Wealth Independence Podcast
The Wealth Independence Podcast guides high-income tech professionals through proven strategies for building passive income and achieving true financial independence.
Hosts Dustin Bailey and Adam Penn share battle-tested frameworks, real-world case studies, and hard-won lessons from their years of experience in private markets and alternative investments. Each week, they break down complex investment concepts, analyze current market trends, and interview successful investors and industry experts.
Through a freedom-first approach that emphasizes passive income, smart diversification, and thorough due diligence, learn how to shorten your learning curve and avoid common pitfalls on their path to financial independence.
Whether you're looking to understand private placements, real estate fundamentals, or alternative investment opportunities, Wealth Independence delivers actionable insights that help busy professionals make informed investment decisions.
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Interested in being a guest on the show? Reach out to us at guests@wealthindependencepod.com with a brief intro and any relevant topics you'd like to discuss.
Episodes
87 episodes
v2.31 - No Investor Left Behind: 1031 Exchanges
A 1031 exchange (named for its section of the tax code) lets you roll real estate investment gains into a new property, deferring the tax and keeping all of your capital working. Dustin and Adam rank it as the second-biggest tax benefit in real...
v2.30 - The 80/20 Double Standard
Plenty of single-family investors have split a deal 50/50 with another partner and never thought twice about it. But put a passive syndication in front of them with an 80/20 LP/GP split, and the sponsor’s 20% suddenly becomes a dealbreaker....
v2.29 - 1,000 Investors, One Recurring Mistake (ft. Mike Sullivant)
Every deal that shows up in your inbox leads with the same summary: a projected return, a hold period, a market, an asset class. Comparing those side by side feels like diligence. But two deals projecting the same return can end in completely d...
v2.28 - Wall Street’s Hottest Trade Is Losing Money (On Purpose)
The Wall Street Journal is calling a new kind of tax-loss harvesting the hottest trade on Wall Street – funds built to deliver index-like returns with a smaller tax bill. Dustin and Adam read the coverage and land on a simpler summary: tax-loss...
v2.27 - No Investor Left Behind: Investor Splits, Waterfalls, and Preferred Returns
The first time you put money into a commercial real estate syndication, the way the profits get divided up can look surprisingly complicated – tiered splits, preferred returns, and something sponsors call a “waterfall.” It’s easy to read this c...
v2.26 - Investing in Private Equity for Individual Investors (ft. Sequoya Borgman)
For most individual investors, “private equity” is usually associated with “inaccessible” – something reserved for the Elon Musks and Blackstones of the world. Buying and running established companies has been an institutional game with large m...
v2.25 - Be the Bank, Not the Landlord (ft. Scott Carson)
Most real estate investing means owning the building – and taking on the tenants, toilets, and trash that come with it. But there’s another way to invest in real estate: owning the debt instead of the property, and collecting the payments as th...
v2.24 - No Investor Left Behind: Commercial Real Estate Debt
The loan on your house is simple: take out a 30-year mortgage, make your payments, own the house at the end. But commercial real estate debt is a different animal, with widely-varying structures that don’t exist in the residential world – and u...
v2.23 - The Manufactured-Home Niche Hiding in Plain Sight (ft. Brent Bowers)
Most real estate investors chase houses, apartments, or self storage. But Brent Bowers built his business on something almost nobody talks about: buying cheap vacant land and selling it at a profit…often with a brand-new manufactured home place...
v2.22 - Pensions, Private Credit, and the Quiet CRE Reset
What’s actually backing the money you’re counting on for later? Dustin and Adam take that question through two Wall Street Journal articles: one on what’s quietly accumulated inside pension funds, the other on a shift in how distressed commerci...
v2.21 - Rivers of Cash Flow (ft. Cameron Philgreen)
Cameron Philgreen photographed ~400 weddings before he bought his first rental property. He’s now up to 25 rentals, a specialty coffee shop, and a 50,000 sq. ft. commercial building in Waco, Texas – all of it sparked by one dinky house he bough...
v2.20 - No Investor Left Behind: Real Estate Professional Status (REPS)
Real Estate Professional Status (REPS) is a tax designation that lets qualifying investors deduct real estate losses (primarily from depreciation) against ordinary/active income like a W-2 salary. The benefit is real – but the bar is high, and ...
v2.19 - Hard Money Loans & Character-Based Lending (ft. Will Harvey)
When individual fix-and-flip investors need a loan to purchase and rehab a property, they usually don't get a bank loan – instead, they go to a private lender for a hard money loan: a short-duration note, secured by a first lien on the property...
v2.18 - No Investor Left Behind: Debt Service Coverage Ratio (DSCR)
Debt Service Coverage Ratio (DSCR) is a critical part of any debt-financed real estate deal, and shows up in nearly every real estate syndication pitch deck – but many passive investors would struggle to explain what it measures or why it matte...
v2.17 - Why Your Financial Advisor Won’t Cut Your Tax Bill (ft. Kevin Brunner)
Most investors think about taxes once a year: when they file. Kevin Brunner, founder of The Q Companies, joins Dustin and Adam to talk through what proactive tax planning looks like and why most financial advisors aren’t set up to deliver it.
v2.16 - Not All "Private Credit" Is the Same
“Private credit” has become a headline label covering wildly different investments – loans to software companies, rescue capital for distressed borrowers, and real estate-backed lending all filed under the same term.Recent Wall Street Jo...
v2.15 - How Everyday Trade Creates Fixed Income Returns (ft. Andreas Schweitzer)
A $3 trillion financing gap exists between the companies that make everyday products and the buyers who purchase them. When a hammer manufacturer needs payment in 30 days but Home Depot pays in 120, someone has to bridge that gap – and it’s rar...
v2.14 - Portfolio Review with a Billionaire's Playbook
How much of your portfolio should be liquid...and does a private credit fund or a line of credit “count” as liquidity?Adam recently got a one-on-one portfolio review from Bob Fraser (co-founder of Aspen Funds, author of Invest like a Bil...
v2.13 - Building a $50M Media Empire and Deploying It Into Real Estate (ft. Matt Paulson)
Matt Paulson started making money on the internet in the 1990s. Today he runs MarketBeat, a financial media company generating $50 million in annual revenue with 6 million email subscribers — all bootstrapped from a $5,000 college grant. He als...
v2.12 - No Investor Left Behind: Recourse vs. Non-Recourse Debt
Can you imagine borrowing millions for a real estate property, but not having to personally guarantee the loan? That’s the reality of non-recourse debt – and it’s one of the biggest differences between residential and commercial real estate len...
v2.11 - What Robert Kiyosaki’s Bitcoin Sale Actually Teaches
If you think a 14% return in the S&P 500 and a 14% cash-on-cash return in real estate are the same thing, you’re missing the full picture.Dustin and Adam dig into Robert Kiyosaki's recent tweet about selling $2.25 million in Bitcoin ...
v2.10 - Why the “Invitation Only” Investment Club Is Wide Open
Dustin and Adam break down why two Wall Street Journal articles published on the same day – one about “little known” tax strategies and another about the “invitation only” world of private investing – both miss the bigger picture.The WSJ...
v2.9 - No Investor Left Behind: STR Tax “Loophole”
Short-term rentals have become one of the more popular tax strategies for W-2 employees looking to reduce their taxable income – but is the so-called STR “loophole” really worth the hype?Dustin and Adam break down how the strategy works:...
v2.8 - Legacy vs. Liquidation
When you die, should your investment portfolio be sold off and split among your heirs…or structured to keep producing for generations? It’s a question most investors put off or avoid entirely, but the answer leads to two very different estate p...
v2.7 - Oil Wells, Tax Breaks, and Year-End Scrambles
What happens when you drill an oil well and oil starts gushing before you’re ready to catch it?Dustin and Adam walk through their latest oil and gas fund – an 11-well vertical portfolio in Oklahoma that closed for investment at the end o...
