Written By Travis Hornsby, CFA®, CFP®
The Six-Figure Debt to Six-Figure Net Worth Course is finally here.
We designed this Student Loan Planner® course to teach you how to reach financial abundance in less than a decade. If you have a goal of growing your net worth and not letting your student loans run your life, this course is for you.
Keep reading and I’ll walk you through each section of the Six-Figure Debt to Six-Figure Net Worth Course to give you a preview of what you could learn.
What does this Student Loan Planner® course include?
At Student Loan Planner®, we know how stressful life with student loans can be. Survey after survey shows over 90% of our readers report high levels of anxiety from how much debt they have.
Many borrowers are forced to put their dreams of buying a house, starting a family and reaching financial independence on hold because managing their student loan debt is such a burden.
That’s why we created the Six-Figure Debt to Six-Figure Net Worth Course — to teach borrowers who have $50,000 to $1,000,000 in student loan debt how to invest. The entire course consists of six sections and takes approximately three hours to complete.
Section 1: Why investing is so important
There are at least a dozen things you’d rather do than think about investing, right? Even though I read personal finance books for fun, I’d opt to go on vacation or spend time with my family over micromanaging my investments.
But investing is still important.
For example, let’s say you go buy a $20,000 car. If you make $120,000 a year and take home about $80,000 after taxes, that car isn’t $20,000 — it’s 25% of your annual earnings.
If you translate that to time, you’ve spent three months out of the year working to pay for the car. And the time you spent working is time you could be spending doing other things.
This concept is what makes investing so valuable.
Investing gives you income without costing you the same amount of time as working. Income from investing can take about two weeks of your time instead of the three months needed to work to buy that same car.
Investing allows you to spend your time however you want. It can also shave off 10 to 20 years of working to get to retirement.
Section 2: Smart ways to invest
Some investments can be complicated, but others are much more straightforward. The building blocks of most investments are equity and debt:
- Equity is an ownership share in a company. When you purchase or gain equity, you’re entitled to a percentage of profits. Stocks are a type of equity because they represent partial ownership in a company.
- Debt is another type of investment in which you loan money and expect a higher return once it’s paid back. A bond is one example of a debt investment where you can earn your money back plus interest.
The best way to invest in stocks and bonds is not through direct ownership. Instead, investing in funds can streamline the process and help you make better decisions so that you get bigger returns on your money.
Different types of investment funds
There are two kinds of funds: mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
- Mutual funds pool stocks or bonds into one big pot that you can put your money into, and they trade only once per day.
- ETFs on the other hand, trade multiple times throughout the day.
Additional investing options you might consider (but don’t really need) are hedge funds, private equity, cryptocurrency, crowdfunding, or alternative investments.
To help you decide which is right for you, ask yourself, “Why is this opportunity available to me?” If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Being a successful investor is as much about picking the right investments as it is avoiding the things you shouldn’t be putting your money in to. In our course, we’ll show you different ways to identify the investments you should avoid.
Section 3: Understanding the risks of investing
The United States has had a great economy over the past 10 years, which is the longest period without a recession since the 1850s. Since everything has gone up in value, we have an elevated risk of loss in the stock and bond market.
There’s a good chance you’ll lose at least 30% to 40% of your money (on paper) anytime you invest. The key to managing that loss is to be aware, strategic, and in many cases, patient when investing.
How to handle stock market losses
The psychological consequences of a stock market loss can be severe. Some people panic when they see their account balances plummeting.
You can lose a lot of money if you sell when the market is down. Plus, if you’re not aware of the risk, you could lose your chance to earn back double or triple what you lost as the market improves.
You need to understand how market fluctuations can impact you. Once you see the long-term vision of investing, you’ll get comfortable with the idea about how much money you can lose, but you’ll also know the potential for how much you could make.
Section 4: How to pick investment funds
People ask me all the time what they should invest in. I’d love to share my expertise, but I can’t. In order to tell you one-on-one what to invest in, I’d have to be a licensed financial advisor. And I’m not.
But there is a way around this. By making this course an educational program that’s mass-distributed to the audience, I and my team can share high-quality recommendations of what investment funds we think you should be using.
It’s a little like a newsletter subscription back in the day. Investors used to subscribe to newsletters that would come in the mail and provide advice on what stocks to buy or trades to make.
This course dives into what funds to use and what percentages of your investment money to invest in them. We also talk about when you need to use a financial advisor and how much they cost. You’ll also learn how to manage the expense of investing yourself by making your own investments.
Section 5: Investing when you have student loan debt
Very few financial professionals understand student loans well enough to coordinate an investment plan for a borrower. Loan rules and the math behind student loan payoff strategies are complex and impact how you invest in a big way.
As you progress through the course, I’ll share my knowledge as a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and what I learned from managing billions of dollars of bonds and investment trading to help you.
How to make your investments and student loans work together
If you want to work part-time and retire someday but you have $400,000 in student loans, there is a way to make it happen. Most financial advisors will suggest that you work more to pay down loan debt and invest the money you have leftover. But that’s a bad plan.
Income-driven repayment (IDR) plans allow you to customize your loan payment to your income. The right investment strategy can reduce your taxable income to make your monthly payment even lower.
When you make your investments and student loans work together, you can have enough money to make your loan payments while working part-time and still retire before the age of 60.
The course will show you how your savings rate will impact your future lifestyle and teach you to calculate your target net worth so you know how much money you need to be able to stop working.
Section 6: Set up your action plan
The last section is where we put it all together into an action plan.
Knowing what to invest in and how much to invest versus how much to set aside for savings is important. But you won’t live forever, which is why having an action plan to help you get the life you want in retirement is crucial.
We’ll help you figure out a date when work will be optional. You can target with precision the exact date using projected returns and investment strategies and say, for instance, that work will be optional for you on January 1, 2030.
When you have a set date, your plan becomes tangible. You’ll also be able to calculate how much sooner you can get there if you save a little bit more. Instead of 2030, your new retirement date might be 2027 if you save an additional $1,000 per month, for example.
New bonus sections for 2020
The feedback we got the last time we launched this course is that we didn’t cover enough about real estate investing. New for 2020, the course includes two bonus sections that provide in-depth advice on real estate investing.
Anyone who purchases the course will have access, and those who bought the course in the past will gain access to the new bonus sections as well.
Stocks and bonds are great investments, but if you want to diversify your portfolio, real estate can help you get there. We interviewed three real estate experts to bring you the best real estate investment strategies in the context of this course.
Bonus 1: Real estate investing tips from experts
The bonus real estate investing course is designed for people who want to own real estate. After all, the idea of owning 20 properties and making $200,000 a year in passive income may sound amazing.
The three real estate experts I interviewed share different strategies. They’ve used these strategies to achieve a substantial level of financial independence. Each one has a particular style that helped them get to where they are today.
Bonus 2: Investing, managing risk and budgeting
The second bonus section focuses more on passive investing in real estate. Basically, it’s where you buy a fund or a deal or participatie in owning part of an apartment complex that requires you to lock your money up for five or more years.
Most private deals like these require you to have a six-figure income and they can be lucrative. You must know what to look for and do your due diligence to understand what it is you’re being offered, however.
You also learn how to use real estate to achieve financial independence through this course. We cover the real estate debt snowball and tips like house hacking, where you buy a house or a two-, three- or four-plex and rent out the other rooms to earn enough to cover the cost of your mortgage.
How to get started with the Student Loan Planner® course
You could avoid hundreds of thousands of dollars in mistakes by using the knowledge in this course to build wealth while managing your student loan debt strategically. Once completed, you’ll have a step-by-step plan in place to help pay off your student loan debt and get to $100,000 or more in net worth.
The Six-Figure Debt to Six-Figure Net Worth Course costs $399 and comes with a no-questions-asked, seven-day money-back guarantee. If it isn’t what you were looking for, send us an email and ask for a refund. Out of the hundreds and hundreds of courses we’ve sold, only 2% of people have ever asked for a refund.
If you’re ready to commit, the Six-Figure Debt to Six-Figure Net Worth Course will teach you how to gain financial independence and freedom with your time, which is the best asset of all.
Not sure what to do with your student loans?
Take our 11 question quiz to get a personalized recommendation for 2024 on whether you should pursue PSLF, Biden’s New IDR plan, or refinancing (including the one lender we think could give you the best rate).
