Break free from trading time for money and discover the power of passive income. Join host Bronson Hill and co-host Nate Hambrick, author of The 18 Laws of Leverage, for an inspiring conversation with Dr. Peter Kim, former OB anesthesiologist at Cedars-Sinai and founder of Passive Income MD, recorded in June 2025. Growing up in a family of immigrant physicians, Peter was set on a path to medicine, only to find the “golden ticket” of a dream job came with unexpected challenges—broken promises, rigid schedules, and a loss of freedom. This sparked his journey into real estate and passive income, leading to Ascent Equity Group, where he raises capital for cash-flowing investments like preferred equity and debt funds. With a community of over 50,000 physicians, Peter coaches professionals to diversify their income and reclaim their time through real estate, businesses, and more.
From his abundance mindset—“there will always be enough”—to prioritizing family trips over work, Peter shares how to shift from scarcity to freedom.
Get my new book: https://bronsonequity.com/fireyourself
Full Transcript:
Bronson Hill: Alright, welcome.
Welcome. Welcome to the Mailbox Money Show. I’m super excited that you’re here.
We’ve got an amazing guest today, Dr. Peter Kim. I also have my guest host today, Nate Hambrick, who is the author of The 18 Laws of Leverage. Nate, I was thinking about this topic today. We’re gonna talk about, I used to work with a lot of physicians. And I just realized everybody, kind of like everybody, a lot of people work too hard. They just do a time-for-money trade. Even if you’re a physician, you’re trading time for money, right?
I know you have a corporate background as well. What’s something that you’ve kind of struggled with, when it comes to passive income and getting that started for yourself?
Nate Hambrick: Honestly, just getting started, and I’m super excited to chat with Dr. Kim. Because my father’s an ER doc. And it’s funny, because most of my friends think that doctors make a ton of money doing medical work. But the reality is, most of my father’s friends make way more money on the real estate, oil and gas, passive income side.
So this is gonna be a fun chat.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, it’s gonna be great. Well, let’s get into it. Let’s introduce Dr. Peter Kim, and just a little bit about his background. He is a physician, former practicing physician at Cedars-Sinai, the exclusive medical center. A lot of celebrities go there. He lives in kind of a similar area that I live in, and he’s created something called Passive Income MD. It’s one of the leading podcasts. He’s got over 50,000 physicians involved in his different networks. He does mastermind coaching groups to help physicians to experience financial freedom, to raise capital, to vet deals, all kinds of things. He has a conference coming up in Newport Beach, California, coming up in the fall.
So really excited to have you, Peter. Welcome to the Mailbox Money Show. How you doing?
Peter Kim: I’m so excited to be here. I mean, this title of your podcast, one of my favorite out there, man. I mean, Mailbox Money, come on.
What do you want? I mean, there’s nothing better than that. And Nate, it’s cool, I didn’t know your dad is an ER physician. That’s awesome, man.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome. It’s really good to be with Peter. I just love the energy you love, you’re always so collaborative, man. You got, obviously, a great reputation in the investing world as well. But we’re gonna have a good time, so let’s get into you.
I know some people know who you are, some people don’t know who you are. I want to hear about how did you decide to not only become a physician. But also to stop being a physician, right, or to be a coach of physicians. What was that process, what broke down for years?
Like, hey, this was promised to me, and it didn’t quite achieve. It may work for a while, but then it stopped working. Tell us that story.
Peter Kim: Well, I don’t know about you guys, but when I was young it was kind of like ordained what I was gonna do or be, like my parents had this set out for me. I mean, my father’s a physician, my grandfather’s a physician, and like my uncle’s a doctor, you know. Everyone you name it, like it’s just like, we come from a family of doctors or physicians. And especially a lot of them being immigrants. They felt like that is the path to success and stability and wealth in this nation.
And so when, when they came over here and they immigrated over here, the expectation was that, hey, Peter’s gonna do the same thing as he grows up. I kind of grew up around medical stuff. I had stethoscopes around me all day, playing with them as a kid, posters on my wall, that kind of thing. And so that was kind of the only thing I knew when I was growing up. I mean, I was gonna be a physician, and it seemed like, hey, being a doctor equates to having a good life.
Again, I saw my dad, or someone, grandfather. We lived in a nice neighborhood, and we lived well, and we went on vacations and things like that. And so that was my whole path.
I mean, I went to college. I even picked the college I went to thinking that I’m gonna go into medicine. And so I went through the whole path, and fortunately it worked out for me. But all along the way, I definitely had some distraction, where there’s definitely moments of doubt. Like one key moment was when I started college. Everyone else was going into, like, biology major and all that, and I was like, you know what, this might be my only chance to learn about, like, business or something like that.
In the beginning, I was like, maybe I’ll be an Econ major. So I don’t know why, I started as an econ major there. And I started on that path, and I realized it was gonna be a little hard for me to do that and still go into medical field, or do all the classes I wanted. So I switched back into the sciences. But there were little hints along the way, kind of breadcrumbs that kind of made me think, like, hey, there’s something more that I want to do beyond just being a physician.
Like, I would have a lot of little random side hustles, even when I was in medical school and things like that, to create other income for myself. Because I was a medical student. You just start, I mean, you’re like neck deep in debt, and I wanted to live a good life. I started dating my now wife back in medical school, and I wanted to, like, go out and have some good, you know, go out to a concert or whatever that is.
And so I always had all these little side hustles on the side.
Bronson Hill: So, real quick side note here. I had a friend as a doctor, my best friend growing up is a doctor now. And he would literally, his girlfriend at the time in college would say, I know in Jason, you know, we got on a date. I know that he recently gave blood, or gave plasma, because…
Peter Kim: It might have been a trial or two that I signed up also as well to make some extra income. All these little side trials. I mean, I would do things like let’s say you want to take your wife, you know, take your girlfriend on a concert. I’d buy multiple tickets, I’d be selling them all over eBay, and that made some extra money.
But yeah, so I was down that medical path, and that was kind of what I was gonna do my whole life.
And I was really fortunate, because the doors just kept opening up to me in terms of where I wanted to go, where I wanted to be. And I’ll say, when I got my job out of fellowship, which was like the final stage of training, I did it. I got it at the hospital where I wanted to, in the exact field, and the department, everything that I wanted.
Like, I was like, I got my dream job right off the bat, and I thought I was set. I mean, I thought I was like, this is it. I’m in my early, you know, mid 30s, and I’m gonna do this for the next 30 years, and that was gonna be it. And really, that was my plan.
It’s so funny how life kind of just takes its own turns. And what happened is, I honestly, I got screwed at work. They changed what was promised to me when I became a partner, it was in the contract, which I thought was gonna be there. And so I was like, what happened? I felt like blindsided. I was like, wait a minute, this is what I expected when I became a partner financially.
It wasn’t what I expected, schedule wise, freedom, choice, all of these things were not what I thought it’d be. And so I said, I got to figure something else out, and I started looking around the hospital. I probably ran into your dad, Nate. Their friends were investing in real estate, and I was like, wait a minute, you can create income outside of medicine in real estate or in other things. I was like, oh, this is amazing. So I just went deep into it, man.
And so that kind of changed the trajectory of my life, and that kind of led to all the other things that have happened.
Bronson Hill: What was your specialty that you, as a physician? What kind of specialty were you?
Peter Kim: I was an OB and a sociologist, so that was specific, like very specific. That was my passion. If anybody has gotten, either listening to this, or one of their spouse or partners got an epidural, spinal, C-sections, you during the time of birth, that’s me. I thought that was like the best place to be, because it’s the one place in the hospital where people want to be there, right? There’s cupcakes, there’s balloons, and it was a great place to work.
And like you said, I worked at a really fun hospital. There’s celebrities, VIPs, and it was just a wild place to work. And so that’s why I wanted to be there in the beginning. But it eventually became, I guess, less and less of my life. I’d say, in terms of a focus.
Nate Hambrick: And I’m curious with that, because one of the things that my dad would say is, you know, you go to med school for 10, 12 years, then you start practicing, and then you realize, oh shoot, I am talking about the same thing every single day, and it’s been 20 years. And so I don’t know if you’re the same way, but one of the things that he loves about the business world, or the real estate world, is he’s not confined to just medicine, just single-family homes, just this, just this, just that.
And he’s got a lot more variety versus some physicians. You know, they find their lane, they stick in their lane for 50 years, and they talk about the same things. I’m curious if that was your experience, of just the freedom of knowing, oh, I can actually learn lots of a variety of different skill sets.
Peter Kim: It’s so funny that you mentioned that. I mean, that’s the whole concept, I think, behind the whole, like, seven-year, ten-year itch. It could be far. I mean, it’s not just physicians, anybody. Like, when you find yourself, whatever you decide to do, it can be really interesting at first. But if you do the exact same thing over and over again, like even some of these surgeons that go into the, like, how many gallbladders can I take out, right, before it feels like just another one?
And hopefully you can approach each surgery, each person, with the same type of energy and purpose. But sometimes, again, if you just kind of run through the motions, like day after day, and in medicine that happens to a lot of people, I’ll say they actually hit a wall. A lot of people hit a wall between, I’d say, you know, once they’re establishing their practice, they kind of get into it.
They become a partner. Maybe about seven to ten years in, they start thinking, all right, am I gonna just do this again for the next 20 years and maybe just stop? And so it’s cool. And I found it’s really important for doctors and physicians, especially these days, to kind of diversify their interest.
It’s not just income, but diversify their interest. They got to have something else beyond just medicine. I mean, whether it’s the old cliche of playing golf, right, but a lot of them don’t even play golf. But a lot of them have started doing businesses, becoming consultants, advising, doing all this stuff. And when you find a lot of physicians end up in these different specialties, or different kind of side businesses, or whatever it is, it kind of brings a lot more excitement to our lives.
Bronson Hill: So Peter, I was in medical device sales for 10 years. I was actually at Cedars-Sinai, probably at some of the same time maybe you were there. So we probably crossed paths. I was an OB, you know, big hospital. One time I came out publicly so I can talk about it, but there was a John Doe that was there one time, and then Arnold Schwarzenegger later did a press release. They did a mitral valve, and it was like, there the day that that had happened and all that stuff.
And of course, seeing all the celebrities was fun. But I think what you’re saying is so true, that like, you can do the same thing again and again and again. And then to me, like in sales, that was different. It was different, but it’s, you know, you have your thing you do. But it stopped being intellectually interesting after a while. I mean, you still, I mean with medicine, there’s always stuff you learn, there’s always things you’re doing. But at least in sales, it’s like, you know the players, you know what you need to do.
You’re kind of, it feels like a grind. You’re just simply, it’s like productivity. You are producing. You’re not producing widgets, but you’re like doing these many things. This is the productivity. This is what it is. And so it sounds like you kind of got tired of that. What was it, I guess, around like how did that process go around kind of the mindset, and even I imagine with family. If your whole family was saying that was hard for me to like fire myself and quit my job, right? It was like well, no, it’s the golden handcuffs. Why would you ever leave your great job? Like your family probably thought you’re nuts, right, because they’re all like how was that like, like did you have coaching through that or support?
Did you go to like like an entrepreneur support group or something? So you get around that, because everybody thought you’re crazy.
Peter Kim: Again, you guys, it’s like you’re reading my mind, like you kind of know my story. I don’t know what it is, but it’s funny, because when I first started talking to my father again, he’s a physician, was a surgeon, and I started telling him I’m starting to invest in real estate, I’m starting a few of these side business, and doing this kind of thing.
He literally just told me, he goes, just focus on being a doctor. He’s like, why are you wasting your time and energy on all these things? You’ve got again the golden ticket, and that was at a time when he was in private practice. He’s doing really well.
Still, that old practice he’s been in for many, many years, and he thought, why would you even want to consider doing something different? But it’s funny because his life changed. His life actually, even in medicine, changed where the private practice group was basically pushed out of the hospital. He had to become an employee physician. He had to, they kept changing his contract. They cut his pay in half, and I mean, it’s just wild things happened to him. And years later, it’s funny.
So I hear him say this now, he goes, you were right. It’s funny, you can get that to your parents, you get the other parents. He was like, I am so glad that you started doing these other things, and not because, like, he wanted me to leave medicine, or I actually never really wanted to leave medicine. I just, I love doing it, I just didn’t want it to be the only thing I relied on, both from a financial, emotional, even identity standpoint. That’s not the only thing I wanted to do, but it’s funny, he’s come full circle on this, and it’s funny to hear that now from him.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, no, that’s interesting Nate. I want to ask you as well, when you have looked at transitions in your life. I know you’ve done a lot of investing, and you’ve had corporate, and you have different things as well. What’s, and as you’ve written your book The 18 Laws of Leverage, what’s some things that you’ve realized when people make a big shift like this? Kind of what changes in their mindset to be able to allow them to do that?
Nate Hambrick: I think it’s really freeing. I, I think the first shift that you make, the first major shift that you make in your life, is really terrifying. And it’s funny, you mentioned the story about your father. My father has only offered me a sum of money once in my life, and this is so funny, but he offered me ten thousand dollars to not go into sales. Because, just like your father, you take the, you do the, and then, you know, ten years later he’s like, you know what, that, you know, that was a good decision.
And so anyway, that first transition is super scary, but I’ll share with you my brother. He was a pharmacist and just hated his job, and then about a year ago he realized, you know what, I just need to quit.
And so now he does, he trades loans basically, and he loves it. We hung out for a whole week in Galveston on the beach last week, and we were talking through his transition. And the biggest thing he kept coming back to is, I was so scared and I’m so glad I did it. I was so scared and I’m so glad I did it.
Because you have the people in your life who care most for you, help you make the worst decisions in your life, right, because they don’t want to see you go through pain. But the reality is, on the other side of pain there’s so much freedom in there.
And so, with a lot of the people I talk about in The 18 Laws of Leverage, with my brother, with the many career shifts I’ve made in my own life, figure out what you want to do, go find somebody that’s already done it at the highest level, and then just go do it. Because even though it’s terrifying, you’ll be so thankful that you did.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, you know, Peter, tell us real quick on, and thanks Nate, for that was really wonderful. I guess you work with a lot of people now, you coach a lot of people, they’re in that, actually know a guy.
This is a really funny story. He was like, he was an engineer at same immigrant family. Like you’re he can be a doctor, you can be an engineer, be a lawyer, what do you want to shoot. It was kind of like, hear your choices, you know. So it became an engineer, and then he was making more money in his real estate business than he was making at his job.
And he wanted to leave his job, but like he couldn’t leave the job because of like he just says. So he actually hired a coach, like a mindset coach, to help him leave the job. And his wife was like, why don’t you just like quit your job. And he’s like, no, no, I need to actually have a coach to help me to quit. He’s like, save that. She’s like, save the money and just like quit the job.
And then you’re so what is it like, I mean, you walk a lot of people through this. And like either passive investors or they raise money, whatever, like what’s that process you’ve seen. Other people go through that, like what’s the mindset it takes to kind of go through that. What do you, how do you kind of coach people through that.
Peter Kim: Well, I think my goal is, I mean some people will kind of get the wrong message that when I tell people about making money, other streams of income, that I’m trying to get people to leave medicine. That’s really the furthest thing I want. I mean, I think we need doctors, we need people who care, we need people like this just to stay and take care of people. The thing that I’m trying to help people to do is not leave medicine because they’re burnt out. That’s part of it, right.
I want them to continue to do it because they love doing it, and then do it on their own terms. And I find that when people are given the tools and the option and the choice to spend their time how they want, maybe even run their practice how they want. You’ll find a lot of people just don’t end up leaving, or they go back and deeper in a lot of ways, and it just changes their perspective.
Here’s an example. I had, I remember I talked to somebody. He came to my conference, and he said he just stumbled into the event because he was feeling totally burnt out. Like he was showing up at work, and there was almost like a sense of dread for him. He knew he had to do all these things, take care of it. He was running his own practice, he had his whole group, and he’s like, and he happened to find out since he was local, he happened to find my own conferences when I was running in Dallas, and he showed up.
And he met all these people, and he met the community, saw all the different options, what was available to him. We had to talk about it while we were there, and he sent me a message the week after. He goes, I don’t know what it was.
Nothing changed at work, absolutely nothing. I walked in there, same load of patients, same this. He goes, but just realizing that I could potentially do something different, or add something, or change my life in some way, he goes, it completely made everything that seemed to be a problem less of a problem. Right, and so it’s funny how that mindset just shifts when you start thinking.
Hey, there’s an option, there’s a choice, like I get to do this versus I have to do this. It’s like that perspective change, right. Yeah, that’s like for anything in life. If you feel like you have to do something, or like, you have kids, like kids feel like they have to do something, then they act one way. But if they get to do it, they’re totally excited, right. It could be the exact same thing, and so part of it’s like playing that mind game with them, to try to get them to realize they get to do this. But it’s funny how people go through this whole thing. And I think part of it’s again a sense of identity that we have that’s so tied to medicine, probably all of you.
We all kind of, you follow Tony Robbins at all, huge balls, like the strongest force in the human emotion is to be consistent with what you call your identity.
So if you say I am this, like I’m a doctor, I am, I’m a runner, then you’re gonna run, right. But if you say I am not whatever, you’re gonna stay consistent with that. And so for us, so many of us as physicians, we’re so used to being, you know, labeling ourselves.
We meet somebody, hi, this, I’m doctor this, I’m doctor that, whatever it is. It’s so tied to who we are, that even like even something that kind of comes, either threatens that, or feels like we’re giving that up a little bit, it’s a tough thing for us. And if I have one story, maybe one story here with that is when I finally decided to retire from medicine, I didn’t tell, I didn’t tell my parents for a while. It’s funny, it was a weird thing. It was like I was actually worried about the judgment they’d have against me, even though they weren’t to me doing all these things, and then how they would feel about that.
So I kind of kept that from them for a while. And then even actually my wife’s dad, right, my wife’s father, my father-in-law, you want him to feel like you’re, you know, you take care of his daughter and doing all these things. I was like, what are you gonna think if you thought I left medicine, you know, and so I, yeah, it took me a while to do that. And even the one thing where I, you know, I sometimes introduce myself still as a doctor, you know, people ask, what do you do, I’ll say I’m a doctor.
I’ve had a situation where my kid was next to me, and in the beginning as my daughter, she would go, she goes, no, he’s not. Because I retired from medicine, I guess, and I’d be like, no, I’m still a doctor, even if I don’t practice, I still have my degree and all this. I don’t know why that hurt, I mean that kind of hurt me, and I was like, wait, no. But I realized this again is that sense of identity, and I think we hold on to that no matter what profession you’re in. It’s not just doctor, but for all of us we do that, and so getting people past that and realizing they’re more than just one identity is a big part of what we do.
Nate Hambrick: So now that you help lots of people do that what are kind of to pivot a little bit What are some of your favorite investments? What are currently things that you’re investing in? What do you get excited about doing what you currently do?
Peter Kim:Yeah, the cool thing is I feel like in the beginning the path that I took was real estate, because that’s the only thing I knew. I ran into some people, now I’ve seen people in especially medicine, it started the whole brand that we started, Passive Income MD, was specifically around passive real estate investments initially. I’d say that’s where it kind of started. But over time, as we’ve gotten to know different pathways, different vehicles for creating passive income, I mean Mailbox Money is probably, I’m assuming, not just about one thing.
Mailbox Money is probably about whether it’s real estate, you know, I mean there’s things where you can buy businesses, you know, there’s so much for you to do, right, from Mailbox Money perspective. And so same thing with our brand, and what we’ve started to learn is that there’s so many different ways we get creative enough to create, again, leveraged income, like your word there, leveraged income, scalable income, passive income, whatever that is.
So yeah, we talked a lot about real estate investing. For the physicians that own their own practices, we talk about optimizing that, they already run a business, why not try to figure a way to become more of an owner in your business and optimize that, or potentially even exit from that. We talk about those things, which can be a big day or do well. And then the other thing is, again, maybe beyond your practice, other businesses that you can run. So a lot of physicians have created businesses leveraging the skills they already have inside the medical world.
They’ve started medical apps, they’ve started technology companies, they’ve started, they’ve done direct to consumer products. It’s really cool, it’s been really fun to see all the stuff that people can come up with when they get creative.
Bronson Hill: It’s amazing. I know you mentioned this before about being in a job, and just it not creating passion. I just, I had somebody that just came back from a trip, did a tour of the holding lands in Israel. And I said, you know, when I come back from a trip, like I’m excited to get back to work, and I’m excited, whatever. And they’re just like, I’m just really not excited to get back.
Most people, like 70% of people, really don’t feel engaged at work. And I think it’s really tragic, because I think that, and then we do, we do what we have to do. We do it for our families, we do it. But the challenge is when we can actually be in a place where we can actually be learning, we can be developing, and we can be growing in areas of passion, it’s really exciting. And so, I guess with physicians, I guess even what you said, when you came back, or you see people, they come back not necessarily like, okay, they’re back in their practice, but now they’ve got this new journey. They realize like, oh, actually, I can create passive wealth, and like you said, have the choice. So that’s where you’re talking about, to fire yourself.
It’s not necessarily about replacing income. It’s about replacing living expenses, and then being free to, like, okay, do I want to work this way? Do I want to change it up? Do I want to go part-time? And then, or God forbid, I become disabled, or a family member becomes disabled, or something happens.
You want to travel. It gives you more freedom, and that’s where I think we should all aspire to. It’s funny, I wish I’d got it earlier. I know some guys in their early to mid-20s, and they get it, and they’re just going for it. They’re raising millions of dollars, they’re doing these big deals. I think I was late 30s, mid to late 30s, but I’m glad I got it when I did. Some people get to be 60, 70, and they never really get that. So, how has your lifestyle changed? It sounds like you’re going to Europe coming up. Are you traveling a lot more? Or are you home?
Are you at all the baseball games for your kids? Like what does it look like now versus as a physician most physicians. I knew are working 60 hours a week or more
Peter Kim: Yeah, it used to be that you have your schedule first in terms of work, whatever that is. You’re given your schedule, your shifts, and then you have to rearrange everything around it. It almost feels like everything else is done in the cracks of your work or your job, and sometimes it was just hard to say no. Even if you got an opportunity to work an extra shift, you start thinking about the money that you’re giving up if you don’t take it.
And so it becomes this never-ending hamster wheel type of thing. You start making more, working harder, spending more, that kind of thing. I would say that happens to a lot of physicians unfortunately, and everything else is kind of a default. You fit in your family time, you fit in your personal health, health in terms of working out or whatever it is, your relief time, focus on your relationship. Everything happens after your medical schedule comes out, your career schedule. The biggest thing for me that has shifted in that is that I’ve flipped that, which is I’ve put non-negotiables in my schedule around time. I spend with my kids.
Non-negotiable about time I spend with my wife. For example, every Tuesday is like our day, and it’s the time when the kids are in school. And so, drop off the kids at school, and then it’s a day for myself and my wife that we get to just, we say we’re gonna get it, just put our phones aside, hang out together, whatever. We’re down here in Southern California, so sometimes, like, I don’t know, maybe we’ll go to Disneyland or something by ourselves, something like that, just for fun, right?
Whatever it is, it’s just a day for time for ourselves, and we’ve set that, and that’s the non-negotiable that we build everything else around. And so, I’ve learned, and it’s not always easy to do that. It really actually helps if you have like an assistant who, kind of like, you tell them this is it, and so whenever calls or meetings come up, you do it, and you set your schedule around all that stuff.
And so, that’s been the biggest shift for me, is to put in my schedule the things that I want to do that are important to me around my kids, my family, my health, my friendships, and then you get to fit in your business and those other things that you want in those cracks.
Bronson Hill: Value centered living, right? You’re putting the rocks in first, and then all the pebbles and the other things fill in after that. But you can start with the things that really are most important, not just the job, right?
Nate Hambrick: And when you start doing that, I don’t know if at Bronson if you’ve experienced this too, but I realized how few people have the opportunity to even do that, where they can say, you know what, I’m taking off a Friday to take my kids to the zoo, right? And so it really is a game changer. And Peter, I’m going to put you on the spot here in a second, so I’ll give you a chance to think about this. But one of my favorite questions to ask people in your position is, what do you believe about money that nobody else would agree with? And I’ll answer the question first to give you a minute to think through it. One of the many things that literally my friends give me so much grief about is, ditch the 401k, right?
Invest in real assets, and then buy things that give you tax credit to the government, right? So that would be an example of, you know, one thing I believe that most of my friends don’t. But I’m curious for you, what’s one thing you believe about money that you know to be true, that most people would want to hang you for?
Peter Kim: That’s a great question. There are a lot of things along the lines of what the conventional thinking is that I’m totally counter to in a lot of ways. But when it comes to the thoughts around money, I would say that for me, I always feel this is the way I’ve always kind of thought about it. There’s always going to be enough. I tell people that a lot of people start from the place of there’s not enough. I can’t tell them that, because again, it’s more like a feeling, and it’s maybe almost a conditioning that you have to do. But I always say, you know what, there’s going to be enough. And I don’t know if you guys follow the whole Die With Zero book.
You might have read that book concept before, and I would say there have been before my mentality, I think it was I gotta just keep storing this up because I don’t know if I’m gonna have enough later. And so I would give up on certain experiences. I wouldn’t, you know, I said, oh man, I would love to sit closer, you know, let’s say go to a concert, man, I’d love to sit a little closer, but it’s not much more, like forget it, I gotta save that. And it doesn’t mean that I just spend the money frivolously, but I’ve started to realize that spending money on those experiences today is invaluable, and the funny thing is you’ll figure it out later.
The money will come, I believe it. There will be enough, you can always adjust. And so I have now come to the place where, in terms of income, money I will spend money on experiences all day with my family. I’ll travel, you said one of the one things like what is one of your focus is. I told myself this year, a big goal of mine.
One of my top goals was I’m gonna go on 10 family trips this year, and that’s been like my driving force. 10 family trips, and we’re gonna make that happen. Not all of them are the big trips to Europe, three week long whatever that is, but some of them are smaller trips. But I’m not going to give up this time right now, when my kids are 9 and 11. This is an amazing time right now. They still want to hang out with me, they’re a lot of fun, they’re independent.
I’m not going to give up this time for a time in the future that might not come, but I don’t know what’s going to happen. And so, that’s for me, there’s going to be enough. All of us, I think, listening to this, if I can absolutely believe it, you know, if you’re listening to this, you’ve gotten, you figured out how to be resourceful enough to listen to a podcast like this, and you’re learning from people like you and the guests that you bring in. You’ll find a way, you’re gonna be resourceful.
You got to figure out a way to live a good life, and so don’t store everything up right now, miss out on things for later that might not even come.
Bronson Hill: Well, it’s really, it really is an energy that we put out. I think Peter, whether we come from scarcity or we come from abundance. And I know so many people are like, oh, there’s not enough, or I can’t do this, or like people have money, but they’re so rigid in the way that they do it, and just so many little choices, like okay, am I gonna, and I’m my daughter as well. She’s just, she’s 12, and we’re going to Alaska next month. And I’m like, well, I’d love to do the seaplane, and love to do this, love to do that. I’m like, well, but you know.
Those are experiences like, I want to do with her, because we’re going to have that experience together. We’re going to be able to do it together. When I show up, you know, in a business sense, if I show up with abundance, it’s about I already have enough, and there’s more than enough no matter what position I’m in, but like there’s more than enough out there, right?
So if I just simply show up and I believe that there’s more than enough, it does change everything. Let’s come down to for a second about assets. I know you kind of, some of us, we started with real estate, did 2500 multi-family units, raise a bunch of money for that. Then we started shifting, so the last few years have been shifting to other assets. We’re buying businesses.
We’re doing oil and gas deals. Doing some debt funds and things like that. But what assets are you really excited about now, because cash flow and real estate is kind of tough? So what would it, like you personally, you guys raise money for deals as well, right? So you have your own syndication group. Okay, tell me.
Peter Kim: I have a company called Ascent Equity Group, and we also raise capital, mostly doing JB Parch and JB Equity. Also, we’ll do a lot of preferred equity as well. I would say, of course, the sentiment has changed a lot in real estate, considering what’s happened in the last several years. We started our business and our company right at, I’d say, 2021. Yeah, it’s probably not the best time, I’ll be sarcastic, by the way to start this kind of thing.
But we learned a lot over this process, and in the beginning, just like a lot of people, we were chasing yield in a lot of ways, just because the yield was there, or appreciation, and just getting nice pops of equity at the end. But I’ve learned over time, and I’ve been reminded again and again, it’s all about cash flow. It’s all about what comes in terms of a check, a passive check into your pocket at the end of the day, each month. That’s what really changes your life. A lot of what I’ve focused on is making sure that base is there first before going after the shiny object. A lot of our focus has been on things like preferred equity.
We’ve done debt funds, things like that, where we’re getting established cash flow. Maybe it’s not as, again, exciting on the other side with these potentially large returns, but I’ll say in today’s market, probably people who are promising larger terms are taking a fair level of risk to do that. So I’ve invested also in oil and gas. I’ve invested in all of these things that are just going to produce, again, oil and gas from a mineral rights perspective. So I’ve, again, more focused on assets that are just producing those dividends, those distributions on a monthly or quarterly basis that are really, really consistent. And so that’s been my focus, and it’s still real estate. I love a lot of real estate. I just think, like, I’m focusing on a little different asset class within real estate.
Bronson Hill: Yeah, it’s interesting. There’s always opportunities for investors. If you know where to look, there’s always things that are there. I think what I’ve realized is, I ask this question when I have, each, probably onboarding calls when you have new investors, and you kind of ask them questions and go through a questionnaire. One of our questions is, like, what’s more important to you, cash flow or appreciation, right? And it was like, well, I don’t know, appreciate both. They kind of like, but I tend to believe now that cash flow is everything, because cash flow helps reduce your risk of the basis, and in the deal, you’re getting money back sooner.
It also led to covering expenses. I know guys that are, I know guys where there were 500 million dollars. He loves cash flow. I know somebody that loves, that’s just trying to kind of figure out how to replace their living expenses. Cash flow is awesome. So, I think that anything that provides cash flow is great. Nate, I want to ask you a question on this too. Jump in as far as leveraging and other ways you’re seeing people kind of leverage cash flow or leverage their investments in this time right now. Kind of some things that you’re seeing.
Nate Hambrick:Yeah, you know, I’m beating a dead horse here, but cash flow absolutely changes your life. I have a lot of friends now who leverage other people’s cash to then buy cash flow, and it’s amazing. It should be illegal, but it isn’t, so you should take advantage of it. My wife and I have actually done some of that ourselves, where we’ll take debt, really, really cheap debt, and then reinvest it into assets that produce cash flow.
The new rule that we’ve been using has been very successful. We only buy into investments where we get our capital back in two years or less. The reason for that is you constantly have enough cash flow to buy the next thing, because the reality is, with new administrations, with tariffs, you never know what’s going to happen. If you keep your cash flow strong, you can always buy into new things quickly. It also gives you freedom. Any opportunity where you can arbitrage somebody else’s cash flow, or somebody else’s money, take full advantage of that. That gives you so many other opportunities to find other points of leverage.
Bronson Hill: Love it. Love it. So, Peter, you’ve achieved a lot in life. You’re really looking at your life. You’ve got time freedom. You’re taking 10 trips this year with your family. Financial freedom. You’re respected in the industry. You know, you’re still a young guy. You’ve got a lot of life ahead of you. So, what’s next for you? What’s next on your horizon in terms of what you’re looking to accomplish or achieve?
Peter Kim: That’s it. I mean, that’s a great question. I try to do a fair amount of goal-setting, short-term, long-term type stuff. In terms of what I’ve accomplished, I still feel like there’s so much more to go. Obviously, I still feel like there’s a lot of room for improvement when it comes to being even just in my family stuff, right, and becoming a good dad, being a good husband, being a good mentor, being a good coach. I still feel like there’s so much more to go there for me. I’m still learning a ton.
When it comes to real estate, the last couple of years have taught me more than anything ever else. I’ve been investing for a little while, but in terms of education, I’ve learned so much in the past couple of years. I still feel like there’s so much more to grow there.
What my vision is overall has been, we have this platform called Passive Income MD, where we educate people, connect people to great resources, and build communities around this. Then, Ascent Equity Group is kind of like a vehicle to help people actually create cash flow. Creating that whole pathway, there’s so much more to grow there. I think we’re trying to build this community and just reach more people.
I still feel like we’ve only reached a small portion of the physician community in particular. That’s where I’m passionate about. There are about a million practicing physicians today, and we have connected to a lot of them, but I still feel like there are so many more people who could hear this. It’s not about me per se; it’s about just connecting with other people who are thinking the same, doing other things. I feel like that is an untapped market that we still have so much to explore. When we explored a part of this world, there was so much to do there. Every day, there’s more to do in terms of that.
From a lifestyle perspective, there’s not that much more necessarily. I love where I live. My community. The neighbors. I love the people that I spend time with, and I’m just trying to make more meaningful experiences here. From the purpose or mission perspective, in terms of the business, there are definitely more people to reach. I think it’s great.
Bronson Hill: I think it’s really important to continue to clarify. I love that your goals person. I think that most people that I find that have achieved great things, or continuing to create awesome things, their goals, people, their mindset, people. They’re doing a lot of this work.
Tony Robbins. Tony Robbins is coming to Southern Col. If you’re coming in October, I’ll be there. Okay, you’ll be there. We’ll be there together.
Then I’ll be there, Nate, you should come out, man. He only does a couple live events a year. It’s gonna be an Anaheim, October 9th through the 12th. But yeah, just seeing how you’re doing that. But I think the biggest thing is like having a vision for your life.
And I think for anybody listening or watching, it’s so important to have a goal, a vision. Something for your life that you’re doing that’s beyond yourself, right? That it’s like, Peter, you found a way to like really impact a lot of physicians that, you know, were just like yourself, that you, found some friends, mentors over the years. It really helped you to kind of get to that next level. I think we’re always, like, there’s that saying where the average of the five people that you spend the most time with, right? So it’s like if we want to change who we are, we’ve got to change the rooms that we’re in. So hence, Tony Robbins. That’s, you have mastermind groups, I have a mastermind group, the World Forum.
So we have groups that we’re a part of. So I guess, what, give us like a little bit insight, we have a few more minutes here, just about personal development and some of the things that you do. Are you part of Tony Robbins, kind of platinum partners, or one of those groups?
Peter Kim: Yeah, I’m part of different groups. I mean, that is one of the groups that I’ve been part of for about five, six years. And again, part of it’s just about trying to expand your circles and trying to find like-minded people. People who relate to you, but also people that will push you, and that will in some ways you feel like there’s a different standard there, that there’s maybe a higher standard, and that you feel pushed.
That’s why people join groups like Tiger 21, YPO, and things like that. Again a lot of people probably are very successful in their own rights, but they feel like they can learn more, do more, right, and be around people. And just being connected, people like you, like I’m just seeing what you’re doing and seeing all the cool things you’re doing, and it’s incredible. And so I’m learning from that as well, right.
It inspires me to try to do new things, right. I see that man Nate wrote this incredible book, and I’m like, shoot man, I need to write my own book. I get you to do this, and so it’s like you just come, the more you rub shoulders with people who are pushing, doing things, being creative, resourceful, kind of opens up the world to you in terms of what’s possible. And so yes, I spent a lot of time.
I spent a lot of time and money on personal development stuff, and that’s probably the stuff that I do outside of my family, and that, and my obviously the brand mission. But that’s probably how I spend the majority of my time otherwise, right. Some of my hobbies like probably I’ve gone by the wayside, but I’m trying to connect with as many people as possible and learn and grow and me in the circle. So yes, I do stuff like Tony Robbins, but I also listen to people like Male Robbins.
No relation there, and I learn from a lot of people. I do a lot of YouTube. David Goggins I was listening to this morning while jogging, like you guys probably know David Goggins, and he kept me running even though I was feeling the pain. And I was like, I gotta keep going, he’s telling me he’s going. And so, I try to learn from all these people. I think there’s something to learn from all of them.
Some of them have very similar messages, some of them have different ways of presenting it. But I mean, you got to find what fits for you, and what works in terms of the voice that you hear, and it kind of resonates. Because again, it’s kind of like, I don’t know if you, my wife says this sometimes, where she’ll say something to me, and I guess I ignore it or whatever, and then somebody else tells me the exact same thing, and I’m like, oh yeah, that’s an amazing idea, that’s great, I’ll do it. And so sometimes you just need to hear the right voice, and sometimes said a certain way it kind of resonates with you. So of course, I always recommend everybody out there that there’s something that could be, everyone can learn something from somebody else, right?
So find somebody, find a group of people who will push you, who will kind of open your eyes to different possibilities. And whatever that is for you, like again, that’s not my place to judge who that is. But find, find it. Go look for that person, go get coached, find a mentor, whatever that is, and I think that’ll expand your whole world.
Bronson Hill: I think this is really the number one thing that separates next level people, is that they’re constantly looking to grow, and they’re getting in rooms with people that are more successful than them, and that’s how you get better. And so I think it takes security to do that, right?
So I feel insecure around my peers, or people that are ahead of me, right? I’m in an entrepreneur’s group or something, but that’s where the growth happens. So I think it’s really magical.
So, well, Peter, I just really want to appreciate you. Thank you for making the time today with me, with our group, and just really excited for what you’re creating for physicians, for individuals, really to create the life they want to create in medicine, outside of medicine, and their families, just to create that financial freedom.
And how can people reach out, connect with you, follow what you’re doing, hear about your groups, and hear how people can connect?
Peter Kim: I think everything can, the jumping off point is just a website, passiveincomemd.com. That’s just it. You can find from there, you can find out about our communities, you find out about our events, whatever it is. And then, of course, I’m on some social media channels, so if you can reach me there, happy to connect with you.
Bronson Hill: All right, Dr. Peter Kim. Thanks so much for being with us today, brother. Appreciate you, man.
Peter Kim: All right. Thank you guys.
Thanks, Bronson. Thanks, Nate.
Bronson Hill: All right. So, Dr. Peter Kim amazing, amazing, amazing. Nate, I know you’re the leverage guy. What did you leverage from this interview?
Nate Hambrick: His mindset was so healthy. Right, there will always be enough. I have to remind myself of that so many times, because you know whether you want to call it greed or just chasing the next cash cow, there’s always that next thing over the horizon. And the reality is, there will always be enough. And so now is the time to endure family, our friends. Now’s the time to do really cool things, because there’ll always be another thing for us to do.
And just like you said, especially if you get yourself into good circles, you’re gonna be fine from a financial side. Go live your life, go make the most of it, go be a blessing to the people you love.
Bronson Hill: You know, it’s really tested. I love what you shared because it’s really tested at times. Sometimes you lose the job, or we had a situation recently I haven’t shared with you. The deal, this big e-commerce deal, the lender, it’s a refundable deposit of 110,000, but they are holding it and not returning it. When you think it could even be potentially a fraudulent issue, it’s affected our business from a cash flow perspective.
It’s a lot of money, you know. We have net worth long term, but it’s, but again for me, it’s like, well, am I gonna approach things from an abundant place, right? That like, you know what, it’ll always work out.
There’ll always be enough. God will always provide. It’s always enough. So it’s so easy though to miss that, and so that’s where I think my big takeaway is the mindset piece of this, of just continuing to get better, continuing to be in rooms, pay to be in the rooms, bring value, join memberships of groups.
We have our group, the Wealth Forum, we’re going to be at coming up here in a bit, maybe after this show is released, but we do them quarterly, and there’s so much value of being in great rooms.
So Nate, I appreciate you for being here. Thank you to our audience, each of you, for being here as well. Please feel free to share this with a friend that you think needs to hear this, particularly if they are a medical professional, or if they are a high-paid professional, or have a business, or they are just being owned there.
Even if they are making a lot of money, they are a slave to their job, right? They are a slave to the business, right? We don’t want to do time for money trading, no matter how much money you make. Because you can always make more money, but you can’t make more time. So this has been The Mailbox Money Show.
Thanks for taking the time to educate yourself. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode.
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