For the last few weeks, we’ve talked about how Americans are unprepared for any kind of retirement in this lifetime. But is it really your fault? Is it easier to just put it out of your mind and not think about it?
Most importantly…Is there HOPE?
Chris Miles will share how his recent auto accident reminded him of the importance of hope and optimism in your situation. Tune in now!
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Are You Discouraged By Your Financial Situation Right Now?
I know it’s not about getting rich. It’s because you have a deeper purpose behind this. You want to live a rich life where you can be able to bless the lives of others because as you are blessed financially, you have a greater capacity to be a blessing to those around you. That’s what it means to be a rippler. I’m so proud to be able to be a rippler with you guys. Thank you for allowing me to share my ripple effect through you, what we do here today, and the education. I’m not just giving you the education, but you guys are implementing those things. Thank you so much for doing that.
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I want to talk to you that I’ve spent several episodes where I’ve talked about what are the real numbers, the real statistics, and everything. I’ve painted a negative picture of what’s going on. This is not to discourage you at all. In fact, this is not to make you feel guilty. If anything, this is for me to point out the true villain. The villain isn’t you. The villain is the financial industry that’s been masking your eyes. They’ve been blindfolding you. They’re trying to help you think that somehow it’s your fault. You’re not saving up. It’s all on your shoulders. It’s not.
You have control of the situation. You can make choices, especially having new information I give you here on the show. This is not to imply that this is your fault. It’s not. It’s the financial industry, the financial advisors, and the companies they work for. I know because I worked in that industry. I was there. I drank the Kool-Aid and sold it to people like you as well. That’s the true problem here. It’s not about you.
I’m going to tell you guys a story because it became apparent to me in a different aspect of my life. A few weeks back, I was driving around. I had my September 1st, 2023 birthday. Shout out to those who have September birthdays. On the Labor Day weekend, I was hanging out with my kids. We went up to Park City, Utah. We rode on the chair lifts and everything and had an amazing time. I was even thinking, as I was driving back down from there, “This was the best birthday ever.”
I’ve had a lot of my birthdays that I had to make my own meals and do my own things. I still had to do that, too. Let’s be honest. I have to cook for the family still and even get my own birthday cake. Regardless of that, I still had a fun time enjoying it with my kids. As we were driving back, we realized that it was getting late because we hit traffic, especially with the holidays, so we said, “Let’s go to a restaurant for dinner.”
As we were driving down, and it’s a busy street and everything, we were about to turn into the left lane to turn into that restaurant. I looked back to check my blind spot because I knew I was getting in the lane early because I could see there was a lot of traffic. There was a green light there, so I was like, “The traffic is starting to move, but I’m going to get over earlier than that.” As I looked over and then looked back, what did I see? Nobody’s moved from the green light. Everybody stopped.
In that split second, I can hear my kid, my oldest daughter, like, “Dad, stop,” as I’m already breaking at that point. By the time I’m hitting the brakes and it responds, it’s barely starting to screech, and right into the car in front of me, it hit this little Honda Fit. It was in a flash. All of a sudden, I can’t see anything, realizing that now airbags are in my face. It was all deployed. There was smoke from the powder everywhere and the sound of liquid leaking out. The radiator fluid was leaking out of our car.
I hear my oldest daughter. She is seventeen. She’s like, “Everybody out of the car.” My daughter is the one being the general here. I’m still dazed. My wife realized she had broken her wrist because the airbag broke her wrist. The airbag blew open. After almost three weeks, I still have this nice little scar from not the airbag but the Nissan logo blasting open and hitting me in the arm. I have this Nissan logo branded into my arm right now. That’s it.
Both my wife and I are in pain because I’m holding my arm and she’s holding her other arm from the impact of breaking her wrist. She stumbled on the ground. I stumble out of the car, and then I look in front of me. What do I see? I see the car and the driver coming out. He’s holding his rib. He’s holding his side. I see there are two car seats, and I’m in absolute horror because I know that there are little kids in that car that I rear-ended. I immediately went to him and asked, “Are you okay?”
I’m looking inside and I see about a 4-year-old and a 6-month-old in there as well. I can see the four-year-old has a little bloody lip, but he seems to be fine. With the baby, I start panicking and freaking out, wondering, “Is everybody okay? What’s going to happen?” Regardless of what’s my demise, I was more worried about what was going on with them. In fact, I even left my family. Luckily, my oldest daughter was taking care of everybody. They were calling 911 because I didn’t know where my phone was. I didn’t even know where it was at that time. I was like, “I have no clue. It’s probably somewhere in the car.” I didn’t know.
They’re calling 911. Everything is happening. It’s like a big blur because I realize I’m going through shock. Long story short, my wife gets away in the ambulance. They take the 5-month-old away. The five-month-old is fine. They took that for precautions. Pretty much, it’s us. Pretty soon, I’m left alone other than some of my kids. My ex-wife comes to help us go to the hospital.
As I’m in the hospital, the gravity of the situation really starts to hit me. I start bawling and crying on and off all night long. My wife, they were trying to set her arm and everything else. I’m feeling this overwhelming amount of guilt. I’m feeling horrible. The people in the car in front of us, even their family members and everything, when they saw me in the hospital, they were like, “Is your family okay? We’re so grateful it wasn’t worse.” Luckily, I wasn’t driving at a super high speed at that point, but still, I was scared to death. I felt horrible. I’m responsible. Even the ticket says so.
That feeling or that post-traumatic stress from that event has stuck with me for the last few weeks. It has thrown me in a little bit of a loop, even though I’ve done everything. You guys have seen where I’ve produced episodes, the previous episodes, and even after the event, I’ve probably produced two episodes since that event, but still, it was something that really hit me to the core. I felt horrible. When I finally went to bed at 4:00 AM the next morning, when we finally got my wife released from the hospital, it was only three hours of sleep. During those three hours, every dream was about me tripping and falling. It was always having an accident. I wasn’t very restful. I was in a little funk for a while.
I realized that this is what you might be experiencing to some level. You might not be experiencing anything that’s traumatic, but over the years, every time I’ve spoken with hundreds of people, and they may be into the thousands, almost every time, people say as a disclaimer, “I know I’m not where I should be, but here’s my situation,” or, “I know it should be better than this. Here’s my situation.”
You start shooting all over yourself. You are like, “It should be this. It should look like this or that.” Who says what your finances should look like? Who told you that by a certain age, you should have X amount of dollars? Maybe it was a financial advisor, your parents, or the society that was telling you, “This is what your life should be like at this point.” Maybe you think from your expectation of knowing what’s possible and your potential, you probably know that you should be better.
The truth is that life throws curves at us all the time. I should have a car that’s not totaled, but it is what it is. I shouldn’t have been in an accident. That should have been something that should have been avoided. I told my kids, “I’ve probably driven over a million miles in my lifetime career,” whatever you want to call it with driving. Still, that was the worst event I’ve had. The odds are very small that I’m going to get in that traffic accident like that, especially where I caused it. Still, it caused me to reflect and threw a curve into those things. Life is going to throw curves at you. There are going to be things that are going to come up.
Even those who work with us one-on-one, our consulting clients, our VIP clients, I warned some of them. I said, “There is a lot of crap in the economy coming up. Even if you’re doing all the things right, things can still go wrong. There could still be an operator that may not pay you on time. You might get into a deal where it gets stressed and they have to try to figure out how to sell it so that you can get your money back and maybe some of your returns, too. You might end up going from what should be a cashflow deal to a 1 to 2-year time horizon when you finally get your money back and you don’t get paid anything in the meantime.”
That could happen. You could have a rental where the renters stop paying you. That could happen. You could have a situation where, all of a sudden, they pay you less than what they contractually said they were going to pay you. At least they pay you but it might not be as much as you expected. Cashflow could drop. That can happen even to our best clients doing the best due diligence. That can even happen to me in my situation.
I even have one person that they are five months behind on paying me. Does it mean they’ve lost my money? No. Despite all of that, I still have that surety and faith, knowing that at least I bought real assets, and then I have a real chance of getting that money back and then some. I couldn’t say that same thing when I put my faith in the stock market. When I put my faith into stocks, it was not even faith. It was a wish. I was like, “I hope it comes back.” It’s not a good hope. It’s the hope of, “This better play out the way I hope it does.”
I hoped I would be retired by the time I was 40, packing away as much money as I could in the stock market. Even if I made a ton of money as an advisor, I still pushed everything I could in there and lived cheaply. It was so that I could have enough money to live on a $5,000-a-month lifestyle by the time I was 40. That was the life that I was trying to aim for. That wouldn’t have happened based on what those markets had done.
Even though the 2010s were great, still, the mid-2000s to the late 2000s weren’t so pretty. In the 2000 to 2010 time period, the market was still down. It was down over those ten years, not up. If I would’ve stayed in the market, I would’ve had to wait until 2015-plus before I might’ve had my money back. You guys have heard this story before. I say this because if you’re feeling bad about your situation, maybe the market wasn’t friendly to you and to anybody, and you’re getting less than market returns, which isn’t impressive at all, you’re going to feel behind.
If you’ve been living life and you had kids, maybe medical emergencies came up, or there were layoffs in the interim that happened, those curves are going to happen. All of a sudden, it’s going to throw off your idealistic future projections. Even people who are doing the Dave Ramsey method are trying to pay off their debt. If something like that comes up, it slows it down. You are going to feel guilty and discouraged.
Know this. As you keep having a positive outlook, and I don’t want to sound a little naive or anything like here when I say that, and you try to look at this from a different angle like I had to look at this accident, I had to look at it like others looked at it. They were grateful. Even my wife was looking at the accident as a blessing. It may not be all the time, but even right after it happened, she felt at peace.
I wasn’t feeling that peace. The peace was my choice. The peace wasn’t happening because I interpreted that as a bad thing rather than being grateful and saying, “Maybe this happened for a reason or this helped me look at my life from a different perspective to slow down and re-prioritize things. I need to prioritize my family. I need to prioritize what I’m doing here for you guys in Money Ripples and make sure that’s all happening.” What if that were happening for me rather than to me? What if that were the case? What if that’s exactly what needed to happen for me to have something better happen in my life?
The same thing happened to me in the last recession. For those of you who know my story, I went broke in the last recession. I didn’t go bankrupt, but I was worse than bankrupt. Bankrupt, at least I could hit the reset button and go back to zero. I was negative $1 million in debt. A lot of people will even ask me, “How’d you do it?” It wasn’t easy. I had to learn a lot of lessons along the way. I had learned to be a better investor and even a better business owner because I was in business. I learned how to generate better income. I was starting from nothing. I had no money, no credit, nothing like that.
I remember at that time having to re-contextualize and saying, “What if this situation is exactly what’s supposed to happen to me in my life? Maybe this is not a coincidence.” Even though some people might say, “I don’t believe in fate,” it doesn’t matter. What if this were the exact experience I needed to be able to inspire more hope for you in the future?
Maybe you’re starting at zero. Guess what? That’s $1 million better and more ahead than I was in 2008 and 2009. By 2016, I can become financially independent for the second time. Maybe there’s hope for you, too. It doesn’t mean it was easy. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t have to put a lot of focus and attention into generating more income for my business. I had to make sure that I kept my expenses lower so I had more cashflow and that I had enough cash to then invest and create that passive income. That was required. It required me to do a lot of active things, not just passive things. That shouldn’t be any different for any of you.
For some of you, if you hadn’t had anything bad happen and maybe had a nice smooth ride, that’s great. That’s awesome. Take advantage of it right now. This is your opportunity. I want you to know this. This is not your fault. Don’t feel any shame. Remember, if I was in a situation worse than yours, how can I judge you? How can I even judge that your situation’s bad? The truth is we don’t.
There are people who are supersavers out there who think that life should be perfect and that you should be perfect too. They’re like, “That is dumb and cash is king,” and all that kind of stuff. Those people are going to wave that finger of judgment at you all day long. That’s not happening here. I’m not doing that to you at all. I have a lot of empathy for your situation and compassion because I’ve been in the depths of crud.
Not to mention, not only was I broke, but I was the guy who was supposed to have it all figured out who had this Imposter syndrome now. I had this factor that I felt like I was completely out of integrity, which is why I stopped teaching people how to get out of the rat race. That’s why I started teaching people how to find money and how to get resourceful because I could only teach what I was doing. I didn’t start teaching you guys about passive income in the show until I was investing for passive income and got out of the rat race myself.
I want you to know that I can only teach what I know. I want you to know that this is about you and your situation. Wherever you are right now, it’s perfect. Even if you feel like everything is going against you, don’t worry. Even if things aren’t going against you right now or you say, “I’m not where I thought I would be. I’m now in my 40s or my 50s. Maybe I’m in my 60s, and still, I have no hope of freedom in my near future.” Maybe you do and you don’t know it, or you need a different set of eyes to see something that you didn’t see before. Sometimes, it takes somebody with a new perspective to do that.
In that accident, if it weren’t for my wife, and especially the people in the car in front of me who didn’t have a different perspective, I might have wallowed in this longer. Seeing that new perspective and saying, “If these people that were the ‘victims’ of my actions are okay, maybe I am, too. I’ll be okay.” There’s still that sorrow or that sadness that I felt. There’s that guilt.
I’m now driving probably over cautiously. Now, I get freaked out when I see somebody cut me off, which happened this morning on the way to doing this episode. Regardless of that, still have grace for yourself and others. There’s plenty of grace and opportunity for you to be able to get out of your situation. It may not be overnight. I’m not going to say you’re going to get rich quick overnight. That’s not the case.
For some of you, we could probably get you financially free in the next year. Know that wherever you are, I don’t care if it’s going to take you 15 to 20 years, think of this. If it’s 15 to 20 years that you could get yourself out of the rat race and free, wouldn’t that be better than possibly never? Wouldn’t that be better than maybe 40 or 50 years if you’re lucky?
Maybe you’re getting to the point where you don’t have that life of freedom but you have a life of barely living. I never want that to be for you guys. That’s why the show is here. That’s why I’m trying to create this ripple effect through your life. This is not just for you to read it, but to do something about it. Instead of feeling guilty about it, do something. You now have the choice. You are empowered to do something different with it. It requires you to take that first step.
It might be that you go to our website, MoneyRipples.com. There’s that Passive Income Calculator. Try it out. Even if the number is negative, that’s not a problem. There are things you can be doing like infinite banking. We offer you education on how to prepare yourself to create more passive income, have more cashflow now, and increase and improve your cashflow right away. Many of you don’t know this, or maybe you do. When you become an infinite banking client of ours, we offer you the Wealth Accelerator Academy for no charge.
In fact, it’s pretty much indefinite. I haven’t put a deadline on when it stops. Usually, it’s a $1,000-a-year membership. For you guys, if you get an infinite banking policy, it’s done. That doesn’t matter if you guys are putting away $4,000 or $5,000 a year and that’s all you’re saving into these things. That’s enough. That’s the thing. Any little action you take, we want to reward you for that. We want you to feel good and keep being encouraged. The truth is we need more encouragement in this world. I felt my own fair share of discouragement in this world. It’s nice to have a little bit of encouragement. You deserve that, too.
We’re not coming from a place of judgment. We know that you have hope. No matter how bad your situation is, there is hope. It may not be easy to be able to turn your life around, but I can promise you this. Looking in hindsight now from going through some really ugly crap financially, I can tell you it’s 100% worth it to have a life where I can wake up each day knowing I have an option. I have a choice. I could do this or not. I can have Money Ripples. I could shut it down.
The thing is, you are the reason why Money Ripples exists. You are the ripple effect that I’m here to create and that I know my team is here to support and create as well. You have hope. You have a real fighting chance to have that time back and real freedom that everybody else tells you that you can have but they never get you there. That’s why we’re here today. That’s why we exist. That is our mission. That’s why we want over 1,000 of these families or of you guys right now financially independent by 2030. I know there will be thousands more even after that year.
Do something. Take action from here to make your life change today. Click To TweetIt’s your choice what you do with it. I don’t care what you do. Make sure you do something with this. Don’t wallow in the disappointment. Don’t feel discouraged or feel like you’re behind. Even if you feel like you’re ahead or maybe overly confident, either way or regardless, do something. Take action from here to make your life change today. Make it a wonderful and prosperous week. I’ll see you later.
Important Links
- Money Ripples – YouTube
- iTunes – Money Ripples
- Passive Income Calculator