From Firefighter to Real Estate Mogul: Dave Seymour's Unique Path | SMFG Podcast

In this episode we get to know Dave Seymour, a former firefighter turned successful entrepreneur and real estate investor. Dave shares his journey from a blue-collar background to becoming a prominent figure in the real estate industry.

Our conversation highlights the importance of affordable housing, financial literacy, and the need for individuals to take control of their financial futures. Dave also introduces his latest project, Freedom Venture Investments, and emphasizes the significance of aligning with the right partners in the investment landscape.

About Dave Seymour / Freedom Ventures:

Dave Seymour is a retired 16-year veteran of the Fire Service who transitioned into real estate during the market crash, quickly establishing himself as a leading expert in commercial multi-family and ground-up development. Known for his "blue collar attitude in a white collar world," Dave gained national recognition starring in A&E’s Flipping Boston and has since disrupted the private equity landscape as a key leader at Freedom Venture. 

Freedom Venture is a boutique private equity real estate firm that brings institutional-quality management to the lower middle market, specifically targeting underperforming multifamily assets in the Florida Gulf Coast region to deliver robust returns for investors.

Connect With Dave Seymour: linkedin.com/in/daveseymour343
Freedom Venture Website: https://freedomventure.com/
Inflation Nation: https://legacyalliance.link/Pod-Inflation-Nation
Free Multi-Family Masterclass: https://legacyalliance.link/Pod-Multi-Family-Class

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Dave Seymour

04:04 Dave's Journey from Blue Collar to Real Estate

11:03 The Birth of Freedom Venture Investments

17:11 Navigating the Real Estate Landscape Post-COVID

20:02 Focus on the Southeast: Demographics and Opportunities

21:04 The Need for Affordable Housing

24:03 Economic Factors Affecting Housing Prices

25:32 Financial Literacy and Wealth Building

29:13 The Sandwich Generation and Housing Solutions

32:46 Understanding 401(k) and Retirement Planning

37:08 Legacy and Building Wealth for Future Generations

#entrepreneurship #smallbusiness #realestate #financialliteracy #investing

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Transcript

Dave Seymour (00:30)
How are you man? Thanks for having me on the show! Let's go! This is good!

Brad Banyas (00:33)
You know, I

love it man. was I You know, I remember that show so and so you and I were talking before even though you were you can't guy brick guy I made the assumption that you were a traditional Boston guy So you were right there in the tea party nest and you're you you're a hell of a success story for the UK Hey, these guys that rebel I'm in here making money now, but uh, so it's

Dave Seymour (00:56)
Bye!

Yeah, yeah, I infiltrated.

have, shh. You know, with all of this immigration stuff going on right now, I always have to qualify and make sure everybody's aware I am a legal, legal immigrant into the United States of America. I now carry an American passport, much to the distress of my 82 year old father. But ⁓ look, brother, I've been almost 40 years now. December 86, I emigrated 20 years old. So I've got more Boston. Boston!

Brad Banyas (01:11)
Hahaha

well.

Yeah. Awesome.

Dave Seymour (01:28)
Boston, I got more Boston

Brad Banyas (01:29)
Yeah.

Dave Seymour (01:30)
in me than I do the Queen's English, old boy. So it's all right, it's all right, we're good.

Brad Banyas (01:33)
That's right. That's

amazing. So a lot of people don't know. I mean, I've pretty much grown up in Atlanta my whole life, but my dad did get transferred to Boston when I was like fourth to eighth grade. you know, I have some of that Boston blood and grit in me still. I still have a good buddy base up there in Boston. So anytime that someone has that kind of Boston accent, whatever it picks up, and I just, I feel like the brotherhood is there. anyways.

Dave Seymour (02:01)
For sure,

for sure. It comes with a certain edge and a definite attitude whether you like it or not. your New Yorkers are more crass. The Bostonians have got just a little more class attached to the same BS. That's the only difference, I think. That's why we love each other and hate each other all at the same time.

Brad Banyas (02:07)
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah, I love it. I tease everybody talking about the fighting nature there up in Massachusetts is when I moved to Boston in fourth grade, I think I got in a fight every day for a year because they told me that I drove a horse and buggy to school and lived off a dirt road. And I'm like, dude, Atlanta is a city, man. We don't have horses and buggies.

Dave Seymour (02:28)
yeah. yeah.

Yeah.

Brad Banyas (02:44)
Anyways.

Dave Seymour (02:44)
No,

no, no. Anything outside of what we call the 495 belt up here in Massachusetts, anything outside of there, that's just foreign. That's foreigners are out there. And if you go south, well, that's even worse with the mentality. And the funny thing is, little story for you, you'll love this. When I emigrated, I went from London to New York City.

New York was awesome, loved New York. Somebody gave me bacon and eggs at three o'clock in the morning, delivered it to my door. I'm like, I'm in love. I'm in love with this place. But my first wife's family was living in Wheeling-by-God, West Virginia. So I went from London, England, New York City to Wheeling, West Virginia. And you want to talk about it, Sting, right? The singer from Police? know, message in a bottle.

Brad Banyas (03:10)
Yeah. ⁓

wow.

Yep. Yeah.

Dave Seymour (03:35)
He sang that song, an alien in an alien nation, right? And it's like, that was me, that was me. West Virginia was interested. So I got a little Southern flair in me too. Bless your heart.

Brad Banyas (03:37)
Yeah, ⁓

bless your heart. If someone tells you that's not good, so just let you know. It's not a term of endearment. It's a subtle way of giving the middle finger. But anyways, it's great. Well, you've got such a great story and for

Dave Seymour (03:49)
I know that. I know. I know. I know.

Yeah, is. Carry on as you were. Yeah, I got you.

Brad Banyas (04:04)
people that don't know Dave Seymour, I mean, I think it's important not to go into everything, but you kind of started in the blue collar firefighter paramedic construction, and it just kind of eased you in to this multifamily commercial real estate, ⁓ residential real estate. So give the people that don't know Dave Seymour just a high level.

Dave Seymour (04:25)
Yeah,

you know what, it's interesting you say eased me in. No, I was beaten into submission. All right. I highly recommend you don't do it the way I did it. Long story short, and I will be concise for respect of both at times, but I came from that blue collar background in England. My dad was a heat and air conditioning guy. My mom was a secretary in a bank. I grew up in the English equivalent of the projects. It was a housing estate is what we called it.

Brad Banyas (04:31)
you

Dave Seymour (04:53)
And growing up on the housing estate, nobody told you you were poor. You didn't know you just needed a soccer ball and a little bit of grass and it was unlike Donkey Kong. That was it. That was life. We never had any entrepreneurial insight, education, initiative, nothing of that nature. Best advice my dad gave me was work hard son, don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal. Keep your nose down boy. Do as you're told. Do a solid eight hours. And then after 40 years or so son, you'll retire if you're lucky.

Brad Banyas (05:00)
Yeah.

Dave Seymour (05:20)
You'll have a wife, you'll never be out or fold a house. That's it. That's your plan. After that, maybe 15, 20 years, you'll die. And that was it. That was a retirement plan. That was like ⁓ the path that was laid out in front of me. So when we talk about finance, we talk about entrepreneurship, I was at less than zero. I didn't understand anything about money. And I bought that ignorance, that financial illiteracy with me from England to the States. And then I come here.

And it's like Disneyland, brother. It's like you can spend more money than you earn. can spend all your time and effort is keeping up with the Joneses, right? Throw it on a credit card. MasterCard and Visa became my very, very best friends. And you you pay a price for financial ignorance and illiteracy. The blessings I did have along the way with the fact that a buddy of mine said to me one time, he said, Dave, why don't you get a good government job?

Brad Banyas (05:52)
Yeah.

Hahaha.

Dave Seymour (06:18)
I'm like, why? He goes, well, you you got a pension son, you'll be all set. And I was blessed to land a job with the fire department here just north of Boston, city called Lynn, Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin, you never come out the way you went in. And ⁓ it was chaos. It was on the edge, right? It was at a quarter of a million population. We had the downtown, you know,

Brad Banyas (06:31)
it.

Dave Seymour (06:43)
drug and gangbanger areas. had more affluent areas. We had a little bit of beach along the Massachusetts coast. And I loved it. I loved it. I loved the chaos. I loved the flippers and the floppers. I loved being the first one in and the last one out. I loved the camaraderie. I loved the brotherhood. I did not like the politics. ⁓ But again, with financial illiteracy, sick as a dog with money, bro. I mean, it was like, okay, I couldn't make ends meet, so I got to get a second job.

which was construction, started a little construction business. Then I got to get a third job, nights and weekends, working retail security, stopping shop police, bro, it was crazy. ⁓ 127 hours a week, I was trading my time for somebody else's money. And ⁓ that ceiling was there and it pays a price. I paid a price emotionally, financially, spiritually.

Brad Banyas (07:20)
Yeah, wow. Yep. Yep.

Dave Seymour (07:38)
separation from God, separation from man. ⁓ In January of 90, I got sober. I was 23 years old. And during that tough time in my life, it's the closest I came to picking up a drink now in the past 35 years. And I'm like, what, what's going on? And I prayed and I prayed and I prayed and I prayed and I screamed and I shouted. And I tried to have a rumble with God. I tried to tell him what the rules were. And I'm like, I need answers. And... ⁓

The culmination of that whole story up until that point was I was sitting in my F-250 pickup truck, covered in concrete dust and garbage and sad, broken. My house was in pre-foreclosure. My wife was at home with my two young sons and I'm like, God, you got to figure this out. I'm done. I got nothing left. I got nothing left. Give me an answer. And I'm praying on it. And I get nothing. There's no like...

bolt the light in, there's no whisper in the ear, there's none of that. I turn the ignition on in my truck and a BZ radio, WBZ radio, commercial came on the radio. It's what gives me gut bumps today when I tell the story. Chokes me up, man. It's like, it was a commercial came on the radio. Teach me foreclosure. A free one and a half hour seminar coming to your neck of the woods. Learn how to do real estate with no money down. And I'm like.

What? What? In that moment, in that moment, I'm like, are you kidding me? And I took a leap of faith and I look up and I'm like, okay, okay. And I drive home like a lunatic to my wife, Mary Beth. I'm like, baby, I got it. I got the answers. God gave me the answers. She said, what is it? I said, we're going to be entrepreneurial real estate investors. She's like, you out of your trees?

Brad Banyas (09:06)
Wow, yeah, yeah

Yeah.

She's like, all right, yeah,

yeah. She's like, are you drinking again? What are you talking about?

Dave Seymour (09:36)
Are you drinking?

Are you out of your trees? I said, no, the commercial, ba. And we did it. I went to the class and at the end of a three day class, you know, the three day was a couple of hundred bucks. And at the end of this three day class, there was an investment and it was like $30,000 of real estate education package. And I looked at Mary Beth and we were we were more than broke. I told you I was losing my house.

Brad Banyas (09:55)
Wow.

Dave Seymour (10:02)
I looked at Mary Beth and I said, what do you think? She said, what do you think? I said, I can't keep doing what I've been doing because I'm going to keep getting the same results, I have to try something different. And she changed my life that day because what my wife did for me that day was she said to me, go get them killer. She said, I'm proud of you. She said, I love you and I'll support you in whatever it is that you want to do. And I looked at her and I said, I'm so glad you said that baby girl, because I maxed out my credit cards. We got to use yours.

Brad Banyas (10:23)
That's all.

Dave Seymour (10:31)
And you know, when

I tell that story today, she became she became my first private lender. That's that's the way I described it. But within ⁓ eight months of that class, my wife was able to leave the nursing career that she had. She was a labor and delivery nurse and she raised raised both my boys and was able to stay home. And it was real estate and that commitment that I made that day to God to my family.

Brad Banyas (10:38)
Yeah. Shit.

Dave Seymour (10:59)
that really put me on that path. So that's the short version. There's a lot of stuff going on inside of that. That was pretty good. It was only 10 minutes. I rocked it.

Brad Banyas (11:03)
Yeah.

That was awesome. That's

awesome. mean, so obviously God works in mysterious ways. And now here you are, know, whatever 40 years later, you know, with basically a private equity firm that's a real estate firm. he had the right. He put you on the right path. So tell like today, Freedom Venture Investments. Tell this explain what it is, you know, what you're doing.

Dave Seymour (11:18)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, look, free.

Yeah, freedom venture was a the result of ⁓ pretty much the COVID crisis. So as a residential plus a small multifamily investor, really good at that TV show, all the stuff you talked about, that was great. ⁓ But when we went into 2020 into the COVID chaos, ⁓ I've always been on the lending side as well. I've been a private lender, hard money lender.

I've raised capital to do smaller deals. I've always been in the game at some capacity or another. But when COVID occurred, ⁓ it was a pretty scary time because all of the education environment that I later became a teacher and a mentor in and a coach, all of that went away. That was always a great way for ⁓ deal flow, for relationships, because I'd stand on stages all over the country and all of that just ended overnight.

as did my lending business. My lending business went out of business overnight because I was no longer using these lines of credit from Wall Street, non-QM loans, turning over loans, lending money to flippers and smaller investors. That whole business, like all my businesses all went away in like 24 hours. And, you know, again, it's a moment of prayer and reflection.

Long story short, again, I reached out to a couple of compadres, guys that I respected in the business and in the industry. And I said, what's next? And I connected with my CIO down in Florida, gentleman by the name of Walter Novicki, about the same age as me, been through a couple of cycles, seen some Starfax military. ⁓ Walter worked with a group of guys who did things that he can't talk about in the military. so we had a connection there, which I

Brad Banyas (13:18)
Yeah, we know a few of those.

Dave Seymour (13:23)
think was pretty pivotal for where we are today was, you know, my experience as a firefighter and a paramedic and Walter's experience in the military, we would look at each other quite often and say, we know what a true emergency is. We know what a true crisis is. Everything else is conversation and then solution, right? Conversation, identify the problem, find the solution and then execute, execute, execute. And coming from those structured backgrounds,

we built Freedom Venture. And what Walter had said to me was, said, look, Dave, he said, I've been doing onesies, twosies in the larger multi-family space, 50 to 150 unit space here in Florida. ⁓ He said, why don't we leverage that guy from the TV show, you know, that dude, let's leverage him and see what we can do to raise some capital. And that put us in a position to raise capital and take down some larger deals and.

Brad Banyas (14:09)
Ha

Dave Seymour (14:18)
and begin to underwrite and structure and systematize what it is that we do in the multifamily arena. So where we're at today is what I was explaining to you before. The pipeline has always been robust. It doesn't matter how much capital you have access to, you're always going to need more. I don't care who you are. Ask Elon Musk, even he can tell you that. So we looked at the scenario and we said, where are we at today? End of 25 going into 26.

Brad Banyas (14:36)
Right,

Dave Seymour (14:46)
And what we saw was there was so much ⁓ underwritten deals during that COVID time with that influx of the Biden bucks, right? Biden and that administration just dumped and printed so much money and smashed it into the market that everybody was buying everything no matter whether it made sense or not. When now the loans backing up those decisions are come and do the interest rates as we know have changed. The landscape is so dramatically different to what it was five years ago.

Well, that's massive opportunity for us. If you're now ⁓ loaded, loaded up and ready to go, if you've got an army or a team that understands the industry, then it's time to execute because this paper's coming. And when I say paper, I'm talking about distressed assets, distressed notes. ⁓ People can't make the deals work anymore. You can't pencil them out. So we started Legacy Alliance, which is the education brand of who we are today. And Legacy Alliance works in tandem with Freedom Venture.

Freedom Venture is the private equity firm. Private equity, money coming in. Our investors have an expectation of a 2.2 to 2.5 equity multiple on their capital. Five years ago, I would have told you three to five years to recoup that. I'll tell you the truth today. Today, it's five to seven years to recoup that. It's gonna take a little bit longer. We got a longer trot. But where do you wanna park capital in this environment? Do you wanna ride the roller coaster of the stock market?

If you do, God bless you, it's not my wheelhouse. But if you want to do what the Rockefellers have done, which all the wealthy families have done throughout history here in the great country that we live in, they park it in real estate. They say, okay, it's an inflationary environment, where can I do well? Let me get capital into a commercial real estate asset. So that's where we focus. We focus on teaching people how to do it, potentially partnering with them if the deals make sense.

they'll invest a couple of grand in themselves, not the 30,000 I spent, a couple of grand in themselves, Well, that $2,000 investment they make in themselves is skin in the game, right? Attention goes where money flows. It's just simple. That's the rules of the game. So they put a couple of grand in, they come through our program, graduate at the back end of it. And then if they want to, they can align with us and partner with us. We can help them find capital. Maybe we've got some capital resources that will align with the deal flow that they get.

Brad Banyas (16:45)
Ha ha.

Absolutely.

Dave Seymour (17:11)
So it's a great opportunity. 26 and seven is gonna be a recoup. Those are the two years to pull it in and then grow it back out again. 28, 29, 30, and then, you know, 2030, 2032. See ya. I'm done, right? That's not true. I'll still be going. But anyway, that's the idea, you know? That's the plan. No. Yeah, yeah.

Brad Banyas (17:25)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're not going anywhere. I saw your book, Inflation Nation, though. And that's

just, you know, I don't know. I'm one of these guys, you know, ⁓ about the Fed and quantitative easing and all that. always paid attention to that. I if you ever read the book, The Creature from Jekyll Island, but it's about the Federal Reserve. You got to read that book if you haven't.

Dave Seymour (17:42)
Yeah.

I did. I did.

I have read it. Yeah. Yeah.

Brad Banyas (17:49)
You know, I mean, so

when you you start getting into things like that, they like it, it like strikes my, you know, my interest, you know.

Dave Seymour (17:56)
Yeah, but you know why? Here's the thing, you and I, it strikes our interest. Let's just be frank, what population has no freaking idea what we're talking about, right? How big, it's such a small amount of people. And you know why, brother? Because I cannot compete. I cannot compete with Schwab. I cannot compete with Fidelity. Just follow the green line, numb nuts and everything will be fine. Give us your money.

Brad Banyas (18:19)
Yeah.

Dave Seymour (18:25)
I don't have the marketing budget, brother. Darn it, right?

Brad Banyas (18:30)
Well, yeah, well it's funny so I bought that book 15 times and given it away and said hey I want this book back like I'm not giving it to you read it and give it back to me 15 times over the last 25 years ⁓ it's people just

Dave Seymour (18:36)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, you're getting it back. You're getting it back.

Brad Banyas (18:48)
Yeah, like I said, when you can print money and people, they don't understand what causes inflation. ⁓ but.

Dave Seymour (18:51)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There was a

PBS special. The heck was the name of it? Can you afford to retire? It's old. It was 96, 97, maybe a little later than that. But they interviewed Jack Bogle and Jack Bogle, as you know, was founder of Vanguard, which was the lowest fee structure there is in a mutual fund invested, which is

Brad Banyas (19:02)
Yeah.

Dave Seymour (19:18)
pretty much where every 401k is, is in a mutual fund somewhere. And even Jack Bogle, he said, you know, why would you put up 100 % of the capital as the investor, right? Take 100 % of the risk and walk away with 30 % of the profit. Cause those are the numbers when you look at them. Those are the numbers. And what people never, ever, ever, ever look at is the compounding cost of a fund structure like that.

Brad Banyas (19:20)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Dave Seymour (19:44)
They always

they talk about compounding returns. ⁓ I 7 % every year. Really, then let's do the math on a 7 % return on your capital year over year over year for 20 years. Let's see if that's true. And the numbers never jive and they don't know why. Because nobody understands the rules of the game. It's it's interesting. It's interesting.

Brad Banyas (20:00)
I love that you're out there educating

people like you know eight out of ten people won't listen but ⁓ you know you're you know you're out there doing it so what the since I'm in the southeast you know you you guys are kind of in the mid-market ⁓ building in that kind of ⁓ area so what what so much do you guys love about the southeast?

Dave Seymour (20:08)
For sure.

Yeah.

It's always been the demographic and the data. ⁓ I don't even like saying the word data because it's not my wheelhouse. I've got data guys, right? I've got guys who look at the numbers and they say, okay, this makes sense and this makes sense and this is why. So it's always population growth, rent growth. It's all of those drive in underlining factors. It's huge now is geopolitical friendliness. ⁓

love them, hate them. I don't care if you're on the left or always on the right. I have a responsibility for my investors. So I want to be in an environment where my money works with as much velocity as possible. So where is that? Well, unfortunately, it's not New York anymore. You know, it's not it's not Boston. It's it's so southern states. It's those states where, you know, freedom means something. And ⁓ in those markets, we're able to focus and identify what we call the middle market. So we like to

Brad Banyas (21:01)
Right.

Yeah.

Dave Seymour (21:19)
supply housing for ⁓ workforce housing. Now, not low income housing, as we would call it, maybe up here in Boston or Section 8, anything of that nature. We're talking about the middle market. I'm talking about police and firefighters who can't afford a house anymore because the price index is ridiculous, right? ⁓ We're talking about ⁓ small business owners, your landscapers in Florida, the medical field, the nurses, right? ⁓ The assistants, all of those people need

clean, decent, affordable, safe housing. So we like those indicators. We like those driving factors. And when we start looking at those, we can pinpoint, know, tertiary and some secondary, even that's kind of overpopulated now, but some of those tertiary markets, because what happens is, if we start with an MSA like this, we then go into that secondary market, well, that gets absorbed them full. And they're like, well, what are we going to keep fighting in there? No, let's come out a little bit more. What else do we have?

What else do we have? What's the drive? So we're looking for new hospitals, new airports. ⁓ If you go down to Fort Myers, Fort Myers Airport is blowing up ⁓ because of the amount of growth that's going on down there. So those kinds of ⁓ visual indicators supported by data get us excited. And those are the areas where we'll either rehab and reposition or we'll try and get some dirt and get it through permitting

⁓ Those are the things that get us excited. Yeah.

Brad Banyas (22:48)
That's great. Yeah, well,

I mean, it's needed. You know, I've got four kids that are from 33 down to 20, and know, trying to find affordable housing anywhere. When I was a younger guy, I bought my first house like $107,000. know, three bedroom, two and a half baths, acre, and it was amazing. And my kids are like, I can't get in for under $700,000.

Dave Seymour (22:52)
Sure.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah,

yeah, my son is 30. My oldest boy is 30 years old, right? I got a 13, 16 and 30 year old and my oldest boy, Robert, ⁓ smart kid. does, he works for Moody's, the finance company and he's a computer kid, as is his beautiful wife, Ellie. Combined, combined, they got to be over 300 in income and they can't find a house.

Brad Banyas (23:39)
yeah.

That's insane

Dave Seymour (23:44)
They're accredited investors. They're accredited investors at 30 years old, right? Their debt to income ratio is practically zero. They paid off their collegiate debt and they can't find a house. What happened? Right? What happened?

Brad Banyas (23:46)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah,

well, we printed a shit ton of money ⁓ in a time of about seven to eight years, like 75 % of all the money ever printed.

Dave Seymour (24:03)
Thank you. That's what happened. Yeah. Yeah. You're right on it. 78

% was printed in the last six or seven years. Isn't that?

Brad Banyas (24:14)
That's insane. Yeah, there's a lot of people

that aren't going to like this conversation, by the way, but hell, know, whatever.

Dave Seymour (24:18)
No, no, but here's

the thing, right? Watch, watch this, this is so good. That is a factual statement. So then we all know that if there's more dollars than there are goods and services, the dollar is decreased in buying power, right? It loses its value. Last numbers we pulled down, last numbers we pulled down, the true buying power of a $1 bill today is anywhere between five and seven cents. That's its true buying power.

Brad Banyas (24:46)
Yeah, I was gonna say ten... I

was gonna say ten cents.

Dave Seymour (24:48)
a nickel,

10 cents. So watch, so this is where it goes even crazier, right? What are we told to do? Save your money. Save your money. Save your, what? What are you out of your freaking trees, you donkey? Save your money. Put it in a nice CD, certificate of death. Let's stick it over there, right? Let's put it over. It's gonna be fine. It's FDIC insured, David. I'm good. I'm good.

Brad Banyas (24:57)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah,

Dave Seymour (25:17)
No, you're not. You're uneducated. You're uneducated. So, go ahead.

Brad Banyas (25:19)
yeah. Well, I was just going say that they don't want a population that's financially literate.

Dave Seymour (25:29)
Correct. Correct. Correct. Yes.

Brad Banyas (25:32)
Simple term,

I'm being very professional and eloquent in what I really want to say, but they don't, yeah.

Dave Seymour (25:39)
As am I, as am I. I've taught

this in live events all over the country. There's a whole section of a three day class that I would teach around multifamily investing, commercials, some also some residential, but I would allocate, I would specifically allocate a couple of hours to the topics that we're touching right now. 401k accounts, where they started, why they started, how they started. Then when I start looking at the tax laws and I educate,

Brad Banyas (25:45)
Yeah.

Dave Seymour (26:08)
I'm not an accountant, I'm not an attorney, but I know some tax stuff, right? And when you start looking at the tax laws and how they are designed to benefit one class, one class only, which is the business owner, that's who they're designed for. And then who writes the tax code? ⁓ the politicians, right? So the politicians write the tax code. and by the way, do the politicians also have businesses or affiliated with businesses or influences of businesses?

Brad Banyas (26:12)
Yeah.

Dave Seymour (26:38)
You cannot deny it. You don't have to go 20, 30,000 levels deep. You don't have to go on the dark web. You can stay right on Google and a little bit of AI today and you'll get the answers that you don't wanna find. And when I start look, it is, it is. Yeah, look at Nancy Pelosi and Nvidia. Just look at that. Take a look at Nancy Pelosi and what she's worth today in

Brad Banyas (26:44)
Yeah.

Absolutely, it's like a proctology exam is what they're into. ⁓

Dave Seymour (27:06)
listen, watch,

you know this. I'm like talking to my people. This is what it's all about though. Because if there isn't some element of rage, right? If there isn't some element of who's got their hand in my back pocket, if that is not felt, then the motivation to do something different does not occur. Then you can stay stupid.

Brad Banyas (27:11)
Yeah, absolutely.

And look,

Dave Seymour (27:31)
You can stay stupid, it's okay!

Brad Banyas (27:33)
got a guy from the UK, fight for your taxes for God's sake. What a wrap around, what an awesome wrap around, I love it. And we've got the Declaration of Independence behind, so let's do it.

Dave Seymour (27:47)
Right behind you on the wall. Look,

it was an eye-opener. It really was. I would sit in the firehouse, okay? And any firefighter who listens to this podcast will understand exactly what I'm talking about. As a union firefighter, a union, right? A union of brothers, AFL, CIO, truckers, iron workers, union brothers, lot of love, lot of respect. Up until, up until I...

Brad Banyas (27:52)
Yeah, absolutely.

Dave Seymour (28:17)
tried to do more. And now I'm the bad guy because I want to do more. Now, whether I want to do more for my family, whether I want to do more for my finances, my community, my faith, my church, whatever, I'm now separating from the masses. What are you doing? are you, Dave? You're on a what? You're on a TV show? Who the hell do you think you are? What are you, Donald Trump? You're a firefighter. You stay in here with us. Don't you dare leave.

Brad Banyas (28:19)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Buh.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Seymour (28:45)
Where you going? Yous can't leave. You know what I mean?

It's like that mentality serves only one group and it's not the mentality or the working class that created it. It serves the next level up the pipe. And when you start looking at that and you look at, as we said, the way that these laws are written, they are not designed to help the average American. They are designed to compartmentalize them, to crush them.

Brad Banyas (28:54)
Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Seymour (29:13)
and to put them in what's now called the sandwich generation. And the sandwich generation is that 35, 40 to 55 year old American family that cannot take care of their kids and cannot take care of their parents unless they're all living under the same fricking roof. So they're now sandwiched in, which the government is now seeing and they're still making fricking money on it because now there is a law, as I'm sure you're aware,

that says any house can meet a certain amount of square footage criteria and we can now have an ADU, an attached dwelling unit. What that means is we understand we screwed it up so bad and we gotta keep you guys all together before there's a riot and before we kick out the English again, right? So we're gonna give you this cute little ADU law which for guys like us gives us another avenue as business owners and entrepreneurs to profit from these kinds of. ⁓

Brad Banyas (30:00)
⁓

Dave Seymour (30:11)
laws that come down. I'm not a smart guy, brother. I'm not. But I look at the landscape, I look at the landscape, and what I started to do when I started in this business was ask some freaking questions. Ask questions. And if the answers don't make sense, then ask another question and another question until I get there. Because I chose to not be part of the sheep anymore. And I was like I said, at beginning, I was driven to it. It wasn't because I had a

Brad Banyas (30:15)
⁓ yeah you are.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, bye.

Dave Seymour (30:39)
an epiphany one day, I was beaten into submission, beaten like a dog. And that's how I ended up here.

Brad Banyas (30:42)
Yeah. Well,

and I love it because you're the American story now. Lucky you were fighting that day, but now look at you, buddy. You're a freedom patriot, bro. It's OK. Your dad's OK. He still loves you. It's all right.

Dave Seymour (30:49)
Yeah, I am. Yeah, I am. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, am. yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

Brad Banyas (31:11)
Yeah.

Yeah. ⁓

Dave Seymour (31:24)
Right?

⁓ It was a legacy. It was the ability to leave ⁓ something of value. I think about the Seymour family tree, right? And they're to go up this family tree and they'll get to Dennis Seymour, you know, maybe my uncle George or my uncle Roy and a couple of others. And then they got this shoot that went off that way, right? He took a far left to the other side of the world. ⁓

Brad Banyas (31:45)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dave Seymour (31:49)
you know, the trajectory of the family tree changed. My 16 year old, he's gonna be 16 in December, you'll love this. He's like, dad, I'm thinking wicked smart this kid, off the charts smart. I don't know where he got it from. Definitely not me, it must be his mother. But he scores stupid on the SATs and all that collegiate stuff. He goes, dad, I don't know where I wanna go. don't know if, might, listen, he goes, I might wanna go to Bible college. I might wanna go to Harvard. I'm not sure which.

I go, you're going to go wherever it feels right for you. goes, you know why I'm going to go though, dad? I go, why? He goes, so I can learn how to socially interact with the people that I'm going to employ when I graduate. I mean, that's really, that's really the only reason, That's what he says to me. And he must, he must have got a message elsewhere, but the truth of the matter is this, right? For that freedom component to be in place, the questions have to be asked, right?

Brad Banyas (32:26)
my god. That's awesome. ⁓

Dave Seymour (32:46)
it's when I think about the the 401 chaos and how it manifested itself. And if you'll indulge me, I'll do the little presentation on it. I'll make it very concise. Ready? Watch this. This is how I this is how I portray it from a state. I always say, Do you remember the day that you joined the company, whatever it was, and somebody said we're having a presentation in the vestibule or having a presentation in the conference room.

Brad Banyas (32:57)
Let's go, I love this stuff.

Dave Seymour (33:15)
and somebody says, don't know, there's something going on there. I don't know what it is. Somebody says something about some free money and people's heads come up out of their cubicles and they go, free money? They go, yeah, I like free money. It's gonna take about an hour. Are we gonna get paid? Yeah, we're gonna get paid. Wait a minute, free money and an hour's extra pay? This is too good to be true. But wait a minute, they got free donuts and coffee too.

Brad Banyas (33:24)
Ha ha!

Dave Seymour (33:39)
Heck, I'm going. And everybody starts funneling, right, out of these little vestibules and they're all going in a straight line. And they're all working their way down, working their way down. They all turn left, they sit in that conference room and some slick individual, right, starts flapping his or her gums up front and they spew out a bunch of numbers and they tell you, this is the only way to go. This is gonna be a beautiful thing. This is perfect. And they talk about medium, low and high risk investments.

and they then look at your age group and they say, this is for you, you and you. And everybody goes, well, if Bob's doing it and Fred's doing it, that must be good, I'm doing it. And where's the free money? Well, that's a company match. What? Yes, a company match. You want to have as much of your money go into your 401k as the law will allow. Because if you do that, if you do that, the company will match it. I'm gonna take the man's money and...

put it in my retirement account, let's go baby go. And what nobody ever told you was the fee structure inside most 401ks will eat away at your compounding returns. They'll give you a chart and they'll show you some really great numbers. And if you pay attention, I think the really, really good number is if you stay invested for 101 years. That's a really nice number. They put that one on there.

Brad Banyas (34:39)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right.

Dave Seymour (35:04)
And then what they never do is they never show you what the real numbers are with regard to the fee structure, management fee, asset management fees. I could pull up my list and we'd just laugh and get aggravated all day long. But the truth of the story in that is nobody asked a question. It's almost like why when cows go to the slaughter, isn't there just one cow in that line that looks up the front of the line and says, what's going on up there?

Brad Banyas (35:16)
Yeah.

Ugh.

Dave Seymour (35:32)
What is that? And they never seem to veer because the marketing is so loud. The message is so perpetuated over and over and over again. We are a product of the environment in which we live in, period. End of chat, right? End of chat. It's just fact. How do you break out of that? I broke out of it through depression. I broke out of it through destruction, right? That's how I was kicked out. I was kicked out of it.

Brad Banyas (35:46)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Dave Seymour (36:00)
But some people will just suffer the, you know, the death by a thousand cuts. And then look, I've seen it firsthand. A retirement account and a retirement plan that is not right, that is not precise, leads to 40 to one ratio of old people dying in beds with one person that is supposed to support them. I cannot tell you how many times difficulty breathing at the old people's place.

We'd get there and grandma or grandpa had been dead for at least three hours because there were not enough people to go through that government retirement facility to be able to look after these people. I don't wanna go there, bro. And if I can scream loud enough to help people not end up in that environment, then I'll stand on the soapbox. So I get a little passionate. I

Brad Banyas (36:54)
Well, well,

story is amazing. You have your charisma. I just love it. I'm really grateful that you spent some time with us. So in closing,

So either the legacy alliances where you learn how to do this, right? Where you learn all the basics, fundamentals, how to execute. So you're kind of building your own kind of minor league, who's good, these guys are good, they become your partners. I love it. We're building our troops, minor leagues into the majors. And then basically you guys are doing through your private equity, the freedom venture. And so.

Dave Seymour (37:12)
Yep. Yep.

Yep. Yep.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes,

yes, those are the two options.

Brad Banyas (37:34)
Tell, just tell

anybody how they can, if they want to be part of Legacy Alliance, how to learn and how to get to you.

Dave Seymour (37:40)
Yeah,

yeah, go to Legacy ⁓ Wealth Masterclass, which is a great little, you know, our slide deck presentation with a little bit of ⁓ a little bit of flavor added to it. It starts you on the education gradient and my guys will give you all those links anyway. ⁓ You can also find me on LinkedIn, Dave Seymour. ⁓ You can just Google my name. All of the America's Most Wanted stuff has now been pushed way down. So I got rid of all of that stuff. So that's good. ⁓ But

Brad Banyas (37:49)
Right.

Yeah.

⁓

Dave Seymour (38:10)
Yeah, Dave Seymour, look, the Facebook stuff and all of those things. If you wanna look at what the investment landscape looks like right now with us and for us, then go to freedomventure.com. But I would highly recommend Startup Legacy Alliance. Just because you've got money doesn't mean I wanna use it. Let's make sure that we're aligned first of all. And then if we are, we can rock and roll from there. So you'll find me, you can find me.

Brad Banyas (38:27)
Yeah. Right.

Yeah,

absolutely. He was easy to find. Flipping Boston. We thought he was a Bostonian. He's really a UK guy in disguise. He learned from that guerrilla warfare. He's learned he's not walking in a straight line anymore. I love it when I see a Brit convert to a true American. I'm actually happy. I am happy, Dave. Well, brother, you are awesome. And I'm going to close this out

Dave Seymour (38:41)
He said, London up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I am too. I am too.

Brad Banyas (39:02)
So you've been listening to the SALTYmf Goat. We'd have Dave Seymour on with us from Freedom Venture. Check it out. He's an amazing story, amazing guy, and a great American. And we were grateful to have you on with us, brother.

Dave Seymour (39:16)
Thank you, much love, bro.