Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in America, has been warning about a potential debt-death spiral. And this isn't just another market correction we're talking about. This isn't a doom and gloom video. No. We could be approaching an enormous wealth transfer. But there's the catch. Only those who are prepared will benefit. And then the 2008 housing crash hit real estate prices, they fell 40%. Remember that? During the 2020 pandemic, we saw the fastest stock market crash in history. The people who are ready, they bought incredible investments at 50% off. The people who weren't ready, well, they were probably a little bit like Hamish here, who's probably not quite ready yet, but we're training him up. And they those people, well, they watched from the sidelines while others built generational wealth. And my promise for the next 20 minutes, our promise for the next 20 minutes, is to walk you through a comprehensive preparation strategy, how to protect yourself, and more importantly, how to turn economic chaos into your biggest opportunity. This is not about being scared. This is about being prepared, like little Hamish here. Right, I'll put you down. My name is Felix Preen. I'm an ex-invest and banker. I've seen how the money markets actually work. I've been on both sides of the table. And I learned that the biggest opportunity comes when everyone else is panicking. And I also learned that the biggest opportunity comes from being prepared when everybody else is celebrating. I'm also the founder of the GOAT Academy, where we've taught over 20,000 students so far, and the co-founder of Tradevision.io, where we give you access to the kind of data and live news that usually is the purview of Wall Street in Wall Street only. So our mission here is simple: make a million people financially free. That's it. That's what I'm dedicating my retirement to. And I'm not here to sell you fear or hype. I'm going to share research-backed strategies that have worked historically, the same approaches that successful investors have used to prepare for downturns and capitalize on opportunities. But remember, I'm sharing educational content and analysis. I'm not giving you financial advice. I'm not telling you what to do. You need to do your own research and make your own decisions. And this can be the start of that. Now, Ray Dalio recently gave an interview where he said America is entering what he calls a debt-death spiral. Now, before you panic, let me break down exactly what this means in plain English. According to Dalio, there are three critical reasons why this is happening. Number one, debt is growing faster than the economy. And Dalio compares this to plaque building up in your arteries. Think about it this way. If you're earning 50K a year, but your debt is growing by 10k a year, eventually you can't keep up with it. But right now, the US government is paying almost a trillion dollars a year in interest. That's money that can't be spent on infrastructure, education, financial education, apparently, defense, or anything else. It's like having a credit card bill so high that you can only afford the minimum payment. Number two is the supply and demand problem. And here's where it gets interesting from an investor's perspective. When the US government needs to borrow money, it sells treasury bonds. But there's a problem. We're trying to sell more debt than there are buyers willing to buy it. Gallia says we are facing a supply-demand imbalance. So what happens when you have too much supply and not enough demand? Prices fall. For bonds, that means one thing. That means higher interest rates because you have to attract buyers. So higher interest rates would attract more buyers. And that means what? It means the debt gets even more expensive. It's a vicious circle. And then number three, and this is the real death spiral part, Dalio warns the US is approaching a point where the government might need to borrow money just to pay the interest on existing debt. So imagine using one credit card to pay off just the interest on another credit card. Not exactly sustainable. And everybody knows that, but everybody knows how that story ends. Now, Hamish is just zoomed in on my camera monitor, which makes me slightly concerned. Hamish, would you prefer sleeping on my lap where you have less likelihood that you're going to be uh, you know, affecting the recording quality here? We've covered reason number one. Got pretty slides for this two. We've got reason number two, and then reason number three, borrowing to pay interest. And that's where things get really, really, really, really messy. And nobody can exactly predict when this will happen. Not Dalio, not me, not anybody, not Hamish. But we do know is that recessions are a normal part of the economic cycle. Over the last hundred years, the US has experienced 14 major recessions. So the terrorist stole my mic. By the way, if you're wondering why we have two mics, mics break. You need more than one mic. So the US has literally experienced more than 14 major recessions, roughly one every seven years. So it's not a question of if we're gonna get one, it's a question of when we're gonna get one. Now, before we continue, I want to invite you to something special. In literally one week, I'm gonna invite you to a free workshop where I'll show you how to use Wall Street's rules and Wall Street's insights and Wall Street's tools to build a better portfolio. So we could cover AI and tech trends and all that kind of stuff, but really it's about how Wall Street actually manages money. They have rules, they don't wake up in the morning and go, oh, I know what, I just dreamt of a brilliant stock. And this workshop's completely free. And it's uh, as I say, at FelixFrence.org slash training, you can grab yourself a free spot for that. So grab yourself one early because they do get filled. Now there's a harsh truth here about opportunity. There's something most people don't want to hear. You could see in the investment opportunity of a lifetime tomorrow. The SP 500 could drop 50%. Real estate could be selling at massive discounts, but if you don't have any money saved, it doesn't really matter because you're going to be stuck on the sidelines watching others build wealth. That's why financial preparation is absolutely crucial. I call it the 75, 15, 10 wealth plan, a proven wealth building framework for every dollar earned. So what do we do? Well, the absolute maximum you're allowed to spend is 75 cents of every dollar you bring in. That's the maximum, by the way. Like try to lower that. That's the absolute maximum. And you want to invest 15 cents of that as an absolute freaking minimum. And you're going to want to put 10 cents of that into things like an emergency fund and some opportunity capital for market shifts on the sidelines. You can still earn some interest on that, but you're always going to have wanna have some money on the sidelines. And there's different ways of doing this. There is the really passive strategy, uh, this one here, where you just invest consistently every week or every month. Doesn't matter what the market does, you just keep buying the S P 500 or some sort of broad-based ETF, and it'll build wealth over time. And as what Buffett says, time in the market beats timing the market, and it's true in the long run. It's just it's going to give you the average return, which is better than what most people ever achieve. And then you've got the more active investing approach, and that involves having money set aside specifically for strategic opportunities. The focus is on identifying market shifts where the money is flowing into specific sectors, which is what I do every week. So, for example, presidential executive order benefits certain companies, drones, it was, uh, rare earths, it was, you know, now it's the next thing. We just put out a video on that this week. And major tech breakthroughs. And that takes a little bit more effort, a little bit more time, but it's where investors can potentially see outsized returns. This isn't day trading, by the way. We're looking for opportunities that might be months and years in the making. We're not looking for things to buy on a Tuesday morning and sell on a Tuesday afternoon. That's far too much work. And then the third part of this is just opportunity. You want to have some cash on the sidelines for major downturns and you deploy them when markets crash. Remember 2020, the pandemic, remember the 2008 housing crisis? So when others panic, you get greedy and you're like, this is brilliant. So people who were prepared back then, they bought in phases as the market was falling. So while most people were panic selling, which is why the market was dropping, those guys were picking up the panic sold brilliant stocks. And let me give you a real-world example here. In 2020, the SP dropped 35%, but it actually recovered within just six months. So if you bought somewhere down here, and no one, by the way, is going to buy at the exact bottom of the market, forget that theory completely, what did you make where you made significant gains? Housing crisis was the same thing. House prices fell 40% in many areas. That was a brilliant opportunity to pick up some housing. So, how's the best way to do that? Buying phases. So buy as it drops down 10%, you buy some, down another 10%, you buy some, down another 10%, you buy some, goes back up 10%, you can still keep buying some. So it's a very effective way of doing it because you never quite know when the bottom of the market is. So don't splurge all your capital at the same time. And people make money like this, not because they're smarter, they're just better prepared. That's really all it is. And that's really what I want to get through to you here today is it's all about emotions. You if you control your emotions and you control your emotions much better if you've got some cash on the sidelines, because when the media screams, is it the end of the market? Is there, you know, is there a massive crash prediction, your retirement is over, and all that kind of good stuff, then well, that's what people say when the market crashes, which is actually when you want to buy. And when the market booms is actually when you want to sell, right? So everybody says, you know, this stock's gonna make you rich, next Bitcoin, don't miss this opportunity, and so on. And there are there's an acronym to this. It's called poop, right? Panic means overselling, opportunity means profit. So which side of this do you want to be on? Do you want to be in the PO or in the OP? Put that in the chat if you are still with me. So keep some powder dry. You want an opportunity fund. But the key ultimately is if we look at real data here, every single crash since the beginning of time has recovered, right? We had we had 2000, we had 2008, we had 2020. And really, if you just closed your eyes and started here and ended up there, all you'd see is one great big line that went up and up and up. Generational wealth was created there, it was created here, and it was created in 2020. The pattern repeats. So, what does it mean for you right now? Where are we right now in 2025? Well, the US debt to GDP ratio is some crazy 120%. Interest payments are a trillion dollars. We're seeing political polarization that makes any kind of spending reform near impossible. Ray Dalio and other experts are raising the warning flags. Does this mean the crash is imminent? No. Does it mean we should be prepared? Absolutely. So, how what action steps can you take today? Step number one, you assess your financial season. Are you in debt? If you are focused on paying that off, do you have an emergency fund? Build three to six months of expenses into that. Are you ready to invest? Well, then start building your strategy. And step number two is you set up your passive investment plan, automatic investments into the index. Even if it's just like$100 a week or something, the key there is consistency. Always be buying. Remember the acronym, ABB, always be buying. Step three, you start building your opportunity fund. And let me know in the comments, by the way, where you are. Are you in one, two, three, four, or five? You start setting aside some cash specifically for market downturns. That could be 10 to 20%. It's like dry powder. If you've got lots of capital coming in every week, every month from your income, then it could be less or even none in theory. But this is your dry powder for when opportunities arise. And then number four, educate yourself. Learn to analyze market shifts and trends, understand the basic financials, understand economic indicators, stop relying on headlines, do your own research. It's much simpler than you think. If you want to leg up on that one, join me on the live trading at FelixFriends.org slash training. I'll teach you all the cool stuff that Wall Street looks at. And then number five is stay calm and carry on. Write down your plan now. And then when the market panic hits, which it will, you refer to it. Because when the panic hits, you'll do some dumb stuff. But if you've got an actual plan, you're like, okay, here is what I'm doing. Maybe come back to this video and watch it again. So recessions aren't negative events for most, especially investors. They are a wealth transfer event. And wealth doesn't disappear during a recession, it just changes hands. It moves from the unprepared to the prepared, from the emotional to the rational, from the reactive to the proactive. So which side are you going to be on? Now, all investment has risk. So you gotta understand how this business actually works of investing. You've got to learn how to do your own research. I'm gonna consider talking to a financial advisor. Pay him by the hour, by the way. Don't pay him a commission. That's a terrible way to incentivize them. And never invest money you can't afford to lose. And never blindly follow anyone's advice without doing your own due diligence. But we're living in a unique moment. The warning signs are there, the opportunities are there. The next recession will come eventually. I think it'll come next week. I don't think it'll come in the next six months, quite frankly. But it'll take you time to prepare for it because there are quite a few steps you actually need to get in place so you are ready for it. And when it does come, there'll be two groups of people: those who panic and lose, and those who prepare and profit and smile. If you want to learn more about finding those opportunities in this very rapidly changing economy, the fastest changing market I've ever seen, then join me for the free investor workshop at feedixfriends.org slash training. Grab yourself a free spot. And if you got some value out of this, share it with a friend or a cat or a golden retriever, and I wish you great success.