Are you wanting to give your family a better Christmas this year?
Need some extra cash to hit some of your year-end goals?
In this episode, Cash Flow Expert, Chris Miles, will share how he find an extra $1,817 a month when he first launched Money Ripples, and how YOU can find some extra money NOW!
Check it out!
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 Can I Have More Money For The Holidays?
I’m going to welcome you out here for another wonderful episode and another great way I can serve you, especially before we hit the end of this year. As a reminder, check out our website MoneyRipples.com. If you’ve got questions for me, and you say, “Chris, I want to figure out how I can have more money for myself and more cashflow,” email me at Chris@MoneyRipples.com. On my website, you can check out there is a free eBook on there called Beyond Rice and Beans: 7 Secrets to Free Up Cash Today, which are my top cashflow tip. That’s a short read but easy to implement. Check that out on MoneyRipples.com.
I want to talk about how you can have more money for the holiday season. This is something I like to do every single year. Usually, I do this as a webinar, but I decided to do this as a podcast instead because this is a stressful time of year for a lot of people. Even if you’ve got a lot of money, still, to have more cash because there are many cool things you can do right now, I would not wait for a second to implement these things. These are the things you can take action on right now and start getting results, and they work.
Some of these tips I’m going to give you, you should not want to wait on some of these because some of you might feel like you are almost too late. Here is how you do it. We talk about cashflow all the time because when you have more cashflow, you have more options. When there are more options, you have more freedom.
I had to do this about a couple of years ago. Four years ago, when I launched Money Ripples, I left the business I was in. I left with nothing from that business. They did offer me a little severance check, but it was ridiculous. I was like, “Thanks for that. I’m grateful for it, but that is not hardly anything part of the value I created over that time.” I knew it was going to be a little bit tight because I got to start over with a new company and had a non-compete. I knew I had to have time to start building my business and start getting clients, especially because I was branded as another company for many years and being that coach.
I knew I needed to get a little tighter. This helped me free about $1,819 a month in my own personal situation. That is why I was able to do, which was awesome. A lot of this I learned because of the first experience I had back when I went through challenging financial times during the Great Recession. It wasn’t the whole over $16,000 a month. I had to get creative. This time, I was doing it again, but this time, I was doing it from a place of preparation, more of a place of peace and calmness versus frantic. That’s what I did.
I was able to find an extra $1,819 a month. That enabled me to slow the money I was using to help live on and eventually started building my company to where I was able to get Money Ripples launched and to start making some positive impact and a big difference. These are all things that you use and some of the stuff we work on after the holidays.
Number one, this is something that you can do. I tell you all the time to start tracking your money, and I hope you are in your business using QuickBooks and in your personal life using Mint. I would add to that that if you are tracking your money, awesome, great. Here’s the next step. See if you can go into each category and see what you can do about lowering your expenses by about 5%, if you are spending $100 in an area, see if you can get it down to $95. If you are spending $500, see if you can get it down to $475 and so on.
Start tracking your money. Go into each category and see if you can lower your expenses by about 5%. You’d be surprised at what you can do there. Click To TweetSee what you can do about trying to tighten the belt a little bit. It may not even be placed as you expect. It might be in things that you forgot you’re paying for, and you need to stop. There might be things you’re paying for monthly, like dues and subscriptions, and maybe not using. I went and got a new gym membership. I’m thinking, “I’m going to make good use of this because I’m going to make dang good use of this membership.” I know there are a lot of people that don’t make use of that membership. They hope that someday I might do it. If you’re not going to use it, lose it, get rid of it. Find that 5%, so you can cut back on your utilities and things like that. Your cell phone bill, can you call up the companies, start asking, and see if they have got a promotional rate or something like that? See what you can do there. You will be surprised. There are a lot of ways to do it.
Our number two is looking at selling stuff. This is the perfect time of year. If you’re going to sell anything, sell it during Christmas. There are people looking at classified ads, looking for things to do. Whatever your local classifieds are, you might be using Craigslist, which is more general across state lines and even some country borders. You might be looking at some local classifieds. There might be some yard sale pages. On Facebook, we have been selling a lot of stuff and trying to declutter. We can go snowbird down to California this winter.
One thing we’re trying to do right now is to declutter stuff is over. Can we sell things off and get rid of things we don’t need? If you can’t sell it, donate it again. If you’re not going to use it, lose it. For example, I got married a few months ago. My wife said, “We’ve got some of the same books. We’ve got multiple books. Can we give them away, sell them, or whatever?”
We decided we were going to donate them, and we donate them to the local library. You should have seen their face when we came in with that huge cart, especially when they said, “Do you need a box?” I’m like, “No, we need a cart. We need some to haul the stuff in.” We did. We donate a good couple of grand worth. That is the stuff that we can write off our taxes and get a benefit from anyways. If we didn’t get cash, we know that at least we’re offsetting some taxes. That leads to money.
Selling things is not that tough. It might mean you have to squash your pride and get rid of some sentimental stuff. It might mean you sell for a lot less than what you bought it for, and that’s okay. A dollar is worth more today than it is tomorrow. Find out ways to be able to use that today. That’s selling stuff. Find ways to do that.
I saw my face with memory. I saw a client who did that a couple of years ago and sold off tons of stuff. She sold off $1,000 worth of stuff. This could be your retirement accounts, mutual funds, stocks, bonds, savings, or something like that, that you have that aren’t doing anything for you. Maybe gold, silver, and things like that. I remember I had a client who had a lot of gold and silver. I said, “Cash out some of that. You can increase your cashflow by $1,700 a month.” She was like, “But the government like.” I’m like, “The government is going to do stuff, but still that’s $1,700 a month in your pocket today by doing that.”
I heard back from her, and it has been a few years. She updated me like, “All that debt paid off and gone.” I bet she didn’t sell off all the gold and silver. I haven’t told him too either. It’s cool to see that once you get rid of it. If you can do it the fastest way possible, the faster you can do it, the better. Look at selling stuff. It can give you the extra cash you need for the holidays or get rid of things you don’t need.
The third thing is restructuring your debt. Can you refinance and do some things there? The nice thing is if you start doing home refinance, maybe it’s a good time to do that, especially when rates are still low. Maybe you need to refinance. I had a lot of my clients. We looked at refinancing mortgages. In some of those cases, is it refinance either to want to cash out money from the home to pay off other loans and consolidate their debts?
Other times it had been like, “Cash out the money. Maybe you can do some other types of investing with it. Maybe you can go with the money equity from your house. Go buy two properties and start cashflow in that real estate.” Whatever it might be, getting that stuff to be used in a more productive way. Other ways, too, are that if you got mortgages, car loans, things like that, maybe the student loan payments, you can’t ask them to forgo. Ask them to see if you can skip a payment or two for the next month or two.
One of the big things they did to free up that $1,819 a month was I called up a few loan companies that said, “Would you be willing to skip for a month or two?” In some cases, even defer, like with student loans, you can even defer. I even did that with a few student loans, and that freed up the cash greatly. Here is the key to any of these tips. If you go and blow this money, you get the money to spend. That’s great. If it creates some memories, maybe this is not even for gifts. Maybe this is for a special trip that you want to take. I can see that.
I’m not telling you to do this stuff to blow money and keep blowing it day after day, year after year, month after month. I want you to do this in a way it is with wisdom. Hopefully, it might even give you a better spot and a better place. If you skip those loan payments, it’s not like they’re forgiven. They’re put on the back of the loan. You extend the loan another month or two.
If that gives you the cash that you need and even helps you pay off a credit card or wherever it might be, cool. That’s great too. Look at ways to restructure debt, even refinance, or whatever it might be. Look for ways to do that in a cool way. Lots of things to do there. I have so much fun helping clients with that thing. If there is anything I love, it’s about financing, getting bank loans and stuff. That is one of my favorite things to do.
Number four is taxes. If you work a job right now, I can’t guarantee anything. I’m not an accountant. Like I can’t tell you what to do with your taxes. You have probably noticed that if you get a tax return, it is because you have overpaid your interest on your taxes. If you get a tax return of $5,000 a year, that means you overpay on average $400 a month. If you’re at this stage, and you are already into the end of the year now, you have probably already paid the tax you need to. If you keep being a hex tern every year, you have probably already paid them.
You can either go tax-exempt and start taking more cash home today. This is especially useful if you ever get bonuses because bonuses kill you in taxes. They take a ton out of you in taxes. Be able to raise your exemptions. May you go tax-exempt, or maybe you raise them up to higher than what you have met. I worked as a side business when I was a financial advisor starting out, and I had a job on the side. I would claim all-year-long claim ten exemptions. Even though, at that time, I only had one child. I had my wife and my child. That was it. Because I had written off some of the business and everything else, I was able to do that.
Think of creative ways to go about serving people. Give them what they want. Click To TweetEvery situation is different, but the thing is if you are getting tax returns every year, why do that? Don’t worry about doing that. Adjust your paychecks to see if you can get more money back now. That’s more money coming home. This works throughout the year if you think about it because if you can get more money back now, that can help you speed up building savings, paying off debt, and be able to help and invest in different and better ways. The thing is, I want you to be aware that not to go crazy with this, to the point where now you’re owing so much in taxes, you can’t pay the bill. Naturally, taxes do need to be paid.
If you’re a business owner or an investor, there are probably taxes you are already missing that you are probably overpaying on anyways. Even the taxes you are paying, you are probably paying too much. If you say, “Why do I get all my money back?” You can get more money back in taxes on what you pay. If you are an investor or a business owner, you should read that blog from a few weeks back, where I talked about some great ways to be able to free up money in taxes.
The next thing you could do is you could stop contributions. You could stop doing your 401(k) or your retirement type of contributions that you are doing. These are not required. If you have credit card balances and things like that, you probably shouldn’t be putting money into a 401(k) or any type of government plan. Even if there is a match, it won’t make that big of a difference. You can’t make that big of a return on that money compared to paying off certain loans or credit cards.
If you got credit card balances, stop with the 401(k), that is not worth it. Find something else to do with it. For some of you, and some of you are already investors, you already know this, you can make way more money than a 401(k). Why even worry about that stuff? I tell people, “Stop contributions, whether it be temporarily or permanently. Look at stuff in your retirement contributions and do something better with that money.” That could be more cashier given.
As a bonus, I will even say this, look at your paycheck stub. You might find some things in there that you are paying for that you’re like, “Why am I paying for this?” Many times, I look at people’s paycheck stubs if they do happen to work a job. I see things like if they’ve got different insurances, they pay for that. They are overpaying on some insurances. I’m like, “Let’s get rid of that insurance. Let’s change it to this instead,” and help them free up a little bit of extra cash in their paycheck. That is money that they never saw in the first place because they saw it as deductions coming out of their paycheck. Let’s get that money back, and have more money coming home, every paycheck, rather than trying to pay everybody else.
The sixth thing is to look for ways to earn additional income. We talk about selling assets, and that’s one way, but what about ways you can do to help people right now? Can you do an end-of-the-year promotion? Can you do something to say, “Up until the end of this year, I’m going to offer this?” Look for ways to earn income. What are people looking for? What do they want? Give it to them now.
There are many ways to earn more money. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t require money. Although you might do things with investing to make more money that way and get your money working for you. There might be other ways to do it where it could be as a hobby or something like that. It could be something you offer.
I have even seen kids doing this where they are trying to raise more cash too. Kids are doing little things. I saw somebody put up college football flags in people’s yards. I was like, “What the heck are all these flags doing?” Usually, I see flags in people’s yards on holiday, but instead, these are college flags. I asked my kids about it, and I said, “What are all these flags in people’s yards?” They said, “These kids are going around going and making money by saying, we got these college football flags, if you want them, we will put them in your yard for X number of dollars.” People put up flags in your yard, which is an option. They did that.
I knew a guy that came around, and he was offering to stencil in people’s address numbers on their curves right in front of her house because how many times have you tried to look up somebody’s address? He can’t see because the porch lights are on or the address is not even on the house. You’re searching around trying to find that house, guessing which house is theirs. We can have it spray painted right on the curb. He could see it right away. That helps with emergencies too, when ambulances or fire trucks are coming around. The guy was charging $5 to take stencils and spray paint in his spray-painting stuff.
He even offered another $5 to put on your favorite college team in Sydney. It would be your address number, and he would put it on the letter or the logo of that college team. I was like, “That’s pretty brilliant.” he did that. There are many ways to do it. It may not require a lot of effort but think of creative ways to go about serving people. Give them what they want. If you got resources and stuff to do, this could be something you find when you’re trying to look at getting rid of assets. This could be it.
These are a few ideas. One, do that 5% challenge. Start tracking your money. When you’re tracking it, see if you can cut back 5% in each area. Two, see what you can sell and offer three. Three, what can you do to restructure debt or be able to skip payments and things like that? Four, are there things you can do with taxes? Can you start increasing your exemptions or go tax exempt? Can you use some of the tax tips I gave you a little while ago? If you cut some tax up that needs to be done, it needs to be right now because pretty soon, you are going to lose out on 2016. That’s it, and you have lost the ability to get all the tax breaks. Fifth is stopping contributions like with your 401(k) and such. Six is finding ways to earn more money.
Try those out. See what they do. I had people free up hundreds of dollars a month. Try it out and let me know your experience. Make sure you email me and say, “Chris, this is what I did. This is what I found every month.” I would love to hear about the experiences that you have had with it. Have a wonderful, prosperous week, everybody. We will see you.