539: Best of 2025 Holiday Special
Wealth Formula Podcast
It’s been another interesting year in the world of personal finance and macroeconomics. As we look ahead to 2026… well, who really knows what’s coming? I’ll be sharing my own take—and making a few predictions—in an upcoming episode. What’s hard to ignore is just how unusual this moment in history is. We’re coming off COVID. We went through a rapid rise in interest rates, and now a pullback. Tariffs are back in the conversation. There are a lot of moving parts, and as usual, the consensus hasn’t exactly nailed it. Almost every expert was convinced tariffs would push inflation...
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538: Is Gold Still a Buy?
Wealth Formula Podcast
For years, gold was the asset nobody wanted to talk about. It sat there quietly while stocks and real estate continued to rip. Gold was for pessimists. For doomsayers and perma-bears. And then suddenly… gold didn’t just wake up. It launched. As of mid-December 2025, spot gold is trading around $4,300–$4,400 an ounce, depending on the market, marking a gain of roughly 60% over the past year and pushing decisively into record territory. The obvious question is: why now? The short answer is that gold isn’t reacting to one thing. It’s responding to a stacking of pressures that...
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537: Markets Do Not Behave Like Saber-Toothed Tigers
Wealth Formula Podcast
You know, the longer I’ve been an investor, the more I realize this simple truth: the biggest threat to your wealth isn’t the market… it’s your own brain. We’re all wired the same way—with instincts that were fantastic for avoiding saber-toothed tigers but are absolutely terrible for making good financial decisions. Take something simple like a marathon. If I asked you to predict next year’s top finishers, you’d look at last year’s results. That works. Human performance doesn’t flip upside down in twelve months. The best runners tend to stay the best runners. There aren’t...
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536: Should You Own a Home?
Wealth Formula Podcast
Homeownership has been baked into the American Dream for nearly a century. Politicians, parents, and banks all tell you the same thing: “Buy a house as soon as you can. It’s your biggest asset.” But as a real estate guy who actually understands how wealth is created… I’m not convinced it makes sense for everyone—especially early in your career. Let me explain. Say you finally start making some real money—maybe you’re a doctor fresh out of residency. The cultural script kicks in immediately: Buy a house. Build equity. Feel responsible. But here’s the part most people forget:...
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535: Apartment Buildings Are Having a Holiday Type Sale
Wealth Formula Podcast
It’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...
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534: The Economics of Professional Sports
Wealth Formula Podcast
This week’s Wealth Formula Podcast is about the economics of sports—if you are a sports fan like me, you will love it. But before we get to that, I want to give you my two cents on one of the most important elements to financial success in anything: conviction. As I write this, Bitcoin sold off from a high of $126K to under $90K. Other cryptos have lost 50-90 percent of their value in the same time. It’s been called a blood bath. Some are even saying it's over for Bitcoin. I might even believe them if I hadn’t seen the same story at least 5 times before over the past decade. True...
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533: What’s Really Going On in Real Estate Right Now with Prof Norm Miller
Wealth Formula Podcast
When you invest in real estate, you’re not buying what it is today—you’re buying what it will become a few years from now. That’s especially true in multifamily, which, despite all the noise, remains one of the most compelling long-term plays out there. Unlike stocks, you don’t get a live ticker reminding you every five seconds what your property is “worth.” And that’s a good thing. Real estate moves slowly, and that patience rewards people who can see the story before it unfolds. The national headlines are confusing right now—depending on who you read,...
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532: Pejman Ghadimi - A New Paradigm for Buying Nice Stuff
Wealth Formula Podcast
A few years back, I bought some very expensive sports coats. I wore them at first and enjoyed them. But over time, they kind of lost their luster. As I have found often to be the case in my life, I don’t tend to care that much about fancy stuff—fancy jackets, fancy shoes. My true self regresses to a fairly simple jeans and flannel circa 1992 style—not expensive. Realizing that these fancy clothes were just rotting in my closet, I recently sold them on a well-known second-hand site with only designer stuff. And I was shocked when I realized I was only getting 10 cents on the...
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531: How to Identify a Good Real Estate Deal
Wealth Formula Podcast
I grew up with a very different perspective on personal finance and investing than most. My parents were immigrants, and when they arrived in this country, they didn’t come with any preconceived notions of conventional financial wisdom. My father grew up dirt poor in India—that’s really poor and he had never even heard of investing as a kid. But he was blessed with a tremendous intellect and used it to rise from nothing to truly live the American dream. He came to the U.S. in the 1960s on an engineering scholarship and started working as a bridge engineer in Minnesota. When he finally...
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530: A Tax Attorney Talks Tax Mitigation with Buck
Wealth Formula Podcast
This week’s Wealth Formula Podcast features an interview with a tax attorney. While I’m not a tax professional myself, I want to drill down on something we touched on briefly that is incredibly relevant to many of you: the so-called short-term rental loophole. If I were a high-earning W-2 wage earner, this would be at the top of my list to implement—and I know many of you are already doing it. The short-term rental loophole is one of those quirks in the tax code that most people don’t even know exists, but once you do, it can be a total game-changer. Here’s why. Normally, when you...
info_outlineHomeownership has been baked into the American Dream for nearly a century. Politicians, parents, and banks all tell you the same thing: “Buy a house as soon as you can. It’s your biggest asset.”
But as a real estate guy who actually understands how wealth is created… I’m not convinced it makes sense for everyone—especially early in your career. Let me explain.
Say you finally start making some real money—maybe you’re a doctor fresh out of residency. The cultural script kicks in immediately: Buy a house. Build equity. Feel responsible.
But here’s the part most people forget: your primary home is not an asset. As Robert Kiyosaki puts it, if something takes money out of your pocket, it’s not an asset—it’s a liability.
According to Bankrate and the Census Bureau, U.S. homeowners spend around $17,000 per year just to maintain and operate their homes—and that’s before you make a single mortgage payment.
That’s property taxes, insurance, utilities, landscaping, repair bills, HOA fees… the list goes on. If your house is worth $1.5M, even the bare-minimum 1% annual maintenance rule hits you with $15,000 a year just to keep the place from deteriorating.
Add insurance, taxes, utilities, and everything else, and you’re looking at $30,000–$40,000 per year in unavoidable, non-negotiable carrying costs.
And that still doesn’t cover the roof that fails, the appliances that die, or the curveballs Mother Nature throws at you. None of that feels like an “asset” to me.
Now, to be fair, people don’t usually buy homes as investments. They buy them for stability, a place to raise kids, a sense of being “settled.” It’s emotional. It’s psychological. And it’s real.
But if you’re young—and especially if you haven’t hit your first million—it’s worth asking yourself a tough question: Is buying a home right now the best financial move… or just the most familiar one?
Because historically, U.S. home prices appreciate around 4.3% a year (Case-Shiller). Meanwhile, the S&P 500 averages closer to 10%.
And if you're in real estate investing? A solid multifamily value-add deal often targets 16–20% IRR—plus tax advantages your primary home will never give you.
So if you’re just getting started, it might make sense to delay that home purchase. Invest first. Build your passive income. Let your assets—not your salary—pay for your lifestyle.
Then when you do buy a home, you’ll be doing it from a position of strength, not strain.
The irony is this: waiting often gets you to the dream home faster because your capital compounds instead of being trapped in drywall, windows, and a backyard you barely have time to enjoy.
This Week on Wealth Formula Podcast, I interview expert Dr. Ken Johnson, who digs even deeper into this question—and lays out why homeownership isn’t the golden ticket people think it is, especially for high earners early in their wealth-building years.
Links mentioned:
Beracha and Johnson Housing Ranking Index:
https://www.ares.org/page/beracha-johnson-housing-ranking-index
Waller, Weeks and Johnson Rental Index:
https://www.ares.org/page/waller-weeks-johnson-rental-index
Price-to-Rent Ratio Report:
https://therealestateinitiative.com/price-to-rent-ratios/
Top 100 Housing Markets - Inflation Adjusted:
https://therealestateinitiative.com/housing-top-100/
Learn more about Dr. Ken Johnson: