Pod Insights Vision Pros Live Podcast Build Wealth Like an Engineer: Options Investing with Fadi Habib About this episode What if building wealth was less about luck and more about strategy, and you already had the mindset for it? In this episode of Vision Pros Live, Fadi Habib, founder and CEO of Legacy Wealth Builder Academy, former executive at BlackBerry and Sun Life, engineer with a Master's degree, 6-year university professor, and options investing coach with 1,000+ students worldwide, shares his powerful journey from first-generation wealth builder to financial freedom coach. From real estate to stocks to business, Fadi breaks down the G. R. O. W. T. H. system, the fear vs. greed balance, and why the stock market isn't gambling, it's a skill.
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 All right. Welcome back to Vision Pros. I'm excited to introduce to you Fadi Habib. Fadi, would you please introduce yourself?
0:06 Speaker 01 Hi, Sue. My name is Fadi. I live in Canada and I'm a father and I have been, I'm an engineer and so very analytical person. And been in corporate for a lot of time and I enjoy scuba diving and sometimes playing some tennis and traveling.
0:35 Speaker 00 Nice. Oh, my gosh, that's fantastic. And I see you have a TED Talk. Is that correct?
0:41 Speaker 01 I don't have a TED Talk. I helped my son organize a TEDx event.
0:48 Speaker 01 Apparently, anybody can organize it. So he is in high school and I helped him with a bunch of high school kids to organize it. It has been a project for about a year. We helped them apply, get the license. They had a sponsorship team and they had a marketing team. It was beautiful.
1:07 Speaker 00 You must have been so proud. That's incredible. How old is he?
1:10 Speaker 01 He is 18 now. I think he was 16 at that time.
1:13 Speaker 00 That's amazing. Really, really cool. Well, I'm excited to hear about your business at the Legacy Wealth Builder Academy. Would you tell me, you know, tell me about your vision for this?
1:26 Speaker 01 The vision has been always to help people gain financial freedom or be better because I talk to a lot of people, Sue, and a lot of us are hurting when it comes to finance, when it comes to money, especially with inflation, all the things happening outside in the economy. So the vision is very simple, is to help people as much as possible. I love being in this field, coaching people how to invest and stuff. I have been a fan of investing since day one I started working because I knew that nine to five is not going to cut it, basically.
2:04 Speaker 01 So I had my personal journey in terms of the Transformation that I had to go through because again, starting day one, I didn't know anything about investing and my family didn't know anything about investing. So there was no generational kind of transfer of knowledge. So I had to figure it out myself. So the vision basically is to help people while doing something I love, I I I'm passionate about.
2:29 Speaker 00 I love that. Probably your engineering brain, like it's so fascinating to imagine an engineer brain tackling the whole topic of investment. Like you must go about it different ways than.
2:41 Speaker 01 It it works sometimes for you and sometimes works against you. So investing and being a business entrepreneur in general needs a little bit of.
2:52 Speaker 01 You gotta stop analyzing and start doing, okay? My engineering brain stops me from doing so because engineers, we love the idea of analyzing because we get paid to do analyze and do math and.
3:05 Speaker 01 In the business world, this is really nothing. There's no action. So you you get you get. The rewards are dependent on the action and performance in life generally is is related to the action that you do. If you analyze, that's not action. For the engineering brain, it is a lot of action. That's what we get paid to do. So it works against you in that. But also the analytical mind helps you a little bit to to to to be realistic, to understand what is the worst case scenario, to. Figure out what can go wrong. But if you do that and do nothing, or if you took two years to analyze, let's say, a property or something, then.
3:47 Speaker 01 Then then it's really working against you. So I I I've been both sides.
3:52 Speaker 00 I can see that. That's that's interesting. Yeah, if you, you know, analysis paralysis, if you never take a step, yeah.
3:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:59 Speaker 00 That's interesting. It is a double edged sword.
4:02 Speaker 01 And in investing in the in the stock market, for example, we have to manage these two major emotions. That's what I call it, fear and greed. So greed is important because it will push you to try to figure things out, to do the right thing, to get the rewards. But also fear um is a double edged sword. If you have if you have one hundred percent fear, you will do no action because you will be paralyzed. You cannot do anything. That's the engineering brain, the analysis paralysis. And if you're too greedy, then you will do something really stupid like selling your house and buying lottery ticket because that's all what you're thinking of the ROI. So we need a healthy dose of both.
4:43 Speaker 01 A little bit of greed to be able to get something, to be able to have the drive to to drive to solve problems and get something. But also you need a healthy dose of fear. You can be oblivious about the risks out there and and and that things can go wrong. So we need both.
5:01 Speaker 00 Yeah, that makes a lot of sense then. Where did this whole vision come from for for teaching this? You could have just learned it for yourself, you know, and and been happy, but.
5:11 Speaker 01 It's a
5:14 Speaker 01 it's kind of by luck. So it started by me trying to figure out for myself how to be wealthy because the the the idea of wealth, like I've been always been in high paying jobs all of my life because I got good grades, got good salary in all of the jobs, but I I always find myself, I can't buy the car that I want. I can't go to traveling the like, you know, it just it's always tight. So I I I searched this topic wealth and I think thirty years ago, I read this book called Cash Flow Quadrant, which was
5:46 Speaker 00 Kiyosaki, yeah.
5:47 Speaker 01 Yeah, Kiyosaki. And he told me basically, you gotta be an investor. So, okay, great. I will need to be an investor. Basically, the the book very quickly talks about four different ways of making money. Employee is the worst one, which I've been groomed all of my life. All of us usually are pushed to that and told me that you have to be an investor. So. Uh issue is I don't know how to invest, invest in what and so I started with real estate. For about fifteen years, made a lot of mistakes, uh made a lot of money. And then fifteen years ago, I had this view that anybody who invests in the stock market is a gambler, is an irresponsible investor. Um, so I just didn't really touch it at all. And then one day, one of my friends told me, why don't you come to this course?
6:33 Speaker 01 It's about options. And uh so I went with the objective of proving the guy wrong. I wanted to go and prove to myself that I, I, I know that this is gambling and that the guy doesn't know what he's talking about. And I was pleasantly surprised. Uh, I understood that investing in the stock market, it has a bad uh like uh reputation because a lot of people are losing money. That's why I thought it's gambling, but uh I understood that it's like driving. There are people who drive sedan, there are people who drive racing cars, there are people who drive vans, there are people who uh drive trailers, there are people who drive motorcycles. And there are people who drive motorcycles on a rope in the circus.
7:13 Speaker 01 Right? Each one of these has its own risk level. And we always hear about people who are, don't have a strategy, they're doing something that is very risky. The people who want to get rich quick scheme stuff, which the people who think that they can double their money every two months. Like, you know, the, the, the, the crazy ones, kind of. And that's why they lose money. And if most people for some reason use the stock market as a big casino, because they have not been trained and nobody's providing training. So um, so I understood that, did very well. And then they told me, why don't you come and coach for us? And I found out that I, I, I'm doing very well in coaching.
7:54 Speaker 01 And then when I transitioned from my nine to five as well, one of the jobs that I really loved is being a professor. So I taught six years at uh Laurier University, Goma University and Kostoga College. Loved it. I loved it. I loved it that the fact that it's not nine to five, so it's part time. So I can just go to the class and then I can mark the students at two M in the morning if I want to.
8:15 Speaker 00 Yeah.
8:15 Speaker 01 So there's a lot of flexibility as well as um, there's a lot of uh leeway to, to use whatever methods you, you need to do to convey the, the information. So the way to go about teaching is also very creative. It's like a show. Um, so I love that a lot and then I.
8:38 Speaker 01 I amalgamated the fact that I love teaching with the fact that I love investing and I love coaching people and put that all of that came to the point whereby I am doing what I'm doing right now. So I always tell people, even if I'm not charging anything in what I'm doing, I will do it for free because I really love helping people. I see the value, I see that it actually
8:58 Speaker 01 touches their life uh in a way that is positive. And it's the fact, it's a, it's a problem, it's weird, it's a universal problem, everybody, so I teach, I, I, I coach people, I have like clients all over the world, from Cairo to UK to US to and we're all human beings, we're all having the same problem, like you know, finances is something that um it's, it's weird that we are not taught this at schools, it's weird that um I, I have, I have, I have people that come to me to learn from me who are finished, finished MBA in finance and stuff like theoretically, they should know more about the subject than me.
9:40 Speaker 01 But I, I don't know, school and, and I have a masters in engineering, so it's not that I'm like it has this very weird way of
9:53 Speaker 01 emptying the thing from how to make money, like they teach you something just to be an employee, not to, not to be an Elon Musk, right, that like
10:01 Speaker 00 Yeah.
10:02 Speaker 01 That's why a lot of people who are successful also left school, I, I, I'm not saying that for people to leave school, I'm, I'm a big like uh fan for schooling, it's very important, but um but it's definitely lacking how the, teaching the skill of how to make money.
10:18 Speaker 00 Yeah.
10:19 Speaker 01 They don't do that, they just teach you how to be an employee.
10:21 Speaker 00 Yeah, why do you think that is?
10:29 Speaker 01 Good question, um I think the design point of the schooling system that happened, I don't know, one hundred, one hundred and fifty years ago, it was designed to produce, it's like a factory, it's, it's designed to produce people who will work in factories.
10:48 Speaker 01 And it did well, it it it it's actually successful in producing people who really don't think a lot, like know that they're just, they're good in making, in doing shores and listening to processes and like it's good, it's good in that. But it's not like if somebody is designing right now, how to produce as an entrepreneur, the way of auto will be very different. And it has not been designed this way and all of the institutions are just doing that because the main client is the corporations that will employ people, right? Um, so it's just a design point. The design point is, and they're successful at getting the people, getting the product that they want, which is good employees.
11:29 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think you might be right. That makes sense. And then what's driving you to do this? I mean, you you could be totally retired, happy scuba diving every day and but you're still in here doing this.
11:42 Speaker 01 I can't scuba dive in Canada. That's why I have an old, that's why I do, okay. Why am I doing this? Um, I think part of it is selfish is I want to prove to myself, I I for me, anybody who um
11:58 Speaker 01 who who is serious about wealth needs to be in these three categories. One is real estate, second is stocks, third is owning a business. So I did, I did stocks, I did real estate. And you can't, you should not be, you should not start the three at the same time because it takes a lot of time to figure these things out. Everybody makes mistakes. You shouldn't be afraid of that. But but but I've been fifteen years in in stock, in real estate before I went to stocks, been fifteen years in stocks before I decided to that I'm going to do a business. So part of me is just, I want, uh, I want to be successful at running a business. I like this badge. Part of it as well is, I love what I do. So so there's this saying
12:40 Speaker 01 that says that if people do not know if you're working or playing, there's a certain mastery in in that state. And I feel I'm in this state. I feel that I work really hard, but doesn't, it doesn't feel like work for me. I'm really busy. So I woke up at seven AM in the morning. I think this is the tenth meeting I had so far. There's like probably seven more.
13:02 Speaker 00 Oh, boy.
13:02 Speaker 01 I don't feel tired, like I'm tired, but I don't feel, I don't feel like it's work. So, uh, and I've never been in this state whereby I really love what I do, like it's not work for me. Um.
13:17 Speaker 01 The fact as well that you're touching people's lives and you see them happy and you you know that you're teaching them a skill that it's not like Excel where but they're gonna use it at work, it's something that they will use in their daily life that will make their life easier and better and their family's life better and it's a skill that there's value because for some reason the schools are not teaching that so so there's there's value, there's scarcity in people who do it properly. The fact as well that I am doing it, I try, I do it with integrity as much as possible. Again, with any business, if you're just running after the money, you can end up doing a lot of things that is unethical or you can be very salesy or you can you can you
14:02 Speaker 01 can I find myself a lot of times telling people, you know, I don't think that my program is for you, right? If if yeah, you know, if the last like I was anyway, part of what I do is that I have a coaching program and I charge X number and sometimes people come and say, you know, Fadi, here's the X, let's start that coaching and then I ask them, how much capital do you have? They may know this is the last money I have and I say like ethically, I can't really take your money because the whole objective of what I'm doing with you is for you to be able to invest and start making money and recoup what you paid. So so the right thing for you here is that go save some money, go go find a job like, you know, it's it's a there's always an ethical, even when I was teaching real estate, not
14:46 Speaker 01 teaching, I was learning real estate. There is some companies who will tell you that what you need to do is to screw up the tenants as much as possible, you go before closing and change the thing like, you know, just very unethical way. And then again, because if you're a good person, you will move to people who will teach properly. I went to this group called Rain, Real Estate Investment Network in Canada, they're really, really good and they tell you the tenant is your best business partner, he's really basically.
15:18 Speaker 01 Buying the house for you, you treat them like gold. You should know their names. You should give them Christmas gifts. So there's always a right way and an ethic way and a way to deal with people with integrity. And there's always the so, so the fact that I'm touching people and I'm helping people as well as I'm getting a lot selfishly from it as well is making me do this. Like, why should I retire?
15:48 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Impact, you're making income, you know, I mean, and if it's fun for you, absolutely.
15:56 Speaker 01 I have some master classes and next month, for example, I'm going to, I'm opening new chapter. So I'm going to Dubai next month, going to Cairo, then Dubai, and then maybe I'm gonna go to Saudi Arabia. So I'm expanding a little bit in the Middle East. So it's fun. It's a game like, you know, one of the programs I took was something with landmark education and they call it the game. So every three months, they ask us, what is your, what is your objectives? And treat it like games. So there's a game of somebody will play the game of money. I want to double my money in whatever. Somebody will be playing, you know, will saying, you know, I will quit smoking and you treat it as a, you gamify it. You treat it as a game that you don't beat yourself. So for me, the game that I'm
16:38 Speaker 01 playing this quarter is the game of expansion. I want to do some partnerships and I want to expand. And I'm doing my best. I want to succeed. But if it's not succeed, it's a game, right? I'm gonna play another game.
16:48 Speaker 00 Right, right. Oh, I love that. Oh, I hope you'll come back because I want to hear so much more.
16:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, I would love to.
16:57 Speaker 00 Thank you. That's awesome. Well, let's do that for sure.
17:01 Speaker 01 Beautiful.
17:01 Speaker 02 Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live. I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward. This is gonna get more and more fun. We'll have more and more engagement as well. We'll invite people to participate in the show and thank you for giving us your time and attention. Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a vision pro yourself.
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