Tell me about your vision, Steve.
My vision is much too big to actually be accomplished.
My vision is to change the way investors look
at their investment portfolios
and change the way Wall Street emphasizes market value growth
instead of income production.
In other words, turning things around
so it's not to the benefit of the Wall Street professionals,
it's more to the benefit of the clients.
Because you can't spend market value, only income.
And that's exactly the opposite
of what the emphasis is on Wall Street.
My vision has been since I started this
to create an environment for my clients
where they had more than enough income to pay their bills
throughout their careers and into retirement.
So how long ago did you start this?
I started investing when I was 25.
So that was 54 years ago.
Wow, you're in the late 70s then, huh?
In my 80th year.
Okay, wow, my hat is a little off.
That's awesome.
I haven't reached 80 yet.
You were right on, but this is,
you know, you're 80 when you get there.
That is awesome, that is awesome.
I plan on making it to 80,
but I'm trying to keep myself busy in that timeframe.
So you talked about...
So I started investing then.
I was fortunate, I chose my parents well.
I came into my small, what would you say?
Whatever your parents put together for you
to take care of your college and graduate work
and stuff like that, and you don't spend
because you go to some cheaper college, you know,
and you don't do your master's right away.
Well, I took over that sum of money
and made it my goal to make more money with that
than I was at my employment
so I could stop commuting to New York
and just live a life a little bit more sanity
than that provided.
And I did that when I was 34.
I left my job, I was making about five times
my salary investing, and I started investing
for other people.
I showed them what I had done.
They agreed to let me manage their money.
I kept plugging away until eventually I was managing
over 110 million for 150 odd people
throughout the country and a couple overseas.
Then last year, the company that we were doing business with
made us an offer we couldn't refuse
and we sold our business for a nice chunk of change.
And now I've decided to take my...
Take my business on a one-on-one basis to individuals
and teach them how to grow their portfolio income every year
and just get out of the...
Out of the, I guess, the rut they're in
where they're chasing the market
and worrying about the next correction
and never being happy because they didn't take their profits
because their professional told them,
oh, no, the market's going up.
Now the market's going up.
They wind up losing all the paper profits.
That cycle, that cycle of disappointment,
it was my goal to fix that.
So let me get this a little cleared out.
So your main investment portfolio,
it goes to, I'm guessing it's all stock market?
No, it's not all stock market at all,
particularly not at my age.
It varies with how your age.
A guy your age should probably be about
at least 50, maybe 60% in the stock market.
A guy my age should be more like 30% in the stock market
because the stock market is inherently more risky
than the income producing market.
Correct, correct.
But the focus, my focus is that wherever you're investing,
be it the stock market or the fixed income market,
you should always recognize that it's income
that you wanna develop sometime in your future.
You wanna take that cruise from Amsterdam to Budapest
in the first, in the best room on the boat.
You can, you know?
You wanna go to Japan, you can.
You wanna do what you wanna do.
And you can't do that unless you have income.
Yeah, that's correct.
Otherwise you have to sell your assets
and then you don't have them anymore, you know?
So my methodology fixes that.
And my latest book explains how you can do it.
Okay, that is awesome, that is awesome.
Okay, that answers quite a bit of questions.
So there it goes to my next question, Steve.
Where did your vision exactly come from?
Came from my dad.
You know, I guess you hear that.
That's a pretty common thread.
Growing up, he was a developer, a real entrepreneur.
He had a vertically integrated company.
Do you know what that is?
He was a builder.
He owned a lumber yard.
Okay. Okay.
And all his contractors that he bought,
got everything at his lumber yard.
He owned the property.
He built for people, took back the mortgages.
He built homes on speculation and rented them
and collected the rents.
He had an insurance arm.
So he did all their insurance work as well.
So he had insurances, mortgages.
He had the lumber yard, you know, you name it.
He had money coming in every which way.
So he basically took a business
and found every possible scenario
to make money from that, in every aspect.
That's awesome.
Right, to make income, not to sell products
or something like that.
Certainly not to create market value.
You know, oh, my land is now worth a million dollars.
How much does it pay you in income?
Well, nothing.
But it's still a million.
I'm a millionaire.
Fine. Can you afford to take me to dinner?
No, I don't have any income.
You know, he eliminated all those questions.
And that's what he drilled into me.
He didn't so much drill it that much into my brother,
but he drilled it into me, certainly.
And, you know, and that gave me my impetus
to when I started investing,
when I got that bunch of money that I told you about before,
I bought stocks, but I didn't buy any stocks
that didn't pay dividends.
You know? Yeah.
And I bought, and I, with my first early,
and I didn't, and I always,
and I made a profit target on everything I own.
You know, if it went up 10%, I was gonna sell it.
Because I had studied the charts
and I saw how they go up and down,
and up and down, and up and down.
And I said, why don't you just, you know,
you see it's at a down stage, buy some, you know?
You sell it, it goes up a little,
and you buy something else that's in a down stage,
and you do it again, you know?
The names didn't matter to me.
All of them paid dividends.
All of them were rated B plus or better by standard and poorest.
There was a guide at that time
that published by standard and poorest.
I'll show it to you.
This little book used to come out every month.
Stock guide.
They don't have it anymore.
I think 2016 or 18 was the last issue.
But it gave you all the information you needed
to determine the quality of a security.
Today, it's pretty much hearsay.
Telling you that you hear about a stock and you go buy it.
In those days, you discovered something
that was profitable and paid dividends,
and then you went after it.
That's correct. That is awesome.
So that's the way I did it then.
And I do it now.
Now I use a different vehicle
because the risk with the market,
the size of the markets,
the size of the volatility,
the amount of change that can happen in any given day
made stocks to me more risky than they needed to be.
So I started investing in a form of fund
that I'm pretty certain you have never heard of.
And that's called closed-end funds.
I've not heard of that.
Closed-end fund.
And you'd be surprised how few financial professionals
have heard about it.
I hadn't heard about it.
Actually, I hadn't realized
that I was actually investing in a couple
in the early days of my career
until I looked inside a little better.
These are different than stocks.
What they are, trusts.
They're trust vehicles.
And the difference that they have from all the other types
of funds, they pretty much have the same securities inside
as ETFs and mutual funds.
But their difference is that they focus on income
because the trust vehicle, the pass-through trust,
has to pay out 95% of its income to its shareholders.
Can you imagine if Amazon paid 95% of its income
to its shareholders?
Yeah, that would be tough for them.
Yeah, and Amazon would never have gotten as big as they are
today because they wouldn't be able to reinvest.
And that's the distinction between these income-focused
closed-end funds and every other security out there.
Their focus is income.
And you can't buy them and expect
that they'll ever go up in price,
that they'll ever be $100.
I mean, I own maybe 250 of them.
And none of them is over $40 a share.
That's about as high as they go.
And you can buy every stock in a New York Stock Exchange
within these closed-end funds.
Every stock you want to buy is in there, and you own it.
But if one of them goes out of business,
it's not even going to cause you a hiccup.
And that's the way I like to feel about investing,
so that I know the market goes down,
I'm going to be in a position to take advantage of it.
If it goes up, I'm going to be taking lots of profits.
What's your goal for being on this show?
The goal for being on the show is the same
as the goal is for my book.
And the goal of the book is to educate investors of all sizes
to this new form of security and a new set of concepts
that will allow them to make more money
and be comfortable with the markets, both the interest rate
market and the stock market, regardless of which direction
it's going, because they'll be able to meet their income goals
and grow their income regardless of what's going on around them.
That is awesome.
So that's the goal.
The same form of education is what I feel I can
give in being on the show.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes
continue to move forward.
This is going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.