Mark Willis | Banking on Yourself, Uninterrupted Compound Growth, & Kickstarting Your Financial Future

“The rich plan for four generations, but the poor plan for Saturday night." - Gloria Steinem

EPISODE OVERVIEW:

Have you heard the one about the twenty-something man with a master's degree who could only find a job cleaning the bottom of elevators? You know, the one where he was in hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, credit card debt, and all sorts of other debt, and saw no way out.

In this episode you're going to learn how this overwhelming debt not only brought strife and conflict into his marriage, but how they were suffocated to the bottom of their finances until they figured their way out.  And not only does today's guests talk about becoming his own bank, the power of compound interest, and how he is now able to leave a legacy now to his children and help other people get out too, but he's going to show you how to do it too! Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the Mark Willis story! 

SHOW NOTES :

Guest Info:

• Website: https://lakegrowth.com/
•  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw-DvhKT2EaPFdncLy39LIQ

Special Offer for RPP Listeners:

• Book a free 15-minute phone introduction strategy session with Mark Willis at https://kickstartwithmark.com

Transcript

Mark Willis | Banking on Yourself, Uninterrupted Compound Growth, & Kickstarting Your Financial Future 

Hired of the banks ready to beat the system. Looking to make your own financial future and trusting only God and not man. All this and more right now.

Hello, my Remarkable friend. Today's guest is a entrepreneur who started by getting a degree, actually multiple degrees, as you'll hear in the episode. And then when he got out, he was cleaning the basement of elevators, right? [00:01:00] Glamorous. Not that it's a bad job, not that you should be too proud to do it, but after you go to school and get a master's degree, the only job you could get.

Was cleaning out the bottom of elevators. So he's going to talk to you about how he followed the system of the world and he was in hundreds of thousands of student loan debt, credit card debt, and other debt, how it brought strife and conflict into his new marriage. And how they are suffering at the bottom until they figured their way out.

And not only does today's guests talk about becoming the bank and compound interest and how he was able to leave a legacy now to his children and help other people, I think you said 1400 clients currently, him and his team, that they're helping them leave legacies to them and their children. But he's going to show you how to do it.

It's going to explain why he does it this way, and then you can make the decision if you want to too. [00:02:00] So if I can help you in any way, reach out to me if today's guest can help you in any reach out to them. And if you think this is quality content, please give us a five-star review on your favorite podcast player on YouTube.

Please subscribe, please share it with your friends and family. And if you can't gimme a five-star review, reach out to me at me@DavidPasqualone.com and tell me why. I got tough skin, tell the truth, and I'm just going to use it to make the show better for your growth and God's glory. So at this time, ladies and gentlemen, I present to our friend Mark Willis.

Enjoy the episode and I hope it benefits you and generations to come immensely.

Mark Willis | Banking on Yourself, Uninterrupted Compound Growth, & Kickstarting Your Financial Future:

Hey, mark. How are you today, David? Glad to be here. I'm doing great. Glad to be on. Thanks, man. Oh, it's an honor to have you. I was just telling our listeners a little bit about you and about your story, and they're pumped to dig in. Before we do, I do this every episode. Now, [00:03:00] if the listeners stick through the episode, they're going to get a ton of gold from you in a bunch of areas of life.

But if there's one message you're like, you will get this if you listen to this episode and this will benefit your life. What is the message that the listener can count on getting today going to be, banks are running the show, but you can become your own source of financing, fire your banker, and become your own source of financing.

By listening to today's show, you'll know exactly how to do that and how you can take control of your finances. Awesome, awesome. So that's important, especially with the World and global crisises have gone on and are about to go on in this crazy world. So Mark, at this time, who you are today was established from your beginnings.

So let's start off, where were you born? Your origin story, what was your upbringing like? Mom, dad, brother, sisters, you know, cats talk. No, we don't need that. But what was your upbringing like? Where were you born and what formed you to the man [00:04:00] today? Well, yeah I was I was born in Tennessee and then they quickly rushed me up to Indiana cuz they were moving right after the birth I guess.

So I'm officially a from Tennessee, but who's your by I guess growing up. And my background is really just one of a wonderful family. Had a great. Childhood. Lots of struggles, of course, like every family does. We were very much in the working poor zone, so did not grow up with a silver spoon in my hand for sure.

And did not learn much about money. They, my parents taught me what they knew which was great, but not a lot. And I had this great memory of money early on in my life, David, where my mom took me to a bank. I had somehow collected enough cash to open a checking account as a little kid. We're talking maybe five or six years old maybe six, seven.

And I had enough money saved to open a checking account, which I think was [00:05:00] like 50 bucks. And it was in this little paper bag that I had shoved in my sock drawer, you know, like little kids do. And we go to the bank and my job was to hand over that little paper bag to the banker. And my mom was there to help with the paperwork, but I was very hesitant.

To give this stranger my entire life savings. I mean, who's this guy? You know, I had worked hard for all that money, my quarters and nickels and pennies and dollars, and who's this guy? He is going to take all my money and put it somewhere safe. It was already safe in my sock drawer. Well, little did I know how, like right, I was to be that concerned about the banks and security.

Fast forward to today, where we're working with, you know, si, Silicon Valley Bank asking for help from the F D I C. The F D I C itself doesn't have enough money. So they're having to look for pennies in the couch cushions to cover all the [00:06:00] depositors, which makes no sense in the world to me. But that's above my pay grade.

And so our, our origin story, you might say is looking toward the skepticism of. Traditional banks and looking for alternative means to help with where do we put the cash If it's not going in a savings account, where do we put the mon, where do we put our money that it does what we want it to do for us?

That's sort of my young years now. Fast forward a few more years and I'm going through college and like most kids in my financial class, I was taken out tons of student loan debt and it just so happened that I graduated from graduate school with three private school degrees between my wife and I and about $120,000 in student loan debt in the middle of 2008.

So I don't know. David, do you remember what was going on in the world? Yeah, because all the corruption in the hosing market, there was a bubble that was created and then it [00:07:00] popped. Yeah, so you had the realtors, you had the mortgage lenders, you had the banks all in collusion. They created this artificial increase in property value and then.

And everything crashed. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And I didn't know any of this as a young kid going through it, but you know, we're mid 20 something years old looking for work. I remember my first job was, you know, I had this fancy master's degree, but my, my job to pay the bills was at a property management company basically with a wet dry vac sucking all the filth out of a nasty elevator shaft, you know, just trying to pay the bills.

Right. And, you know, nobody was hiring, I was looking for work. It was certainly an ego buster, lemme tell you that, you know, going through that experience, having this fancy degree. And the best job I could get was, you know, working at the bottom of, literally the bottom of the earth under a broken elevator.[00:08:00] 

So that was, that was kind of a wake up call that, hey, you know, your fancy paper. It doesn't mean anything. What matters is what kind of value are you bringing to the marketplace, to the world. And that's where kind of, I guess the li life or the universe, God slapped me upside the head and said, it's time to get focused on this thing called money.

Cuz I'd gone through a seminary degree and didn't learn a thing about my theology of money. And at the same time I was now being forced to deal with this thing called money and figure out why did Jesus talk so much about it? Why didn't I pay attention to it? And what am I going to do next? So that's kind of what brings us up to 2008.

Okay. And then in your life, again, I'm not trying to be drama, like we're trying to find chaos. Some people have ideal childhoods and growing up it's just the status quo normal. Some people have traumatic things that happen that reinforce. Where they [00:09:00] are today, and it made 'em stronger, but it was a rough journey.

So between your birth and 2008, is there anything we missed or anything you want to touch on that was significant to forming your mind? Because it sounds like, you know, your parents didn't, you were with your mom and dad, right? Mm-hmm. And then how many brothers and sisters did you have? Had a young, have a younger brother?

Yeah. Okay. So two kids, mom and dad, they struggled, but they did the right things and they did the best they could. And then that kind of gave you that drive to be like, I don't want to be poor. Is that right? Well, what, what really got me was it was an ignorance, like a lack of thinking. That was what my biggest issue was really, was.

I never really thought, why am I doing what I'm doing? You can be lulled into a environment that says, Hey, this is why we, we do things like this around here. If you're a fish and I'm a fish, And you show me to flip this fin, [00:10:00] I'm going to flip that fin, and I'm going to not think much about it, but we're never going to really notice that we're in this thing called an aquarium, and we're never really going to notice that there's this person who feeds us every day and controls the dials on our temperature of our water every day.

This person could pull us out and fry us on a pan for dinner tonight. That person might be the bank in this metaphor, but you never really stop to think about the environment that we're all swimming in. And until you realize that you're a slave to the banks, you know, I, I was a slave. I had to work three, four jobs as a young adult.

I had to go without, we went without starting our family. For years. We went with, you know, beans and rice every night. And on Fridays, David, we would have rice and beans just to mix things up. So we had a, a rewind that if you're listening and didn't catch the joke, that's pretty good. That little dad joke there.

So we have, we have a, I think, I mean, we all, I [00:11:00] had, we all have difficult moments that we struggled with as we come to our awareness of this thing called life, this precious gift called life that God gives us. But, you know, for, to keep us, I guess from going too far afield, man, I would say the, the biggest piece to me, the biggest struggle was my stumbling into six figures of debt with no plan to pay it off.

To me that broke everything I thought was going to work. And we didn't have a skillset. My wife and I didn't have a skillset to talk about money. She did. She was much better at this than I was. But I remember we were having really fights over how to just manage the budget such that we had to have our budget conversations at an ice cream store so that we would be loaded up with sugar and so that we'd be in a public place in case there needed to be some witnesses.

[00:12:00] You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Because we just didn't know how to do this money thing. I mean, it was not, we didn't get taught it, and I don't care if we were taught or not. We didn't seek out the skillset that we needed to be able to manage this money thing. So for us, it was kind of a wake up call.

It was almost like Seminary 2.0. It was like bringing all this. Philosophy, theology, all the stuff that you, you learn in school, bringing it down to the, so what are we going to do about next Tuesday's light bill? You know, how do you take theology like that and bring it all the way down to paying your bills?

That from, for me, was the biggest wake-up call of my early adult life. And something I think we, we can help kids anticipate for, you know, did I really know what I was doing when I was in that dirty hotel room, signing my life away to Sally May, and all of her cronies, all the banksters that took over my future?

Did I know what I was doing? I [00:13:00] don't think I did. Looking back on it. Maybe. I thought I did. You would've asked me at the time, maybe. Sure. I would've understood it, but not like you really understand it when they're asking for, you know, 75% of your income after you get outta college. Mm-hmm. Because back then folks still had to pay back their student loans.

I don't know what's going to happen today, but we had to pay it back and it was a big monster payment. We, we threw more than we had to at the debt because we wanted outta that problem. They were calling us at dinnertime. I mean, it was not a good experience for us. We had some credit card bills too, but for us it was a, it was just a massive wake up call that we had to figure this money thing out.

Yeah. And you know, the bio talks about the borrower's servant to the lender, and people don't believe that, but you know, who does Sayan. Mm-hmm. And you know who does the government and you know, who does The people wanna control you. So if you don't believe that, I'm sorry. You're being ignorant and I love you.

You're my listener. You're on this show and you're trying to grow. So listen to Mark and listen to I. Listen to the [00:14:00] Bible. The borrower is servant to the lender. And Mark, since you had your student loans, what's happened in the last 14 years? Who owns Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac now? Yeah. Well, yeah. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, all these mortgage companies, they all are now government owned.

Right. What? The government owns the loans. No way. So that means ladies and gentlemen, they're in control of you. Again, the borrower is servant to the lender. Mm-hmm. And what Mark was alluding to is there was just another corruption of this administration currently. And what they did is they forgave selectively a bunch of student loans, which is not right.

It's not what our taxpayer money is supposed to go to. Our taxpayer money is supposed to go to national security and mark and millions of other people had to pay off student loans. They had to do it and figure it out. And that's what Mark's going to help you do. So if you have student loans, He's going to help you [00:15:00] figure out how to get outta there.

If you haven't got student loans, listen and don't get in the situation, because I'll tell you right now, we all can go to a fancy college. But is that what God wants you to do? And then I'm sure Mark's going to elaborate on this. I chose to go to a college, I could pay for out of pocket as I went because I didn't want student loans.

Mm-hmm. And everybody has a different path. But I just, I was like, you, mark, I grew up poor. I, I didn't want to go into debt and I didn't really know better, but I knew I'm just going to pay as I go. So I went to where I thought God called me. It was a great Christian school and I could afford it out of pocket.

I worked my butt off, but I, mm-hmm. I paid for it. So now you're in 2008. How long have you been married to this point? In 2008? My wife and I got married at the very end of oh four. So I guess three and a half, four years, something like that. Okay. So you're past the honeymoon period now, reality's setting in, you said you're having fights over money because that's normal when there's pressure.

It's, you know, money doesn't bring joy and [00:16:00] peace, but it sure brings happiness. So, you know, it can bring a lot of fun things. Yep. And you don't have that, it brings stress. I would actually, I would just nuance what you've said so well there, I would just say money made me more of who I was inside and, and the lack of money makes you more of who you are.

So there's a, there's a relationship there. The more you are a jerk when you focus on money, it just amplifies who you already are. So I was a jerk. I was trying to figure out this money thing. I was selfish. I was trying to figure out how am I going to get mine, you know? And we're both scared little kids, basically.

Young, middle aged, you know, middle 20, I hate to call it middle 20 somethings kids. But you know, you're kind of still figuring life out at that point. So anyway, yeah, we, we had to figure out this money thing and get right in our hearts, not just on our balance sheet. So, I didn't mean to interrupt you there.

Go ahead. No, you didn't. This is your show, man. I, I just, I'm passionate about all these topics and really what you just said, a hundred percent true in [00:17:00] your twenties, you're an adult and you're responsible and you need to pull your own weight. But at the same time, you're a young adult and you're still learning.

Mm-hmm. And our government, here's another side note that, I don't know why I'm saying this, but I'm going to say it. Our government, American America, olive world is trying to get into this transgender agenda. They're saying kids in first and second grade should, who should be playing with Play-Doh and Legos and thinking about just growing.

Not thinking about having sex change operations. So if the world accepts that in your twenties, you're still not fully developed, why are we letting children make these massive life-changing, mind altering decisions? So that has nothing to do with Mark, but for whatever reason, I feel like I should say that.

So you can write me hate mail or praise mail, but it's the truth. So Mark, go back to 2008. You're, you're having a, you're at a bottom. How do you rise and get to the top? Well, you bring up several great points there, and there's a great quote by Woods Hutchinson. He says [00:18:00] 5% of people think 10% think that they think, and the rest of the 85% would rather lay down and die than think.

Yeah. And I believe that's true with everything you've just said in the various topics we're covering here. But I think money in particular has, I think just a, a, there's a cloak of There's a cloak of of imperceptibility with money. Folks don't want to think about it. It, it'll go, the problem will go away if I don't think about it.

Or, or on the other side of the equation. You've always had enough. So why do I need to bother with this thing called money? I'll always have enough. They'll always be more, I've been handed everything on a silver platter or, you know you think to yourself, Hey, you know, this money thing only corrupts only, only corrupt people get money.

Only all the rich should go to jail. You know, whatever your philosophy of money is. You know, having that, having that discussion and learning. W why do I think this about money? [00:19:00] What am I, what am I truly believing about? Money is a really big deal. It it, it's the mindset that really helps us get to the skillsets that we're going to cover in our episode today.

But, you know, first and foremost, for me, it was figuring out that I needed to have a, I needed to have a, a real. Practical solution to the problem I was facing. Remember, I was like sick and tired of being sick and tired with my debt. And I wanted to not just pay cash for things. I wanted to be better than debt free.

I wanted to have something that would be lasting for generations. There's another good quote by Gloria Steinem. She says the Rich Plan for four generations, but The Poor David Plan for Saturday night. And to me that that encapsulates a lot of our culture. Today, we are all planning for Saturday night.

It feels so good to buy that ice cream cone today or buy [00:20:00] that Lamborghini today, or get that student loan today, or get that credit card today, or get that McMansion mortgage today. And we sacrifice everything that we're going to be, every person that we might grow into over our lifetime and we're killing our.

Kids' futures too, and our grandkids too. Were sacrificing the next four generations so we can enjoy Saturday night. And I worked one of my jobs along with that apartment property manager type job, I was working at a restaurant and probably two thirds of the crew of that restaurant, they would take all their tips that they earned that night at the restaurant, working hard.

We worked hard, man. We were running, we were throwing plates all night long, a hundred dollars bottles of wine, whatever. And they would take all these tips and go blow it at the club that night. Yep. And then they'd be stuck on that hamster wheel. And, you know, they looked like they were having fun, but I knew that I was going to go put my tips in a little envelope and my wife and I would [00:21:00] divvy it up and we would say, all right, what do we need to do with this money before we get paid again?

And that conversation had regularly, was like a salve for me, man. It was like it was like balm on the wounds of the, the, the wounds of the, the slave master on my back. Man. It was sort of like when we would control that little bit of money in an envelope every month, we, we knew that we could do that.

We could at least do that, and we could make it till the next time we, I got paid again when we prioritized and gave every single dollar a job. So if anyone's listening and has a, like a, if they're stuck and feel like there's no hope, you feel like you're just a tennis ball floating down the gutter of life, let me tell you, you can control what you can today.

You know, you can take your next breath if nothing else. Take a breath, figure out what you can control and focus on that. As, as Jordan Peterson says, you know, go make your own bed if nothing else, military teaches you to do [00:22:00] that. You know, because they know that if you can make your bed, you at least know you've got control over that.

So we started doing that. We started keeping a budget. We started doing Dave Ramsey's snowball method, and we loved the process of paying off all that debt. And that was good for about a y six months, nine months, a year maybe, of doing that. And we were throwing everything, we were overpaying on those debts to try to get 'em knocked down.

So we had done that, but I, I kind of started getting that that empty feeling in the pit of my stomach as I was making those big payments on all my debt. I, I now call this the sugar high of finance. And I was getting into working with finance, actually. I was working for a CPA also along with these other jobs.

I was working for a CPA and I loved this thing of money. I'd gotten a seminary degree as I mentioned, but I never saw myself like working as a preacher or minister or pastor or whatever. But I did. Want to work [00:23:00] with finance. And I love the idea of working with money. And I, I realized that I jokingly say my favorite book of the Bible is the book of numbers.

Cause I love numbers. So I worked for the CPA firm and this lady, she, she was an awesome cpa, but she made these phone calls during the 2008, 2009 meltdown. I was listening to these calls. I would overhear the conversations she was saying to the client, Hey Mr. Client, I'm sorry but I just lost you half of your life savings cuz the market's crashing.

I know you're 63 years old, but I just lost you half of your life savings or a third of your life savings. And that terrified me as someone who was looking into finance as a career. I almost got out of the industry, David, cuz I just didn't want to ever make that phone call. But I, you know, stuck with it.

And at the meantime, in meantime, I was like, I don't need to be investing. I need to be throwing money at my student loans anyway, so, I was throwing money at the student loans. I was hearing these conversations. I was thinking, what is this thing [00:24:00] called money? So I'm just kind of painting the picture of where I was at the time, and it was about 2011 or so when I kind of started getting fed up with paying cash for my debts and even paying cash for things like cars and other things, because I realized, and this was another big wake up call, my mentor and professor from seminary, he sat down with my wife and I in our living room.

I'll never forget it, David. And he said mark, I need to tell you something pretty important. It's about a strategy that he had come across. Again, he's just a, he was a theology professor and a good friend and mentor of mine. So I wanted to listen to what he had to say. And he said, mark, paying cash is not the answer.

Paying cash is not the answer. And he taught me that you finance everything you buy, either you pay interest to a bank. Like I was doing with my student loans and my car loans and my credit cards. Either you pay an interest to the banker and he [00:25:00] takes a little piece off the top there for his profit, or you pay cash for that car or whatever, and you pass up the interest you could have earned on that money had you not bought the car.

Your money would continue to grow and compound for the rest of your life. And he said, it's actually kinda like stealing from your future self. When you pay cash for something, you're financing it from your future self. You're sacrificing your future well off person, your your future self for today's great feeling of paying cash.

And that's when I realized I had the sugar high of finance. I was paying my, my, all of my things in cash. I was paying for my student loans directly with cash and I was losing my. The biggest and most important and most powerful dollars in my pocket that I'd ever have for the rest of my life. Because when I was throwing money at that debt, it was gone forever.

You know, also gone [00:26:00] was all that money it could have earned for me. Had I not had the debt in the first place, I could have invested that money had I not had the debt. So that's sort of the, the, the breakdown moment for me. And he said, mark, is it possible that Dave Ramsey could be wrong about something?

And I had never considered that as a possibility. I had thought maybe Dave Ramsey had the the, the corner on truth. He had written the Fifth Gospel at least on money. But, you know, he had, he had me, I knew that I had to figure out, do I actually believe what I've been told, or am I still just swimming in somebody else's aquarium?

Hmm. So anyway, any feelings, feedback? I'll pull over. Yeah, no, I mean, I've read through Dave Ramsey's books and I've taken his financial peace course and I wanted my kids to, you know, go through it. Just good fundamentals. Yeah. But I don't agree with everything he says either. And I don't even think the bi, like, I'm, I'm not saying he's not, not right with God, [00:27:00] but what I'm saying is he's not, it's not gospel.

It's, it's his opinion on finance and it does work for most people. But like his stance on gold, I think gold's a great investment in precious metals. Then there's like credit cards. I understand what he's saying. And if I was in his position, I'd tell everybody stay away from credit cards like the plague.

Mm-hmm. However, if you and I and our listeners have the self-control not to abuse credit cards mm-hmm. It's smart. I pay, I make my charges, I pay it off in full each month. I acquire some points. I'm leveraging the system to my benefit. Gives me another 30 days to get interest in my bank account. So if you can be responsible with it, absolutely.

Use credit cards to make, but if you can't burn 'em and move on. Right on. So, yeah. Yeah. So I understand what you're saying. Now I do have a question for you, but I don't know if we're going to get to this in later part of the episode. So when you [00:28:00] say you can invest today, and through compounding interest, make more money down the road, there still has to be enough interest being made or enough profit being made from the investment that overpowers what you're paying in interest today.

So there has to be that balance. What are the percentages that you're like, you know, this is your minimum return on investment you should be looking for in everything you do. This is like the most you should be paying on anything you purchase. What are, what are the standards or parameters? Are you going to get into that as we go?

Yeah, I will. That'd be fine. Yeah. And so fast forward a few more years, I've now gotten my certified financial planner designation. So I went through those rigorous training requirements and I opened up a financial firm that now we work with clients in all 50 states and really around the world to work with clients who wanna become their own source of financing and help them get to their financial goals without [00:29:00] taking any unnecessary risk.

And we have several, you know, a little over a thousand. We've almost got 1400 clients with me and our associates that work with me at our firm. Nice. That we work with which, yeah, praise God. It's been a lot of fun. One of the big recurring questions I get is, Hey Mark, I got this debt, but I also wanna save.

Which one should I do first? That's kind of your question a little bit. And I had a guy one time, we had a conversation. He was very proud of his savings, his mutual, I should say his investments. There's a difference there between saving and investing, which we can talk about. Mm-hmm. But he had a portfolio of investments in a 401K and IRA that was doing a very nice 11, 12%.

Well, who, good for him. And he was also proud that all of his interest rates were very low on his car, his mortgage, his boat, his student loans, his other boat, his other car, his other vacation house. You see where I'm going here? Mm-hmm. He had, he had low interest rates, [00:30:00] but it was the volume that was killing him.

All right. If you're into diet, you look like a pretty healthy guy. It's not so much the rate at which we eat our food, it's the volume that matters the most. Right. It's the volume that'll make us skinnier fat based on how much we're eating, not so much the rate of our food eating. It's the same with injections, right?

It's not the rate that they put it in your arm, it's the volume that kills you or saves you. So when I think about your interest rates, I don't care what you got on your mutual funds, last year this guy had 11 or 12% on his mutual funds pre-tax 401k, and which if somebody's not familiar with investing Yeah.

This is new to them. That's a great return on investment, especially it is for 401k or Roth ira. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It is a, you know, you're, you're looking at in, you know, you're looking at double, at least the rate of official inflation, but he was spending 30 plus percent of his money, $80,000 a year of [00:31:00] money just to service the debt on his portfolio.

All of his. Debts, his student loans, his mu medical debt, his two mortgages, his boats, his cars, 30 plus percent of his after tax money go into just service the debt. All low interest, high volume. The volume is what kills you when it comes to debts. And there's a great book on this topic. It's called Debt, the First 5,000 Years by David Graber.

Great title, scary title. You think about how many people have taken their own life over those four little letters, d e b T debt. You think of how many marriages have ended. Just had a conversation with someone today. They had a, they're going through a nasty divorce because money among other things, but money.

So this, there's a reason why Jesus talked more about money than almost any other topic. But back to your question, yeah. There is some particular spreadsheets and data we dive into to really decide what's the right way to go. [00:32:00] But what if, what if you didn't have to choose between paying off your debt and saving for your future self?

That was the big question that my mentor back in my living room there, my mentor from college, he came to visit us and he said, mark, what if you could become your own source of financing? What if you could become the student loan company that youor so much and buy back that debt rather than having to pay them all that money?

What if you could pay yourself an interest that gave you the advantage over just being debt free? What is better than being debt free? Being the bank is better than debt free. That's what's better than debt free being the bank. And most people think that paying cash is the answer, but I gotta say it's more like being the banker because they're participating.

In the most profitable enterprise of all of human history. That's why the book is titled Debt the first 5,000 years, cuz banks have figured it out that banking is the most [00:33:00] profitable enterprise in all of human history. All right? So I would say that's, that's maybe what kind of was the first light bulb for me That I could do something other than just saving a bank account, saving a 401k, pay off my student loans.

What other options could I have? Oh yeah. I could become my own source of financing. I could actually pay myself that student loan payment that I was throwing down the whole of my debt over there at Sally May and all of her cronies. Now, how do you do that? What do you, how do you, when you say pay yourself, how do you define that?

Yeah, well, it's first it started with a mindset shift. And we've done that on this podcast here. But I also needed some particular tools and strategies that helped me actually do it. You know how I, how am I going to pay off the next student loan? How am I going to buy my next car? You think about just buying your cars, for goodness sakes, we're all going to probably buy eight, 12 cars somewhere in that range.

In our lifetimes, you know, between us and our spouses and [00:34:00] kids or whatever. My buddy just bought a truck that literally cost more than my first home. Wow. Wow. And it wasn't an RV truck, I'm guessing not right. It was a, and I hate it was a loaded Chevy, and I'm not a Chevy fan even so that makes it harder for me.

But he loves it and it is a beautiful truck. Yep. But he got a loaded Chevy, and I think the sticker is like 90 something thousand dollars. Wow. My first house in Knoxville, Tennessee was 85 9. Yep. Three bed, two bath, beautiful little house on a cul-de-sac. And his truck costs more than my home. It would, wow.

It's like mind blowing. You multiply that nine, you said 90 K, you multiply that over se 7, 8, 9 more cars that he might get over his lifetime. Just the raw cost of that. That's 810,000 bucks for nine of those trucks. 800,000 bones for stinking trucks. That will basically be a pile of rubble. Right? Someday he lost half of that.

As [00:35:00] soon as he drove it off the log. Yeah. Now he's gotta be saving that money on a somewhere. So let's say he's saving 1800 bucks a month for that. I don't know how often he's, he's paying for that. So 1800 times 12, that's 21,600 bucks a year. 21,600 bucks a year going and just, you know, this is an incredible man.

Oh yeah. Awesome. I don't mean dude, super successful. He's listening right now and I want to say well done that you were able to save that kind of cash for a Chevy. Yeah. No, no, no. But what I'm saying is he's not, he's an educated man. He's a businessman. Mm-hmm. He's been there, done that. Yep. But just the fact that vehicles are so expensive.

Yep. Yep. It's mind blowing to me. But what were you doing with your calculations? Go down. Oh yeah, yeah. Well, if you're putting away just picked a random figure there, 1800 bucks a month, whatever, and put it into something that you could save. You could just ride shotgun for the rest of your life and not buy those trucks, and you put that money into an interest-bearing account.

Earning, let's do a, just a general four or 5%, 5% [00:36:00] over 30 years is $1.5 million. Now folks gotta drive a truck. You know, we gotta drive stuff, we gotta drive. Even a Prius, you gotta drive something. Hopefully not a Prius, but you gotta drive something. So how are we going to buy the stuff of life without going into debt or paying cash?

The problem is we either are stuck on the debt staircase where we fall down, climb our way up, fall back down, climb our way up. All the while the banker is collecting his his piece and retiring off our backs. Or we climb up the saver staircase, climb, climb, climb, crash, climb, climb, climb, crash. We save a little bit in our savings, and then we withdraw it.

Every time we withdraw money, we break compound growth, don't we? That's the problem with paying cash. We're breaking compound growth. So again, what if you could borrow against yourself? Pay yourself back. And continuously get [00:37:00] compound growth. All the while. That's how banks do it. That's what they do. So don't do what banks tell you to do with your money.

Watch what they're doing with their money and go do that instead. So I started digging in, well, where does the bank put their money? And guess what? Of all things in the financial universe, they put it into life insurance. What the heck? So I started digging into this thing called life insurance of all things, and I never thought I'd be looking into life insurance as a certified financial planner.

I thought we'd be doing sexier, you know, arrangements, dynastic trusts, mutual funds, whatever, you know, syndication deals, but no dividend paying whole life insurance. Not the kind Dave Ramsey talks about, but modernized for cash accumulation. Banks have hundreds of billions of dollars wrapped up in life insurance contracts.

Bank of America in particular has more cash in their life insurance [00:38:00] policies than all of their real estate they own combined. So that's saying something about this weird old stodgy asset class called life insurance. So I started digging into this and I'll just be real brief and then I'd love to get your thoughts cuz this is the answer to your question.

How do you become your own banker? You can put money into a cash value life insurance policy that's designed the bank on yourself way. It's gotta be designed properly. And when you do that, it does a couple of things. One, it is life insurance, so you're going to leave your family a big life insurance policy.

That's great. But what's interesting is all the rest of what you can do on this side of heaven, you know, which is the most fun time to spend money, in my opinion, is on this side of heaven. So there's a cash value, I call it the living benefit. It's a. Pile of money that you can access while you're still alive and you can access that money at any time.

So the first thing is that it's accessible cash. You can access the money, you [00:39:00] can use it for anything you want. You can use it for a vacation or for a business deal or a real estate investment or your kid's college. There's no red tape on how you, the government does not get involved in how you're dealing with this money.

So that's the first piece, is it's accessible money. Second, it grows guaranteed every single year. So against all odds, the market was down last year, but my policies and all of my clients' policies all hit all time record highs last year, even as the markets were tumbling and they're hitting all time record highs again this year and next year.

And the next year is a, it's a guarantee from the insurance company that that money will go up every single year and there's nothing we can do to stop it. Third, the money, if we design it properly, can be accessed totally tax free. So it's like a Roth ira. The government can't get involved in life insurance income.

You know, the money coming outta that policy will be income tax free and doesn't even get reported on the vasa forms for [00:40:00] college or social security provisional income for your retirement. It just shows up as a check in the mail or direct deposit in your, in your account. And then finally, maybe most intriguingly, I can borrow against the cash value of my policy and use the money for anything I want, like a bank.

I can borrow against the policy and the policy will continue to grow, compounded, uninterrupted, compound growth as if I had not borrowed the money. So I had this money in my policies after I had set set up policies for myself. I borrowed against the policy and bought a car, paid off my student loans, invested in real estate, paid for a medical emergency that we had.

Thank God everyone's okay. And the money continued to compound and grow as if we had not touched a dime of the money. And we were in control of repaying that loan to the policy that we controlled and owned. So it was like being our own banker. We controlled every part of [00:41:00] the aquarium that we were swimming in.

And it's changed my life on a financial basis and in more than, more than just financial, but it's changed my life and it's helped us in tremendous ways, both my wife and I, and also our clients. Now, is there a time limit you have to repay the loan back? How does this policy work? No, there's no required repayment plan at all.

Remember, you're the one that controls the whole process Here. You are your own source of financing and we're using the policy as collateral for that loan. If you never pay off the loan and the policy is enforced when you die, then the policy's death benefit gets reduced by your loan balance. Meaning, let's just use some numbers real quick.

Let's say you had a million dollar death benefit. Mm-hmm. When you, when you pass away, and let's say the day before I did that, let's say I borrowed out a hundred grand against my cash value to go buy a real estate deal. Woo-hoo. And then I croaked that night. God [00:42:00] forbid my family would get the real estate.

Okay, that's theirs. Plus they'd get a million dollar death benefit minus the loan of a hundred thousand bucks. So they'd get 900 grand income tax free plus the real estate deal. I guess they're going to have to struggle along without me. Yeah. At that point. So now to get into these programs, you know, a lot of people are, you know, we have in America the most complex tax law in the world.

We have the most extensive. Verbally, like, I think it was like s you know, thousands and thousands of pages, tens of thousands of pages of tax code. And the whole purpose of it being that complex and wordy is because it's corrupt. The politicians who are the biggest criminals in the country wrote the tax laws and now they play by their own rules while most people pay for their shenanigans.

So if [00:43:00] you are using this system, you're saying it goes with tax law. So there's nothing that anybody's doing wrong. How much do you need to get started? Is there a minimum, like 10,250,000? How much do you need to put in this type of policy to get going? Well, great question. Several comments there. You're right.

These policies have been around since before the US Constitution. Okay. We've got records of this going clear back to colonial times and even before that in United Kingdom and beyond that too. But. The IRS is only about a hundred years old, that's all. And so this predates the IRS and it's been grandfathered into the US tax code.

In fact, I love when, when someone told me this, I cannot un unhear it. They said you know, mark put the word the and IRS together and what does it spell Theirs? Theirs. Okay. Theirs. Yeah. They, they think it's all theirs. It's, they think it's all theirs. Yeah. So the IRS tax [00:44:00] code thinks that they own all of our stuff, but there's something older than the irs.

And that is the contract. The contract is the bedrock of all of civilization. You tell me that if we don't have a contract law, we don't have civilization. Right. The insurance contract is the. Contractual wealth that our clients build real wealth with. Not paper wealth like you'd find on Wall Street, but real wealth, contractual wealth.

You think about real estate. Real estate, why is it real? Well, besides it was referred to that because of it, it w it has, you know, it came from the word royal, but it comes from why does it, why does it actually have wealth? You know, I had a guy, he had 10 rent real estate properties. All of them paid off in cash.

Had 'em all paid off. First of all, congrats to him for paying off 10 rental properties. But why are they his, [00:45:00] you know, is it because he lives in all 10? No, of course not. He can't live in all 10. He owns them because he has a contract. Mm-hmm. He has a deed with the county or whatever. It's his property.

If he didn't have a contract, he, all he would have is squatter's rights. You know, whoever's got the bigger shotgun owns that house now, right? Yeah. So contracts are at the basis of all of human wealth, at least as far as money is concerned. And we can go even deeper than that if you want, but that's enough for now.

Maybe you asked another question, which is, how much do you need to get started? You can start with a lot of money or just a nominal amount. You know, I've had folks start at two or 300 bucks a month and I've had folks doing 3, 5, 800 grand a year into policies and more than that, again, banks are putting in hundreds of billions of dollars into these contracts.

But you don't have to be JP Morgan [00:46:00] to do what banks do. You just have to reclaim the banking function in your own life. So many of us have just simply outsourced it the way I did as a five year old, gave my money over to that strange banker. But what if I could have kept that money in my own wealth system and built it around a contract like a life insurance policy does, and do what banks do rather than giving them the money and outsourcing their, their banking function to them.

So yeah, two or 300 bucks a month to get started, or you can go up the ladder to any size that really fits your budget. But the key is where are you keeping your money? Is it staying at your bank or is it staying at somebody else's bank? So this show, one of the things we do is it's like the Remarkable, People, Podcast, how they overcame adversity, achieve success, and you can too.

So it's not just what you're able to achieve, but it's how you did in practical steps. So for our listeners who are interested now, [00:47:00] mark, what are some of the practical steps for them to get started? Step one, be okay with where you're at. And realize that you can only improve when you realize where you're at.

It's the g p s question. You are here, the, you know, the map at the mall. So start there and be okay with that. And take the first step. Take a breath, make your bed whatever you need to do to get, get yourself feeling like you're in control of your own life. Cuz you cannot do this if you're just floating like a tennis ball down the gutter of life.

You gotta be banking on yourself. And that means taking control of your financial future by saying you do have agency. So that's step one. Step two, make a list for free. You can do this for free and a legal pad. Grab a legal pad or something and write down what you want your money doing for you. You know, where you put your money makes it act different.

It gives it different characteristics, makes it do different things. A 401K is different than a brokerage account, [00:48:00] which is different than a savings account, which is different than gold. Where you keep your money, makes it act differently. And the best thing I can say is figure out what you want your money doing for you.

Because if you don't figure that out, someone else is going to decide what they want your money doing for them, and your money's going to go work for them instead of for you. So make a list. What are your attributes? This will be fun for us to kind of do a little experiment here. What do you want your money doing for you, David?

Like, make a, let's make it a little starter list for folks, you know, if you could paint with a magic brush, create a brand new financial vehicle that had all the best characteristics. I don't want any nouns, I just want verbs, you know, like what are actions or functions that you wanna make sure your money's doing for you?

Well, definitely compounding. Compounding. Yeah. It's a good one. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Like, and I'd be buying rental [00:49:00] properties and mm-hmm. Using it for travel and experience. And what does the rental property help you accomplish? In order to continuously instability, gain wealth. Mm-hmm. And then have something tangible.

I can leave my kids and my grandkids. To me, the rental property is a great way to go. Yeah. But again, I could be wrong. I just know a lot of people have been very successful with that. Oh. I just, I'm just trying to get, I'm just trying to get verbs and you're doing a great job. So you said compounding, you said I'm going to add passive income.

Yeah. A hundred percent passive income. I'm going to add legacy to that. I heard you say you wanna leave it to your kids, which I think all these are And grandkids. Great. Grandkids and grandkids. Love it man. Love it. Yeah. And you know, collateral, you know, I want to use this as collateral. I can borrow against those houses.

Yeah. I wanna be able to have some predictability. Real estate is not quite as volatile as say other things. So some sort of predictable accumulation of wealth over time. Yeah. And I just wanna [00:50:00] travel and love on people and just see the world. Love it. Love it. And I'm going to probably go out on a limb and say, you don't want the government involved in a lot of your money.

You want it to be private as possible. Yep. As little as possible. Legal, but as little as possible. I love it. And maybe maybe let's keep banks out of our lives too, what you and I are describing here. Private. I would also add private. If you're going to be in real estate, we need it to be outside of creditor reach and also lawsuit protection.

You know, I mean, these are things that I would put on my list and what you've said. I would add that same, you know, what we just described, could be put together with 13 different financial vehicles. You know, you could add a real estate with annuities, with mutual funds, and you could throw in some, you know, savings accounts.

And of course you would need some term insurance for the legacy, and you'd need a trust to wrap all this around. You'd need a couple of attorneys to manage that trust. The whole life insurance policy that I'm describing, [00:51:00] not the old-fashioned stuff that Dave Ramsey loves to hate on. He's right about old-fashioned whole life.

It's, it's not a, it's heavy on commissions, but what we're talking about today, again, it gives you dividend paying whole life insurance, which is essentially passive income in retirement. That's if we do it right, totally income tax free, outside of the realm of banks out, you know, it's completely income tax free in the way that we design it.

So that's outside of the reach of the government. It's private. So if you get sued, usually in most states, the insurance cash value is protected from lawsuits. It grows on a guaranteed basis and we can use it as collateral for anything else. So I like to say, and I'll hush after this, I promise, but I like to say that this is kind of an and asset.

It's a both and not an either or. So instead of it being, Hey, I, I can either get. My real estate deal or I can [00:52:00] save this money in a savings account. I can now say I will put it in my policy and I will get my real estate. I've got it in my policy, and I'll send my kid to college and I'll, you know, go on that vacation and I'll travel the world and love on people and, and so on.

You get my picture. When it continuously compounds in the life insurance policy, it's not an either or situation. It's a both and situation and for the listener saying, well, you can't invest and I can't, you know, borrow, I, I can't bank away what I don't have. So Do you have any advice for people how to accumulate the wealth?

Or is your ministry and mission focused on once you have the beginner funds, this is how you [00:53:00] exponentially grow that? Great question. Yeah. Really thoughtful question cuz when I started, remember I was in, when I started my first two bank on yourself, designed whole life policies. We were way upside down, negative net worth.

But we had a desire and capacity to s to throw money at the debt. Now again, we could have waited three or four years to be debt free and then started our policies. Remember that story? I say a lot of our clients come to us saying, mark, should I pay off my debt or should I start saving first? Well, what we did was we, we did what we now have trademarked and called the debt snowbank method to pay off our debt.

So you cannot do this without saving something, without having some kind of income. If you have zero income. And you're going into debt deeper and deeper and deeper into debt, and you don't desire to see that change. I really can't help you no matter what. No one [00:54:00] can help you if you're des no desire to change.

But if you have an income and you're just trying to throw money at your debt, maybe take a moment to review this strategy and see if it would be a good fit for you. You know, I was making okay income for, for young 20 somethings. We were just throwing it all at our debt. We were overpaying on our debts.

But what we started to do and what we again now call the debt snow bank method of paying off our debt was, and I'll say it in four steps. We step one, we kept current on all of our student loan debts. We didn't go behind on anything. We just kept paying the minimums Only. Step two, we threw everything extra that we could into our bank on yourself.

Designed whole life insurance policies. It's gotta be designed the right way or else this doesn't work. So we're flooding our policies with cash. Our policies are growing quickly, even as our debts are slowly coming down. Step three, we borrowed against [00:55:00] our cash value to wipe out our debts. One at a time.

Borrow, borrow, borrow, paying off those banksters, getting them out of our life. Meanwhile, the policy kept on growing and earning interest, like we had not touched that money. So we still had this asset growing for us uninterrupted. And then step four, the final. We repaid the policy loans to ourselves on our own schedule.

Like we're just, you know, saving for our retirement. And the money was there as if we had never borrowed the cash in the first place. Once we paid off those loans to ourselves that we controlled, we were in control of that process. So that is what we now call the debt snowbank method. We're becoming better than debt free.

Excellent. Now what about when people are looking to invest and they're trying to, you know, secure the financial future and even they're present and they're seeing this and it's new and it sounds good, but it's unfamiliar territory. They're like, okay, I'm [00:56:00] going to try it. So they contact you and they set up the right plan and they put money in.

How long is it before they can withdraw money out? Is it immediate? Is it after five years? How long is that money held up? Yeah, and I would also just quickly add that you don't want to just jump into this cuz you heard it on a podcast and you certainly don't want to just work with any old insurance agent or financial advisor.

There are hundreds of thousands, there's 400,000 life insurance agents and there's more than a million financial professionals around the country. Very few even know what you and I are talking about right now, David. I mean, and very few know how to design these policies properly. It's kinda like getting into an elevator.

Mm-hmm. All you want to do when you get into an elevator, I'm sure is just push the button and up you go. Right. But if it's not designed properly serviced well by a professional, you get into that elevator and you might be looking for a, you know, a plunge [00:57:00] below. Right? Look out below. So you wanna make sure it's designed properly, you wanna make sure it's the right fit for you, that it's custom tailored.

And yeah. You know, I think that's maybe the biggest risk in this whole enterprise is, you know, designed, improperly designed policies have been the ruin of many people. So yeah. To your point, what we'd want to do is just have a 15 minute phone strategy session first, just to answer folks questions and see if this would be the right fit for them.

And then if it is not, we move on. Yeah. And then for people who do invest though, is there a time limit before you can pull money out? Yep. Great. Thank you. So generally, once it's started and it's put in place, once the policy is set up, you can get the money, the cash value is available within two or three weeks of starting your policy.

Okay. So now in your life, yourself and your wife, I'm taking it normally things don't change unless you're equally yoked and on the same page. So I'm taking it, your wife and [00:58:00] you both subscribe to this new thought process. Is that correct? That's right, yeah. We've made it past the ice cream shops, although I still love a good ice cream, but we are now a bit more on the same page and it came through a long, you know, difficult road.

But I, I, thankfully she was patient enough with me to, to keep with it. And then, so from 2008 to today, is there anything we missed in your journey, mark, as you learned this and as you applied in, as you grew your business and, and company? The biggest piece is learning to think long range for me, you know, I think it was mainly just a, okay, I'm going to sign this student loan cuz I got schools starting next Tuesday.

Or, you know, I really wanted to get that video game, so I was going to blow that money in my bank account. Now I'm starting to begin to see that there's value in uninterrupted compound growth that can last for a hundred years, 200 years. What would it, what's going to be different? [00:59:00] What are my great, great grandkids going to say changed about their family tree in this generation?

And that to me gives me goosebumps. You know, I want them, the worst thing on my gravestone man is the word potential. He had such potential. Yeah. That's what I, I think would be like, devastating on anybody's gravestone. Wow. Put a shame. But what I want is for my great-great grandkids to somehow find our legacy here and say, this is where it changed for us as a family.

Awesome, man. So if someone wants to get ahold of you and learn more, what's the best way for our audience to reach out to you? Mark, you know, thanks for asking and David, thanks again for this great episode and great interview. Thank you. The, honestly, the, the worst is, I hate to say it, but we're not through turbulent times just yet in this world.

You know, it's, it says in the Bible that you will have trouble and we're going through trouble. That's for sure. Most [01:00:00] folks would say that we're not done with volatility yet. So I would say the best thing you can do is work with your financial professionals such as myself or one of my colleagues, if they are a bank on yourself, professional, to set up one of these policies as an option.

And if you're sick and tired of seeing unpleasant surprises on your account statement, when you're working on your 401K or ira, I think we can help. You can go to kickstart with mark.com. That's kickstart. With Mark with a k.com and we can sit down and have a 15 minute phone strategy session. Just say that you heard this on this awesome show with David and be happy to speak with you.

And then are you available for people in other countries? Is this US based only? How many people can you serve of our audience? Great question. I know that you've got a global audience cuz you're doing a rockstar job with your podcast. [01:01:00] The bad news, good news. The bad news is this is only available in the United States and Canada.

The good news is the connection you might have to the United States and Canada might not be that you live here and sleep here every night. You might have a couple of rental properties in Canada, then you would qualify. You might have a business in Montana, you would qualify. It all just comes down to the details.

So reach out to us and we can work with you. Yeah. Like you might have an account at the Silicon Valley Bank in California. That's right. Exactly. And if you don't get that joke, don't trust Google on that one. That's right. That was basically a giant, I mean, mark, I mean, in my opinion, it was a giant embezzlement organization and it was a way for people to basically clean money.

Mm-hmm. And then our government is so corrupt that they bailed out the The criminals. Yeah. Is that your op? That's my opinion. Before the sensors go after me. [01:02:00] Is that your understanding as well? Well, well listen, bank's going to bank, you know, bank's going to bank, and we're all in their business. We're all. Ponds in their business.

So the question is, who's sitting behind the banker's desk in your own life? Are you going to participate? Even if you're just a depositor at a simple little bank deposit? Hey Mark, I just pay cash for everything. I don't get into all this bank stuff. Yes you do. You're a part of that problem. When you put $10,000 into a savings account, guess what they do with it?

Do they just put it in a little shoebox and put David's name on it? No, no. That's part of the problem. They can inflate that money supply to a hundred grand or more and loan it out to the guy behind you in line. That's called fractional reserve banking. And we just saw what happens when that goes amuck.

So, I don't know, I keep my tinfoil hat at my desk most of the time, David, but I do think that banks are going to bank, and the question is, what are we going to do about it? Yes. Great [01:03:00] advice. So we've went through your past. We went through ways that people can invest better or put plan on their future or be their own bank.

Where is Mark today and where are you heading and how can we help you get there? Well, thanks for asking. As far as I can tell, I'm sitting here outside of Chicagoland in a beautiful, beautiful wooded area here and having a great time building financial plans for folks and helping folks reach their dreams.

I get a great kick out of seeing people reach their goals helping folks through tough times, divorce, unemployment, and great times like buying businesses, paying off their mortgage, helping their kids go to college. If you wanna be a part of that journey, hey, you know what we're hiring. So there's that too.

So again, go to kickstart with mark.com, mention that you'd like to join on the journey and we'd be happy to see what we can do here together. And one last thing, leave David a five star review for his awesome show cuz you're doing a great job, man. Thank you so much. [01:04:00] Well, mark, it's been a true pleasure to be here with you today.

And ladies and gentlemen, check out the show notes check out Mark's website and then if you have any questions, reach out to him. No matter what you do with your money, remember main thing is it's God's money. We're just temporary stewards of it. So be wise with it, be generous with it and you know you can enjoy it.

But don't be a selfish pig. Pigs get fat, hogs go to slaughter. So don't be the hog, I guess I should say. So Mark, thank you again for being here, brother. I truly appreciate you and it's been great hanging out with you today. Thank you. Appreciate it. Awesome. Ladies and gentlemen, if you think this episode can help somebody share it, if you know it can help you, don't just listen to the great content.

Like our slogan says, listen, do repeat those at good actions each day so you can have a great life in this world. And most important attorney to come. So I'm David Pasqualone. This was [01:05:00] our friend and guest, Mark Willis. Mark, thank you again. Thank you. All right, ladies and gentlemen, have a great day and we'll see you next episode Chow.