Unscrew The News Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Marco Pfeiffer grew up lower middle class in Germany and heard the same things you heard in Canada. Money doesn’t grow on trees. A penny saved is a penny earned. He came to the United States at 26 for what was supposed to be a two-year posting — a line on the resume, a chance to learn real English. He stayed. Within ten years, with no American work history and a shaky command of the language, he was Chief Financial Officer of a $150-million company, working sixty, eighty, ninety hours a week. He had the title he’d wanted his whole life. And, in his own words, corporate had killed his spirit. Then in 2016 he lost the job. Two or three months out of work, on a salary well above average, he discovered something that rattled him: he was completely dependent on that paycheque. He owned one rental house at the time — a place he used to live in and decided to rent out rather than sell. An accidental landlord. That was the hinge. He went back to work in finance, but from that point on he bought every rental property he could and learned how to scale. By 2020 he owned 25 single-family homes generating $400 to $500 a month each at roughly a 10% cash-on-cash return. That replaced the CFO salary. He walked away from a career he’d poured tens of thousands of hours into and never looked back. The advice that’s supposed to keep you there Marco’s central claim is one worth sitting with: Middle class financial advice is designed to keep you in the middle class. Not accidentally. By design. As he put it on the show — the system is not broken, the system works exactly as it is designed. Consider what you were taught. Save. Live within your means. Get out of debt. Pay the house off early. There’s nothing wrong with living within your means, Marco says, and he isn’t preaching recklessness. But nobody ever taught you that debt comes in two kinds. Bad debt sits on things that lose value — your car, your credit card. Pay those off fast. Good debt sits on appreciating assets that cash flow, ideally enough to cover the debt itself. So why does a billionaire take out a mortgage? Because long-term fixed debt is a bet against your own currency. Your $2,000 payment ten years from now isn’t $2,000 today. Inflation shreds your purchasing power — and it shreds the real value of your debt right alongside it. That’s how Washington carries forty trillion dollars without the roof falling in. Forty trillion isn’t what it was thirty years ago. Tell someone in 1996 that number and they’d have told you to get off the crack pipe. Which brings us to the friendly little chart your bank hands you at signing. Make one or two extra payments a year and you’ll clear that thirty-year mortgage in twenty-two. How thoughtful. Marco’s response: do you really believe they’re telling you that because they want less of your interest? The middle class is a tax trap Here’s the part that stings for anyone on a T-4. When you get paid, the money is gone before you see it. Say the cheque is $10,000 and the rate is forty percent. You see $6,000, and you build your entire life around $6,000 — the car you can’t afford, the mortgage you can’t carry, the restaurants you don’t go to. The other four thousand never existed as far as your daily life is concerned. Marco pays tax on what’s left at the end of the year. You pay tax before you’re allowed to live. Same country, same rules, entirely different game. There’s a saying in the States he’s fond of: there are two tax codes, one for the educated and one for the uneducated, and both of them are legal. None of this is taught in school. Not how the tax code works, not how to keep more of what you earn, not how compounding works, not how to open a chequing account. You learn plenty of other things. Marco’s read: the foundation of the whole arrangement is to keep us financially and economically illiterate, because people on the hamster wheel don’t leave the hamster wheel. Nineteen forty-three If you want a single date that explains the modern taxpayer, it’s 1943. Before that, an American who earned $10,000 was handed $10,000 and then wrote a cheque to the government. People hated it — visibly, viscerally, every single year. So during the war a senator had a glorious idea: take it out of the paycheque so they never see it. Temporary, of course. Wartime measure. Three or four generations later we don’t merely tolerate it. We can’t imagine any other arrangement. And when a portion comes back the following spring, we say thank you — for the return of our own money. The same trick, Marco notes, that took the dollar off gold for a few months. Fifty-odd years and counting. And it’s worth remembering what came before all of it. For roughly 140 years — until 1913 — the United States had no income tax at all. It went from a handful of colonies to one of the most prosperous nations on earth funded by tariffs and by bonds that citizens chose to buy when they agreed the bridge was worth building. Marco is a free-market man and no great fan of tariffs. But he’ll say this much: used properly, with no income tax on the other side of the ledger, it is not a bad way to run a country. Which is precisely the argument we’re making in Alberta. Let the resources and the businesses fund the roads, the schools and the hospitals. Keep a small consumption tax on what people actually use. Keep government to the few things government is for. That’s not a fantasy. That’s a description of North America for most of its history. The Canadian problem — and the way around it Marco is straight with us, and I appreciate it: what he did in the US is close to impossible to replicate here. We don’t have thirty-year fixed mortgages. Our access to credit is tighter. And the ratio that matters — rent to home value — simply doesn’t work. He can buy a solid $200,000 house in Mississippi or Alabama and rent it for $2,000 a month. Try that on a $700,000 Calgary property renting at $2,000. You aren’t even covering the mortgage. He’ll say it plainly: Calgary is a fine real estate market and a poor rental market. So his philosophy is this — go where your money is treated best. Americans in New York and California do exactly the same thing, investing in states where the numbers work. Can a Canadian do it? He’s already helped Canadians, a Brit and an Australian do it. You won’t get the best rate and you’ll put more down. After two or three deals, the terms improve because the lenders know you. And he doesn’t use banks at all — he uses private lenders, which in the US is a multi-billion-dollar industry of institutions that simply aren’t banks. He hasn’t taken a bank loan in about eight years. His view of the banks, on why you’d hand them your savings in the first place: whatever you give them, they lend out ten or twelve times over. Why a house beats a screen One last thing, and it’s the part I liked best. Real estate isn’t fashionable right now. Everyone wants the stock that’s up twenty percent. Marco owns stocks and trades them, so this isn’t purism. But take a run-down house that’s an eyesore on the street, renovate it, and hand a family a home they’re happy in — you have built something. It’s hard to tell that story about a click on a screen. Shares used to come with a certificate you put in the safe and were proud of. Now it’s numbers and clicks and nothing to hold. Same reason I keep telling you to get some silver. If the machines go dark tomorrow, a hundred Maple Leafs in your hand is a different feeling than a balance you can’t reach. Tangible. Dirt, or metal, or a roof over a family. He’s coming to Alberta Marco already had a ticket to the Vancouver conference this format grew out of — small world. He’s never been to Alberta, he wants to come, and he says he feels strongly about our cause. So the invitation is open and public now: come north and teach Canadians how to put their money where it’s welcome. Find Marco: LinkedIn — search Marco Pfeiffer, and send him a message. He answers, he coaches people who ask, and he doesn’t advertise it. This episode’s sponsor: NuggetStacker. I’m not your investment advisor — but get some gold and silver and protect your family’s wealth. Link and discount code at unscrewthenews.com. Free delivery in Canada on orders over $600. Coming up: Capitalism & Morality, Calgary, September 11 and 12. Great speakers, real conversation about freedom in the West. Use UTN10 for 10% off your ticket. Share this out. Get more eyeballs on this information. The shadowbans only work on people who stay quiet. Let’s stay sane together. Keep your head on a swivel. — Bruce This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unscrewthenews.substack.com/subscribe
