Welcome to My Wealth Trail, I’m Josh! I’ve worked my way up from starting in restaurants as a bus boy making minimum wage in Texas, and 20 years later I’m building billion dollar construction projects around the world. Along the journey, I’ve done some smart things with money, but also made some very foolish mistakes. There was a point I was making 6 figures, but had over $60,000 in debt with no assets.

“Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.“

-Robert Frost

To be clear, I wasn’t on the road less traveled… I was on the American mega highway. I had a nice car, a nice house in a respectable neighborhood, and too many $100 dollar purchases to list, but all that excessive spending put me in a hole, and I felt weighed down. Weighed down by all the “things” I had surrounded myself with, weighed down with the inflexibility to pick up and go, weighed down in conversations trying to impress people I really didn’t care about, and most significantly weighed down by the high interest rate credit card debt I had accumulated.

I needed a hard reset, and started devouring as much financial literature as I could. I knew a lot about personal finance already, my mom was an accountant and so I was privy to many conversations about finance growing up, but I hadn’t put it in to practice. I wasn’t resisting the urge to spend on that new guitar, finance a BMW, or to say yes to dinners and nights out.

The path has been rocky to say the least, but shortly after that I realized where I was heading. I don’t want to work 60-70hr weeks for the rest of my life, and I realized if that was going to change I needed to drastically rethink my habits. My goal with this blog is to help others create a clear pathway to financial freedom, with the side benefit of keeping me accountable to that vision as well as my own journey.

About 4 years ago I started selling off items. I sold the nice car, paid off the note with the proceeds, and bought a 10 year old car for $4000 cash. Immediately I had a shift of almost a thousand dollars a month in my cash flow, that I was able to use to snowball into other debt. Next came inventorying the house and posting things to craigslist, facebook marketplace, and anywhere else I could offload them. The momentum was building.

Now, 4 years later, I have 0 credit card debt, a rental property, and am actively investing and prioritizing assets or debts. Still though, even after reading books like Robert Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”, I struggled to put the content into effect.

“Assets put money in your pocket, whether you work or not, and liabilities take money from your pocket.”

Robert Kiyosaki

There’s tons of people eager to take your money, with the promise of a return, but there are so many bad deals and gimmicks out there it’s hard to sift through at times.

My hope with this blog is I can show you clear steps to create your own path to financial freedom, and that we can grow together as a intelligent community.

All the best, I’m rooting for you!

-Josh