From Rock Bottom to $115 Million Dollar Exit: Eric Spofford's Journey to Entrepreneurial Success 💰 105

If you understand addiction, it ends in only a couple different places.

The person ends up in recovery, or they end up in jails, institutions, and death.

And the thing you need to consider is what are you going to regret if the worst case situation happens?

And that is a tool, the mechanism that you need to overcome your anxiety and your fear

on confronting your loved one that has alcoholism and has addiction. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a special edition of The Money Mondays.
As you guys know, I've had a very strict rule. I only record podcasts inside of the RV motorhome.
But sometimes you got to break the rules for very special, special guests. So I'm here in Miami inside of Eric Spofford's mansion.
This gentleman built up his career. We're going to go through a bit of his story, but really focus on what is going on in the world today because it is the number one money Monday in the history of society.
Today is the inauguration. Today, TikTok is back.
Today, it's Martin Luther King Day. Today, cryptocurrencies through the roof.
You've got meme coins worth billions of dollars. You've got Bitcoin breaking records.
Everything is very exciting about this money Monday. And so what we're going to do is get a quick two-minute bio from Eric Spofford so we can get straight to the money.
Straight to the money. We're out here breaking rules.
I like it. That's appropriate, right? For you, for sure.
100%. If anyone's going to break the rules, I'm honored.
It's me. Quick bio, folks.
Listen, grew up in the greater Boston area, lived a very crazy life, got involved in drugs and alcohol, young age, state youngest convicted drug dealer. I believe I still hold the record for that.
Fifth grade, I believe I was 11 years old, selling weed, yep. Got a kid named Garrick Pelletier ratted me out.
I still fucking hate him, just kidding. And that led to the next 10 years of just an insane life.
Got addicted to Oxycontin, which turned into heroin, crime, violence, jail, streets, yada, yada, yada. And I got sober on December 7th of 2006, just before my 22nd birthday.
Went on to find a passion in helping others recover from addiction and alcoholism. Did it at first on a volunteer basis.
That turned into an entrepreneurial idea. Started my home state's very first sober living home.
Scaled that over 13 years, two months to the largest provider of addiction treatment services in New England. Sold it for $115 million to a private equity-backed strategic.
Alongside that, I've done a couple hundred million in real estate transactions, invested in many other opportunities, and built a little bit of a personal brand. You know, I've been messing around here on social media for the last few years, having a good time, connecting with like-minded folks like Dan.
Now, today, back at it in the addiction treatment space,

active day-to-day CEO of two explosively growing businesses.

One, TreatmentX, a national collective of treatment centers.

We acquired two businesses in Q4 of last year.

We're set to acquire four more this year.

So we're currently operating facilities in California, Ohio, and Pennsylvania and growing expeditiously. And then a separate business, which is turnkey real estate, where we are taking ordinary average Americans and giving them the opportunity to buy investment grade single family homes under $100,000 that are cash flowing with low income section eight tenants and so that's the majority of my day-to-day i also oversee a transportation chartering company consisting of a private jet my challenger 604 a 92 foot yacht the bonus round um and many other things uh so we could do like 17 minute bio it was hard to condense it into two minutes you know it's a fun it's a fun journey all right so on the money monies as you guys know we cover three core topics how to make money how to invest money and how to give it away to charity but what i want to first ask is once you sell a company for 115 million dollars what do you do the next day like you get that wire it comes in it's monday morning it's money monday like whoo 9 a.m 901 and you click refresh yeah 115 shows up it's funny it was december 21st was 2021 was my money day i don't know if it was a monday or not it's just called money monday yeah it was my money monday and um and you i sat you know for the closing call and they clear it and they say all the wires have been sent and then you sit around all day refresh up refreshing your online banking app it was like 5 35 that night and i was sitting in my kitchen with my feet on my table honestly getting frustrated because i'm like yo it's after banking where's my money and i refreshed it for the last time and boom all that money just showed up and uh it was that was the probably the craziest feeling uh that i it was a wild experience you know what i did next i went to fucking work guys that's what i did i got up the next day yeah yeah and so i got up the next day uh i drove with uh lori my right chief operating officer, been rocking with me a long time.
And the next morning we were standing in front of some brick mill buildings that I was considering acquiring and renovating into apartment buildings, like two hours away from home, outside of Boston on the South Shore, freezing cold, holding a hot Dunkin' Donuts coffee. It's like 9 o''clock in the morning we've been up since five on the road since seven and she whacks me in the arm and looks at me I mean we just cashed an enormous check you think we'd like go to an island celebrate or something and she says we're never fucking taking a day off are we I said probably not that's three years ago and we haven't we haven't taken off.
Wow. I don't know anything about a vacation.
I know more about changing scenery and working from remote locations. Is there a number? If I was like, okay, Eric Spofford, here's $1 billion, no more work.
There's no number. $2 billion, there's no more work.
No number. No number.
It's inside of you. Because what people don't understand frequently is that, like, they see oh, this guy's worth 1 billion or 200 billion or 50, whatever.
There's a certain threshold where life doesn't change. Right.
You run out of shit to buy. Right.
I have a ton of exotic cars. There's not a car on the planet.
I couldn't make a call and have it dropped off. Right.
So it kind of, it's like, all right, whatever. I sitting in a fucking 20.75 million dollar home in the venetians islands venetian islands of miami right now what else are you gonna buy and so it has to become for a love of the game it has to become about the sport of business and entrepreneurship and the grind and the grit and the and the team and the camaraderie and like and so you love it as much as I love it, it's really not about the money.
It really isn't. Like the money's the scoreboard, but you play the game because you love the fucking game.
And you want to win, but you still love to play. So I always say I still get excited when I get like a $41 random commission the same way I get it with $41,000 or $400,000.

100%. I just like it.

Winning's winning.

Yeah.

$41 came in.

I'm like, oh, that's cool.

$40,000 comes in.

Oh, that's cool.

I just like the action of it.

Okay.

So you've mentioned a couple different markets

that you're into.

Real estate, Section 8 housing,

and then diving back into opening sober living places.

Walk us through.

Action treatment, yeah.

Why go back into the treatment centers? just because you know it inside out i know it inside now i i understand the business intimately it's you know it for me i had this conversation recently with the addiction treatment business it's that is as much of an entrepreneurship in the sport of business journey as it is a spiritual journey for me, right? Like you go back into, I come off of heroin and all these other drugs, you know, more than 18 years ago. And I'm confronted with, you know, some guys in 12-step recovery, Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous.
I get put into that process, which changed my life, right? And part of that process is you actually make a decision, and it's a prayer, that you turn your will and your life over to the God. It's the third step in the 12 steps.
People obviously probably wouldn't know much about this, but it's a contractual process between you and God that says, left to my own devices, I have destroyed my life. This is my best thinking got me here.
Fucking, you know, not in a good spot, right? And so I need some help. And so the deal you cut with God is that, you know, he's got a job for you and it's your job to do that job.
And in turn, if you do the job and the work

that he's assigned to you, that he'll take care of you.

And so when I sold my company,

the next day we were busy, but my phone was just silent.

And over the coming months, it left this like void of like,

I'd spent 13 years every day doing something that had a meaningful impact on other people and all of a sudden like real estate's cool and i've made a lot of money in real estate but like you're not really helping anyone you know what i mean and it's not and so it just it felt like a labor of love and i kind of got called back to it so there are a lot of reasons but are you looking

for the same goal you want to rent it back sell for 115 million do you want to get to 116 like what's the goal for the next run 500 million to a billion this next time three years five years 10 years five to seven five to seven years on the outside five to seven years 500 million dollars at a minimum threshold correct and are you the target's a billion but but also understanding market cycles the world changes there's a lot of things that we know in 2025 then in 2027 are going to be different sure you know interest rates come down the multiples go like so there's a lot of things that you can't you can't perfectly plan that process but it's 500 million at a minimum it is a much different grind this time because it's much more about a roll-up strategy acquiring businesses not building them organically it's much faster yeah explain the roll-up strategy what do you mean by that we're buying businesses by existing addiction treatment facilities yeah

and so we're buying businesses buying existing existing addiction treatment facilities yeah and so where we bought two i bought one in october of last year 2024 i bought another one in november and right now we are ramping up to with the target of buying four additional businesses facilities this year we'd like to close and integrate one per quarter so every three months be acquiring a new one so let's say it's 2030 you get another wire transfer this time for 520 million dollars you hit your goal within five years the day after that you're getting back into the same game i don't that the other that's the other

information that i have to consider when i think about selling the next time right

it's it left me so fucking bored and so it's like you give it like okay now you have an enormous

pile of cash but the day-to-day of what i'm doing right now is so fun it's going to be hard to let

that go again knowing that i've already had the experience of selling a business once

I'm doing right now is so fun. It's going to be hard to let that go again, knowing that I've already had the experience of selling a business once.
I've already experienced the void. Like, this is the stuff that they don't talk about in, everyone wants to talk about the exit and selling their company.
And I mean, how common in the business world is that conversation? We don't talk about the void after. How close are you with the people that you work and grind and build with every day? Because you just divorced all of them.
You left. You packed.
They're on another mission with another leader, with another group, and you're off on a fucking island alone with a bunch of money. And so, what am I? I'll always'll always have to do something right and so i don't know if it's back into this or too far to tell so you mentioned that here where we see on social media a lot of people talk about the exit how many people do you think actually have had an exit in the social very few very few that's one of the reasons why i got into social media was I looked out at the landscape and saw a bunch of people that I thought were fake.
I looked at them and I was like, you're talking all this business and entrepreneurship, but you haven't actually built it. You're only good at making content and using buzzwords that sound good to get attention.
But in the world of Instagram and social media influencers, the amount of people that have actually built a real business is a small fraction. Kind of on our hands.
And of that, the amount of people that have actually sold one to a successful exit is a fraction of that. So it's a small minority.
Okay. Other category you dove into was Section 8 housing.
Talk us through why put so much money and time and energy into it and why teach people how to do it. I love Section 8 housing because, one, I love third-party payer reimbursement systems and understanding that the government, if you can cut through the red tape, will actually pay you significantly more to provide quality low-income housing to the people that are in their program over and above market rate tenants because they know that they need to incentivize landlords to overcome the stigma of Section 8 and deal with their government bureaucracy, paperwork, and red tape.
And so once Once you can kind of figure all of that out, the ability to make money in it is astronomical. And it's the one thing that I've found in recent times that cash flows at such a rate that it overcomes the objection of the high interest rates and the cost of capital destroying cash on cash returns in traditional real estate investing.
So walk us through the general concept. So section eight, how, as you mentioned around a hundred thousand dollars, if someone's out there like, okay, I can, I can come up with that, or I can come up with a 20 or 30% I might need to get down.
What's the general idea of what they should be looking for if they were trying to dive into the market? Three bedroom and higher homes, because section eight doesn't reimburse on square footage or reimburse on bedroom count so the more bedrooms the higher the rent you're going to get doesn't matter if it's a 10,000 square foot mansion or an 1800 square foot four bedroom home and then just solid bones to the property you know you want to get something that's in decent condition one of the one main, there's a couple, there's a couple pain points within it.

One is screening the tenants and making sure that you're bringing in quality

tenants.

And that'll pay off in dividends over time.

And the other is looking at properties and overcoming a lot of the deferred

maintenance.

So you want to make sure you have something and try to like,

when we come in and we rehab it, we try to make it so it's not going to need someone to come back for quite some time i don't all right we talked about your business stuff let's talk about the world's business talk about the world today's a big day and this this episode is literally i've never done this before we're filming it right now at nine in the morning and in an hour this is gonna be live yeah that's the biggest money monday of all time i'm not just saying that it's literally at 12 o'clock it's the inauguration what do you think about the economic impact of just the energy that's happening with the new president stepping in today i think the entire world changes today i think that you know the economy is going to be on a crazy run for the next four years because people's fear is subsided. They have a lot of faith and certainty in what the future looks like.
Love Trump or hate Trump, you remember what that four years looked like. For sure.
It was good four years, right? And so I'm excited to see what happens in the markets when they open this week. I'm excited to see what happens in crypto.
I'm excited to see what happens in real estate with interest rates um and just watch the i mean the energy of the

country is like yeah electric and it's electric you know what i mean it's like everyone's like

we're back baby we're back and it's really really really interesting to see how many people are more

vocal this time than they were the last election cycle when he lost or during his first presidency

See you next time. to see how many people are more vocal this time than they were at the last election cycle when he lost or during his first presidency.
People are no longer like, who'd you vote for? Trump. Oh, thank God.
They're like, you know what I mean? They're loud and aggressively no longer scared to to come out and just say it how it is so what's interesting is i've always wanted i think people have talked about before like you want a business person in the white house but also this time unlike any other time you have a bunch of billionaires and venture capitalists as the advisors there's obviously team doge but there's also like just legit billionaires like david sachs that are just like wealthy beyond imagination that are there in the white house or next to the white house advising for our country what are your thoughts about having strategic advisors over our actual country because i think our country i don't think i know it's an actual business so what do you think about that i love it I absolutely love the idea of having real operators operating the country, right? Politicians aren't meant to, I mean, politicians are politicians. Look at what they've done so far.
So very excited to see people with operational experience running it. I think the amount of money we're going to save alone is going to be so efficient.
Absolutely efficient absolutely you just hear about how many programs or employees or overhead or they have like entire massive buildings that no one goes to work at because they're working from home so what are we paying 800 000 a month for that rent for example don't leave that can we just talk about how donald trump and the supportive team's attitude around you know how much we to the world. Sure.
Like, God, he's a funny dude, man. You know, entertaining.
And a bare minimum, love them, hate them, love something about them. Whatever your opinion is, you got to give it to the duties.
Entertaining. He comes out and says, this is now not the Gulf of Mexico.
It's the Gulf of America. Okay, dude.
You know, that's what you're you're thinking about you know you're just sitting there on like a Wednesday morning and said you know it really pisses me off they call that the Gulf of Mexico we're gonna rename it you know Greenland let's go bust by Greenland but you know one of the things I'm excited just that he's thinking about and taking actionable steps towards is like I'm sick of listen I'm a taxpayer man like I have paid the government tens and tens of millions of dollars so when i say this i'm not coming off of like you know i have significant revenue that i've contributed to this and so to turn around and watch us provide assistance and aid to countries like ukraine makes me fucking sick like listen i care care about Ukraine as much as I care about fucking Uganda

and South Africa and China

and, like, generally everywhere else.

It's not my country.

It's not my problem.

Like, I live in America,

and this country has problems.

This country has...

Homelessness.

Homelessness, a drug epidemic

that I personally watch on the front lines every day. 112,000 people died last year of fentanyl overdoses.
We just had fires in California, and they fucking send them $770 a piece after burning half the fucking city down. It's shameful, man.
Kids are going hungry to school. It's absolutely disgusting.
And so, like, I don't mind paying taxes.

I pay them one way or the other

because I like to sleep good at night.

But I feel a lot better about seeing that money

come out of my businesses and my ecosystem.

Because, I mean, when you look at it,

when you really understand tax,

everything that fucking moves gets paid.

For sure.

Taxes get paid on.

Seven or eight times.

And so, like, it feels a lot better

to know that they're paying attention and then gonna be making america about america right and and people like have been so scared to say that but it's like yo there are no other countries that i'm aware of and mind you i'm not like this great you know geopolitical guy but i don't see any other countries just fucking handing money out across the globe we didn't get a wire to los angeles from anybody right exactly yeah who sent us money you know who else is fun and so to see us kind of repurpose and refocus on spending american tax dollars on american people and american problems and like yo hakuna matata like best wishes to all these other countries and like but it's on i don't go to bed sleep thinking about fucking ukraine or any of this other shit i do go to bed thinking about those parents that lost their kids to fucking fentanyl sure i do go to bed thinking of like feeling terribly about these people that were displaced in los angeles or the hurricane that whacked north carolina that was totally mismanaged no one's talking about that disaster i mean it just like yeah so i'm excited to see the focus turn back to uh to america with the external revenue team yeah i like that what is it the irs and the the ers yeah exactly external external revenue service so so you see something like los angeles last week i had 19 in-person meetings i don't know how many phone calls meeting with people in the construction space which you understand construction and remodeling very well my concern for los angeles besides the 150 billion dollars and growing number that's impacted is there's no calvary coming and here's's why. If you have a construction company in Dallas, Arizona, Utah, Vegas, the surrounding areas, you're not coming because you're not going to get licensed and you're gonna have to go through a big headache to get licensed.
And so like when I posted about it, I was getting a quarter million views, half a million views of posts. And all the comments were, I'm not going there.
I got 80 employees here. I'd love to go there, but I'm not going to get licensed.
I got 400 400 employees but i'm not coming and i can't deal with the headaches blah blah blah blah blah i'm like well who's going to build it then like and these people are so fucking stupid that they won't give them reciprocity to like their home state licensure you're approved in dallas you're approved in la come on 100 please bring the cavalry like think about when the fire truck showed up from like o or something. They stopped them and made them go through a smog check.
You stopped smog check, there's 40,000 acres burning. What smog matters when the whole freaking city's on fire? That's unbelievable.
Literally, that's not a joke. God, they're so fucking dumb.
It's crazy. It's hard to imagine what's happening.
So, another fun one real quick. I, when Trump, you mentioned about like, I'm going to change the Gulf of Mexico or Greenland or buy that or whatever.
He also did it with Canada and talking about making Canada another state and adding it as the 51st or 52nd state. And then a week later, the evil ruler of Canada resigned, you know, like the guy that was holding Trudeau.
Like, again, I don't even talk about politics very much I talk about math and reality I like to talk about money that's what we're here for he hurt them by hundreds of billions of dollars Trudeau and within a week of basically saying we're gonna take over Canada the guy's gone he resigned and we never hear from him again like the impact of that for that entire country whether we end up merging with them or not is staggering that someone could literally do a couple tweets and all of a sudden you take away an evil dictator yeah the guy that was literally like not letting people go outside their homes for a year or two during the the shutdown like anyways i get too emotional about how frustrating he was to that society i don't like again like canada's not our thing but this is right next door 100 and every time i try to fly in there i go through like three hours of inspections at the border and it's just like a hard hard country to deal with hopefully we can work something out with them because that'd be a great add to our economy okay next topic you saw all over social media last week was tikt Everyone was freaking out. Who's going to buy it? Who's going to figure it out? Is it bad for our society? Is it amazing? Here's the thing.
170 million Americans have a TikTok account. So people think like, oh, that's about half the people.
Wait a minute. Out of the 340-ish million people we have in our society, there's a lot of them that are babies.
They don't have TikTok. There's a lot of them that are senior citizens.
They don't have TikTok. So it's basically everybody else.
It's like 170 out of like 250 or 220, whatever the number is. So it's a vast majority of our society.
And 2023, it was $1.5 billion on TikTok shop. Last year, it was $1.4 billion a month.
So think about the revenue of people that are just making money in the middle of Michigan out of their apartment. A 17-year-old girl or a 36-year-old guy or a single mom with three kids who's 52 and she's making money as an affiliate on TikTok shop.
People don't realize the economic impact. They think it's just like dancing around videos.
That's serious money that's being had there. What are your thoughts about the fun situation where everyone freaked out and cried on saturday tiktok's over and then you wake up sunday morning tiktok's back literally trump went on in his speech yesterday and he said tiktok's back yeah i mean it's just too big to fail right they couldn't let it stay down yeah and so i didn't have a lot of concern that it would be down for very long i think tiktok had to do what they had to do to stay in compliance protect themselves but also kind of stand their ground and so you know the 12 hours that tiktok was down i mean god how many people were complaining oh my my muggling you see how dependent people are on you know these platforms for a lot of reasons for the social greed but also their own entertainment right you know so i didn't have a lot of concern that it was going to stay down for very long okay so on the money mondays we talked about the making money side let's talk about the investing side you get pitched a lot oh and as your personal

brand keeps growing and growing and growing and growing and everyone keeps sharing your videos and you keep growing and growing bada bing bada boom you're gonna get pitched even more sorry to tell you you're gonna get pitched way more how do you interact with people that are trying to pitch you like what do you want from them that what do you want to see to like sift through it all honestly my answer to almost everything right now is no it's and here's why the cost of distraction is unbelievable right and so i'm tunnel vision on these couple initiatives these operating companies that i have they're explosively growing and. And if I take 30 minutes, 15 minutes, 10 minutes away from my day-to-day to disengage from what I'm doing, pay attention to some pitch on some idea, and then potentially say yes, it takes time and energy even to just get that deal done.
And to get it over the finish line and to deploy capital into it.

Do diligence, review it, and then review it.

And all the while, you know, when you look at it,

like if you say I'm three to five years away from $150 million,

I mean, I'm sorry, a $500 million valuation, right?

I'll hit, this year I'll hit $150 to $200 million enterprise valuation. enterprise valuation not liquidity but just the business this is what it's worth if i sold it so take three years from now i've been in for two i'll be in for another three right 60 months what's 500 million divided by 60 a lot a lot divided by 4.3 weeks to the month it's 8 million a month.
It's $8 million a month. $8 million a month.
All right. So that's $2 million a week.
Right? And so when you look at the value of time. $2 million a week.
I will get it done, but for the sake of conversation, if I transact in three years or if the business is, say even if just I grow the business valuation to 500 million in the next 36 months that means that when you take that value that i've created and accredit it backwards that my time right now is worth two million dollars a week it's five days a week i mean i work seven but but we'll call it five the four $400,000 a day. That's $400,000 a day.
So this podcast is $50,000 an hour. Yeah, the answer is fucking no.
Right. And so I acutely understand the value of my time in that context.
And so when I look at it, I'm just like, I can't afford to even stop long enough to listen to what it is you have to say right now. Even if a deal crushes it and someone pitches you like,

hey, invest into this deal.

You're like, okay, I'll throw in 250K.

250K becomes 450,000 or 600,000.

It does really well.

You were doing $400,000 a day in this theoretical number, right?

Right, exactly.

And that would take three to five years from you putting in 250 to wait for that

compared to you doing it on your own.

That's fascinating.

It's a really interesting way to think about time management and the value of time like when i look at my 13 year two month run i had the math done but it's been a while so i forget what it was but it was like every dollar that i made from the beginning when i didn't make any money the first couple years all the way through the end when the business was cash flowing a million dollars a month and then the the equity proceeds at the transaction of the 115 million and then looked at that and credited that for the 13 years two months and i had that boiled down to like what my hourly rate was right and that's where i first started to think of it like that and so now i think of it like this it's like similar because it's 13 years at 115 million it's around a little less than 10 million a year so that's like 800 000 a month 200 000 a week it's almost the same concept exactly but at a much faster rate this time right well yeah now you have the game down you've got the team the lawyers the accountants the advisors advisors that understanding the insides and outs moving quick okay what do you see people doing wrong on social media here's the moment where he pissed the entire internet off you know i just fucking hate these people that are that are making money online with things that they they have no business selling because they don't have the expertise or the experience to back it up right and so the space it's the only reason i remain to stay in the space with my business coaching mastermind is because I'm an actual operator and we bring real value to people that own companies that want to take them to the next level. But seeing these people that you have business coaches that have never owned and operated a real business, that have never hired and fired human beings, scaled headcount,, scaled sales, operations, seeing just all these coaching offers.
And it just become this big, like, yuck. You know what I mean? And I really dislike it.
And so I'm looking forward. I think this year, and I think right now, the tide has turned and is in the process of turning and more and more people will be aware of of kind of consumer behavior of being like kind of weeding through what's fake and what's real and what's bullshit um so that's one like if you have coaches that are coaching coaches on how to coach other coaches it's like what the fuck are we talking about jesus christ go get a job um and then second people are just they're just not authentic you know what i mean when i watch people's content like the the stuff that i see go wrong is is that they create a stage character that they think is the thing that people on social media want to see, and they try to placate absolute everybody.
Like, they're scared of pissing people off. And I guess what I'm saying is that the people that have the greatest personal brands are the people that have mastered being able to be authentically them and totally okay with creating a division.
You're gonna, if you're authentically you at some level, you're going to be polarizing to people. There are going to be people that are don't fuck with you at all.
And people that love with you, but people become so scared of what people think and the rejection of the people that don't fuck with you that they try to placate everybody and in that nobody loves them so on the charity side of money are there things that you care about or is like you helping get people back into reality and help them get off of drugs is that your form of charity or is there certain charities that you like my charity comes is my purpose, right my god-given mission here is to help people with addiction and alcoholism that's very clear and so everything i do in a charitable sense is around that and so it's very frequently helping people get into treatment finding resources for people that can't afford it um helping families etc that's my main area of focus i i think all these other things are great but this is my thing yeah because you care about it deeply totally okay there's a question i ask on almost every episode but i've never ever ever ever gotten the same answer i know i'm not gonna get the same answer right now eric spotford you have a few children and one day you're gonna sell for 500 million probably in five years another time you probably sell for a billion or two billion and by the end of your journey 100 years from now maybe you're 136 years old one day you finally pass away but you've accumulated billions and billions of dollars what percentage of billions and billions of dollars do you leave to those children? I don't know if I've ever thought about it in the context of what percentage, right? I have thought about it in how is it managed. And so I have an estate plan that's set up for my kids that has taken the core issues that I think that my wealth could cause harm to them and tried to, tried to delever that and manage that from the grave after I'm gone the same way that I would here in real life while I'm still on planet earth.
And so some of those things are in my estate plan, my kids don't get a fucking dime. I mean, I will let them starve on the street if they can't pass a drug test and so they're getting i think it's like twice a year hair tests that go back six months like if you're using drugs you're on your fucking own homie they have to be full-time enrolled in school or employed full-time and so there's no sitting around you know spending dad's money right and they have to have and that's at the discretion of um the person that'll be in charge of my estate if they want to go out pursue the entrepreneurial journey cool but you have to be doing it at a full-time you have to be productive it can't be just a charade and smoke shirt.
Like you have to be gainfully like doing something. Um, and even then there are a lot of mechanisms where they never get access to all the money.
Like you, one of the, one of the most over underrated, I should say, one of the most underrated, uh, attributes of a human being that I have to a painful extent is hunger. And so I don't want to spoil them and give them everything.
I don't do that now. I've never done that when they're, since they're children and I'm not going to do it later in life from the grave.
So we've heard famous stories over the years about either child stars or people that have very wealthy parents go down the drug path. Why do you think that is that they, you know, they grew up in a rich household or they get tens of millions of dollars and they inherit a bunch of money or a rich kid, for example.
Why do you think they go down so heavily in the drug path sometimes? I think it gets more attention because people can't make sense of it because they don't really understand addiction, right? If you come from a nice family and mom and dad are still together and there's lots of money and a nice home and fancy cars and all this stuff, people look at that and go, why would you ever do drugs? Why would you destroy this? But when they look at different socioeconomic classes, they can reconcile it. They're like, oh, well, they're from a bad neighborhood.
Their parents were divorced. It makes sense.
The truth is this, is that addiction falls squarely across all people, regardless of economic status, race, neighborhood, et cetera. It's inexplainable.
And so it happens in the neighborhood like this one with $20 million homes, $50 million homes, and it happens in Section 8 housing projects and middle-class America and everything in between. And so addiction is just a disease that doesn't discriminate.
It does not respect that you come from a good family. It doesn't respect that you come from a high net worth status.
It doesn't give a shit shit about any of that so last question i'm going to ask you stare right into that camera for someone watching that is impacted by someone in their life that has gone far down the drug path and they're too scared or nervous to have the conversation with them to try to help them what would you say that person to give them confidence to talk to their friend that's going down the path of potentially dying? It's somewhat of a brutal conversation and a little bit morbid, but you have to think about it in the context of this because this is the reality. If you understand addiction, it ends in only a couple different places.
The person ends up in recovery or they end up in jails, institutions, and death. And the thing you need to consider is what are you going to regret if the worst case situation happens? And that is the tool, the mechanism that you need to overcome your anxiety and your fear on confronting your loved one that has alcoholism and has addiction.
Because let me tell you something, I have consoled hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of grieving moms and dads and loved ones of people with addiction and the amount of regret of the I wish I had, I wish I hadn't enabled them, I wish I'd said it, I wish I'd thrown them out of the house. I wish I'd had that I've heard at funerals and in deep grief post losing their loved one is it is some of the most painful shit that I've ever seen anyone go through in my entire life.
You know, I, I nor any other person in recovery or the addiction treatment industry can guarantee that your loved

one will find recovery. But what I can guarantee is that if you do the right things, no matter what the outcome, as painful as that might be, you will not have the excruciating pain of regret.
And so it's something that you have to do. A lot of people die and lose their life in vain, in addiction and and there are co-conspirators there are co-defendants to that situation and they are the loved ones of that person that love them to death literally you see that addiction lives off of codependency right if addiction is a fire codependency and enablement is the oxygen that keeps it going.
Without enablement of some sort, addiction itself as a fire is arrested and extinguished. And so a lot of these lies and hiding between, well, I'm not the one doing the drugs, and it's not me, and it's their decision, and they have to make their own decision, and the fucking million things that I've heard from loved ones to excuse them not having to have these uncomfortable conversations and do very uncomfortable, painful things to do what's right for their loved one, I assure you that's not how they'll feel, how you'll feel at their funeral.
And so you have to close your eyes and really envision that very painful moment

and think about everything that you're going to regret

and then use that information to dictate

what you're going to do next.

All right, guys, you're listening to the most special edition

of the Money Mondays because it is the biggest Money Monday

of all time, and we're not inside the RV Motorhome for once

because we're inside of Eric Spofford's home. Check him out across social media if you want to learn about section eight housing, how to build real businesses, what he's up to in the real estate game, and just telling real things of what to do in business because he lives it.
He shows it and he shows all aspects of it. I call it building in public and he's showcasing real time like, hey, I just bought 70 units and here's why.
Hey, I'm doing this deal here. Hey, I'm rolling up rolling up these clinics to eventually sell for 500 million he's showing you in real time and he has the receipts to back it up unlike a lot of people across social media so check us out on the money mondays make sure to have discussions with your friends family and followers about money because we know growing up it was rude to talk about money and finally in our society especially this last couple years with this podcast we've been able to change that narrative to have discussion with your friends, family, and followers about money.
And finally, in our society, especially this last couple of years with this podcast, we've been able to change that narrative to have discussion with your friends, family, and followers about money because it is part of your daily life. It's not rude to talk about it.
It's rude to not talk about it. People need to talk about loans, taxes, finances, accounting.
How much do they ask for their salary? What should they be doing with their money? Should they borrow money from their friend or how do they pay back? Or what if they're owed money? People feel scared to talk about money.

You have to discuss it.

It is part of your real life.

So check us out on themoneymondays.com.

Follow Eric Spofford.

And we'll see you guys next Monday.