E5 - Money That Never Rests — The Velocity of Wealth

Most people think about money in a straight line: earn it, spend it, save what’s left.
 Wealthy families think differently — they think in circles.

In this episode of Before the Returns, Jaden Zubal reveals one of the biggest secrets behind how the wealthy build wealth faster: they never let their money rest.

You’ll hear how Elon Musk used leverage to buy Twitter without selling Tesla stock — a perfect example of keeping money in motion. And you’ll see how average families are already using a similar concept through home equity loans, margin lines, and credit — just in a way that benefits the bank instead of them.

💡 In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why “still money” quietly loses power
• How velocity — not just growth — accelerates wealth
• Why even everyday borrowing mirrors what the wealthy do
• The difference between using leverage and losing control
• How structure, control, cash flow, and movement tie together to create lasting wealth

🔑 Key takeaway:

“You don’t need more money — you need more movement.”
 “Wealthy families don’t chase returns — they build velocity and control.”

Learn more at www.jadenzubal.com | Follow @jadenzubal | Join the *Before the Returns Weekly* newsletter

📩 Questions or ideas? Email: jadenzubal.wealth@gmail.com

⚖️ Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational purposes only. It is not financial, tax, or legal advice. Always consult with a qualified professional before making financial decisions.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction & Recap of Previous Episodes
• 0:44 The Concept of Money Movement
• 2:41 How Most People Handle Money
• 5:27 The Wealthy Approach: Family Offices & Reusing Capital
• 6:42 The Staircase Analogy & Leveraging Assets
• 9:20 Real-World Example: Elon Musk & Leverage
• 10:10 Tools for Keeping Money in Motion
• 11:51 The Importance of Purposeful Money Movement
• 12:54 Key Takeaways & The Family Banking Strategy
• 15:12 Final Thoughts & Next Episode Teaser

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome everyone to Before the Returns, the podcast where we discuss how to separate families and individuals who hope to build wealth from those who actually build wealth. Over the last couple of weeks, we've talked about things like control, access to money, the ability to influence your budget and timing and all of those things. And we even talked about some stories from uh these pictures I have up on the wall behind me where we went over the Rockefeller family, the Vanderbilt family, what those families did, the differences between the two. Today I want to get into something just a little bit different. And I want to talk about money movement because all of these aspects will tie in together. So if you go through episodes one through five, this will be the fifth episode. Each of these episodes has a different concept, all tying together that lead into the main overarching goal of this podcast. Last week specifically, we went over why cash flow, not net worth, is the real measure of financial freedom, right? We need to have cash flow in order to control the circumstances in our lives and have better influence over how we live and how we want to live, where net worth can be a great number on a page, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you have a better lifestyle. And money is not the goal, right? Purpose is the goal. So it's not just about how much money you earn or save, it's about how often that money gets put to work. That's kind of the next step in this evolution is okay, if we understand that net worth isn't the main target and cash flow is a better target, then we also need to make sure that when we have that cash flow, we put it to work properly in order to achieve the real purpose. Okay, so the wealthy have a simple rule that most people never think about, and it's that money never rests. And that doesn't mean that you have to be, you know, leveraged to the hilt and making poor decisions financially. That's certainly not what I advocate for. In fact, you'll find the longer we go with this podcast, the more conservative you'll probably see that I am as an investor. But there is a way to be conservative as an investor and still keep your money working. How does most people's money stop moving? Typically, what happens for most people is we bring in income, we first put all that income towards our expenses, right? We pay all of our bills, might have some credit card bills that month, a few different things that come up. And oftentimes this thing called lifestyle creep comes into play, which means that we end up spending a little bit more each time we earn more. And because of that, we often get to the end of the month and there's very little that moves into savings or moves into a 401k. One of the ways that people inadvertently might save is they own a home, they build equity in their home, they're making their payments. So they are building their net worth that way, but that gets back into the conversation of that net worth is not necessarily spendable. You might be able to take a HELOC against your home, but not in all cases and not in all times. So sometimes it just sits locked up and untouchable. Still money feels safe, but still money can't always grow. Okay. So those who know how to move money with purpose create opportunities while everyone else waits for something, right? Who knows what? Sometimes we're just sitting around waiting and we don't actually know what's happening. But opportunity doesn't wait for slow money. Opportunity is always there. There's always things that can be done. We have to be prepared for that opportunity. That's a big lesson that I've probably taken over the last 10 years of investing and really just learning about these things, right? Just like all of us, I'm constantly trying to learn new things and trying to figure out how to better the strategies that I do. And what I do today is significantly different than what I did five years ago and definitely different than what I did 10 years ago. Because I've had to learn a lot of lessons the hard way. Uh, in fact, there's going to be a bonus episode here that I'll come out with probably within the next couple of days, telling one of those stories of a hard-learned lesson just recently, something that I've been thinking a lot about lately and feel like it would be really beneficial to people. And so I'm hoping to just put that out there and see what you guys think. But it ties into how dramatically our strategies can change over time as we learn new things and find new opportunities. So the wealthy keep their money in motion, right? Wealthy families just typically think differently. If you've ever heard of a thing called a family office, there are families that have significant wealth and they use this family office, which is essentially a bunch of people that are hired by the family, like lawyers, CPAs, investment strategists, all these things, they work together to grow the family's wealth and to manage the family's wealth and to keep it safe and keep specific targets on track. There's a lot of concepts from the idea of a family office that we can take for ourselves and implement into our lives as well, right? So one of those concepts is that they reuse capital instead of just replacing it, meaning they borrow against assets that they own so that they can put that to work in other places. An example that I often give to my clients is that imagine for a moment that your bank account is like walking up a set of stairs. Okay. So as we save money, we walk up this set of stairs, we get to the top, but when we get to the top, we realize, oh, we don't have a floor yet. So we jump down, we go back down, let's say we jump down into the basement or whatever, and then we start saving again and we build back up, and this time maybe we build a little sectional floor, and then we jump down, and we have to climb back up again and save that money again. And then we just keep repeating this cycle over and over, and we might make little bits of progress here and there, but it's like this constant repeating, you know, the old, the old phrase, the rat race, right? We're just going and going and going on the hamster wheel there. Wealthy families don't do that, they avoid that model by saving up the staircase. So they get to the top of the staircase and they say, you know what? Okay, I'm gonna build my section of floor here, and then I'm gonna borrow money against these assets that I have over on the sidelines. So for some people, that is stocks, that's real estate, it's life insurance, it's all these different tools that you can leverage against to maybe finish some more of your floor and keep yourself on that pathway. And then you can build the next level up into your home, right? So now instead of going between main level and a basement over and over and over, they might build a level two and a level three, and they start to create this skyscraper because they've been able to leverage against other assets, leverage against other tools to keep money working in both places. So now it can work like let's let's use the home as an example again for a minute. If you have a home and you take a HELOC against your house, so you take a line of credit out against the house, it does not change the home's ability to appreciate, right? The value of that home is still going to increase the same whether you borrow money against it or not. Okay. So they can do that. They can take that money and invest it. I've done that personally. I've had a HELOC out before that I use to buy other real estate. That is something that um that is one small example of a way that you can leverage. Now, this is certainly not financial advice, this is just general education to say there are so many different ways and so many different tools that we can use. And we'll get into detail on a lot of these tools in future episodes. But the point right now is we've got to keep money in motion. Okay. So let's talk about a real world example, something that many of us have heard of that happened just a few years back. When Elon Musk, who currently is the wealthiest man in the world and has been, you know, he's trailed behind a little bit, caught back up over and over. So this will tie back into the Rockefeller story, right? Like Elon Musk is the Rockefeller of today. When he bought Twitter, now called X, he used leverage. That was all over the news for a while. How he was leveraging his stock to be able to buy what is now X, but he still had the stock. He didn't have to sell all of the stock to be able to do that. So when all is said and done, you know, when X is profitable for him, he can pay back what he borrowed and still have all of the stock. He didn't lose anything in doing that. Okay, so it's the same principle the Rockefeller family use to build their dynasty a century ago. They created trusts where assets were never sold, only borrowed against. Their money never stopped compounding. I do that today on another level as well. Obviously, I'm not on the level of a Rockefeller or a Musk, but again, there are tools and there are strategies that we can use to be able to leverage the same way that these wealthy families and wealthy individuals do. So let's tie this in a little bit more to us and today. Something that may even sound a little crazy, but a lot of people are already doing this. They're already borrowing against their homes, they're already borrowing against their stocks, and maybe they're just not using it with the mentality of I'm going to invest and I'm going to grow yet, right? There are risks that come with doing that. There are risks that come with borrowing against your home and borrowing against your stock. So I personally think there are better ways to do it. And one of those ways is by borrowing against life insurance. It's what I've used to build the real estate portfolio that I have today. I've used it to pay medical bills, I've used it to all sorts of things over the years. And it works similarly to borrowing against your home or borrowing against your stocks, but you have significantly less risk. So there are all of these different tools out there, though. And really the point of today's conversation is just to help people understand that money moving is not necessarily a good or a bad thing all by itself, but it's the way that we move it, it's the things that we do with it that determines whether it's good or bad. This is not about taking on more risk, it's about creating more movement. The goal isn't to avoid using your money, it's to keep it active, working, and under your control. When money moves with purpose, it multiplies. And when it rests too long, it rusts, right? It's like driving your car in the road salt here. I live in northern Utah, and so we have a ton of salt on the roads in the winter. Go out and drive that, and then let's say you park it in the garage for a year, don't wash it, don't do anything with it, well, you're gonna have a pretty rusty car. Same thing happens with your money. Your money's out there doing things all the time, you know, getting dirty, whatever. And if you just sit it and forget it, it's gonna get a little rusty. It's not gonna do anything productive. In fact, it's actually gonna lose value because of inflation. What is$100 today, a year from now, is going to be$95,$96, depending on inflation rate that year. If you've been following this series at all for the last couple of episodes, you might have noticed a pattern. But we've talked about structure, control, and cash flow. And today we're adding in movement. But I really believe that these four pieces, structure, control, cash flow, and movement are what separate families who hope for wealth from those who actually build it. And there's a strategy I use with my clients that ties all of this together: a system that keeps money moving, accessible, protected, and compounding. It's what I call family banking, and we'll unpack that more in future episodes, right? It ties into all of this money movement, it ties into the life insurance stuff that I've mentioned, it ties into how we use leverage against homes, against stocks, all of those things. Really, all of this ties into a big overarching strategy. Okay, so what are some of the main takeaways from today? Well, one of the biggest ones is that you don't necessarily need more money, you need more movement. Again, this is the same idea as in the last episode how we talked about cash flow is more important than net worth, right? Because cash flow is money movement. It's the ability to keep money coming in so we have resources to work with. If we just have a big net worth, it could just be this black hole of money that doesn't do anything for us. And that's not the purpose. The purpose isn't to build this massive bucket of money in the background so we can feel good about ourselves. It's to build money that works and does whatever we want out of our life, right? And most of us, even those of us who are focusing really hard on building up net worth and growing our money resources, let's say, even when we're trying to do that, it's inadvertently for a bigger goal and a bigger purpose, right? We all have something deep down in there that's like, hey, I'm building it for this. For me, I'm building it for my family, right? I have four kids and a soon-to-be stepson. And in my family unit, what I really think that my main purpose is, what my goal is, is to be able to show them a different way of life, right? A different way to think about money. Again, it's not focused on net worth, it's focused on the outcomes that we can get with it, the people that we can help with it, and living a productive and value add kind of lifestyle. Wealthy families don't just chase returns, they build velocity and control. In fact, we'll also talk about this in future episodes, but in a lot of ways, it's more important to have control over the money than it is to own the money, right? We don't need to own everything. We just need to have control over the movement of it. So the key really is keeping your dollars active, not asleep. So next time I will get into a little bit more about how your money's working and not just looking busy, because as always, money is the tool and purpose is the goal. If this episode helped you shift how you see your money, share it with someone who's ready to make their money move as well. And with that, we'll look forward to seeing you on the next episode.