you have contributed to the policy.
- [19:16]
Joey Muray
No, those are the premiums.
- [19:18]
Travis
Okay.
- [19:18]
Joey Muray
Your premiums go in and a percentage in the early years, it's not even 100% goes to cash value and it accrues over time. Now, about the way that we design these things and it's, there's all sorts of different ways people do it. Roughly, you're looking at it to break even within a seven to eight year period compared to the way just traditional whole life policies are sold, they're usually like 15 to 20 years before they break even. So we've designed them where they create cash value faster. But again, the point of it is not every dollar you put in becomes cash Value immediately. It's a long term strategy. But as the cash value is available, you borrow against that by using life insurance company's general fund money. It's like they're putting their portfolio to work through you and they charge you interest for the use of that money. And so, but the, the whole thing you said, how do you access it? You request a loan and you can do that by calling them, you can do that by filling out a quick form and they, they ach you within a few days. We personally have kind of graduated, since we have so many policies to where we have a line of credit at a bank that is collateralizing all of our policies. And so I literally write checks out of it. I can, you know, transfer money back and forth with my bank. It's really simple. But that's kind of more of a 201, you know, application.
- [20:53]
Travis
Sure. Is the interest set by typical, you know, interest setting policy from Fed or is it a little bit different rules?
- [21:02]
Joey Muray
It's actually based on each individual company and so they set their own rules on that. And some of them will, you know, change it yearly, some of them will not change it at all. Some of them are fixed, some of them are floating. And so it kind of depends on the carrier. I actually have policies with four or five different carriers and they all have different rules on actually how the, the lending part works.
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Travis
Okay.
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Joey Muray
But now that I have it against the line of credit, I just have it with that bank. That bank sets the interest rate.
- [21:34]
Travis
And is there a limit to how much cash you can invest into the policy?
- [21:38]
Joey Muray
Like how much your premiums can be?
- [21:40]
Travis
Yeah. So let's say, you know, you just sold a company and you walk away with three and a half million bucks and you're like, well, I can put this into my savings or I can put this in S and P, or I have this multifamily deal that I've been scoping. I want to put it in that, but I would like to, you know, have it secured in this policy first. How would that, how would that work? Or could it work?
- [22:02]
Joey Muray
Yeah, so if you're just starting one from scratch at that point, you wouldn't be able to put three and a half million in all at once without it becoming a taxable account, typically speaking. Okay. Because. And it's all based off of some old rules from the 80s that the IRS ended up capping this number. And because this is exactly what was happening, what you just said is these investors in the 80s, they were getting these really big deals and they were Just dumping them into one time policies and getting all the tax free growth. And they were like, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. They're not really buying life insurance. They're just, they're kind of loopholing this deal.
- [22:42]
Travis
Yeah, we need to get some money out of this.
- [22:45]
Joey Muray
Exactly. And so it, what they've done is they've essentially made some rules that you're going to need to put in premiums on a regular basis, at least for roughly seven years. They call it the seven pay test. Okay. And, and so we always say you want to do it longer than that, but there's, that's kind of the minimum. And so if you had three and a half million, you might can put a little bit more extra the first year, but you'd probably want to, you know, taper it out over a number of years in order to keep it tax free.
- [23:17]
Travis
I appreciate you coming on and explaining a little bit about the infinite Baking concept. If you're listening and you want to hear more about that wealthwithault wall street.com you can go to Joey and Russ's site and have a chat with their team. Joey, I want to pivot the conversation a little bit here before we wrap. Tell me why you guys do so much with the podcast. What, what, what's the, what's the strategy behind that?
- [23:34]
Joey Muray
Oh, man, I'll tell you this. We, if you haven't already heard the story, Joey and Russ are some rednecks from Alabama. And we're sitting around a table at 2016 and we're just doing business belly to belly. That's what we call it here in the south, right? Hey, I met Travis at a, you know, gas station or coffee shop and we get to talking and now we're following up and we're doing business, you know, face to face. Well, we're starting with 2, 300 clients at the time. And we're like, man, we're talking to like, I might have this conversation with you in the office, Travis, and be talking about, man, he's doing this really cool real estate deal. And I'm like, I wish all the other clients could have that same conversation. You know, they, they're, it's only me and him. Everybody else is missing out. And unless I call each one of them and tell them, hey, this is what Travis is doing, nobody knows. Right? And so we're like, how do we scale the conversation with our clients? And what this young guy in our office, he's like, you guys should do a podcast. And Russ and I look at each other and we're like, how do you spell that? Like, yeah, this is 2016. It's not like they just came out. I mean, we were just. We're just really behind. And so we're like, okay, well, let's just do it. So we start recording podcasts all in the same room. There's three of us on the same. In the same room with one mic.
- [25:02]
Travis
Yeah.
- [25:03]
Joey Muray
You know how that, like, the audio quality was phenomenal. I mean, just amazing. And. But. But here's what happened. The crazy thing happened. We're doing this. We're. We're. Again, we're doing this in mind of, like, hey, we're going to record this and send it to our clients. That's. That's what was in my brain.
- [25:21]
Travis
Yeah.
- [25:22]
Joey Muray
So we're sending it out, emails. Hey, check out this week's podcast. Blah, blah, blah. Six months in, we start getting calls from people like Massachusetts, Idaho, I mean, Nebraska. We're like, how. Who sent you our podcast? Literally, this is what we're asking. They're like, what do you mean? Like, I just was on the podcast app. I found your stuff. I've been listening to it, and I want to see if you guys can help me. And we're like, you could just search on. You know, like, we had no idea
- [25:53]
Travis
people can listen to this other than
- [25:55]
Joey Muray
what you send it to.
- [25:56]
Travis
Yeah.
- [25:56]
Joey Muray
It was unbelievable. And so, like, almost overnight, we went from Joey and Russ being the guys, like, doing the actual meeting with clients every day to having to scale up an entire team of coaches because we had such demand of people coming off of the show. Yeah, we're like, we need to. We need to scale up before. Before doing business online was cool. We were figuring it out the hard way. But, yeah, anyways, we use the podcast to build trust, to share our wins, our losses. We want to be as transparent as possible because authenticity in our space is lacking at best. I mean, there's people that just inflate crap all the time and make things that it's. It's not. It's like, let's just be real. Let's help a lot of people, like, and so help us get our message out, you know, and we want to help a million people to get to financial freedom, so this is one of the best ways we can do it.
- [26:55]
Travis
Joe, I appreciate you taking the time, man. I'll always have a blast chatting with you guys. Where can people go to get more from you?
- [27:01]
Joey Muray
Well, we. We set up a page just for your show. So you go to Wealth, Wall street, dot com, forward slash Travis Makes Money then you should have some free giveaways there. Some. There's some of our content is there and our contact information. So love to. I love for you to reach out to me when you go there and say, hey, I heard you and Travis having the conversation. Because I always love to hear where people people find us. Perfect.
- [27:26]
Travis
Love it. Thanks so much for taking the time, Joey. I know you're a busy guy. I don't take it for granted. Everybody else tuning in. Remember, money only solves your money problems, but easier to solve the rest of your problems when you got some money in the bank. So let's start there here on the Travis Makes Money podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Catch you guys next time. Peace.