EP 81: From Homeless to 30 Year Old Multimillionaire. Jerry Fetta, CEO/Founder of Wealth DynamiX
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This week on The Millionaire Choice Show, Tony talks with Jerry Fetta, CEO and Founder of Wealth DynamX, about his journey from homelessness to wealth expert and multi-millionaire at age 30. They discuss Jerry’s life as a financial advisor and how a parents’ financial habits, good or bad, can affect their childrens’ financial outlook and future.
About Jerry Fetta
Jerry Fetta grew up in a three-times divorced household finding himself homeless by age eight. At age 19 and just out of high school, Jerry was homeless yet again, but this time with a newlywed wife. Working their way up from the bottom; he and his wife are now 10 years still married and multi-millionaires.
CEO and Founder of Wealth DynamX, Jerry is a published author, successful entrepreneur, investor, and a nationally recognized financial expert featured in Forbes, Yahoo Finance, Fox, Chicago Weekly News, New York Finance, earning endorsements and affiliations throughout his career with names like Grant Cardone, Dave Ramsey, and Pamela Yellen. Jerry’s mission in life is to help create millions of financially educated and solvent families achieving greater financial freedom and sharing the truth about money with those around them.
Learn more about Jerry Fetta, https://jerryfetta.com/freechapter
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Show Transcript
Tony (00:00 ):
Welcome back to the millionaire choice show. Today, I guarantee you're gonna have a good time listening to Jerry Fetta. He's the founder and owner of Wealth DynamX. He's specialized in financial education and services, especially with alternative assets. You guys know that, I like you to spread your money around. I like to spread my money around. I don't like to keep it all in 401ks and mutual funds. They're probably not the best idea, especially in the season of life that we're living in economically. He's also the author of Blueprint to Financial Freedom, How to Create Wealth, and the Daily Financial Journal, Big Three Challenge Journal. Thanks for coming on the show, Jerry.
Jerry Fetta (00:37):
Thanks so much for having me on, Tony. I'm excited for it.
Tony (00:40):
In the pre-show, you shared with me- I gotta say; I've done 75 of these now and I've talked to a lot of different people. All of our stories have a lot of patterns and similarities, but yours has a lot of barriers. Like, if anybody had an excuse not to build wealth and become a millionaire, I think you would be one of the poster children for that.
Jerry Fetta (01:04):
Yeah, totally. I think, if I go back to where I grew up from, a lot of people have that same type of story and that's the environment, unfortunately is, "we can't make it. We're not supposed to. Wealth is for other people."
Tony (01:17):
And, that's just a lie. That's one of those lies that keeps us held down, keeps us stuck where we are. Stuck in the system, but it is the farthest thing from the truth. I'm a story like that. Your story is like that. Well, let's get into it. Share it with the future millionaires listening.
Jerry Fetta (01:31):
So, I own a company called wealth dynamics, and our whole thing is helping families achieve financial education. Like, real financial literacy, not financial consumerism and marketing dressed up like education. We go back- and this is part of my story- I went back- at one point I was a mainstream financial advisor, actually with Dave Ramsey. In your neck of the woods; I was a Dave Ramsey client and then also an endorsed local provider in eight states for investing. I started studying like, "what do the wealthy actually do with their money?" And it turned out it wasn't mutual funds and 401ks and annuities; like you'd mentioned.
Tony (02:10):
Imagine that right?
Jerry Fetta (02:12):
Exactly. We teach, "where do you actually invest in what's fun and unique?" Because I've been on both sides of it. Now I was really good at telling you why you needed to buy my mutual funds and my investments. So, that's an area where we focus on, and then we also focus on solvency. You'd mentioned how we are in some interesting times right now, the families that have made it, the individuals that have made it, they had very high reserves, they were properly protected. They didn't have a bunch of consumer debt and outflow. They had a lot of income coming in. And so, there's a solvency aspect that we cover. Then really it's about financial freedom. We believe financial freedom happens at the point of financial independence. I have passive income that exceeds my savings expenses and taxes. Then we just continue building towards that, and I relate it, and this is part of my backstory. I relate it to having the ability to treat money like oxygen. When we breathe, we don't think about how many breaths we have. We don't live breath-to-breath like we live paycheck-to-paycheck. And then we also don't hold our breath. We're afraid to let it go and get rid of it. We just take in what we need and get rid of it as we don't need it anymore. So, that's a little bit about me, a little bit about my company, and what we do.
Tony (03:22):
Awesome. Now, you didn't grow up with money a lot of times, you mentioned, being stuck in the mindset. That's where we were born into poverty or born into low income, and we think that's where we stay. That's a lie. It's not true. Especially in America, I quote this stat all the time; roughly 40% of millionaires in the whole world live in America. When you look at the numbers, statistically, by population, America should have no more than about like 3% of the world's millionaires, but yet we have 40%. So, the reason for that is because of America's economy and financial system. There is so much opportunity here where other countries don't have that. They don't have the laws, the protections, the systems, the ability to build wealth in those countries, like they like exist here in America. Also, the barriers. And so, it's not to dismiss that people have problems, and there's barriers to it that make it more difficult, for some people it's easier for some people it's not. You still all have to go through the same challenges. But, of everybody I've had on the show, you had some of the most difficult things to overcome in your childhood. What did that look like?
Jerry Fetta (04:34):
You told me about the guy in the Chinese concentration camp, it wasn't anything that big, but I think for me it was consistent. It was one challenge after the next. And so, that kind of just became my life. For me, I think I was telling you around age four or five, I started noticing my parents fought a lot. It wasn't uncommon to hear shouting and swearing and things breaking in the house. It was usually over finances. Long story short, my mom and dad got divorced and remarried to and from each other, like two or three different times. It was always about money at the end of the day. My dad's name was William, so my mom would call him Bill like, "here's the bills."
Jerry Fetta (05:18):
So, when I was eight or nine; this was all in the same summer. It was a grand slam, house got foreclosed on. We lost it. Mom and dad got divorced again. We had the car repossesed. Then on top of that, we were splitting time between mom and dad. So, we were homeless on both sides with my dad. We were living in a tent for, the summer. I was eight, so I thought we were camping. It didn't feel like we were homeless, but we didn't have an apartment or a house to go back to. Then on my mom's side, we were living in a camper trailer behind somebody's house. So again, I just thought we were camping out in the backyard, but we didn't have somewhere else we could go.
Jerry Fetta (05:58):
That was my early upbringing with money, needless to say, it was already kind of taboo. And on top of that, it was an area for me that had a lot of negativity associated with it. A lot of painful emotion, memories that were- I was a tough kid, so I wouldn't say they were traumatic. I turned fine. It wasn't something I dwelled upon, but it definitely wasn't like