Thomas Cox the Financial Architect Helping Business Owners Build WEALTH | DFS 392

Welcome to Destin for success. I'm your

host, Jennifer Takagi, and I'm kind of excited today about my

guest, Thomas Cox. We have already been chit chatting for a

bit, because that's what I do, and I love that he used to be a

football coach, and he's into food and all the things that I

love and so and we're going to talk about wealth today, on top

of all of that, then we can throw in the wealth. I'm very

excitable about all of this. Thomas, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Jennifer, so much. I appreciate it. And

yes, the conversation has been wonderful so far, so I know this

is going to

be great. So give us a little bit about your

backstory and what led you into this. Okay? So the title is

financial architect, helping business owners build wealth.

Most of my audience business owners, entrepreneurs, and yes,

we can't do great things in the world if we don't have the money

coming in.

That's exactly right. So growing up from the

time I was five, I knew what I wanted to be. I was never the

kid that says I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. I

wanted to be a college football coach. So my dad is in the Hall

of Fame in the state of Alabama for high school coaching. And I

got into coaching. Played football in college, got into

coaching. Absolutely loved it. So from zero birth to 32 years

old, that's what I did. I was football and so really, really

felt moved to get out, and didn't really know what I was

going to do, so got out of coaching and started working at

a church. Guy comes into me, and I was, I was really scared when

I got out, but my dad, who was who coached for 37 years, came

to me, and I said, I don't I'm a little concerned. I said, Dad, I

don't know if I can do anything else. This is all I've ever

done. He said, he said, he looks at me and he goes, son, you can

do anything you want. That was extremely encouraging, because

all I'd ever done was football, but in that process, and we can

unpack this later, the skills I had by coaching for 10 years in

college football helped me so much as a business owner. I mean

dramatically as a business owner. So I get out of coaching,

and I'm working at a church. My boss walks in says, Hey, can you

help me with a meal plan? So he helps me. I help him with a meal

plan. And then this is in 2012 13 ish, and I start doing meal

plans for him. Well, fast forward, handful of years later,

we've done we did you know, 1000s of meal plans for people

in 27 different countries. Now, this was way different than what

you have today. It was targeted to busy moms. This wasn't meat

head gym rats. This was busy moms. This was Jennifer with her

three kids, going to and from her job every day, back, ballet,

football, practice, basically all that. That's our target. So

we did that well, then that morphed into catering, okay,

then we morphed into meal prep. So we're doing meal plans, meal

prep and catering. This is in a little bitty place in Tennessee.

So that grows. I got my first taste of being a business owner,

and absolutely loved it. Absolutely loved being

unemployable. Absolutely loved working as hard as I wanted to,

to make as much as I wanted to. So I did that. And I'm still, we

still do that. I still own two different catering companies

here in Birmingham. I moved from Tennessee to Birmingham,

Alabama, back where I'm from, and so we did that for a while.

And then I still, like said, I still own the company, two

catering companies, and we have a company that feeds a college,

Hollins College, here in Birmingham, Alabama, so, but

about five or six years ago, I got into the finance part

of just the world,

excuse me. So 2017 I bought our first apartment

complex. So we own a all my friends were buying single

family homes. And I listened to this video. This guy said, why

would I want to buy a single family home when I'm 10 single

family homes, when I've got 10 roofs and 10 HVACs, and each

started, and I said, this is what I'm gonna do. So I bought

it. We bought my partner bought a apartment complex. Well, the

reason I bought an apartment complex because at 18 I started

dollar cost averaging. Do you know what that is? Jennifer, in

the market? I do,

but go ahead and explain it for the audience.

Yeah.

Dollar cost averaging is at a monthly draft

from your checking account into a what they call a brokerage

accounts, which that brokerage account then goes and buys

different stocks and things like that in the market. All you're

doing is putting money in the market in a systematic way every

month. So I started when I was 18, and just did that

systematically every month. So when I was 37 I guess we bought

our first apartment complex. Two years later we bought another

one. Part of the way we did that was number one. Was all the

money that I invested over the years. That's number one. Number

two, owning my own business. So when you own your own business,

you've got a couple options. You can take the money that you've

you've made, and you can roll that back into your business.

People say that I put it back into the business. What the heck

does that mean? Well, there's only so much you can do, but if

your profits good enough, you can take that money and put it

in your business to grow with it, through marketing, buying

better equipment, whatever. Lacher, or you can take that

money and you can invest in other assets that can produce

wealth alongside your business. That's what I chose to do. So

our business is still growing, and we're taking a lot of the

profits and we're putting it in another avenue. So we bought a

second apartment complex. After that, I bought another complex

on my own, so on 32 units myself. But then in the midst of

all that, Jennifer, what we started doing is we started

dealing with private lending. So I got into these real estate

circles and met some people, and someone asked me if I knew

anything about what they call hard money lending, or private

money lending. I said, No, tell me more. So you loan money to

somebody, they give you a favorable rate, because you can

move with speed. Lot more details of that. So I started

doing that. So I've got apartments, I'm running our

business, and I was doing some private money lending, and it's

the easiest money ever made. So I started doing more than that,

more of that. Then a friend of mine sat down with me. I moved

back to Birmingham, a friend of mine sat down with me and said,

Hey, I want you to look at something. I said, Okay. I said,

What? He said, Okay. What if we could put your money in a spot

and it would continually grow, and you could borrow against

that money, but the principle, the number, the big number,

would still grow. So say I had $300,000 in an account, and I

borrowed 100 to do something with invest over here, but it's

still going to grow at 300 the violence is not going to come

down, so I'm going to grow them 300 but then take another 100

and go invest it. I said, that sounds like, oh, Justin. And so

what are we doing? And so he said, No, and he just began to

explain what they call infinite banking. And so I get went down

the rabbit hole, and I asked all the questions, and I watched all

the videos, and I did all the, all the, all the things that go

to that. And so I started down that path of understanding what

infinite banking is. I got my first Infinite Banking policy,

and I started using it, and then I got another one, and then I

started to put policies on my kids. And so what infinite

banking is is it is me becoming the bank. I am putting money

into these, what they call cash value life insurance policies,

and I'm using the money in the policy to take and go and do

other things, all while the money continues to grow in the

policy. So it's a contractual guarantee, so I'm not worried

about the market, which is great, and I can use the money

in and out just like the bank does. So I got really, really

involved in that, and just started using that well. When I

started telling other people about it, it became something

that I really, really enjoyed. So here, over the last however,

many years, I've started doing that as my full time job. I

manage the food businesses. I do a good job at that, but then I

started brokering and doing infinite banking for business

owners, and it has been a game changer for so many people. So

the people that we target are business owners of any kind,

anybody that's doing investing in high w2 Okay, so those are

the three areas to be honest with you, it's not for someone

that's living paycheck to paycheck. So if you've making 60

or $70,000 a year and you're waiting to the end of the month

to get your check. This is not a system for you. There's got to

be excess cash in your life and in your ecosystem. That's why

it's so good for business owners. But what it does is it

allows you to have so much more freedom, financial enough to

depend on the banks for money, but also recapture all the

interest that you would be paying for banks. And so long,

long answer to say, I am loving and being involved in finance,

and I love that it wasn't a direct path, like

you said at birth. You knew you were going into football, and

then you're like, one day, oh, gee, what do I want to be when I

grow up? And that's right, that's that was the story that

just happened in my head. And I remember several years ago

talking to a friend's daughter, and she was like, like, I don't

know what I want to do. And she was like, in 10th grade, in high

school, and her friends were a year or two older, so they had

already picked their colleges. They had already, you know,

decided, and I looked at it, I went, girlfriend, like, I'm a

grown old woman and I still don't know what I want to do

when I grow up. If anybody had said with my French degree, I

was going to work in housing for the federal government, like

that wasn't on my list. That was,

you're the only person I know with a French

degree.

Hey, do you know the other one who has a

finished degree? That beautiful. Ashley Judd, I think there you

go, University of Kentucky. So she followed in my footsteps.

She followed in your footsteps. She did

know me, but she followed in my footsteps. No, I don't ever use

it. No, no, ever.

I have a history. I have a history degree.

Well, that probably comes in a little more

useful.

Yeah. It only with stupid facts I know, right? So

four and a half years of college, notice I said four and

a half, four and a half years of college, and the best class I

ever took was the social history of the automobile. I know more

stupid, silly facts about the car than anybody. Love it.

Dumbfounded. We were driving down the road. I said, Oh yeah,

that's right, you know, this is the reason this is and my kids

will go, what? And I go, Yeah, that's why that's like that.

How do you do that stupid car? Fact, Okay,

while we're off track, let's just stay on this road for a

minute, I didn't get cable TV for many years. I was the last

person of my generation to get cable TV, and I finally did, and

I got up on Saturday morning, I flip on the TV, and I just

landed, I don't know if it was the History Channel modern

marvels, was not around there, but some show, and they did a

whole episode 30 minutes. Maybe it was an hour on traffic

patterns. And if there is a car accident, it takes four hours

for traffic to start flowing normally, to regulate. So if you

leave the house at eight o'clock in the morning and there was a

car wreck at six, and you're caught up in all this traffic.

Quit being frustrated because somebody was in a car wreck at

6am and it hasn't had enough time to work. That's exactly

right. I mean, another trivial thing, you know, we're just a

plethora according to copia, I love big words like that, that

you never get to use. You never get to use so wealth. Okay, so

there's one person out there listening, and, you know, I've

already kind of had a little bit of a back talk about this, but

somebody out there's listening, and it's like they have all the

bad money stories in their head. Money is evil. Money is bad.

Rich people are jerks, blah, blah, blah, which I don't

believe or buy into any of that. But I think that money is our

currency, like in the olden days, if I grew vegetables,

which I would never do, but if I were in a pretend world to grow

vegetables, and you had the chickens, we might trade, I

would give you some carrots and you give me a chicken, sure.

Okay, money. I want everybody to hear this very clearly. Money is

the same way. It's just I don't have to grow carrots or raise

chickens, sure, to get the other things I want, need and enjoy,

to live a good life.

So let me, let me give this analogy.

Money is a tool. And you've heard that so many times

before,

but here this time, people, money is a tool.

It's a tool. I mean, it's all, let me, let me give

you this analogy. Also, it's like a gun. Okay, so money is a

gun. A gun can be used for evil. It can be used to kill someone,

it can be used to harm someone, just like money can be you can

use money in negative ways, but money can also feed your family.

Money can also protect you from evil. It's all a matter of how

you use it. You do a lot of coaching with people in what you

do, whether it be the emotional side and unpacking all these

different things. One emotion for you can be the total

opposite emotion for me and help this emotion could help me

dramatically, but this emotion may be harmful to you. Yep, it's

all about how do we learn and understand those emotions. So

I'm going to use your your world for for example, anger can be

very, very debilitating, but anger can be very, very

motivating in some ways. Okay, money is the same way. But

here's the thing, just like what you do, you teach people about

those emotions. We teach people about money and how to use it

properly. The Bible is very specific. Money is not evil. The

love of money is what the Bible said is the root of all evil.

The love I do. I everyone I would think, because could say

they do. Love money I do. I love the tool and the things that it

can do, but it is not have me. I love creating it, but I also

love what it can do to people. So having that and being able to

teach people about how to leverage that and use that is

extremely free

well, and it's a critical part. I was at a

conference and a retreat, actually, and this woman for two

days, one of the participants, was going on and on about how

evil money is. And finally, I was like, it's our currency.

Like, you're staying in a beautiful hotel and you're

eating amazing food, and it has to be paid for, and our way of

doing that in society is with money. And so yes. Um. So do you

teach people how to do this? Is this like, I mean, if you're a

coach for so many years, like, teaching is obviously in your

blood, whether you knew that or not, that might be a big aha

moment for you just now, but it's in your blood. So do you

work with people? Do you teach people? Like, how do you get

your message out, other than being

on the podcast. Yeah, sure. A lot. There's a

handful of different ways we do this. Number one way is

referrals. People say, hey, Thomas can help with this.

Thomas can help with that. But also, obviously, social media.

People send us teach these things. But a lot of times we

do, we sit down with people and we teach them the concepts that

we understand. Believe, I don't try to teach the whole thing. I

don't try to teach everything about money. What we specialize

in, specialize in is infinite making in teaching people that

process. Here's the thing, it's not for everybody. It's not it's

not for everybody. I need to qualify people and say, Hey,

this is not for you. This or or I sit there and go, Hey, this is

for you. I tell people this all the time. I looked at a guy that

is 28 years old, makes about $220,000 a year selling knives.

He sells knives. He's a great kid. Can wonderful salesperson.

I looked at him, I said, Hey, Devin, I would not be telling

you this and sharing this with you if I didn't think this would

be a slam dunk for you and your wealth journey. Because I said,

Hey, look, I don't tell everybody about this. I don't

because if I did, I would be wasting a lot of my time,

because a lot of the world is not ready for this concept. So

we do, we teach people how to use this, how to leverage it.

And sometimes it clicks with people, and they love it, and

they're on board. And sometimes it click? When it clicks, it

clicks, and you can't help but filter everything you do

through. How can I leverage this for my game?

I love that. So if somebody wants to get hold of

you to see if you know this is a fit, is there a place they can

go? Is there? Do you do webinars like, how can they find

out more? Yeah, I would say the best thing to do

is our website, Thomas cox.co Thomas cox.co and I give you a

link, Jennifer, and it's going to be, it's just a very simple

page that goes and explains in three simple videos what

infinite banking

is. Ah, okay, it's

super easy. It's less it's all right at 30

minutes, it's it's an intro video, and then a little bit

deeper dive. And then the third video is very specific. The

third video, you can pick a track, can be business owner,

you can be investor, or you can be high w2 you pick the one that

best describes you, and then watch, then I can say, hey, this

is for that path. And what that does is it gives you an idea of

what that is. And then I'm happy to sit on a 1520 minute call and

say, ask you a handful of questions and figure out if it's

right for you. I can tell, within five or 10 minutes if

this is going to be a fit for you, I can tell, and if it's

not, I'll just say, Hey, Jen, this is not a fit. Or hey, this

is but that's, that's the best thing, is our website. And then

I'll send you that link for for the video series.

Okay, yeah, and it'll be in the show notes. And

those of you who are listening to this, like just it's still on

your phone, just scroll down and get the show notes, and the link

will be there. So it'll be simple. People, I often hear,

don't take people off the platform. Well, they have to,

Yep, we got to take people off the platform. I love it. Okay,

so as we wrap up, yeah, what is the one message you want to

leave with my audience?

Everything you buy has a cost. If you're going to

borrow money to pay for something, you've got to pay

interest to somebody if you're going to pay cash for something,

you've got lost opportunity costs in that cash with infinite

banking, we can recapture all the interest that would be going

out to somebody else that I would be losing if I paid cash.

Understand and think, if you can understand and think of that,

you can be a lot more freer in your business journey.

Oh my gosh, thanks so much for being here

with us today and shared your message. I'm Jennifer Takagi

with destin for success, and I look forward to connecting with

you soon. Bye.