Your Golden Opportunity | 423

What is today’s big opportunity?

Where can you find cash for investing?

How does the CARES Act help?

Is your 401k available now?

In this episode, Chris Miles shares why NOW may be the best time to get your hands on more money. Find out how! Watch this 15-min episode now.

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Hello, my fellow Ripplers! This is Chris Miles. Your Cash Flow Expert and Anti-Financial Advisor. Welcome you out for a fantastic show. Show that is for you. And it’s about you. Those of you that work so hard for your money and you’re ready for your money to start working harder for you. Now! You want that freedom. You want that cash flow. You want that prosperity. Today! Not waiting 30 or 40 years from now, right? You want it now! Because that’s all we have. It’s the time to do it. And you want to work because you want to. Not because you have to, right? You want to be able to have options, have freedom because cash flow creates options. You have more options that creates real freedom.

But guys, it’s so much more than just having that abundant lifestyle, right? Although that’s an amazing part of it. But it’s also about creating a massive blessing in the lives of others. Because as a Rippler, you’re here to create a ripple effect to the lives of others too. Especially as you liberate yourself financially, you can do the same for others. Guys, and I appreciate you allowing me to create that ripple effect through you because without you, this would not be possible. As you guys bingeing on these podcasts and sharing them and creating conversations with other people and saying, Hey, let’s create a better level of freedom than we’ve ever seen before. Right? Not going off the same old mainstream advice of save everything, spend nothing and make no money, essentially. You know, gamble in the stock market and then hope that somebody might have some sort of freedom. You guys deserve better than that. And so I’m appreciative of you guys being here.

Hey! As a reminder, you can always check out our website, MoneyRipples.com On there we’ve got the blogs. We even got video blogs or video podcasts of this show under the blog section. We also have that free ebook Beyond Rice and Beans. So if you’re trying to find more cash to be able to use, to work for you now check out that book.

Alright! So today guys, I want to talk about like opportunity, right? Because right now there is an abundant opportunity and I’m seeing it everywhere. But the opportunity isn’t so much an investment as it is an opportunity to get liquid. To get money in your hands. So then you can go and invest and make more with it. Now I know some of you guys, like some of you are looking for ways to get money, right? But there’s two big places. And I mention this a lot. Two huge places where I often find money can be utilized right away. It’s either one that’s in savings, including retirement savings or two it’s in house equity.

Whether it’s be your own house or it’s the equity from houses, maybe you happen to own. Maybe you have a second home or a rental property or rental properties that you have. And I’m telling you right now, there’s a big green light currently. So we’ve got a few things, right? So with the cares act, obviously there’s ways to tap into the retirement. You know, you can actually tap into retirement if you’ve been affected by COVID. Now I’m not saying you just got sick with it. Although that could be the case. If you had to stay home and do a 14 day quarantine, cause you were with your loved ones, got sick with COVID. Right? But on top of that, if your job has been affected, you know, where your hours have been cut back, or maybe you lost bonuses because the company is not doing as well or anything of that nature, maybe you didn’t get that pay raise, or maybe they give you a pay cut or maybe you had, you got furloughed for a few weeks or whatever it might be.

If you had any kind of interruption, you have this ability to be able to access up to a hundred thousand dollars of your 401k or IRA money. And you can either just cash it out or you can borrow it. A lot of times, I think cashing out would even end up being better because you’ve got a golden opportunity right now, where if you cash that money out and again, I’m not giving you a recommendation right now. I’m just telling you the options and what would happen. And the consequences of this. If you cash out up to a hundred grand, you can avoid that 10% early withdrawal penalty. If you’re not 59 and a half. Now, if you’re over 59 and a half, it doesn’t really matter as much. And the only thing that does matter, and this applies to both groups, whether you’re a 59 and a half or not. Is you can actually spread those taxes up over the next three years. If you’re cashing it out.

Now, if you’re borrowing it, you can pay it back. But if you’re cashing it out, you can actually break up those taxes over the next three years, rather than all at once. And so this is a great opportunity to be able to access cash there. But that’s not going to be the focus of my show today, the focus of my show is going to be what I’m seeing right now, which is this golden opportunity to access equity from your property or properties. Right? If you’ve got more than one. If you’ve got rental properties right now, here’s what we’re seeing happen in the market, right? We’re seeing right now, people are actually fighting for houses. It is completely a sellers market right now. Not so much of buyer’s market, but it is much more of a seller’s market. So people are pining right now.

There’s bidding wars going on. Even with higher end homes. Even in my own neighborhood, I had a neighbor who had three or four people, all bidding trying to outbid each other end up going for a higher price in their listing price, right? So, which is always awesome to see that kind of thing happening. Now, why is that happening? Even with everything going on in the economy, right? Now, I do believe that we already know we’ve entered into a recession officially. I do believe that this isn’t going to be a V-shape recovery. I fully believe it doesn’t matter what government does. We’re going to be more like a U shaped recovery, right? It’s going to take some time to come back, but I don’t think we’re even close to the bottom. And this especially includes the stock market.

But here’s the opportunity. Stock market’s at a high, right? So when I just mentioned about getting access to your funds, this could be the best time to get access to funds. When the market came back up. And also house prices were at a high because all of this competition. So if you’ve got rental properties, you might have so much equity in those properties. It might be worthwhile tapping into this equity by selling those properties and moving that equity into buying more properties. This can be the perfect time. Cause your cash flow may not be as high as it could be. If you move into other properties. Again, this is not recommendation. I’m just posing these opinions, these options, right? Because I’m seeing the same thing happen for my stuff. Even my own house, I just had a comp done on it, a realtor. I said, Hey, go ahead and run comps to see what our house is doing.

From last year. I already saw the house appreciate by more than 10% from the year, year to year. That’s huge guys! And here’s what’s happening. Here’s the one reason why it’s driving it up. The interest rates have tanked lower than they were during the last recession. So now you can get an interest rate below 3%, even for a 30 year fixed. Guys, this is dirt cheap money. This means views that cash flow index I talk about, right? That means index at 230, 240. So that means for every 230,000 or 240,000 you borrow, you’re only paying a thousand dollars a month, right? I mean, that is incredible! This is beyond cheap. You know? So here’s a few things you can do. One, you can actually go and refinance. Right now could be a great time to refinance. Even if it’s just a simple rate and term refinances they call it. Where you’re just refinancing the current loan.

If now, if you’re three and a half percent or less, it may not be worthwhile, right? But maybe you are three and a half percent, but you’ve refinanced it 5, 10 years ago. This could be the best time to free up cash flow. I’m telling you, as you move in a recession, the best thing you can do is have the lowest payment possible. This is why I’m not a big fan of doing 15 year mortgages right now. Even though the interest rate. And I just saw a guy that reached out to me, he said, Hey, I’m getting 2.625 on my 15 year mortgage. I said, that’s awesome. That’s great. And he’s even freeing up a little bit of cash. But I’ll tell you, the lower the payment, the better. You can always pay yourself that difference in payment, right? You can always pay yourself into cash.

You can put in the savings. Yes, you can put in life insurance. You could put it in different places where it can work for you better. You can put into investments. You can get that money working for you to then go and pay it off down the road. That’s absolutely the key. Again, it has to be about saving the difference, right? It’s not about just going cheap and then spent and blowing all the rest of your money. That’s not what a wise steward will do. Wise steward says, Hey, I freed up $500 a month or $300 a month or whatever it might be on that mortgage. And they’re going to take that 300 or 500 a month. And they’re going to apply it to some sort of savings somewhere to build equity. But I recommend outside the home. Don’t put it back towards a mortgage, although you could.

But I don’t recommend doing that. The last thing you want to do is put this money back into a house where it gets locked up. It’s just like a 401k, right? You just lock it up in prison and you can’t access it. It’s there. And especially if things go sour. Banks are definitely not in favor of trying to give you money back in your hands. So that I completely believe that the most conservative thing you can actually do is refinance to a 30 year mortgage, very low risk at that lowest payment possible. And then any extra money you could do that have been freed up that goes towards savings. That goes towards billing and buying more assets, especially cash flowing assets. It can also go towards paying down loans. You know, if you’ve got some of those low cash flow index loans like we talked about in other shows that might be worthwhile too.

So that’s again, all things to consider, right? There’s lots of things you can do there. There’s a refinance that can be great. Also selling your home could be a good option because here’s the thing. Is even if you try to do a cash out refinance, right? If you were, you want to get equity out, you can do that with the banks right now, but they’ll only let you get up to 80% of your home’s value. So if your house is worth $500,000, they’ll only let you access up to 400,000 total. That’s the total amount of mortgages that max they’ll let you have. And that’s pretty standard across the board, across the country right now. But you know, if you’re saying, you know what, maybe with the market being at the high where it is right now, maybe I want to go rent. You know, maybe I want to get all that cash out, get that money work for me. I go rent.

That’s a strategy. It’s not necessarily always going to be the best strategy and it’s case by case. That could be an option. And of course you could just say, cool, I’m taking that equity out, selling the house and putting a minimal down payment on the next house. And now I’m getting low 3% interest rates on that next house. Right. Which could be good too, either way. There’s opportunity. You know, I was talking to somebody just the other day and this came up, they had a house that was paid off about worth 150,000 or so. And, but it was fully paid off. And I was like, okay, well I’m seeing your situation. I actually looked at their situation. I said, even if we don’t do much with the house, you could easily increase your cashflow by $75,000 this year, right?

Their goal is to get up about double that or so. And so I said, you could do this. I said, if you had your house equity, you could do more. And they said, well, Chris, you know, we could refinance, but we’re thinking about actually about selling our house here pretty soon. I say, great! Sell the house, get the equity out of it, put a minimal down payment on the next house, right? Don’t go dump every single penny of equity you have from that house into the next one. Just go and put the minimal down payment you need to do. It could be, you know, 5%. It could be 10%, right? Whatever it might be. Put that money down. The rest of this cash. Now it’s free and clear. We can use to go make more money. And so let’s just say on the next house, I put a hundred grand down, but they made another 600 grand on the house sale. Well, great! That’s 600 grand. We can go and use and easily make at least $60,000 a year of passive income from that money. That’s now not tied up and locked up in their house.

So guys, that is what I’m talking about. That is the opportunity is that you have the ability right now. This year especially. You have the ability to get cash out. Cash out from your retirement plans that aren’t really making money for you right now. You can get cash out from your equity of your home. You have these resources. And the worst thing you do is have this high net worth, but have that net worth not pay you because net worth is worthless, unless it’s actually creating real freedom for you. Right? And I like having net worth, don’t get me wrong. But I like having that money in my control.

I like having that money working for me, especially if you can create passive stable income. That is the goal, right? And why do we want passive stable income? Because we want to have options in our life. Just like I said, at the beginning of the show. When you create more cash flow, you create more options. You create more choices you can make. You can, you don’t just feel like you’re stuck in a rut where you have only one path. You’ll now start opening up and creating multiple paths. And when you have multiple paths to choose from that is where there’s freedom. There is responsibility, but there’s massive freedom with that too. And guys, like this is the time. Interest rates are low. You know, you can’t really get full access to your equity of your home, but at least can get some, but at least you got low interest rates or refinance or selling your home could be great.

And of course, because the cares act, you can even get access to money that normally would have been tied up. That usually they say, Nope, you can’t touch this unless you quit your job or you get fired. Right? In which you’re neither preferable, but there are options now. And again, the market’s at a high, real estate’s at a high, when things are at a high, what is the old mantra? You buy low, sell what? Sell high. Again, that’s not a recommendation saying you guys should go and sell everything off. There’s always different circumstances and different conditions. I’m just saying you might want to consider this. You might want to consider that this could be your chance to get your money, actually doing something for you. To get your money out of that prison and get it working for you right now. That is the golden opportunity available to you.

The question is, will you take advantage of it? Or you watch it pass you by? And if you do decide to watch it pass you by, how many other times have you done that in your life? Is that happening a lot? Is that a regulatory occurrence? You’ll start to wonder, if the only thing separating from you and financial freedom has nothing to do with the strategies, has nothing to do with your money, has everything to do with you. And guys, you know, I’m telling you freedom is possible. There’s hope. There’s ways to do this. And there’s still opportunities right now. There are still great opportunities to create that freedom. The question is, will you act or will you sleep? Guys, I hope you make a wonderful and prosperous week. We’ll see you later.