Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Chris Miles - The “Anti-Financial” Advisor | How to Become "Work Optional"

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Chris Miles - The “Anti-Financial” Advisor | How to Become "Work Optional" · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  I find myself going from millionaire to upside down millionaire. I'm really in debt and
• 0:03
  million dollars. I was losing everything. What if everything you've been taught about money
• 0:07
  was wrong? Chris Miles, the cash flow expert, has helped thousands achieve financial freedom
• 0:12
  by debunking myths and teaching strategies. Traditional financial advisors won't.
• 0:16
  2006, I get to that point. I'm like, well now what? What am I going to do with my life?
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  I thought about starting up like a dance studio and I was actually about to close on that studio
• 0:25
  and then some just told me, don't do it. So 2007 we opened up this new business. Now I had
• 0:28
  these different streams of income. But after a few months they're like, hey, you know you got
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  the all these little different side households and you know things that you're earning money from.
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  You really need to like just focus and go all in with our company. And the next thing you know
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  after about a year or so of doing that, it caught fire. And in 2009 we started getting
• 0:43
  with a tire practice in Dentist and our company went from almost bankrupt to 2009 to like
• 0:47
  exploding in 2010. Don't invest more than you're willing to lose. It comes to things like Bitcoin.
• 0:51
  2018, December it was starting to hit a high of like 20,000 every time I Bitcoin and I said,
• 0:56
  you know what? I predict it seemed to crash and it did. And whenever it was scared of Bitcoin,
• 1:00
  that's my Bob Bitcoin. Money doesn't change you. Money actually just makes you more of you
• 1:04
  already are. If you're always reinvesting all of your money back in your business, the thing is
• 1:08
  you're not profitable. Retired at just 28. Chris now empowers entrepreneurs to create wealth quickly
• 1:14
  and live life on their terms. This is Chris Miles.
• 1:20
  Welcome to success story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The success story podcast is part of the
• 1:24
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• 2:58
  Chris, you went from financial advisor to becoming the anti-financial advisor. You retired twice
• 3:07
  by 39. So what was the thing? What was the inflection point? What was the major event that made
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  you realize that traditional finance and the traditional financial path was broken?
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  It actually comes back to my dad. I was raised in a typical middle class household. My dad was
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  in the automotive industry selling auto parts. My mom was a loyal painter trained by the same
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  master painter that trained Bob Ross, the happy little trees and all that kind of stuff.
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  And so they taught me good values. He taught me work hard. Your yard is your bond.
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  Don't have to ask anything. That kind of stuff. Where my mom was like, follow your dreams and
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  that kind of thing in your heart. And so naturally, I wouldn't say agree upon because they
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  were eventually divorced. But the one thing that they definitely had in common was that when it
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  came to money, it was scarce, right? Even though they had different perspectives, everything was
• 4:04
  about scarcity. Hey, we can't afford this. What do you think I am? Made a money? Money doesn't
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  grow on trees. You know, all those kind of things you're here growing up. My favorite one was for
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  my dad where he said, you know, because I had you kids, you know, because I wanted to be a father,
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  I gave up that core bet. It's like, wow, thanks, dad.
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  Dude, that's that's some early trauma. That is some early trauma.
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  So yeah, so naturally I didn't want to live that kind of life as scarcity. I mean,
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  the one thing that didn't impact me as well, you know, kind of in a traumatic, I mean,
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  I wouldn't say traumatic for me, but I could tell it affected him dramatically was he would always say,
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  you know, this job is literally going to kill me. I'm going to die from the stress of working
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  because by his 40s and 50s, he already had strokes and heart attacks. And I vowed I never wanted
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  to live that kind of life. So like every, every person that's looking to strive to live their dream,
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  I went to college, right? And I was almost through my four years. And my point, you know,
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  I was a sociology major is going to be triple minoring and in ballroom dancing, Japanese and psychology,
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  you know, kind of a little known fact, those on the nation's top amateur ballroom dancers about 20
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  years ago and 20 pounds ago. And so I was doing that. And then I realized if I'm going to become a
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  business consultant, that was kind of my goal. I should have real life business experience. I
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  shouldn't just get go get an MBA or something and then walk out as this, you know, arrogant little
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  20 something year old kid, trying to tell people how to run their businesses. So I took a sabbatical.
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  I actually stopped one, that one project, not even a class, one project short of getting my bachelor's
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  degree. I said, let's take a year off and then come back and finish it up. But I wanted like,
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  get some real life business experience. And for a few months, I wasn't sure what that business
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  looked like. And the first opportunity that kind of sounded interesting to me was a financial advisor
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  because I had a friend that was doing that and he said, oh, yeah, we're learning about money
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  and investing. And I was like, well, you know, that sounds pretty cool because worst case,
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  I walk away knowing how to make more money, right? How to invest and grow my money in my wealth.
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  So I interviewed, got hired and started to do that. I didn't realize it was so easy to get in
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  because to be a financial advisor, all you have to do is pass a test with 70% and not, you know,
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  be a mass murderer, right? If you're as long as you're not a serial killer or you haven't robbed
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  people, you can parents become a financial advisor. And so, uh, so I went down to that path and
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  I stayed there for four years. I actually never went back to college and stayed dropped out.
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  Um, I never finished that bachelor's degree. Um, and by the way, it's not because I couldn't cut it.
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  I actually had a 3.85 GPA. I just like, I just realized like entrepreneur, or you can make so much
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  more money. And so, but you were successful. You started to make some money because by the way,
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  just on a side note, yes, there's as many financial advisors as realtors. And I don't know what
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  the stats are exactly, but it's something like 70 to 80% of them barely make 35 grand a year.
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  So it isn't easy job to get into, but it's hard to be successful at it. Yep. And I was in that
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  group, you know, I was in that group, you know, barely making maybe three grand a month. If that,
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  you know, um, I mean, I even got promoted in the company because I stayed around long enough.
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  I was in there for four years. Most of them never last the first two, kind of like realtors,
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  as you're saying, right? So I was doing that for a while and just trying to teach middle class
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  families, you know, how to save and all that kind of stuff. Well, eventually my dad, you know,
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  he said, well, Chris, when are you going to advise me? Now, I never, I never expected my own dad,
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  the guy that cheesed my diapers to ask me for money advice because he was always one giving me
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  money advice, usually from that scarcity perspective. And his advice was always save everything,
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  spend nothing. You know, it's kind of like, you know, be as cheap as possible. He would say
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  frugal. We all call them cheap, you know, even cheaper than cheap sometimes. You know,
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  and so, uh, so, you know, I'm sitting down with him for the first time ever, you know,
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  I'm looking at his numbers and everything. And I said, all right, dad, you're 61 years old.
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  I see you've maxed fund your, your four win K, you're getting the match and everything.
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  You've paid off your house. You've, you know, you paid off all your debt. You're completely
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  debt free, including your mortgage. However, if you want to retire today, you better hope you
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  died about five or six years because that's about the time you'll run out of money.
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  Okay. What do I do? I don't know. You did everything right from what I teach as a financial
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  advisor, right? You paid off your debt, you've been stuffing your money and your, your retirement
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  plans. This is everything I've been teaching. And he's like, well, should I do something different?
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  And I was like, well, I could put him in this or that. But what if the market goes down? I don't
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  want to be the one blamed for losing my dad's money. And this is 2005, by the way. And so,
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  I was like, I don't know, you know, I really don't know what to do. And that bothered me so badly
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  because I was selling the dream, right? I was drinking the Kool-Aid. I was trying to get other people
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  to drink the Kool-Aid too to, you know, to live on Hopium as I call it. Like they're smoking Hopium,
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  you know, hoping that someday they'll be financially free. But it wasn't even working for him.
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  And it was even worse because just a few weeks later, it's like when the students ready the
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  teacher appears, I had a friend who I trained to be a financial advisor, but then he left to go do
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  real estate investing, you know. And I thought, okay, good luck with that, you know. And so I'm
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  talking to him on the phone. I call him up. It's like, Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. It's like
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  right that week in between Christmas and New Year's of 2005. And I have a thought he'd be saying,
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  oh, yeah, I'm not doing great. I'm like, good, come back to work for me. That's what I really want.
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  And, you know, to say to him, right? But I get the opposite response. He says, Chris, my life is
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  amazing right now. My dad and I have partnered on some real estate deals and we've now doubled his
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  income as a professor of the local university. I said, hold on a second. You just started doing this
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  in August. That's too good to be true. There's no way you could be making it. He could be making
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  that much money. By the way, I had sat down with his dad just that previous July or August,
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  trying to sell him on mutual funds. And then he decided not to go do that dumb real estate investing
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  thing, right? And so I'm all pissed off. And so I started arguing with him that stocks are better
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  than real estate. And if I stopped, he's like, well, Chris, how many of your clients are truly
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  financially free? Were they don't worry about money? I said, well, they all worry about money.
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  Even the retired doctor is still worried about running out of money or living too long.
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  Okay, good job, Chris. Way to help nobody. How about this? How many of you guys as financial
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  advisors are financially free? Not off the commissions you're earning, but actually doing these investments.
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  And as I thought about it, and there's probably about 100 guys in my office. I said,
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  well, there's guys been working here since the late 1970s. Maybe none. And he said, well,
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  there's your problem. And so, you know, I was like, okay, well, give me something. Give me
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  something, you know, to learn more. He's like, I don't believe you are. You're just going to
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  argue with me that stocks are better. I'm like, no, I'm serious. You got me listening. Give me
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  something. He's like, listen, if you're serious and I don't think you are at this guy,
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  like the biggest best takeaway selling. I don't think he even knew it. You know, he just really
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  was convinced I was not going to listen to him. And so he's like, if you're really going to do
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  something, go get this book by Robert Kiyosaki called Who Took My Money, which is a lesser-known
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  rich dad series book. Now, basically, if you want to save the three hours of audiobook,
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  mutual funds suck. That's pretty much what he explains in three hours. And then he's like,
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  and then go ahead and, and then, and listen to this radio show. This is pretty podcast,
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  and you know, AM talk radio of these two real estate investors that were local here in Utah.
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  And so I started listening to him every day, two hours every morning. I'm listening to these
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  guys five days a week. And most of the time, they're not even talking about real estate, which
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  ticked me off. But they were talking about financial principles, right? Like, we're the principles
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  of wealth, you know, and the things you have to shift and change your mindset to make those
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  investing, that investing work. And, and over the next couple of months, I realized, I can't do
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  this anymore. Like, I can't make these two worlds work together, being a financial advisor,
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  but then also what's actually creating wealth. These guys are financially free, and they're
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  in their 20s and 30s. So, you know, obviously, the evidence is heavily in favor of real estate,
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  not definitely not with the, with, you know, with the financial biasing and stuff. And so I left
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  March of 2006. I said, I'm done. I'll never teach about money again. I'll just be a mortgage
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  broker because everybody was a mortgage broker in 2006, kind of like 2021. And, and then I'll teach
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  ballroom dancing on the side. But while I was doing that, of course, I wanted to know like, okay,
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  what do these guys know? How do they invest? How do they do stuff? Cause I want to learn for
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  myself. And so really, I started to learn more about real estate investing, you know, even how they
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  did their little flipping type process. Even though it wasn't huge on doing flips, I was doing more
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  like cash flowing or rentals. Cause I was the big shift, right? Like the impetus was meeting with
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  my dad and then talking with my friend who got me to open up this whole other world was like the
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  matrix, even though existed. You know, and then of course, switching my mindset away from this
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  accumulation mindset, the financial advisor's teach to a cash flow where I call it acceleration
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  mindset, which is it's all about the income. Cause that's the thing that got me excited. Because
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  I'll tell you March of 2006, I quit going out to lunch with some friends that they're like,
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  Hey, Chris, you bought them Mercedes yet? Oh, you know, I just kind of joked around. I'm like,
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  how do you know? Like, I'm actually planning to sell my car in July. I'm after I knew it,
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  the registration. I'm going to sell in July and get a Mercedes. And wipe that smug little
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  smirk off that guy's face because I was so confident it was going to happen, even though he's
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  like, well, how much money you making? Nothing. Like I haven't made any more money, but I can now see
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  the light because before as I get a hundred thousand bucks, right? You're supposed to fall off
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  three percent. If you're going to go with mutual funds, that's $3,000 a year, a hundred thousand
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  bucks. But what if you got what paid one percent on a hundred grand? Now you're getting paid a thousand
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  bucks a month. And also, I'm looking through my old clients and my, oh my gosh, this person could
• 13:21
  actually retire. They don't have to wait 20 or 30 more years. They could actually do it in the
• 13:25
  next year or two or so. And that's why I open up my whole world. And in fact, later that next year,
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  that year in 2006, I was able to retire myself on this 29, creating those passive income streams.
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  Here we're going to talk about what happens after 29 because it's a fun story. But it's very
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  interesting. So I thought about this a lot. And this is actually what sort of pushed me on my
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  entrepreneurial journey. And I'll give you some context why this sort of ties in and it resonates
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  with me so much. So all of our parents, not all of our parents, a lot of our parents had pensions.
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  And that's how they retired. And they had a defined benefit pensions. And there's also defined
• 14:00
  contribution pensions. But they like, for example, my dad, he's going to make 70% of his best years,
• 14:05
  of his five best years, I think, until the day that he dies. So say for easy math, a hundred grand
• 14:09
  a year, he makes 70 grand a year until the day that you die. Great. That doesn't exist for 99% of
• 14:15
  the jobs that are available anymore, especially not in private industry. Maybe if you were for the
• 14:19
  government. So growing up, I was looking at what he did. And I was like, okay, that's not going to
• 14:23
  happen. And then this actually pushed me into the mindset of I got to make a ton of money.
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  Because if I retire, I have to have tens of millions or at least 10 million in the bank. If I
• 14:34
  want to retire at 65, I do have different views of the retirement now. If I want to retire at 65,
• 14:40
  never work again. I'm doing the math. I'm going to live through 100. Hopefully God willing.
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  This is how much money I'm going to need every single year to maintain this lifestyle. And just
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  you make a lot of money. Now I chose to go entrepreneurial. Now I invest in real estate as well. And I do a
• 14:52
  couple of other things. But I feel like what happened, not everybody had this sort of aha moment.
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  And it radically shifted their career. What happened is people are now working nine to five kind of
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  like their parents are emulating what their parents did in terms of like their work.
• 15:07
  And they make some money, but they're not getting a pension anymore. Maybe they're getting 401k
• 15:12
  contributions, but also if you're getting 401k contributions, the company is skimming some of that
• 15:17
  as well in fees. And you have really no understanding of what's actually happening with your money.
• 15:22
  And then financial managers sort of fill the gap in the market because they realize that people
• 15:28
  don't have pensions anymore. They still want to retire. They have no idea how to do it. And education
• 15:35
  teaches nothing about finance. So let's fill that void with whatever we tell these people.
• 15:41
  They're probably just going to listen because no one else is telling them any differently
• 15:44
  and they're scared about retirement and they're scared about money. So I don't think many people
• 15:48
  do it maliciously. I just think that even the financial advisors are ill-educated about the
• 15:56
  realities of what's going to happen when people try and retire in 40 years. And it's really scary.
• 16:01
  I don't know how many people are going to do it. Like you said, that example, the 3% on neutral
• 16:07
  funds, that's not retiring anybody. So what's going to end up happening is if you don't think
• 16:11
  into the future, if you don't think sort of forward-looking, you're going to be working till the day
• 16:17
  that you die. And that's really it. I don't see a way around it following the traditional non-pension,
• 16:25
  go work with a financial advisor path that I think a lot of people take. I think it's scary. I
• 16:31
  don't think it's a good spot that the majority of 9-5 W2 people, I don't think they're in a good spot
• 16:38
  right now because I don't think they know what they're doing. Yeah, totally agree, Scott. I mean,
• 16:40
  it's true. I mean, we think about like the way the financial limitations taught, you know,
• 16:44
  financial advisors for the vast majority of them really have good hearts. They really do want to
• 16:49
  help people just like I did, right? There's nothing against them for wanting to help people.
• 16:54
  The problem is, and this is what I realized myself, is I discovered that I was just a pawn in a larger
• 16:59
  game. Is that all the financial education that's taught out there, come from the financial institutions,
• 17:04
  they come from the fidelities and the marital inches, they come from the big banks like Wells Fargo,
• 17:09
  who have self-interest in letting you set it and forget it as they would say, right? You know,
• 17:14
  put your money in with them where they get paid guaranteed fees, right? If you think about it,
• 17:18
  like they're telling you to save everything, save it forever, you know, save as much as you can,
• 17:24
  as often as you can, and take out as little out as possible. Why? Because they make those fees
• 17:28
  on that money, right? That's the guaranteed commission they always earn a management fee.
• 17:32
  So when you have that involved, of course, they're going to tell you, put it in there, live on less
• 17:37
  than the interest, right? So that you don't write out of money. And, and on top of that, I mean,
• 17:41
  they're even telling you high risk creates high returns. Why? Because they want you to take all the risk
• 17:46
  so they can take as little as possible. Because real investors try to figure out how to take as little
• 17:51
  risks possible, as much calculated risk as possible, so they can maximize the returns while minimizing
• 17:56
  their losses. If a bank will really take high risks that say, let me throw in all my own money in
• 18:01
  the stock market, not your money, but my own money I'll put in the market. And I won't take fees
• 18:05
  unless you make money. That's the one thing I think it's kind of crooked in the industry is that
• 18:09
  they get paid with you make money or not. They're always getting paid. They're the ones that will
• 18:13
  always come out winning, even if you don't. And, and that's where the financial visors just kind of
• 18:18
  got roped in that system like I did. And, and some are waking up to that. Unfortunately, most of them,
• 18:24
  just like, I mean, I had that choice too. I either could put my blinders on and keep doing what I
• 18:28
  was doing. Or I kept my integrity intact and say, I'm out of the industry. I'm going to do
• 18:33
  something else. Didn't know exactly what, but I was going to try to do something. And, you know,
• 18:38
  you mentioned about pensions too. It's fascinating because I was teaching like a in my old neighborhood.
• 18:43
  I was teaching this retirement type course, right? This retirement investing course. And these people
• 18:49
  knew I had retired early twice by Thomas 39, which we'll talk about how, you know, two times and not
• 18:53
  a good thing. I mean, you screwed up the first time. But, but it's interesting because like they,
• 18:59
  they knew I retired before I was 40 the second time twice, you know. But there was a guy in the
• 19:05
  group that was like in the 70s also retired, even was in the financial industry for a little bit,
• 19:10
  selling like insurance and stuff. And they would always look to him because he's the old gray hair
• 19:14
  guide. I mean, I've got some gray hair. I'm almost 50. But still, you know, this guy was in it,
• 19:19
  he was about 70s. And so this is during 2022. So during the year 2020. So it was kind of fun too.
• 19:24
  And so anyways, they would look to him. And then the funny thing is when they would ask him details
• 19:30
  about his money situation, right? Especially when 2020 hit, you know, March when everything was
• 19:34
  tank in the market, they were starting to panic a little bit. They're like, whoa, what's happening
• 19:38
  to you? Because you've got money in the market. They're assuming all of his money is in the stock
• 19:43
  market in retirement accounts, just like them who are younger than him. And he said, yeah,
• 19:48
  I lost a lot of money in the market so far. But I mean, I really don't rely on that money at all
• 19:52
  because I get income streams from a pension. I also have a military pension that's coming in.
• 19:58
  So he had a pension from an old company, a military pension, and he was still getting paid
• 20:02
  from the stuff he sold as an insurance agent. So he's getting residuals off that. So his,
• 20:07
  the only thing he actually made pure money on is in business, like what you talk about, right?
• 20:11
  Like in business and doing that kind of active stuff, that's where all his money was come from,
• 20:15
  not from the investments. And he could tell like their, their heart's kind of sunk in that moment
• 20:19
  saying, oh, well, it doesn't even affect him at all when he has social security too, right? So
• 20:24
  really, he's getting paid left and right. He didn't even need the money in the market was just
• 20:28
  play money for him. That's not case for people anymore. As you said, right? Like it really is. So
• 20:32
  that people are 100% going in, relying that those 401Ks are iris going to save them and the harsh
• 20:39
  reality is it's not. Yeah, it's very scary. So, okay. So you went down the path of investing,
• 20:47
  and you figured it out, quote, unquote, you're going into real estate. So you say, so explain,
• 20:52
  you were going to real estate investing. You also were doing, you were a mortgage broker,
• 20:56
  so you were getting fees from that as well, but you were putting your money into real estate.
• 21:01
  And I'm assuming you put enough into real estate by the time you were 29, that it was,
• 21:06
  it was generating some quote, unquote, passive income obviously. So I have to manage to a
• 21:11
  degree or you can hire somebody, but you were making it now for your like, okay, I've kind of figured
• 21:15
  at the money game, I could always increase my lifestyle. But for now, if I, if I don't do anything
• 21:22
  else, this is good. That was sort of where you're out of 29. Yeah, I like it. So a few things
• 21:26
  were going on there. So yeah, I had my own property, my starter home. It's kind of like a burr for
• 21:32
  me, but I did more creative deal on that one, where I sold to an investor at full appraisal,
• 21:36
  stripped the equity out of it, went to invest the equity with other investors to make passman
• 21:40
  come by lending out my money. And then, and then I was also renting out like I was leasing back
• 21:45
  the property from the investor I sold it to and then sub leased it out to create rental income
• 21:49
  off of it. So I basically stripped the equity out, sub leased it, you know, when I leased it back
• 21:53
  from them. So I was renting from the owner, the new owner now, sub leasing out by renting it out,
• 21:58
  trying to make cash off that. And then of course, I had the other money outworked for me as well
• 22:03
  that was doing with lending and whatnot. And then, yeah, like mortgages was interesting because
• 22:07
  I had a friend that gave me an interesting idea because I never considered not doing mortgages
• 22:12
  in the sense of not being the mortgage broker. But I had a license, of course, and I was doing
• 22:17
  them, but I hated doing the paperwork. And my friend said, well, once you find a nerd that likes
• 22:21
  doing paperwork, I might wait, I could do that. He's like, yeah, to split the commissions.
• 22:26
  And it was, it was like a big epiphany because in scarcity, especially when I was a financial
• 22:31
  advisor, I try to be the every guy, like everybody, you know, the one-stop shop. So I try to be the
• 22:35
  guy that gave you, you know, mutual funds, insurances, mortgages, even like debt pay down plans,
• 22:41
  you know, things like that, right? Trying to be everything to everybody, which was okay, but it was
• 22:46
  kind of just vanilla, you know, in my, in my mind, looking back now, I was like, I was good,
• 22:50
  but it wasn't that good. But, but I realized like, and also, but when I was mortgage broker,
• 22:55
  because I was in a scarcity mindset, I thought, well, it's a win-lose game. So in order for other
• 23:01
  people to get a good deal for me to be a good person, I have to lose, right? Because either I make
• 23:06
  money and I screw people over, or I help them, and I just take it, you know, take it in the teeth,
• 23:11
  you know, which is great when you're married and have a family, because your spouse really
• 23:15
  appreciates you trying to minimize your value. And so I went to the guy, he was a, he was a very good,
• 23:22
  you know, I asked in the brokers, I said, who's a good guy that just likes to do paperwork?
• 23:25
  You know, who's your nerd, right? I said, oh, his name's Clark, which of course,
• 23:28
  of your name's Clark, you are a nerd. And so, 100% like Clark, he's as much as Clark can.
• 23:33
  And then we all know, right? But even he pretend to be a nerd. So anyways, I go to Clark and I say,
• 23:38
  Clark, listen, if I just send you people to do the mortgage, basically do all the work for me,
• 23:44
  will you pay me 50%? And he said, of course, the violent, the fine people, you're just spoon-feeding me,
• 23:50
  I'm like, yeah, like I'll teach him like how to strip equity out to go and invest in real estate
• 23:54
  and stuff. And then just send him on to you to do all the work. He's like, yeah, I'll do that.
• 23:58
  So I'd spend maybe a half hour or so with people to teach him like, hey, here's how you can actually
• 24:01
  get your mortars to pay you, right? By taking that money out and then making a higher rate of return
• 24:06
  in real estate. And then, and then like, cool, what do I do next? I'm like, talk to you with Clark,
• 24:10
  let him do the work. And then I get a check in the mail for like a month or two later for that,
• 24:15
  for that deal closing. And I'm like, well, that was easy. So I was getting a little bit of residual
• 24:19
  income from that plus I have the real estate income income coming in. And then that kind of help
• 24:22
  accelerate me getting there faster. Because pretty soon, I'm like, wait a minute. Now the active
• 24:28
  like work I was doing, you know, even I even was like doing like stock coaching on the side.
• 24:32
  All the stock coaching I was doing on the side was like pure gravy. I didn't even need it anymore
• 24:36
  because I was making four or five grand a month between my real estate and even a little bit on
• 24:39
  the residual from the mortgages. And so that's where, you know, that's where I realized like, wait a
• 24:44
  minute, I could legitimately quit working at this point, right? I can, it was almost like I could
• 24:49
  live the three to four hour work week by a couple of years before 10 Ferris wrote the book, you know.
• 24:55
  And it was kind of cool because like it was a big epiphany. I didn't think it would be that
• 24:59
  easy to have shoes of income coming in where I didn't have to work my tail off like it was as a
• 25:04
  financial advisor. How long do you think is a good timeline to set for somebody to achieve that
• 25:11
  kind of success? Because again, something didn't work out yet to redo it. But when people get into
• 25:17
  this game, expectations are also important. So when you get into investing, what is the time
• 25:22
  on you should give yourself? And I always look at it from the lens of set yourself up so that you
• 25:27
  aren't worried about paying your rent or your mortgage or putting food on the table in six months
• 25:32
  from now because you just quit your job and went all in on something. I'm a big fan of
• 25:35
  de-risking investing, de-risking entrepreneurship, de-risking, anything. So from your experience,
• 25:40
  because you did it and it could be a little bit different in 2024, you can speak on that. I don't
• 25:45
  know because I'm not as big into real estate as you are. But how much time should you give yourself?
• 25:49
  It really depends on where you're starting from. And that's one thing I try to tell people to,
• 25:53
  because your situation does matter. People think, oh, can I do it less than a year? Yeah,
• 25:59
  you could, but most don't. It usually takes longer than that, at least a few years if not five to
• 26:04
  10 years or a little bit more. Because in my situation, I only need 3,500 bucks a month to live.
• 26:09
  At that time, I only had barely two little kids. I was living in a cheap house at the time and
• 26:15
  everything else. So it was a lot easier to hit that because my expense, my burn rate was so much
• 26:20
  lower. And it's different for everybody because I get dentists and guarantee they're going to want
• 26:24
  30,000 a month or more to live on, right? Because their center to living is higher. It's a,
• 26:30
  you know, I'll give you an example. I had a woman that I was talking to that she has a lot of
• 26:34
  farmland of whatnot. Didn't have a lot of money to invest. But she did have a lot of equity.
• 26:39
  You know, she was technically a millionaire based on her land, right? And she's like, well, I just,
• 26:45
  you know, she was at my annual event, like mastermind with all my clients. She was the only non-client
• 26:49
  there. And she's like, there's people who got like millions of dollars are investing. And I don't
• 26:54
  have millions of dollars. And I'm like, yeah, but some of those people with millions of dollars also
• 26:58
  want to live on like tens of thousands a month before they could quote unquote retire. But you,
• 27:04
  you only need 5,000 a month. I said really with your situation, the land you had, if you were willing
• 27:07
  to sell off a little bit your land, take that and then either do like lend your money out to
• 27:12
  to real estate investors or whatever you might do syndications or whatever, right? Even if you made
• 27:17
  a temporary term, you could actually get there in the next year, where some of these guys might
• 27:20
  take a couple of years to get there, even with their millions or multiple hundreds of thousands,
• 27:25
  you know, because again, they have a higher expense, you know, to hit, you know, that to be able to
• 27:30
  pay their bills. So it really is case by case. So for her, and she finally like got the light,
• 27:36
  saw the light as she started working with us. And she realized, oh, okay, I can see that now. And
• 27:40
  yeah, I could actually be there very quickly next year or two. I could legitimately be financially
• 27:45
  independent. So it just depends on where you start from and really what, how much of expenses
• 27:50
  you have to replace to get to where you want to be. But I'll tell you like it's not hard. I mean,
• 27:55
  we're, you know, I had like one client, for example, he was in California. He did save his retirement
• 27:59
  plans. And this guy was like, the, he did this better than almost anybody ever seen. He actually
• 28:06
  pulled his money out of the market right before way to K. And again, right before 2008, right? He
• 28:12
  had pulled his money and it wasn't like he just predicted anything. He was like, I think I'm
• 28:16
  going to pull my money out now. So he just happened to time the market perfectly. And even after
• 28:21
  that, you know, he was the fourth, the fourth highest ranking general in the state of California
• 28:25
  in the national guard. So he's got all this stuff going on. He finally, he actually saved a million
• 28:30
  bucks. I mean, so it's funny how like Dave Ramsey tells you, save for 40 years, a hundred bucks
• 28:34
  a month, you'll be a millionaire. Bull crap. This guy timed the market perfectly, got a high rate
• 28:39
  of return than most people. And still by the age of 60, he was barely a millionaire. And of course,
• 28:46
  he goes to his financial advisor, he says, well, pull off three percent a year. He can live on 30,000
• 28:49
  years. I live in California. There's nobody that can live on 30,000 year unless you're homeless,
• 28:53
  right? Or you live away on the east side where it's dirt cheap. And so he's like, no, I can't do
• 28:59
  that. And so that's where he went, found different podcasts like yours, mine and whatnot. And
• 29:03
  and then he's like, as we start working with him, it's like, well, what if we get that to even make
• 29:06
  a 10% a year? Well, now that's a hundred thousand dollars a year, you're making passively not being
• 29:10
  the active investor, right? So that's a big thing is like, how much money do you have to work with?
• 29:15
  That's liquid. Many people, if they love their money in 401Ks, they can't touch it, right?
• 29:20
  Until they either quit or change jobs or get fired or something like that just a few weeks. So
• 29:25
  I actually had a client that literally we've been banking on her at some point where like, we don't
• 29:30
  want her to get laid off, but obviously it'll help if she ever does change jobs. So I'm like, don't
• 29:36
  don't quit your job. Don't do anything to screw up your situation. Well, she just got laid off
• 29:39
  a couple months ago. And and now this quarter of millions free and available to use like, well,
• 29:44
  good. That quarter million can generate at least 2000 to 2500 a month for you that you didn't have
• 29:50
  before. We can take you from, she was roughly about 500 bucks a month with a rental that she had.
• 29:54
  This, but this can now take you over 3000, maybe 3500 a month more, you know, so it just depends
• 30:01
  on what you're starting with. And it's also about, I mean, like, yes, so you have to know your situation,
• 30:05
  you have to know your burn rate, you have to know your numbers. These are sort of the the homework
• 30:10
  you have to do before you do anything. But when you know those things, and you can take these
• 30:14
  calculated risks. Okay, but I do want to understand, um, why did you unretire? What happened
• 30:20
  when you were 29? And what were some of the lessons that you learned from not not being able to stay
• 30:28
  retired? Right. Yeah, the second time around. Well, so 2006, I get to that point. I'm like, well,
• 30:33
  now what, what am I going to do with my life is almost like, what do I want to be when I grow up,
• 30:36
  but I was almost 30, right? And, um, and I kind of played around with a few different ideas.
• 30:41
  I thought about creating a dinner and, you know, like a, like a starting up, like a dance studio.
• 30:46
  And I was actually about to close on, on that studio. And then some just told me don't do it.
• 30:52
  And this is like towards the end of 2006. Now, even when it's a go, I was even going to go buy
• 30:56
  this like old theater. Like, yeah, I'd watch the majestic. They had Jim Kerry in it. If you remember
• 31:00
  that movie, you know, I'd watch that movie. I'm like, I'm going to refurbish this old town theater.
• 31:05
  Like, it's like a main street, like type of theater. That was actually in like different TV shows
• 31:09
  and whatnot, right? They've filmed there. I was like, I'm going to take this theater, turn around.
• 31:13
  But then I looked at the renovation costs, everything. I'm like, now that's a money pit too.
• 31:17
  Like, why can't I find something? I was just going stir crazy, not having something to do.
• 31:22
  And, and so at the end of 2006, I had a, you know, I had a guy that was a friend of mine that approached
• 31:28
  me. He said, listen, there's a Southern guy. His name Garrett Gunnerson. I don't, some people
• 31:33
  might have heard of him. He wrote a book called Killing Sacred Cows. He's like, hey, there's this
• 31:36
  guy Gary Gunnerson. He's a partner of mine. I told him, I won't be a partner with him unless you
• 31:41
  come on with me. And so there's a handful of us all gathered together. And we said, you know what,
• 31:46
  let's teach people how to get out of the rat race, right? Like they have a legitimately do it.
• 31:50
  He's like, and all of you guys have basically done it in various forms, right? And so, so basically,
• 31:56
  like we're going to help save the world, you know, kind of like, you know, rich staff poor guy,
• 32:00
  but we actually teach you how to do it. And, and so anyways, so 2007, we opened up this
• 32:06
  new business. Now, I have these different streams of income, but after a few months, they're like,
• 32:10
  hey, you know, you got all these little different side hustles and, you know, things that you're earning
• 32:14
  money from, you really need to like just focus and go all in with our company. So even though we're
• 32:19
  all independent contractors and really like, you know, partners, we're throwing it all over
• 32:22
  our money to start up this business. They're like, yeah, you should really be all in, you know,
• 32:26
  even with your time, not just with your money. And so I'm like, okay, fine, I'm going to cut off
• 32:30
  my income streams. The stake number one, you know, if you're telling people how to get out of the
• 32:33
  rat race, don't cut off your income streams, right? That's kind of hypocritical.
• 32:38
  Two, there are markets, all the people we were talking to were real estate flippers.
• 32:43
  The people get hurt the worst and the first, I didn't mean to make that rhyme this time, but
• 32:49
  the previously got hurt the worst were flippers because when that bank started to restrict their
• 32:54
  money access flippers with ones that couldn't turn around and sell it to sellers as easily anymore,
• 32:58
  right? Especially when they used to do stated income loans and things like that. That was starting to
• 33:02
  go away. I even remember trying to cash out equity from my house because I bought a brand new house
• 33:07
  in 2006, you know, I bought a show home because I wanted to wow people. That was another mistake too
• 33:12
  is like, you know, my, my ego, I realized that more money money doesn't change you. Money actually
• 33:17
  just makes you more of you already are. If you have a delicate ego, right? If you feel like you're
• 33:23
  less than or whatever it might be, like you're just not worthy, you know, like what I did as I would
• 33:28
  try to buy the stuff, I bought the Mercedes, the shit, you know, I bought it in May, not in July,
• 33:32
  I bought it two months sooner, and then I bought the great house because I wanted to wow people.
• 33:37
  Now, did I make any money from that? Heck no. Like I had a few young kids that want to lick my
• 33:41
  rims of the car, you know, people came to my house that were wowed, but it didn't mean I made it
• 33:46
  any more money, right? It was just stuff. So I ran up my burn rate a little bit more obviously,
• 33:51
  you know, my burn rate was in fact, between my business and my personal, I found out my burn
• 33:55
  rate was about $20,000 a month now. Okay. So that's significantly more than three grand for sure,
• 34:01
  right? And on top of that, because things were getting a little bit tight, I was only making about
• 34:06
  six grand a month in the business. So now I'm finding myself in the whole 15,000 months. So I'm
• 34:10
  going to try to get a read cash out refi because I was just dumping all my extra cash in the house
• 34:14
  because I thought I'm a mortgage broker. If I ever need the equity, just cash back out because
• 34:17
  at that time, they were stated and come loans. They had cash out refi is up to 100%. I mean,
• 34:21
  it was ridiculous. I mean, they even had loans you could get over 100% value, right? I mean,
• 34:27
  it was just a wow, wow, wow. Yeah, that was a wild time. That was a little bit of crazy time.
• 34:31
  Yeah, well, that's where we had the negative amortization loans. You could literally pay less
• 34:34
  than interest only on the for pay option. I've never saw a couple of those. And, uh, and here's
• 34:40
  the crazy thing is like, of course, when things started to dry up, I go to get a recharge
• 34:43
  or refi. They're like, Oh, we'll boost your score up two more points and we'll do it next month.
• 34:47
  And I go in August of 2007. Oh, you know, we just changed the rules. Do X, Y, and Z. And then we'll
• 34:52
  give it to you in September. And then I get to September did everything they asked and they said,
• 34:55
  we're sorry, we don't do cash out refinances, especially if you have a business. And so all my
• 35:01
  equities trapped in there because that wasn't just me with happened to have everybody. I watched all
• 35:05
  the equities appear as the as the values can crash and down, especially because if you buy a,
• 35:09
  you know, higher than average priced home, those are going to be swing bigger, right? It's the
• 35:14
  lower price ones are a little bit safer. So anyways, long story short, I'm in the whole 15, 16,000
• 35:19
  a month. Uh, I can't get access to my equity. I'm watching my equity disappear. My,
• 35:24
  my rentals now doing great. The renters not paying me on time and everything. And they even had
• 35:28
  government help coming in and things like that. And, and so long story short, like I find myself,
• 35:33
  like going for a millionaire to upside down millionaire where I'm over, I'm really in debt a million
• 35:38
  dollars, especially as I'm running up credit cards, depleted savings and everything. This is a
• 35:42
  stressful time. It was like, you know, it's kind of stressful. You know, friends stop calling me,
• 35:46
  but collectors never stop calling. They were awesome. They, they call me day and night, you know.
• 35:50
  And I mean, I remember the worst, the worst one that that burned in my memory was,
• 35:54
  was a guy calling about my Mercedes. Like, I, when I just saw the writing on the wall, I
• 35:58
  turned my Mercedes even before I was 30 days late. I just said, listen, I'm not going to make
• 36:03
  this payment anymore. Just take it back. Well, then they auctioned off for $30,000 less than
• 36:07
  it owed on it, which shocked me. I was like, holy cow. And they're like, well, now you've got to pay
• 36:11
  the $30,000. Like, really? This is not like a house. I can just four clothes on. And so they did.
• 36:17
  And of course, I get a collector call. It was about six or seven o'clock at night. It was,
• 36:20
  I was actually burning the midnight oil off the office trying to make money. I was stressing out.
• 36:24
  And I get this call. I answer it. And the guy says, yeah, like I'm here to collect a debt
• 36:29
  on this Mercedes, you know, it's $30,000. Can you pay it? I said, no. Obviously, that's why
• 36:35
  you're calling me now. That's why I couldn't pay it. Well, can you make monthly payments of $1100
• 36:39
  a month? I said, do you understand that that was exactly what my payment was before I lost it?
• 36:45
  If I could make that payment, you wouldn't be talking to me right now. And then the guy just said,
• 36:49
  he's like, Chris, you're like, I mean, he probably didn't call me a Chris, but he just said, you know what,
• 36:54
  you're the reason why we're having problems in the economy right now. It's your fault. It's people
• 36:58
  just like you not paying their bills. And I was like, I was, I saw red at that point. Like,
• 37:04
  I don't usually yell that guy got personal real. Oh, it did. Yeah. And I was just like, are you
• 37:09
  kidding me? Like I just, I've hired people just like you who spent $100,000 hiring people and
• 37:14
  put money in the economy and doing everything else. You have the gumption to tell me that? Like,
• 37:19
  I'd like screw you hang up on, you know, and, you know, and that, but that tick now, and I think it
• 37:24
  ticked me off not just because it was kind of on call for, but because there was, there was a
• 37:29
  piece of it that I believed to be true, right? Because I felt like crap. You know, I, I mean,
• 37:34
  I was losing everything. You know, I hadn't lost my house yet. I did eventually four clothes in
• 37:38
  my home in 2009. And I didn't expect that to happen. I was trying to short sell the house. They
• 37:42
  wouldn't even let me short sell it because lo and behold, lean the brothers on my mortgage.
• 37:48
  And Liam brother, we've used your cell. You had zero luck. You had absolutely zero luck in this
• 37:54
  time. Yeah, at all. Yeah, it's like, it's like the perfect storm, but in the George Clooney movie
• 37:58
  way, where like everybody dies. Are you spoiler alert? It was like that. It was like, it was like,
• 38:03
  nothing could go right. I mean, even my wife at that time, like she was talking about moving
• 38:07
  in with her sister and like maybe going to help me till I give me some time to figure my crap out.
• 38:12
  I mean, culture calls are calling left, you know, day and night. I'd like to say that. I mean,
• 38:15
  I was feeling like a hypocrite because I was teaching people to get out of the rap race been on
• 38:19
  back in. So I stopped teaching people how to get out of the rap race. I actually started pivoting
• 38:23
  in my business to teach different stuff. I started teaching people how to get resourceful because
• 38:27
  that's what I was doing is finding money. I wouldn't tell them I was broke. I wouldn't tell
• 38:30
  them I was in a worse financial situation than they were. But lo and we're telling me in the
• 38:34
  recession, they're like, Chris, I would like to pay you to learn the things you've learned. I just
• 38:38
  don't have the money. Like it's tight right now in the economy. And in my mind, I'm thinking,
• 38:42
  well, you're better off financially than I am. So I instead, I would tell them, well,
• 38:46
  if I can help you find the money, will you pay me? They said, yeah, I'll do that. Like great.
• 38:51
  Here's what you need to do. And I tell them like different things like, here's ways to free up
• 38:54
  money, especially with their business owners. Like here's ways you can free up on taxes or creative
• 38:58
  ways of pay off debt. That's outside of like the Dave Ramsey method and things like that that
• 39:02
  worked for me as I was trying to pay off my debt and get out of that hole. And next thing you know,
• 39:07
  after about a year or so of doing that, it caught fire. And we got it with the right people.
• 39:12
  End of 2009, we started getting with the tire preachers and dentists and our company went from
• 39:16
  almost bankrupt in 2009 to like exploding in 2010, you know, and which helped me, of course,
• 39:22
  earn more income to help pay off more debts, you know, and that kind of thing.
• 39:25
  I just want to take a second to thank the Housebot podcast network for supporting today's episode.
• 39:29
  Now, if you like success story, you're going to love other shows and the network. One of my
• 39:32
  favorites is the hustle daily show hosted by Juliet Bennett Ryla, Rob Literist, Ben Berkeley,
• 39:37
  and Mark Dent. It's brought to you by the Housebot podcast network, which is really the audio destination
• 39:42
  for business professionals. Now, the hustle daily show brings you a healthy dose of this
• 39:46
  a reverent offbeat and formative takes on business and tech. I was just listening to an episode to
• 39:51
  give you an example of what they talk about. So they broke down how this hundred year old
• 39:55
  organization has created one of the most successful business models in the world. Not only does
• 40:00
  this organization teach young entrepreneurship, they generate over a billion dollars in annual
• 40:05
  cookie sales. And what I really love about the show is they take these stories and these businesses
• 40:10
  that we think we know. And then they reveal these surprising angles that we never consider.
• 40:14
  So I really think that you should go listen to the hustle daily show wherever you get your
• 40:18
  podcast. It's one of my favorites. You're not going to regret it. No, of course. And then this
• 40:23
  is this is sort of the first version of like present day what you what you teach now. This is like
• 40:28
  that rebound out of the out of the recession. Now, you can make the argument that if the recession
• 40:36
  never happened, the strategies you were deploying in your life and what you were teaching our
• 40:42
  sound and some of them like still are like investing real estate is not a bad idea. You could so
• 40:45
  you could still create passive income out of that. But forget pretend the recession. Pretend we
• 40:53
  would hit another recession, which can always happen. What are some ideas that you teach now that
• 41:00
  are recession proof that you wish you had done before the first recession before the 2008
• 41:06
  2009 financial crisis so that you could have survived regardless of what happens with the economy,
• 41:12
  the market, the banks, anything. Yeah. Well, that's where you kind of kind of heard the endertones of it
• 41:17
  in that story, right? I remember in 2020 when we thought, okay, this is it. This is the this is the
• 41:22
  actual black swan event that's going to create the recession that we were already expecting in 2019
• 41:26
  because we were predicting 2020 would be the year of real estate would actually get hit and
• 41:30
  possibly depreciate. And then it didn't because they serve print money like Willy Wonka Chocobars,
• 41:35
  right? And uh, yeah, but that's not, but that's not good for the future, right? No, like that's,
• 41:40
  you know, this makes the bubble bigger that, you know, it's like blowing up that bubble, you
• 41:43
  like, get this nice little bubble gun bubble and you're like, oh, that's big. Let's just keep going
• 41:46
  and it's all of your hair and stuff, right? That's yeah. That's kind of what I'm expecting too. And so
• 41:51
  in 2020, it's the same advice I even get people today, which is these three things is Git Lean,
• 41:56
  Git Liquid and Git Out. So Git Lean means, you know, make sure that you're tracking your money,
• 42:01
  right? Track, if you're a business owner, it's even in real estate or wherever it might be,
• 42:05
  track your money or business, using QuickBooks or whatever you might use. Zero is another one like
• 42:10
  XERO is another one that's like QuickBooks you can use too. In the personal life, make sure you
• 42:14
  track in your personal home as well. Uh, track things, you know, you can use like rocket money or
• 42:19
  a monarch money or good tools you can use to track your money. Um, but start really watching what's
• 42:25
  coming in, what's going out? Don't just watch your spending. I mean, that's important too. But watch
• 42:30
  what's coming in and going out, know the full flow of your money, how much positive or negative
• 42:34
  cash flow are you? And, and understand that on a very, on a very solid level. Don't just do it once
• 42:40
  a month or at tax time once a year, you know, do it like, I would say, if not weekly, at least every
• 42:45
  other week, you know, really start to understand your money and where it's going. Don't even worry
• 42:49
  about creating budgets. If you've never done this before, track your money for like at least six,
• 42:52
  twelve months, then you'll have enough evidence and enough data to figure out how to actually
• 42:57
  create budgets at whatnot, which by the way, I hate the word budget, I like spending planned because
• 43:02
  let's be honest, that's really what it is. Um, so that's a big one. So get lean and get rid of the
• 43:07
  expenses that just don't serve you, right? Things that, you know, it could be a subscription. That's
• 43:12
  not serving you very well. Maybe it's like, you know, maybe it's like, you're just going out to
• 43:16
  eat one to many times or probably more like 10 to many times, if anything, right? Or whatever it
• 43:20
  might be, like just try to find ways to, to be a wise steward of your money. Um, then get liquid
• 43:27
  that, see, that's the problem. I, so first I did, I was a track of my money, you know, in 2007,
• 43:32
  I was, because money was so abundant, it was like air, but also like air, when it disappears,
• 43:37
  you count every breath, don't you? And the same thing with money, I didn't start counting my money
• 43:41
  until it was already too late. I was, I was already, I was reactive, not pro pro active.
• 43:46
  And so track your money for one, two is get liquid. Get liquid means make sure you have liquid reserves
• 43:52
  in business. Man, you gotta, you better make sure you have at least a few months of, of, of expenses
• 43:57
  for your business. Now, if you're a real estate investor, like, like, I was talking on Steve
• 44:01
  Triang's show recently, we're talking about this. If you've got like marketing strategies that
• 44:05
  could take nine months to finally deliver results, then you might want to have nine months of
• 44:11
  reserves or more, just in case, because if it's going to take a while for that to kick in to start
• 44:16
  producing some income, you, you don't be left high and dry, because then I'm one failure in
• 44:20
  business is not because people just suck a business. It's usually because they lack the capital.
• 44:24
  They've usually haven't planned appropriately to have enough reserves. So have good cash reserve
• 44:29
  in your business, have reserves of home. I found as a business owner, I recommend at least 12 months
• 44:34
  is pretty of your monthly expenses. So if you already know your expenses are, say, it's 10,000
• 44:38
  a month, you probably want to have about $120,000 you don't touch. In my own life, I have 400 grand
• 44:43
  that I keep between, you know, typical bank savings, high yield savings, and then life insurance
• 44:48
  that I keep, you know, most lines share there just so I can diversify my money a little bit.
• 44:53
  But make sure you have those reserves. And don't tie your money up in those IRAs and forewing
• 44:57
  case and whatnot. I mean, I know that's counter to what everybody else wants to teach you,
• 45:01
  and even in the real estate space, how some people say, oh, no, it's good to get the solo forewing
• 45:05
  case or get the, you know, the self-directed IRAs. And if you already have them, that's one thing.
• 45:09
  But if you're trying to put new money into these plans and you're thinking, oh, yeah, I don't want
• 45:14
  to, I don't want financial freedom before I'm 60. No, screw that. Like I want to make sure I'm at
• 45:17
  least 60 years old before I have any kind of freedom. Well, then good, keep putting money in those
• 45:21
  plans. We want freedom before you're 60, because you don't have to deal with 59 and a half penalties
• 45:26
  and things like that. Well, then get your money liquid. You know, have it outside of that.
• 45:30
  And then that's where I will say that then get it out. And especially if you're an active
• 45:34
  real estate investor, one of the biggest mistakes I've seen, and I'm in several mastermind groups
• 45:38
  where I mean, there's like high level investors, you would never think we'd go out of business
• 45:42
  and are today one because they didn't have enough cash reserves, but two, because they were all
• 45:48
  in on their business. And so Mike McCallowicz, that's another great book. If you ever read Profit
• 45:53
  at first, great book to read and then implementing that system into your business and make sure you
• 45:58
  actually have Profit, if you're always reinvesting all of your money back in your business,
• 46:03
  the thing is you're not profitable, right? You're spending money, you know, and I'm all about
• 46:08
  growing a business and making it bigger and bigger, but not if it means that you stuff to keep working
• 46:13
  as a slave in that business forever. I like to be work optional, right? I work because I want
• 46:18
  to not because I have to because I've been able to retire twice and I just can't do it because I
• 46:22
  get bored, right? I just I have to have purpose. I can't just sit around my beach or go golfing
• 46:28
  because I don't golf. That's big reason. You know, sorry, I know you're a Miami. I know they've
• 46:32
  got great golfing out there too in that direction, but you're not defending me. Listen, I grew up in
• 46:37
  Toronto. So golf was the necessary side effect of playing hockey in the winter. That's all we could do.
• 46:43
  But outside of that, I'm not a big golfer. Yeah, I'm just not lying. It's indoors in that, you know.
• 46:48
  Yeah, listen, after moving down, I'm still acclimating to everybody loving football and basketball
• 46:55
  over hockey. So that's fine. I'm getting used to it eventually. But yeah, no, I also don't think
• 47:01
  that people completely should completely retire, but that's besides the point. The point is do you
• 47:06
  have the option to retire? Do you have the option to work if you want to? You're your family safer,
• 47:11
  especially if you have other students who haven't come outside of that business. So when you have
• 47:14
  that extra profit, take that and invest in things that do generate passive income for you. And
• 47:19
  that's a kind of a debated word about passive because is anything truly passive? Not necessarily,
• 47:26
  because you still have to manage it. You still have to be a steward of your money. But it's nice for
• 47:30
  me. Like I like to be able to, well, here's an example. Like several guys in this high level
• 47:36
  wholesaling flipper group that I was in the match mine with. You know, I don't want to say their
• 47:41
  names out, you know, out here, but they're great. A great group. But in that group, there's a lot
• 47:47
  of guys that were like all in on wholesaling. They're doing great. And I kept saying for years. And
• 47:52
  I wasn't the only one, even the leadership was saying the same thing is take the chips off the
• 47:56
  table. And, you know, even if you got great deals, maybe keep them for yourself instead of flipping
• 48:00
  that property. Maybe you keep it and you rent it out, you know, or whatever it might be. Like,
• 48:05
  get additional streams of income. And there was one guy in particular, he was out in in Pennsylvania.
• 48:10
  And he was even like, dude, how do you have so much passive income? He's like, I would love
• 48:14
  to have like 10,000, 20,000 a month. I was like, well, dude, just even if you're an active investor,
• 48:19
  cherry pick. Now, cherry pick some of your best deals. Keep them. Don't, don't flip them all. Like,
• 48:24
  yeah, it looks good on the on the ego numbers, you know, for revenue and such. But keep, maybe
• 48:29
  keep those properties and cash flow and dude, when 2020, especially going to 2022 and 2023 hit,
• 48:35
  which was even worse than 2020 for us, right? I mean, 2020, 2020, 2023 hit. He was one of those
• 48:41
  guys left standing because he finally decided to take some of the chips off table, cherry pick and
• 48:45
  keep some of his properties. His rentals literally saved his whole sailing business. If they were for
• 48:50
  that, he would be out of business today. But because he didn't have to keep taking our family,
• 48:54
  because he knew he can maneuver and pivot and do certain things, he was okay. And even had some
• 48:59
  of the business owning some of those rentals too, so that the cash was still coming in even if
• 49:02
  wholesaling had dried up. And so that's where it's very, I think that's, that's the big thing I
• 49:07
  learned. That's why the second time around in 2016, when I was financially independent again,
• 49:12
  you know, and I don't do active stuff. I'm not the type of person to go and wholesale or flip
• 49:16
  is really anymore. Like, I let other people do it. Now I just use my capital to go out and work
• 49:20
  for me and let those guys do all the work, right? Because they're younger and full of life energy.
• 49:24
  I think that it's, so this is something that I see with entrepreneurs as well. They, they build a
• 49:30
  business to the point where then they make a ton of money with an exit or an acquisition. And then
• 49:35
  they just start investing. Then I'm a big fan of invest along the way and take money off the table
• 49:42
  a little bit earlier. So you again, it's the same concept, right? You come from a real estate world
• 49:46
  where it's all active, active, active, I come from a background in tech where it's all active
• 49:50
  building and raising the next round. And whenever you have the opportunity, start to learn how to
• 49:56
  invest because a good entrepreneur or a good active, uh, somebody's actively participating in
• 50:02
  real estate wholesale flipping, it doesn't mean you're a good investor. So you have to learn,
• 50:05
  you have to practice. It's not something they teach you in school. And I think that if you wait
• 50:10
  until you have this huge windfall, this huge amount of money and that's when you start,
• 50:14
  that's when you can make some super costly mistakes as opposed to if you're just playing with,
• 50:18
  you know, a couple 10, 10,000, couple tens of thousands as opposed to doing really large investments
• 50:24
  before you've ever really had experience doing it. And what I see how often is people who become good
• 50:31
  at making money and they make a lot of it, they think that they're going to be good at investing.
• 50:36
  And then the mistakes they make are in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars,
• 50:41
  which is horrible. I mean, they can probably afford it, but that's not the point. Those mistakes
• 50:46
  could be made completely, uh, those mistakes never had to happen. If you just start acclimating
• 50:52
  yourself and and and learning how to invest at a very small level and something that can generate
• 50:58
  income all you sleep, um, make early money and money and growing wealth are two very different
• 51:03
  skill sets. Very much so. And for some reason, they get conflated as just one, one idea,
• 51:08
  and which is incorrect. When you put your money and you park your money into something,
• 51:15
  there's another point or an idea that we have to discuss, which is say it is something passive,
• 51:22
  is there ever a point when you should pull it out? So for example, you sort of saw some signals
• 51:27
  that the market wasn't going in the right direction. You mentioned that guy, the the general
• 51:32
  at a California that just by chance took his money out of the market at two very specific points.
• 51:38
  And he had great returns. So it can be invested for the long haul for a period of time. Are there
• 51:45
  signals that you should maybe liquidate and take some of those, uh, sort of longer term investments
• 51:53
  and just maybe hold that cash that you've seen? There are. Um, the thing I often teach our clients is
• 52:01
  is I tell them not to ignore the news, at least from the standpoint of taking any advice,
• 52:07
  but listen to what people are saying, not just the news, but even like what might be like the
• 52:12
  person that barely graduated high school that you went to school with, right? Or even the person
• 52:17
  that's like on the street or you're Uber driver for that matter. I mean, if they start talking about
• 52:21
  a certain investment as being like the best investment right now, that is probably investment
• 52:25
  to start selling. I have for example, um, I remember, you know, there's been ups and downs in Bitcoin,
• 52:31
  right? Now I'm not a big fan of like Bitcoin as a wealth building strategy. I think
• 52:36
  it's kind of a fun thing to play with, you know, great gamble with money, but don't be, but don't
• 52:40
  be mad if you lose it all, right? That's kind of I say, like don't invest more than you're willing
• 52:44
  to lose when it comes to things like Bitcoin. Same thing with stock investing and whatnot. Well,
• 52:50
  I remember, uh, this is in 2018. It was in December. It was starting to hit a high of like 20,000
• 52:55
  everybody's talking about Bitcoin. And I said, you know what? I predict it's going to crash and it did
• 53:01
  a crash because why every time I Bitcoin, um, and then it started to sort of rear back up again,
• 53:06
  you know, towards like 65,000 remember that like in in 2022, right? The spring of 2022. And I
• 53:12
  actually bought it when I crashed down whenever he was scared of Bitcoin, that's when I bought Bitcoin.
• 53:17
  It's kind of like that Warren Buffett thing. Like, you know, whenever things, whenever he's greedy,
• 53:21
  be fearful, whenever he's fearful, be greedy, right? So I always do the opposite wherever the crowds
• 53:25
  running away from or running towards I run the opposite direction. Well, same thing happened again.
• 53:30
  So I bought like a 6,000 Bitcoin. Now it's going up towards 65. And then everybody starts to say
• 53:35
  how to buy Bitcoin. I even remember on Facebook, I had friends that barely graduated high school saying,
• 53:39
  how do I buy a Bitcoin? And where do you, I mean, where do you buy it? Do you get it from a store?
• 53:44
  Like I was like, oh my gosh, this is the time when dumb money's in right now. This is it. This
• 53:50
  time to get out. So I sold right around 50,000. And of course, I came crash down like 16,000,
• 53:54
  right? And and that's and that's the thing. Like now real estate isn't much different. Even
• 54:00
  real estate tends to be a little bit more stable. And that's why I liked store most of my wealth in
• 54:04
  real estate backed investments. But same thing can happen, right? If everybody's saying everybody buy
• 54:09
  real estate, which I haven't seen that day really happen, I've I've always heard people be scared
• 54:14
  of real estate ever since 2008, right? Like it really everybody's like, oh, I don't know,
• 54:19
  real estate's going to come crashing any minute. But you don't really hear that about the stock market.
• 54:23
  Summer just keeps going up up in a way more than it ever has in history for these last 15 years.
• 54:28
  Now going on 16 years. And yet people are still like, oh, yeah, that's where you put your money.
• 54:33
  That's where you go. Yeah, put in stocks. It's great. Put in the S&P 500 index. You know,
• 54:37
  don't even pay the extra fees, right? They all say the same thing. That's when you know something is
• 54:42
  overvalued. So now whenever it's fearful, like right now people would be fearful of buying apartment
• 54:47
  buildings. Like it's finally got to the point where people now been burned so badly in last two
• 54:52
  years, this might be a good time to start looking at apartments again because the value has to come
• 54:55
  down. Self storage, not so much. Self storage is still a little bit overpriced. Nobody's really said
• 55:00
  self storage is a bad deal, right? So when people tell you it's a bad investment that's usually
• 55:04
  when it's good, when they tell you it's a good investment, that's usually when it's bad, at
• 55:08
  least for the timing. Just one one thought when you just tying back to that first that sort of
• 55:14
  that first period in your life where you lost everything you were in tons of debt. After this
• 55:21
  question, I want to keep moving to sort of some of the stuff that you work on right now.
• 55:25
  But why would you not declare bankruptcy at that point? Is that a useful tool for people?
• 55:29
  Because I don't think people really understand that that tool very well and you chose I'm assuming
• 55:34
  not to. Yeah, I'll tell you, it would have been easier on me if I filed for bankruptcy in some ways,
• 55:40
  right? Having to hit the reset button going to zero would have been way easier than trying to
• 55:44
  negotiate with creditors, trying to you know, negotiate like, you know, paying the debts for less.
• 55:49
  Like, for example, that Mercedes, eventually I was going to negotiate down to about 7,000 bucks
• 55:54
  and then pay it off and full once I had the cash to do it. But I mean, it was like a year or two
• 55:59
  of them trying to collect a debt and then then getting desperate saying, okay, we're about to lose
• 56:04
  this. What will you offer? Mike, offer, you know, 20% and they took it. I'm like, yes,
• 56:10
  God, you know, you know, so I did a lot of that kind of stuff. But, you know, hit the reset button
• 56:16
  can be good. Now, the thing is I think bankruptcy has kind of an emotional and a spiritual
• 56:23
  component to it as well, because I knew a lot of people that did go bankrupt during that time.
• 56:28
  And for them, some of them never emotionally recovered. Like, they never, they almost like lost
• 56:33
  their mojo after they filed for bankruptcy, right? Now, I could have lost my mojo, you know,
• 56:37
  doing what I did. I hacked Dave Ramsey. I mean, that's his whole story is about how he went bankrupt
• 56:42
  doing this high, high risk flipping strategy he was doing in real estate. I mean, he was taking,
• 56:46
  he was gambling big time on market conditions. And then for him to come out of that say,
• 56:51
  debt's always evil, right? I mean, that's a trauma response is what that is. And that's why he doesn't
• 56:57
  teach according to principle. He teaches according to his emotions. Where me, I came out of it. Yeah,
• 57:03
  I had some trauma, but I learned about debt. It was that that's not evil. It could be good or bad.
• 57:09
  Either it's your it's master or you're at slave and you have to be a wise steward and know how to
• 57:15
  use that money appropriately in the right places and at the right times. So for me, I came out of it
• 57:20
  like, Hey, be careful with debt. You know, be responsible with it versus just, Hey, you know,
• 57:25
  the sky's limit. Let's just get as much debt as I can, which was what I was kind of thinking back then.
• 57:29
  So there's there's definitely different things that come out of it. But I think bankruptcy can work
• 57:35
  in some situations. I am glad in hindsight, I didn't, even though my credit score was way worse
• 57:41
  because of it because ironically, your credit score is better after bankruptcy than it is after
• 57:45
  just going late and just trying to pay collections and judgments over years. My credit score, actually,
• 57:51
  I saw the like the little history like, you know, 2010, your credit score is a 510. I mean,
• 57:58
  that's almost like an STT score for getting your name right, you know. But you know, I eventually
• 58:04
  got it back up, you know, now to where it's, you know, like 830s in that kind of thing. So
• 58:10
  it can come back, but it just was a longer, harder road. But there's a part of me that I think
• 58:14
  part of me, the reason I didn't do it personally is because whether it's consciously or subconsciously,
• 58:19
  or just that deep impression, that spiritual impression was listen, like, this is going to be
• 58:23
  part of your story. You know, if you can dig out of this hole, you know, this million dollar plus
• 58:28
  that hole you have. And you can even come back and become financially dependent a second time.
• 58:34
  Man, wouldn't that be an awesome story? You know, and I was even thinking that in 2008, 2009,
• 58:39
  you know, it took me all the way till December of 2016 to get there, right? So I think that's for
• 58:45
  me, I'm glad it didn't, you know, that it would, it would been for me emotionally, maybe it would
• 58:50
  have been harder if I had filed for bankruptcy, but I'm definitely not opposed to it in the right
• 58:53
  situation if you've tried everything possible and you just can't dig out.
• 58:58
  What changed, I mean, we sort of touched on this, but if there's any other big changes in
• 59:02
  how you invest after that first period and that has really benefited you, like some major
• 59:08
  fundamental shifts in how you think through investment. I mean, definitely cash flow, cash flow,
• 59:12
  cash flow, right? I mean, like, just like I mentioned, that rental property. I mean, that
• 59:16
  that rental property would get horrible renters. I realized that was a bad property manager.
• 59:21
  So if I do buy properties, I generally don't want to property manage them because I know I'm
• 59:25
  a pushover. So I love getting property managers. Yeah, it costs me money, but I get that time
• 59:31
  freedom. I get that really that mindset freedom too by not being the one responsible. The hardest
• 59:37
  thing is, of course, getting a good property manager, but if you find a good one, hold on to them,
• 59:41
  use them as much as you can, right? They're great. And so I've actually, that's why I became more
• 59:46
  of a passive investor versus an active one is that I realized that for me, I just didn't enjoy it.
• 59:51
  You know, I think anything you do in investing, it should be something you really enjoy. So if you're
• 59:56
  an active, say you're an active investor, right? Maybe you're an active real estate investor. Great.
• 1:00:00
  If you love it, it's like you love the hunt that it gives you life. Keep doing it. Don't stop doing
• 1:00:06
  it. You don't have to do it 24 seven, but definitely, you know, keep doing what you love.
• 1:00:11
  The other thing too is also when I invest, I like to go for what some people, well, some people
• 1:00:16
  think it's risky. If they've only known mutual funds, I love people that say, oh, that seems
• 1:00:21
  risky doing real estate. Mike, you do mutual funds. You have zero control over your life.
• 1:00:26
  And you think that's just because, you know, just because two billion people in the world do it,
• 1:00:31
  doesn't mean you should too. You know, it doesn't mean that's a safe thing or a good idea, right?
• 1:00:35
  There's a lot of people that eat crap and think it's a good idea. You know, they think they're
• 1:00:39
  eating healthy and they're not. So same thing with money too. And so for me, like I like to make
• 1:00:44
  sure I lower my risk, you know, so even when I invest, like if I'm going to lend my money,
• 1:00:49
  being first position, make sure that I'm the first person that gets paid back. I've also learned
• 1:00:54
  that even being an equity investor is always good. Like, you know, when people pull their money together
• 1:00:57
  to go buy an apartment building or, you know, or something like that, that's not always a good thing.
• 1:01:03
  You know, being an equity investor, you get paid after whoever holds the debt, you know, and I think
• 1:01:08
  one of the biggest problems of that in the society is that you've taught that ownership is a good
• 1:01:12
  thing. Now, I'm not opposed to it. I still like to have ownership and control, but again,
• 1:01:16
  it comes back to that control. If I'm investing with somebody else, I could be an equity investor,
• 1:01:21
  but think about it. You have a mortgage on your house. If you have a mortgage on your house,
• 1:01:25
  you sell your home, who gets paid first? It's not you. It's a mortgage company.
• 1:01:30
  Debt gets paid first, then equity gets paid second. So to be an equity owner isn't always the
• 1:01:36
  safest way. Sometimes being a debt owner or control that debt, especially if you're in that
• 1:01:40
  top position, you know, to get paid back first can be a safe way to do your money. And so,
• 1:01:45
  I've been doing a lot more debt investing lending and things like that because it's paying better
• 1:01:49
  than rentals are right now, especially. I'm doing raw land. You know, I've had some really good
• 1:01:54
  success with that. Again, I'm not the one doing it actively. I got partners that know how to buy
• 1:01:58
  and sell and flip raw land and do all that stuff. And I just, I finance it. I finance it all, you know.
• 1:02:05
  So those are big lessons for me. How do you find, I mean, so that's a great,
• 1:02:09
  that's a great conversation to you about the fact that you don't have to be actively doing it
• 1:02:12
  yourself. But now you're, you know, you're an experienced investor. How do you find the right
• 1:02:18
  partners to do these kinds of deals? Because I wouldn't know the first thing about doing a raw land
• 1:02:22
  deal. And I was actually going to ask you about that. But the secret sauce is finding somebody who
• 1:02:26
  can do it, which is can't be sometimes just as hard as doing the thing yourself because there's
• 1:02:30
  a mind field of people out there promising this that and the other. So how do you vet?
• 1:02:35
  Oh, still we can take this in both directions. Originally, I wanted to ask you how do you vet
• 1:02:39
  and understand and do due diligence on some of these opportunities. But then secondly,
• 1:02:43
  how do you vet, understand the due due diligence on the people that are doing the opportunities?
• 1:02:48
  Because I think that that's also a, I think that can also be an interesting way to invest. Whether
• 1:02:52
  they're not it's a, a rate or some sort of fund or a raw land deal trusting people.
• 1:02:59
  It's probably one of the harder things to do when you're figuring out where to put your money
• 1:03:04
  places, right? So how do you do it so that you don't get screwed over?
• 1:03:07
  Absolutely. I mean, there's, there's two different types of people. There are the actors,
• 1:03:10
  you know, the people that are just, you know, just trying to screw you over. And then there's
• 1:03:13
  the people that maybe get lazy, you know, on their rules. They're just bad operators, right?
• 1:03:18
  They're good people. They just didn't make good business decisions. And there, there really
• 1:03:23
  is nothing that's zero risk. Anybody who tells you otherwise, just selling you something, right?
• 1:03:27
  I mean, there's always risk, even in real estate, even though you have a, an actual asset there,
• 1:03:32
  anything, you know, anything can happen, you know? And so when it comes to that, you know,
• 1:03:37
  that network of knowing who to invest with, because who is definitely more important? Like, you bet
• 1:03:41
  on the jockey enough of horse. I think you bet on both, obviously. But the jockey definitely
• 1:03:45
  has got to be there. And, and you can either one, do it yourself like I did over the years,
• 1:03:51
  build that network or two, you borrow somebody else's network, right? That's what a lot of our clients
• 1:03:56
  do with us. They say, well, you know, it's not, I know it's not recommendations, Chris, but who are
• 1:03:59
  you using, right? Or who do you use for this or that? And so I have a my own network that does that.
• 1:04:04
  For my own network, I realize that birds with feather flock together. That's a big thing. So mastermind
• 1:04:10
  groups have been very helpful for me. People that share a lot of the same values. I'll tell you,
• 1:04:16
  like there's, and not even a mastermind group. So there's people that have offerings that would
• 1:04:20
  love me to promote them to my people. But I just get this weird feeling off of my, I personally,
• 1:04:26
  I just have a pretty good intuition. It's not 100%. I can always be duped like the next guy.
• 1:04:31
  But usually I have a pretty good feel for people. And I know there's one guy that's switching from
• 1:04:35
  real estate to oil and gas. And I've just never had a good feeling about it. Plus it's, I don't like
• 1:04:42
  when people switch from one kind of investing to another. And then they say, hey, just give me all
• 1:04:46
  your money. I'm not really experiencing this field, but give me all your money, right? I had
• 1:04:50
  another friend that did that same thing that, you know, I'd sent several clients to and he,
• 1:04:54
  he always had his own quote, quote, vanilla deals, you know, like he would do that. We're like
• 1:04:58
  multifamily in Alabama. And that was like his thing. But then all of a sudden, you know,
• 1:05:03
  getting into 2021, 2022, he couldn't really find good deals in Alabama anymore. He started venturing
• 1:05:08
  out, you know, many is like looking at like coffee farms and he's looking at things like hotel
• 1:05:13
  conversions and Phoenix, Arizona, which I'm like, dude, Phoenix, I wouldn't even touch that. It's too
• 1:05:17
  hot. You know, just like Tampa was, right? You know, you know, you're there. But I mean, like all
• 1:05:21
  those things like once they got so hot, I'm like, I wouldn't want to touch that. It's just
• 1:05:25
  two dang hot. And, and of course, you win on all those, those markets with these chocolate
• 1:05:30
  deals instead of his plain old vanilla. And the next thing you know, like he's losing money left
• 1:05:34
  and right. And not just his money, but investors money left and right. And he's still doing stuff
• 1:05:38
  now. I hear like he's going into private equity. It's like, oh my gosh. Now, yeah, it's not enough
• 1:05:43
  to pivot into something you didn't understand. They're pivoting into something else you don't
• 1:05:46
  understand. Like, what if he just froze operations, you know, and actually have a friend that's,
• 1:05:50
  you know, in contrast to this, I have a friend that has done multifamily in the southeast and
• 1:05:56
  lives out actually near Tampa. And he's like, I haven't seen the good deal in a year and a half
• 1:06:00
  for two years. He's like, so I'm just not going to do it. If it doesn't fit my buy box, I'm not
• 1:06:04
  going to do it. That guy, I trust much more. Now, he's got more gray hair too, right? That helps.
• 1:06:10
  I do like him. People have experienced some full market cycles. So that usually means about pre
• 1:06:14
  2011 pre 2010. If they've had that experience, that gives you a little bit more certainty.
• 1:06:18
  Doesn't mean it's guaranteed, but they've they've had a maneuver more. They've had more
• 1:06:23
  experience to know how to make things work. And they've might have even been kicked in the teeth
• 1:06:27
  with some bad deals that then now they've more experienced on the back end, just like I got kicked in
• 1:06:31
  the teeth financially, right? Same thing for them. So I look for that. I actually look for,
• 1:06:35
  have they had bad deals? Have they had experience? Do they just focus on one area, one kind of
• 1:06:41
  investing versus trying to branch out to something new, you know? Yeah, I stay away from things like
• 1:06:47
  a lot of people ask me over the last several years about ATM funds. And then I've had people come
• 1:06:52
  back saying, yeah, you told you warn me about that. And now I found out it was a Ponzi scheme,
• 1:06:56
  right? You know, or you know, certain types of oil investments and whatnot. Like I actually have
• 1:07:00
  money in, you know, like mineral rights and oil investments and whatnot. But again, I found
• 1:07:05
  somebody who's got like 35 years of experience in that field versus someone who's just trying to
• 1:07:09
  show up recently, you know? Shows up overnight with the new opportunity, which is always a red line.
• 1:07:14
  Regardless of their great marketer and they sound amazing. Like I cut through the BS there and
• 1:07:18
  then it's like, well, who are they? Like, are they actually sound? And that kind of comes to the
• 1:07:23
  other point, too, is are they financially sound? That's the harder part to see because you can't
• 1:07:26
  always find their numbers. But going beyond just the performance that they send you, right?
• 1:07:31
  It's saying, here's what it's going to do. I don't care what the performer says because they all
• 1:07:33
  look great. They all look the same. They almost look like they took the page out of the same books
• 1:07:37
  and just copy to put their name on that pasted it, right? Oh, wait, I've actually done everything.
• 1:07:41
  It's not really done the right. So I don't want that. Like I want, you know, I want to know like,
• 1:07:46
  hey, do they have good cash reserves? Do they have their own money, invest in the deals, too? Because
• 1:07:51
  like there's one guy, you know, he's been doing, you know, in the more of the private lending,
• 1:07:54
  private lending space, he has a huge fund now, right? That does lending and in real estate,
• 1:07:59
  a little bit in business and whatnot. But with his fund, he's like, yeah, I've got
• 1:08:04
  $700,000 of my mom's money in this fund. It's like, well, okay. Now he could still lose it and
• 1:08:09
  try to pay her back, right? But, you know, he's got his own money in there, too. He's always putting
• 1:08:13
  his own money into that fund as well to let him know that you're kind of yoked together. So if
• 1:08:18
  you go down, they go down versus those that just say, I'm charging nice little management fee
• 1:08:22
  of this deal. Even if it goes under, I don't have a money to lose. I just got my management fee
• 1:08:26
  because I'm doing the work, right? And they make money regardless of the, oh, exactly. That's
• 1:08:30
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  Range Rover Sport today. So our incentives aligned. Is there history? Is there track record?
• 1:10:12
  All the things that we should look for, but we get we over looked because of great marketing.
• 1:10:18
  That's not that's not good. I was going to ask. So now you focus on in terms of what you do
• 1:10:27
  personally. Massive, diversified portfolio. How do you help people now? Because you are not
• 1:10:34
  investment advising and we can talk about, I think we can do like an entire episode on infinite
• 1:10:41
  banking and all of that as well because the whole other can't or is it good on that rabbit hole.
• 1:10:46
  But when people come to you right now, how do you help them? But also what problems is the average
• 1:10:52
  person having with money, finance? What's the thing they're trying to solve?
• 1:10:57
  Yeah, the vast majority of people that are coming to us are just saying, listen, I want to do what
• 1:11:00
  you talk about Chris, which is become more optional. How do I get the point where I work because I
• 1:11:04
  want to? Not because I have to. And I feel like I've been saving. I tell you, we get a lot of the
• 1:11:09
  Dave Ramsey poster children, those that like save and save, they've been paid off their dead,
• 1:11:14
  maybe even paid off their mortgage. They're totally debt free and they're saying, wait a minute,
• 1:11:17
  I've got a couple million dollar net worth, but I have zero income coming in from it. How is that
• 1:11:22
  going to help me? And some people see the writing on the wall before it happens,
• 1:11:26
  fortunately, right? So they're usually coming to me and funny enough, they're not all business owners.
• 1:11:31
  Some of them are actually like, you mentioned IT, like I'll tell you, I don't know why we get a lot
• 1:11:35
  of IT guys that hire us too. Like they're just in the tech industry, they're looking for something
• 1:11:40
  different, you know, they're researching a lot and they want an alternative path, right?
• 1:11:46
  And that's what really what we do is that we kind of that's why I'm known as like the anti-financial
• 1:11:50
  advisor because people are like, what do we call you, Chris? Like you're not a financial advisor,
• 1:11:53
  obviously, what are you guys like? It's almost like you're an anti-financial advisor. I was like,
• 1:11:58
  who I like that? Let's keep it. And I like that too. Is it true? I like that. We're trying to
• 1:12:03
  like undo all that training and brainwashing you've had over the years to say, let's see if we
• 1:12:08
  can get this money out, you know, get a liquid for you and get it out to invest. And so we're really
• 1:12:12
  just strategists and connectors. We're not investment advisors, like we don't ever try to give
• 1:12:17
  investment recommendations or anything like that. But we do help them strategize to figure out what
• 1:12:21
  money could they be using? Where are some of the best places they could place it? And of course,
• 1:12:26
  you know, if people want to use their connections, they can use that, they can go do their own
• 1:12:29
  investing. You know, we've got those kind of options too. So we give you an example. Like sometimes
• 1:12:34
  people will say, hey, I've got like, I've got like money sitting in savings, this sitting there
• 1:12:38
  doing nothing, losing to inflation. I've also got money and there's an old 401k or his IRA.
• 1:12:44
  I'm not sure what to do with it, right? Well, we can kind of say, well, based on this,
• 1:12:47
  did you know you could self-direct that IRA? You know, you could self-direct it and actually
• 1:12:51
  invest it almost anywhere you want. But don't put in these kind of investments if you don't want to
• 1:12:56
  lose the tax advantages because you might want to use your liquid cash for this because, like,
• 1:13:00
  you do buy a rental, for example, you get the tax benefits. But if you buy a rental using your IRA
• 1:13:04
  and it's got a mortgage on it, well, guess what? You have a possibility of getting taxed again
• 1:13:08
  because you got you bit tax and things like that that you may not expect. So instead, let's take
• 1:13:14
  your IRA money. Maybe we invest in places that have no tax benefits like lending or into certain
• 1:13:18
  types of funds wherever it might be back in building, grow your money. Well, if you're also focused on
• 1:13:23
  cash flow, how do you do that? Because some people are like, I don't even care about the cash flow.
• 1:13:26
  I just want to grow my wealth and then maybe eventually I have cash flow. Cool. Well, then we might
• 1:13:30
  look at these strategies instead where, yeah, you don't get paid great cash flow upfront, but
• 1:13:34
  there could be a bigger back end payoff down the road in like five years or so. So it's really
• 1:13:38
  this very strategic, very one-on-one customized to help them create that game plan and even help
• 1:13:43
  them implement it and figure out what to do to really get their self-to-app place where they work
• 1:13:48
  because they want to, not because they have to. Well, it's also because you aren't tied to a certain
• 1:13:53
  set of products. That is like, I think that incentives matter and I think that people don't realize
• 1:13:59
  that if you go to a financial advisor at a bank, like they get compensated and they are told,
• 1:14:04
  these are the products you sell and this is what we do and this is all we do and they're not going
• 1:14:09
  to give you conflicting advice. They're not going to get themselves fired. They're not going to
• 1:14:12
  sell you products. They don't make them money. Like incentives really do matter. So when you have
• 1:14:16
  somebody that's not tied to anything, you can sit down and be like, hey, these are 2000 options.
• 1:14:22
  Let's figure out which one works for you actually because it doesn't really matter to me at the
• 1:14:26
  end of the day as long as it serves you versus the traditional financial advisor model.
• 1:14:31
  True. There's a lot of fee-based planners that claim to do the same thing but the problem is
• 1:14:36
  that still when they get their training, it comes from financial institutions. Even if they're
• 1:14:40
  independently brokered, they're still getting all the same training, the brainwashing, which is why
• 1:14:44
  I kind of refused to want to ever go to those things. You know, I never want to go to those
• 1:14:48
  trainings that are put on by fidelity is like really trying to teach you. Here's how you actually
• 1:14:53
  sell for us, even though they don't say it that way. They're like, here's how to make a suitable
• 1:14:57
  product for your client. Then they show you all the different options that they can offer as
• 1:15:01
  suitable options, which is only what they offer. But they'll never say, hey, here's a great real
• 1:15:05
  estate option that could actually get you financially free faster and probably safer than this
• 1:15:10
  market option. In what you say to reminds me of another thing because there's other people out there
• 1:15:16
  that have, since I have matchmind groups, I have some people that are like, oh, well, I don't do
• 1:15:21
  one-on-one coaching, but we have the matchmind group and we get a whole network of people we can
• 1:15:24
  invest with. The problem is those a lot of times, even though people might pay to be in the mastermind,
• 1:15:29
  there's also they're getting paid on the back end from those operators, those investment operators,
• 1:15:34
  right? So they're getting money from the client, the person that wants to get the connections,
• 1:15:38
  but then they're also getting paid on the back end. I don't even know if guys that are financial
• 1:15:42
  advisors or investment advisors, they're doing the same thing, and they'll promote a particular
• 1:15:46
  investment because they get paid on the back end. And that's one thing that I decided early on,
• 1:15:51
  no, I don't want to get paid based on somebody investing in a certain place, right? Because
• 1:15:56
  now, how do you know my intentions aren't being biased towards that? And what if that's the deal,
• 1:16:00
  the very deal that you lose money in? And I know from a liability standpoint because I've watched
• 1:16:04
  it happen in the previous recession, is that if you're promoting something because you get paid
• 1:16:08
  a commission on that or a finder's fee or wherever they want to call it, right? But then you lose
• 1:16:14
  your money in that deal, guess what? You're going to be suing that company and then find out,
• 1:16:17
  oh, they paid my need to that person to that. Basically, that's as a broker. So now we're
• 1:16:21
  going to sue them too. And so it's a massive, you know, mess. And I just like to stay clear of that.
• 1:16:27
  No, I think I think the way you approach it, smart. When you, when you look at analyzing someone's
• 1:16:34
  finances, when somebody comes to you, like, what are you looking for? What's the first thing
• 1:16:37
  that you look at? First thing is really the cash flow, right? Really like, what's coming in
• 1:16:42
  and what's going out, which is why we have them actually detail out the different categories of
• 1:16:46
  where they're spending their money and what income's coming in to see what the cash flow is like.
• 1:16:50
  And that can really determine a lot of what we do. I give an example, I had a woman and
• 1:16:55
  an interhusband, a couple that came to us and they're like, came to us primarily just to say,
• 1:16:59
  you know, we've got $5 million in stocks, you know, specifically like Google and, you know,
• 1:17:05
  Facebook and things like that was like, okay, that's high risk right there. That's like usually
• 1:17:09
  if one tech company goes down, they all go down at the same time. And so she wanted to diversify
• 1:17:15
  a little bit more. And before we even got into the investing, we were looking at her cash flow,
• 1:17:19
  we said, hey, we're noticing your cash flow and we're looking over here. We have this like a special
• 1:17:24
  like way to pay off debt called a cash flow index. And that's like based on this cash flow index,
• 1:17:28
  if we actually refinance your house to a cash out refi, pay off a bunch of these loans, we can
• 1:17:33
  actually free up about $3,800 a month with zero out of pocket. So even before we invest, let's do that
• 1:17:40
  first. So we did that, you know, free up almost $4,000 a month. And then right after that,
• 1:17:46
  realized that because our business owner just said, let's have you meet with the CPAs we have
• 1:17:49
  connections to. And now the CPAs found we can they're actually overpaying by over 30 grand a year
• 1:17:54
  in taxes. So we started saving over 30 grand a year. So even before they even invested, we've
• 1:17:59
  already improved their cash flow by about 75 grand a year. And then of course, after that,
• 1:18:03
  it's like all gravy, right? Because now even they cash out $2 million of their stocks to go
• 1:18:08
  invest in real estate, even makes 10%. That's 200,000 a year on top of the 75,000, right? So
• 1:18:14
  that's the kind of stuff that we do is we are looking at kind of the full picture, right?
• 1:18:18
  Looking at everything of, especially what it relates to, how do we get you to the point where you
• 1:18:22
  have enough, you know, not just passive income, but even just improve your cash flow situation
• 1:18:26
  on a month-to-month basis. And then of course, we're looking at the other stuff as what is this,
• 1:18:30
  what money could be used to invest where you have money to sit on the sidelines or even equity
• 1:18:35
  at another client in California where he didn't have him. He had a little bit of money on savings,
• 1:18:39
  but he was like the strict saver. I have a lot of Asian clients and they're all like amazing
• 1:18:43
  savers, right? And he was no no different. And he said, Chris, my plan is he's like, I want to
• 1:18:49
  actually pay off my mortgage and my rental properties mortgage in six years. So he's like, I'm
• 1:18:54
  taking all my money and aggressively paying these down. And I say, okay, if we do that and let's take
• 1:18:59
  out tax insurance because you'll still pay that even if they're paid off, if we free up principal
• 1:19:03
  interest, how much do we free up? That I was $4,200 a month. So 50 grand a year is not bad. That's
• 1:19:08
  an improved cash flow. And so I was looking at, do we pay it off or not? But then I noticed I said,
• 1:19:13
  hey, your rental property has $700,000 of equity in it. What if we so am I, by the way, what's your
• 1:19:19
  net profit on that property? 200 bucks a month. I said, do you realize you're making like a 0.3%
• 1:19:26
  return on your equity? Like you, you could sell your property, put it in a bank savings account,
• 1:19:31
  even a high yield savings account and make more money than you're making right now. And he's like,
• 1:19:35
  yeah, but you can't do that. And it's an asset. I own this asset. He was like, I'm married to it.
• 1:19:41
  This is the first and only rental property we've ever had. And so it took me two years to convince
• 1:19:45
  him to finally sell it. And he sold it. He 1031. You know, it did a tax freeze change of that equity
• 1:19:51
  into about six properties in Louisiana into rentals. Well, now it's a few years later. This would be
• 1:19:57
  year five. He's not even at year six yet. This next year will be year six. He's at year five. So he
• 1:20:01
  would have not even paid off his mortgages yet to free up that 4,200 a month. He's already at over
• 1:20:06
  $8,000 a month of income from just selling out one property from those rentals because he kept buy
• 1:20:11
  more rentals of that cash flow over the last couple of years. And that's the difference, right? It's
• 1:20:16
  like that acceleration versus just accumulation, right? He was so focused on just trying to pay off his
• 1:20:21
  debt. And that was the strategy he was going to use like Dave Ramsey taught me, right? It's like, no,
• 1:20:25
  you could do so much better by selling this. You know, that's where I get people all the time,
• 1:20:29
  like, which I cash out refinance equity for my rental property or for my house to go and invest
• 1:20:34
  in this. I'm like, well, no, you're destroying your cash flow. Just sell the house, like,
• 1:20:37
  sell the rental property. But everybody says to refi, screw whatever he says on freaking social
• 1:20:41
  media, they're they're they're just idiots sometimes. You know, they just have time. They've only been
• 1:20:46
  doing it for a couple of years. Anyways, like, no, the numbers work out better here. Look,
• 1:20:50
  you know, and I show them those numbers and voila, you know, that's what it is. So that's,
• 1:20:54
  that's kind of where we, I mean, I'm kind of nerding out a little bit, but that's kind of where we
• 1:20:57
  have fun, right? No, no, I love it. This is, this is the audience to nerd out too. Please don't,
• 1:21:02
  don't apologize. It's very good. No, I'm taking some notes. I'm going to, I'm going to talk to you
• 1:21:06
  after and figure out what I'm doing with some of the stuff that I have. But no, this is amazing.
• 1:21:10
  This is really, really good. Um, what would be, so that's, that's how you analyze. We've,
• 1:21:15
  we've gone over a few cardinal sins that people have about money. Are there any other major misconceptions
• 1:21:22
  or how would I say it? Mistakes that people make with money that you just want to, you know,
• 1:21:30
  you want to slay these sacred cows or whatever it is, you want to just make sure that people don't
• 1:21:34
  do these things with their money, with accumulation, with wealth building. Well, this is good dirty.
• 1:21:39
  Let's talk about the 401k, right? Okay, we've talked about the 401k, yeah. Yeah, because I mean,
• 1:21:44
  go for it. That, that will probably be the hardest sacred cow to slay for people. I mean,
• 1:21:49
  some people kind of get like, okay, debt, I can leverage, you know, maybe debt's not always bad,
• 1:21:52
  right? But the 401k, especially if you're an employee, that gets a match. Now, if you're,
• 1:21:57
  you're a business owner and you're throwing in your own match in 401k, to me, it kind of seems
• 1:22:01
  stupid, right? Like it's like, well, I don't get any benefit. Like I'm just, you know,
• 1:22:05
  delaying my tax down the road and simply with IRAs, right? You're kicking the tax can down the road,
• 1:22:09
  hoping and praying that the government's going to have less taxes in the future, even though
• 1:22:14
  historically in the last 110 years, we're at the one of the lowest tax brackets after the previous
• 1:22:18
  Trump tax plan, right? We're one of the lowest tax brackets we've been in and people think,
• 1:22:23
  oh, I think taxes will go down. I think I'll be tax less in the future. Why are we doing that? Why
• 1:22:28
  are we trying to get a tax advantage today to only pay taxes down the road when the government's
• 1:22:32
  probably literally banking on you, waiting till they can raise rates on you, right? That's one
• 1:22:38
  problem. But the other problem is the match. I call it the myth of the match. I even done podcasts
• 1:22:42
  on this on my money ripples podcast as well, because everybody thinks, well, if I get a 100%
• 1:22:47
  match, I get a 100% rate of return. I will challenge you to do this, right? You know, I'm not
• 1:22:54
  going to screen share with you guys right now. But if you go to like a compounding interest
• 1:22:58
  calculator, go ahead and put in like say that you're putting in 20, you know, say it's 10,000
• 1:23:04
  a year. You're putting into your 401k and say they match 10,000 a year into that 401k, right? So
• 1:23:08
  that's 20,000. So that's, you know, like 100% return. So put in 10,000 as which are
• 1:23:13
  contributing annually, but put in that 100% rate of return, you know, add your, you know,
• 1:23:18
  you think it's like 10% or 12%, which is a bunch of BS to the market. It's not, it does not return
• 1:23:22
  that high. But let's just say that's by the way, the average market last 30 years, the actual yield
• 1:23:27
  is about eight and a half percent, not 12. On top of that, most people never get that, especially
• 1:23:32
  in their 401ks. But if you put in 10,000 a year into a calculator and just do it for 20 years,
• 1:23:38
  add 108% rate of return, you'll find out you're richer than Jeff Bezos in just 20 years.
• 1:23:44
  I don't know about you, Scott, but I've never ever seen anyone say, oh, man, like I got,
• 1:23:49
  I mean, people like, how did you become a billionaire? Like the life of hard knocks guys,
• 1:23:52
  like interview people street, like, oh, I say my money, my 401k got my 100% match. Like nobody
• 1:23:58
  ever gets that even after 30, 40 years, the real rate return might add about an extra, when you
• 1:24:05
  thought the topic, the reason it doesn't work is because it's not compounding and doubling your
• 1:24:09
  money, right? All your money is just doubling your new money. So when it comes at the longer you save,
• 1:24:14
  the less that rate of return that X return becomes in that 401k because that rule is 72, right?
• 1:24:20
  How long does it take to double your money? Only thing it does, if you get 100% match, it just
• 1:24:23
  doubles your money at whatever year you finally get that money. So if you save for 40 years,
• 1:24:28
  rule 72 means you might get a barely maybe a 2% return, right? If you only save for 20,
• 1:24:33
  hey, cool, maybe you get about 3.5% extra return. But here's the problem.
• 1:24:39
  I was actually looking at fidelity because I like to pick on fidelity because they're big.
• 1:24:42
  They got 45 million users. This should be evidence enough for you. One is out of 45 million
• 1:24:49
  account holders with fidelity. Only $810,000 have at least a million dollars. That's a 1.8%
• 1:24:58
  success rate, if you're to call a million dollars in an account at a success rate, 1.8% of people
• 1:25:04
  have at least a million dollars. By the way, this is when Dave Ramsey says you save $100 a month for
• 1:25:07
  40 years, you'll have a million bucks, right? Or he says 1.1 million, which even got those numbers
• 1:25:11
  wrong. But think about it this way. If only 1.8% do it and then Trans-America did a separate study
• 1:25:18
  of these same people have over a million dollars in their accounts and said, what are the
• 1:25:24
  chance of you being financially free, right? 35% of those that over a million dollars say it'll
• 1:25:30
  take a miracle for them to be able to retire. A miracle. They don't think they can do it.
• 1:25:35
  So think about it. The 1.8% means really only about 1% things they can.
• 1:25:40
  Maybe there's another success. Yeah, that's not success at all, right?
• 1:25:44
  And so that's the problem is that if they were working that well, why aren't they getting it?
• 1:25:48
  Well, I also studied fidelity. I looked at like their target date retirement funds where it says,
• 1:25:52
  if you're going to retire it, 2055, 2060, 2065, like you can throw your money in those different
• 1:25:56
  accounts, right? Well, I looked at the last 10 year performance. It underperformed the stock market
• 1:26:03
  by over 2% was 2.1%. Ironically, the match adds roughly about a 2% or so return on your money.
• 1:26:12
  So what that means is like, yeah, you get the match, but it only make up for the bad performance
• 1:26:17
  of those funds that you could just be doing investing on your own. So I tell people,
• 1:26:21
  it's like, well, really you can actually be investing in the SP 500. Like a lot of people do suggest
• 1:26:25
  on social media today and you would probably do better than getting a full 100% match or even worse
• 1:26:30
  when somebody max funds are 401k and they don't even get a full match, right? They're not even getting
• 1:26:35
  that high of a return. So you could actually do better just investing your own outside of the 401k.
• 1:26:40
  Now, I don't think you should, right? I think you've just invested in SP 500. There's already
• 1:26:44
  plenty of evidence that that only does so much. That's the 4% rule. That's another myth, the
• 1:26:50
  sacred cow that especially young people in the fire movement. I actually got kicked out of the fire
• 1:26:55
  group. I got kicked out because I dropped truth Brahms too many times. And so the fire movement
• 1:27:04
  didn't like it because I didn't realize the fire movement. I thought fire movement was like people
• 1:27:09
  like me who actually did it financially independent, retired early and I did it twice. That's what
• 1:27:14
  it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be, right? So I would share my, I would share that stuff. But I
• 1:27:18
  realized most people in that group are investing in mutual funds and they're young. They're like 20s
• 1:27:22
  and 30s. So they'll say, Oh, it's okay because you got to live on 4% right that 4% rule, which by
• 1:27:28
  way is not a rule. It was actually a number that was created from looking at history up in through 1976,
• 1:27:34
  1976, 1976. Do you know what happened in 1974? We were taking off the gold standard.
• 1:27:40
  Inflation started to skyrocket after that time and people are living longer, which is why like the
• 1:27:46
  4% rule would work great back then, you know, when people lived less time, they didn't live as long
• 1:27:52
  and inflation was as high. Inflation is, you know, consistently higher than it was back then over
• 1:27:59
  that 50 year period. And people are living longer. Therefore, I tell people if you're retiring at
• 1:28:04
  a retirement age like in your 60s, 3% would be a safer number. And I've shown that on my podcast,
• 1:28:10
  too, sometimes where like Dave Ramsey says, you should be able to pull 8% a year and I showed like
• 1:28:14
  how you actually run out of money like 15 years if you did what he recommended. Even if you get
• 1:28:20
  the market averages, you just have to have one down year for every three years and you're gone,
• 1:28:24
  your toast. But even then, like I was in the fire, but I said, no, it's not 4%. It's more like,
• 1:28:30
  if you're trying to do it young, it's more like 2%. And they hit in the before, like they like
• 1:28:35
  kicked me out of the group. The admins did because they're like, oh, no, no, you can't say that.
• 1:28:39
  Because I had a friend who was, you know, even markets to real estate investors and he's like 30 years
• 1:28:43
  old and he's like, yeah, I'm actually financially a pennant. I've got enough money in my
• 1:28:46
  mutual funds to pay my expenses at 4%. Like, well, you're 29. You can't live on 4%. It's going to be
• 1:28:53
  like 2% of your rely on mutual funds. He's like, what? That can't be true. Like, well,
• 1:28:58
  what I know, I started in this money game when you were in first grade, but what I know, you know,
• 1:29:02
  like, you know, and he didn't want to believe me. Like, okay, fine, but you'll find out eventually.
• 1:29:08
  Like, that's what people find out. Usually, unfortunately, too late when they get into 50s and 60s,
• 1:29:12
  and they say, oh, crap. Now it's not enough, right? And that's that. That's very sad because then
• 1:29:17
  it's like, okay, so then what do I have to do to make it up? And then they start making these
• 1:29:20
  super high risk decisions and they lose even more money. I don't know why people have such,
• 1:29:28
  it's like this, this, this, like, this fervor for these financial, in my opinion,
• 1:29:38
  like not, I don't know, scams, not scams, but not well-presented facts is the best way to put it.
• 1:29:44
  Like 401k is just, there was a guy who came on Andy Tanner and he spoke about the sort of the
• 1:29:51
  history of the 401k because he interviewed the guy who, I guess, was responsible for the
• 1:29:56
  legislation. And I don't think if you actually go back to the legislation that introduced the 401k,
• 1:30:03
  I won't remember the exact numbers, but say regular legislation that impacts finances,
• 1:30:09
  like say, 100 pages, something like that. The legislation that introduced the 401k is like a
• 1:30:15
  couple paragraphs, and it was never meant to be as taken as seriously as it actually is,
• 1:30:20
  and it was never meant to be the thing that it turned into. And the guy that created it,
• 1:30:26
  like he was shocked that it was, and it was because companies realized that this is a great
• 1:30:31
  way to get people to be distracted and not realize that we're not investing in their pensions
• 1:30:36
  anymore. And this is a great way to sort of, you know, dangle the carrot over here and say,
• 1:30:41
  oh, we're going to take care of you with this 401k. Companies were leveraging this government
• 1:30:46
  tool that was never meant to be taken this seriously as a way to just basically pay people less.
• 1:30:52
  And this is what happened. And now, I don't know how many people I could attribute a 401k. It's
• 1:30:56
  probably, you know, millions and tens of millions of people. Yeah, but it's not a good tool.
• 1:31:02
  It's like a really bad tool. Canada, I'm Canadian. They have RSP as well. Same difference.
• 1:31:07
  That's right. Canadian is RSP. Exactly. Same thing, right? And yeah, when we get Canadians, I mean,
• 1:31:12
  it's funny because like at least you guys will have better interest rates on bank savings, but still,
• 1:31:15
  that's, you know, that's about it. Plus you have tax receivings accounts too that we don't get
• 1:31:19
  unless you use life insurance. But the other thing too, I'll tell you, like that 401k is true,
• 1:31:24
  because the legislation initially was as executive plan, right? It was really because back then,
• 1:31:29
  the top federal tax rate was about 80%. So they were saying the same thing that we're saying today,
• 1:31:37
  right? Which is, oh, it's okay. Because if you, and by the way, when I had a 401k over 20 years
• 1:31:41
  ago, I worked in corporate America before I came a financial advisor. I remember the HR person
• 1:31:45
  said this. She's like, and she was kind of interesting. She's like, so here's the thing. Here's
• 1:31:50
  the 401k. And it's the best thing ever because you put money in, but you don't get taxed until
• 1:31:56
  you retire. But it's okay because when you're old, you don't spend money anyways. And that's,
• 1:32:01
  it's going to be great for you. You know, like she's, she's talking about all this stuff. And even I was
• 1:32:05
  like, somehow this doesn't seem to make a logical sense to me. Will I be spending less when I get
• 1:32:09
  older? I would think I'd be spending more. Yeah. But she's, of course, 30 some odd years old at
• 1:32:14
  time. So she didn't really see it. But you know, those, for those back then, when the top rates
• 1:32:19
  like 80%, and if you can delay it and get your tax to a much lower tax bracket, and then when
• 1:32:24
  you retire, because you are living on less, because you're getting paid so high as an executive,
• 1:32:28
  you will live on less down the road. Then yeah, it could make sense. The problem is, uh, is,
• 1:32:35
  of course, the financial institutions got embedded with the politicians, right? They said,
• 1:32:39
  wait, we can make this a win-win here. Because listen, you know, such securities going bankrupt,
• 1:32:44
  you guys are on the hook for that. We also want to have more people put more money into savings.
• 1:32:49
  Why make up for when K plan available to the public, right? So then everybody can have access
• 1:32:54
  to this thing. And we'll even tell them, hey, it's okay, because you'll be taxed less in the future,
• 1:32:58
  right? Because of course, that always happens with the government, because you know, we're not going
• 1:33:02
  in trillion dollars of debt. Like, you know, it seems like almost every day, you know, or every month
• 1:33:06
  we're building another trillion of debt, right? And so, so of course, they're telling us this stuff,
• 1:33:11
  right? So in 1985, it became open to general public. But I've seen people have had four cases
• 1:33:15
  in 1985, and they're not anywhere close to what, you know, anyone who we've had a financial
• 1:33:20
  calculator back then would say they would be out today. Because it's not because they weren't
• 1:33:25
  saving. Now, that's the thing that pisses me off when people say, oh, it's because they're not
• 1:33:28
  saving enough. People just need to save more. But you know, back in those days, they're saying,
• 1:33:32
  save 10%. You'll be fine. And then it went up to 20%. And now they're like, well, save all your,
• 1:33:36
  in 100% income, and maybe you'll be okay, right? It's just ridiculous. And, and you're right,
• 1:33:41
  like that's, it's, yeah, I don't blame financial advisors by blame that they, they turn their brains
• 1:33:47
  off and just accept whatever they're taught. And I'll tell you, there are people that do turn
• 1:33:51
  their brains on, even in that industry. I mean, Dave Ramsey, I rip on him a lot, but he has a
• 1:33:56
  co-host named George Campbell, right? He's kind of a nerdy guy with glasses. I know he's, he's coming on,
• 1:34:00
  and I think the week after Christmas, he's coming on. That's awesome. Because if that's the case,
• 1:34:05
  tell him hi for me because I think he was a rock star for doing what he did last year in 2023,
• 1:34:11
  because he, here's what happened. He, uh, he actually came out saying, people should pull off
• 1:34:16
  3% a year. Just like I've been saying for years, he said it. And, uh, and the crazy thing is,
• 1:34:23
  I actually did a react clip on my podcast about this because someone called into Dave Ramsey's show,
• 1:34:30
  and the caller was distressed. He's like, I don't think I've saved enough. I don't have enough
• 1:34:33
  money. And, and he's like, yeah, like if I only pull off 3% a year and you see Dave do his usual
• 1:34:38
  face like, yeah. And, uh, like what are you talking about? He's like, well, yeah. Well,
• 1:34:46
  George has said on another episode recently that, you know, we should only pull off 3% a year.
• 1:34:51
  And that means I haven't saved enough. Dave was like, what is he, what the hell is he saying? I
• 1:34:56
  don't get it. You know, like, this, that's ridiculous. You make 12%. You should be able to pull off
• 1:35:01
  8% a year. You know, and he's like going off and all pissed off at George for doing it. I think
• 1:35:06
  George eventually came and re-nigged on it or whatever. You know, I tell you like George was right.
• 1:35:11
  Dave was wrong. But that's the problem is that some people get so invested into saying things
• 1:35:17
  are certain way or doing things, you know, that, and that's one thing I try to make sure I don't do
• 1:35:20
  is I don't try to have so much ego that I'm not willing to adjust and say, you know what? I wasn't
• 1:35:25
  right there. I was wrong. You know, this is what's more true today. But those guys like, they don't
• 1:35:31
  have any responsibility. He's a, he's a TV personality. He has zero risk, you know, for people
• 1:35:36
  suing him because he's just a TV personality. Everybody knows that you shouldn't listen to him
• 1:35:39
  anyways. But so many people do literally banking their lives on that as being truth when they're
• 1:35:45
  finding out it's just not working. It's a minefield out there. I really wish. I mean, there's,
• 1:35:51
  there's, there's a lot of people that put out a lot of financial education, which is a good thing
• 1:35:55
  and a bad thing at all at the same time because some people mean well. They put out the stuff that's
• 1:35:59
  actually going to help people. A lot of people either don't know what they're talking about
• 1:36:03
  or just pure malicious. Like, I mean, I just to clarify, I do not consider Dave Ramsey to be
• 1:36:10
  malicious in his intent. I genuinely think he's trying to help people just through the lens of
• 1:36:14
  what has worked for him. But I do agree that you should, uh, you shouldn't be so naive to other
• 1:36:21
  ways of doing things. I think that it that's actually important because then you can understand
• 1:36:25
  how what has worked exactly for you may not be the exact strategy for other person at a different
• 1:36:32
  stage in their life, at a different season in their life. In my mind, if, you know, we were talking
• 1:36:36
  about financial advisors being so myopic and so blinders on and what they offer, if Dave has the
• 1:36:44
  same attitude, he's no better because he's, he's only educating you on one thing in the world.
• 1:36:51
  Two two ideas can be correct at the same time and to have the best chance of helping people,
• 1:36:56
  you have to have the widest array of ideas to understand all these different circumstances
• 1:37:02
  that somebody might be going through. So it's not, it's not like anybody that we're talking about
• 1:37:07
  is malicious in their intent. It's just, it's just not the best way to approach education. I don't,
• 1:37:14
  I don't like, I mean, you can make the same argument for a lot of online content. I guess it
• 1:37:18
  goes as I said, you shouldn't trust a lot of the stuff that you just, you're on online,
• 1:37:22
  like you have to vet and you have to do due diligence and you have to see, you know, the person
• 1:37:26
  teaching it what their experience is, but the same would go for like fitness education and what not
• 1:37:30
  that, you know, some people are so, so devoted to their one idea of how you lose weight or put on
• 1:37:37
  muscle or your diet or whatever. And there's a million different ways to do it. So I think that
• 1:37:41
  that's a really smart attitude. Just be open to different ideas. That's the best way to help someone.
• 1:37:45
  Well, bring a full circle. You're absolutely right. I mean, that makes it harder on us, right?
• 1:37:48
  When we're trying to educate people, but there's so much other education out there as a listener,
• 1:37:54
  it's hard to know what is true. And that's where I was come back to what I said earlier is like,
• 1:37:57
  I like to see evidence. I like to know what actually works, right? I've known a lot more people,
• 1:38:03
  even in people that hire us even, right? Accidentally become millionaires owning real estate than they
• 1:38:10
  ever have owning a mutual fund hands down 100% of the time, like and starting a business and
• 1:38:17
  start business. And that was going to be my next thing. That was at my exact next point too,
• 1:38:20
  because you know, I talk about Dave Ramsey, right? And you know, maybe he's kind of like my,
• 1:38:25
  you know, I'm he doesn't know who I am, but he's kind of like a nemesis to me in some ways. But
• 1:38:30
  again, going back to evidence, how did Dave Ramsey create all this wealth? Now he's claimed
• 1:38:35
  that recent interviews, he's worth like $700 million or whatever. That's BS. When I went to try
• 1:38:40
  to research, I actually thought it was true. But then I went to research and found out he's closer
• 1:38:44
  maybe $200 million, which in my mind is still like amazing. Why would he over inflate his number,
• 1:38:50
  right? The 200 million would be incredible. So anyways, so that's one thing is just like he's
• 1:38:56
  like even somebody on on their podcast, he even said, oh, he's a billionaire now like they like,
• 1:39:00
  they just keep inflating his number bigger and bigger. So I thought, okay, maybe we're 200 million.
• 1:39:04
  Where does he keep all his money? Where is his net worth? Because I want to know how much does he
• 1:39:08
  have invested in all his mutual funds? He keeps recommending, right? He keeps telling us what
• 1:39:12
  everybody else should do. If I wait, you should never buy a rental property unless you pay all cash
• 1:39:16
  for it. So you got to save up for many, many years, chasing inflation like a Dalmatian after
• 1:39:20
  fire truck. So you finally get it. And then you can buy that property, right? Well, I look at his
• 1:39:24
  net worth about 50 million arguably is the value of his business, right? Because remember, his business
• 1:39:31
  was the economic vehicle to allow him to buy the other 150 million of a net worth, which is real
• 1:39:36
  estate. He has very little negligible amounts in the stock market. Most of it is in real estate
• 1:39:43
  in his business. That's where he made all of his wealth real estate and business, right? And I
• 1:39:48
  would even argue it was his business first that he took the profits from that to then use that to buy
• 1:39:53
  the real estate he keeps talking about. So then that actually grew his wealth even bigger along with
• 1:39:58
  the valuation of his company too, right? And that right there, guys, like if that's not evidence
• 1:40:03
  enough, it's like don't do what they say, do what they've done, right? And I really believe the two
• 1:40:10
  best investments, I mean, number one, the best investments in yourself, your business, wherever you
• 1:40:13
  can control and how you generate, make money. Then number two, if you're going to gamble on anything,
• 1:40:19
  if you can have at least the right education to go with it, real estate. Like I think real estate is
• 1:40:23
  one of the safer places to store and keep your wealth and even grow your wealth when you do it
• 1:40:28
  the right way. So that's that's the biggest thing I would say is comfortable circle is that
• 1:40:33
  you remember even financial visors, remember when my friend asked me, he said, how many financial visors
• 1:40:37
  are financially free, not the commissions you earn, not if you're business, but actually off the
• 1:40:41
  investments, none of them are off those investments. It was all off of the commissions. The number one
• 1:40:46
  investment that financial visors offer is trying to hire people to become financial advisors. That
• 1:40:52
  was the only investment you see pay off with financial visors is becoming one of them. Unfortunately,
• 1:40:57
  you have to keep perpetuating the lies to become one of them. And so you have to kind of ask yourself,
• 1:41:01
  do I really want to do that or not? I love it. Okay. Chris, we went into a lot. What would be,
• 1:41:08
  I always like to ask this before we wrap up, what would be anything that we didn't go into that
• 1:41:14
  you wanted to cover or a question that I should have asked you that I didn't? Well, I think I
• 1:41:18
  discovered it now. So I kind of blended it in. But I mean, no, I mean, we covered a lot. You're
• 1:41:24
  right. I mean, I don't think there really is a question. Well, here's a question. If I were to,
• 1:41:29
  if I were you to just sum up more of what else can create more wealth, this is what changed for me
• 1:41:36
  in 2006. It wasn't just the investing in real estate. Remember, I mentioned those guys are talking
• 1:41:41
  about money and creating the abundance mentality and things like that. If you were to say, what's the
• 1:41:47
  number one way to create and make money is to stop thinking, how do I make more money?
• 1:41:54
  Instead, start asking, how do I create more value for more people? How do I solve problems?
• 1:41:59
  Serve people add value in such a way that money is just the byproduct of that service rendered
• 1:42:04
  or promise to be rendered. That for me is when everything changed. But I realized that money
• 1:42:10
  wasn't just about getting lucky or exploiting people like I used to think it was. Money was all
• 1:42:14
  about how do I serve people and show up in such a way that they say, I will give you these dollars
• 1:42:19
  to have you or whatever you offer your product, your service in my life. And especially if you're
• 1:42:24
  a business owner and even if you're an employee, you realize that everything comes back to how you
• 1:42:28
  create value for the people that pay you and you focus on that. What can I do is solve problems for
• 1:42:34
  you, serve you. What can I do that would merit me a raise at my job? What can I do for the company
• 1:42:39
  that would make me earn and worthy of a raise? I will do that. If you do that, you will always find
• 1:42:47
  out that money is formulaic. It's not by chance. It's not by luck. You don't have to get lucky or
• 1:42:53
  get in the right time of that right opportunity and all that kind of stuff. Get in the ground floor
• 1:42:57
  of that pyramid scheme. No, you can actually do it from anywhere you're standing by just focusing
• 1:43:02
  on how do I serve people, solve problems or create value in such a way that money is the byproduct of
• 1:43:08
  that. I love it. If people want to reach out to you, where do you want to send them? And also
• 1:43:15
  anything you want in the show notes, so we'll put link to the podcast website, socials,
• 1:43:19
  anything else as well. Just let us know on live on the show and then we'll also drop it in the
• 1:43:24
  in the show notes as well. Anything money ripples, right? That's ripples with a S on the end,
• 1:43:29
  right? Or IPP LES, not money nipples. That guy said that yesterday on the show on his podcast.
• 1:43:35
  Like, wait, I almost misread that. Sorry, it's money ripples. Like, nope, that's that's the other
• 1:43:39
  website. Not money. No, so money ripples. That's not that's not your website. That's someone else's
• 1:43:44
  right that I should buy it. I don't know. Just just make sure nobody gets confused there. But
• 1:43:49
  money ripples, that's at money ripples on all social media money ripples.com and even the money
• 1:43:52
  ripples podcast. Okay, perfect. Last question I like to ask, you know, you've had an incredible
• 1:43:59
  life you built. You've gone through sort of two times in your life, you've retired, you've built
• 1:44:05
  businesses, you've created wealth, you teach people. If you were going to leave one lesson out of
• 1:44:12
  all the things that you've learned, it could be business, it could be a philosophy life lesson,
• 1:44:18
  it could be a money lesson, you have to pick one lesson that you want to lead your kids with.
• 1:44:22
  What would be the most important lesson that you'd want them to really internalize?
• 1:44:28
  It probably goes along with what I just shared about the the vibration. But even going deeper than
• 1:44:33
  that is that people are the true assets, not things, right? It really is. I mean, even things they
• 1:44:39
  would have no value if there were no people on this planet, right? No one would care how big your
• 1:44:44
  house is or what it's worth or what kind of pool you have if there's no humans on the planet. That's
• 1:44:48
  the thing. It's always about really like you come to this earth of nothing, you leave with nothing,
• 1:44:53
  everything in between a stewardship. What are you going to do with that stewardship? What are
• 1:44:56
  you going to do with those resources? What are you going to do with that time that you have,
• 1:45:00
  right? What are you going to do with your talents? What are you going to do and how can you show
• 1:45:04
  up and serve people and leave a legacy of that? And so people are really the true assets, not things.