In this episode, I bring back an incredible guest, Damion Lupo, to discuss EQRP (Enhanced Qualified Retirement Plan) and how it can transform your financial future. Damion shares his story of building and losing millions, only to rise stronger and more focused on creating tools to empower others to achieve true financial freedom.
We break down what makes EQRP different from traditional retirement accounts and self-directed IRAs. From avoiding the dreaded UBIT tax to gaining the ability to invest in real estate, gold, crypto, and more, this tool puts you in full control of your financial destiny.
Damion also dives into the incredible success of his latest venture, Frame Tech, and the lessons he’s learned from building over 70 businesses. His insights on financial freedom, leveraging EQRP, and investing in big solutions will inspire you to think bigger and take ownership of your future.
Damion’s links:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/damion.lupo/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/damionlupo/
TRANSCRIPTS
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Have you ever heard of EQRP? You want to know what it is and how do you actually use it where you take control of your own freedom. That’s what we’re going to talk about today. Hello, my Phil Ripples. This is Chris Miles, your cashflow expert in anti Financianal advisor. Welcome to Schutz for you. Those have worked so freaking hard for your money and you’re now ready for your money. Start working hard for you today. You want that free and cashflow now, not 30 or four years from now, but you want to become work optional where you work because you want to now because you have to. And most importantly guys, it’s not just about getting rich, it’s about living a rich life because as you are blessed and prospered financially, you have a greater capacity to bless the lives of those around you. That is a ripple effect I’m here to have you create today.
(00:54)
Thanks for allowing me to do so as well. Thanks for binging and sharing on our episodes. Guys, it has been such a pleasure to do so. As always, if you ever have questions or anything you need, go to our website, money ripples.com and contact us today. All right guys, so I’m bringing on back a guest that has not been on for literally hundreds of episodes. We got Damien Lupo here. Some of you guys, if you listen to other podcasts, you might’ve actually come across his stuff. This guy is like the king of EQRP. What is that? We’ll talk about that today. But also guys, we want to talk about his story and actually what he’s done in his own life because he’s built companies anywhere from zero to over a hundred million dollars. This has been over 70 companies that he’s helped do that. And so he is going to talk about his path of freedom, entrepreneurship and everything else and what’s led him to where he is today. So Damien, one more show.
Speaker 2 (01:42):
Chris, it’s great to be back. It’s good to see you.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Yeah, same here, man. So give us a little bit about your backstory, because like I said, unless they binged all the way back, they probably wouldn’t even find you. So tell us more about you.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Man, the story is pretty bloody. Back in the two thousands, I went out and started buying some real estate, thought I was super superman, 10 feet tall, Bulletproof, went from zero, had college dropout and started buying these houses and made a bunch of millions of dollars. And then 2008, I ended up losing 25 million out of 20 million. What that means is I was negative 5 million and had this whole reset thing. So that was about 50 companies in over the previous 15 years, all the things I’d done, that was really what told me, you’re not going to die if you lose money. You’re not going to die if you make a mistake because when you lose 25 million, most people cringe. They go, man, that’s a lot of money. And I was like, it is, but it’s always the same thing. It’s all you have. If it’s all you have.
(02:36)
So somebody that’s risking a hundred thousand or 20 million when you lose everything plus some, there’s still the experience you have to go, whoa, I’m starting over. And that was part of the core story. And really the coolest part about that was on the other side of that, I realized it wasn’t about the money, it was about the impact. The people like our EQRP community will talk about that, but I remember this guy reached out to me and he said, man, I really want to say thank you because of you and your team and EQRP. My wife is able to stay home and raise our young daughter. And so it’s those type of things where people do what you said, choosing your freedom, choosing to have the time and being able to determine your own course instead of saying, well, I guess I have to wait until I’m 60 or 65 and then I guess I’ll take the 3% of my portfolio. The traditional financial advisors tell you you can take, and then hopefully you don’t run out of money before you die. So this is the alternative to the traditional 401k thinking and what the government and advisors tell you, the EQRP is this tool that really does put you in the driver’s seat versus the trunk of your car hoping you don’t go off a cliff.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. One thing I love about your story, just going back a little bit there, is that a lot of people on the show here about me going from millionaire to upside down millionaire during that same period of time, but they’re like, oh, Chris was only a million dollars in debt, was 5 million in the hole. So that’s pretty incredible to come back from.
Speaker 2 (04:00):
It reminds me of Trump back when he wrote one of his books and he and his wife at the time were walking around and he said that homeless dude is worth more. And she’s like, well, he’s like, yeah, we’re 900 million in debt. And when it’s everything or it’s all relative, and the question is, how big is your thinking? And that’s the only thing that limits you on these swings being bigger and ultimately your wealth being beyond your wildest dreams. It’s how big can you think? I think there’s actually a book called that by Schwartz or Schwartzman, but it, it’s the thinking big is really what it is. And then realizing that even when you make mistakes or you lose money or both, it doesn’t eat you your mistakes. They grow you. And that’s the big shift for people. It’s like, oh man, this is a gift. This is not the end of the world. That’s right.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
It’s funny you mentioned that because actually in 2009, one of the books that gave me hope was Never Give Up by Donald Trump talking about all his failures. I call it his more humble book with air quotes about as humble as Donald Trump will ever get talking about his failures.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Yeah, I mean, humility has value. There’s also, there’s this fine line between arrogance and confidence. And for the outside world, confidence, a lot of confidence looks like arrogance. And I think for most of the people, they would say Donald Trump in particular is very arrogant, but the reality is he’s just very confident. And when you’ve made lost billions of dollars, you’re going to look different and you’re going to sound different than other people. So just take it with a grain of salt, not to be overly political or anything, but it’s the same thing with money. When you go out there and somebody says what I’m saying, there’s just a truth about that. That’s just what happened. And the greatest gift to that was I stepped back and I asked myself, what is my role? Why am I here? And when I got down to it, it was to be a teacher to teach people real things based on real experiences that I’d had.
(05:48)
Not some book I read, but I just went through all this stuff and how can I give people financial freedom? How do I empower them, not give them a lottery ticket and say, here won. But really what was that? And I realized watching both my parents retire and then die broke. What’s the reality? People have retirement accounts that they don’t know what to do with. They think that they’re stuck in mutual funds and stocks. And the truth is the tax code lets you do something totally different if you want, you know about it. And that’s where EQRP when I created that, that’s what it was all about, giving people control of their retirement accounts so they had a fighting chance to actually have a future of freedom and not a future of slavery.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
And that was even my next question for you actually, was because generally not big fans of government plans like IRAs, 4 0 1 Ks, traditional stuff, self-directed is okay because at least you have a little bit more control, but still the government can change the rules. What makes EQRP different than doing a self-directed IRA?
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Well, traditionally, self-directed IRAs are something where Schwab or Fidelity or somebody says here, you can pick your stocks that you want, you can pick, and you’re still stuck in the paper assets. Paper meaning stocks, mutual funds, things that are made up on paper and there’s no real physical thing. They’re a derivative of a company. And so what EQRP is that it gives you an option to control your money and invest in things like real estate, like private businesses, gold, silver, crypto, all these really interesting things that you could actually connect to get your arms around. And the best option in the world, from my opinion, is the Roth EQRP, where when you have your money grow in, let’s say it’s a real estate, let’s say you bought Bitcoin when it was a thousand bucks and then now it’s 60,000 and you’ve got this 60 x return.
(07:26)
If it’s in a Roth account or Roth EQRP, you’re not paying taxes on that forever. In fact, heir’s passed when you die, you’re still not paying, your heirs aren’t paying taxes. So my belief is that everybody should have a Roth account of some sort, and to have the most control, you’re going to have a Roth EQRP. So you don’t just have to buy stocks and because you can control, you can hold, possess, possess these assets. So that’s why I like it. I generally am in the same thought process, government controlling things. My friend Robert Kiyosaki says that he’s like Government 4 0 1 Ks and pension plans are terrible. I’m like, yeah, but except he’s not familiar with, I mean, I’ve taught with them on stage and I don’t think he was listening because the Roth EQRP gives you the ability to buy things and not have to ever pay taxes, and you don’t have to do 10 30 or exchanges. You have all this control.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
And
Speaker 2 (08:14):
So that’s a very big difference compared to what most traditional IRAs or self-directed IRAs might look like.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
Well, let’s get more specific is self-directed. IRAs can let you do alternative investments too. We know that. So what gives you the advantage of the EQRP, even if it’s a Roth, right? I mean, what’s the real advantage or difference between those two when people want to do real estate deals?
Speaker 2 (08:33):
So there’s a couple of very big specific ones. One, if you’re ever doing real estate and you use a self-directed Roth IRA, there’s a UBIT tax that you could get hit with where you literally have to pay taxes on leveraged real estate. You’re exempt from that with an EQRP, Roth EQRP or regular EQRP. So there’s one, if you’re doing real estate, there’s no reason in the world you’d ever want to use an IRA because you’re probably going to use debt. The other thing is, so that’s huge and that tax isn’t little. It’s 37% on most of the gain from ordinary income, which is a lot of damn money. That’s unnecessary. It’s optional. The other one that’s really big is that you can physically take possession of assets, so you could take possession of physical gold, silver, bitcoin. You cannot do that legally with an IRA or a Roth IRA. So major differences, you’re in control of your checkbook. You don’t need to get permission from a custodian, an EQRP, you’re the trustee. So there’s massive differences with these two things.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
Yeah, I know, especially because it’s trended more in the last several years, but I mean, especially with Bitcoin, how many people are like, well, wait, I can have Bitcoin and not pay tax on it. That’s possible. Yeah, it could be, right?
Speaker 2 (09:39):
It’s entirely possible. You just have to have better information. If you want to change your taxes, change your facts, and that’s really how it is. A lot of people got hammered with Bitcoin. What’s funny, it’s people are like, I need to track all my Bitcoin or all my crypto stuff. If you were literally buying and selling inside of a Roth EQRP and you were holding it, you wouldn’t care what happened. And the government quite frankly wouldn’t care either because there was no tax event for you buying and selling things. That’s not the case if you’re doing it personally. So there’s a really clear reason why you’d want to use this because it takes you out of the tax regime completely forever.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
Now, was it just as easy to roll money into EQRP as it would be like in a self verted irate?
Speaker 2 (10:17):
Yeah, it’s really, really simple, and one of the reasons it’s simple is because you’re rolling money into an account that you control. So you don’t have a bunch of other people. There’s not a bunch of intermediaries that you’re trying to dance through their documents and things. EQRP company effectively does all of your paperwork and says, okay, sign here. And then we organize everything. Setting up bank accounts and brokerage accounts and all the different things, crypto exchanges, it’s very straightforward because there’s a lot of work behind the scenes that gets taken care of so people don’t have the brain damage. This stuff does get complicated if you’re doing it on your own, which is quite frankly what a lot of people will do. They go, I can just do this on my own. They’re cheap. And when you’re cheap, you pay a big price because you end up making mistakes.
(10:56)
One guy actually did not want to do. One of the things we do is we prepare any tax forms. He said, I’ll do it myself. I don’t want to spend a few hundred bucks. He ended up with a $60,000 penalty and his tax attorney said, sorry, you have to pay it. You literally didn’t file this thing. You made an error and they did not forgive it. So $60,000 to save a few hundred bucks and that’s all included. You get all that service. So here’s the big takeaway, don’t be cheap. It’s really fricking expensive to be cheap.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
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Speaker 2 (12:03):
That’s exactly right.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Yeah. Now tell us more about, because as you build up this EQRP community, you’ve actually started a brand new business, right? Tell us a little bit about this that’s now worth over what you say, 400 million at this point?
Speaker 2 (12:16):
Yeah, so about five years ago, a very close friend and a business partner and I decided that we were going to look at creating opportunities for people to invest with us. So we started off creating some opportunities around self storage and gold and silver, and then that evolved and what it led to a few years ago was a company called Frame Tech. It was basically an idea. There’s a lot of ideas out there, and this idea came to us and we said, wow, here’s what the idea is. It’s this huge problem called the housing crisis. We don’t have enough units. We’re somewhere between five and 10 million missing units. It didn’t get better over the last three or four years when you had 10 million illegal immigrants come in and now there’s just a gap in the market. We don’t have enough. So these guys said, Hey, we have an idea.
(12:59)
We have decades of experience building trusses and walls, and that was the biggest gap in housing. We can’t build enough stuff. We can’t build a fast enough, and the quality hasn’t really changed over the last 70 years. I mean, the last innovation in the space was the nail gun for cry out loud. So now these guys said, we have this idea, we can automate the process. We can do things four times faster. As an example, if a house takes, if it takes two weeks, two frame up, we do it in two days. And that’s from the design to literally producing all of the floors, the walls. This is anything our men’s houses, so it’s four times faster. We do it with 10 times better quality. So there’s really very little tolerance inside of a manufacturing facility, and there’s 99% less waste. So you start thinking about that.
(13:43)
All those things I mentioned are not only they’re good for every part of the environment, the people, the quality of the house, but it actually ends up saving a crap load of money. So ultimately you have a better quality product for less money. And so we had this idea, well, ideas are interesting, but then you have to execute and how do you execute on that? You have to have 40 or 50 million to start. So our community came together and they said, yes, we want to do that. So we went and put the money together and we’re able to build this, and it’s starting to come online now two and a half years later, and it went from a napkin to an enterprise that’s appraised at third party, appraised at $463 million today. So that’s what happens when you build community and you give people power and control over their future. They say, we want to build solutions to giant problems, and that’s what we’re doing right now.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
Yeah. What were some of the biggest lessons you learned along the way as you’re developing this?
Speaker 2 (14:33):
I mean, one, you have to be willing to have brass balls because there are so many things that you think you know a lot and you have experience of decades. But it all comes down to the execution intelligence. What I tell people all the time when I’m teaching them about investing is it has everything to do with people and almost nothing. With a deal, you can evolve a deal, but if you have the wrong execution team, the leadership, the execution intelligence is where everything happens. And so that’s your first question. Do you have the people that are all in, is this all they’re doing? Are they putting up a bunch of their money and all of their time? And if you don’t and just run away? So I’ve learned, fortunately, we have the best team I’ve ever worked with. I mean, just unbelievable. And things are generally almost always going to take longer and they’re going to cost more.
(15:19)
Our original budget was, I think it was like 35 million. We’re going to end up being at about 60 million. And that’s because we expanded it, we added more robots. So if you’re doing something that’s complex like manufacturing one, it’s almost impossible to do without world-class talent, and it’s still hard and it’s going to cost more. So people have come to me and said, I’m going to build tiny houses, and they say, we’re going to raise $10 million. And I’m like, you should raise 20. And they go, why? I’m like, because you’re going to need 20 or 25. And that’s the same thing with all these, I’ve started 70 plus businesses. Every single one of them was undercapitalized until frame tech, and then it was super undercapitalized and then we fixed it. But the reality is capital a lack of capital ends up putting you in a pressure box.
(16:02)
So either you bankrupt or you have to go out to the market and get additional capital. And usually that means you lose most of your ownership at a company. So for people thinking about investing when you’re investing in something else, you want to make sure there’s plenty of capital there, make sure people are paid really well, make sure the founders have a lot of stock in the thing so that when it wins, they win. Big people get wound up. One of the lessons is people go, well, somebody’s making too much money. And I’m like, they’re doing all the work. They should make a crap load. And then when they make a crap load. So there’s a lot of weird jealousy, and the lesson here is don’t get greedy. Understand that there’s a lot of pie if you’re willing to build something that matters.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
It kind of brings two topics together here. I mean, I know the one real big limitation among many with just traditional IRAs of 401k is that they won’t let you invest in your own businesses unless I get a Robs account. But even then, there’s still a lot of parameters and barriers. But the EQRP, do you have any more flexibility investing in business that way?
Speaker 2 (17:03):
So it depends. Similar rules in your own business, but this is why it’s so much more valuable to look at big businesses because you have the ability, if you’re just doing a mom and pop shop, it’s very hard. You can borrow some money from your EQRP from a retirement account, but still that’s only like 50 grand and Robs just, it’s a different deal. What I love is big operations, and here’s one of the keys, getting yourself out of the job of managing something. So I see people going, my rental property is making me $5,000 a month, my portfolio, and I go, no, it’s not. They say, yes, it is my tax return. I’m like, no, you have a job that’s paying you $5,000 a month because you’re the damn property manager. When you think bigger, then you force your deal to have all of the expenses and not your time.
(17:47)
People give away their time and act as if it doesn’t cost something. And so that’s one of the big things when you have an EQRP should be used as fuel, not as a job application tool for you. And so when you put your money into something else, the goal is let the capital work, not you. And people get wound up like, no, I want to put it in my own deal. You need to become a better investor and go find world-class teams and then park your money in something. That’s what the government wants you to do anyway, so why not just follow the rules and then let it accelerate versus you just getting yourself worn out because you’re working night and day running around and fixing toilets.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
That’s right. Yeah. Actually, I know I’ve seen a lot of different rules where they say you can’t be more than 25% owner, especially if you’re active, but I did see it was a little bit tough to get around some of those fine print, but then it was like, oh, well, you could be in one situation, a business. There was 70% partner, but there were all just financing it hands off, pass a partner. The other 30% partners were the ones actually doing the work, and as a result, they were able to get it approved and actually able to use that money.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
It’s interesting because you can probably find just about anybody, you can find just about any type of backup to let you do the thing that you want to do. The question is, do you want to worry about sleeping at night? And I’ve always thought, well, look, I’m going to go build businesses. Do I need to use my retirement account or could my retirement account be used in things where somebody else is growing that capital and just play by the rules? I think so many people, they’re still thinking small, and when you go, I’m going to find my job is to go find great teams and vet them and become friends with them and date them and then get married to the deal and put my EQRP money in there. When you think about it that way, and it forces you to think bigger, not being a property manager if you’re doing real estate.
(19:36)
So I always just think it’s easier to now try to jam everything together and turn everything you see into a chicken pot pie. People try to put all their stuff in there and it’s like, yeah, you literally put a slice of pizza in the chicken pot pie. Why would you do that? Well, I was trying to jam it all in there. I’m like, it should be a different dish. Why are you doing that? So that’s my philosophy. When I hear those kind of those ideas, I’m like, I get it because you’re trying to leverage your retirement and 10 X and put your own money, but why would you want to worry about the IRS auditing you and disqualifying the money? Just go find a great team.
Speaker 1 (20:07):
Right, exactly. Just be passive and let it be passive, right? That’s right. I love it, man. Well, hey, before I ask you the last question here, if someone wants to be able to learn more about EQRP full you, even about frame tech or anything else, what’s the best way to do that? The
Speaker 2 (20:21):
Best thing to do is check out what we’re doing with the EQRP community. If you visit turnkey retirement.com, that’s where everything sort of comes together. We’re talking about how you bake these tools and the ideas and the investing communities all together. So turnkey retirement.com, you can grab a download of, there’s a download there that you can get that talks about how you look at deals and how I look at deals, the 19 landmines and the biggest mistakes people make. So you can avoid losing 25 million bucks and actually have a successful financially free future.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
I love it. Yeah, we’ll be sure to put that in show notes there. Everybody can click on that, especially if you’re driving. Please don’t wreck yourself before you check yourself or whatever it might be. So, all right, so moving to the last question here. This one we ask everybody on the show is, Damien, what do you feel is like your ripple effect that you’re here to create? What do you feel like is that imprint you’re here to leave on this planet
Speaker 2 (21:13):
After oh eight? And then it took about five years for me to get to the other side where I asked the question, what am I here for? And the ripple effect is giving people hope and not Obama hope, but real hope and hope is you feel empowered to go and create your future, that it’s a life by design, not by default. And for me to be able to give people, not to say you have a great future, but literally giving people tools and then the training and then the support. I think the ripple effect is people are going out there, not because they have me right next to all the time, but because I’ve helped them grow the muscle and now they have the confidence because financial freedom is not money. It’s not money in the bank. It’s not money getting the cashflow. What financial freedom is, is the confidence to create. You have to go to the gym and do the work, and you build the muscle. So that’s the ripple effect. There’s a lot of stronger people out there that have freedom, and whether or not I talk to them ever again, they’re going to move forward with some bits and pieces that I’ve helped them see or do that gives them the ability to see their kids grow up and then influence other people. That’s the ripple. It’s building that financial freedom muscle.
Speaker 1 (22:16):
Well said Damien, man. Awesome. Well, I appreciate you being on our show today, man. You’ve been awesome. Again, we’ll put your contact in the show notes. Everybody else, hey, if you’re feeling like this is the thing I’ve been looking for, go check out Damien’s stuff again, Rob Damien’s linking everything in the show notes there for the turnkey side he’s got. But guys, go check that out. Remember, it’s not just about listening to this. If you want freedom, just like Damien was saying, if you want hope or any kind of freedom for that matter, it requires that personal responsibility, accountability, and the willingness to actually act upon it too. Go and make it a wonderful and prosperous week. We’ll see you later.