New Year's Day: Win Right Now

The calendar has turned. Some of you are already failing.

You woke up with a hangover. You woke up with a vague sense of hope. You wrote a list of “Resolutions” on a sticky note. “I will save more money.” “I will work harder.” “I will be better.”

Burn the note. Hope is not a strategy. Hope is a liability.

You do not need a resolution.

You need a Rebuild.

A reframe: you are not a person. You are a biological machine blessed with creative power, intuition, incredible drive and an onboard computer that can simulate the future.

You are an Engine designed for one purpose: Output.

But your engine is misfiring. Your timing is off. Your intake is clogged. You are leaking torque at every gasket.

The modern economy is not a playground. It is a racetrack. And you are driving a sedan with a blown gasket while competing against Formula 1 cars driven by algorithms.

You want to win? Stop wishing for a better year. Build a better engine.

You win by starting right now. We are going to strip your financial chassis down to the bolts.

We will focus on three mechanical systems:

1. Acceleration (Asset Growth)

2. Intake (New Income Streams)

3. Combustion (Income Amplification)

Let’s get to work.

Phase I: Acceleration

Some believe that wealth comes from “saving.” This is a lie told to keep you poor. Saving is static. Wealth is kinetic.

If you put money under a mattress, it dies. Inflation eats it. It is entropy in real-time. You need Velocity.

You need to take the raw fuel (capital) and convert it into forward motion (equity). But there is a problem. Your transmission is full of sludge.

1. Eliminate Parasitic Loss (Fee Drag)

Every engine has friction. In finance, friction has a name: Fees.

Wall Street is not a charity. It is a mechanism designed to siphon horsepower from your engine to theirs. They call it an “Expense Ratio.” They call it “Management Fees.”

I call it Parasitic Loss.

If you are paying 1% in fees, you think you are losing 1%. You are wrong. You are losing the compound growth of that 1% over thirty years. You are bleeding tens of thousands of dollars of torque because you were too lazy to read the prospectus.

The Command: Audit your holdings. Today. If you are paying more than 0.5% for an index fund, you are being robbed. Move the capital. Stop feeding the parasite. Streamline the gears.

2. Calibrate the Gearing (Asset Allocation)

You are afraid of volatility. So you hoard cash. Maybe you buy bonds. You play it safe. But safety is a trap.

In a high-inflation environment, cash is not a safety net. It is an ice cube melting on the sidewalk. To generate torque, you need traction. Traction requires weight. That weight is Equities.

If your time horizon is ten years or more, holding cash is negligence, and I don’t know a single investor who plans to be dead in 10 years.

The Protocol: Check your gearing. Are you heavy on cash? Shift. Are you heavy on bonds? Shift. You need exposure to the market. You need to be in the gear that provides maximum torque, even if the ride is bumpy. Accept the vibration.

The vibration means the engine is working.

3. Install the Governor (Automated Scarcity)

The human brain is flawed. It is designed for immediate gratification. It sees resources and wants to consume them now. You cannot trust your brain. So you must bypass it.

You need a Governor. A mechanical limiter that prevents you from blowing up your own engine.

This is “Automated Scarcity.” If the money hits your checking account, you will spend it. The “lifestyle creep” is a law of physics. Gas expands to fill the container. Spending expands to match the income.

The Fix: Install the limiter. Set up auto-transfers that fire the moment your paycheck hits. The money moves to the investment account before you even see it. You never touch it. You never smell it. You are forced to run your life on the remaining fuel. This creates artificial pressure. Pressure creates diamonds. Pressure creates efficiency.

Lifestyle inflation creep has crippled many empires before they formed. This is one strategy to reduce that risk.

Phase II: New Income Streams

Most of you are running on a single intake valve. One job. One paycheck. One point of failure.

If that valve clogs? If that valve breaks? The engine dies. The car stops. You starve.

This is unacceptable fragility. A robust engine needs multiple intakes. It needs redundancy. You need to decouple your RPM from your fuel source.

You have two options to upgrade the intake: The Turbocharger (Buying Income) or The Auxiliary Unit (Building Income).

Option A: The Turbocharger (Buying Income)

This requires capital. This is for the soldier who has saved but has not built. You are using stored energy to force more air into the engine.

1. Dividend Growth You buy shares of companies that pay you to own them. It is not exciting. It is not “crypto.” It is boring. Boring is good. Boring is reliable. You are building a fuel line that drips steadily, regardless of whether you work or sleep. You can borrow against this portfolio. You can write options against it. Speaking of…

2. Selling Theta (Options) This is technical. This is high-pressure. But it is powerful. You sell the risk to others. You collect the premium. You become the casino, not the gambler. Not passive, you have to manage positions. You can invest into companies that professional sell Theta (ETFs do this, I’ve seen HFs run this strategy, etc…).

3. The Real Estate Syndicate You do not want to be a landlord. Fixing toilets is low-leverage labor. It is manual maintenance. You want to be the owner of the structure, not the janitor. Invest in REITs or syndications. This is “Mailbox Money.” It is the purest form of intake. The fuel arrives. You do nothing.

4. High-Yield Cash Management Lazy capital is a sin. If your emergency fund is sitting in a standard bank account earning 0.01%, you are insulting your own labor. Move it to a High-Yield Savings Account (HYSA). Move it to a Money Market Fund. Make the fuel sit in a pressurized tank, not a leaky bucket.

Option B: The Auxiliary Unit (Building Income)

You have no capital? Then you must use sweat.

You must fabricate the parts yourself at the start. No shame there. Get building.

This is time-intensive. This is grinding metal.

1. Service Arbitrage You have a skill. The market has a price. Find the gap. Consulting. Writing. Coding. Do not treat this as a “hobby.” Treat it as a secondary engine. Run it on nights. Run it on weekends. It is grueling. Good. Fatigue is the cost of entry.

2. Digital Products This is the holy grail of leverage. Code. Media. Books. You build it once. You sell it a thousand times. The marginal cost of replication is zero. This is infinite scalability. This is how you turn a single piston stroke into a perpetual motion machine.

Phase III: Amplifying Current Income

This is where the battle is won.

You are obsessed with side hustles. You are obsessed with saving $5 on coffee. Stop it. You are missing the biggest lever in the machine.

Your primary income. Your 9-to-5. This is your main drive shaft. If you are running at 50% efficiency here, no amount of “side hustling” will save you.

You need to increase the Compression Ratio. You need more bang for every hour of labor.

1. The Loyalty Tax (System Calibration)

You are loyal. You think the company loves you. You are a fool. The company is a machine. It is designed to minimize costs. You are a cost.

Data shows that employees who stay longer than two years are paid 50% less over a lifetime than those who switch. This is the “Loyalty Tax.” You are paying a tax for your own comfort.

The Action: Interview. “But I don’t want to leave.” I don’t care. You need market data. You need leverage. An offer letter from a competitor is not a betrayal. It is a pressure gauge. It tells you exactly how much horsepower you are actually generating.

Take that gauge to your boss.

Demand the recalibration.

Or drive the car off the lot.

2. Operator vs. Owner (ECU Re-mapping)

You are currently an Operator. You trade time for money. This is a linear equation. Time is finite. Therefore, your money is finite. You will hit a redline.

You must re-map your Engine Control Unit (ECU). Shift from Operator to Owner. Stop asking for a higher hourly rate. Start asking for a piece of the machine.

The Command: Equity. Commission. Performance Bonuses. You want your compensation tied to Results, not Hours.

If you generate a million dollars of value, and you are paid by the hour, you are being exploited.

If you are paid by the result, you are a partner.

Align your incentives with the chassis of the business.

3. Forced Induction (Upskilling)

The market is evolving. The old engine designs are obsolete. If you are still operating on the skills you learned five years ago, you are a vintage car. Vintage cars are nice to look at. They are useless in a race.

You need Forced Induction. You need AI. You need Automation. One engineer with an LLM is worth ten engineers without one. One writer with a synth-mind is worth an entire newsroom.

The Reality: If you are not using these tools, you are being lapped. You are running naturally aspirated in a turbo era. Learn the tools. Multiply your output.

Make yourself so efficient that firing you would be an act of corporate suicide.

Then build so many systems that you decide to run your personal Wealth Company vs working to build someone else’s equity.

The Final Assembly

The diagnostic is complete. The parts are laid out on the garage floor.

You have the blueprint for Acceleration.

You have the schematic for Intake.

You have the tuning guide for Combustion.

Most of you will read this. You will nod. You will feel a brief spark of motivation. And then you will close the tab. You will go back to your old engine. You will sputter through January. You will stall in February. And you will remain broken.

Don’t be that casualty.

Do not be the rusted wreck on the side of the road.

The key is in the ignition. The track is clear. The lights are green.

Your Next Step: Open your banking app right now. Not later. Now. Calculate your monthly “Parasitic Loss” (Fees + Subscriptions + Waste). Write the number down. That is your enemy. Destroy it.

Then, initiate the first transfer to your “building wealth engines” account, and decide where your first allocation is going.

Start the engine.

Friends: in addition to the 17% discount for becoming annual paid members, we are excited to announce an additional 10% discount when paying with Bitcoin. Reach out to me, these discounts stack on top of each other!

👋 Thank you for reading Wealth Systems.

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I started Wealth Systems in 2023 to share the systems, technology, and mindsets that I encountered on Wall Street. I am a Wall St banker became ₿itcoin nerd, ML engineer & family office investor.

💡The BIG IDEA is share practical knowledge so we can each build and optimize our own wealth engines and combine them into a wealth system.

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