Creating a Tax-Free Family Bank featuring Mark Quann

Mark Quann is currently the President and CEO of the REMii Group, Inc. The REMii Group offers consulting services to help business owners and high net worth individuals with asset protection and advanced tax-reduction strategies.

 

Mark has spent 13 years as an Investment Advisor Representative (IAR) with Transamerica and during that time Mark has authored three financial books, with his most recent book becoming an Amazon Best-Seller. Mark has been an expert in using insurance for tax reduction and creating a “tax-free” family bank for 16 years

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Listen to this informative Publish. Promote. Profit. episode with Mark Quann about creating a tax-free family bank.

Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:

• How most schools don’t teach the “debt matrix” to their students.
• How to achieve the freedom to do whatever you want, whenever you want.
• Why inflation as a lie.
• Why it’s crucial to raise your financial IQ.
• What an IUL is and how it can help you eliminate taxes.

 

Connect with Mark:

 

Guest Contact Info:
Twitter

@markjquann
Instagram

@markjquann

Rob Kosberg:

Hey, welcome everybody. Rob Kosberg here with another episode of our Publish Promote Profit Podcast. I have a great guest for you today. Mark Quann is the president and CEO of the REMii Group. The REMii Group offers consulting services to help business owners and high net worth individuals with asset protection and advanced tax strategies. Mark spent 13 years as an investment advisor with Transamerica, and during that time authored three different financial books. Rich Man, Poor Bank was your first book, Top 10 Ways to Avoid Taxes, and, Top 25 Ways an IUL Can Secure Your Financial Future. That’s your most recent book, which also became a bestseller. So congratulations on that. Mark, I know you’re an expert in using insurance for tax reduction and to create a tax-free family bank, which we’re going to want some definition on that. Great to have you on the podcast today.

Mark Quann:

I was looking forward to this. I enjoy teaching people financial literacy. I enjoy talking with other entrepreneurs, sharing ideas. I’m sure I’ll learn something from you today. I work with entrepreneurs and investors every single day and we just learn from each other.

Rob Kosberg:

I love that. My first book was on financial services when I had a financial services company myself. In a general sense, the stats are horrible. Statistically, 96% of the people that hit 65 are either broke, or they are going to require Social Security to live. I mean, such a tiny percentage of people are financially free by the time they’re 65, and yet they’ve worked for 40 plus years, and in many cases made millions of dollars. What would you say are some of the biggest mistakes that people make, or why do they get themselves into that position, and how can we avoid it?

Mark Quann:

I would say, one, be careful what your parents and what your schools are telling you. The first book, Rich Man, Poor Bank is about basically one concept. Why we don’t learn finances. It’s when financial education goes up, bank profit goes down. Everything you learn in school comes from the banks. I saw this in college. Banks would come into college campuses, and I was a vice president in the student union at the time in college, and they would basically give us money to let the credit card companies on campus to give us student loans and credit card debts. They can’t educate you on how crooked and corrupt the banking industry is. They literally can’t. Just read Rich Man, Poor Bank. People go, “I want to throw up. Mark, I read your book. I want to throw up. I didn’t realize it worked that bad.” Yet, who’s tied into it? One, the college has to conform to that education. Two, the teachers all have to say, yes, do that. Otherwise they’ll be fired. They have to tell you to take those student loans. Otherwise, they can’t pay their bills. It’s called the debt matrix. We all live in a debt matrix. Everything you’ve ever learned, unless you’re in the top 1%, everything you’ve ever learned has been corrupted in many, many ways by the largest publicly traded banking corporations. They want their money to sit in your savings account so they can invest it at high rates of returns. Then they want to keep you ignorant and say you need to get some credit cards and some auto loans. Just that system alone, if we all continue with the belief that our most important thing is to save money and get good credit, that’s the trap. That’s called the debt matrix. Unless you can get yourself out of that, and here’s the problem is, you know how I made lots of money, I started going to younger people. I stopped talking to older people. That’s why I’m 43, and I never have to work again for the rest of my life. I went to younger people, and said, “What are you guys doing?” A lot of my clients are between the ages of 19 and 26. Some make 100,000 sitting in their basement, some make 400,000 and they still live at home. So I’m telling you, you really have to realize that the older people, they’re in a box. They’ve been stuck there forever. They really don’t know how the world works. Younger people, I mean, they’re killing it. They’re going to retire at a young age. One of my clients retired at a young age, in their early 20s, and they’re financially independent.

Rob Kosberg:

How exciting. I mean, obviously those that taught us, grade school, high school, even college, are stuck in the matrix themselves, right? So even if there’s not some sinister plan to keep the poor man down, they don’t know how to get out themselves, right?

Mark Quann:

That’s the point. It’s the blind leading the blind. You take people who are incredibly good, ethical, they want to help somebody, but where were they educated? They were educated from a mega bank that, one, they’re not allowed to teach anything else. I mean, you can have a checking account. I got five bucks in my savings account. Everything else is invested for me at high rates of returns. I can borrow at low interest rates whenever I want with no credit checks, you would go wait. I could literally show you how I did that today to use other people’s money to grow my wealth. It costs me next to nothing. I can do this over, and over, and over again. I’m literally teaching a course on this right now. It’s crazy. So it’s just a lot of fun. When you’re financially independent, you get to do what you want. I wake up whenever I want. I do whatever I want. I work from Zoom. I can do it anywhere in the world. I went to Miami on vacation, and then I came back for a little bit and then I went to Cabo San Lucas, spent some time out there, worked on the beach, and then I got to do whatever I want for the rest of my life. I just want other people to have that. That’s freedom.

Rob Kosberg:

So if I’m not mistaken, Chairman Powell just came out even within the last couple of hours, and said that inflation is apparently going to be more persistent and probably higher than they anticipated. Of course, this is him saying that a week, two weeks after he said, “Don’t worry. It’s transitory.” Maybe explain to people why that matters to them. You said something that most people will hear, and maybe go right over their head, savings is the way to debt. It’s the way to be broke financially, not to be free financially. I’m sure you’re thinking about banks and savings accounts and that kind of thing. So maybe talk about that as it relates to inflation and the answer to some of those challenges that people face.

Mark Quann:

First of all, you need to realize that, one, inflation is a lie. In 1980, they took food and energy out of the inflation rate. Why? Because inflation went out of control before. They said, “Wow, we can’t,” and then had to raise interest rates to reduce inflation. The inflation rate they’re quoting you is a lie. Why is it a lie? Why can’t the government tell us the truth about inflation? Well, pensions and government salaries, and all the things that are the real inflation rate. So if they report the real inflation rate, they have to adjust Social Security and pensions, and all those things to the real rate. That just makes the government go bust faster. Our government’s basically bankrupt. I mean, they basically are by definition. By accounting principles, our government is bankrupt already. If they report the real inflation, they have to print more money to try and pay the bills. I’m not conspiracy theorist. I’ll back it up with facts, and data, and why it’s happening so you actually understand. Why do schools teach us inflation? Well, again, it goes so much deeper. You live in a debt matrix. You need to get your head out of the debt matrix and realize. If you want to struggle generationally, here’s what you should tell your kids to do, save money and get good credit. Put all your money into a retirement account so you can retire at 65. If you want generational poverty, tell them to do that. The real inflation rate will wipe them out. I can run any illustration. Send me to a financial advisor. Put your money, and save, and you got good credit. Get the match on your 401(k). Put it into a 401(k). If it generates 7% rate of return, and we calculate the inflation, you’re going to retire in poverty. Take me to any financial advisor, I will show you exactly how, by taking their advice, you’re going to retire in poverty. That’s if Social Security is there, right? If there’s no Social Security, now you’re really in trouble. This goes so deep. I was an investment advisor for 13 years and a financial advisor registered rep for almost 17. I’m sorry, but even the advice we’re getting today, there’s better advice. I’ll just say there’s better advice than what we’ve been taught. So just be careful. Where are you getting your money, and who’s teaching me that, and what’s in it for them?

Rob Kosberg:

Give us some of the better advice. Can you briefly kind of outline what the steps to success really look like?

Mark Quann:

You need to raise your financial IQ. You really need to raise your financial IQ. If your financial IQ is save money and get good credit, pay off my mortgage fast, put money in my 401(k), and hope to retire, you really got to step it up. That’s going to lead to very tough times in the future. You need to raise your funding. Now it’s pretty fast to do it if you find the right places. If you find the right places to do it, you can do that. Now traditional advice says, okay, put your money into an index fund. We put our money into an index fund, and it goes up. It goes up, it goes up, goes up, goes up, goes up. Then when the market crashes, it loses a whole bunch of money. That’s when we lose our job. Then we have to liquidate our retirement accounts to do that. Then the only other alternative is, if we have an emergency, we have to go credit card debt, take money out of my mortgage, all those different things. Now the difference is called correlated assets. Non-correlated and correlated. Correlated means everything goes in the same direction, and non-correlated means it can go in the opposite direction. So this is a simple thing that I teach my newest advisors. So you could have one asset that’s going up, but you have one asset goes up, but doesn’t crash. Now, when are the best opportunities to build wealth? During a crash. Now here’s what happened. Here’s how I wrote this book. I’m sitting at home, and the stock market starts crashing. I’m thinking, “Time to make some money.” I can borrow money at 0% interest. I can do all kinds of crazy things. I also know the difference between a Vanguard index fund, the market times three, or a stock option on the stock market. I know the differences between those three things. Let’s say you put 100 grand in a 401(k). Market crashes, it’s 50. I can put something in one non-correlated asset, and let’s say it only grows to 80. So I got 50 grand over here. I got 80 over here. But I can borrow against that 80. I could borrow another 60. Well, I can take that 60 and use those other tools. I can turn that 60 to $600,000 pretty quickly using options, leveraged ETFs or whatever. So you have two assets. You need one that can go up and down, and then you need a non-correlated asset. I can show you that I could literally go in my trading account and show you. I bought a stock option on Tesla for 7,500, and sold it for $75,000 in two weeks. That’s two weeks. That is pretty significant. Yeah. If your financial IQ is, “I’m going to put my money into a portfolio of 70% stocks and 40% bonds,” if that’s your financial education, you’re in a lot of trouble. I go into all these non-correlated, I’ll put the stock market, the stock market times three, any times it goes up, I’ll sell some, anytime it goes down, I’ll buy some. The story’s the return of the stock market, pretty easily. The point is that you have to raise your financial IQ. If you’re just putting money in 60% in the stocks and 40% in bonds, and then you’re just hoping, when it goes up, it goes up, but when it crashes, and you need the money most, you can’t get it. If my 80 grand is up here, the 80 grand goes up from the bottom. I take the 60 grand, I can turn that 60 into $600,000 pretty fast if you know what these other things are. That’s just financial education. I’m a high school and college dropout. I came here to the United States with no green card. My first job was a security guard for $6.15. I’ve got three generations of poverty. My dad was a bricklayer. My dad was at the top of the scaffolding, mixing the concrete with a cigarette in his mouth. I was at the bottom of the scaffolding as a teenager mixing the concrete with that cigarette. That’s my financial education when I was growing up as a teenager. Now I can pretty much create money. In fact, good markets, I’ll make a lot of money, bad markets are fantastic. I can 10X your net worth. You have to get financially literate. People spend, what, four hours a day watching television. I’m like, “Put two hours a week into your financial education.” They’ll go to Costco and spend all this money in Target and Amazon, but they won’t spend money on financial education. It’s crazy to me. Today, if you don’t have money, it’s because you’re lazy and you’re watching too much television. You’re not willing to go out there and learn. I don’t know how to say it any more than that. I’m saying that I want to wake people up, and that’s the point. I can’t sugarcoat this. I need to wake people up. You get out of the matrix, raise your financial education. Do it. Just learn a little bit and learn a little. That’s how I learned. I learned a little bit like this and a little bit like this and kept learning.

Rob Kosberg:

Define for people what an IUL is, and how that fits in this process.

Mark Quann:

An IUL goes back to, what do rich people do? If you want to invest money with no risk, here’s what you could do. You could do this in your own fidelity account. Put money into bonds. Risk-free, right? All the corporations, you’d have to have a default of all the corporations to lose money. Then when it has a bunch of dividends, you could buy a thing called a stock option. That’s up on the stock market. Now, that’s a one-year call option. That’s easy to do this in Robinhood. Robinhood simplified some things. But again, I don’t want people going to do this after this. You should probably raise your financial education. If you just took the dividends and you buy an option, let’s say on the S&P 500, one year, only two things happen. The stock market crashes. Do you lose any money? No. Your money was in bonds. Or two, the stock option makes money. You sell the stock option one year, and you throw it in the bonds. Your portfolio can only go up. So, it’s not magic. It’s not whatever. These are things that rich investors and hedge funds do to make money.

Rob Kosberg:

You’re hedging your bet there.

Mark Quann:

Exactly. You’re saying, “I can never lose money and my portfolio can only go up.” Now let’s not get to it. You can buy an option and sell another one, and you can put a floor and a cap. These are things that really wealthy people do. So in 1997, some rich person, some guy on Wall Street said, “What if we put that inside an insurance wrapper?” There’s a tax code that’s been around since ’88. You pay no taxes on the growth. You can take money out, and you die, there’s no taxes. You could eliminate yourself. It’s like a big Roth IRA where you can put tons of money. It only goes up and it never goes down. It locks in. Now here’s the cool part, if a stock portfolio drops 50%, how much does it need to make to go back? It needs to make 100% to get back. A portfolio that only goes up, it actually buys at the bottom, doesn’t it? So it goes up, it never goes down. When they buy the option one year later, they’re buying it wherever the market is. It actually goes up from the bottom. People just don’t realize, it’s so much better, it’s not that’s it better, but if you have a correlated asset, a non-correlated asset, a non-correlated asset would buy the stock market at the bottom. It doesn’t need to go back to the previous high. People go, “That sounds like magic. That’s too good to be true.” I told you how it’s done. You can do it in a brokerage account. You wrap it in an insurance wrapper, now you eliminate the taxes. That’s an IUL. It’s a highly sophisticated thing they use in hedge funds and on Wall Street to make money. They just do it in an insurance wrapper, eliminate the taxes. So it’s not magical. It’s not too good to be true. You can do it. It just if you did it, there’s a lot of taxes there. The dividends from the bonds and the call option, you sell it. There are all these taxes, tax consequences.

Rob Kosberg:

Obviously, your book on the top 25 ways is a great way that they can understand and learn how to use that. This is the whole idea of a family bank or infinite banking, right? Can you maybe explain that and what that term is a little bit for people?

Mark Quann:

How do you define a bank? We’ve been taught to save money, put it into something where it’s safe and secure. Then we’re taught to go get good credit. That’s a trap, right? You put all your money in a savings account, it does nothing, and it gets eaten away by inflation really fast. If you put it in the stock market, you can lose it. That’s the reason, if we’re told to put six months of savings in a savings account, well, who gets really, really wealthy, the banking corporations do. Let’s challenge that perception. If you can put money into a risk-free tax-free portfolio that only goes up and never goes down, you’re the person who has a lots of money when the stock market goes down, because it doesn’t go down. The portfolio will naturally buy at the bottom of the market because it buys the options at the lower price, wherever the market is. So it goes up. Well, you can also take your loans with no credit check. It doesn’t go on your credit report because you can take loans based on the security of the investments. It is 100% tax free. The question is, what’s your financial IQ to invest outside of the IUL? Is it to buy real estate? Is it to buy stocks, stock options, leveraged ETS during down markets? I posted them on Instagram. Anyone’s welcome on my Instagram. I was posting what I was buying on Instagram after, during coronavirus. So welcome to go check it out.

Rob Kosberg:

Well, raising your financial IQ, obviously you have several books that will help with that. Maybe we can just change gears a little bit. You told me your first book took five years to write. At this point, I’ve helped well over 1,000 authors to get their books written and launched. I know how difficult it is. You’ve written two since then. Obviously, you’re getting something out of writing your books. Talk to me about that. How have your books helped you to spread your message, grow your business, maybe get speaking engagements? What have your books done for your business specifically?

Mark Quann:

It’s been really good. I write books because there’s something that inspires me at the moment. The first one was frustration over the banking industry that everyone’s taught to just save money and get good credit. We’re all stuck in a debt matrix. What I like to do is take complicated stuff and simplify it. That’s my fun thing to do. In 2018, I got really sick, and I had heart and valve repair. I’m sitting in the intensive care unit of USC Keck Hospital. I’m in the ICU. I’m on Narcos. I got nothing to do. I’m sitting there going, “What am I going to do? I got five, six weeks off to do nothing. Well, what am I going to do?” I started writing a book. I wrote most of, The Top 10 Ways to Avoid Taxes, while on Narcos. It was all done in the ICU. I also learned about programs, where if you’re going to name a book, and you name it wrong, it’s not going to sell. There’s programs where you’re going to hack Amazon and find out what words should be in your title. You can look at your competitors these days. You can find out what they’re using to sell their books. How did I learn that? I talked to people that are younger than me. They’re just doing this stuff. They’re learning to hack stuff, right? They hack Amazon to find out what it is. I wrote that one and that was basically on taxes. I was like, “Okay, we understand how debt works, but how do taxes work?” I’ve done a lot of things to make a lot of money without paying taxes. Buy a house, live in it for two years, sell it, no taxes, right? You can do that every two years. I’ve done that three times and made a lot of money and didn’t pay a single penny in state, federal income taxes on it. Now you could rent properties and collect income off of it, but you can also do an advanced strategy where you eliminate all the income off the property. That’s another strategy that wealthy people use. I just give them the basics of what they need to do. That raises your financial IQ. There are certainly different levels of raising your financial IQ. It’s the simplest things that anybody can implement in their life to just avoid paying lots and lots of taxes. You realize that your 401(k) is rigged to trigger Social Security taxes and put you in a very high tax bracket. You need to know what that is. People don’t know that. Social Security is tax free only if you invest properly, otherwise your Social Security is taxable. You can design a tax-free retirement strategy where you can get four different income streams, and they’re not taxable. If you do that wrong, you can push yourself in a really high tax bracket. Just knowing those basic things, they’re in the book, it takes, what, two hours to read the book. I take all the big words out so it’s simple to read. You can read a chapter a day in four or five minutes a day, and rock and roll. Every chapter of my book has to be worth the cost of the book. If anybody doesn’t like my book just don’t give me a crappy rating on Amazon, reach out to me on Instagram, and I’ll send you your money. How about that? If every chapter of my book is not worth the cost of the book, and you don’t say, “Wow, I’m learning lots of cool stuff,” just send me on Instagram. You can keep the book, I’ll send your money back. I’ve never done that before, but that’s how confident I am in the financial education I’m helping people with.

Rob Kosberg:

That’s a good segue. Where can people get your book? Let’s give them some links to connect with you, whether it’s on Instagram, or wherever you want to send them to get a copy.

Mark Quann:

Okay. Pretty simple. Just put Mark Quann into Google. You can put it into Instagram. Instagram is good. You can put my name in Amazon. All my books come up, Mark Quann. Or you can put IUL into Amazon, my name comes up. I have an email address on my website for my company. People can send messages there. help people. So as long as somebody is cool and I get good vibes, I’ll help them out.

Rob Kosberg:

Love it, Mark. I think the theme was to increase your financial education, and we’ve shared with people how they can do that. Mark, great to have you on the podcast, man. Thanks so much for sharing authentically with the group.

Mark Quann:

Again, this is fun for me. I enjoy every single day waking up and just teaching people finances. I’m telling you, when you become financially independent and you don’t need to work anymore, it becomes more fun. actually. If you keep following the same advice that we’ve been taught for 30 years, I think it’s going to have some devastating consequences. You can’t keep printing five trillion, another five trillion, and then things just keep going in the same direction. This is an experiment. We’ve never done this experiment before. We know that the stock markets are going to go up, and we know that the stock market’s going to go down. If your only plan is, when times are good to make money, and you don’t have a plan to make more money when the economy’s bad, that’s an issue. That’s going to be a problem for you. I really want people to get this message today. People need to wake up and realize you cannot do the same thing. If I’m right, and we do have a major crash much worse than we had, most of the middle class is going to fall under poverty. If I’m wrong, who cares? You’ll make more money. It shouldn’t matter if taxes go up or down, you shouldn’t care. If the market goes up or down, you shouldn’t care. If inflation goes up or down, you shouldn’t care. If you have a high financial IQ, those things can be tweaked relatively simple to make money in any economy. Cryptocurrency is another topic, of course.