447 - Your Success Is Your Own Dang Fault

https://moneyripples.com/2020/12/03/447-your-success-is-your-own-dang-fault/

Today, Chris Miles has some good and bad news for you. The good news is if you succeed, give yourself a pat on the back, good job! The bad news is, if you fail, it’s also on you, it’s your fault.

Regardless of what comes into your life, you have the power to make a change. You have the power within your mind to create the results that you want. That is the most liberating part, that’s freedom. To control a lot of situations in your life.

You may not be able to control all the outside influences, but the truth is you have the ability to respond accordingly, to be able to choose differently.

You can control what is happening to you. How can you have financial freedom if you feel all things are out of your control?

For instance, if you throw money in the stock market, is that out of your control? The answer is yes, but the fact is you don’t have to keep it there.

Take personal accountability and accept responsibility for it.

Listen to our Podcast:

https://www.blogtalkradio.com/moneyripples/2020/10/28/447–your-success-is-your-own-dang-fault

http://moneyripples.com/  https://www.blogtalkradio.com/moneyripples  https://www.twitter.com/chriscmiles  https://www.facebook.com/moneyripples 

 #FinancialAdvice #RealEstateInvesting #Finance

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Hello! My fellow Ripplers. This is Chris Miles, your Cash Flow Expert and Anti-Financial Advisor. Hey, welcome to our show. A show that’s for you and about you. Those of you that work so hard for your money, and you’re now ready for your money. Start working harder for you. Now! You want that freedom. You want that cash flow. You want that prosperity today, not 30 or 40 million years from now, but right now, so you can live that life that you love doing what you love with those that you love. But guys so much more than creating the life of ease and comfort. It’s about creating a “ripple effect” to the lives of others, through your family and generations, beyond you, as well as to your community and across the planet. And guys, thank you so much for allowing me to create that “ripple effect” through you. Thank you for being a part of this movement, thank you for sharing and bingeing and applying the things that you learned on this show, because that is where freedom really comes from.

It comes from actually doing and walking the walk and not just talking the talk. So guys, thank you so much for tuning in as a reminder, check out our website, WWW.MONEYRIPPLES.COM You got great blogs on there. And of course, subscribe to our YouTube channel. You know, the Chris Miles with Money Ripples. We have that in the show notes as well. You can check that out. So guys today I have some good news for you and some bad news. The good news is if you succeed, great job, you succeeded. The bad news is if it happens, that’s also on you. The truth is that your results are your own dang fault. It’s your fault. You know, now I get this, that there’s things outside of your control, but the truth is that regardless of what comes into your life, you have the power to make a change.

You have the ability to do that, and it doesn’t just require a free country to do that, although that helps. But guys, I’m telling you that you have the power within you. You have the power within your mind to really create the results that you want in your life. So if you fail, good job, that’s on you. If you succeed great job, that’s also on you. And that is the liberating part. That is how there’s freedom, because you do have control over a lot of the situations in your life. You can’t control all of the outside influences, which I understand. I’ll tell you some stories here in a bit. The truth is that you have the ability to respond accordingly, to be able to choose differently. And guys, it’s driving me nuts because there’s this culture. Now, even as counterculture out there, right?

This culture of becoming a victim and in fact, it’s becoming permanent, not just in certain groups, like the ones you hear on social media or the ones that you hear all across the news about how they feel that their race or their background is the reason why they’re persecuted or the reason why they are, you know, less than what they should be. Guys, this is happening to everybody. This is becoming a cultural thing across all races, all religions, all sexual preferences, everything. This is happening to everyone because right now it’s actually, okay, many people are making it okay, to be a victim to say, Hey, it’s not my fault. Or, Hey, this is what’s going on in the world. Like, I don’t have control. It’s not like I can do anything about it. I can’t control the government. I can’t control when my spouse does it. It’s their fault.

I can’t control my kids do. It’s their fault. It’s everybody else’s fault. But yours and the truth is guys that it actually is your fault. Yes, they’ve got their own things they’re doing. Right? They make their own choices. You can’t control that. But you can control what’s happening to you and this, even then you might think, well, Chris, is this just a life lesson? Well, heck yeah. It’s a life lesson. Because if you want financial freedom, how can you have freedom? If you feel like everything’s out of your control, by the way, if you throw money in the stock market, is that a control? Yes. But the fact is you don’t have to keep it there. You know, I was talking to somebody today where they’re saying, yeah, my husband is really bought on this 401k thing. And he really want to give money to other people, you know, especially to individuals that might take it, because he works so hard for that money.

Why give people that money? They might just steal it or lose it. And I told her, I said, that’s completely valid point. Why give your money to somebody that you might lose or whatever, right? Or run off with that money. But here’s the thing I said, he’s still putting money in that 401k, nearly max funding it every year, he’s giving his money to somebody else for somebody else control where the government makes all the rules and they can change the rules whenever they want. He’s in a partnership where he has no say in the matter, the only thing he has is how much money he throws in. But no say of how much you can take out and when. He has no say on how he’s able to access his own money or really how to invest it, because the truth is even when you try to pick your own funds, you still don’t invest it.

You still don’t control where it’s being invested. They pick everything. You’re just trusting them. I said, he’s already doing that. He’s already turning over all of his cash to somebody else to be the victim. Now, if it does great, he thinks he’s brilliant. Right? And I’m just saying this in general, I’m not saying this is him specifically, but people in general and the market goes up, they think they’re brilliant when it goes down. It’s not their fault. No, it’s the financial advisor’s fault. No, it’s the market’s fault. It’s the politics. It’s everything else. It’s everybody else’s fault. But when it goes up, do you say I had nothing to do with that? I’m purely lucky. In fact, I did nothing. All I do is throw money in and it made some money. Yeah. That’s the truth, right? You have no control in your life there.

If you want freedom, you must have control. That control starts by taking personal accountability, accepting responsibility for it. And I’ll tell you the biggest fights in my wife and I have had is when I’m not honest with myself, right? When, like, for example, there’s been times where I’ll get defensive or I’ll say, well, you hurt my feelings. You did this to me. Right? And social media and everything else. You see this happening all the time. People are like, yeah, this happened. Or you did this. And people are taking offense, everything. Well, when I took offense. The thing that takes her off is she’s like, Chris, you took offense at something that wasn’t supposed to be offensive. You know, that’s your fault, Chris, not mine. Yours. You chose to be offended, which is true. Anytime you guys are offended, that’s your choice.

You know? And now I might be an offensive type of statement, but again, you choose how you respond. Do you take offense or do you laugh and say, well, that’s ridiculous. By the way, I’ve noticed in my life, the things that offend me the most are usually the things that actually have some truth to it. You know, because if it is ridiculous, like if somebody says, you know I remember, I can’t remember what somebody has said recently. I remember I did a podcast cause somebody sent me some hate email anonymously. A few years ago, I don’t get hate mail nearly enough. I guess I’m not roughly enough feathers, but you know, like they accuse me of stuff that wasn’t even close to truth. And I just laughed. That’s why I did a show on it. Now some of the things ticked me off a little bit, which is also, I did a show on it.

Right? But and it wasn’t because it wasn’t true. It was just because it was too close to home a little bit. Right? But and there were, you know, trying to find my character, but the truth is they didn’t really know who I was. They were pretending to know who I was. And the truth is like, we get offended by things we take, you know, take fault for things we get offended. And the truth is that’s not the case. And if you want financial freedom, you must change this. This has to switch in your brain. You cannot be blaming everybody else for your life. You have to accept responsibility that your life is yours and yours alone to control, not your spouses, not your children, not your financial advisors, or whoever you listen to, or the stock market or whatever it has nothing to do with that.

It’s all about now, you, you’ve got to choose that. Let me dig down a little bit here. Right? So you know, first off, like I get life circumstances. If you’ve heard my story, you know, I’ve been through hard times, heck the last recession, I went over a million dollars in debt. A lot of that stuff wasn’t my fault. But some of it was, some was based on choices. There were results of choices that I had made. Right? You know, when the real estate market tanked, I couldn’t control that. But the fact is that when I went into real estate gambling on appreciation first is trying to focus on cash flow. Yeah. That was my fault. The reason I was losing was because I made dumb choices. I wasn’t focused on the right things. You know, the business I went into, I cut off my streams of income because I told the partner, yes, I’m all in.

I’m all into your mission. Yes. Yes. But the truth is, is that I should have kept the streams of income and said no, if I’m going to live what I preach, shouldn’t I be doing this stuff too, so no, I’m not going to cut off these streams of income. I’m going to keep them and heck we’re not going to focus on real estate investors. We’re going to start broadening our company, broadening our marketing and things like that. All of these things were within my control. Right? Now again, I couldn’t control outside market circumstances, but I could control how things worked. You know, the fact is when I went reclusive, I started becoming anti-social because I didn’t want to spread my scarcity on other people. Have you ever done that? Where you’re like, Ugh!!! Like I feel, like I’m struggling right now.

I don’t want to spread it or depress people or bring them down. So I’m just going to do this. I’m going to suffer in silence. Guys, that was the wrong thing to do that made me suffer more financially. The truth is that I should rightfully get go, got out and started serving people. This was the difference of what I did when I went through a divorce that divorce, by the way, emotionally was harder on me than even losing over a million dollars. It was much harder. Now the million dollars thing, I mean, that took a good, it was about two years before I started to really pull out of that and feel like now I was leaving that situation that was on the ups, much higher on the upswing versus kind of rolling around on the bottom. Right? In the pit.

With my divorce, it was much different because although emotionally was harder, the thing is, I realized from what I learned back then, I had more control than I gave myself credit. And so after I went through my little victim experiences, I, and I did go through a victim moment, right? Especially when, you know, things were being said, rumor spread. I was mad. I was bitter. And really hurt. I mean, that’s really where all the madness and bitterness came. It was, I was just hurt. And what happened is I said, you know what? Enough is enough. Like I need to start answering emails. I actually had left my inbox blowing up because I didn’t want to look at emails. So I started answering emails. I started fulfilling on commitments. I started focusing instead on the clients I wanted to tract because I had clients that were draining me at that time.

I said, it’s not just, you know, things from my marriage it was draining. I had clients that were draining, not all of them, but there were some, what do I need to do? Where do I need to focus? And I put my focus on what I wanted versus what I was trying to avoid. I start focusing on what I had power to control and create versus becoming a victim to something that wasn’t a thing I should have been a victim of anyways. And there was a thing, that things turned around quickly. Like that little motion, the little emotional, and even a little financial dip that I had, was just a matter of few months. And that’s started pulling right out of it within a six month period of time, pulling out of it and guys about a year or so later, well, year and a half later, I was able to retire.

And that right there guys is the key, is that, I was able to flip that switch and start can taking control and ownership of my own crap .I’ll give you another example. I had a client recently who had reached out and said, Chris, you know, we’re just not feeling like we should really do anything with our money. Like we’re feeling like we just don’t want to use it to buy real estate or do this. I said, okay, well then don’t, if you feel like you just sit on it. And they’re like, Chris I mean, can you refund us the money? You know, that we paid you. I’m like, why would I do that? Like, I have no problem refunding money people if I thought, Hey, you know what? I can’t find the money, but here’s the thing we never take on clients.

Unless we know we can at least double the results that they pay us. Right? Same thing with them. And then the truth is they ended up finding more than I expected in their situation. So I said, no, absolutely not. You know, like you already have the information, you have the resources. I give you all the resources you need to more than double what you pay me. In fact, it was actually going to be closer to about triple, quadruple what they paid me. I said, no, like, you can just take that information, use it whenever you want. You know, do you go to college and then change your major and say, Oh, can you give me money back for the classes I really didn’t need? No, you know, even if you change your mind and take a different career path, like I did, I didn’t go back to my university and say, Hey, I’d like to have that four years of money.

I paid you back because I decided to become a Financial Advisor instead of going into Sociology and Psychology. Right? That’s ridiculous. But the thing is like, they didn’t want to take responsibility for their own results. I’m like, you got to take responsibility. I took responsible for what I taught you. You take your own responsibility. And then the thing that ticked me off, wasn’t the fact that they asked for whatever reason, the fact is that they came to the table thinking that somehow they weren’t in control, but they were in full control of their destiny. And they’re like, well, Chris, it sounds like you expect us to you know, like you only want to honor that commitment if we do what you ask? I’m like yeah, like when I say give him a good, full faith effort, you give a good full faith effort.

You don’t just say, nah, I don’t feel like it. You know, that doesn’t work. Now contrast that with today, like today I talked to somebody who is looking to hire us. Right? And she even reached out. She was like, you know, I’ve been listening to a podcast. She’s probably listening right now. In fact, maybe her and her husband listening to this now, which would be perfect for them. But she reached out and she said, you know, Chris, you know, here’s our situation. And the crazy thing is they’ve been trying to pay off their mortgage. Right? They’ve been aggressively paying off. They’re about 10 years away from paying it off. They’ve been aggressively funding their 401k and saved up a nice nest egg for being in their mid forties. Here’s the thing. Now, just like, if you heard that podcast earlier about the 401k issue, right?

Like you cannot ever retire. I said the truth is even in 20 years, when you’re 65 years old, if the market does better than the average, right? It actually does better than expected. You might have enough money to pay you 50,000 a year. In today’s dollars 50,000 a year. Not in real buying power. Right? We got inflation to worry about too. I said, just in today’s dollars, that’s 50,000 a year. Not a lot considering how much they’re putting away. And I said, and in fact, if you factor in inflation is about 20,000 a year, right? Maybe less than that. And they’re like, well, that’s not great. I know it’s not. I said, but here, do this. Stop funding, your 401k that even after you pay taxes gives you 10,000 a year. Two, we refinance your mortgage to 30 year mortgage. By the way, I hope you guys are listening to this because this is exactly kind of stuff that I help clients through.

By the way, if you’re wondering, what does Chris do? On the consulting side, this is what we do. I said, if you refinance your mortgage here, we can actually lower your payment by 600 bucks a month. Now there’s equity trapped in this property, of course, because now you’re trying to pay off aggressively there’s equity here, the cash that some more equity get about 165,000. Even with the payment, you actually will still save 40 bucks a month on your mortgage and have 165,000 you can invest, and we’ll pay off one of your debts. They’ll free up over 200 bucks a month. And then the rest of it, the other 150,000 plus, we’re going to use that to go and invest. And I showed them, I said, Hey, here’s two properties right here. You buy right now. It was less than a hundred thousand dollars, but it’ll generate over a thousand bucks a month.

And I said, what’s your mortgage payment? They said a thousand bucks a month. Let’s say, guess what? Between that, and paying off this loan, you’re going to have over 1200 bucks a month and you still have 50 grand in cash that you can invest and do whatever you want with it. I’m like, that’s, if you don’t do anything, they just let it sit and savings. You would actually now have your mortgage paid for, you know, that payment went out. We fully paid for versus you trying to aggressively pay it off, which by the way, the banks love. Because if they ever foreclosing you, they love taking properties with equity. Now with the ones that are leveraged. And so I said, voila! There you go. No money out of pocket, just using the same money you’re using, but you can generate at least a net $20,000 a year.

And here’s the key thing guys I said, but the choice is up to you guys because she’s just like, Holy cow! Like that doesn’t even seem real. She’s like, does anybody tell you that seems too good to be true? I’m like, I hear it often. And the reason it’s too good to be true is because your brain has been shifted and only been looking at it from a certain path, looking at the Dave Ramsey Method, right? Are you looking at it from a very, not even conservative approach, really a risky approach because you’re everything you’re throwing. You’re throwing your money into your house and you can’t get to it. Especially if something goes wrong in the markets, right? The banks can say, Nope, you can’t get to that money. So you’re throwing into a place like your house. You’re throwing it away into your 401k, that you can’t access while you’re working with that company, it’s trapped.

The government could change the rules on you whenever you want. And you have zero vote in the matter. Technically, you guys are doing the most aggressive risky thing that’s possible versus getting that money in your control and going and using that to invest, whether it’s by real estate, into different types of funds or whatever it might be. And you can generate more cash flow. In fact, to the tune of at least 20,000 a year to tack on to that 10,000 year you’ve been saving your 401k. Now you put those together. You got 30,000 in the next year. Guess what? 20,000 now becomes, about 23,000 a year or more possibly. Actually probably more. It’s probably going to be closer to 24,000. Then the next year that’s going to be up to at least 28,000 next year about, you know, now you’re about 33,000 a year.

And so on, like you’re already creeping up to that 50,000 a year income that you’re hoping to get 20 years, but you might easily be able to do within five to seven years. I’m like, and they’re like, Oh my gosh, that seems crazy! I’m like, it is. But here’s the thing guys. It’s up to you. You have the control. You can decide whether you actually take advantage of it or not. You’re not the victim here. You are the hero of your story. Or you should be the hero of your story. It’s fully up to you. And I told him, I said, honestly, I don’t need your money. Like, I’m fine financially. I don’t need to work with anybody. But I was like, but to do this, would be fun. Like this would be fun to change your life, to actually do something. That’s what makes it worthwhile for me to create that “ripple effect” guys like, and the ball’s in their court.

They can either keep being the victim and keep trudging along, right? Just keep working their tails off, make it a good few hundred thousand a year, hoping and praying that something will change and hoping that maybe that 401k will build up if the market doesn’t tank on them, which obviously it will at some point over those next 20 years, or you can take advantage of their life now. Have more life to live, have more years of their life, that they can actually do something that’s impactful now. That can actually impact their family and be able to create something much bigger than just themselves. Guys, that’s the choice. Each of us have, each of us choose every single day to be the hero or the victim of our story. Which one do you choose to be? By the way, if you ever watch a movie, right?

Think about it with Halloween, right? Coming up here. Do you ever really remember the victims? Do you remember the screaming teenage that gets killed in the woods? No. You don’t remember who that is, you know, but you, you remember that you might remember the murderer, right? You might remember Michael or Jason or Freddy. Right? but you remember the hero, you remember the hero’s story. We remember the forced gumps of the story, right? Remember those people, remember the people that become the hero. We remember the Luke Skywalker’s of the journey, right? We remember those people. We don’t remember the storm trooper that got shot. Nobody does. Right? Nobody knows what happens to those characters. When they become the victim, they become forgotten. You are not here to be forgotten. You are here to make a difference. This is much, much bigger than just making money.

Guys, this is about you choosing the life that you want. Not believing all the dumb perspectives out there about being the victim, being the victim, to whatever circumstance or people or organizations that you see out there. You’re not a victim of your masks. Guys. You get to choose still. Even though you say you have a mandate on you, you’re still going to choose how you respond. You’re not a victim to that. Yes. We get thrown curve balls all the time. Welcome to life. Welcome to the freaking human club. But your life, your results are your own dang fault. And that is the good news. There is where the hope is guys. It’s not up to somebody else to give us our freedom. We have that choice to make within ourselves. Will you take it? Will you continue to be the victim? And the purely the choice is up to you.

446 - Money Ripples Newest Coach - Craig Feldmeier

https://moneyripples.com/2020/12/02/446-money-ripples-newest-coach-craig-feldmeier/

In today’s episode, Chris Miles has a special guest in Craig Feldmeier.

About a year ago, Chris launched a financial program for people who are either financial advisors or looking to become more like anti-financial advisors, one of the participants that really stood out was Craig.

Craig is one of the few people that Chris knows who practices what he preaches. He is getting himself out of the rat race by doing investments.

In the beginning, Craig always tried to follow “the script” to become successful. Study hard, get good grades, find a job and open up a 401K. He then realized in his first month of having a 401K that he can’t even choose what he can invest in.

A couple of years in his job at Premier Investment Bank on Wall Street and working with ultra high net worth clients, (meaning people with 5 million dollar net worth and more), a light bulb moment hit Craig. He started to learn how his client’s portfolios are designed, he came to know that people with 5 million dollar net worth, are only able to generate cash flow on those assets about 10 to 15 thousand dollars a month pre-tax.

He came to a realization that he is nowhere near having a 5million dollar investment portfolio, then he started tracking his 401K and learned that it wasn’t growing as much as he thought it would be. This is a stressful moment for him because he knew he was doing everything right, what the “society” wants him to do.

With this he takes a grand shift by educating himself. He looks for great mentors and tries to do what they are doing because Craig knows that there are people who do not struggle in their retirement years. This way of thinking led him to Chris Miles and other people who are buying, investing in cash flow and producing assets.

Listen to our Podcast:

https://www.blogtalkradio.com/moneyripples/2020/10/23/446–money-ripples-newest-coach–craig-feldmeier

http://moneyripples.com/  https://www.blogtalkradio.com/moneyripples  https://www.twitter.com/chriscmiles  https://www.facebook.com/moneyripples 

 #FinancialAdvice #RealEstateInvesting #Finance 

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Chris Miles (00:08): Hello! My fellow Ripplers. This is Chris Miles, your Cash Flow Expert and Anti-Financial Advisor. Guys, welcoming you out for a wonderful show that’s for you and it’s about you. Those you work so freaking hard for your money and you’re ready for your money to start working harder for you. Now! You want that freedom. You want that cash flow. You want that prosperity today, not 30 or 40 million years from now, right? For right now, so you can live that life that you love doing what you love and do it with whoever you want. And on top of that, guys, not just you’re here for your own financial prosperity, but you’re here to make a difference in life. You’re here to make a difference in other people’s lives. As a Rippler, you want to create that “Ripple Effect” by blessing more lives as you are blessed too. Guys, thank you so much for allowing me to do that through you.

Chris Miles (00:50): Thank you for allowing me to teach and to guide and to inspire you guys to live and create something greater than the status quo. Here’s a reminder, check out our website, WWW.MONEYRIPPLES.COM There’s great stuff on there. There’s blogs and videos, and you can even go check out YouTube on our Money Ripples with Chris Miles page as well. So subscribe there and check it out. So today guys, I’ve got a special guest for you. Last week I kind of teased about him a little bit, mentioning that, you know, as you know why I’m here, why I’m doing what I’m doing, right? Like I really had to have kind of my own little come to Jesus talks over the last several months, you know, of what do I really want to do? Because I recognize that as Money Ripples grows and gets bigger and it’s just naturally getting bigger.

Chris Miles (01:34): You guys, I mean, that’s all because of you, right? Like the fact you guys are, you know, bingeing on these episodes, you’ve been sharing with other people. You’ve been having conversations. And this is even becoming not just nationwide, but even global too. And I realized that, you know, I have a choice I can either grow or I can shrink, right? I can either try to go back to what’s comfortable just focusing on what’s good for me, or I can really create that “ripple effect” I keep talking about with you guys and that “ripple effect” can go way beyond just a small even audience of what you guys are now. Although there’s thousands of you, I know it could be millions of you. And I know that I can’t do that alone. And that’s exactly why I brought on a special guest here.

Chris Miles (02:16): So if you guys went back to the episodes about a year ago, I launched a financial program for people that were either Financial Advisors or looking to become more like Anti-Financial Advisors. Right? And that’s exactly what I did. And so there was about a dozen people that went through this training program. And one of them that really stood out was my guest here today, which is Craig Feldmeier here right? Now, I’ll tell you like a, you know, the one thing is I love people that practice what they preach, you know, and Craig’s doing that. Like, he’s the guy that’s getting himself out of the rat race already doing these investments. He’s a sharp guy. He’s been doing this a lot and I really just want to introduce you guys really introduce him to the world! You know, here to talk about that. Like no pressure, Craig, you know, but, really just to kind of introduce him to you guys. And so Craig welcome our show!

Craig Feldmeier (03:05): Yeah. Thanks for that intro, Chris!

Chris Miles (03:07): Yeah you bet. So, give everybody your background, like, you know, what leaving led you down this path to be where we are today right now?

Craig Feldmeier (03:14): Yeah, sure. So I kind of we’ll start back from the beginning. And I think a lot of people, I think my story will resonate with a lot of people in terms of, you know, I was always trying to follow the script of what you’re supposed to do to become successful. You know, at least what, you know, your parents teach you what the media teaches you. And you know, even going back to my high school days, you know, I was a really good student. Tried really hard in school, got a good grades, you know, went to a good college when I was in college. My goal was to get a great job and make a lot of money. So I, you know, I got a job with, you know, a premier and investment bank on Wall streets, you know, and then when I started with working with them, I said, you know, man, I’ve you know, I’ve made it, I’m here, I’m 22 years old, making some good money.

Craig Feldmeier (04:05): And then what did I do, which, you know, most first year analyst do, or most first year employees? You open up a 401k because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Right?

Chris Miles (04:15): Right.

Craig Feldmeier (04:16): So I remember, you know, the first month of work kind of opening the 401k and then the first, you know, the first big shock for me was, Oh, wow! I can’t even really pick what I can invest in. You know, I’ve got 10 different mutual funds and target date funds, where I can put my money. Doesn’t really know too much about the target date fund at the time. This is, you know, 2008, 2009. So I said, okay, you know, I’ll put in a certain percentage of my salary into this target date fund and just kind of let it ride. So, you know, over the years my job at that investment bank was working with ultra high net worth clients.

Craig Feldmeier (04:53): So that typically means in the industry a $5 million liquid net worth. And so people who have significant amounts of wealth.

Chris Miles (05:01): Yeah.

Craig Feldmeier (05:02): And what really kind of the first light bulb moment I had, a couple of years into the job and I was really starting to dig into how our client’s portfolios are designed. And I came to realize that, you know, people with that $5 million net worth, they were only able to generate cash flow on those assets about 10 to $15,000 a month pre-tax. Now it’s a pretty good, I would take 10 to 15 grand a month. Don’t get me wrong, but it dawned on me. And I said, you know, I am nowhere near having a $5 million investment portfolio. And on top of that, will I ever have a $5 million investment portfolio? I don’t know, you know, so then I started tracking my 401k, seeing, you know, how that wasn’t growing nearly as much.

Craig Feldmeier (05:49): As I thought it would be a start, you know, looking into more of, you know, the expenses of these mutual funds. I mean, even with the company match, wasn’t growing, you know, nearly as much as I thought, and I really kind of had, you know, a stressful moment thinking, you know, what am I going to do? I’m doing everything right. I did everything, you know, society told me to do, you know, maybe I’ll reach that magic $1 million number, you know, 30 or 40 years from when I started working, I took it a step further. And I said, okay, see you even get to the million dollar number. You know, the financial pundits say, you know, when you’ve accumulated assets, what can you withdraw? You know, 4%, even 4% now is I think a little generous. I think most of usual advisors are saying, you know, kind of the two to 3% range, you know, just for the purpose of this conversation, let’s say 4%.

Craig Feldmeier (06:37): I said, if I have a million dollar net worth or a million dollars in my retirement account, and I’m withdrawing 4% a year, I’m only making or only taking $40,000 a year pre-tax so you still have to pay taxes on that money because the 401k taxes are deferred until you make your withdrawals.

Chris Miles (06:55): Yeah.

Craig Feldmeier (06:56): So that was a very jarring kind of light bulb moment that happened to me. And I said, wow! Even working all these years, working super hard, you know, I’m only able to take out $40,000 a year. You know, that’s just for me to live at that point. You know, I want to be able to help my family be able to put my kids through college, you know, how am I gonna do this? And so I really kind of went down the path of trying to educate myself. I said, you know, I know there are people who do not struggle in their retirement years.

Craig Feldmeier (07:23): So let me try to do as much research as I can, really kind of find some mentors that are out there and see people that I kind of want to emulate my life after, I let me do what they’re doing. And through those kinds of thoughts and conversations that led me to, you know, introducing myself to you and similar people who think like us. So that’s kind of led me to to where I’m at right now. And I’ve had a huge shift in mentality in terms of I’d say the main shift is really going from being an asset gatherer, accumulating a pile of assets, which really is kind of the scarcity mindset that, you know, I know you’ve referred to in the past, it’s kind of humiliating a bunch of assets and then doing everything you can to making sure that, you know, your assets don’t go down and just kind of, you know, a few percent off the top every year to live on, as opposed to having a really shift to more of an abundant mindset.

Craig Feldmeier (08:24): And that really has to do with buying, investing in cash flow producing assets, because if you can start building cash flow now, you know, 500 a month, a thousand a month, 2000 a month, you know, over time that can really accumulate to 10, 15, $20,000 a month given, you know, individual circumstances given how much runway you have. But it’s really become a very big passion of mine. And, you know, I’m gonna, you know, try to follow in your footsteps and really try to help people escape the rat race. You’re really helped that financial underdog get to financial freedom, take control of their finances and really kind of take control of their life.

Chris Miles (09:04): Yeah. And the cool thing is, you know, you’re talking about doing this stuff all without having to build up five or $10 million. Right?

Craig Feldmeier (09:10): Exactly. You really can get started. I mean, you can get started really with any amounts. I would say, you know, if you’re looking to invest in real estate and single family homes, multi-family properties, which is, I know a big part of my investment portfolio, I’d say at a minimum you need 15 to 20,000 to get started.

Chris Miles (09:31): Yeah.

Craig Feldmeier (09:31): In a good credit score. And, you know, really, you can kind of take it from there just to kind of get your passive cash flow rolling.

Chris Miles (09:38): That’s right. Absolutely. Yeah. One thing we always thought about it’s like, you know, you even have a hundred thousand bucks, you know, and the a hundred thousand can easily turn it to at least 10,000 a year, which for some people I think that wait, that doesn’t seem like it’s possible. It’s like, actually we’re being conservative. We’re trying to go on the low end. So you don’t, we don’t over promise anything, you know? Cause it depends on where you decide to invest, but it’s not that difficult is it?

Craig Feldmeier (10:01): It’s really not. And especially too, if anyone’s listening to this in 2020, you know, you still have a few months left to qualify for those Cares Act distributions, which I have taken advantage of myself. So just as a kind of a recap, you know, that’s allowing people to withdraw to a hundred thousand dollars from their retirement accounts. You don’t have to pay the 10% penalty and you can defer taxes on those investments over three years as opposed to paying taxes the whole lump sum next year. So a very powerful thing to do just to kind of get the ball rolling. And it was a very, you know, it was really tough. I’m not gonna lie when, you know, I stopped contributing to my 401k a couple of years ago. You know, when I took out that first, you know, lump sum of cash, from my retirement assets, you know, as I said, Oh my gosh! Am I doing the right thing?

Craig Feldmeier (10:53): Is this a huge mistake? I’ll tell you what, it all disappeared. As soon as I got that first rental check, kind of hitting my account. I said, wow! You know, this is real. And a lot of people say real estate is risky. You know, I’ve done a lot of work getting myself up to speed and kind of becoming, you know, an experts and the real estate space, at least in terms of the single family home, the multi-family home, you know, there are, you don’t have to go out driving through your neighborhood right away and finding, you know, some duplex that you need to spend a bunch of money renovating, trying to find tenants yourself. You know, there are easier ways to go about investing in real estate. I know we’ve talked extensively about getting started with turnkey properties, which I think is a great first step for people.

Craig Feldmeier (11:45): Basically, you know, you have these companies that really go into neighborhoods that they’re experts in, they purchase properties that you buy. And all you have to do is really kind of send in your down payment check. You talk to a property manager and you really just kind of collect that cash flow every month. And I think conservatively right now, kind of given where rates are. I mean, this is the best time to invest in real estate rates are so low, probably the lowest we’ll ever see in our lifetimes. You know, you can get 10, 12, 14%, I think cash on cash return in a very conservative investment.

Chris Miles (12:24): Yeah, I totally agree. And that doesn’t even sound conservative to most people, they hear those numbers that’s high risk creates high returns. Right?

Craig Feldmeier (12:32): Right,. Exactly.

Chris Miles (12:34): It’s kind of flipping on its head.

Craig Feldmeier (12:36): And I mean, the way, you know, different people have different ways. They think about how they want to invest their money. For me personally, my wife and I, you know, we came to the agreement that we wanted to cover our fixed expenses with passive cash flow. So passive cash flow is you don’t really have to do too much in order to get your money every month. And then, you know, once we have our fixed expenses covered, maybe we can take some more risks and look at some more active cash flow measures, really try to kind of follow our passions, do something where you can maybe make a little bit more return. But I think just, you know, just the freedom that being able to cover your fixed expenses through passive cash low, it provides you with just such certainty in life that you can really, you know, if you love your job, that’s great. You know, maybe you get a new boss that comes in. Maybe they want you to move to another city. It really gives you kind of the power to control your life in the way you want. And just, you know, educating people that you don’t have to be a slave to the corporate world. You don’t have to be a slave to a financial advisor or to these mutual funds, you know, is very empowering. And I think, you know, people can just start learning that way of thinking. It can really change someone’s life.

Chris Miles (13:52): Yeah. I agree. So from your experience, you just left the corporate world, right? Like you’re now out of that, you’ve the shackles have been released from wall street, you know, invest how you want, you know, for those that are also in the corporate world right now, and they’re trying to do what you’re doing, right? They’re trying to get to that step where they’re able to free themselves from that. What are some recommendations you would give?

Craig Feldmeier (14:13): I would say the best thing to do is just to start small and don’t take any drastic moves right now. I would say number one, the thing that every investor has to do, and this is no matter kind of what type of investor you are. If you like stocks, if you like bonds, if you real estate. You have to get your personal financial statements in order. That’s number one, it’s really important to be organized. So what that means is you have to come up with your own personal balance sheet, come up with a list of what all your assets are and what all your liabilities are. I remember when my wife and I did this for the first time, she was shocked at how many assets we accumulated. Cause we never had really looked at them all together on paper between our, kind of our 401k accounts between our primary residence, between some other money we had.

Craig Feldmeier (15:05): And she said, wow! I didn’t realize we had so much, but it doesn’t seem like it because none of our assets were producing any cash flow for us, which I think is a problem. You know, there’s so many people have. So first getting a sense of, you know, what are your assets? What are your liabilities? What are some high, if you’ve got some high interest credit card debt, how do you pay that off quickly? And then you also want to get a sense of what your income and expenses are. So in the business world, we call that a profit and loss statement. On a personal side, I would say, you know, list out what your income is, list out what your expenses are. And that’ll give you a really good sense of areas you can cut back on and it will give you a good sense of how much money you have every month to start, you know, your investment portfolio.

Craig Feldmeier (15:51): And then I’d say once you kind of get a better understanding of how your, you know, your financial statements are set up, then you say, okay, what are my goals? What do I want to accomplish? Do you want to, you know, get out of the rat race in 10 years in 15 years in 20 years, you know, do you want to help your kids pay for college? You know, you had to really think about what those financial milestones are. And then it’s much easier to design a plan in order to produce cash flow to reach those goals. So maybe you could say, you know, if I can get 5,000 a month, 10,000 a month, that would really help me solve my financial goals, my financial problems, then you and I can come in and say, okay, this is what you need to do. This is how long you know, we think it’s going to take, and that gives you a sense of kind of how to structure your working life.

Craig Feldmeier (16:41): How aggressive do you need to be to save? Are there any sacrifices you need to make? You know, right now my wife and I are debating, do we still need two cars? Now that we’re both, kind of working from home, you know, that could be a huge expense that somebody could get rid of that maybe seem, could be jarring at first, but you know, maybe once it’s gone, it’s like, ah! We didn’t, we don’t need two cars anymore. Just kind of getting a sense of what your goals are, how your assets can produce cash flow for you, I think is kind of just the best way to really get started.

Chris Miles (17:15): Amen to that. That’s great. I love it, man. So last question for you, Craig, right?

Craig Feldmeier (17:19): Yeah.

Chris Miles (17:20): Why? Like, why you care so much about teaching and doing this? Cause you could just keep focusing on your portfolio and doing your thing just like I could do, right? Why are you doing this? Why are you wanting to teach people this stuff?

Craig Feldmeier (17:33): You know, such a good question, Chris. You the, 2020 has been such a rough year in so many different ways, but a lot of people, myself included and you know, my wife and I, you know, kind of midway through the summer when COVID is really kind of, when it, when we realized it was going to be more of a long-term reality than, you know, than a short-term reality, we said, you know, what do we really want our life to look like? We never really sat down and kind of have that conversation. And I was pretty miserable in my current job. And you know, I said, I really, you know, what is it I really want to do? What really kind of lights my internal fire? And I told my wife, I said, I really want to help people that are really struggling and are really frustrated with their financial situation.

Craig Feldmeier (18:22): I want to help them, you know, take control of their life, you know, help them build the steps to financial freedom. That really gives me a lot of fulfillment. And I think that’s kind of, you know, the light bulb moment I had when I said, you know, this is important. This is kind of what my mission is. This is the problem that I want to help people solve for.

Chris Miles (18:42): Yeah.

Craig Feldmeier (18:42): How am I going to do that? And so that’s kind of, you know, what led me to, you know, conversations with you going through your financial training course and you know, that’s just, that’s kind of what gets me out of bed every day. That’s kind of, you know, that connection with clients trying to help them, you know, just plan their financial future, in the Anti-Financial Advisor way is, you know, really kind of what my passion is and something I’m really looking forward to exploring.

Chris Miles (19:09): I love it, man. Well, Craig, I gotta tell you, I’m excited to have you as part of the team, like, and

Craig Feldmeier (19:13): Yeah. This is great, Chris. It’s going to be fun.

Chris Miles (19:16): It’s going to be a fun ride that’s for sure. And so and then everybody else too, and I know a lot of people can relate to where you’re coming from and where you’ve been and where you’re, well, they hope to relate to where you now are. So I’m definitely excited to have you a part of the team, man, and everybody else, like if you’re saying, Hey, I think I need to do that same thing. Like, I feel discontented just like Craig was saying, like, I’m not feeling like, you know, I’m feeling frustrated my financial situation. I feel like I should be better off than I am right now. Or I feel like there’s pipe potential here. We don’t know how to tap into it or what to do with this money. We have, you know, shoot us an email, go to WWW.MONEYRIPPLES.COM Send us a contact email and just say, Hey! What do we do?

Chris Miles (19:51): Like, you know, is this something that’s a good fit? Because you know, whether it’s me or Craig or it doesn’t matter, like the truth is we are here to serve you. We’re definitely been here to serve ourselves plenty. Now it’s time for us to give back and that’s what we’re here to do guys. So, you know, reach out to us, shoot us. You know, shoot us an email through the web page there. And Hey! Let’s see if we can serve you. Anyways, Craig, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been such a valuable amount of information experience that you have here.

Craig Feldmeier (20:18): Yeah. Thanks for having me, Chris. I appreciate it.

445 - How Government Programs Destroy Financial Prosperity

https://moneyripples.com/2020/12/01/445-how-government-programs-destroy-financial-prosperity/

Chris Miles wants to talk about something that is timely with the elections coming up. He feels like this is an important issue to tackle, the “principles” behind what a government should be.

It is no secret that Chris is definitely in favor of the conservative and libertarian type of approach when it comes to government. He sees how money, government, and prosperity as people work together. For him socialism and communism destroy.

This country was founded on principles and strategies to ensure we have the greatest chance of financial prosperity as a country.

So the question is, “Why do governments destroy financial prosperity?”.

http://moneyripples.com/  https://www.blogtalkradio.com/moneyripples  https://www.twitter.com/chriscmiles  https://www.facebook.com/moneyripples

Listen to our Podcast:

https://www.blogtalkradio.com/moneyripples/2020/10/21/445–how-government-programs-destroy-financial-prosperity 

 #FinancialAdvice #RealEstateInvesting #Finance

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Hello! My fellow Ripplers! This is Chris Miles, your Cash Flow Expert and Anti-Financial Advisor. Guys, I’m welcoming you out for a wonderful show, that’s for you and about you. Those you work so hard for your money. You’re now ready for your money to start working harder for you today. You want that freedom. You want that cash flow, right? You want that prosperity now, not 30 or 40 years from now. Not someday if you’re lucky, but today, guaranteed. That’s real tangible results. That is why you’re here. That’s the kind of “Ripple Effect” I’m here to create. And I’m excited because as Ripplers for you guys, you are actually Ripplers too. As you create something a bit different for yourself and something more, you create a “Ripple Effect” in your own lives and you can bless more people, bless your families and make a bigger difference. Guys, thank you for allowing me to create that “Ripple Effect” through you and the thousands of you that have been following and sharing and bingeing.

Thank you so much for being a part of this. Here’s a reminder, check out our website at MONEYRIPPLES.COM Now there’s a great blogs and podcasts on there, but you can also go to our YouTube channel and subscribe the Money Ripples with Chris Miles channel. Go there. You can find other episodes they’re available for you too. So check it out. So guys, I want to talk about something that is, I think, timely with the elections coming up and everything else, you know, I feel like we got to talk about something that’s so important. And the problem is we’re getting these, you get this left and right debates going on, right about what government should be. And nobody really talks about the principles behind it. I mean, there are people out there, right? But it’s so rare. You see it most of the time, you just make people look like they’re crazies on both sides of the spectrum.

And the truth is, yeah, there is a lot of craziness on both sides of the spectrum, whether you’re left or right. You know, and there’s no secret here that I’m definitely more favor and more conservative, more libertarian type of approach, right? When it comes to government and how it works. Because again, I see how governments and money and prosperity as a people work together. And definitely on the other side, it doesn’t work like socialism, communism does destroy. And that’s why we’re talking about today is really like Why the Governments Destroy Financial Prosperity? Right? not that they have to, in fact this country was founded on principles and even on certain strategies to ensure we have the greatest chance of financial prosperity as a country. And we proved that. I mean, we created a revolutions with the kind of model that we were able to create as such a baby of a country.

I mean, with really a bunch of people that were broke, perhaps, you know, there were broke poppers in some ways, but I’ll tell you the founding fathers, when they created this country, they were incredible because unlike us, I mean, one, they fact checked by reading books and they read books from the sources. They had to know multiple languages, understand that even the guys like Benjamin Franklin, he was traveling to France. Not because he was just, you’d like French women. Okay. He did too. But the guy spoke French, right? They spoke Latin based languages, lots of them. And they read these books from these things and they wanted to know the greatest societies. What kept them going? They will, if you guys ever studied this stuff, it’s incredible to know how intelligent these guys were and how with Google, we are some of the dumbest idiots in the world right now.

In history we’re some of the biggest morons because we have access information, but we don’t look for truth. We’re looking for information. But again, you get so much dumb information out there that it doesn’t matter, but these guys, they founded this country based on truth. The whole reason we’re a Republic versus a democracy is for a very specific purpose. You know, Hey, it’s smaller States. You might be living a smaller state right now. You better thank the founding fathers for creating a Republic, because if it were a democracy, you know what we care about. You Miss, you know Little Ms., Little Mister Rhode Island or Little Miss Massachusetts, no one cares about you and the North, much of you in the Northeast. No one cares about some of you guys that are in the West like Idaho and Wyoming, Montana. We don’t care about you. You don’t have any population.

Your democracy doesn’t count, but because we have a Republic, it does, right? These things are all done intentionally on fully intentional so that we can have more prosperity. And they studied the best of, you know, the, what am I looking for? Civilizations. They studied Rome, The Rise and The Fall. What was the cause of the fall but also the rise of Rome? They looked at even Ancient Israel, the days of Moses and Joshua, they looked at that kind of government and that kind of system to see what made it prosper. There were looking at the Anglo-Saxons back in like around the Sixth Century A. D.. You know out there like in Europe, they were looking at all these societies of the ones that were the, really the strongest and the most prosperous. And they wonder what they had in common. And our whole country is based on that.

So guys, I challenge you study what the founding fathers done and the constitution, everything else, but this is what also, they were not intending. They never intended governments. To come in with their own little programs to help you become prosperous, right? They had three main roles. You know, if you’ve heard this over and over the right to “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness”, if you go back right to life is of course the fact that people can’t threaten death on you, you know, now that doesn’t mean you can break the law. This is not anarchy. Like some people think that the, those on the right will think, right? It’s like, “you have anarchy, no government”, no, you don’t want no government. You want minimal government, but not no government. You still need the government to protect rights. For example, for life that you protect your life, that you protect your liberty, right?

That there you actually free from slavery. And yes, we had slavery. That was a big debate. Even when the founding fathers are doing it. And they had to kind of table the idea for a whole another generation. Right? So “Right to Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness”. That doesn’t just mean you’re frolic along in the forest and be like, yeah! I’m free! I’m happy! No, that was actually “The Pursuit of Property”. If you look at the actual meaning of that, if you look at what some of the founding fathers said, that was the right to property, because back then they didn’t have right to property. They had asked for permission from England to give it to them. And that’s the only way they can get actual land rights. You know, of course the land wasn’t theirs anyways, but they had to ask for permission from a King to give them rights.

You know, they wanted a free prosperous country where through your own prosperity, you could also have your own rights. So anyways, so I’m coming back to these government programs, right? Well, how do they destroy financial prosperity? Let me give you a very easy example. And I know you guys, I’ve heard examples like these, not just this one alone, you’ve heard probably plenty of these, example one, here, well this is my big example. I remember my father, he many guys don’t know, but he worked as an Auto Part Salesman, you know, for really 30 plus years, 30, 40 years, he did that with a few different companies. He didn’t get to work for the 40 years. Like he was hoping for like his generation was told to do. He was the forefront of the baby boomers, almost the prime lifers that time.

Anyways so he, so yeah, he worked for those companies and he did auto auto parts sales and stuff. And he would go to a lot of dealerships or some mechanic shops. And when he was doing his routes, there was one guy that was a Mechanic. Well, he eventually left that place and started work for the government. This is a friend of his that he also hung out with outside of work. Well, that friend went to work for a government agency as a mechanic, Auto Mechanic. The first day on the job, this guy gets there. He starts knocking out. He starts repairing all these vehicles like police vehicles and everything else to start knocking them out. Just like you would with a normal mechanic shop, right? By the way, think about when you go to mechanic shop, you want to done, well, you want it done fast.

You want it done at a reasonable price. Right? Well he got called into his boss’s office at the end of that first day. And the boss said, Hey, do you like your job? Yeah. You want to keep it? Yeah. Then slow down. You need to stop doing what you’re doing. He’s like, I’m just doing my job. I’m fixing these vehicles. Stop it. He’s like, if you start doing your job too fast, we don’t get money from the budget. And if we don’t get money from the budget, I guarantee I’m not laying myself off. So guess who gets laid off? It’ll be you. So stop it. So this guy had to undo all of his patterns of doing quick, awesome work. He had to start slowing down and start taking his time, taking lots of extra breaks, doing things at a very slow pace so that their department will keep get, well, continue to get funding because they’re based on these budget systems, right?

This is basically government as a whole. Anything, the government touches gets more expensive. Let me repeat this. “Anything the Government touches gets more expensive”. Let me give me more examples. Most recently Obamacare, right? The affordable care act. Have you noticed that your insurance premiums, if you don’t have an employer paying a lot of money for it, if you are the employer, or if you have to get your own policies, you already know this to be true. And you’re not getting a bunch of subsidies from the government because you’re not making enough money. You realize that these premiums have skyrocketed, right? Skyrocketed now someone might say, yeah, but there are few percent of people that couldn’t get insurance and it might be you, Hey, at least now we can get insurance again. You’re right. It’s good that you can get something, but guess what? That’s not the reason why the premiums skyrocketed.

That’s part of the reason they had to go up just to account for people that were uninsurable before. Right? The real reason is because the government has stepped in, create a whole bureaucracy, which by the way, increases our taxes because we’ve got to have all these government employees overseeing this program in this marketplace that even worked for a few months. If you remember, that was a nightmare trying to even go in the marketplace. And then of course was to do it causes the insurance company to jack-up everything too. And so they jack-up their rates who lost here? It wasn’t the government. It was us. We lost because the government stuck their noses in places they don’t belong. They don’t belong in stupid places like this. Again, that’s not the right to life, Liberty and pursuit of happiness and the right to life and health insurance.

No, that’s dumb by the way, life insurance is at least guaranteed. Why don’t we have life insurance covered? Oh, that’s the next government program, you know, dumb, you know, another example, State of Hawaii. I remember back in 2006, you know, I was starting to like really understand this stuff. I remember Hawaii said, they’re going to put price caps of $4 a gallon on gasoline. Guess what? The government had to go in and make sure they babysat it, causing them to add more taxes. That fuel pump. Guess what? They surpass the $4 a gallon cap almost immediately. Guys, like if you haven’t seen this before, all these extra programs are ridiculous. They don’t work. Here’s the challenge I’ll give you, go to YouTube. Look, look like a guy named Milton Friedman, right? Milton Friedman look him up. Especially when he went on Donahue.

If he has remembered the old talk show, host Donahue, this kind of dates me a little bit. Cause I remember sitting there watching it with adults and it was boring. But anyways, this one’s pretty interesting. Milton Friedman, he was on Donahue. He started talking about, and Donahue was very like very outspoken. Like we was in favor of these government programs, the socialism, while Milton Freeman saying, we got to cut at least half of these different departments get cut them, get rid of them, lower the taxes. Let the people prosper by the way. I loved not this last time, but well, I guess it was the previous election. When they’re talking about having the flat tax rate. I don’t know if you guys remember that. The guy that was the owner of the pizza place, I’m trying to remember his name offhand now, but he actually proposed a 9% flat tax.

I am totally in favor of that. Even more so than what the Trump tax plan did, because if you noticed your tax rates go higher, as you go up in income, what does that incentivize you to do? Not make more money? Does it because of You’re like, Oh, if I make more money and I hear it from clients all the time, if I make more money, I’m going to get taxed more. I mean, not to mention, I mean, you get to keep more too. Right. But they’re like, Oh, but that bumps me in another tax break and then, all that money I make now it’s at 34% or 36% tax or whatever it might be. And right now it’s a low, well, yeah. That’s not much of an incentive, but if we kept the flat, the tax flat, flat, right? If it were, say it was even 12%, let’s say it’s 12% for everybody.

Everybody had to pay 12% to taxes. Let’s just say that was the number. Right? Guess what would you care about making more money? No, the fact is you’d be incentivized to want to make more. Cause you get to keep more. Now they’ve reduced it as you went higher. See, that’s the thing in bad politics because you reducing on the rich makes it look evil. So they got to tax the rich more to make people feel good. But the real truth is that if you actually incentivize lowering taxes if you’ve made more money, you would be shooting for making more money. And you here’s the thing as you prosper and you make more money, you still have to pay more taxes than people that don’t make money. So as you’re interested to make more money, you still have to pay more taxes. Even if you’re in a lower bracket.

Yeah. As you go up. So if it’s flat tax, same thing, you still have an incentive. You’re still going to make more money. That’s not going to repel or pulse you anymore. You want to keep making more because the taxes won’t go up on you now. I’m not running for office. I know it’s a brilliant idea, but that’s why the idea could work. It’s based on self-interest human behavior, just humans, basic psychology. Instead of going from the psychology of the people that are saying, Hey, it’s not fair the rich, make more money. Hey, the rich are the ones paying all your freaking taxes, right? I’m paying way more tax than all you guys are. Okay. I can’t say all of you, some of you’re probably paying more than taxes. Some of you were unnecessarily paying more taxes than you should be, but I’m paying a lot more taxes than most of the country right now.

And that’s even with all my write offs and benefits and everything else. But guys like that’s the thing is that when governments steps in, they try to control stuff and they try to do these little programs and welfare programs instead of letting people choose for themselves, by the way people. I know, I give more than 10% of my income away to charities. I don’t mind doing that. I actually I like doing that. Don’t force me to do it. You know, if the government has to force you by the muzzle of a gun, right? To say, listen, you need to pay this or else. That’s it. By the way, another great book. Another great resource is a book by a guy named Ezra Taft Benson. He was actually the Department of Agriculture Head, back in the, I think it was Eisenhower days. He has a book called very tiny book called The Proper Role of Government.

That one changed my perspective. A big time. He mentioned, he said, Hey, say you were a particular person. You didn’t have money. You were hurting for money. You go to your neighbor and you ask them, Hey, can you give me money? Now asking for it’s one thing right? Asking for free will. But if you had to say, I’m coming over with a shotgun and I need you to give my money. By the way, in the book, The Law by Frederick Bastiat, Frederick actually says that’s called “legal plunder”, right? Legal plunder, you’re legally robbing people saying, Nope, I’m going to force you. Now. You might say the IRS won’t kill you. They don’t throw you in debtors prison. No, but what if you refuse to pay tax and you just kept refusing, refusing, and then they say, Hey, you know what? We need to do something.

And you’re like, I’m going to completely rebound and try to flee the country. And they try to capture you right? Or whatever it might be. You know, they’re still gonna try to imprison you if you try to get away with it at some point. And if you try to refuse imprisonment or refuse arrest, guess what? You will get killed. There will be a gun in your face. That’s what I mean by that. You’re trying to say like, I really want you to do it. No, actually I’m requiring you to do it. Give me that money. If you can’t feel in good conscience, go to your neighbor and do that. That’s not the right thing by the way. Now, what if you went to that neighbor said, listen, Hey, we need to fix our roads here.

Hey, can you pitch in and put in some money here? In fact, we need everybody to pitch in and put some money in because this is all our road. Would you feel as guilty about that? No. If you’re like, Hey, I need to make sure I have health insurance. Give me the money now. Guys, that’s not it. That’s not how you have a free and prosperous society, a free and prosperous society requires freewill. And yes, it requires government to protect the rights and make sure that nobody crossed the boundary where they’re stealing from you lying, hurting you, trying to kill you. All those other things, right? That shouldn’t happen. We need a society that allows us to be free, to prosper. According to the desires we have. And when a people wants to prosper and continue to grow and prosper, then everybody does. By the way, last example, France, talking about governments, getting in the way, France is a big one.

You know, everybody talks about socialism is amazing. Well, France, what happens if you have more than 50 employees, 50 or more employees, actually, what happens is you actually start getting all these extra benefits like coming out of your pocket. So what a French companies do they stop at 49. They refused employ more. By the way, Europe has a horrible unemployment rate, especially for those coming out of college. Right? And they’re supposed to have free equality for all. But here’s the thing at 49. They have to stop. Now, If they have to keep growing, what do they do? They go open up in Germany. Instead they say, I’m going to go for Germany because at least I won’t have to pay all these extra benefits. Guys. It’s all about self-interest again. You can have good self-interests there’s greed out there. I don’t doubt that. And I believe that people should be protected from people that are doing bad things.

Hey, I think the financial advising world know, even though it’s being regulated, I think it should have some sort of regulations or at least some things that are maybe it’s overly regulated. Maybe it’s not, I mean, that’s debatable, but the truth is that even those that are aligned with those regulations still doesn’t stop them from being a jerk or not doing the right thing for you. Right? So that’s the thing is like governments are necessary, but we don’t need humongous governments protecting and trying to dictate our entire lives. That’s not the way that we were raised to be a bunch of pansies, a bunch of wimps that can’t take care of ourselves, that we have to go to the government to do it. And by the way, I’ve used welfare before I’ve had help before I’ve got, I’ve had my church helped me before, when I went through the recession before, I had to get help, you know, guys, but that’s, again, that was voluntary money that wasn’t like, you know, again, forcing people to give it, by the way, I’ve more than paid back that money since, in different charities and offerings to help pay that back.

Chris Miles, the “Cash Flow Expert and Anti-Financial Advisor,” is here to guide you towards financial freedom!

  Mitch Stephen What to know Before Lending Your Money? https://youtu.be/9_4doUUCqzk

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Chris Miles, the “Cash Flow Expert and Anti-Financial Advisor,” is here to guide you towards financial freedom!

  Chris Miles 433 - Are We In A Bubble https://youtu.be/MFsMmUymV0E

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444 - Raising Private Money with Max Keller

https://moneyripples.com/2020/11/27/444-raising-private-money-with-max-keller/

Max Keller is a real estate investor, best selling author, and highly sought after consultant, speaker, and expert panelist on the topic of lead generation and marketing for real estate investors.

In just a few short years Max went from being a full-time high school Math teacher to flipping over 100 houses. His unique marketing approach landed him onstage with Robert Kiyosaki being presented with the 2019 Industry Innovator of the Year Award.

Fueled by his passion for real estate, Max is still a teacher at heart, and today he is going to share a strategy that’s working right now – in some of the most competitive real estate markets across the country – transforming ordinary inventors into the TRUSTED EXPERT in the eyes of motivated sellers and private lenders.

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Listen to our Podcast:

https://www.blogtalkradio.com/moneyripples/2020/10/16/444–raising-private-money-with-max-kellerr

—————————————————

Chris Miles (00:08): Hello! My fellow Ripplers. This is Chris Miles, your Cash Flow Expert and Anti-Financial Advisor. Welcome you out for a wonderful show today. A Show that’s for you and about you. Those of you that work so hard for your money, and you’re ready for your money to start working harder for you. Now, you want that freedom. You want that cash flow, that prosperity today, not waiting 30 or 40 years from now. If you’re lucky in the stock market, hoping that someday you might be able to retire and have some sort of crappy fixed income freedom. That’s not what we’re here about today, guys. Cause we’re here about creating freedom and cash flow now. So you can use those years and the things that you love to create a life of living of purpose of legacy, and be a Rippler by creating a “ripple effect” through the lives of others, by blessing them with the gifts and the talents that you have versus just living in survival.

Chris Miles (00:55): And guys, thank you so much for allowing me to create a “ripple effect” through you. Because through this show, you guys have been amazing. You’ve been bingeing, you’ve been sharing with others. The show just keeps growing and that’s all because of you. So thank you for doing that. And for applying these things in your life, as a reminder, check out our website, WWW.MONEYRIPPLES.COM There’s again, the great blogs on there and members subscribed, not just to our show, but even to our YouTube channel, you can also see there on our website. So check it out today, guys. So I’ve got a special guest here, so I’ve got Max Keller. So Max here, the thing that I love is that this guy has so much experience in the real estate space, right? He’s been an active investor for many, many years. He’s a real estate investor.

Chris Miles (01:34): He’s a bestselling Author. He’s got tons of books out there. He’s a highly sought after Consultant Speaker and an Expert Panels on the topic of Lead Generation and Marketing for Real Estate Investors. So if you’re an active real estate investor, this is the guy you need to be following. By the way, in just a few short years, Max went from a full-time high school Math Teacher position to flipping over a 100 houses. His unique marketing approach led him on stage with Robert Kiyosaki being presented with the 2019 Industry Innovator of the Year Award ,field by his passion for real estate. Max is still a teacher at heart and which is something I can definitely relate to. And today he’s going to share a strategy that’s working right now. So guys, the big thing I want to talk about here is so many of you guys will say, all right, I’ve got so much money, but how do I get more? How do I get more leverage, right? How do I get more OPM if I can’t get it from the bank? Where can I get it? And that’s really the topic of the show today. So if you want to figure out how to get more cash in your hand to be able create better returns, this is who we’re talking to here. Max Keller. Welcome to our show, man!

Max Keller (02:34): Hey Chris! Good to be here. Just glad it’s a great day. Great weather. And we’re just going to make it happen.

Chris Miles (02:41): That’s right, man. We at least are not being hit by hurricanes. That’s what matters, you know,

Max Keller (02:45): That’s right.

Max Keller (02:46): That’s pivotal.

Chris Miles (02:48): Yep.

Chris Miles (02:48): So tell me like, what how’d you even go from Math Teacher to be in Real Estate Investor? Like what was that jump? What, made that happen?

Max Keller (02:55): Sure. Yeah. You know, I was teaching Math and I really enjoyed it. I figured that I was gonna be a Math Teacher my whole life. But I wanted to, you know, make it extra income, probably like a lot of people, you know are listening to the show. And so like a lot of people I liked, you know, the house flipping shows, I met some local mentors and kind of always had the mindset that if I saw somebody else doing something, you know, I could do it too. And you just really just need the knowledge. I mean, you need a formula, you know, you have to know what you’re doing. And you know, I had a growing family, you know, you have a large family and you know, I did too. I had we had just had our fifth child. And so, you know, salary wasn’t really enough, you know, and I wanted to have more time, freedom and more passive income.

Max Keller (03:42): So yeah, just started dipping my toes into real estate. You know, I started out wholesaling. Then I was flipping about one house at a time and then I started flipping multiples and then, you know, things kept going, you know, really good. The problem was is that my deal flow was exceeding, you know, my funding that I could handle on my own. So I had to reach out to, you know, to banks. I had to reach out and get more financing so I could do more deals and scale up my business. And this was a new concept for me. And, you know, there’s, you know, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of other real estate investors like me who are kind of in the same predicament all the time, especially, you know, now with what’s happening with the, with the virus and the disruptions.

Max Keller (04:27): There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of houses that need to be rehabbed. I mean, there are every year people move out of them. And so there’s a huge market for people, active real estate investors who borrow funds to revitalize these neighborhoods. And so, you know, I started out going the traditional route. I used, you know, all of my, you know, lines of credit and all the things that I had I qualified for, you know, that I went to community banks and I found that they were really, you know, they, weren’t very flexible, especially now, you know, the lending is really strange and are really tricky. So I get in with the community bank route and then and then I started using hard money and hard money is a good place to get started, you know? And it really helped me understand that relationship, but, you know, I had local, I would talk about what I do and I had local business owners that would reach out to me and say, you know, how could I get involved in this?

Max Keller (05:23): And they didn’t really know what private mortgage lending was and you know, and how it even works. So their idea of getting into real estate was like buying a rental. Like if you find me a rental, you know, can you, can I buy it and can you manage it? And, you know, so there’s just like, I think that there’s a lot of people out there. I know this is why it was for me. They kind of know like real estate, they’re making connections between wealth and real estate cash flow and real estate, but you know, what are like the actual step-by-step process to get there? And that’s the part that you is a little bit fuzzy. So yeah, just, I was flipping more homes and I started meeting people in my office, building people at my local community that wanted to get involved.

Max Keller (06:06): You know, I started learning the private lending system and creating, you know, a program for my own and started using private funds to, to take down, you know, the deals for short and long-term deals and, you know, help, you know, investors make great rates of return. And now we’ve expanded it to an education program where we actually my partner, Brant, and I wrote a book and we use it to teach people how to get involved in the space because, you know, there’s, you can’t just give your money to somebody and you know, it’s not hope estate it’s real estate. So like there are steps, there are checks and balances. And if you’ve never been in real estate before, it’s a great thing. It may be great for you, but I just encourage people to get the education, get the knowledge, really understand, you know, details matter, you know, the deal matters who you’re working with matters. So that’s been the journey for us. You know, we flipped about 120 houses in the last few years here in Dallas Fort Worth. And, you know, we have rentals and now just, I think being a teacher turned into a whole another mission, which is now we’re on this mission to educate people on private lending and how it works and you know, what mistakes to avoid.

Chris Miles (07:21): Yeah. It’s a big deal. I mean, I’ve done it personally as well, like before the last recession. And that was not fun, especially when it was in a real estate deal that depreciated and then couldn’t get their money back because there was no liquidity. Right.? And that was a nerve wracking place. And there’s a lot of liability behind that. I mean, there’s, I mean, you don’t do it right. I mean, it can be a big risk. It’s, it’s amazing. Like it creates massive leverage and it’s awesome. It’s way better than using banks. Cause it’s a lot less red tape to go through, but I mean, you got to be careful.

Max Keller (07:52): Yeah. The active, you know, both people do, you know, the active real estate or, you know, from, you know, as you know, when I’m sitting in the seat. Cause I do both, I lend, you know, my own money and then I’m active real estate investor. I borrow.

Chris Miles (08:04): Yeah.

Max Keller (08:04): And so, yeah, you know, when you’re borrowing are the mindset that we, me and Brant have and in our students who co-author some of our educational books, they don’t trust the experts all over the country. You know, the mindset that we want them to have is, you know, you have to be able to put the odds in your lender’s favor and just do everything that you can to, like you said, stay liquid and make sure that, you know, you’re borrowing somebody’s money and this is a big deal.

Max Keller (08:35): And so what are your, you know, plan? What’s the plan B you know, what’s the backup plans? What are the contingencies? What are, you know, do you have the capacity to make somebody whole even if, you know, you don’t make a lot of money on the deal or lose money on the deal, you know, Brant and I have been thankful the way that we structure our deals going all the way back you know, Brant, I think for 13 years to where we’ve never you know, we’ve been able to pay every single lender back and that’s super important. There’s kind of two components to that. So if you’re passive and you’re thinking about maybe getting involved in real estate, you know, step number one, educate yourself, really understand, you know, how does that a borrower? How does that a deal?

Max Keller (09:18): You know, how to make sure that you have your documents set up to where your, you know, your money is, securitize. And it has, you know,

Chris Miles (09:27): Right. Has collateral.

Max Keller (09:29): Yeah, that has the collateral. It has the correct forms, you know, and they’re prepared by the right people. You know, these are details matter. So that’s, I would just say education, you know, first and then, you know, make sure that you’re working with somebody that number one if a deal goes sideways, they take responsibility. You know, we take personal responsibility for the deals that we borrow. Some people don’t, that’s okay. Just find out. And then you know, so people don’t pay investors back for one or two reasons. They either don’t want to, the deal went sideways and that was the risk they took, or they don’t have the capacity. And so, you know, if you, people who get involved in private lending, you know, does the person that you’re lending to have the capacity to pay you back, if something goes wrong in a deal and go sideways, even if they want to? So those are some things that we, you know, encourage people to really learn about as they’re going down the journey.

Chris Miles (10:26): Yeah. I always remind people that they’re being the lender. They got to think of themselves like a bank too, you know, like there’s gotta be assets there. There’s gotta be something to back it up, you know? Or what if there’s something does go wrong, what’s plan B or even plan C case even plan B doesn’t work. Right? You know, where’s there some recourse, do you have even other assets that could possibly have claim? Usually that’s going a little bit farther than, than what most people will do and what you maybe even need to do. But because if the deal is good, if it’s got equity, I mean, there’s different things you can analyze to see if that’s good, but definitely on the borrower side, I mean, there’s a lot of responsibility there. So let’s kind of go into that as well as is. Why would we want to borrow private capital? Like, why do you think there’s such a benefit to that with despite all these risks and everything else? Why should we do it?

Max Keller (11:09): And so you’re one of the great ways is that, you know, just from, you know a benefit to everybody standpoint, you can help a lot of people, you know, there’s right now that are, you know, investing in the stock market. They don’t feel like they have control. And they’re not sure if it’s going to go, you know, up down sideways or diagonal. And so, and they don’t even know about this. It’s like a secret club. And so, you know, when we bring people into our program, you know, they’re so excited. It’s the peace of mind, you know, and they know that real estate is there and, you know, if it’s insured correctly and they’re named, you know, on the insurance policy, like, you know, they just, it just feels better. It’s really the way to explain it.

Max Keller (11:51): So from the barrower’s standpoint, it’s great because number one, working with private lenders you build relationships where, you know, sometimes you work at banks and other people you know, it’s kind of, you know, it’s just a corporate thing and it’s kind of hard to really get that continuity. So it’s great to build relationships with like-minded people help them. It’s great. As a business owner, because you can do more deals, obviously, if you have more funding, you know, it takes money to do deals and to make big improvements. And so, it’s really how you have it structured. If you have it structured to where it’s a win-win, then it’s good. I mean, you obviously have to know what you’re doing. I tell folks, you know, who are active real estate investors, if they’ve never done deals or they haven’t done a lot of deals, don’t borrow from private lenders go and borrow from hard money lenders.

Max Keller (12:44): Go more from banks, borrow from people who are, you know, looking at this all day. Because the last thing that you know, that you want to do is not qualify for a hard money loan or a bank loan, and then, you know, borrow money from a private individual. That is not what you want to do, you know? And the same thing, you know, a lot of times the private lenders, they’re not as up on this, they made their money in something other industry. They don’t understand real estate that well, and they’re just trusting the person you got to do more than that. You got to know a little bit about what you’re looking at, because you may have somebody in front of you that just got turned down from a hard money lender. They got turned down from a bank you’re kind of their last hope. And that’s not probably the deal that you want to invest in. So it’s just, it’s an education, there’s education involved on both sides. And that’s what it really takes to make it a win-win.

Chris Miles (13:40): Yeah. I agree. Yeah, you know, the thing that’s amazing. I mean, not so much my clients, because my clients usually want double digit returns. Right? But I’ll tell you like the general population, they horribly question double digit returns. They think that it’s, there’s like, it’s gotta be a scam. If you’re going to pay me 10, 12%, it can’t be legit. It’s too good to be true. Would you tell them, Hey, we’ll pay you a steady income of 6% or 7%. They’re all over it. You know, they think that’s great because that’s more than I can pull out from my mutual funds where I’m making two or 3% a year. I can make double the cash flow, the double, the income from the same money. Right? And so for them, it’s like you said, it’s a big win-win, but it’s also a win for the person, because if they’re only paying six or 7%, unless you stink at real estate, it, you should be able to make a lot more profit than that.

Max Keller (14:26): Right. And you know, the other thing about that, a lot of the demand from people who find out about private mortgage lending to real estate investors and never heard of this or done it before, a lot of the demand comes from the fact that they’re not just looking for return of you know, they’re not just returning, looking for return on their investment. They’re looking for return of investment.

Chris Miles (14:49): That’s right.

Max Keller (14:50): But with some of the other, you know, we’ll just use, we’ll just pick on the stock market for right now. I mean, it can, I guess, theoretically go to zero and I’m not saying that house prices can’t go up or down, you know, I’m not a CPA, I’m not an attorney. You know, I don’t, I can’t predict the future, but people feel like, okay, I’m looking at a physical building here and I just don’t know how it would ever go down to zero.

Chris Miles (15:14): It has an intrinsic value.

Max Keller (15:15): Yeah.

Chris Miles (15:16): Yeah.

Max Keller (15:17): A utility. And,

Chris Miles (15:19): Yeah.

Max Keller (15:19): So that’s really, you know, a lot of the draw and the benefit is, there’s been folks and you have been, you do this long enough, you know, who lost, I mean, at least in the last recession, the major one, right? Or, Oh eight you know, they lost a lot. And you know, so they lost a lot of principal. Wasn’t just the interest. And so those are some, that’s really what drew me into it. I mean, that’s what, I didn’t even know that existed. When I got into real estate, my goal was to get one rental a year. I thought if I just stayed in that teacher, get a rental a year, you know, that’ll do something. And then after 20 years, you know, I’ll have some stuff I’ll just, it’ll be paid off and that’s pretty different ways to go.

Max Keller (16:02): But then, I like lending now from my own, out of my own bunnies, because it’s so passive, you know, I don’t, I can drive by the house, you know, if I’m lending to somebody local, it’s insured, you know, if there’s a buyer or something like that, I can go check on the property. It’s somebody that I know, like, and trust, there’s always risk in whatever we do, but I, that’s why I do it is because it makes me feel good. And and it’s just, yeah, just feels like you know, once you know, what’s going on, I don’t have to spend much time in it. Like I don’t have to go check on the house every day. I don’t have to spend hours doing research. You know, I mean how to do research on some of these companies. I just, you know, I already have a relationship with the borrower and I look at their deal and then I send the money to the title company.

Max Keller (16:55): And then, you know, I get either my monthly interest or, you know, some of my borrowers, I get paid monthly, you know, some of them, we just let it accrue until the end. And then, you know, that’s not a sign the release form at the end, you know, for the payoff. So it’s like, it’s very passive. One thing, you know, Chris, you know, as well as me, we’re both really into time and how it’s, you know, in spending time with our families and not just being a, you know, a wage slave.

Chris Miles (17:25): Yeah.

Max Keller (17:25): And I was really important. And so it’s not just return. Return is important. Okay. Return of your investment, then you know what the return is going to be on it. But then also is how much time do you have in the deal? Because if two people make, you know, 10% returns and it’s a certain amount of money at the end of the year in two different investments, they didn’t make the same amount.

Max Keller (17:48): They had time costs involved. They had different emotional costs involved. So it’s just, so I just, you know, just from my own personal experience, that’s what drew me to private lending was because of the time leverage. I don’t have to put a lot of my time in the emotional costs for me, isn’t very high because I already, because I’ve researched it and learned. And so I know what it looks like. So I’m going to bed at night fine. And that’s, you know, so that’s what people can, you know, aspire to if they’ve never done it before.

Chris Miles (18:19): Yeah. I love it like that leverage of, i mean time and energies to me is way more important than money. Right? And that’s the key right there. And yeah, to leverage that time to go say, Hey, now I can get the returns, you know, depending on what they look like. Yeah. I agree. And I definitely love what you said too. I mean, it’s more important to I, this is a mantra I use of my clients. It’s more important to get return on your money or return of your money than as the return on your money. Right? You know, that’s always, the first priority is how would I make sure I get my money back? And then secondly, do I get return on top of it too? So, yeah. Great advice. I really appreciate it, Max. If people want to, like, you know, either like understand more like how to do this for themselves. And I know you’ve got a lot of great educational tools and things like that, how would they go about reaching out to you or following you more?

Max Keller (19:02): Yeah. So I’ve got a couple you know, contact emails and things like that. So why don’t I just I’ll one of them is [email protected] So they can send me an email there. If they want to get access to some educational materials, we’ve got some of those. And then you can just, you know, probably easiest where I’m most active Is Facebook. So you can just look me up there, Max. N as in Nicholas Keller FACEBOOK.COM/MAX.N.KELLER And all my stuff’s on there, send out a message and yeah, I hope it works out for, you know, everybody just explore it and learn about it. You know, my partner, Brant and I have a book out that teaches people how to invest in private lending if they’ve never done it before. And so we, more than happy for, you know, folks who reach out to send them a copy, you know, digital or print, you know and get into their hands. No problem.

Chris Miles (19:52): Awesome! Love it, man. Again, thank you so much for your wisdom and your experience and in your advice here, this has been very valuable, so I really appreciate it today.

Max Keller (20:00): Hey, thanks for having me on!

443 - Why I Do What I Do And Why You Should Listen

https://moneyripples.com/2020/11/25/443-why-i-do-what-i-do-and-why-you-should-listen/

Many of Chris’ followers and as well as clients have reached out and asked him these. “Chris, why do you have to do this and what is it that you love about this?”

These questions got him to really think of the real purpose of why he keeps on doing these podcasts and why people should care.

Going back almost 2 decades ago, Chris started to become a mainstream financial advisor by doing traditional plans. Although he thought he was learning something new to give people hope he realized that he was just giving them the same answers just like any other financial advisors you can find.

With this he concluded that financial advising is classified into two things: Mutual Funds and Insurance Products. But if there is one thing that Chris wants his listeners to learn is that “Cash Flow creates Financial Freedom”.

Listen to our Podcast:

https://www.blogtalkradio.com/moneyripples/2020/10/15/443–why-i-do-what-i-do-and-why-you-should-listen

——————————————————-

Hello, My fellow Ripplers! This is Chris Miles, your Cash Flow Expert and Anti-Financial Advisor. Guys, I’m welcoming you out for a wonderful show. That’s for you and about you. Guys, if you’re here because you want your money working for you, so you don’t have to work so hard for your money, you’re in the right place. It’s not just about you creating a life of convenience and ease, but as a Rippler, you’re here to create something more, to bless yourself, be blessed financially, but be able to bless those around you too. Cause you can create that Ripple effect for them. It’s all about creating that cash flow, creating that freedom, that prosperity now, not 30 or 40 years from now, but today. Absolutely, right now to make a difference in your life today. Guys, thank you for joining me. Thank you for being a part of this movement because as Ripplers, we are here to make the world a better place and right now don’t we need that.

Right? So anyways, thank you so much for joining us. Be sure to check out our website WWW.MONEYRIPPLES.COM As well as our YouTube channel, The MONEY RIPPLES with Chris Miles page, subscribe to that. You could check out other videos of these podcasts and other things that I’ve produced there. So check it out. So today guys, I’ve been really thinking a lot, really, I guess just about what I’m doing here, you know, like why in the heck am I doing this? I’ll tell you the last few months have been insane and I’ve loved so much the many of you that have reached out, whether you’ve heard me on other podcasts and come here, whether you’ve been following me for years, you know, it’s been amazing. And I had a huge rush of you guys use me, whether it’s for the, you know, the consulting aspect, it’d be hiring me, hiring me as your Financial Advisor or Anti-Financial Advisor, really?

Right? You know, or even those of you that have been hiring me there or been used my services with the life insurance side, doing the infinite banking and everything else. And it really got me the question, because the question will come up for many of you saying, so Chris, why are you doing this? And in fact, some of my clients at a mastermind recently even asked that question were in my home and they said, Chris, why do you do this every day? Like, why do you do this? Because obviously you don’t have to, like, you financially are fine. You’re out of the rat race. You don’t have to do this. So why do you keep doing it? And what do you love about it? And I love that question that came from that client because it got me to really think of the real purpose behind what I’m doing here.

Why am I even doing this podcast? Right? It’s not because I need more clients. The truth is I actually brought on another coach that I’ve been prepping for the last year, just to be prepared to work with some of you. Right? Personally, I’m only taking on three clients a month, you know, as one-on-one consulting clients as like an Anti- Financial Advisor, the others, I hand off to people like him, you know the insurance stuff, I’m still doing myself, but same thing I’ve been working in training some of the guys on my own team to take some that of overflow, you know, because there’s only so much of me and the truth is I don’t want to ever be full-time doing this. Right? Not that I don’t care. In fact the hardest part is trying to keep myself, you know, limiting really the 20 or 30 hours a week.

And so I want to take you back to why I’m doing this, right? Like, and why you should be listening? You know, why you should care? Because it’s vitally important. The reason why I’m doing this is the reason you should be listening right now. And the reason why you should be taking action because again, almost two decades ago, right? Really just I guess now it’s been almost 19 years. I started out as that, Mainstream Financial Advisor, I started out doing those traditional financial plans. And really when you think about it, although I thought I was learning something different and new to something to help people and give people hope the truth is I was giving them the same answers, just like you’ve received from other Financial Advisors, right? The same exact answers. It was always product based, right?

It was always based on you buying the particular types of mutual funds, you know, whether you do an IRAs or Roth IRAs or whatever it might be, or certain types of insurance products. So it be annuities or Index Universal Life that I actually used to do. Back in their early days, I was one of the early Adopters of the Index Universal Life Plan, which now I’m kind of more against it in many, many situations, most situations that you guys present me. So anyways, like I started doing those kinds of things, even Variable Universal Life, you know, so I started doing things that were more stock based, you know, mutual fund based or something of that nature. Now, the thing is as time went on, I realized that financial advising is really just the Mexican food of money. That’s really what it is.

It’s the Mexican food of money, you know, for example, Mexican food, you look at the basics of it, right? You got meat being cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, right? Or whatever it might be and a tortilla. So that’s basically what a taco is, right? What’s a burrito, meat, bean, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, you know, wrapped up with, you know, just all wrapped up, just packaged differently. What the tostada, it’s the same thing. Like really, if you look at financial advising, it’s kind of dumbed down to really just two things. It’s mutual funds and insurance products, that’s it. And if it doesn’t fit in that parameter, if it doesn’t fit within what the suite of products that they offer, then it’s not possible. You know, they would just trash talk it, right? For sure if you do something outside of that realm, you’re, blasted for it.

You’re, you’re considered to be risky. You’re considered to be someone who’s not thinking you should be diversified in all these different areas. Right? And you should be in this for the long haul. So it doesn’t matter short term and short term, you got to delay that gratification. You gotta delay that happiness, that joy today, so that tomorrow, which is really 30, 40 plus years from now, you might have hoped to do those things, whether you’re alive or not, we don’t know. And whether you’re in the right amount of health or not, we don’t know. And whether your family wants to be around you, by that point, you probably there’s. The answer is probably not. So all of these things, they tell you to delay that gratification, right? For someday take high risks to get high returns, you know all this stuff, you know, that stuff is really just a bunch of bull is a complete lie.

Now I didn’t, I wasn’t doing this as a lie, right? Like as a Financial Advisor, I wasn’t feeling that way again, to their defense of the Financial Advisors. It’s not totally their fault. There are trained by companies that make profits off of you putting your money, putting your assets under their control. And then they make all the fees and the money off of that. And we talked about this. If you really listened to a few of the previous episodes, when I talked about the 401k, you know, why you can, you can’t even retire with max funding, a 401k and getting a match. Also that stocks aren’t real, they’re not real assets, right? All of these things, this is stuff that as a Financial Advisor, I really wasn’t doing, you know, it, wasn’t about cash flow. As you see my shirt says here, right?

Cash Flow = Freedom. That’s absolutely a hundred percent true. Cash flow does create freedom. It’s not about saving up and trying to build up your net worth or having a big nest egg. Because if that nest egg does not produce income, it doesn’t matter. And guys, after four years of being a Financial Advisor meeting with many clients, inheriting clients from other Financial Advisors that quit. And then I inherited their clients after decades of advice, we’re still in a place where they felt they could not ever retire. Guys, that is not the situation I want you to be in. That’s why I’m here. It’s like when I see videos of other Financial Advisors on other podcasts, occasionally I’ll listen to it. Occasionally I’ll pull up the Dave Ramsey show and listen to that every once in while I actually like the things on his show. But I’ll tell you, like, when I hear the mainstream advice being taught again of spend nothing, save everything, sacrifice, suck it away for someday in the future.

So that hopefully someday, if you’re lucky, you’ll be able to retire. That should not be your situation, right? That should not be the life that you’re hoping for and praying for and crossing your fingers that the market will just happen to smell on you the right way. Guys, there is more to it than that. And the thing has, you know, I didn’t get out of the rat race once, but I’ve done it twice. You know, So as a Financial Advisor, I quit, you know, 2006, I vowed never to teach about money. Again. I would just do mortgages as a mortgage broker, do a little part-time stock like coaching people, how to trade stocks and options being a stock coach. Right? And then I was also doing ballroom dancing to kind of is that little release, you know, that fun. And I wanted to actually go back to school, finish the degree to then become a ballroom instructor, even if it’s at a local university.

So I started doing a little bit of side gigs there at that time in 2006. But the thing is like, when I knew that there was people already financially free in their twenties and thirties, I had to know what they did. And I hope that’s the way you feel too, is that I couldn’t deny it. I said, you know, even though I was a Financial Advisor and I thought I should have all the answers, the truth is I didn’t. I knew that there was something better and it ate at me that there was something better out there. And I didn’t know it, I didn’t understand it. And so that 2006, I started learning from guys that had done it themselves. Right? Guys, that had, but now I’ll tell you, these guys weren’t perfect by any means. In fact, in a lot of ways, there were sloppy.

In some ways they were actually more free because of the markets of what was going on at the time, especially with real estate. Right? And so there were some things that there were some holes in what they did. And those holes also passed on to me too where I would find myself in trouble, especially as they cut-off income streams. The crazy thing is actually some of the income streams I created were more solid than the one they had because a lot of that was turning over and flipping properties. And that’s deceiving, right? And when you’re just flipping properties, you know, you’re really transactional. You’re not really creating cash flow. It’s not passive. You’re just actively turning money. Right? You have to be very active in that business. It’s not quite like the passive, like many of you, when you come to me saying Chris, I want a plan that creates passive income.

So I work because I want to, not because I have to. Right? So anyways so, you know, in some ways I actually created a better plan for myself than them. Mine was actually more through business streams of income. It was very rudimentary. It was very nonchalant. It wasn’t even official. I wasn’t marketing or doing anything. It was just realizing, Hey, I can create value, solve problems. Money comes as just very naturally. And I didn’t need a lot of money back then. Then, 2007 and 2008 hit, we had the recession. I had cut off my income streams that come out of retirement 2007, did start teach people, get out of the rat race. Well, guess what? When I was back in the rat race, I couldn’t keep teaching people how to be out of the rat race when I was in it. So I stopped, I changed it.

And I also started listening to what people wanted, again, listening for what people really needed. And when it came to money, they were saying, Chris, like, I just need money to survive. You guys remember that? Like, when it just felt like things were tight, right? You couldn’t get access to money. If you were working, you were blessed, right? But if you got lost your job, you’re in real trouble. But even if you were working, you know, you weren’t, there was like hiring freezes. There was wage, you know, there weren’t there like salary freezes, I guess you could call it right where they weren’t increasing your wages. There’s a lot of things going on. And so you know, people, as they started to say, I just need to find money. Well, the thing is because of all the crap I was going through, I went from, you know, being in a place where I was able to be retired from residual income to a place where then I’m like, I got to make money because I’m in the hole sixteen thousand dollars a month and that’s with making money.

So I had to reduce expenses, you know, get down to bare bones both of my business and my personal life. I had, you know, do a lot of things you see in that book, The Seven Secrets Free of Cash Today and Beyond Rice and Beans eBook on my website and Money Ripples. Right? You see, you actually see those very things that I did for myself. And then I taught my clients to do, and that’s what I would tell them. I said, you know, I was broke. I mean, I really was broke, especially in 2008. I mean, I was at a low, I mean, I was depressed 2009, but the first part of it, I was actually struggling a lot. I actually considered quitting many times over the course of that year and doing my own thing, leaving the company. I was coaching for that time, but something just kept me telling me, stay with it, stay with it.

Right? And so I did, I followed that whisper, you know, I stuck with it. And even though everybody was quitting from that company, I stuck around, even though I wasn’t get paychecks a lot of times, you know, but that, you know, that being said, you know, the cool thing is eventually I started to come out of it. Right? 2009, especially I hung in long enough, I started using that cash flow process and those things I learned. And once I started planting it with the right people, the right influencers, both in the chiropractic and the dental space, that’s when they exploded. That’s when all of a sudden we had something legit and understand like 2007, 2008, that type of process of the company I was with at that time, it was very theoretical. A lot of principals, pretty much, if you were dumbed down what they say, they would say, here’s a, you know, go find some real estate, hard money loan where they’ll pay you lots of money and then just go buy these life insurance products.

And they were not good life insurance products. And they were not good, hard money loans. So people were losing their money. They weren’t losing the life insurance, but they weren’t in a place where they thought they were making good money with that. Right? And that was pretty much it when it came to, you know, real practical advice. And I’m giving you all of these details. I’m trying to lead you down the path and the journey I’ve been on, you know, especially if you haven’t heard this journey before, I want you to understand where I’m coming from and all the things I experienced. Right? And by the way, that’s when I started learning that I could do different things with, you know, infinite banking, as I was taught, infinite banking, 2006 with the life insurance. Right? But I started to learn how to do it better.

During that period of time, when I was struggling, I started really like, get, becoming a student and realized, wait, we could do this better. And that just kind of progressed over the years till about three, four years ago, I got to a point I’m like, now I’ve found how to do it optimally the best way possible to get the max ROI, infinite banking policy versus the traditional infinite banking where you don’t have cash or much cash in the beginning. Right? So all those things started happening around that time. The cash flow process of helping people free up money and find money. I wasn’t doing anything with alternative investments. I wasn’t talking about real estate at all. We were just trying to find more money, more cash flow. You give example, I just had a client just the other day. I was on the phone with her.

It was our first meeting, amazing entrepreneur. She makes great money, but she’s been raised as a saver. So she can’t spend money well. So she is not spending a lot of money per month. It was a lot of surplus, but she’s still not free. She still has to keep working. Well, we started looking at her situation and said, all right, let’s see what we got here. Well, between some of the tax strategies and things like that, I’m like we can already from tax savings because he had a dumb accountant telling her she couldn’t have a corporation yet. And that’s a liability problem by itself. I was like, with all of these, we could probably free up at least 10,000 or more a year. Just the taxes. You know, another client had just yesterday same kind of thing. We said, we weren’t doing taxes.

I mean, that’s another thing we haven’t addressed quite yet. But we were looking at ways to, they were looking to invest money. I was like, let’s take someone’s money instead. We can pay off certain credit cards. We’ll pay off some of these things. And then we’ll do some things to reduce some costs. You mean like health insurance actually send an email to a lot of you guys, if you have seen it, if you’re not on my email list because you haven’t been on my website, you missed, you probably missed out. There’s a Health Insurance Agent that I used that helped me free up over a thousand dollars a month, myself and cash flow. So anyways, same thing with them. I’m like, Hey, already. We were probably funding at least 10, 12 grand a year. And not more actually over the course of this next year, I’ll play end up being somewhere in the ballpark of about it might save them over 20, 25 grand a year.

And we haven’t got to the investing stuff yet. Right? That’s just reducing some costs that we could do without them changing their lifestyle. By the way, this isn’t a lifestyle change thing. This is just simply getting their money to be more efficient, right? With what they’re doing, well anyways I mean, that’s the kind of stuff that I was doing back then, that even today I do sometimes as well, but now my focus has gone more to you’ve got savings. You’ve got equity in your home. How do we take that and turn it into passive income? So that now you’re not relying on that one source of income that you’re getting or two source or wherever you might be making that if they’re gone, you’re in trouble, right? It’s not just about financial freedom, it’s also a defensive strategy. You know, they kind of say that the best offense of the best.

Yeah. The best defense is a good offense. Right? That’s kind of true. Now, I still teach defense too. I still teach like ways to make sure we protect yourself, keeping cash reserves. I did that with that couple from yesterday, you know, saying, Hey, we got to keep this money and don’t touch it. Like leave it alone. We’re not going to invest it. We’re going to maybe use it for some of that in the life insurance to kind of get a better return on your money. But at least we’re going to let it sit there and it’s available for emergencies if you need it. Right? But that’s the kind of stuff I’m doing. But then getting people like, just like with the same woman where we freed up 10,000 in taxes, right? You know, going back to her with this business owner. And well, now we’re like, cool.

Now we’ve got a few hundred thousand dollars. I told her, I said, Hey, if we, depending on how much of this money we use, we can actually get you to replace the, or actually not replace her income. But we’ll we’ll actually cover all of her normal expenses. So she’ll actually be literally out of the rat race within one year. Now, again, results may vary, you know, that’s my disclaimer, right? Because it’s always different. The ones that were like the ultimate savers, funny enough, they actually are the ones probably have the most potential to be free. They just don’t see it. And that’s really what I’m here to do is to help you to see something. I’m helping you. I’m here to help you to see that there’s another alternative. Because if it’s been proven, we can not retire well using the mutual funds and the stock market options that Financial Advisors are giving.

Well, where’s the hope? The hope is that there’s something different just like with this woman, she’s not creating cash flow. ‘Cause she’d thrown an IRA. She already did that stuff. It was producing zero cash flow plus she’s in her thirties. So she’s got to wait a quarter of a century before she gave him cash out, her IRAs or Roth IRAs without getting slept with dumb penalties. But if we start doing things are different. Maybe like we’re buying things in the real estate world, right? Or maybe different types of funds, you know, it could be oil and gas or something like that. Like there could be different paths or avenues you could take to get you there and get you there much more certainly. And safely than you would doing the traditional financial plan now is not the most popular thing. Of course not.

Because there, you don’t see too many people spinning Billions of dollars advertising like financial institutions do because that’s what they make their money. They’re paying so much money to make sure that that’s what you see. It’s like fake news on social media. Right? You know, they know how to show you what you already believe to be true. Does it show up as what’s true. Right? And it supports your point. You’re like, how did people not see this? Well, the AI figured out, well, marketing dollars is kind of like AI in some ways marketing dollars says, Hey, this is what we’re gonna put people’s in front of people’s eyeballs. All these money shows, yes, we are going to sponsor them because Hey, we’re fidelity. We care. Right? And all this kind of stuff, a Merrill Lynch, the bull, or, you know, that was my imitation of a bull.

Right? So anyways, that’s the kind of stuff we’re seeing guys. And that needs to stop. Like that needs to be thrown away and question, sure It has it’s purpose. But the purpose, if your purpose is trying to become financially-free and financially sound in a place where, you know, you’ve got cash flow coming in, that is not where you go. That does not work as a Financial Advisor. I’ve seen it over and over. I ran the numbers. I couldn’t get into work. Just like I ran the numbers on that 401k podcast episode. We just did. You can’t get the numbers to work without lying about the numbers. You’ve got to inflate the numbers to be something that’s not real. Guys, I don’t want you doing that. I don’t want to see you suffering any more. That should not be happening. That is why I’m not just sitting there being retired, enjoying myself or just doing this podcast and saying great!

That’s it. Because the truth is, most of you guys are just going to be listening to this podcast. You’re not gonna be taking action on anything. You’re just going to keep learning and learning and hoping that someday you’ll be ready. But the truth is is that until you change something and do something different, you gotta change your mindset first. And I’m glad you’re doing that. You should be here. And this is where you need to go change your mindset. But the next step then requires you to take it one step further. You know, you can’t just go and set up an random life insurance plan and hope that that works. That doesn’t work. You know, because many of you, when you’ve come to me say, yeah! I did infinite banking policy. I’m like, okay, well you’ve done it. That’s cool. You could have done it better.

Next time. Don’t do that. Do what I’m talking about. Right? And I’m not saying like, I’m the end all be all. But I’m just saying that, you know, I’ve seen the industry. I’ve seen what those guys are doing. One, you don’t see people like me who are free teaching this and actually helping people implement it. Right? Most of us that are free. Just want to be free. And I could be there too, but I’m a teacher at heart. I want people to learn and to get it. It fires me up and takes me off so bad when I see people getting bad advice, advice that I know for a fact doesn’t work. When I see people setting up insurance policies that I know are not the best thing that they can get, that they overpaid thousands dollars in costs because that agent needed to make his commissions or her commissions.

Right? And yes, they’re good people and they need to make money, but there’s better ways to do it. There’s better ways to design a plan. That’s why I say it’s an “Anti-Financial Plan” because it needs to be against the grain. It needs to be against that traditional advice that has already been proven not to work. That is why I’m here. That’s why my team is here. That’s what we’re doing everyday guys. And that’s why I’m talking to you right now. That’s why now stepping back it’s like, I’m talking to myself, but I know you’re there because I know there’s lots of you listening. There’s thousands and thousand of you listening to this, right now. Guys, this is my call to action. My call to arms, not just for me in doing what I need to do to help rally you guys, to get you to find a better life, to create a better life, doing something different and you can do it better.

It’s not that you haven’t done a good job. It’s about getting it to actually get the results you want. If you want cash flow and freedom. Now, you know, even though insurance plan, I mentioned, that’s not going to get you a cash flow there. Insurance policies by itself, never do for you. You need these other alternate investments to work, but you need an insurance policy. Well thing that does help is having that work in coordination with those things, not against it because every Financial Advisor likes to pull money away from the things that work they want to put them in their hands versus keeping in your control. That is the key guys that right there is what helps you become free. So that’s my challenge. You guys like, of course you can always reach out. You can go through our website, you can message us and say, Hey Chris, like, I need to do this.

Like I need to, I’ve heard this infinite banking forever. I’ve been going down that rabbit hole. How do we do it differently? Or I’ve been hearing about, you know, I, I need to create a plan. I think now’s the time I’ve got cash you know, by the way, good amount of cash. If you’ve got at least a hundred thousand, $200,000 in cash sitting there, you probably need to talk to us, especially if it’s not doing anything, if you got money to sit around, not doing anything you got to do, you should be doing something with that. You got home equity. You know, we probably can be doing something with that. You know, if it there. And sometimes I’ve had people where they don’t have a lot of cash, but again, just like this people earlier this week where there’s just ways that they have some cash.

And then instead of investing it, we ended up using that to help their debt situation and paying off in a different way that actually creates more cash flow and better certainty. Sometimes. That’s great too. So lots of different ways to do it. But again, like and guys, until this becomes real for you, it doesn’t matter. It’s gotta be something that becomes tangible and real guys. That is why I’m here. That’s what I’m doing. I’m doing. And that’s why you should be listening. I’ve been on both sides of the fence. I’ve been that traditional Advisor, and I’ve been free, financially-free. Not just once, but twice at second time. By the way, after I dug out of that big million dollar plus debt hole from the recession was the end of 2016. I was able to be free again. And that was actually when I decided I was going to do this podcast more.

Chris Miles, the “Cash Flow Expert and Anti-Financial Advisor,” is here to guide you towards financial freedom!

  Chris Miles 433 - Are We In A Bubble https://youtu.be/MFsMmUymV0E

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