The Wealth Cockpit
Take the controls of your financial future. The Wealth Cockpit — where smart investors navigate money, markets, and freedom
Why an Amazon robotics engineer moved to the woods
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Tait Carroll spent 25 years building automation: twelve years running his own factory automation firm in the Pacific Northwest, then four and a half years at Amazon Robotics as lead engineer on one of the biggest robot deployments in North America. Then he moved to the mountains of northeast Oregon and started Larix Robotics. We talk about what fixed-bid engineering teaches you about estimating, how he turned around a roughly $4.5 billion Amazon project and saved about $2 billion of it, and why he picked forestry by running a list of business ideas through a screen instead...Most deals today lose money on the loan. You can check it with two numbers.
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Most deals today cost more to borrow on than the building earns. That's negative leverage. I walk through a $100 example, a 6 cap single-tenant building I passed on this week, and Aspen, a building I bought in August that was negative leverage on the day I closed, and the plan that's built to flip it. Year-one and year-two figures are projections, not results. The test is two numbers: the cap rate on the real trailing twelve months, and the rate on your loan. Want the one-page Leverage Check? Email [email protected] and tell me...The box everybody skips: moving business profits into real estate
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I started five businesses. The e-commerce one worked, and it handed me a tax problem I was not ready for. This is the mechanics of what I did next: rolling business profits into real estate, and the test in the tax code that decides whether those losses are worth anything to you. I am not a CPA, a tax advisor, or an attorney. This is educational, not advice. Take it to your CPA. Chapters 00:00 Intro and disclaimer 00:57 Five businesses, and why taxes became the problem 02:35 The cashflow quadrant 03:31 Employee, self-employed, big business, investor 05:50 Why...Ep 5 - Why I say No to Good Deals
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Every operator I know is wired to chase the next thing. New deal, new asset class, new opportunity across the desk. It feels like ambition. A lot of the time it's just noise.
This week I did the opposite. I spent a morning building my whole financial picture in one place with AI, the operating businesses, the properties, the loans, the cash, and asked one question: am I being intentional, or just reacting to whatever showed up this year?
I walk through exactly how I did it: measuring real es...
Two Years of Income: Where the Proceeds Actually Go
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Three decades of work. About two years of current income after taxes. That's what a long-time service-business operator walked away with when I ran the math with him recently.
I tell his story (anonymized), then walk through what I did when I faced a version of the same concentration problem with LeisureQuip. Why apartments specifically. The four ways real estate pays you.
And the four structural levers that change the after-tax math for an operator near exit.
If you're 5 to 10 years from selling your business, the question isn't whether to sell. It's where...
Are you one bad week away from a financial crisis?
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Most successful business owners are one bad week away from a financial crisis — and they don't even know it.
In this episode, Brent Neely shares the story of how a single Amazon account suspension, triggered by a missed phone number verification, exposed a $3.5M problem hiding in plain sight. At the time, he was doing $30–40K/day in sales, carrying $2M in supplier payables, and staring down a $1.5M tax bill. Seven days of zero revenue nearly unraveled everything.
The culprit? The trap of h...
What does it actually mean to be free?
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Growing up, I watched my dad build a successful fourth-generation family business. He worked six days a week for 30 years, commuting over an hour each way, rarely missing a day. By most measures, he succeeded. But success and freedom, I learned, are two very different things.
In the second episode of The Wealth Cockpit, I walk through the decisions that shaped everything for me. From leaving a thriving family business, building an e-commerce company that scaled to over $20 million in revenue, facing a $1.5 million tax bill with cash locked in Amazon...
Turbulence, Tailwinds, and Why We're Buying Now — Live from Best Ever Conference
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In the debut episode of The Wealth Cockpit, Brent Neely sits down live at the Best Ever Conference in Salt Lake City with Joe and Levi from Cowboy Capital. The three operators break down why they're going all in on multifamily while the rest of the industry chases shiny objects.
Topics covered: — The supply cliff forming in growth markets like Boise and what it means for operators buying today — Buying from distressed sellers and lenders at 30–35% below peak pricing — Why the hardest time to raise capital is often the best time to deplo...
