535: Apartment Buildings Are Having a Holiday Type Sale
Release Date: 11/30/2025
Wealth Formula Podcast
If you’re paying a ton in taxes right now… it’s because you’re playing the wrong game. Most people think taxes are about income. They’re not. They’re about behavior—more specifically, incentivizing behavior. The government is constantly telling you what it wants through the tax code, and once you stop looking at it emotionally, it’s actually pretty obvious. It wants businesses. It wants jobs. It wants housing. It wants capital deployed in specific areas like energy and infrastructure. And when you do those things, it rewards you with lower taxes. Now contrast that with the...
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This week, you’re going to start hearing a familiar narrative again… “Inflation is back.” And on the surface, it’s going to look true. The next CPI print is very likely to come in hotter than expected. We’re already seeing it in real-time data like Truflation. Energy prices have surged, and because energy feeds directly into headline CPI, it’s going to push that number up—fast. But here’s the problem… That’s not the whole story. Energy is notoriously volatile, which is why the Fed focuses more on core inflation—stripping out food and energy. But even core isn’t immune...
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Most people assume a high income leads to wealth. Sometimes it does. But more often, it leads to a very comfortable lifestyle that depends on getting paid dollars for hours. There’s nothing wrong with that. For many people, the best path is to keep doing what they do well and invest their income into real estate and other real assets. That alone can create significant wealth over time. But if you look at the people who build outsized wealth, there’s usually another element involved—they own something that scales. The key difference isn’t how hard they work. It’s what they own that...
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If you spend enough time listening to economists, you’ll notice something interesting. They rarely agree. Over the years on the Wealth Formula Podcast, I’ve interviewed economists from across the spectrum—Keynesians, Austrians, monetarists, market practitioners, academics. Some are bullish about the next decade. Others are extremely pessimistic. But there’s one thing that almost all of them have agreed on in private conversations. The entire economic outlook changes if artificial intelligence dramatically boosts productivity. And that possibility is no longer theoretical. The Latest...
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I recently had a long conversation with a very successful professional. He’s 58 years old. Highly educated. Respected in his field. Financially sophisticated — in fact, his job depends on understanding money. If you looked at his résumé, you would assume he was completely set for life. He wasn’t. A couple of bad investments. Some concentration risk. A few decisions that looked reasonable at the time. And suddenly he’s essentially back at ground zero — trying to start a new business at 58. This story is far more common than people realize. The Dangerous Assumption is that many...
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There is one truth that has followed every major technological revolution in human history. Energy demand always rises to meet technological capability. When we industrialized, coal consumption exploded. When we built the modern transportation system, oil demand reshaped global geopolitics. When we entered the digital age, electricity quietly became the backbone of the global economy. And now we are entering the AI era. What most people don’t appreciate is that AI is not just a software revolution. It is an electricity revolution. Training a single advanced AI model can consume as much...
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There’s a moment most high-income professionals remember clearly. It’s when the first real money finally starts coming in. If you’re a doctor, it’s when you finish residency training. And almost immediately, the world starts whispering in your ear: “It’s time to buy a house.” Not just any house. The nicest house the bank says you can afford. And that’s where people unknowingly sabotage one of the most powerful wealth-building windows of their entire lives…by becoming house poor. You see, the bank is not qualifying you based on what will make you wealthy. They’re qualifying...
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At some point in a successful career, taxes quietly become your largest expense. Not housing. Not lifestyle. Not investing losses. Taxes. And unlike most expenses, they grow automatically as your income rises — unless you deliberately structure around them. You know that my favorite means of tax mitigation is through investing in real assets like real estate and operating businesses. That approach has been the backbone of my own strategy for years — taking active income and redirecting it into assets that generate cash flow while providing meaningful tax advantages. I’ve also...
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For most of my career, I’ve been focused on two things: Operating businesses and Multifamily real estate. The strategy has been pretty simple. Take money generated from higher-risk, active businesses… and move it into more stable, long-term assets like apartment buildings. That shift—from risk to stability—is how I’ve tried to build durability over time. Now, to be fair, the sharp rise in interest rates a few years ago put a dent in that model. But zooming out, it’s still worked well for me overall. So I’m sticking with it. That said, there are other ways to think about real...
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This week’s episode of Wealth Formula features an interview with Claudia Sahm, and I want to share a quick takeaway before you listen — because she’s often misunderstood in the headlines. First, a quick explanation of the Sahm Rule, in plain English. The rule looks at unemployment and asks a very simple question: Has the unemployment rate started rising meaningfully from its recent low? Specifically, if the three-month average unemployment rate rises by 0.5% or more above its lowest level over the past year, the Sahm Rule is triggered. Historically, that has happened early in every U.S....
info_outlineIt’s that time of the year again—Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Everyone loves a deal.
If you’ve been investing long enough, you know one important fact: there is always something on sale.
The problem is the herd never sees it. They’re too busy chasing whatever feels safe because it’s setting new records.
And right now? That’s the stock market. That’s gold. Everyone’s piling into the most expensive things they can find and patting themselves on the back for being “prudent.”
But smart investors don’t chase what’s already expensive.
They look for the thing sitting quietly on the clearance rack, the thing nobody wants yet.
And today, that thing is real estate—particularly apartments.
We’ve seen this movie before.
Think back to the early 2000s. After the dot-com crash, everybody ran to gold and Treasuries. Meanwhile, the very companies that would define the next two decades—Amazon, Apple, Microsoft—were sitting there marked down 75%. You didn’t need to be a genius to buy them. You just needed the stomach.
Then there was 2009–2011. Real estate was radioactive. The media made it sound like apartment buildings were going to fall into sinkholes. But if you bought during that window?
Values didn’t take ten years to recover. They snapped back within three. And then they kept running for another decade.
And remember 2020—oil going negative? That’s the kind of insanity that only happens once in a generation. People were literally joking that Exxon would pay you to take barrels off their hands.
It was absurd… and it was the greatest energy buying opportunity in modern history. But most people sat on the sidelines in fear.
Different cycles, different assets, same principle:
If you want outsized returns, you have to be willing to buy what everyone else is mispricing.
And right now, the only major asset class not making all-time highs is real estate. In fact, our Investor Club is still finding deals discounted 30–40 percent from just a few years ago.
Apartments, specifically, are in this bizarre sweet spot where pricing is still beaten up from the rate shock, yet the fundamentals underneath are quietly strengthening.
Sellers who bought with floating debt are fatigued.
Buyers with dry powder are getting real discounts.
Construction has collapsed—meaning supply will be razor-thin in 18–24 months.
And the interest-rate environment is shifting in exactly the direction apartments benefit from.
This is why rates matter.
This is why liquidity matters.
This is why cycles matter.
When financing costs come down and supply is constrained, prices don’t grind higher—they launch.
This Is Exactly What the Bottom Feels Like
Bottoms never feel like bottoms. They feel confusing. Uneasy. Contradictory.
And that is precisely why it’s the opportunity.
Every big wealth-building moment looks like this in real time. Everyone’s distracted by what’s hot while the discount sits in plain sight.
Make no mistake—if the Fed keeps cutting and liquidity continues loosening, apartments aren’t going to stay discounted. They’ll do what they did after 2009. They’ll do what oil did after 2020. They’ll do what tech did after the dot-com crash.
They’ll reprice fast.
And years from now, people will look back at this exact moment and say the thing they always say after missing the obvious:
“It was right there. Why didn’t I buy more?”
Well… it is right here. Apartments are on sale.
No one has been beating the drum more on this than my guest on Wealth Formula Podcast this week.