Here’s a more detailed, point-by-point breakdown that covers every part of the talk comprehensively:
- Building Personal Infrastructure:
- Kreil emphasizes the importance of creating one’s own financial infrastructure. Instead of relying on external systems (pensions, insurance, credit), individuals should focus on building a strong, self-sufficient asset base. This personal infrastructure provides security, independence, and long-term financial stability.
- Avoiding Liabilities and Living Modestly:
- During the initial phase of wealth-building, he advises against accumulating liabilities like mortgages, credit cards, car loans, and overdrafts.
- Kreil suggests living well below one’s means, possibly renting or sharing a space for up to 10-15 years if necessary, to avoid being burdened by debt. This helps maximize savings, allowing individuals to build assets instead of incurring financial obligations that drain resources.
- Starting Small and Building Assets Gradually:
- Kreil points out that building wealth doesn’t require huge startup capital. Many small businesses can begin with little to no funding, allowing individuals to start small and progressively build their asset base.
- He believes that entrepreneurship is a better route to financial freedom than relying on salaried employment, as it provides more control over wealth creation.
- Critique of the Pension System:
- He criticizes Western pension systems (in the U.S., UK, and Europe) for failing to provide adequate retirement support.
- Kreil notes that, on average, retirees only have enough pension savings to sustain their current standard of living for one year. This insufficiency forces many to downgrade their lifestyle or depend on their children for support in retirement.
- Kreil suggests building a “personal pension” by saving and investing independently, as relying on traditional pensions may not ensure a secure retirement.
- Flaws in Insurance:
- Kreil is skeptical about the insurance industry, describing it as largely exploitative. He explains that insurers use actuarial models to minimize payouts, resulting in only 2-4% of claims being honored annually across sectors like auto, home, and health insurance.
- He advises building wealth to act as a form of “self-insurance.” This wealth can cover unexpected expenses, negating the need for policies that might not pay out when needed.
- Criticism of the Credit System:
- Kreil views the credit system, especially credit scoring, as counterproductive. He finds it absurd that high scores are simply rewards for compliance with taking on more debt.
- The more debt one manages, the better one’s credit score, which only increases access to further debt. Kreil advocates avoiding this system and focusing on building an independent asset base free of credit reliance.
- Respect for Money and Asset Building:
- Kreil stresses that achieving financial success requires understanding money and its role in personal freedom. He suggests being indifferent toward money itself but valuing the control and options wealth provides.
- He advises seeking to “own” the system by building one’s own financial infrastructure, rather than merely functioning within traditional structures.
- Focus on Passive Income and Cash Flow:
- Kreil emphasizes the importance of generating passive income through investments and other cash-flow-producing assets.
- Passive income allows wealth to grow over time, providing income even without active work. This, he says, is crucial to becoming financially independent and is the goal of building personal infrastructure.
- Kreil acknowledges that this process is slow initially but compounds over time, making it easier to sustain and grow wealth as the years go by.
- The Importance of Patience and Long-Term Mindset:
- Kreil notes that the journey to financial independence often takes years and requires a disciplined, long-term mindset.
- He quotes the saying, “It takes 20 years to become an overnight success,” emphasizing the need for consistency and patience in wealth-building efforts. Over time, this approach yields exponential returns.
- Conclusion – Embracing Self-Reliance:
- Kreil wraps up by stressing that the path to wealth involves rejecting conventional advice around liabilities, credit, pensions, and insurance.
- Instead, true financial security and independence come from self-reliance: building personal infrastructure, focusing on asset accumulation, generating passive income, and maintaining a long-term, patient approach to wealth creation.
In essence, Kreil’s talk advocates for a disciplined, self-reliant approach to finances, rejecting traditional systems in favor of a personal infrastructure focused on long-term asset-building, independence from debt, and wealth generation through passive income.
The video is by InstituteofTrading and is titled Anton Kreil – Build and Own Your Own Infrastructure. The entire transcript is given below.
how do you die how do you build your own infrastructure okay well listen we’re gonna get yeah we’re gonna get in a cab now and head back up to the hotel before we go to before we go to the airport if we jump in the cab now I’ll show you how to build your own infrastructure okay so this infrastructure issue how does it work so building your own infrastructure ahem okay well this period we talked about earlier between essentially going from zero to owning assets that periods we talked about so having no liabilities during that period what you’ve actually got to do and it might sound obvious but what you actually have to do is safe and you have to build your asset base because during that period it’s gonna be very very easy for you for example to go and take a job somewhere get a salary every month and then start signing up for liabilities based on that salary so the best way to do things is actually build up your business so work for yourself build up a business it can still be done if you’re working for a business or a corporation but it’s more difficult you’ve just got to live well within your means and you’ve got to have no liabilities so liabilities like we talked about earlier with mortgages overdraft facilities credit cards taking loans to buy cars stuff like this you got have no liabilities you are safe and you know even if you have to rent for example or share an apartment for 10 or 15 years you’ve got to be prepared to do that and you’ve got to drop your pride you know setting up businesses if that’s the choice you’re going to make there’s a million ways to make a million dollars you know you can start off small and you don’t have to have hundreds of thousands of pounds hundreds of thousands of dollars to start businesses off most small businesses you can start off with nothing so if that’s something that you want to do you know that’s the way you have you have to start small and built and built this asset base so during that entire period going from 0 up to owning assets it’s saving and having no liabilities and in its entirety what you’re trying to do is essentially build your own infrastructure so you’re building your own pension now if you look at the way the pensions industry works in the Western world so if you look at the United States United Kingdom Europe what’s become really apparent in the last five to ten years is that the generation previously who started on the pensions infrastructure in the 70s and over the throughout the 80s and 90s and noughties those people are not able to retire properly so if they can’t do that it means the pensions question or the pensions solution has not been met because the whole point of a pension is that it provides you income in retirement and these people can’t retire so pensions infrastructure has failed in the Western world so whether that’s the fault of the system or the fault of the people themselves it’s probably a mixture of the two but essentially the stats are across the US Europe United Kingdom the annual national average salary in each of those regions is basically equivalent to what an average person’s pension value is when they retire which means if everybody retired today in the Western world it would mean that they’d only be able to live in their current living standards for one year and this is why everybody downgrades their lifestyle when they retire or rely on their children to pay for their retirement that’s not something you want to be doing you know if you want to be wealthy you want to be building your own pension not outsourcing it but in sourcing your pension so learning how to do things properly so the pensions infrastructure has failed another another infrastructure you know that you have to be very very careful of is insurance you know insurance is a classic example where it’s essentially a fair pitch you know insurance companies create policies you know this can be on anything can be on home insurance car insurance health insurance it doesn’t matter because at the end of the day it’s just thought numbers to the insurance company they create the policies you pay a premium for it and they literally hire people like actuarial mathematicians to build models to insure that they never pay out so or if they pay out it’s a tiny percentage of overall policies so insurance claims for example in the car industry the home insurance market medical insurance these types of policies the percentage that get paid out on per year I mean it’s so small I mean we’re looking at like two to four percent of policies per year so you know the best way to create your own insurance and it’s again pretty obvious is to build your own infrastructure so you become wealthy so imagine in you know why do you take in an insurance policy to say for accidents or health insurance because one day you might have an accident and people live in fear that one day they will and then they have all these medical expenses that they have to pay so let’s say for example in 15 25 years you’re going to have an accidents where you walk into the road the road and you get hit by a car and you’re gonna be in hospital for a month well the only real way to reassure yourself against that is to actually just become wealthy you could so if you spend all that time knowing that that could be the case it’s lazy to go and pay for a premium that might not for a policy that may never actually pay out so insurance is another infrastructure as well as pensions that isn’t necessarily built for your own benefit and the other one is the whole private debt Mokey’s which we keep going back to so just think about for example credit reports and the credit reports companies just think how absurd this is you get scored on your ability to borrow and the higher your score the more you can borrow so the so the more but the higher you score and the more compliance you are when it comes to liabilities the bigger liabilities you can take on that’s your reward it’s complete insanity it’s absurd and if you want to start off on the road to success and build your asset base and build your own infrastructure these are all things that you have to avoid you have to literally do the opposite of what everybody tells you to do so going back to this point understanding the function of money respecting it having or being indifferent towards building money and becoming wealthy but wanting to do it because you understand how the system works and you don’t necessarily want to operate within it you want to own it this is the way you have to go you have to build your asset but you have to build your asset base and in that period as your building have no liabilities and it’s difficult to begin with but it gets easier over time because the key to this when you’re building assets is actually to generate passive income and cash flow you want to be making money while you sleep and it becomes exponential so it starts off difficult but it becomes progressively easier over the years and what’s the old saying it takes 20 years to become an overnight success but you’ve just got to stick at it so build your infrastructure yourself build your own infrastructure it’s the only way to go [Music]