Millennials

Financial Freedom For Millennials with Daniel Ameduri

TWS 18 | Financial Freedom For Millennials

 

The road to financial freedom has always been dictated by financial norms, a lot of which don’t really seem like freedom at all. Editor and the Founder of Future Money Trends, Daniel Ameduri, talks about financial freedom and what it looks like for the Millennials. Walking us through the concepts of his book, Don’t Save for Retirement: A Millennial’s Guide to Financial Freedom, Daniel notes that the Baby Boomer generation has inculcated in most Millennials the idea of saving for their retirement and putting their money on retirement funds which has given the younger generation more pressure. Breaking the shackles that are forcing us to commit to that tradition, Dan teaches Millennials how to deviate efficiently from investment and embrace the gifts brought by their time.

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Financial Freedom For Millennials with Daniel Ameduri

On this episode, I have my good friend. He’s become a great friend, but he’s also the Editor and Founder of Future Money Trends, which is a publication business. He has come out with a book, Don’t Save for Retirement: A Millennial’s Guide to Financial Freedom. I know he has been working on this for a while. I had him on the show many years ago. Daniel has been front-running the cryptocurrency, the cannabis, the precious metals and other alternative investment world for quite some time on his YouTube channel and very popular website, FutureMoneyTrends.com. You are going to get to love his perspective on life and I think you’re going to get a lot out of reading his book and hearing the story firsthand. Daniel is an amazing writer and entrepreneur. If you’re reading about him for the first time, then it is going to be a treat. Without further ado, welcome, Daniel Ameduri.

Daniel, thank you for spending the time, it’s awesome having you back on. You were on several months ago. It’s a pleasure and I’m super excited about your book.

Thank you for having me on. I should let the audience know that I have seventeen policies, dividend-paying, cashflowing, gushing, safe. I’m dual compounding them too, but I’m sure we don’t want to go down that rabbit hole but they need to learn from Paradigm Life for that.

There are many things you can do as a Millennial if you embrace all the gifts and the things that the world has given us. Click To Tweet

Daniel, I’ve gotten to know you over the years and you’ve done some incredible work. It was awesome to hear more about your story. I never got into that with you even though we’ve had some discussions over the years. Your book is well-written and I like how it opens up your life. How people come to this opinion or perspective of life, there’s a backstory to it. Without that backstory, sometimes it’s hard to buy into a person’s perspective, especially if it’s different than the status quo. Looking at the title of your book, it’s totally against what most people believe. Telling your story and opening yourself up that way awesome. Would you mind maybe talking through what was the book about? What was the purpose of it? What message do you want to send? Who is it intended for? Maybe start there.

The book is called Don’t Save for Retirement. For your audience, we’ve set up a special page at FutureMoneyTrends.com/save. They can read the intro in the first chapter. If they like it, they can buy it. There’s a link. This book started when I was in an attorney’s office setting up my trust, my will and I turned to my wife like, “We know where the kids are going to go. We know where the money’s going to go. What about teaching the kids? What if they get this bad conventional wisdom conditioned into them without mom and dad there who is a fairly strong presence and force against that stuff.” We started brainstorming what we could do. I was like, “How about we write a book? It will be great for the business. It will be great for other people who can read it.” It started with no initial audience in the sense that it was teaching my children, but also keeping in mind Millennials and other people who might be saving the conventional means of retirement and what they could do with their money.

I wanted to bring in what my wife and I did because I didn’t want people to think that, “This guy has got an economic sense on his shoulders and all this stuff.” The intro starts in a bankruptcy attorney’s office. We were messed up after 2008. I got a job making $10 an hour. My wife was a school teacher. We were about to have a baby. Things were wrecked. That’s where the book starts. It starts off how I dug myself out, what it took not just financially, but a change in my mindset and my change in what is even acceptable. The book, Don’t Save for Retirement, I would say almost is a cross between my personal story and personal finance. That’s an alternative way.

It’s not Robert Kiyosaki where it’s all getting leverage. It’s definitely not Dave Ramsey where it’s like, “No debt.” It’s like, “This was my story. This is how I did it. This is all the things I learned along the way.” One thing that rings true with what I’ve learned from Robert Kiyosaki is the poor and middle-class speculate, they just do, no matter what they’re in. Their retirement vehicles, they’re always speculating. The rich preserve and focus on income, which is one of the reasons why I’m so attracted to your company, Paradigm Life, that preservation and income mindset. The advantage of the rich is they’re already rich. However, I learned that if the middle class apply those same principles, they can also be very wealthy.

TWS 18 | Financial Freedom For Millennials

Don’t Save for Retirement: A Millennial’s Guide to Financial Freedom

You use some very strategic words in the book. The one that comes to mind is the idea of control and I thought a lot lately about group psychology, a group narrative. I look at our school system. I look at the workplace. I think it’s programmed into our mind the being told what to do mentality, “You’ve got to do this. I am superior, therefore do what I say.” These days, people are speculating, but they’re not even thinking. They’re doing what everybody else is doing and they’re assuming that whoever’s telling them to do it is going to give them the results that they want, which of course there are many different examples of that not being the case. It was cool as taking control and using your mind to figure out what you want financially is where it starts. Unfortunately, there are these traumatic events, difficult events that cause us to have those paradigm shifts. When you’re writing the book specifically for your kids, if they read the book, what did you want them to get? What was that message? They close the 196-page and it’s like, “What is that next thought?”

That they choose their destiny, that there is no right way or wrong way. Whether they have a job and become great passive income investors or they have a business and they’re investors as well or they’re a stay-at-home-mom or a stay-at-home-dad. I don’t care what they do. I want them to know that they can do whatever they want to do. It is their life and many of us, exactly in line with your question, do what everyone else does and follow the crowd. Everyone else is going to college. Everyone else is saving for retirement. Everyone else is financing their house for a few decades. Everyone else is financing their cars for a few years. Everyone else is buying term because your whole life’s a scheme.

It’s nonstop no critical thinking and I want them to let them know like, “You can do whatever you want and if you want freedom, you have to buy your freedom. It’s not going to be free. It will require sacrifice and it will require good decision-making that will compound. You’re not going to be eighteen and financially-free, but you could be 25 to 40 years old and be financially free as opposed to the alternative plan which is, ‘Give all your money to Wall Street and we promise you in 30 to 40 years, even though you have no idea what your tax withdrawal rate will be or what the funds will even be at, you’ll be able to retire at this magic number that some German politician wanted to win an election.’ He upped the other guy by instead of running on 70, he said 65.” I want people to know that ultimately you choose your destiny and a lot of us have to be woken up and slapped in the face like, “What are you doing? You’re on autopilot.”

I’d love to hear your opinion on what are the events that would cause a person to read this information and not necessarily have it discarded but actually implemented and used. We’re in this period of time where debt is an all-time high, student loan debt, consumer debt. If you look at household income, it’s been stagnant for many decades. You look at people who are not getting ahead and I know that there’s frustration. There are polls. There are headlines that come out all the time about the frustration that exists in America with people not growing, not getting ahead, which essentially is the anti-life because people are naturally compelled to grow. Where do you think the pain threshold is until people snap out of it?

I hope their pain threshold is not bankruptcy or like me, where I was in a bankruptcy attorney’s office with my wife crying. I certainly hope their pain threshold doesn’t go to a point where they get so angry at their job that maybe they do something that gets them fired or damages their resume for the future. Ultimately, that frustration Americans are feeling is because they have subscribed to a middle-class lifestyle that is not sustainable. Much like the national story of what our government is doing, our citizens are doing. I can’t fix the government, but we can all fix ourselves by making some changes in our own lives. In the book, I talk about what my wife and I did. We drastically cut spending.

Did we do it forever? No, but we did it for a year-and-a-half, two years. Even when we weren’t drastically in cutting spending mode, we still live very frugally. I always tell people it took many years. When I achieved that financial independence, net worth millionaire status, not even liquid, but net worth. I was driving a 2003 Nissan Altima. It was a ten-year-old car. I was living in a house, at the time when I purchased it, it was about one time our annual income. By the time I was financially independent, the thing was one-third of our annual income, but I was still doing that and not permanent. Now, I live in a very nice house and I get to enjoy all the luxuries of those sacrifices that I made.

If you want freedom, you have to buy your freedom. It's not going to be free. It will require sacrifice and good decision-making. Click To Tweet

You have to, at some point in time, say stop. For most of us, unfortunately, we’ve subscribed to the unsustainable lifestyle. You might have a car that’s equal to your annual income spread out over a few years. You might have a house that’s ten times your annual income. You might have done a lot of things that have messed you up. That’s where I love the Dave Ramsey personal finance part like, “Start the cutting spending.” Stop doing all this stupid stuff that’s excessive. What I like to do is after I cut the spending is shift the savings of the spending into buying income and training that brain that everything I buy, I want to see a check either quarterly, annually, monthly. I want money coming in from everything I do. One of the things I have in my house in the children’s schoolroom is only to buy assets that cashflow.

We’re all going to get involved with speculation. I’m the worst. I love microcap investing and venture capitalism, especially here in California. Ultimately, 90% of my efforts and my focus is focused on buying income. Anyone who’s frustrated and who is in that lifestyle of trying to keep up with the Joneses realizes that financing everything in your life and spending every last bit of your paycheck, it is not normal. It may be perceived as normal because that’s what everybody else was doing, but it’s not. You have to say no. If you’re reading and that resonates with you, it can be done. It’s going to take a few years to mop this thing up, but you can be financially independent and either quit your job or work part-time or full-time because you love what you do.

These are all amazing points. In the book, what direction are you giving to people? What are the steps that they can take? Starting with whomever that person you were writing to when you were typing out the words of the book and getting them to take that first step then the next step. What are some steps that people can take to go from where they’re at and start to circumvent better or build a bridge over the gap to where they want to be?

The first chapter starts with, “What is wealth?” A lot of people don’t even know what they want. They’re just going through the motions of life. They’re killing time while they’re here on earth, which is very sad. For me, wealth is the ability to be able to do what I want with my time, to wake up when I’m done sleeping, to be free. I think that’s the first step is defining what you want. I always tell people, I learned this from James Altucher. He talked about the three things you want people to say at your funeral. What do you want people to say who you are and then embrace those things? Remind yourself, write it down on a piece of paper and see it every day when you get up. I have daily statements for every single of my kids and my wife and I. I like to remind myself that. Steve Jobs talked about that, ask yourself every day, “Am I happy with what I’m about to do right now?”

The next step is if you decide to become financially free, you need to see what the gap is? What do I need? How much income do I need to pay for my expenses, my monthly lifestyle? Ultimately, becoming financially independent, in my opinion and in the book, is to be able to have multiple sources of income. Instead of having a one or two-household income, think about having how do you get to a 21-household income? Maybe it doesn’t pay all the bills, maybe it just pays the utilities. How good will that feel? It pays all your utilities, maybe it pays the mortgage. However, you want to look at it, how would you like it if every month you went to work and you realize that all your utilities and your mortgage were being paid by passive income?

TWS 18 | Financial Freedom For Millennials

Financial Freedom For Millennials: The Millennials may have been conditioned to believe that they want socialism, but they love the efficiency of capitalism.

It starts small. The book talks about the biggest first step is work where you can cut. For a lot of people, that’s moving, that’s one of the biggest expenses. Whether you’re moving to a further area in your county or you’re moving to another state. My wife and I moved to a desert community in California. The next area is retraining their brain. Instead of dumping all this money into a 401(k), start using these whole life policies to dual compound. Start using different investments that pay an actual dividend that bring a check into your life. That’s the biggest thing I can tell people to have that mindset of start buying things that make you money.

It’s interesting and I’ll be somewhat open here because the first thing you said resonated. Most people don’t know what they want. I think it goes back to the mindset that we’ve been programmed or highly influenced to understand, which is being told what we want or being told what to do instead of us recognize. It sounds trivial but us recognizing that we have a choice of what we want. I had one of my business coaches, I had this meltdown. I didn’t even anticipate it, but it was the rocking chair test. They essentially get you into this state where you’re 95 years old, you’re sitting in a rocking chair and you’re describing what life was about. It was powerful for me and I connected with what was important to me. I connected with what I wanted.

It wasn’t necessarily a dollar amount. It was more about my relationships. It was about the people that I loved as opposed to anything material. At the same time, those material things allow a magnification of the experiences with the people that you love. The second piece is interesting too that you talked about, which is the idea of understanding where you are financially and where you want to be. I look at what most people obsessed with, which is weight and money because it’s measurable. At the same time, how people measure money is fascinating because it usually has to do with either their income or their bank account and that’s it. The true measurement of money, which Robert Kiyosaki heavily emphasizes in all of his books, is a financial statement.

He has a whole book at how to create a financial statement, which is ultimately the scorecard for where you’re currently at but can also help you objectively measure what you need to do in order to get to where you want. Ultimately, the wealth side of things is fascinating, Daniel, because in the end, why are financially successful people so miserable end up committing suicide or getting multiple divorces or alienating children? It’s interesting where people have connected wealth with money but yet, in the end, people would trade all of their money for what is truly valuable to them if they opened up and were vulnerable. That’s where I look at where we’re at in our day and age with society and what’s available to us with technology.

Wealth is the ability to be able to do what you want with your time, to wake up when you are done sleeping, and to be free. Click To Tweet

It’s more possible than ever to live that type of life, but yet the comfort that people have with what society has told them is a success is still bought into. Even though people are starting to see that there’s a different way of doing things and there’s a different lifestyle. “Look at this guy, look at this friend,” but yet they’re still programmed to do what’s safe and comfortable. How did you break out of that? Where have you may be talked about in the book how you have written whether it’s your newsletter or your YouTube channel, like getting people to snap out of it and believe in what is possible.

I would say that what you just touched on, the first thing I thought of was the Millennials. The Millennials are trying to apply the Baby Boomer life plan to a totally different economy. They are suffering and complaining about it. I got rid of my car because I Uber everywhere and I go for nice long walks or I jump on a Lime scooter and I go as far as I want. I don’t have to go back to a parking lot. I flip out my phone and five minutes later, I’m back at the house. You can start a website for $10 if you’re a Millennial, a business for $10. You can freelance anything, sell your skills, you’re going to work from home and you can monetize your own job. There are many things you can do as a Millennial if you embrace all these gifts and these things that the world has given us.

I ordered lunch and I wanted to order some Thai food, so I went onto Grubhub. A lot of people are trying to do the same thing with their investments and their investment mind setting. The Baby Boomers had the best bond market, best real estate market and the best stock market. According to Vanguard, the median account for 65 and older is only $58,000. If that experiment didn’t work for them, and by the way for most people, 401(k)s have only been around since the ‘80s. They passed them in the ‘70s but ‘80s for all intents, purposes and implementation. A lot of people think the 401(k) was with Adam and Eve, and they came out and they had their employer match.

TWS 18 | Financial Freedom For Millennials

Financial Freedom For Millennials: Trying to keep up with the Joneses financing everything in your life and spending every last bit of your paycheck is not normal.

A lot of this stuff is new. It didn’t work and that’s okay. Some of the intentions were probably good. What does work? What’s been around for hundreds of years, thousands of years when it comes to passive income and the way the rich invest? I look at the frustrations of people that it’s a lot of times it’s because they’re adopting and applying these rituals. I was in Africa and I was with the Maasai. I was asking the guy, “What’s your goal in life?” He was like, “I need more cows.” I was like, “You guys cleaned our rooms and you see the bathrooms and the match them. You don’t want a mattress in your house? The houses are made of cow crap. You don’t want a toilet?” He’s like, “No, the elders say that’s not the Maasai way.” I’m like, “Tradition can kill,” like it’s doing to the Maasai, it’s doing to the Millennials here in America and all around the world because they are in the tradition of something that hasn’t even been around that long, especially when you apply the way conventional finance has been applied to for people.

Here’s what’s fascinating. What you said is that the root of the word capital, like capitalism, comes from cattle. The nature of capitalism isn’t the cattle itself. That’s not capital. The capital comes from the derivative use of cattle, how people figured out to use a cow for not just milk, not just meat, but leather for instance. I look at the world of immense resources and people look at the value in a piece of land or the property. That’s not where the value is. The value is our ability to take our mind and make use of that in a variety of different ways. Look at what we live amongst every single day, whether it’s Grubhub, uh, whether it’s the Lime scooters. These are essentially resources that people figured out how to look at some friction or some frustration and to get a solution to it. That’s all around us, but yet not understanding the fundamentals and subscribing to the status quo doesn’t open your mind up to what those possibilities are. That’s why the Millennials don’t like capitalism. It’s because everybody else is coming up with ideas and they’re not.

They may have been conditioned to believe that they want socialism, but look at every aspect of their life, they love the efficiency of capitalism.

It’s an amazing world we live in and it’s evolving so quickly. It’s awesome that there are more books like this coming out. They are reinforcing not just talking points, but they’re reinforcing principles that have been around for a long time, but also ways in which you can capitalize on the current environment to achieve the outcome that I would assume most people want.

In the book, I provided the links of the different companies I invest with. Obviously, your company is mentioned in there when it comes to my whole life policies. I didn’t hold anything back. I put it out there and the same thing goes with my letter at FutureMoneyTrends.com. If I’m investing in it or writing a check, it’s in there. If not, it’s not in there at all.

Daniel, what are some other ways in which they can follow you, learn about what you’re up to, learn about Future Money Trends, some of the video stuff that you’re doing online. Why don’t you throw those out there?

I would love for them to go to FutureMoneyTrends.com/save. They get the Weekly Wall Digest free. It shares a lot of the different stories and things that my wife and I went through and did to become financially independent as well as some stuff that I teach my children, as well as any investment, passive income or speculative that I’m actively involved in. They get to also read the first chapter of the book.

Daniel, it’s a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for taking the time. Hopefully, we get to do a follow-up soon.

I hope to see you soon.

Thank you.

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About Daniel Ameduri

TWS 18 | Financial Freedom For MillennialsDaniel Ameduri is a self-made multi-millionaire, a full-time skeptic of conventional thought, and a proud father of three. He is the co-founder of FutureMoney-trends.com, which, with nearly 150,000 subscribers, it’s the most widely recognized online authority in investment ideas and economic advice. He’s been featured in The Wall Street Journal, on ABC World News Tonight, and on Russia Today TV. Daniel correctly predicted the collapse of Lehman Brothers, AIG, and Washington Mutual on “Vision Victory,” the YouTube channel he launched in 2007 and which now has had more than thirteen million views.

 

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Breaking The Common Stereotypes About The Oil And Gas Industry with Beau Flowers

TWS FF 5 | Financial Friday

 

Having the biggest driving population right now, the common stereotype about oil and gas is that they are simply for fuel. However, they are more than just that. For Financial Friday, Chief Executive Officer of LoneStar Asset Management, LLC, Beau Flowers talks from a 30,000-foot view about the oil and gas industry – where it is at right now, and where it is going. He touched on the impact of the new millennial generation, the green movement, and the downsides of the industry. Sharing lessons for success, Beau also gets into what makes or breaks an opportunity, how to set up operational structures, and what are some of the poor choices in the industry that have led to bad outcomes.

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Breaking The Common Stereotypes About The Oil And Gas Industry with Beau Flowers

Financial Friday

I have an interesting topic. It’s oil and gas investment and I have as my guest, Beau Flowers, who’s the President of Lone Star Asset Management. He participated in the Cash Flow Wealth Summit and also was one of the sponsors. My relationship with Beau is still new so I’m excited to learn more about his business and also about the oil and gas industry that I have some experience in. I can’t wait to get into it. Beau, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

We talked a little bit before we started this interview and I look at the oil and gas industry. There are so many different facets of it. With the social opinion of the biggest driving population right now, which is the Millennial generation who are making their ways in the workplace and they’re living differently. You look at oil and gas, the stereotype is that it’s for burning fossil fuels and it’s for cars and for transportation and there’s a big movement for green. It’s one of those things where the stereotype and the misconception people often have about the oil and gas industry is it’s just for fuel. Why don’t you talk maybe from a 30,000-foot view about the oil and gas industry, where it’s at right now and where you think it’s going and then we’ll go from there.

The new Millennial generation starts establishing itself as the prominent figures in the economy and in society. The oil and gas business is starting to get somewhat of a negative connotation towards it with the old pushing for the green movement. Wanting to eliminate fossil fuels is becoming more of a thing that you hear about. At the end of the day, where we are right now and where our civilization is right now is we’re nowhere near being in a position to where we can eliminate or even come close to eliminating the use of fossil fuels. It’s still the most prevalent and probably one of the most important industries in the economy now. This is where we are right now.

Oil and gas business is so big and so broad and there are so many different ways to get into it. What we try to do is find our little niche, find our little corner in the industry and do specific things that are profitable to us and profitable to our investing partners. Essentially, our main concentration is wealth preservation. You can go out into a wide variety of aspects of the business where the risk factors can be really low and really high. It depends on what your tolerance is. We try to carve out our little niche in to this already prevalent and essential aspect of our economy. We try to be as profitable as we can at that and not concern ourselves with the rhetoric or any connotations that might be evolving with this Millennial-driven society.

Fossil fuel needs to make advances; we need to have different kinds of renewable energy sources. Click To Tweet

You look at the perspective that we have as Americans and we often place our perspective of what life is, how things work and assume that everybody else in the world has that perspective. My wife grew up in Mexico and I had no understanding of what poverty was right until I visited and experienced the neighborhood she grew up in and how people live there. People are happy there, but yet it’s a totally different perspective. If you go to third world countries, it’s the same thing. If you look at the emerging markets and the massive economies that are on the rise, whether it’s India or China or Africa, these are economies that don’t have this massive dependence on fossil fuels.

However, because they are emerging and because technology is integrating into their emergence, they’re obviously going to have demand. You look at the demand now for oil in China, the demand in other parts of Asia, in India, as well as in Africa, it’s massive. Maybe the US and in our production, we’re headed toward more of a green and setting trends there. The transition from being exclusively dependent on fossil fuels to slowly decreasing that dependence, it’s not a one-year, five-year or ten-year. It’s probably a couple of decade transition. What do you think about that?

That’s a very good point. There are two things that I would address about what you said. The first was our dependence and our demand for fossil fuels and the things that fossil fuels provide us is not decreasing. If you look at the actual facts and statistics of the supply, the demand and the usage of fossil fuels to provide the things that we need, even above and beyond in transportation, it’s still a very needed commodity. One thing that I would address, we mentioned the push for Millennials and now being such a big member and prevalent member of society, is they’re also a very vocal generation class with social media.

They have a different medium to vocalize their opinions. It’s not like it was in the past where it was close to your neighborhood or the bar where you hung out with your friends and the coffee shop. Now, it’s like they take that message and because they grew up on technology, the message and the opinion just magnifies.

Just because their opinion or their word or message is broadcast in such a wider spectrum now than it ever has been in the past, that doesn’t mean it’s right. It doesn’t mean that they’re right all the time. I’m not saying that we don’t need as a society to start transitioning into other alternatives. Fossil fuel needs to make advances and we need to have different kinds of renewable energy sources. I’m certainly not saying that. I’m just saying right now, we are where we are. From an economic financial standpoint, our goal is to take advantage of where we are and where we’re going to be for the foreseeable future. That’s what our goal is in our firm. The second thing I would address, you were mentioning of geographic locations and cultural backgrounds influencing what your views are and then perceptions are of different things. That brings me to why am I in the oil business.

TWS FF 5 | Financial Friday

Financial Friday: The opportunities with any industry are what exist in the past and what exist in the future.

 

I’m from Texas. When you grow up in Texas, from an outsider looking in and the guys that aren’t familiar with our industry and aren’t familiar with our culture, when they think of oil business, they get this negative connotation because they think of J.R. Ewing sitting at the top of a big building in Dallas, smoking a cigar with a big cowboy hat and making money hand over fist. That’s the general connotation that folks outside of our industry look at it as. When you grow up in it, when you’re in Texas, you look at it not as something like that. You look at it as your lifeline, as our livelihood. It influences every aspect of our day-to-day lives at some point or another.

We’re talking about people that are running the companies, producing the oil all the way down to 80% of the working families that I grew up with in my small town were employed and fed their families from this industry. Where we’re from, it’s definitely quite the opposite of a negative outlook. It’s our lifeline. You can even see our business is very cyclical and it has its ebbs and flows for sure. You see how detrimental those ebbs can be and those low points in the business can be. That’s why we hang onto it and try to push it and still be a part of this industry because it’s what got us here from every definition of the word.

The opportunities with any industry, it’s what exists in the past and that’s what exists in the future. I’m looking at just the oil and gas industry, it’s a major part of our country. The opinion and the stereotype of guys with the big hat, sitting up and smoking cigars, I’m sure that that’s changing. I want to go there really quick because one of the things I’ve perceived in the financial industry over the last ten to twenty years is there is a significant shift. The 2008, 2009 financial crisis forced it in a sense where individuals were taking matters into their own hands. Individuals were not using stockbrokers, were not using money managers but also they pivoted to these Robo platforms or technology. There’s such a quick evolution and a lot of financial advisors or the financial industry has a difficult time keeping up.

By the time they try to steer their battleship in the direction of where things are going, it’s changed again. There are new trends and there are new demands. I look at the same thing with the oil and gas industry where it’s controlled by some big players. Because of how big they are, it’s sometimes difficult to pivot which provides opportunities for smaller firms to go in and find a niche and capitalize on that. Maybe talk just briefly about what you see as your industry and how the guard is changing and how things are evolving and the opportunities that are presenting themselves to smaller firms.

I’m glad you brought that up because what you mentioned and what you talked about is our driving motive why we started this company and why we do what we do. It is because of the different natures of the business between large scale operator like ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips. Did you hear about Valero? Did you hear about every day? You pump your gas in? A lot of people think about the old business, that’s all they think about. They are the biggest players, but there’s a whole lot in our industry that goes on outside of that. Since about the mid-late 1990s and early 2000s since we went through what’s called the Shell play revolution where we have essentially discovered a brand-new way to efficiently produce this massive wealth that the big guys produce. That’s all they’re concerned about with now is going in and looking at $50 million developments, drilling 30, 40, 50 wells or whatever it is. All at once of these extremely expensive wells to drill to have these astonishing production rates.

It's easy to get stars in your eyes in this business. You see opportunities and all you think about is the upside. Click To Tweet

When that shift happened, it started happening in the mid-2000s. Whenever the big companies completely shifted their focus to those developments, there was a ton of what we call the conventional place that was left. That wasn’t what they were concerned with anymore. What we do in our company is we follow where these big companies started and spent their money researching and developing and then all their resources, figuring out where to drill and then how to drill in certain areas. They never finished essentially. When they shift their focus to a different business model of the Shell play, we go in and acquire their data.

We acquire all their records, everything that they had and we picked up where they left off, which for us works out well because we get a plethora of research and data that would be uneconomical for a company of mid-level or small level producer to be able to afford that level of research. We can acquire that from them for a much reasonable financial compensation. We can go in and pick up where they left off. They had every intention of doing and then the revolution came along, they shifted their focus and they forgot about this stepchild. It’s not quite as good as what they’re doing out there, but it’s good for producers like us. That’s our philosophy and what we try to do. We’re evaluating our prospects and it’s worked out well over the last six or seven years.

That’s where things shift with the discovery of new ways in which you can extract oil and then finding big places that have never been tapped before. That’s where all the big players can go, but there are limitations where they need to have a lot of money at work and require a lot in return to get a good return on investment. When it gets to be smaller, that’s when the numbers don’t make as much sense as they did previously. It allows you guys to go in and to clean up. I look at this and we’ve had some guests on over the last several years in regard to oil and gas. I know that a lot of your education and what you provide in your website and talk to people about what goes into a lot of the details of why this is a significant opportunity which I completely agree with. I want to get into what makes or breaks an opportunity, which isn’t necessarily the opportunity itself. On the Cash Flow Wealth Summit, the presentation that I gave talked about Robert Kiyosaki’s B-I Triangle and how a successful product is supported.

A product could be an investment, it could be a commodity or it could be a business. That’s where the least important thing is the actual product, service and investment. The most important thing is the underlying infrastructure that supports it. My exposure to oil and gas, I’ve seen some big success but I’ve seen also some failure because of mismanagement and poor management, poor understanding of details and poor communication. It wasn’t intentional, but I’ve also seen some intentional things too where it was a complete fraud. I look at you have an asset management company and you’re in this industry, I’m sure you’ve heard way more stories than I’ve heard. How do you use the lessons of others and use the failures and the successes to build your operational structure? How you’ve set up your business to be different and successfully execute on your business objective in this massive opportunity?

There are several different answers to that. One is in some cases learning the hard way. One thing about our business is that you get amazing tax benefits better than any other investment vehicle that I know of and any of my investors have known of, but these investments did not come without risks. Anytime, no matter what you do and in our business, it’s going to have a risk factor to it. Probably a little bit higher risk factor than any other investment vehicle most of our partners have invested in. What I found is the old saying, “Keep it simple, stupid,” is what we’ve learned works best for us. In this business, especially when you start having a footprint in the business over a few years as we do now. You can imagine the opportunities or deals that come across our desk of folks that think they’ve got the next biggest well in Texas or whatever. It’s hard and I’ve seen companies that I worked for in the past and even my company and being guilty of it myself to some degree.

TWS FF 5 | Financial Friday

Financial Friday: A product could be an investment, a commodity, or a business.

 

Sometimes it’s easy to get stars in your eyes in this business. People come and you can see opportunities and all you think about is the upside. We’re talking tremendous upside. We’ve had deals that pay back the entire investment within 30 days, which is unheard of in any other typical investment vehicle. Those deals are few and far between. We’ve built our team. I’ve got a very dynamic team of close-knit group of guys, a 50-year veteran in the field, Andy Whitehead, our operating partner that has an old school mentality of evaluating our deals. He and his dad has been doing this for 50 years using his own money for the most part. He evaluates them very conservatively. We’re not necessarily looking to knock one out of the park every time, but we’re trying to put us in the best opportunity to make some money that puts us in the lowest risk opportunity of losing our money.

That’s the real hard thing in our business to evaluate is to be able to walk away from those opportunities that are presented to you that have this tremendous upside that put stars in your eyes. It sometimes makes you forget about the heavy risk factor that comes along with it. We’ve got to be disciplined in our company checks and balances system to be able to pull the reins back, walk away from deals and stick to a more conservative approach that might not have the tremendous upside as the other deals. It also doesn’t carry near the risk factor and it gives our investing partners and ourselves because in every deal we do, we’ve got our own money into it. We’re shoulder to shoulder with our investing partners in everything that we do. We also have more motivation than anyone to preserve our capital. It gives us the biggest opportunity to help that grow and not lose it, which is something that can be done pretty easily in this business if you’re not careful.

It’s the worst thing to happen in any business. I always look at it because we’re in Salt Lake City and our office is right next to a huge conference center that takes up an entire city block. I sometimes equate it to a restaurant starting two days before one of the biggest conferences comes into town. It assumes that the rest of the year is going to be like that weekend where they have people out the door and you’re hiring and you’re ordering food. Before you know it, everyone’s gone and there are three patrons in the afternoon. It’s one of those things where you have to be very cautious. I’ve seen that and that’s one of those reasons to have good structure. A good structure allows you to make good decisions when things don’t go as planned. You have plan B is you have communication, figuring out what can we do at this point relative to whatever the challenge is.

Every opportunity and every business get these curve balls that you’re not prepared for. It could be legislative curve balls, it could be economical curve balls and in your case, oil prices. You don’t know what OPEC is going to do here and here. I have massive options market in the oil and gas industry. It’s one of those things where if you have a good structure when things go wrong, you make the right decision, not when things are going great. What have you seen maybe as a result of poor choices in the industry that have led to some pretty bad outcomes?

I’ll look at it from a different perspective because what we try to do is we try to make a good outcome for us based on some poor decisions of other companies. It is not predatory or it’s not something we go and prey on companies. With this cyclical environment, just like you’re talking about when nobody knows what oil prices are going to do. When they’re hot like they were in 2008 and then again in 2012 and 2013, all the typical governing rules of economics go out the window. It’s the Wild Wild West. That’s what I call it in the business. When oil prices are hot, nobody cares about what they’re spending. Nobody evaluates budgets. Nobody looks at anything except what can we do to get the most oil out of the ground right now. A lot of companies make a lot of money doing that. I can see where those mistakes are made, but a company did that in our area. They’re in Southeast Texas where we are very active.

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A company that was doing well right there in 2010, 2011 and 2012 were bringing in after expenses $34 million a month, really big money and got overextended. They got greedy, put a bunch of money into some stuff that they weren’t with. They borrowed a bunch of money against their production to expand their operation into something that wasn’t their bread and butter. Then when the prices fail, that was it. They were done. Their financial backer out of New York pulled their funding and they were done. I went in 2016 or starting in late 2015 and we finalized the deal in 2016. I went in and bought up. If you put it in perspective with all they spent probably $22 million, $23 million worth of their assets for pennies on the dollar. When I say pennies on the dollar, I mean that in the truest form. I went in and revamped them, repumped it up and made a lot of money off of what they couldn’t keep going because of their poor decisions whenever the prices were high.

The big part of the structure is knowing what you say yes to and what you say no to. It’s hard sometimes to say no to that greed factor because that’s one of those irrational drives that usually kills people. When the decision is made because of that and not a rational model that dictates what your business parameters are. I think we’re all guilty of it. I certainly am, saying yes to way too many things. You lose focus and you don’t have any focus anywhere. Things end up not working out in a few areas and it hurts. If you go into and understand, “This is what we say yes to. Here are our parameters. This is what we say no to,” it makes it easy so that when that volatility produces something that seems like, “This is a five-star star in my eyes, we’re going to make a killing.”

It’s one of those, “Should we do that?” That’s why having a good team, having a good debate, having a good perspective allows for the best outcome. That’s where I went down that road is because you’re hitting on certain things where that’s evident in so many industries. Real estate is one of them where people are buying stuff, pennies on the dollar. It was only the people that understood what was going on that had the pennies to pay. The people that are letting it go, they didn’t have pennies.

I haven’t learned only from other people’s mistakes, I’ve been guilty of it myself. I tell my business partners, the guys that we do business with every day that four or five years ago, what I thought was literally the worst thing that could have happened to me in business and even in life at one point with some deals that didn’t go as we planned. That in our early stages when we needed them the most, that turned out to be one of the most beneficial things that ever happened to me in my career. Because had I not took those bumps and bruises early and saw those curve balls that this industry can tell you first hand right off the bat and learn how to sustain from those curve balls, then I wouldn’t be where I am now and we wouldn’t have the business model that we’ve over the past 18 to 24 months has proven to be successful. Like the tortoise and the hare, go back to slow and steady wins the race. It’s exactly what’s worked for us.

In business and investment, I’ve learned whether it’s hiring employees or investing in a company or bringing a company on as a strategic partner, aligning with this firm or that firm. If they haven’t had their bumps and bruises, you have no idea how they’re going to behave when they get them because that’s an inevitability. When things are at their worst and people do the right thing, that’s one of the greatest signs you can have. That’s ultimately what happens is when things don’t work out and people are not used to failure, they’re not used to things not going as planned and what to do about it. You could get a person that has great morals, great ethics and do the right thing or you can get the other side where they don’t make the right decisions.

TWS FF 5 | Financial Friday

Financial Friday: People who are not used to failure are not used to things not going as planned.

 

That’s the thing, we all have our bumps, we all have our bruises and knowing that and having someone that you align with in whatever capacity and that hasn’t had them, I think that’s one of the worst decisions you can make. This has been awesome. I appreciate you being candid because this is what investment is about. There’s always an inherent risk you have and there’s not just one type of risk. Like we mentioned, you have political risks. You have an economic risk. I would say though the prevalent risk that you have is people risks. That’s where understanding the dynamic of a team and the dynamic of a company, how to communicate and how to have good operations, that’s where businesses make or break themselves. Thanks for sharing your opinion and perspective there.

Thanks for having me on. I enjoyed it. As I said, the investments that we offer and folks that invest in our project are specific target audiences. It’s definitely not for everybody but at the end of the day, we’ve hopped on the risk and the downside of the business. At the end of the day, we wouldn’t be in it and keep doing it if there wasn’t more money to be made in this than any other business that I know of. We go out there and we sustain those risks and we sustain those bumps and bruises. When we do have success, which is way more often than not, the return that we see in this business, even in this modern oil prices are just astronomical compared to normal investment vehicles. There’s a reason that our folks keep investing with us time and time again. The reason we keep putting our money into the projects time and time again because there is a lot of money to be made out there. That’s why it’s one of the biggest backbones of our economy and society in my opinion.

Why don’t you give the listeners ways that they can learn more about you, learn more about your company, learn more about the industry and the specific opportunities you have available?

The best way to check us out is to visit our website at LoneStarAssetManagement.com. From there, you can get the history of us and the background of our company and links and resources to help you learn about the industry and the tax benefits of investing in oil and gas, which are phenomenal and things of that nature. If it’s something that everybody’s interested in discussing further, when you get on the website, right there at the bottom of the main page. You can schedule a free one-on-one consultation. Usually that consists of about ten to fifteen minutes conversation with me or somebody here in the office to explain to them what the investment upside is, what the risk is and what we’re currently offering. What our goals are for our folks in building a small oil and gas investment portfolio outside of their primary investment portfolio and just go from there. If you have any questions, all our contact information, phone number and everything is on there. We would be happy to talk with anybody interested and get any questions answered that we can.

It’s been great. Thank you again for your time. Thanks again, Beau. I’m sure you’ll have an awesome year. Best of luck to you and thanks for being on.

Thank you for having me. I look forward to talking to you soon.

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About Beau Flowers

TWS FF 5 | Financial Friday

Beau Flowers is the Chief Executive Officer of Lonestar Asset Management, LLC. Mr. Flowers is a native of Southeast Texas and a graduate of Texas State University. Mr. Flowers has over fifteen years’ experience in the oil and gas industry, and for the last five years has served as Vice President for some of the top oil and gas firms in the United States.

In that capacity, Mr. Flowers has had the opportunity to work with private investors and investment firms from across the country to assemble and execute numerous successful oil and gas drilling programs.

During the course of his career, he has played a key role in the development and production of over thirty oil and gas joint ventures, similar to the projects currently proposed.

 

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