Quote from: Mauser on Today at 06:51:24 AM

Quote from: Hermez11 on July 21, 2023, 02:15:07 AM

Hey everyone. What are some of your wealth secrets that you could share with us?

Buying homes with cash and taking loans out on it?

Setting up trust funds in foreign countries and setting offshore corporations to avoid capital gains and taxation? (Sorry tax avoidance for any LEO reading this)

What are your secrets?

I am not wealthy yet, so I can't share any success story that might help others. Not sure where you from, but in my country, properties became so expensive that it's nearly impossible to buy anything with cash. Without a loan from the bank for the next 15-20 years it's not feasible to buy any decent apartment or house. There are so many new government regulations on energy efficiency in new houses and apartments that are getting renovated, many people need to take out loans if they are modernising their homes. Which means that most homes already have a loan on it and there isn't much room to borrow more money against it. In the past I also looked into the topics of offshore money investing to reduce taxes, but the fees are so expensive. If you don't already have a few millions available it doesn't seem worth it as most of your return goes into fees.
One thing I am focusing on at the moment is to use private retirement funds to reduce my taxable income today. In my country you can basically choose if you want to take all your salary today and have to pay high taxes on it, or if you want to leave it for retirement and only tax it in the future. The advantage is that my tax rate is going to be much lower when I go into retirement and there are some tricks to make it even lower. For example, you can gift your home to your children and pay rent to them for living there. This makes me seem poorer and I don't have to pay so much taxes. The disadvantage is that I can't use the capital until retirement age.

Of course, you have to look at what is available to you and in your location and based on options that you might be able to buy into.

There are many people who cannot afford houses, and surely it depends on where you are at if loans are available and if the conditions of loans might help for the property to be affordable to you and without any major tricks in the loan... so yeah sometimes people cannot even build up enough of a savings (or investments into other things to build their investment portfolio) in order to use that money for some kind of a downpayment on a house.

Of course, there might be some tax-deferred types of funds that you can invest smaller amounts into, and sometimes there is employer matching up to a certain amount for those funds too.. at least in the USA.. and the terms of those arrangements can vary quite a bit from employer to employer-- but it still tends to show that normies are not even very much into the practice of building up an investment portfolio, and maybe they are disincentivized in part because the money in retirement funds would get locked up until they retire (absent decently high penalties for early withdrawal.. and most advisors recommend against early withdrawal of retirement funds)...

So maybe those kinds of "on-the-ground" facts would be part of the justification to figure out some kind of way of saving and investing in order that you are both able to save/invest small amounts of money at a time, and your funds are not necessarily locked up until you retire.. even though it does not hurt to attempt to impose some of that lock-up on yourself in order to attempt to receive some of the extra compounding effects of that value.

So of course, something like bitcoin gives you control and you can choose to invest small amounts, such as $10 per week... but if you invest small amounts, you still may well need to spend 10 or more years investing before it starts to feel like a meaningful amount, and you likely also have to figure out ways in which you are able to hold most of your value privately so that no one takes it from you - including being careful that you do not make other kinds of mistakes such as not adequately securing your coins or getting distracted into nonsense products that involve gambling, luck and other skills that most normies do not have.. so it is safer for an overwhelming majority of normies to stick to more basic approaches of building wealth through regular, ongoing, persistent and maybe even a bit aggressive accumulation (without overdoing it).