You often hear about Chris Miles’ experiences. But how are his clients taking these principles and strategies and applying them?
Who gets the best results?
Cash Flow Expert and Anti-Financial Adviser, Chris Miles, will share some of the ways people are getting results, including someone saving $100,000+ every year in taxes.
Tune in now!
Chris Miles Bio:
Chris Miles, the “Cash Flow Expert,” is a leading authority on how to quickly free up and create cash flow for thousands of his clients, entrepreneurs, and others internationally! He’s an author, speaker, and radio host that has been featured in US News, CNN Money, Bankrate, Entrepreneur on Fire, and has spoken to thousands getting them fast financial results.
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Listen to the podcast here
How Are People Applying This Stuff?
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I always come from experience. Experience is always my number one place to come from because that’s where I speak most appropriately. Let’s talk about what helps others truly create that financial freedom. What allows them to do what they’re doing? What are my clients doing now? I wanted to share real-life examples of how others are applying this, not just me. I’m flattered. I get people all the time that reach out to me and say, “I love your show. I’ve been reading it. I need to hire you. What do you do?” It’s always funny because I’m like, “I love that you guys trust me. I appreciate that.”
Let me talk more about what I have done for people or helped them do with me. I do co-create with people. I don’t force people on anything. I’m not someone who just says, “Here’s what you need to do. Go do it,” although some people want me to do that. My thing is more like, “Here are ideas. Here’s what I see. How about you? Let’s see what’s best for you.” That’s different for everybody. Not everybody takes my advice. I respect that. It frustrates me sometimes. For the most part, when people take my advice, it usually leads to good things. Even if they don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel quite in the beginning, it does lead to that way. Let me talk about that a little bit.
Cash Flow Optimizer
Many people have come to me because they’ll say, “I would love it if you help me with money management.” A lot of times, they’ll say, “I need help with my cashflow and my money management. How do I deal with it? I’m making more money, but where’s it all going?” This happens with business owners and, surprisingly, even employees alike. I’ll get a very high-income employee that usually makes at least $100,000 to $200,000 a year, but they’re like, “I feel like I could do better.” A lot of it is about how we manage the money.
When I have people work with me as a client, I have an Excel spreadsheet. I call it a cashflow optimizer. In this, we look at everything from income, expenses, assets, liabilities, loans, and everything. It’s funny because a lot of people I’ve talked to, even though they make good money, there are little things we could do to free up some cashflow, maybe a couple of hundred bucks a month max, in some cases. At least with employees, it seems like that. The people I’ve been attracting are pretty good savers already. It’s not like they’re blowing money, if anything. It’s more just getting them to look. This worked for me as well as for many of my clients, creating awareness and getting people to look at their money.
I’ve watched people free up cashflow that seems like magic just by tracking their money. That’s the biggest thing. The biggest hurdle for me to get people to do is getting them to, “Track your money. Look at your income and expenses using Mint.com or something like that for your personal. If you’re in business, use QuickBooks or both if you have business and personal finances.” Try to manage all those things. It’s not that hard.
The biggest obstacle is in your brain. I had one lady who felt she was so busy in her business that she couldn’t take time to look at her money, but when we got her husband to do that, we found $1,500 a month. She didn’t have to sacrifice her lifestyle. It wasn’t like they had to stop having fun. It wasn’t like they couldn’t go out to eat from time to time. We got it under control, and it saved her $1,500 a month. That’s $18,000 a year.
I’ll tell you one guy. This guy was a good saver. This guy was a dentist out in Virginia. With him, it was amazing because we did some other strategies with his personal finances. We didn’t find a whole lot on the cashflow silenced personal side, but he decided to apply it to his practice. He went to look into his business. When he started looking at where he needed to trim the fat a little bit and be more productive and find out what’s a productive expense versus a destructive or consumptive one, we found out that he spent about $16,000 a month that he could free up. That was $200,000 a year.
Not losing money is the number one way for you to actually have more of it. Click To TweetIt doesn’t make a big deal. Sometimes creating awareness around your money is all it’s needed. Not to mention, it creates a lot more confidence. I’ve seen a lot of people who feel more confident to take action on things, whether investing in their business or in other streams of income or whatever it might be. When they finally get to know where their money is, and a lot of times, we discover that together, it’s a lot easier to make a strategy, feel confident about it, and move forward. That’s one of the biggest obstacles. I can see why many people say, “I want money management,” because it is key. It’s not everything, but it’s an essential foundation to start with.
Tax Savings
The next one is taxes. Taxes are a huge one. I had somebody that I did a call with them. I’d refer them to an accountant a little bit earlier. This is our first official call to dig into the numbers. He already started to meet with one of my accountants early on. He came back and said, “I’m hiring them. I’m getting ready to move everything over and get it all set.” I was like, “I know taxes are a huge part of your bill.” It was about 40% of his income because he was bringing home $600,000 to about $800,000 a year from his business. I was like, “What are they going to save you?”
He says, “Some of the changes we talked about with how he changed the corporate structure and everything else. We’ll save about a little over $100,000 a year, which is huge. Our business is probably going to at least triple this year. That’s going to triple my income, too, at least. I need this because this could be hundreds of thousands of dollars a year eventually within the next few years.” I was like, “That’s awesome.”
Loans And Debt
That’s not always the case. That’s pretty awesome. That’s the tax savings winner of the year. Usually, we find $5,000 or $10,000 or sometimes more. It depends if they’re a business owner like this guy who had a business but also wanted to do investing stuff. We found all things on the tax side of things. For people that are employees, you have to get a little more creative to find some tax savings, but there are still some ways. In any case, with him, that was huge, and I’ve had other business owners.
I remember the very first time I had a chiropractic coach. This was when I started breaking the chiropractic market back in 2009. The chiropractic coach I worked with got working with one of my accountants. When he came back and reported back, he was in tears crying because he was like, “I’ve been overpaying by $50,000 a year on my taxes. I thought I had an awesome accountant. He was even focused on chiropractors. I was wrong.” I was like, “There you go.” A lot of times, it’s just simple strategies.
A lot of this stuff is how you use your corporation, how you can structure it, show your income, and things like that, which is awesome. Even if you’re an employee, looking at having a side business would be a huge benefit to you. For some people, that side business, if you’re looking at the investing route, might be coming from a professional real estate investor.
One of the big qualifications you have to hit is you have to average over the course of a year about fifteen hours of focus per week, whether it be you or your spouse, if you have a spouse, that’s maybe working part-time or is at home. Maybe you could have them become the actual person that comes to a real estate investor. You can now start getting some bigger tax claims off your income and things like that.
There are all fun things you do. We always find stuff. For the most part, we do. Especially if you’re a business owner, we usually find something. If you’re an employee, we don’t always find it. Dealing with people’s loans, debts, and things like that, sometimes they’ll come to me and might make great money and have a lot of debt too. They’re wondering what to do. Sometimes it feels overwhelming, and they’re not sure how to address it.
That’s one big thing we address like, “Let’s talk about your debt.” I’ve shared this experience before, but this was one of the best ones because I love it because she worked for a credit union as an accountant, and it wasn’t something we were expecting. We were expecting spending find more and make some money on investments, tax savings, and things like that, which we did. We didn’t expect to find money in the ways we could free up cash with restructuring loans and things like that. In their case, we restructured their loans, consolidated everything with their mortgage, and saved them $4,163 a month from that one move. That’s about $50,000 a year. That was tremendously huge.
The thing is that allowed freedom. They give them a choice because they realize, “One of us could probably quit our job or our business if we want it to. We can stop now. We’re okay. We don’t have to have two sources of income,” but they still do because now the cool thing is they could pocket that money and use it. They had life experiences that came up that made them grateful they had it because there are some things that cost them some money, but now they have the cash to do it.
I remember one guy. This guy is creative. He is a chiropractor as well. In his case, we looked at both his business loans as well as personal. We realized, “If we can restructure a few things, pay down some loans and things like this, we can free up almost $40,000 a year.” It’s like $34,000 or something like that. The way to do that, the only money we had access to was his 401(k) he did through his office. We cashed in his 401(k) even though he’s about 40 years old. He started 20 years ago for his 401(k). He ended up cashing it in.
He had to cash in $120,000 so he could access $70,000 of it because it went to penalties, taxes, and surrender fees. He had had a good chunk of money withheld. Lo and behold, we were able to take that $70,000 and free up that $40,000 a year. Even if it was $120,000 to 401(k), to create $40,000 a year is tremendous. That’s a 33% rate of return on his 401(k) guaranteed. No mutual fund could ever guarantee that. In fact, even as amazing as the stock market’s been, it has not ever done 33% a year. That’s crazy.
Not Losing Money
It created a lot of freedom in his life immediately. That is one that’s fun for me. Another key one is not losing money. I’ve had a few clients where the biggest thing I told them is like, “Not losing money is going to be the number one way for you to have more of it.” I had one client who was an amazing man. He is very successful on his own in the dental industry and is a great man. He goes after me. He’s like, “I’m not finding all the tax savings you would hope we’d find. I’m not finding this. Where’s my return on investment?”
This is one of the biggest clients I’ve had, where he hired me for $17,000. He was getting upset. I said, “You’re right. We haven’t found all of that within the first couple of months now, but I bet you we will. In one place, I guarantee I’ll find it. It is you’re investing because you suck as an investor. That’s the truth. You’re a great business person, but you suck at investing. You don’t even understand how to do it. You do all these creative things, but you don’t understand what’s going on.” He’s like, “You’re right. I can see that. I’ll give you a few more months. Show me.”
If somebody ever says, “Show me the money,” I’m going to show you the door. I am not going to take you as a client if you’re going to be constantly challenging me. Honestly, I don’t like that pressure. I find results one way or the other. If I think I can find a result or I can’t, I’ll tell you. In this case, this is somebody else that got them hired for me, somebody else that brought them to me and said, “Will you work with them?” I took them on. Luckily, it turned out great, as you’ll find out. If somebody comes to me like, “I hope you show me how to get this return on investment,” I’m not going to. Even if I can, I don’t care because it takes me off because of that attitude because usually, they end up sitting back and doing nothing. They wait for me to give them something.
I helped them out and said, “Here. Let’s secure what you did. Only $250,000 of what he had, he’d be kept with a friend that was in Canada who was a financial advisor.” Here’s what happened. Flash forward one year later, he called me up and said, “I don’t know how you do it. Even if I only bring home about $120,000 or $130,000 a year, my net worth went up $100,000.” I was like, “It’s because you didn’t lose money.” That’s the key.
The number one money leak for some people is the money you never see in the first place: the opportunity cost. Click To TweetYou’ve seen your net worth go up every year, but when you don’t lose money, it’s amazing how fast it can go, especially when things are growing and you don’t lose money. You get both, growth and not losing money. It’s huge. That was big for him. Funny enough, flash forward, two years later, he took me out to dinner. He came to Salt Lake City and said, “Let’s go to dinner.”
He told me, “It’s been awesome. The things you taught me helped. Here’s what’s funny. That $250,000 million that I kept with my friend, he embezzled it. He ran off of it. He went out of the country with my money.” I was like, “That sucks. Sorry for you.” He’s like, “It’s okay. You got me set in so many other ways. That hurts, but it’s not the end of the world. Thank you so much.” Not losing money is key.
I had another client who got a huge amount of money from selling his business. I told him, “Do not do anything until you talk to me about how to invest and the things you need to look for because investment opportunities will pop up when you have this money.” He was worried. He’s like, “I don’t know what to do with this money. I don’t want to burn a hole in my pocket.” “Settle down. We can do that. It’s better to have a couple of months to do this than to lose all your money.” He ended up not contacting me for six months. I kept reaching out to him. He never got back to me.
Six months later, he’s like, “Other than the house I bought cash and a farm, I’m out of money. I lost it all to different people.” I’m like, “How’d you even find these different investments? Some of them were in crazy places and stuff.” Just because he had a big heart for some people, he ended up saying, “I believe in you. I put money in and lost it.” Losing money can sometimes be people’s number one money leak that they have in their life.
Passive Income
This is the last one. This one is dealing with investing as well regarding passive income. This has become one of my favorites because the thing I love is whether you’re in business or you’re an employee, the thing that creates a lot of freedom is knowing that you have that cashflow. We can find it from different things like expenses. A lot of these things dealt with managing your money, debt, taxes, not losing money in investing, and things like that. It’s regarding the loss of money, but how about the gain of money?
The number one money leak for some people is the money you never see in the first place. It’s the opportunity cost. This one’s fun because even if you’re a business, sometimes there are ways to create residual streams of income within your business if you have the right systems in place. It requires work upfront, just like anything does if it’s a real investment, but it can produce great rewards for you. I’ve had people too, where we looked at other streams of income, like passive streams outside of their business or outside of their main job. There are great ways to do that.
I had a client who got a good chunk of cash to put up front. With that amazing chunk of cash, his goal is to get to $20,000 a month of passive income, which is a pretty ambitious goal for people. What happened is that because he had that chunk of cash upfront and he had cashflow to go with it, he could probably retire within 2 to 3 years pretty comfortably. The reality is that in his business, within his practice, he could probably become a partner, still get some streams of income without having to work hard in it, and retire easily within 1 to 2 years if he wanted to or he needs to keep working. One of my favorite things about creating this situation with cashflow and passive income is that I love it when people choose to work because they love it and not because they need the money but because they do what they want.
I had a client who got laid off, which freaked both of us. I was like, “We had a pretty good aggressive plan go. We had the game plan started being laid out,” and all of a sudden, the game plan had to change. Fortunately, when we started looking at the numbers and still looking at everything, we found out, “You’re okay. We got stuff into place. You’ve got a few thousand dollars a month of passive income.” We got some other properties in the middle of the process, but luckily we could transfer it to her husband. That can still get them some passive income and work some other things. The cool thing is her 401(k) is free now.
That’s like $100,000 she could use there. The cool thing is it didn’t throw off the plan that much. If she gets a job, even better. She’s rehired, but now she has a choice of, “Maybe we start working from home, or maybe we work a little less full-time than what you were working.” We find out with the cashflow that she’ll need an extra few thousand dollars a month. She didn’t need to make the full amount of income she was making. If she could make that income, that would be sweet too. Passive income is fun.
One of the funniest things I’ve had is somebody who wanted to look at the numbers of everything. He only had about $75,000, but he had the extra cashflow. Where we put the focus is even if you start with $75,000, you can do something. He wanted to try to retire fast. The good news is if we have a lot of income and cashflow, which is why we look at other things, too, that could accelerate his progress. It was $75,000. You usually think, “You should be able to beat anybody who has at least $250,000 or $300,000.” It’s true in many cases if all things are equal. We found that he could do it because he’s at the cashflow.
We started to do some things, find some areas, and we’re like, “We can even have you put away $100,000 if you stay disciplined and you keep managing your money on top of that $75,000.” The cool thing is he could probably retire in about five years. He could probably get to that $10,000 a month or so passive income by that point. That’s not including anything else he might do creating income streams, whether business streams or whatever it might be. That’s creating passive income.
The beauty of it is that no matter where you are, the thing is, if we create cashflow now, we focus on that. It might mean you got to work your tail off a little bit. You sacrifice a little bit now without sacrificing your family or your life, but at least sacrifice some mental energy and focus, not just sit back and be lazy, but create with this. It’s amazing how quickly you can create a life of freedom. That’s going to be the end goal result. That life of freedom that you can have, that journey along the way, there’s amazing power in that journey. There’s amazing excitement that can happen.
People get excited so much when they go to Dave Ramsey, get his stuff, and do his plan. They are like, “I’m going to have my debt paid off in fifteen years.” They’re excited about it and only to have zero in savings by that point. They’re so excited about being debt-free in fifteen years and saving maybe a couple of grand a month. It could be thousands and thousands a month in a few short years if you do it right. Not everybody is going to do that. Not everyone is going to have it exactly that way. Everybody comes with a different set of situations.
I’ve come up from a place where I started with nothing twice. I was broke. When I was a financial advisor, I had almost nothing. I was able to retire because I created residual streams of income through my business. I did it again with my business and with other investments too this last year. Now I’ve become more active, almost out of retirement. Although I know that trying to get this episode out even once a week sometimes seems to be a struggle because I’m trying to enjoy my life and work too. I love my life and what I’ve been able to create.
Mindset And Strategy
It took sacrifice, work, and focus, even for myself. Even to retire the second time, it took a lot more because I had to dig out of a huge debt hole. Most people don’t have the debt hole I had, but I had to do that to create those streams of income to make it work. The thing is, you can too. There’s nothing that’s more special about me than it is about you. The question is, “Who can see the biggest results in this?” It does come down to you. This is why we address mindset so much on the show. I address mindsets even when I do my events and even with my clients a lot of times.
Sometimes that’s all we talk about, and you’ll wonder where the strategy is. That is the strategy. Mindset’s a key piece, but it’s that one-two punch, the mindset and strategy. If you can get both those things working hand in hand, all these results accelerate faster. I’ve told you about a lot of the strategies. The big X-Factor of some of my clients where they get better results than other ones is because of how they did that mindset. Who are the people that I best serve? I can serve anyone, that’s the truth, but I can’t serve everyone. We’re the best people who are the ones that get the biggest result. You probably have heard a few of them already, but business owners can be great. The business owners that I most enjoy working with are the ones who have done well in the business.
They’ve made good money, but they’re wondering if they could be better with it, they’ve imagined better because they’ve done a decent job creating a lifestyle. They figure, “There could be more than this.” It’s like the client I had in North Dakota who was working his butt off to try to bring home $60,000 a year. When we started looking at everything that was going on to get him to slow down and look at what his money situation was, we found an extra $6,000 a month. That brought his life back. In fact, his wife was bawling, saying, “You can’t believe what this is because he’s giving himself permission to not work. He’s staying with us with kids.”
He took that first $6,000 we freed up and bought a four-wheeler, which almost every financial person said, “That’s horrible.” She’s like, “No, that was amazing because now he spends time with the family. Now we’re enjoying our weekends. He’s so much more relaxed when he comes home. Our lives are so much different.” That is the most rewarding. I get people like that who feel like they need their life back. Maybe they’re overworked but highly paid. Whether you’re an employee or a business owner, that’s key. If you are a leader in network marketing, making at least six figures, there’s a whole world that could open up to you that can get you to the point where you don’t have to rely on your income or keep making that money.
You might make great streams of income because of your team. You cannot just rely on that income because that’s key. Many people will lose that stream of income. They’re hustling, trying to get back to the next company that they can join. Even if you think your income will be around forever, you just never know. You may not be around forever. That’s essential. The most rewarding thing for me is when this is like a new world for you, like, “I want to create passive income. What can I do with taxes and things like that?” That’s fun for me.
When you create that discovery process, that’s where it becomes more rewarding. I can help strategize people who are more experienced, make great money, and have already done investing. I have a lot of those clients, but I’m more of a strategist and somebody to bounce ideas off of. I enjoy it when people are new, like the first time experiencing this stuff. That’s fun for me. I hope that you got some value from this because maybe some of these stories would be able to apply in your situation, and you’d be able to apply it yourself. The sky is the limit. There’s so much potential. There’s so much you can do. Go and make a prosperous week. We’ll talk to you next episode.
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