Looking to “DIY” your way into financial freedom? Maybe you should reconsider…
Would you sit your kids in front of the TV and let them be raised by electronics?
Would you let your kids roam the streets unsupervised all day to do as they wish? Hopefully, you answered NO!
And just like you wouldn’t do this with your kids, you shouldn’t do it with your money!
Putting your money in an account and forgetting about it just like giving your kid an iPad and hoping for the best (it’s probably not gonna work out that great).
Today we’re talking about what ELSE you can do with your money that will yield much better outcomes for your money and your future.
Listen here or watch on YouTube!
TRANSCRIPTS
You want to do something more than just survive? What are you really looking for? Because there’s really three methods that happen here, right? When you’re looking at your money. Let me repeat. If you ever want to be in a position where you don’t think about your money,
Hello, my fellow Ripples. This is Chris Miles, your cashflow expert named anti Financianal advisor. This shows for you that works so hard for your money and you’re now ready for your money to start working harder for you today. You don’t want to just get rich, right? You want to live a rich life because as you’re blessed financially, as you become work optional where you work because you want to, not because you have, have a greater ability to bless the lives of those around you creating a ripple effect. Thank you for tuning in today guys. You are the reason that I’m trying to create a ripple effect through you. Thank you for tuning in, binging sharing this with others because honestly, we could not grow this ripple effect without you, so thank you so much for tuning in. Hey, as a reminder guys, if your course, if you’re listening to this and you’re trying to follow us on YouTube, we have two channels.
We have the Money Ripples channel and the Money Ripples podcast channel. Make sure you’re subscribed to both because there are great content coming out on both of these channels right now. We’ve revamped it, putting a much bigger emphasis and focus on giving you more free education, so be sure to subscribe to those today. Alright guys, so I want to ask you a question because many of you might know, maybe you don’t know if you’re new tuning in, I’m a parent of a lot of kids. I’ve got six of my own, my wife has two. We have a blended family of eight children and definitely there’s no shortage of excitement, especially when they’re all together. When they’re all gone, it’s quiet in the house. It’s like we’re empty, nested, but man, when we’re all together, I mean it’s seriously, I mean, especially when there’s five of ’em that are teenagers, it can get pretty crazy sometimes, but let me ask you this.
For those of you that are parents, let me ask you this question. What do you think is a better parenting style? Should you raise them where you say, you know what? Let them out on the street. Just let ’em go. Let ’em go do their thing, whatever they’re going to do. Almost kind of like the way I was raised and being born in the 1970s is probably a little like that for our generation of Xers, but just let ’em on the street. Just let the world raise them. Is that one method that you think you’d agree with or would the other method be, Hey, you know what, I’m going to put them in from a laptop. I’m going to let them put ’em in from a laptop and just let that parent them or would you prefer to be actively involved where you’re trying to raise them, train them to be adults and that sort of thing?
I’m hoping at least if your parent, you chose the ladder, but again, I’m sure you probably have different methods. Somebody might be saying, I might’ve put some of my kids in front of that laptop or in front of that iPad or whatever it might be, and I get it. I’ve done the same thing. I’ve put my kids in front of a from time to time just like I cannot handle this anymore, but as long as it’s not a persistent thing that you’re doing all the time, obviously you’re hopefully having great kids that aren’t addicted to electronics at the same time, you probably aren’t just throwing ’em out on the street, literally telling ’em to go play on the freeway like my parents did and I somehow survived. To this day, it’s not like that at all, but obviously you want to be someone who parents them.
You don’t have to be a helicopter parent, but give them enough responsibility, still be able to help them mature and grow as they go through their different stages of life. Money and your wealth is no different. You can either be a spender, which is throwing them out in the street, telling ’em to play on the freeway, just getting rid of it, and then it doesn’t really come back. They end up becoming homeless, they run away. They’re on drugs and all that kind of thing. That’s what spenders do. The money goes out, but it never really comes back and they have to keep hustling and keep working hard. This is why a lot of business owners actually are spenders naturally because the best way to have unlimited income is to control your own time and your own ability, and that’s fantastic. It’s a great skill if you can make money.
It’s also a great skill if you can keep it, and that’s what savers do. They keep it to some level, but they set it and forget it, right? Let’s put it into that 401k, let’s put it away. Let’s essentially put it in front of that iPad or in front of that TV and just forget about it and hopefully it’ll be something someday. Just like if you put your kids in front of a TV and hope that the TV will raise ’em up, you may find out that those kids aren’t exactly the way you hope they would become. No different with retirement plans. When the financial advisor’s telling you to set it and forget it, just put it away, lock it away, stop following the ups and downs and just keep plugging away. Keep saving and keep saving. Hey, keep giving ’em more hours in front of that tv.
That’s what you need. You just need more time. Let them sit on the couch until they’re 25, 30 years old, maybe 40 years old, and then maybe they might get married someday after they’re struggling with social anxieties and they can’t even leave the house. That’s kind of what it’s like to be a saver with your money, but a steward, a steward says, no, I actually, I don’t believe in truly just being passive with my money. Even if you can create passive income, you’re not passively investing, you’re still involved, you’re still managing it. You have a stewardship over your money. You want your money to grow, you want it to multiply. You want to become something beautiful in your life and not just to grow and just be a big number, but it’s to give you a better quality of life. If you’re that person, I am talking to you now.
If you’re one of the other two people, if you’re just going to blow the money and you really don’t care about having wealth later on or even for your family or creating any kind of legacy in the future, or if you’re a saver and you don’t want to take any responsibility, you’d rather let your financial advisor do all the work for you, then you don’t have to keep listening to this show. In fact, this show’s going to be a waste of your time to be honest. You should just keep watching Dave Ramsey and watch your money not grow. That’s what you should be doing. I’m being a little bit bold and blunt because let’s be honest, I don’t know if I’ll be alive tomorrow. I hope I am, but if I were to leave you with final words, I want this to be something worthwhile that you remember and is that you need to be a steward of that money if you want that money to do something more, if you want to create that ripple effect.
If you’re the people like I think you are, and now there’s a lot of you guys as I start to meet you, especially as you guys come, become our clients and things like that and start to get to know you on a deeper level. I see that you guys are good, grounded people down to earth people. You’re relatively humble. It doesn’t mean you don’t have any kind of ego, but you’re a pretty humble people. You’re a person that’s actually wants the best for your family. You want the best for your own life. You don’t want the mediocre life. You want something more. You want to actually be somebody who is a wise steward because you believe that you’ve been given this gift for a reason. You should be using these gifts to help others and not just your family, but even this could be something that’s bigger than just you and your family.
Now, family’s a good start, but it’s definitely bigger than that. It’s that ripple effect. You want to do something more than just survive. You want to thrive, you want to bless others’ lives. You want to be a blessing in people’s lives rather than a drag on people’s lives. You want to be accountable. You don’t want to be a victim. You want to be the hero of the story, not the victim of the story. If this is you, I’m talking to you because you are that person. Now, it’s interesting. I had somebody recently, they’re messaging and they’re like, yeah, I’m trying to figure out what’s the best thing. I did this one coaching program and it didn’t work out, and they’re like, my big concern is I want to make sure this is not get rich quick, and two, I want to make sure that I’m not just that I actually get advice and I get what this person’s coming from because one, we never claim any of this stuff is get rich quick.
Although we have had people that sometimes can with any year have enough passive income because they’ve got enough money saved, they just got to get working a little bit harder for them to meet their passive income goals, at least to be financially independent first and then the next level of freedom is that financial freedom where it’s much higher, probably 50% higher in a financial independence goal, but what was interesting is this person is like, I just want somebody to tell me what, basically give me advice, tell me what to do. Well, first off, I’ll tell you, I mean we’re not investment advisors. We’re not even acting as financial advisors. That’s why I’m the anti financianal advisor, but I’m not an investment advisor, nor do we have anybody work for us that are investment advisors, and sometimes people are like, well, that’s horrible. I can’t get any advice.
Well, it depends what are you really looking for because there’s really three methods that happen here when you’re looking at your money, and I have my preference and what I believe is morally correct, but other people have their own preferences and it’s up to them too. This is just my opinion. I could be wrong, but I think there’s different purposes for different things, and I get it. By the way, when I hire coaches or mentors, I want them to give me direction. I want them to help me have a clear path of essentially a game plan. Now, you could do it one of three ways. You can either do DIY, do it yourself, do it yourself, is pretty much you just get all the education you can to gather it together and then you try to guess what might be the right thing for you.
Now, education is very important. If you don’t have the education, then it’s hard to take action. Problem is a lot of people that they get educated, they get the knowledge, but if it were always about knowledge, wouldn’t all of us have six packs right now? I mean, if it were about knowledge, wouldn’t all of us be rich right now? It’s not just about knowledge. It’s about how you act on it and very, very tiny percentage of people that do DIY ever really act on the things that they know they should be doing. It’s not even about what you don’t know that you don’t know. It’s the things that you know should be doing, but you don’t because you don’t have that accountability, so that’s the one extreme. You got the DIYs, the people are just trying to do it themselves and hey, they can get a certain amount of success as long as they take action, but just remember that without proper guidance sometimes you could actually end up making a lot of mistakes along the way, losing it and making it go longer and harder for yourself.
Now, the opposite extreme is the DFY done for you, and this is what a lot of people think of when they think of financial advisors is just tell me where to put the money. In fact, why don’t you just put it in there for me? Just put the money in there. Let’s set it and forget it. This is kind of what the savers have always been sold that I can just be passive brain off and in my mind will just somehow work for me, and even people that sometimes come to us will say, I just want that. Just put some of my money somewhere. I don’t have to think about it. If you ever put yourself in a position where you don’t think about it, don’t ever think about keeping it either. Let me repeat. If you ever want to be in a position where you don’t think about your money, don’t think that you’ll keep your money there either, okay?
You’re really bound to lose it at some point because when you start to turn off that big, it’s just like parenting. If you were just to put your kids, put ’em in front of a, Hey, I’ll put ’em from a PBS, right? I’ll put ’em in front of some good educational shows, it should be fine, but you don’t realize the unintended consequences of that because as you become a passive parent, you actually realize that your kids aren’t going to be growing up the way that you might want them to be. They might be nurtured and growing up in a way that they think they become the DIYers and then they screw up a lot and they might wise up, but it might be a long hard road for your kids. Again, you don’t have to be a helicopter parent, but if you’re just turning them over to something else and you just think, I can just be a passive parent and things will work out, come on, let’s get into real life here.
That doesn’t happen, and that’s not true with your money either. You can be passive with your teeth. If you don’t brush ’em, they’re going to fall out. You do this with your money, you’re going to lose your money. Anything that you’re passive with that you don’t pay attention to, you will lose. This is why so many people get to the point where they’re about to retire and realize, wait a minute, I’m about to lose. The only ones that feel more confident, the ones that have those annual reviews with their financial advisors, but really the financial advisor is not giving them any more information. If you’ve ever met with a financial advisor, they’re saying, yeah, it looks good. Maybe we’ll rebalance your portfolio. For the most part, they’re like, yeah, keep going. Keep saving. Keep putting money in this thing and it should work out. Maybe that’s all they’re doing.
It is just guesswork on their part. There’s no real control because they can’t control your returns. You can’t control your returns. Your life is out of control. There’s no predictability. You’re just living on hopium hoping that something’s going to work out, and so that’s where the DFY comes in. People have been trained so well by financial advisors to just turn money over, set it and forget it so that the financial advisor can keep making money whether you make money or not, which I think is kind of criminal honestly, that happens. You have no assurity that you’re going to have anything in the future, and then the one in the middle, there’s the DIYs, the do it yourself, you got the done for you. There’s the done with you, done with you. Now, it takes a little bit more personal responsibility, right? Because I’ll tell you, there is no freedom without responsibility if we’re talking about financial independence here happening tomorrow, right?
At least for the United States, we got the 4th of July independence day. If you want to be independent, sometimes it requires a little bit of interdependence to create that independence because many people make the mistake. They think independence is like DIY, right? I just got to do it all myself. Nobody else helps me out, but guys, let’s be honest, right? I mean, that’s just not realistic. Even in the country where we claim to be independent people, we still have to work together, don’t we? Right? So really I like to look at it as interdependence. How do we work together? Make it work? This is where it really works out with what we do in our coaching, right? Because when we do coaching, we want you to learn what we know. We want you to learn it to create a little bit more independence. Now, it doesn’t mean you’re going to be completely independent.
Let’s be honest. When it comes to your money, you’re going to be a little bit emotional. You might not think clearly about it to have an outside perspective to say, let me shine some light on this. Let me see what’s going on here. You might get all caught up emotionally about some investment, and then we might be like, okay, have we considered this or this or this or this? What if this happens? What if that happens there? There’s a lot of times I’m like, I’ve seen client situation. I’m like, okay, I see the investment you’re wanting to do, which often it’s outside of our network and sometimes even if it’s inside, but I’m like, that one’s a pretty risky deal. You could do that, but there’s a lot more risks you’re taking and real stewards, real investors don’t believe high risk create high rewards or high returns.
They know that high risk creates higher losses. That’s what happens. You increase your risk, you increase your chance of loss. They want to figure out real investors, the people that aren’t gamblers like most people in the world today that have been taught to be gamblers, they believe, no, I want to minimize my risk as much as I can so I can maximize my returns and my gains on my money. That’s how I build wealth. Those people have lasting wealth. Gamblers do not. When you have that perspective to work together, it doesn’t mean you have to be told what to do. And by the way, just so you know, often when we’re working with people, we still give ’em financial strategies. We still help things to help ’em figure out how to improve their cashflow, reduce taxes, especially when you’re business owners. You guys get lots of great benefits that way.
We have one person that reached out saying, Hey, I’ve got a lot of debt. I’ve got some money to invest. How do I make this all work? Do I pay off my debts? Do I invest? Perfect question, because that’s the kind of thing we like answering. Sometimes we can pay off certain debts to free up the most bang for your buck on the cashflow and still invest the rest. You can create passive income. So yeah, and yes, we got a community of investors. We got a community of even CPAs and attorneys and different specialists from insurance to you name it, mortgages or whatnot, right? We’ve got that kind of system and those people to help work together as a team so that you’re interdependent with them. You can still call the shots. You still ultimately call when you actually invest in a certain investment, but you got somebody in your corner to kind of be a voice in your ear to say, Hey, alright, this is what you’re considering with this money.
Some of these might be better options. Well, these ones might be worse options or with this money, these might be better options or these might be worse options. You’re not being told, Hey, you should go buy X, Y, and Z. That’s not the case. If you’re looking for that, if you’re looking to turn your brain off and just do whatever somebody tells you, you will lose period. You will lose money. You will not have lasting wealth. It doesn’t mean you can’t have some guidance. Remember, done with you is different than done for you, done for you. Everybody’s naturally kind of lazy, right? We want that, but the truth is that nothing good comes when you’re just having things done for you, and I mean this more from a standpoint of your stewardship, the things that are your responsibility. Somebody mows your lawn, fine, that’s great, but you still got to make sure they do their job right?
Same thing, that’s the same case here, so we want to make sure you have wise stewardship stewards want direction, they want that outside voice or perspective to help them really weigh the options more clearly so they know the path to take. That becomes easier, especially when you combine education with some of those strategies and those connections. Things work, right? So guys, I’m just going to call out. If you’re a steward, you’re wanting to be a wiser steward of your money, don’t go for the DIY method. I mean, you could start there. If you have no money, start DIY. Build your education, but if you have money, don’t rely on the financial advisor that just want you to turn over their money so that they always get paid and they want you to just ignore it. Just set it and forget it so that you don’t get depressed when you start to realize it’s not enough.
When you use that strategy, go for the done with you. Make sure there’s accountability and responsibility because there can be no freedom without responsibility. Our country was founded on those principles. Our country was founded on freedoms, not by us being little victims and whiny babies, right? We had to take the freedom in our grasp. We had to control, we had to be accountable to it, and every single day, our country is relying upon us to take personal responsibility whenever we become victims, whenever we blame everybody else but ourselves, that’s when our country gets ruined. We need wiser stewards, and I know there’s a lot of you listening to this show or watching this show right now that are that way. So anyways, guys, I’m going to just leave it at that. Be a wise steward, learn how to be a better steward. Work with those that help you and guide you along that way. Guys, if we can ever be a support for you, reach out to us@moneyripples.com. But remember, if you want true financial independence, you need to take personal responsibility and be a wise steward to manage and watch over really those precious assets that you have, whether they be your kids, whether it be your money, whether it be your marriage, whatever might be a wise steward of that, so that you can increase and grow it and beautify it and multiply it. Make it a wonderful prosperous week.