491. Expert Interview: Reinventing Retirement

Damion Lupo

An entrepreneur at heart, Damion Lupo started his first business at age 11, and has started 30 more since. Founder of his own martial art, Yokido ™, and holder of three other black belts, Damion paid for his first rental house with a VISA, bought 150 houses in seven states over the next five years, and then went through a $20,000,000 meltdown in 2008. Today he runs an Austin based FinTech dedicated to disrupting Wall Street by getting people off the Wall Street roller coaster and in control of their money and financial future. Damion has written five books with two more being released in 2017.

Reinventing Retirement

“Drawing from some of the painful experiences I see in my work with others, I started rethinking retirement and reinventing the whole idea. I ended up throwing the old ideas out the window. What was applicable 20 or 40 years ago just are not applicable today. It’s important to start early in your career to focus on how you want to contribute to life and how you can always add value to everything you do, long before you retire.”

Why Is This Important?

In many ways, the idea of retirement treats human beings like worn out factory equipment or farm animals past their prime, Damion explains. “At some point, when people weren’t able to continue working, the system said, ‘OK, you’re done.’ We started to buy into the idea that, at a certain age, we would retire and our productive days would be done. But people don’t stop contributing to life just because they retire. If we look at retirement as creating a space that gives us options, we can start to create those options earlier in life.”

What Are the Key Lessons Learned Here?

“We have to ask ourselves what it would look like to really feel secure. This has to do with two things: the ongoing ability to sustain our lifestyle — which has more to do with cash flow than with cash — and with confidence. The confidence is something you build up, so the amount of money in the bank doesn’t matter so much. It’s more about your ability and belief in yourself to create and contribute as long as you are breathing.”