(upbeat music)
- Okay I'm here with Alexandra
and we're doing another Millennial Money.
And very excited about this program
so thank you for tuning in.
This will be one of 10 and we don't know
which order they're comin' in so.
What are some of your questions when people say
get out of debt, what comes to your mind?
- When people say get out of debt, I think about
credit card debt, the student loan debt,
all that negative debt that people use
for shopping and personal things.
- And is your idea of debt good or bad?
- I have a very negative idea or connotation towards debt
and that's because that's what we were taught
in the school system and the traditional education system,
that it's not so great.
But because I have, I work here and I have these resources
and I've gone to your seminars,
I understand that debt can be powerful
and it can be used in a good way
and it can generate you money.
- So for those listening, debt is
a four letter word for most people.
There are many people in my position,
so called financial gurus who say live totally debt free.
And there's other people who say cut up your credit cards.
And you know that's good advice for certain types of people
so you should definitely cut up your credit cards
if you don't know, you can't control your spending.
You should definitely.
But I don't know how people live without credit cards,
I don't know how you can check into a hotel,
rent a car, or go shopping, go out for dinner, you know, so.
But you should cut up your credit cards
if you're a shopaholic, that's good advice.
And the other thing about debt,
there's good debt and bad debt.
So this is gonna be the lesson today,
is there's good debt and bad debt.
And if you only have bad debt,
which I classify student loan debt as bad debt.
The main reason it's bad debt is
because it's the worst possible type of debt.
You see if I get into trouble as a business man with debt
I can declare bankruptcy and I'm clean.
But the trouble with student loan debt, you can't do that.
You know, it hangs around your neck
for the rest of your life.
So if you're a student, you shouldn't take on
student loan debt unless you absolutely 100% guaranteed
that you will commit to graduating.
Have you seen a lot of kids drop out of school?
- Oh yeah.
- And so the problem with student loan debt
is a person has to know what are they going to study.
- You know I have two friends, they're both medical doctors.
And they came out of school with $500,000 in medical debt,
I mean in student loan debt.
But they paid it off in five years
because they're medical doctors.
They had high paying jobs.
And so they delayed having families and all this
and they're whole objective was
to pay for becoming a doctor.
But I think you have friends who have
no idea what they're going to school for.
- Yes I have this friend and she's changed her major
like three different times, from business to now nursing
and it's a lot of money and she still has no idea
what she wants to do and she tells me,
she's like Alex I want to change my major from Nursing
but I'm already practically done
and I can't pay back this debt
so she's stuck with the nursing career
and she doesn't even like it.
- You know when I was your age, like I think I said earlier
is that my classmates were making like 110, 120,000 a year.
Which is not much money, but for my generation
if I made 20,000 that was a lot of money.
Do you know what I mean? Is this out of proportion?
So we were the highest paid graduates in the world
and my starting pay was about 47,000 a year.
My classmates were making three times as much as me.
But it's a choice we make,
I didn't really want to do what they did so.
I had to join a labor union.
As ships officers we had to join the MM&P,
Masters, Mates, and Pilots.
Which meant we were labor union guys.
So labor union guys make more money
and nothing personal but I don't want to be a union member.
So I joined Standard Oil of California
as a shipping officer and then
I didn't have to join the labor union.
But I only got 47,000 a year, that was the difference.
The difference is standard oil was still sailing
and a lot of those labor union jobs are gone
because the pay got too high.
- You know what I mean, so there's always a good and bad
and it's hard to understand that when you're younger
but I knew when I was 22 years old,
I didn't care if they paid me 100,000 a year,
I wasn't gonna join a union, it was just principle.
My father, poor dad, was head of the teacher's union
and for what I saw (laughs) I didn't want to be a teacher,
I didn't want to be a union member,
so it was kinda youthful exuberance on things.
But anyway, today it's harder because you don't know
what is this mysterious high paying job.
And even lawyers today are having a hard time
because they don't need that many lawyers
which is a good thing and there's artificial intelligence
which is replacing a lot of the high end jobs.
Like even accountants today, they don't need accountants
because artificial intelligence can do
a lot of the work for them.
So that's why for your generation,
student loan debt I would say is possibly
one of the most important things you need to decide
before you take on the debt.
Number one are you going to graduate?
And number two what are you going to graduate as?
- [Alexandra] Exactly.
- Any comments on that, anything you want to talk about?
- So my dream and passion
has always been to be an entrepreneur.
But when I started studying it,
I told my dad it was the last thing I would ever do
because I thought that what they were teaching me
was what I was gonna be doing on a day-to-day basis.
But these teachers don't, aren't actually practicing
what they're teaching and so they give you
this wrong conception of what you're studying
and reality is the traditional education, it's obsolete.
What mattered back then does not apply
to how you're gonna run your business now.
- You know today, if I was in your position,
you know I was pretty clear when I was about 15,
I wanted to sail the seas, I sailed huge ships
you know throughout the world.
But that was a dream of a kid, you know.
By the time I was 22, I was tired of it, you know.
I didn't want to sail the world anymore.
So I understand you know what it's like to keep,
what they call it is finding your way in life, right?
- [Alexandra] Yeah.
- That's not easy.
So I commend you guys and that's why we're doing
the Millennial Money is because as these programs progress
you're gonna find out, in my opinion,
you guys have a harder road to go through than I did.
For me it was really easy, there was a lot of jobs,
economy was booming and all this.
And it was easier so you guys have got to be smarter, okay?
So as far as the subject of debt,
there's good debt and bad debt.
Again it goes back to the financial statement,
income, expense,
asset, liability.
So debt falls in here.
So I'll review, let's say I'm gonna buy
you know everybody says I'm gonna buy a house.
And everybody says my house is an asset.
That's not true, your house is a liability.
I don't care if you put no debt on it or not,
a house is a liability.
Same as if you have a car.
A car is a liability and the reason for that is
as we've talked about earlier,
the six words that are basics
of financial education, financial intelligence,
income, expense, asset, liability.
And the two other words are cash flow.
So when you look at the average person
to have a job, money comes in here,
they pay for their house, and the money goes to a bank,
through a mortgage, so it's not an asset
because the cash is flowing out, so it's a liability.
So the definition of liability,
does it take money from your pocket?
And for an asset does it put money in your pocket?
So when I have a rental property here,
it puts money in my pocket.
So if I live in the house it's a liability
because even if I have no debt on it,
I still have taxes, depreciation,
repairs and upkeep, insurance and all this.
When I rent a property, I've done a good job buying it
and structuring it, every month it sends me money.
So I started off when I was 25,
I had a little one bedroom condo
and it put 25 bucks in my pocket,
it was a start.
So this was good debt, you see,
the debt also went out and paid
but it also put $25 in my pocket.
So net, net, I was making money from my little house.
So today my wife and I own 6,500 of 'em.
And every month 6,500 houses put money in my pocket,
my people who live in 'em love me and all this
because they have a place to live.
But all of this comes from debt.
So we don't, we have they're
100% financed there, it's all debt.
So this is good debt.
And what makes it good debt is
are the two most important words,
cash flow. Does that make sense to you?
- [Alexandra] Yeah.
- Any comments on this?
- So numerous people my age actually think debt is horrible
and you just showed us a perfect example of cash flow
and how debt can generate income.
And many entrepreneurs use this formula
to make money on a day-to-day basis.
- So what most people do is they have student loan debt, SL,
and that debt is going out this way.
You know it doesn't put any money in your pocket.
You can say well I have a job,
well there's still you working for it.
So I don't work for any of this money here,
I do this job once, set the deal up.
Every year I add more and more and more in it,
I'm borrowing money from here,
it's coming here, and going this way.
So the debt is putting money in my pocket
and bad debt is taking money from my pocket.
So the problem is, if you're gonna use debt
you've got to be much smarter than this person here.
You've got to be very, very smart.
That's why I took real estate classes when I was 25
and I've never stopped taking real estate classes.
Because you buy a piece of real estate
and you make a mistake, this turns into a liability.
And this, if I get, the renter leaves the place,
this goes here that fast and the cash flows that way.
And it's going out of my pocket.
So it has nothing to do with real estate,
nothing to do with the car, that there was student loan.
It has to do with these two words here.
So good debt again, is debt when I borrow for this
and it puts money in my pocket.
If I had a car and I borrowed money from it
and somebody rented from me as an Uber driver or something
and I put money in my pocket it would be an asset.
My wife and I have a boat and you know most boats lose money
but our boat makes money because it's in a charter,
you know people rent my boat all the time.
So it has nothing to do whether it's a boat,
student loan debt, a house, a car, or whatever.
It has to do with these two words here.
And so most of the time,
you know you've had accounting classes,
they don't talk much about this do they?
- This is something they've never
mentioned to me in college. - Why is that you think?
- Like you mentioned before, I mean,
there's people that are actually teaching students
something that they don't apply in their daily life,
something that they barely have knowledge about
and they only learned through a textbook.
- But you have, you've taken accounting classes right?
- Yeah exactly, I did.
- You made A's in it?
- Well I did finally get
a high grade the second time around
but that was because I had a real accountant teaching me
the real applications of accounting.
As opposed to a fake teacher, right?
So your advisor, Tom Wheelwright taught me in one hour
what I could have learned the entire semester
with this one teacher that wasn't even
an accountant in his real life.
- A big lesson for you is that it's nothing to do
with the house, the car, the student loan,
it has to do with where's the cash flowing.
If the cash is flowing in to your income statement,
into your pocket, it's an asset, it's good debt.
But if it's taking money from your pocket, it's bad debt.
About debt, there's good debt and bad debt.
Any comments on that?
- Well I think just like Trump,
you know how to apply the rules of debt
and he calls himself the king of debt, right?
- If you're gonna be successful at
whether you're employee or entrepreneur,
you've got to control the direction of your cash flow.
So like most people here, we've talked about earlier,
they got a job and the cash flows out here,
it goes to the government, called taxes.
Trump doesn't do this, I don't do this, legally.
The reason's 'cause we're entrepreneurs, not employees.
Employees have this, entrepreneurs don't.
Because it's a type of asset.
Any other thing?
- [Alexandra] I'm good.
- So what would you like to say
to the young millennials listening to this?
- I'd say don't be afraid of debt
and if you know how to use it, use it.
- Good debt puts--
- Money in your pocket.
- Could a credit card be good debt?
- Well it just depends what you spend the money on, right?
So if you spent it on something that's
gonna produce income for you,
like an asset then it's good debt
but if you spend it on let's say
a jacket that you wanted from Burberry, then it's not.
- First property there, it was in Maui, Hawaii, the 1970s.
I bought it with a credit card.
- Wow.
- Property was $18,000 my first,
but I've taken several real estate classes
and so I knew what to look for, I found this one property.
It took a long time, when I found it,
I just broke out my credit card and bought it
and it put $25 in my pocket.
It went from this little, janky little thing.
This was years ago, $25.
It was good debt, I wish I had never sold it.
I don't, you know it was a big mistake to sell it
because today it's probably worth four or 500,000
and that's a whole 'nother story.
That's why I don't flip properties,
you know, I don't like to do that stuff.
So anything else, so good debt, what?
- Money in your pocket.
- And bad debt what?
- Takes money out of your pocket.
- That's all there is. - Yeah.
- Thank you.