The biggest money mistakes people make

I didn’t grow up with a roadmap for building wealth, so I’m writing this one down — mostly for my kids and grandkids, but if it helps your family too, that’s a bonus. The first rule is simple: stop piling up debt. My kids figured that out and taught their kids the same thing, and watching that happen is one of the best things I’ve seen in my life. Somewhere along the way we stopped thinking about money as a pile you’re always chipping away at, and started thinking about it as a river — you dip in what you need, and more keeps flowing behind it. That’s the difference between being scared of your bank account and actually having security.

If you own a big house with a big mortgage, your next move shouldn’t be a bigger house — it should be a small one, paid off, that you could move your whole family into if everything else fell apart. My wife and I have said it to each other more times than I can count: if a deal goes sideways or a partner burns us, we can always move into the rental. That’s not pessimism, that’s just knowing your floor. I want to see every American family own a home free and clear, even if it’s a modest one, because that’s the difference between wealth that can disappear overnight and wealth that can’t.

I’ve had people try to recruit me into more than one MLM over the years, and I actually joined a couple just to study how they work before I said no thanks. Here’s what I found: it’s never really about the product. It’s about how many people you can get to join underneath you, and the math only works for the person at the very top. Ninety-nine percent of people who join one of these lose money or make next to nothing once you count what they spent to join. The saddest part isn’t the money — it’s watching someone burn through their real friendships trying to recruit the people they love, and then losing those friendships when it doesn’t work out.

The way you spot one of these before it costs you anything: they always come to you as a fellow struggler who found the answer, not as a business selling you something. Ask them straight out what they’re actually selling, and if the answer is “check your DMs” instead of a plain answer, that tells you everything. Real help is upfront about the cost. If I want to help you with something, you’ll know exactly what it costs and what you’re getting — no course to buy first, no forcing you to recruit two more people before it’s free. I don’t charge anything for what I do here, and if somebody’s telling you they’ll “retire your husband” or hand you a free car, do the math on what that car lease actually costs you before you sign anything.

One of the money mistakes I see landlords make constantly is skipping documentation, and it always costs them later. Every time we move a tenant in, we walk the whole property on video together — them and us — and I ask them to point out anything that’s wrong before they move in. We look at every room, test the toilets, check the appliances, and I explain what’s their responsibility to maintain, like changing the air filter every few months. That video, plus photos of everything including the flaws, becomes the record both sides agreed to. It costs nothing and it protects everyone.

The same thing happens on the way out. We walk through again, on video, and talk through what we’re seeing — a stain here, a crack there — while the tenant is standing right next to us. When that stove turns out to still work fine and someone claims it never did, we’ve got proof. When the carpet comes back damaged and someone says it was already like that, we’ve got proof of that too. This isn’t about being suspicious of people — it’s about not leaving thousands of dollars of a decision up to two different memories of the same day. Document everything, every time.

If you’re going to buy physical silver, the first thing to learn is the spot price — that’s the real-time market value of the metal, and it moves every day. A reputable dealer will sell to you a little above spot and buy back from you a little below it. If someone at a pawn shop offers you 20% under spot, that’s not “gotta make a little too,” that’s them taking most of your money. Learn the number before you walk in anywhere, because a dealer that respects you will let you check it yourself.

The scams I keep seeing come from social media, and they’re easy to spot once you know what to look for. Somebody sells a coin made of titanium and calls it a “silver eagle replica,” or a fractional “silver” bar priced way above what the actual grams would be worth even at full silver value. A real one-ounce round from a name-brand dealer costs around a hundred dollars — if you see a “collector coin” that looks like an ounce of silver for twelve or thirteen dollars, it isn’t silver. And if the seller has comments turned off, that alone should tell you people have already caught them. Buy from a dealer with a track record, verify the weight and purity, and skip anything sold with pressure and no real answers.

People sell “infinite banking” or “be your own banker” as a way to escape the ups and downs of the stock market using a whole life insurance policy. Here’s what actually happens: you overfund a policy, and then you borrow against your own cash value at 9–12% interest to pay for things, while the insurance company keeps using your money the whole time. The first year or two of premiums mostly go to pay the commission of the person who sold it to you. It’s marketed to people who are scared and hand-to-mouth, but it was really built for people who are already wealthy and need estate-planning tools — not for a family with $300,000 trying to protect their retirement.

Life insurance has one real job: replacing your income if someone depends on it and you’re gone. If you have young kids and a spouse who counts on your paycheck, a term policy makes sense. Once nobody depends on your income anymore, you don’t need it — and you definitely don’t need it as an investment. If you’d taken the money from a cheaper term policy and just put it in a plain S&P 500 index fund over the last 20 years, you’d have come out ahead of a whole life policy paying 4–5%. The market goes up and down, and past performance never guarantees the future — but don’t let fear about volatility talk you into a guarantee that mostly guarantees someone else’s commission.

The mistake I see over and over with rental property is people paying too much for the house relative to what it can actually rent for. Our rule is simple: monthly rent needs to hit 1% of what you paid, or better. Buy a $50,000 house, it needs to rent for $500 a month. If you pay $300,000 for a house in a neighborhood where rent tops out around $1,700, the math will never work — and if you force it by charging above-market rent to make your payment, you’ll either sit empty or end up with the one tenant desperate enough to pay it, which is usually not the tenant you want. I rent my houses for less than the neighborhood average, and it’s not charity — it’s how I get the best tenants with the best credit, because good tenants have options and they take the good deal.

The other money mistake landlords make is skipping the work of actually screening tenants. We don’t just run an application and hope — we get on the phone with every applicant and talk it through: no evictions, no criminal background issues, income at three times the rent, and a credit score over 650. If someone’s short on one of those but strong everywhere else, we’ll work with them. If they’re weak on two, we tell them straight up so they don’t waste $35 or $40 on an application fee we already know won’t work out. That conversation takes time — sometimes an hour on the phone — but it’s the difference between a tenant who takes care of your property for years and one who costs you a full renovation.