[00:00:06] Viktoriia Miracle: Hello. Hello and welcome back to your happy time happy money podcast and today we have Billy Guan. Billy is a licensed financial consultant. He has been in the field of financial services for the last seven years and have the future then multiple publications, such as Yahoo finance, International Business Times, Disrupt and most recent recently, Buzzfeed. He helped many clients build up tax-free retirement strategies as well as protecting their assets from market downturns. Hi and welcome, Billy.

[00:00:43] Billy Guan: Thank you so much for having me.

[00:00:45] Viktoriia Miracle: Oh So good to have you here. I will always the first, my first question will be, tell us more about you? What inspired you to do what you do, who you are and how do we get to know you better?

[00:00:56] Billy Guan: Awesome. Awesome. So when I graduated from college, I used to be a magician, so I used to be a performer and I did shows and things like that. And I knew I didn't want to live that life for too long because it's, you know, living out of your luggage, going to different tours and stuff like that.

[00:01:11] And so, I was very fortunate and I met a mentor from a business project and he took me under his wing and we worked on a couple of business projects beforehand. And then after that project concluded, he reached out to me again and said, Hey, you know, I'm building a financial firm. Do you know anything about finances?

[00:01:29] And me being, you know, a magician at the time, I didn't know anything about money. And so I was like, I don't know anything. Can you teach me?

[00:01:35] Viktoriia Miracle: I'll create money for you if you want to.

[00:01:41] Billy Guan: Yeah. So that's pretty much, you know, how I kinda got into the financial education space. And so once he kind of showed me, you know, the ropes, the strategies that I teach my clients now. I fell in love with it. I thought there was a lot of opportunity and that people needed to know more about financial education and so I got ended up getting licensed. I'm licensed in. 25 states right now. And you know, now I'm just working with as many people across the country, as I can to teach them about financial literacy, how to get out of debt, how to build up their asset portfolio and how to make sure that they, you know, take care of their families properly with generational wealth.

[00:02:19] Viktoriia Miracle: Beautiful. So your niche, basically, is creating generational wealth or what, what is it investments or how you, how you do that?

[00:02:28] Billy Guan: So I work with a team. I work with pretty much an Avengers team of like, you know, financial professionals. So I work with credit repair specialists, tax advisors, real estate advisors, mortgage advisors, living trusts, and estate planning, lawyers and things like that.

[00:02:44] And I am the, the financial advisor or a consultant, that kind of works together with every single one of those components. And so when I work with clients, I look at their financial profile and I look them up and down and say, Hey, this is what you're messing up on. This is what we need to do. You need to talk this guy, this guy, and this guy, so that you can make sure that your assets are transferring over to your family without having to pay too much taxes or probate or things like that. And so we work together, hand in hand, whenever we work with clients,

[00:03:14] Viktoriia Miracle: I love that. So basically, you have like, yeah, everybody's doing their job and make sure that people are taking care off. So what is your basic let's say, if you don't have debt and then you want to start invest, what is your strategies on investing in those current situation?

[00:03:32] Current situation, current moment in the world?

[00:03:36] Billy Guan: In the current situation, the world right now, we are in unprecedented times, right? Going crazy. We don't know if it's going to go up if it's going to go down everything's overinflated. So one biggest thing, one of the biggest things that I teach my clients is how to make sure that they protect their assets and if the markets were to crash, they don't lose anything. And so obviously we want to build a foundation with those types of strategies, so that in case we do get to retirement age and we will right time, only moves forward. That person has that guaranteed lifetime income there in place and so once we kind of set that back in up.

[00:04:10] We can go into things like IRAs or crypto or real estate, other type of more quote unquote riskier type of investments, but we've just want to make sure that the backbone of your entire portfolio is safe. And then once income gets better, once you have more money coming in, you can then venture off into more quote unquote risky investments or other types of alternative investments.

[00:04:31] My whole thing is creating multiple layers of financial protection.

[00:04:36] Viktoriia Miracle: So what is this, some factors that will impact people's investment?

[00:04:41] Billy Guan: Taxes, volatility markets going up and down, asset under management fees and potential usage because, those four things can cause a person's ability to compound their investments to be severely impacted because taxes are going to be a huge thing in the future.

[00:04:57] Right now we owe like around $30 trillion, which means that if the us government was to Rob every single billionaire in the states, they would still owe 27, 28, 26 or $27 trillion, which means we have a lot of money that we need oh, right, and so that bill needs to be paid. The U S can't default on that, otherwise the entire global economy is going to collapse and so taxes are going to have to skyrocket and. If that's going to be the case, you want to make sure that you protect your assets from uncle Sam, because uncle Sam always wants a piece.

[00:05:33] Viktoriia Miracle: You just got me like a no, all I know that we have a really huge debt ceiling in America, but that if you even, you know, take money from all the millionaires and that's not enough, there is a definitely a problem right. There absolutely huge problem. So what can you do? Like what will be a number one advice to like, what's his start protect in the order?

[00:05:55] Like how to not be so much taxes. I think it's a lottery like I'm from Russia originally, and we don't pay that much taxes. And I don't think Russia owned that much money anyway, and it's still fine in here it's insane in America.

[00:06:12] Billy Guan: Oh, absolutely, and especially, especially since we're living in California too, that's also another, you know, tack on there. And so did I say trillion or billion earlier? I just wanted to clarify, I think trillion, right?

[00:06:26] Viktoriia Miracle: I think billions of dollars. Trillions of dollars.

[00:06:29] Billy Guan: Trillion. We owe 30, and if you Rob all the billionaires, it's still $26 trillion left, right. And so uncle Sam is going to look at other people's investments and things like that that are tax deferred.

[00:06:44] Things like 401k to kind of get their, the taxes out from there. And so there's a huge treasure trove there, which means that eventually when we get to retirement age, you know, we're going to be forced to pull that money. And that's when uncle Sam's going to tax people at higher federal levels. And depending on the states that you live in, you know, California has some of the highest taxes.

[00:07:04] I know a lot of folks that make really, really high incomes. They love California, but they move to places like Texas, Nevada, Florida, because they don't have that state income tax. And so that's a huge impact on a person's ability to retire, because if you're paying like 50% of your income to taxes, That's that's a huge problem.

[00:07:23] And so that's one really, really big thing. Now, another big thing is, volatility. You just never know what's gonna happen in the stock market, right? It goes up, it goes down, go sideways, whatever the case may be, who knows, three days from now, it might go up three days from now. So it's, you know, something that is very, very volatile and unpredictable.

[00:07:43] Now people can day trade, and that's totally fine. That's a, a way for them to make income, but it's not necessarily a way to build sustainable wealth.

[00:07:52] Viktoriia Miracle: Oh yeah. Absolutely takes a lot of, a lot of time and energy to day trade. So what do you, our advice is on taxes is just to move to other things.

[00:08:02] Billy Guan: Not necessarily, there's the attacks

[00:08:04] Viktoriia Miracle: What is it that we can do?

[00:08:10] Billy Guan: There's tax-free investment vehicles where you can put money into where essentially you pay your taxes up front right now when tax rates are low. And then in the future, when you decide to retire, you can pull all that money out completely tax-free. Now there's things like rots index plans, SERP plans, they're called supplemental executive retirement plans or rich man's Roth.

[00:08:29] There's a whole bunch of options out there and it just, most people don't know about it.

[00:08:32] Viktoriia Miracle: Beautiful. Alright, and the last question that I always ask on this podcast is if you're fill in the blank in a sentence, if you really knew me, you will know that I am blank.

[00:08:45] Billy Guan: If, if you really know me, you would know that I am a goofball at heart.

[00:08:53] I like making people laugh. when I do consultations, I try to incorporate jokes cause you know, with something as serious as finances, it requires a little bit of lightheartedness. People are way too uptight. So I want to make sure people are comfortable.

[00:09:06] Viktoriia Miracle: Yes, and I know that you are providing an amazing gift for our audience today. Well, tell us more about it?

[00:09:14] Billy Guan: So I do consultations, complimentary consultations to help people get them off there, a way to build wealth. And you could find me on a, your podcast page. Probably have all the links up there soon. So yeah, definitely look me up there.

[00:09:29] Viktoriia Miracle: Absolutely. And I know that the best platform for Billy is Instagram.

[00:09:33] If I don't mistaking and we will link if you're watching or listening to this episode, just scroll down in there in the caption, there is a link to our, that goes to web page where you can find audio, video version or transcript of this episode and send it to your friend. And if you found that helpful and useful, definitely share it with your family and friends and follow Billy and schedule call with him as well. All the links have been mentioned in this episode will be there. Thank you so much for coming over and sharing your knowledge and I'll see you in the next episode.

[00:10:07] Billy Guan: Thanks so much for having me.