Looking to secure financial stability and growth for your business? Discover powerful tax planning strategies for success.
Join us as Mark Miller shares expert strategies on building lasting wealth through smart investments and tax planning.
Mark Hilton is an expert in wealth building and financial strategies. With over four decades of experience, Mark shares his insights on the importance of smart investing, tax-efficient strategies, and creating a lasting legacy for future generations.
Mark breaks down the key principles of wealth accumulation, from asset allocation and diversification to building a solid foundation for long-term financial security. He discusses how the wealthiest individuals leverage time, patience, and discipline to build wealth and avoid common pitfalls in the world of investing.
In this episode, Mark emphasizes how critical it is to have the right advisors and strategies in place for legacy building. As an advocate for financial education, Mark encourages listeners to adopt a more disciplined, informed approach to investing in real estate and other assets, ensuring they secure their financial future.
Whether you’re a seasoned investor or just starting your wealth-building journey, this episode offers valuable lessons that align with our mission to empower the community through financial literacy and real estate education.
Key Takeaways:
- 15:37 – Why traditional market investing is akin to organized gambling and the importance of safe, strategic investments.
- 16:13- The critical role of asset allocation and diversification in building a resilient financial portfolio.
- 16:21- Mark’s Four Bucket Strategy for wealth management, including safe, income-generating, equity-based, and private equity buckets.
- 23:24- The value of patience and discipline in wealth-building and the significance of time in investment strategies.
- 19:25- Mark’s personal reflections on his early career and the lessons learned from his mistakes in the stock market.
Visit HiltonWealth.com for more information about Mark’s wealth-building strategies and to download his free ebooks on tax-saving strategies and investment methods.
Connect with Mark@:
- Website: https://www.hiltonwealth.com/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HiltonWealth
Connect with Corwyn@:
- Contact Number: 843-619-3005
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cmelette/
Shoutout to our Sponsor: EXIT Realty Lowcountry Group
Do you want something more? More Meaningful Moments opportunities, deeper relationships and memorable experiences? Do you want to make a difference? If you say YES, a career and real estate could be the opportunity you’re looking for guiding people to one of the most important decisions they ever made, the purchase or sale of their home can be both rewarding and lucrative.
EXIT Realty has a revolutionary compensation model training and technology that provides you with the tools you need to start and build your successful real estate career. Call EXIT Realty Lowcountry group today at 843-619-3005 that is 843-619-3005 or visit https://exitlowcountry.com/joinexit and make your Exit today.
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CORWYN:
Do you want something more? More meaningful moments, opportunities, deeper relationships, and memorable experiences? Do you want to make a difference? If you said yes to any of that, a career in real estate could be the opportunity you’re looking for. Guiding people through one of the most important decisions they ever made. The purchase or sale of their home can be both rewarding and lucrative. Exit Realty’s revolutionary compensation model, training, and technology provides you with the tools you need to start and build your successful real estate career. Call Exit Realty Lowcountry Group today at 843-619-3005, that’s 843-619-3005 or visit join.exitlowcountry.com and make your exit today
Good morning, good morning, and great morning to you guys. Welcome to another fabulous episode of Exit Strategies radio show. Hey, I am your host, Corwyn J. Melette, broker and owner of Exit Realty Low Country Group in beautiful North Charleston, South Carolina. Guys, if this is your first time listening to this show, you sir or ma’am are in for a treat because you know it and say it with me for those who have been with us for so long. Our mission here is very simple. That is to empower our community through financial literacy and real estate education, guys. We’re legacy building. That is what we do. So guys, I am super excited. I’m super stoked this week. I appreciate all of you who listened to us from one end of the low country all the way to the other, but those who share and tell others to tune in, but those who send the links in our content all the way from Monkey’s Corner, and that’s where my mama lived, all the way back down to the coast. Guys, we love you. We love you. We love you. And you know what I mean when I say that. So guys, today we’re going to be talking about strategies. Yes. I love that word. It’s part of our name, right? So we have with us none other than Mark Miller. Now let me give you a snippet about Mark, but I’m going to let him tell his own story. Mark is a leader in the tax space. He understands business. He understands wealth. He understands how to preserve, build, and create opportunities. He is like the guru, if you will, of taxation, of strategies. That’s that word again, to help you create and build more wealth. So today I’m super humbled and honored that he took time out of his busy schedule to be here with us. Mark, how are you doing today?
MARK:
I’m doing great, Corwyn. It’s a pleasure to be with you today.
CORWYN:
Well, thank you. So Mark, if you don’t mind, give our folks like high level overview who you are, what you do.
MARK:
Sure. So I’ve been in the business financial consulting industry for about 40 years now. Several years ago, I got on the trust side of the business for the institutional, what we call the smart money side of the financial business, met the Hiltons, and then I’m now the manager of the Hilton Family Office. So we help manage the Hilton’s money as well as many other people’s money too. And my main partner for a spinoff company that we have, which is called Hilton Tax and Wealth Advisors, it’s a spinoff from the Hilton Family Office. My main partner is Brad Hilton, who is the grandson of Conrad Hilton. And Brad and I have had a passion for being able to build a company, which is Hilton Tax and Wealth, to bring these kind of more advanced wealth building strategies that are usually reserved for the wealthiest of the wealthy, bring those more down to main street. And that’s what we’re doing now. The Hiltons, and frankly, me too, have a very good reputation in the industry for being great at tax mitigation strategies, but also doing a wealth planning and doing it more in the smart money side, where fees are less, returns are generally better, a lot less volatility in portfolios. And that’s just kind of how the wealthiest of the wealthy invest.
CORWYN:
So we’re in the middle of going through, so to speak, and I think we’re well beyond the middle of, but we’re in this late season and I don’t get into the politics of any of it. But what I do want to focus on is that the common theme is always about taxes, people paying their fair share and all that. Absolutely right. So that is a common theme. But at the end of the day, people want, if you work hard, whether it’s you or whether it’s generations before that have worked hard, accumulated or figured out maybe that thing that in turn has made you wealthy, then it’s only reasonable that you’d want to try to preserve and grow or continue to grow that wealth. So that is what your company does, correct?
MARK:
Yes. And although we often bring folks on board and we save them a whole bunch of money on their taxes, that’s just one aspect. And that’s great that we can do that. But the main thing is, well, if we can save you money on taxes, we basically find money that you didn’t know existed before. Then let’s deploy that into some of these strategies that, again, only generally the wealthiest have access and just get you wealthier faster. That’s the key. And that’s ultimately what we’re after to help people with.
CORWYN:
So you have written a couple of books, right? I want to make sure that we touch on because I love to get some of that, some of those nuggets, if you will, those jewels of wisdom or information out to our listeners today. But you wrote two books. Again, I’m going to call one. But if you would let our folks know about the other, which is the tax free business owner, because that immediately had my attention. I was just like, look, I’m all in. And what was the other?
MARK:
It’s called Hilton wealth. How to invest like an American dynasty.
CORWYN:
Mind blowing. I love it. So if you don’t mind, so which one was first, which was the first book? Well, the first one we did was the tax book, the tax free business owner. Okay. And what’s the concept? If you don’t mind, like what strategies or if you could without, because look, listeners guys buy the book
MARK:
We’re going to do better. They don’t have to buy it. We’ll give it to them complimentary too. So that’s even better, right?
CORWYN:
Even better. So what I want to make sure we get out, Mark is what’s in there. What’s the content. What is it? You know, there’s an old adage. If you want to hide knowledge from someone or hide something from somebody, put it in a book. So what’s in there. So the folks know what they’re searching for when they go to get these nuggets.
MARK:
Well, the tax industry and most people kind of use a CPA or a tax preparer to do their taxes and everything has been in this loop since about the 1950s and sixties, where a lot of people get there, go to a CPA and they get their taxes done. Really? All they’re using is an advanced version of TurboTax to do your taxes. They usually has a CRM in it or something. So they can keep track of all the returns they’re doing everything. And the model is for that CPA or even that tax preparer do four or 500 tax returns. They’ll make a great living and then they can move on to the next year. Okay. And most CPAs and accountants and everything there, they call them. And I’m not here to attack them because we need them. And they’re all of our very smart people, but they call them bean counters for a reason, because they’re very much the technicians and they, that’s what they do. They count it’s the X’s and the O’s it’s the X’s and Y’s and they just look at the numbers and that is it. Okay. And that’s usually all they do, but people go to them and they think, Oh, this CPA is so great. And maybe they’ll give them some entity, maybe change your business to this entity or whatever. Make sure you put money in a 401k. And for those that are listening that don’t have businesses, make sure, you know, max out what you could put in an IRA and those tax deferred accounts. And then they stop. And the tax code is almost 180,000 pages now. Okay. And who is the tax code made by? The tax code was made by politicians that the majority of them are rich. And there’s things in the tax code that they’ve built into the code to quote help their constituents and themselves, by the way, too, in the process, but CPAs they’re so bogged down and just doing the tax preparation that they don’t bother to take the time to dive deep into the tax codes to find these things. So that’s when you need like a, either a proactive tax planning CPA, a CPA, but that specializes in planning, not just preparation and compliance work to that. Or you need just a tax planner, someone that understands that tax planning from the code side. And that’s what we do. That’s what we teach people about in the book. We basically would put formalized tax plans together that we have 130 different strategies now that are all backed up by IRS codes, private letter rulings, case studies, all stood the test of time for the Hilton’s and us for years and stand up to IRS scrutiny. And generally we save people about 50% per year on their taxes the first year. And then we go from there and that’s what we call it. The tax free business owner. We generally, we have enough time with folks. We can layer strategies and get them into a tax free status. Just like I talked to at the beginning, this is what the wealthiest of the wealthy do. They tap into strategies like this and it’s about having access. Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know. It’s not that your CPA is bad and they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s just, that’s not their model. They’re not really there. The vast majority think that people think they’re there to save their money on their taxes. But that’s not what they’re there for. They’re just to do, they’re there to do your tax returns.
CORWYN:
That is true. Very true. No strategy, just basically, Hey, I’m the person that puts it in order. I know what this goes on this line, so forth and so on. So I completely understand that. So you also wrote a second book. So I love the concept of essentially you are working with one of the wealthiest families in the country. And you have worked in concert with them and are now sharing the strategies. I love that a word again on how to continue to grow, but also preserve wealth. So let’s get into that. Absolutely. So first of all, the book, that one, again, you’re offering as well. So again, thank you so much, Mark, for that. And our listeners guys, please make sure we’ll make sure we get that information to you here in a bit. But what was the type, when did this concept come from? What made you decide to say, Hey guys, we should probably do this?
MARK:
Yeah. Well, the Hilton wealth book is just a, it’s actually taken some time to put it all together. By the way, both of the books are not four or 500 page books. Okay. There are actually a hundred page books and we did that on purpose. Cause no one wants to read a book anymore, right? They want to get it on top or something. So we tried to make them short on purpose. They only take about an hour and a half to read or so. So Hilton wealth is basically going into the concept of how the wealthiest of the wealthy invest. And we call this the smart money. In our jargon, it’s on the institutional side of the business. And many of your listeners may have heard that before. Like there’s institutional investors and then there’s retail investors, like the kind of average investor out there. Well, the institutional investors control all the markets, all the money. And they have all the strategies to make the most money. Okay. And that’s where all the wealthiest of the wealthy people are. Most of these institutional strategies, you’ve got to have 10 or $20 million to even talk to any of these people to invest for you. And that’s the concept. And that’s what we’re doing Hilton tax and wealth advisors. But Hilton wealth is just teaching people about these smart money strategies, smart money investment strategies, where like on the, let me give you an example on the retail side of the business, what the retail companies want you to focus on is returns. And that’s why you’ll see, like most people, the vast majority goes into mutual funds and mutual funds. You’ll always see the 1, 5, 10, 15 year performance and people will pick mutual funds that way. Okay. Terrible way to pick any investment. The wealthiest of the wealthiest, the way that they start with safety first. So they’ll put a portfolio together. That’s very heavily weighted. So you might have 40 or 50% of your money in very safe, secure assets, maybe generating 4 or 5%, 6% per year, depends on what’s available and what you can get at the time. And that’s the first and foremost being because the more safety you have in a portfolio, the less volatility you have in your portfolio. The retail side wants you to take all your money, put it in volatile stocks, put it in the markets, even volatile bonds. Bonds used to not be that volatile. Now they’re, they can be as volatile as stocks and just ride the volatility up and down. And then what do they tell you to do when it goes down? They say, just hold on to it, right? Well, the vast majority of the people don’t do that. They freak out and they sell it. That’s why the average investor really doesn’t make a whole lot of money, but on the institutional side or the smart money side, first and foremost, they’re looking at safety and security, design a portfolio, and maybe only a small percentage of the portfolio, maybe 30% or so has volatility to it, but overall the whole portfolio doesn’t have a whole lot of volatility, even though that 30% is generating their returns in their volatility. So that’s just one example. There’s also less fees. Ultimately you’ll make better returns because you’re smoothing out the volatility. We call it low volatility investing that gets you better returns over time too. That’s why you’ll see, you only see it here and here, the ad is the rich get richer and you won’t see all those people just fall off the Forbes, you know, 100 list. It’s because like Warren Buffett’s portfolio, about 60 or 70% of it is extremely safe and secure in backed up asset, backed up investments, all that type of stuff. But he’s making his return on that percentage that has the opportunity to go up a lot and make the entire portfolio have a really smooth ride over time. \\
CORWYN:
That makes perfect sense. So basically we’re saying we’re going to take the gamble with a small part and the gamble pays off, then, you know, it increases everything. So instead of us betting it all on quote unquote, red or black on a roulette table, we only going to bet a little small piece on there. Just if it goes great, then we got more.
MARK:
And it’s more bold than just that. But frankly, over the years I learned that I used to, I cut my teeth in the brokerage business and I was a stock hawk and all, you know, I loved all that. And even commodities and options and all those types of things made a lot of money, lost a lot of money in the process, but it, in essence, it’s organized gambling. It really is. And I see people all the time, their advisors, they’ll come to me, their advisors, they think that their portfolio is safe and secure. And 70% of the money is just sitting in market equities. What’s safe and secure about that? You’re just gambling on the market going up and down now over time. Yes. The market will go up. There’s no doubt about that. But how do you know you have the exact right investments and you’ve picked the right investments? Okay. So asset allocation is key. Diversification is key. And then picking the proper investments. And we have a four bucket strategy where we have a very safe bucket. We have a safety with income bucket. We have more of an institutional managed money bucket where it’s more of that equity based, and then we have a private equity bucket and depending on what the client wants to do, we adjust the percentages accordingly, but we still want to be fairly heavily weighted in those two buckets to where if something really goes bad, let’s say there’s a lot of stuff going on in the world right now. And a lot of people are kind of negative about a world economy and just the direction we’re going in. This country’s very, everybody’s economically extremely worried right now. What if something really bad happens? Would it be nice to have 40, 50, 60% of your portfolio in something where if something collapses, that money’s still there? So I’m not saying that’s going to happen. I’m an optimistic person. I really don’t think, I think we’re in this information age right now that people are more worried than they should be about things in general. But at the same time, have that solid foundation, like the wealthiest of the wealthy do, and then pick the right things that are going to generate you the returns you need, and that’s how you consistently build wealth over time and really build it faster too.
CORWYN:
So Mark, let’s make sure we get your information out. So where can people read you? You may have referenced to the two books that are eBooks that are available for download. So let’s get that out. Where can people find you, reach you, get in contact with you or your company?
MARK:
Very simple. We’re a little old school on this. Just go to our website, which is hiltonwealth.com, hiltonwealth.com. And you can order the two books on there. You can read a little more about us, what we do, how we do it. But if you read one of the books, depending on if you’re interested in investing or saving money on your taxes, if read one of the other books, if you read those books, you’ll really see how we do the things we do, because honestly, there’s no one else in the industry, in the entire country that does exactly what we do and how we do it, combining all the tax strategies with the advanced wealth building to really help people build wealth more efficiently.
CORWYN:
Awesome. Awesome. Thank you for that. So I call this question, Mark, it’s the old hindsight question. 2020, you turn around, you can see clearer from where you came from, the way you’re going, you know, you’ve been doing this for 40 some odd years and you have been, you’re a leader in this space, instrumental in helping people develop strategies and changing their entire trajectory as far as wealth accumulation and building legacy, which is something important to us here at the show. So my question to you is, if you knew then when you got started, what you know now, what would you have done differently? And that’s always an interesting question. Because sometimes we realize, well, that was a great ride, right? But what would you have done differently back then that would had you much further than where you are now?
MARK:
What I probably would have done differently is I wish I would have, I met a few people that were kind of on the institutional side of the business early on in my career. And because I was such a stock hawk and so caught up in the retail side and selling stocks and all that kind of stuff. And I wish I would have listened to them earlier and made a couple of mistakes in my own portfolio years and years ago. Don’t do that anymore. Fortunately, cause I invest my money, how we talk to how we invest all our clients money, but, and then I also made mistakes on picking some stocks and things like that, and it took those mistakes for me to finally reach out to one of the institutional people and say, how is it that you’re not losing money? And I wish I would have gotten, if I would have gotten to them 10 years earlier, I would have gotten on the institutional side a lot faster, learn these concepts and probably would have had a little less pain in those early years of my career.
CORWYN:
Interesting. Okay.I can see that because stock market is extremely volatile. You know, I was recently a family member asked me, questioned me about, Hey, I’m interested in day trading. And every time I hear it, I’ve known people that did day trading. Like you say, you a stock hog. So how have you got to sit? I used to do that. Yeah, that is not saying it’s not lucrative, but that is a tedious. Occupation, if you will, probably more so than what you do now. Is that correct?
MARK:
Yeah. If it wasn’t for my wife, I think I’d still be doing those things. But she’s like, why are you doing this? Going through all this emotional pain, you lose 10,000 a day. You make 10,000 in a day. It’s back and forth. It’s almost like a zero sum game and all these years I was doing that. And she’s well, I mean, what’s the goal here? And she would try. It was like, well, what’s the goal? What is my return goal? And once I got my return goal, and then I learned a lot of these smart money strategies, then I realized I don’t have to do anything. I can have a passive portfolio, make the return that I want to make. And even if I want to be more aggressive, which I am with some things, I can make a higher return that kind of trading life returns, but not near the kind of a risk. And Hey, Corwin, I just was dealing with a client that is really knee deep and all this day trading stuff. And there’s a lot of stuff on the internet selling people this, but I’m just going to tell you this and everybody needs to listen to me on this. Cause I’ve been through it myself and I’ve seen everybody in the industry. The people that are consistently successful traders have been doing it for 15 or 20 years. For 15 or 20 years, it takes a huge amount of success and expertise and time to learn all of those strategies and learn how to do it. So you don’t shake yourself out of the market all the time. And that’s what happens. Most of these people, they’ll get things online and then they’ll, Oh, this sounds great, all the numbers sound great. And look at this and look at that. And there’s a lot of Charlton selling stuff online too. And Hey, within two years, I’m going to be a day trader and I’m going to be making $10,000 a day or whatever it is. And that is very rare. Again, I’ve been around a lot of traders and once I learned that, I stopped doing it myself and I said, if I’m going to trade, I’m going to deploy my money to traders, the people that truly know what they’re doing. And of course, in the Hilton Financial Network, we’ve got some good people that do that and are great at it. Even in the recent crypto space, I mean, we’ve got some phenomenal traders in that space, but these people, they’ve been doing it for years and years and know how to do it. That’s awesome, man.
CORWYN:
I love that Mark. It’s common sense approach is kind of the fundamentals. Why are we doing this? Let’s focus on doing this and we’ll gain so much more. It’s tortoise in the hay. That’s what I was in my mind.
MARK:
Yeah, absolutely. You’ll hear Warren Buffett talk about that all the time. Here’s the thing. If you really want to look at what’s most important in investing, it’s time and patience and discipline. That’s really what investing is about. And the wealthiest of the wealthiest in the world have time, patience, and discipline. And I would add to that, they educate themselves extremely well and they make the right contacts and have the right advisors and so forth and to become educated from. But also they’re generally, a lot of them are generally people that are eager for more information in the investing world, economics, all of that type of thing. But time is probably the number one thing. You just got to let time do its thing. Obviously you got to invest properly and right. I always advise that most of the time you got to have some real experts working with you to help you do that. Some people are lucky enough to figure it out themselves, but then when you layer in the component of time, it always works itself out.
CORWYN:
So Mark, I want to thank you for taking time out of your schedule today and for dropping those jewels of wisdom, a lot of wisdom and knowledge on our listeners here today, and I thank you for giving your contact information out for our listeners. Guys. I want to make sure that you guys get it. So Mark, if you don’t mind one more time, how can people reach you?
MARK;
Go to hiltonwealth.com, hiltonwealth.com. You’ll learn all about our company and you can order either one of those books. You’re welcome to order them. We’ll send them to your complimentary.
CORWYN:
Awesome. That’s awesome. Awesome. So Mark, again, thank you for being on today. Thank you for being a part of the exit strategies radio show family for our listeners, guys, this has been an amazing show. I need you to put this on repeat. I need you to share it with someone else because this knowledge and this information right here is how you build and create your own legacy for you and for your family for generations to come. And we know what that means. We know where that come from for generations to come for your children and so forth and so on. So guys, thank you so much for tuning in. You know how I feel. You know what I say? And I always put the two of those things together and I give it to you this way, which is to say, I love you. I love you. I love you. And we’re going to see you guys out there in those streets.
