Building Wealth and Financial Freedom

By Mike Reardon

How to Build Wealth and Financial Freedom by eliminating your debt and maximizing your profits on your Investments

• ​​​​​​​Discover how to gain financial freedom by accelerating your debt payoff without paying more or changing your lifestyle
• Learn the 10 Myths Wall Street Advisors do not want you to know about investments and why you never get ahead
• How to use the 5 Pillars of Wealth to grow generational money for you and your family
• Discover how to make money regardless of the stock market, even when it crashes
• Find out how you can make money, even double digit growth, all while being tax advantaged and having checkbook access to your money whenever you want it, not when regulations tell you
• Find out how your money can and will generate an income for you like no other financial plan you've ever seen before
• I also reveal how you will be able to leave a legacy for your family
• Do all of this and so much more 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Reardon
• Release date: Apr 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201902681

Mike Reardon

Mike has been in and around the financial and insurance industry for almost 20 years. He found the biggest issues occurred in the financial and wealth building fields. This became his passion for several years as he found the solution to this huge problem.  He lives with his wife, two boys, and his two dogs.

Book preview

How it all began.

The idea for this book started almost 20 years ago. That’s when the first issue regarding wealth and retirement accounts, more specifically 401k’s, actually took place.

I had been working for a company that had a 401k and the owner was an older gentleman. He decided it was time to get out of the business and his kids weren’t interested in taking over the day-to-day operations. He sold to an out of state group that came in and took over the company.

When the new company came in, they implemented their own 401k program that they were using nationwide. I took my current 401k and rolled it over to the new 401k without much thought about it.

Shortly after taking over, the new company had meetings for all employees from different segments of the business. During my segment of the 401k a few interesting things occurred. Was the meeting held by the financial advisor in charge of the 401k program for the company? No. Was it held by a representative of the financial advisor’s organization instead? No. It was held by the head of HR from the new company coming in.

So, what did the head of HR have to do with 401k’s besides the initial paperwork? The answer, nothing. He wasn’t very helpful regarding the 401k process. He couldn’t explain anything about it outside of a sales ad that came on a sheet of paper for him to read to everyone. It was obvious that knowing all about this wasn’t his responsibility. It essentially got dropped in his lap.

How did he help employees choose where to put their money? Easy, he had three options, risky, moderate and safe. That’s it. He couldn’t tell you anything more than that.

Here are the two best parts though. One, he proceeded to say that using our pretax money we could expect to get 10-12% a year easy every single year. He put up a chart showing a 30-year-old with a growth rate of just 10% and a 401k balance of almost $1.7 million dollars at age 65. That struck me as odd that it would get to that amount but there was no one to ask any questions because he certainly couldn’t answer anything. The other thing that kept coming to mind was that if it’s that easy to get to $1.7 million dollars, why isn’t everyone doing it?

Two, he kept using two phrases interchangeably. Pretax money and tax free. I thought I may have been crazy until I went back and asked 3-4 other people that were in those meetings. They confirmed the same thing. There was never a single mention about taxes coming out of a 401k or what those taxes would be. There was no talk about current tax rates or future potential tax rates. There also was no conversation regarding any fees either. Why hadn’t everyone gotten all the information they needed? It seems as though the financial advisor responsible for the account should have been available to talk to everyone. So, the next question I have is how is the financial advisor held responsible for his actions if he was never there?

A LITTLE OVER 15 YEARS later and the second major issue occurred. As a small P&C agent I was building a book of business when I started to get hit up by several financial advisors to join forces with them. I wasn’t doing any investments or life insurance at the time so my book of business was a little desirable to the financial advisors because there was no internal direct competition for them.

Most of the financial advisors I didn’t respond to, as I really had one huge hang up when it came to investments. I didn’t like the idea that I could make a recommendation to someone and then find out that even though I gave my best recommendation based on the and they could lose all or most of their money if the market crashed. It didn’t sit well with me that this could occur even if I had made the recommendation based on all the information at the time. I, along with everyone else, would have no way of knowing what would happen in the future.

I did actually end up talking to one advisor. I really don’t remember what started this conversation, but I’m glad I did.

The advisor proceeded to tell me how awesome this would be. He went on and on about how great it is to help someone that needs your help. He even had his wife jump on the call and proceed to tell me how many millions of dollars they’re going to make in five years and how I can jump onboard and do the same for myself.

After getting the full court press that day, we had set up to talk again another day. When that call came along, I told him I wasn’t sure I wanted to join his group. He is from one of those cookie cutter financial groups. I was very concerned that I would be giving out bad advice as I felt they were limited with options.

Once I told him I wasn’t interested, he proceeded to ask why. I said that I would have a very difficult time dealing with the scenario where I made a recommendation to someone and it was wrong. So, I asked him, How do you deal with that situation? I would want to either pull out a checkbook and replace what they lost or I would want to kill myself.

Here was his answer. It’s easy. You don’t worry about it. You know why? Because it’s their own fault if they invested in the market and lost money.

Yep. You read that right. That’s his response.

When I told him this certainly wouldn’t work for me because I want something or someway for the client to make double digit returns and almost guarantee the results. He told me to not waste my time, it doesn’t exist. He actually told me that I would be calling him back to sign up with him.

I’m so glad he told me that. That made it my mission to prove him wrong. As I researched more and more, I started to find that the issue didn’t stem just from companies like his. The issue was far greater than that. It actually stemmed from all aspects of Wall Street. That lead to the 10 Myths Wall Street doesn’t want you to know about financial planning.

Now my mission was to find a way to successfully invest not by