Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice - Inflation, Taxes & Interest Rates: The New Reality for Business Owners

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

Right About Now with Ryan Alford Join media personality and marketing expert Ryan Alford as he dives into dynamic conversations with top entrepreneurs, marketers, and influencers. "Right About Now" brings you actionable insights on business, marketing, and personal branding, helping you stay ahead in today's fast-paced digital world. Whether it's exploring how character and charisma can make millions or unveiling the strategies behind viral success, Ryan delivers a fresh perspective with every episode. Perfect for anyone looking to elevate their business game and unlock their full potential.     Resources: Right About Now Newsletter | Free Podcast Monetization Course | Join The Network |Follow Us On Instagram | Subscribe To Our Youtube Channel | Vibe Science Media SUMMARY In this episode of "Right About Now," host Ryan Alford interviews Ryan Stewman, the "hardcore closer," for a candid discussion on the harsh realities facing entrepreneurs today. Stewman shares personal experiences and sharp insights on how government policies, rising interest rates, taxation, and cultural shifts impact business success. He emphasizes the need for accountability, resilience, and embracing discomfort to break free from mediocrity. The conversation offers actionable advice and honest perspectives on navigating today’s challenging economic landscape, encouraging listeners to confront tough truths for real financial freedom. TAKEAWAYS Challenges entrepreneurs face, particularly regarding cash flow and economic conditions. Impact of government policies and regulations on business operations. The current state of the real estate market and its challenges. The effects of rising interest rates on property ownership and investment. Taxation issues affecting business cash flow and decision-making. Rising costs of goods and services, including fuel and health insurance. Cultural shifts impacting accountability and economic health. The relationship between economic indicators and government monetary policies. The importance of confronting uncomfortable truths for personal and business growth. The interplay between asset appreciation, financing costs, and tax implications.  

Most entrepreneurs are on a collision course with massive failure, and the reason is directly hitting your cash flow, not your business plan. Tune in for an uncensored, no-b-s-reality check as the hardcore closer Ryan Stumann exposes the crippling facts that force you to be average and keep you stuck in the middle. Stop chasing comfort and start fighting for your financial freedom. This is the brutal truth you need to hear to survive the current economic climate. The truth hurts, but God designed the truth. to hurt us because we're only motivated by two things, pain and pleasure. And the truth is worse, motivate you because of pain to go do what you need to do. And we just hide as citizens, as humans.

We're hiding from the truth and we're trying to get pleasure out of everything. But pain is a bigger motivator than pleasure. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over one million downloads a month. taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and cash and checks? Well, it starts right about now. All the best practices in the world are set up to get average.

And so when you're actually chasing the top of the mountain or you're aspiring things, the world is conditioning us. If you want to have a bigger life, a better life to have impact, to do things, you have to take risks, break free from average. It never felt like it had an agenda because it felt like it was free. You were freed up. It was because if you want to chase past what everyone else has, you got to be willing to do what no one else is willing to do.

That's a lot of the ways you've built your business. It looks like it. You know, the name of my company is Great from the Academy for that reason. I didn't even know it. I love it. What does that stand for to you? As human beings, we're fighting this force of average. We are fighting mental limitations.

We're fighting financial limitations. Freedom means you have the time and the means to do whatever you want whenever you want. Most people, they get into business because they want to be their own boss and then have time freedom. But then what happens for most people is they have neither of those. They have to answer to investors, the board of directors, employees, middle management, and they have no time left over to do the things that they want to do with the money that they've made. Just trying to help people break free from all of that stuff. What do you make of the business climate right now in America?

The administration and the government has got in the way of my success. When I was a drug dealer and I was trying to be successful with a drug dealer, the government got in the way of my success. As I became a convicted felon and Dodd-Frank was passed in 2010, they wouldn't allow me to do financial stuff anymore because I was a felon, so they've intervened twice, but it hasn't stopped my success. Right now, think about this. Just two years ago, you can make money off of Rolex, Liz, Lamborghini,

private jet carters, crypto, NFTs, mastermind, anything we touched, real estate, houses and cars were selling for tens and not hundreds of thousands of dollars over list price, interest rates were dirt cheap, gasoline was dirt cheap, everything you touched you made money from. And our government got to know what these people take it all the way from. There's no time in my life. I was a load officer in 2007, eight, nine, and ten. Even though the mortgage market was crashing, there were still people that were making money, and it was only the real estate and mortgage market that was crashing.

I never seen the government take everything away. They have the last couple of years. What happens is we're chasing policy for when Congress passed on an act or law or a president puts an executive order. It takes a few years with to catch up. It doesn't happen immediately. This is a test of IQ of America right here, where we're at. Common sense isn't so common anymore because, Because we have parents that for two or three generations now have let their kids be raised by video games, iPads, computers.

I was in school. It gets straight days. Got in trouble. And now there's all these grading curves, participation trophies for education and stuff like that. We're seeing the consequences of that. We're told the stove would burn your hand and you put your hand on it anyway. They laughed at you. They were like, you're an idiot.

I told you the stove was on. Now it's like, oh, my God, we've got to get rid of stove. It's just a completely different climate. We're seeing the consequences of that. Accountability is the word, and it's gone out the window because we have conditioned everything to be convenient and comfortable. It's great. We want our kids to be comfortable. It's not that we don't want them to have a great life, but you don't learn or have a great life without lessons and consequences and accountability.

You've nailed it. We're seeing the participation trophy people are now running companies and government and other things. What's crime in California? You can murder somebody You're out of jail in 10 years. They don't even report it in some of the city of LA and New York. They don't even report it anymore. The FBI put a report out there today saying crimes down by 4%.

But that's because New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Texas, Chicago doesn't report crime to the FBI anymore. We're not getting real statistics. We're not getting the real education. We're not getting real accountability. And we wonder why we have fake-ass people running our economy that are in power. It's crazy. I'm independent as well. I've voted both sides of the line.

I think my practicality. and principles and morals, probably lean right, but I'm not afraid to cross the aisle. I consider myself independent. What's the biggest thing that's impacted you from a business with today's client? Number one, interest rates for it three and fourth percent. You could go buy a rental property and you can cash flow it. Now you have to buy that thing for cash. We'll put a significantly larger down payment down to get it to cash flow at six and a half

to seven a half percent. Then on top of that, in a lot of blue states, they have gap the amount of rates that you can put on the rents. If you raise the rent every year, they've said, oh, you can only do 5%. You can do 10%. But they didn't cap the amount of tax increase because the property values went up. They didn't cap the amount of insurance. My properties in Florida, I've sold all but one and I'll sell it is because I can't raise

rent, but the insurance company raised my policy 300%. The government had fucked the landlord, but we're going to care of the insurance companies and the municipalities. And a lot of business owners own real estate, whether it's, the office they have or whether it's the portfolio of real estate. And when that's true stops cash flowing and then an HVAC goes out or a roof gets damaged or destroys the house on the way out, they're out every dollar that they've made for an entire year on that. The second problem is, let's say in 2022, you made a million bucks. Twenty-t23, you've got to pay taxes on that

million bucks. Taxes are paid in the rear. In 2023, in April, late, June, July, whatever it is, if you decide to pay taxes as a business owner, depending on when you expend it, you're having a year that is 20, 30, 40%, percent less as good of cash flow as it was in 2022. Now every dollar they saved has gone out the window in 2023 and you can't take the loss in 2023 till this year.

And this year if your business is down again, and we're trailing from better years and business getting taxed in arrears. Fuck, man, I'm already out of money. And now they're taxing me from a year ago. I thought things were going to continue to be good. So maybe bought more inventory, maybe got a bigger warehouse, maybe went and hired more people. Now I'm not making as much money, and I still owe those taxes and I've got to let these people go in order to do that.

I hear these stories all day, every day. It's a combination of things. Our cost of goods are up. Diesel is traditionally less expensive than gas. But a few years ago, they started making us put death fuel on top of diesel, and now diesel's more expensive than gas. And I'm watching great companies and trucking companies go out of business left and right because they've got to charge a higher price in order to pay for the expensive diesel. You're burning three, four gallons to the mile because you've got a big-ass load in the trailer that you're traveling with. You can't take a loss on that.

You've got to make some money so you either lower your margin or you go out of business and watch a lot of that happen too. So this is the lie of the statistics we've seen from the government. The cost of goods may only be up four or five percent, but the lack of drilling new wells, We haven't drilled a new well in America since 2017. We haven't opened a new refinery in forever, and everything's operating at max capacity. Diesel is super expensive, which means the transportation of goods to get to the floor, to get to our doorstep, is through the roof. And so now we're having to pay more for that. Even if you're making more money right now, you're actually making less money because everything else that you have to do what's more expensive.

For a family of six, in my house, health insurance, and we're all held. None of us have anything wrong with us. three grand a month. That's $36,000 a year. If I wasn't a good entrepreneur, I either have to even have to take a job where they pay for my health insurance, which costs the company, $36,000 a year. I make $100,000. I'm really only making $64,000 to live on just after health insurance. That's not mortgage. That's my gas. That's not food. That's not any of that job. That was just a masterclass. What is happening in the economy right now that's impacting business? The impact of interest rates being high is having a huge impact. Things that are even related to real estate, the cash that it's keeping

out of the everyday market, because those rates aren't so high, because people aren't doing what you're saying, flipping houses, doing things. When you stall real estate in this country, you have stalled the entire economy. There's not as much free cash flow and just business transactions happening. 47% of real estate agents have not pulled a home in the last 12 months. The median home sales for real estate agent in the country right now is two and 12 months. It was three just a couple of of years. That's been cut by a third. Traditionally hard money rates, eight, nine percent. Now they're 12 to 15. The SBA was six to seven percent. Right now, the SVA's at 12 to 16 percent. You can't go acquire businesses. You can't acquire houses and profit from them. Even if you buy a primary risk,

my home I paid a million bucks for it years ago. It's worth two million dollars right now. Price has gone up in my area. If I would spill that house, out and keep a million dollars. First of all, I'm going to be taxed on 300,000 of that because it's only a $700,000 non-capital gain primary residence. So I'm going to be taxed on 300 grand of that. Then if I go buy another house that only costs me a million dollars, maybe I move further out this city, so I'm paying more for gas, transportation, things of that way, nature. And that house at a million dollars costs more than my house right now with a low interest rate. I have a ranch house that I've bought for $440,000.

The mortgage is more money per month on that than it is from a million dollar house that I bought six years ago and refinanced 2.875%. I'm paying $1,000, and that's a month for a $2 million house that I've flown for six years than a $400,000 home just a year ago. A guy like Ryan, busted his ass, running businesses, creating jobs, doing these things, investments, but these are the impacts for him. Imagine what the impacts are talking about cost of goods. like everyday people, they're paying $7 for a loaf of bread and all this, but that's back to the fuel, the cost of getting it there.

You make 120 grand a year, which historically is excellent money, but you've got three kids. You're paying $2,200 a month or $30,000 a year for health insurance. You're paying 35% 38% in taxes. So you're really living on about $35,000 to $40,000 a year after just taxes and health insurance on a W-2 job with a couple of kids. in $120,000 a year salary. It's crazy. And right now, I'm somewhat of a main street economist because I've been in the financial markets for 20 years.

Anytime the Fed cuts rates, they're chasing problems. And unemployment is at an all-turn high right now. You're not going to get that from a government statistic, but it is what it is. Inflation is actually going down a little bit. So the Fed cut rates because of unemployment companies to go out more cheaper money to grant and hire more people. But anytime the Fed has cut the rate,

there has always been, the next three to 12 months, a 20 to 55% decline in the value of the stock market overall. We haven't seen the market crash yet and the ramifications of what are to come from that because of this rate cut, because they don't just cut the rate because they're like, we want to be nice to people and give them more money. That's not how it works. The whole point in that is, yeah, we want the rates to come down, but they didn't need to get that high to begin with because these policies created, they're about the cause of the

disease and the prescription. It's dangerous. How can I be a problem solver if I don't go create a bunch of problems? That's what these politicians do. They go create a bunch of problems and then promise us that they'll solve them. You get this. The solution was not to raise rates six consecutive times in a row. Three percent interest rate is ridiculously low. That was great. But anybody with a half a brain knows the sweet spot in America for mortgage interest rates is five and a half percent. That's enough to keep people buying. It's not too expensive. That's the sweet spot.

They should have raised from three to five and a half and just stayed there. Fuck that. They went for seven and a half. Yeah. And they flatlined everything else. And you don't feel it immediately. That's why we're starting to feel it now. Everybody tells you it's okay to be fat and you're beautiful and all this stuff when you're

clearly not. Those people are lying to you and doing your wrong versus the person that calls you fat and hurt your feelings and tells you get in the gym and start eating, correct, you hold you accountable. Now, you're more likely to hate person. It calls you fat and tells you to get in the gym and eat right. But that person actually cares more about you. You as the person than the people who care about your feelings and how you perceive them as nice people. The truth hurts, but God designed the truth to hurt us because we're only motivated by two things, pain and pleasure. And the truth hurts to motivate you because of pain

to go do what you need to do. And we just hide as citizens, as humans. We're hiding from the truth and we're trying to get pleasure out of everything, but pain is a bigger motivator pleasure. It's a cycle of comfort because the person that doesn't tell you the truth isn't not telling you the truth to make you feel good. It's so they feel good because they don't have to see you respond negatively and be hurt. They want to be liked too. Everybody wants comfort. Everybody wants to be liked. But it takes real strength, real courage and real belief to tell you the truth because then that's what's truly good for the other person and not good for them. everybody keep up with you.

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You know what to find us, Ryan is right.com. We'll have links to all Ryan Stumman's stuff, Hardcore Closer. Go follow him. And you can find us over on YouTube. full episode. We're blowing up over there. We're taking over. We're taking the BS out of business. We'll see you next time on Right About Now. This has been Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. Visit Ryanisright.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about

sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.