The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Playing the Wealth Game: The Strategies Behind Financial Moves That Win by Freddie Rappina

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

Playing the Wealth Game: The Strategies Behind Financial Moves That Win by Freddie Rappina Amazon.com Optafinancial.com Do you want to transform your financial future? Build the kind of wealth you’ve always dreamed of having? Create a brighter financial future simply by changing your wealth game? Wealth-building isn’t just luck or happenstance—it’s a series of strategic moves that take you from where you are today to where you dream of being tomorrow. It’s all about playing the right game, and playing it well. Just as you would develop a strategy to win at Chess or Checkers, you need to do that for your money. This book outlines the strategies and mindset the biggest companies and the wealthiest people are using to build their fortunes so that you can do the same. By elevating your own game, you can do more than fund a retirement plan—you can create a long-lasting financial fortune and design the life of your dreams!About the author Freddie Rappina spent years building extensive experience and qualifications, including becoming a Chartered Financial Consultant™ Accredited Investment Fiduciary™, Retirement Income Planning Specialist™ and Chartered Life Underwriter™. He also amassed a comprehensive set of certifications, including Series 7, Series 63, Series 65, Series 22, and Series 6 registrations. This education and experience have given him the skills to conduct thorough assessments of his clients' financial situations and craft tailored recommendations to optimize their wealth management strategies.About the author Freddie Rappina spent years building extensive experience and qualifications, including becoming a Chartered Financial Consultant™ Accredited Investment Fiduciary™, Retirement Income Planning Specialist™ and Chartered Life Underwriter™. He also amassed a comprehensive set of certifications, including Series 7, Series 63, Series 65, Series 22, and Series 6 registrations. This education and experience have given him the skills to conduct thorough assessments of his clients' financial situations and craft tailored recommendations to optimize their wealth management strategies.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

Ladies and gentlemen, there are these things that makes it official. Welcome to the internet. We have an amazing young man on the show today. We always have the most amazing folks and authors on the show, so that's another reason to refer the show as well. He's the author of the newest book that just came out June 17th, 2024. It's called Playing the Wealth Game, the Strategies Behind Financial Moves That Win. Freddie Rapina is on the show with us today. We'll be talking about his insights and how he can help you play the wealth game better.

God, that was an easy layup. Freddie spent years building extensive experience and qualifications, including becoming a chartered financial consultant, accredited investment fiduciary. And he does retirement income planning specialist and chartered life underwriter. I think he's saying that he became all those things is what he's saying. If I'm reading the Bible, I need to learn to read clearly. He also, I flunked second grade.

He also amassed a comprehensive set of certifications, including series seven, series 63, series 65, series 22, and Series 6 registrations. Benny doesn't have a Series 89. I just made that up. That's my next one. This education experience has given him the skills to conduct thorough assessments of his clients' financial situations and craft tailored recommendations to optimize their wealth management strategies. Welcome to the show, Freddie.

How are you? Thank you. Thank you for having me, Chris. Great. There's a lot of trad Freddie. How are you? Thank you. Thank you for having me, Chris. Great. There's a lot of trademarks there in your bio. Yeah. I just kind of collect them. It keeps me on the treadmill.

That's like my main reason for doing the next one. It's something that keeps me studying, keeps me up to date, and keeps me on the treadmill. I didn't even know there was a Series 2, 22. What is that for? Oh, that one is oil and gas. Yeah, oil and gas investments. I didn't even know there was one for that.

Yeah, direct participation. Freddie, give us your dot coms. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs? Optifinancial.com. That's the firm's website in the top right-hand corner. Anybody can schedule a complimentary consultation. Playingthewealthgame.com is the landing page for the book. Or you can just go to Amazon or Barnes and Nobles

or wherever for the book. I think Amazon is pretty much the normal one. What's that? Wherever fine books are sold is what we always say on the show. Yeah. So give us a 30,000 overview. What's in your new book? All right.

So I wanted to write a book that would kind of be a self-discovery book for people in finance. Because when it comes to finance, there's a lot of noise out there. There's a lot of suggestions, a lot of things. And I didn't want to say something was right or wrong, but I wanted to explain the two different games that are going on in finance right now, personal finance. So I've likened it to checkers and chess. What I'm saying is that the middle class has been force fed, almost waterboarded checkers for so many years. And I don't say there's anything wrong with checkers and if you're going to play checkers i want you to play a darn good checkers game i want you to be very good at checkers

nothing sucks more in the united states than being a bad checkers player you'll get your butt whooped by capitalism but i also want people to understand that that is not chess and the wealthy are playing chess and that has a completely different set of strategies. And by the end of the book, you should know whether you are a checkers player or if you're a chess player or if you want to switch. And like I said, I don't think there's anything wrong with checkers. You just won't become wealthy, in my opinion, playing checkers.

You've made us lose our whole checkers audience contingency. If you're going to play checkers, like I said, play will have no debt. Didn't you know that 25% of the Chris Voss Show podcast audience is checker lovers? It's just for analogy purposes. We got it. You wrote, what made you want to write the book? What was the proponent? I think you kind of alluded to a little bit, but was there a moment that you went, I'm writing a damn book

on this. I'm sick of it and I'm over it. Yeah. When I was younger, I got around a lot of wealthy people and I was in my early twenties and I realized that they were playing a different game. You go through all the search, you go through all the designations, you go through all the financial planning classes and everything else. And it's just constantly checkers, checkers, checkers. And it's okay, but this is not what they're doing. It's not what the, and when I say they, I don't mean just people. I mean, corporations, I mean, municipalities, governments. Like this is there. I felt like there was a almost like a paternalistic element to the financial world right now. And I don't say that, believe me, it comes from like a scammy point of view.

Like they're trying to scam you over. I believe it's honest, from a oh you know chess would be too hard for you you know this is this is this is not you it's too risky you wouldn't do it you would fail leave it to the adults type you know just keep funding those 401ks and giving us all your money and you know and trust that we're to take care of you in 30 years. You'll give your golden wheelchair. And that's not how you build wealth. But you can be happy playing checkers.

You can retire playing checkers. Those things are possible. So I don't want to totally discredit it. But they're not playing checkers. But it's very true. They play at a different level. They have different tax. What's the right word?

Tax. I don't want to say tax avoidance. Tax strategies, basically. Yeah. Well, tax avoidance is good and legal. You want to do that. Tax evasion is bad, illegal. Don't do that. So tax avoidance is using the tax code to your

advantage and basically doing what the government wants you to do. That is key. You can look at all those tax rules as the government asking you to do something. And if you do those things, they will give you a tax break. If you don't do those things, it's a free country, free will. They're not going to tell you how to spend your money, but then they're going to have to tax you more heavily so they can build roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, and everything else because that's what they need to do with the money. If you use that tax code to your advantage and it's available for everyone, you just may have to switch your mindset a little bit,

then that it can totally be in your favor. So rich people play at a different game. And I know that you mentioned the paternal aspect of it. One of the things is they acknowledge their family have wealth, but they have knowledge, right,? How to do different vehicles like trusts and different ways to protect or set up money or to move money, even through legal offshore stuff. I guess there's technically legal offshore stuff. There's all sorts of ways.

And your thesis is that people can tap into those. They don't have to be high rollers. They don't have to be money bucks at max. No, they need to have a mindset change likely. But yeah, so I want you to think about, Chris, what's your sport? What's your favorite sport? The Raiders, NFL, football. Okay, NFL.

I keep losing every season. Okay, so the NFL and Poper are both football games right yeah but and the strategies that are being taught the techniques that being taught to kids nine ten years old playing pop warner football are the same techniques and strategies that the Raiders are using. Okay. The scale is completely different. Keep the faith. Keep the faith.

It explains everything now, damn it. The last 20 years. But the strategy is the same. The scale is different. The expectations are different. But some of the rules might be a little bit different, but it's not a different game. Unfortunately, in finance, there's two totally different games, right? Two totally different strategies.

And to make it to the NFL, you won't be able to make it if you're playing a totally different game, right? So people need to think about it as, okay, I'm playing Little League, and playing high school and i'm playing college pro the majors or whatever so there's there's scalable aspects to this and it but it doesn't take a whole lot more to be a whole lot better than where you are now yeah it it doesn't take billions of dollars i mean you know it's it's almost amazing what you know just a little bit of a change and a little bit of a mindset shift can really do for somebody and point them in the right direction and part of it's just having that knowledge basis right i mean it's you know it's it's these guys that have generational wealth, they've been dealing with high-end financial planners all their life.

They know what to do with money and how to pack it. And you just got to be just as smart. So people should read your book, Durnit. Thanks. I definitely appreciate you plugging the book. But it really comes down to mindset and saying, okay, what are they doing? And keeping your eyes open and just don't drink the Kool-Aid all the time, right? Yeah.

You know, look around. Look at what the corporations are doing, not just what they're selling. Now, I live in Tampa, you know, and luckily I have power. So maybe we'll be on the show today. But yeah, we're definitely one of the more fortunate ones here in Tampa right now. But on a normal day, if I went down to the boat show here in Tampa and I walked up to somebody with a $25 million yacht and said, hey, man, how'd you or woman, how'd you afford this $25 million yacht? This is awesome. They're not going to respond with, I fully funded my IRA.

Or I bought a well- well diversified mutual fund or i bought a guaranteed insurance product with x percent and saved in it for a bazillion years and now i have this yacht like those aren't the answers right but unfortunately again we're being the middle class has been so force-fed checkers that they don't look around and say, okay, what are they actually doing? And so you look at investment companies that sell mutual funds, right? What are they doing with the money? Are they just sitting around and waiting 30 years for compound interest? Or are they actively investing to build cash flow now for themselves

and their company? That's the key. If you look at what they're doing, look at a bank. Does a bank just sit on all the money? No. Insurance companies, my goodness, if you just need an example that is eye-opening, all you have to do is look at life insurance companies. Three biggest life insurance companies in the world, which are Northwestern Mutual, New York Life, and Mass Mutual, all had great years in 2020, 2021, and 2022. Chris, how in the hell can life insurance companies have their best years during a global life-threatening pandemic? What they insure is life. Life is dying. CNN's got a scoreboard on every night on how people died of COVID. And I'm not saying they did anything wrong. It's the contrary. I'm saying

they're doing things right. I'm just saying they're not doing what average families are doing, again, on a smaller scale. Yeah. I mean, plus most people, I mean, you see the shit they buy. One of my favorite things to do is watch. There's these accountant type people. I mean, plus most people, I mean, you see the shit they buy. One of my favorite things to do is watch. There's these accountant type people. I don't know if they're really accountants on TikTok. And then there's people who, there's a couple of car dealers who are shady car dealers. I shouldn't say they're shady. I don't really know that for a fact.

But let's just say they're putting people in $2,000 car payments for 20 years amortization, and these are used cars that have probably been rolled over a few times. And I'll see the one guy, he goes through people's finances and their spending, and some of their spending is crazy. I still can't put my head around having a payment bigger than $1,000 for a vehicle. Unless it's like a Porsche or a BMW or something really nice, but even $150,000 for a pickup truck? Give me a fucking break.

I'm not doing that. But I see all these people now, they have $1,500 car payments on everything, and they're like, we can't afford to buy houses i'm like yeah i know why a question you might want to ask chris is how can you afford a hundred and fifty thousand dollar car and can't afford a hundred and fifty thousand dollar property yeah how why is it so easy to get the car loan and so difficult to get the mortgage yeah Just own a shitbox. You don't need the 2024 fucking whatever, man. I personally agree. But what I want people to focus on is building income. Like income is the name of the game.

Cash flow is the name of the game. If you want to put yourself in a position where you're going to want that $100,000 car, I want to know what asset are you going to buy first that is going to create the income to pay the payment for that $100,000 car. What asset are you going to use to cover the liability which is the car you know i don't want i don't want people just saving money for saving money so they can not enjoy their lives of course they gotta i mean they gotta be within their means right but whatever but the what's not said enough in my opinion is make more means figure out ways to create more income. More income. Yeah, not just try to save your way to wealth. That doesn't work.

Saving money sucks. I'm not saying it's not a part of the equation. I'm just saying it's not the equation. So saving money is great, but how are you going to build income with that? If you are able to take out a loan to buy a cash flowing asset, and the reason why you can take out the loan is because you have savings, you have money, right? So the lender's looking at you as a good bet and you use the lender's money to purchase an asset, maybe a piece of real estate, a rental property, maybe a business, something that's going to cash flow. Then some of that money, maybe you want to go back in the savings pot.

And some of it, you probably want to enjoy your life with it while you're still young enough and healthy enough to do it. So that's, you know, things that I'm bringing forth are, you know, this, I think this just needed to be said by, by a wealth advisor like myself, who's, you know, willing to kind of buck the trend of everything, just saying this is the whole saving and saving for the one day thing, right? One day, one day you'll graduate high school. One day you'll graduate college. One day you'll get a job. One day you'll retire. It's like all this one day stuff. How about we figure out ways to make it sooner than that instead of the one day thing? Definitely. Do you recommend people set up trusts or life insurance policies and loan themselves money out of the life insurance policies? Do you get any of that stuff? Okay. So trust can be great. It's private. Your assets don't go through probate. And there's a lot of pros and cons to everything. As far as that life insurance comment, I'll just

say that it takes a lot of money to do that correctly? If you're not going to be able to save your way into those types of strategies, those strategies come with being able to have a lot of money and you put it into those types of vehicles and you immediately borrow it out and you purchase an asset that's going to pay yourself back, yourself being the loan of the of the policy not to go too deep into those strategies but that's not like an average joe's strategy to to be able to to build wealth but unfortunately there's a lot of crappy insurance salesmen running around trying to sell that strategy this is what the rich do i'm like yeah yeah some i guess yeah some know, it's not the... It's not a life hack. It's not like that. It's not a life hack, people. But I'm not going to walk up

to the Rockefellers and say, you guys are stupid for doing this. I mean, that's not a six-generation strong now doing it. It's crazy. As we go out, what do you want people to come away with after they read your book? I think we've kind of discussed a little bit, but to give us a final pitch out to people

to order up your book and dot coms. Actually, we need to get into, actually, I'm sorry. I'm cutting a little too early here. Tell us about some of the things we can find at Opta Financial, some of the services you provide, how people can reach out, how they can onboard with you, a scheduled consultation, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, we want to work with chess players we want to people we're going to work with people who want to become wealthy not that they have to be wealthy

already yet but they have to have that want all right and they you know they have to have some means already but you have to be working towards those goals. And if people are just kind of sick of hearing their financial advisor or whomever keep trying to talk them out of purchasing cash flowing assets, such as real estate, such as businesses, and, you know, to stick with the market. Oh, this is one of my favorite lines. You know, you're in it for the long haul. Like when people, when, when advisors say that, it makes me cringe because you know, who's not in it for the long haul. Absolutely. Everybody you give your money to is not in it for the long haul. They're only telling you to be in it for the long haul. They're looking to build cash flow. Now, you know, just people who are ready to have a different type of advisor, different type of wealth advisor, and that's going to help them build something.

Yeah, that's what the people we love working with. Do they need to be accredited? Do they need to have a minimum portfolio investment? We're a mindset. The mindset's the minimum. But we have lower fees than a lot of firms out there. We charge 0.6% for assets under management. The typical fee is 1%. So that 0.6% actually has to be of something for our advisors to be able to work with somebody. But yeah, we of course like working with accredited investors because they're able to do more things.

They're able to get into more investments and do more things. But if someone is not quite there yet, but looks like they're going to be there, we can work with that person too. Thank you very much for coming on the show. Give us a final pitch on as we go out and.coms where people can find you on the interwebs. Like I said, optofinancial.com, or if you just want to read the book and learn a little bit more about me and the firm, playingthewealthgame.com. Looks like this if you're watching the video. And have an open mind. You're going to hear something different. You're you're gonna hear something fresh and I think it just took a retired police officer to come out and say it out loud Wow it's gonna be interesting yeah people need to learn

you know don't don't waste your money on rims and stand $250 what are those stupid drink cups although the women collect Oh Stanley's I've seen women honored variations over something just like is that your retirement program Oh, Stanley's. The Stanley Cup. I've seen women, I don't know, 100 variations of them or something. You're just like, is that your retirement program? I guarantee it's theirs. It kind of reminds me of when people used to buy those, remember those $5 little squishy toys? They were little animals.

Yeah. No, they were something else. They were capped at $5 for the longest time. They're still around, but they were like the hottest thing to collect, I don't know, back in the 2000s or 90s or something. But everyone bought them and paid ridiculous prices, and the bottom fell out. It's like you invested in basically little animal dolls. Good job. Yeah. But investing in those dolls, if they don't cashflow, it's probably not going to be a good investment. Probably not.

I remember one time I was sitting in my NASDAQ fund during the dot-com era, just making all sorts of money, hand over fist. You just wake up every morning, invest in whatever the crazy tech was to come in online, Earthlink, all those companies that are huge now and and i went to my business partner i go hey man why why aren't you doing this with me because you make the same way i do why aren't you playing playing on the stock market and he goes i bought franklin plates i'm like what and do you remember the old flake frank flank grown plates they used to have an ad on the back of just about every magazine, I think. But they're these memorial Patriot plates.

Oh, I don't recall those. He bought hundreds of them for an investor. Hopefully, other people broke their plates. This way, they're more scarce right now, which increases the value of his plates. They threw them out. Or he's the one that broke the plates. Probably eventually, yeah. Anyway, thank you very much for coming to the show. We really appreciate it, Freddie.

Thank you. No problem, Chris. Thank you for having me. And thanks to our audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress Christmas, LinkedIn.com, Fortress Christmas, all those crazy places on the internet. Be good to each other.

Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And I should have a song.