It doesn’t matter what you’ve done in the past for your retirement, if you see that the path is broken, you must fix it.
Bob saw that and now is making $3K a month in completely passive income!
Bob is the co-owner of Michelle’s products on Amazon and Walmart.com. At the same time, he’s also been in the Louisiana and Texas Army National Guard. He is a hard worker who thinks differently and tries new things.
For years, he tried the “Dave Ramsey” methods of saving everything and putting your retirement in stocks, but he saw that he was not growing his money or living the life he expected from his discipline.
That’s when he discovered alternatives and started privately lending money. That one change led him to us and he started seeing exponential returns!
Listen as Bob tells his story and talks about what changed in him to try this type of investing and get HUGE results. Listen now!
Want to be like Bob and create financial freedom for you and your loved ones?
Start here with our passive income calculator: https://bit.ly/48PfKg0
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TRANSCRIPTS:
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, my fellow Ripples. This is Chris Miles, your cashflow expert and anti financianal advisor.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Chris Miles was able to retire twice by the time he was 39 years old, but he’s not content to just enjoy his own financial freedom and peace of mind. Chris wants you to have your own ripple effect so you can live free today. He’s not the financial advisor you expected. He’s the non-financial advisor you deserve. He’s jumping behind the mic right now, ready to make waves. Here’s Chris Miles
Speaker 1 (00:38):
One. I’m going to show it’s for you. Those that work so hard for your money and you’re now ready for your money to start working harder for you right now. You want that freedom and cashflow today, not 30 or 40 billion years from now, but you want it right now so you can live that life that you love with those that you love. But more importantly, guys, I know it’s not just about getting rich for you because you’re good people and naturally as good people. You don’t want to just get rich for yourself, but you want to create a rich life so that as you are blessed financially, as you’re no longer living paycheck to paycheck and you don’t need that job, you’re now work optional. You now can bless the lives of those that are around you too. Guys, that is exactly the ripple effect I’m here to create for you today.
(01:14)
Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for all of you that have been binging, you’ve even been sharing with other people as well. Heck, we’ve even got a guest today that also has heard the podcast. So appreciate you guys really tuning in today because without you guys, we could not create this ripple effect. Hey, as a reminder, if you haven’t done so already, you’re really looking to figure out how to get your New Year’s goals working for you, especially if you want passive income, go check our website, money ripples.com. Lots of great information and lots of ways for you to be able to figure out, especially with that calculator, we have to figure out how much cashflow you could create in 2024. So go ahead and take that today. Alright guys, so I’m excited to bring on Bob Smith here today. So Bob actually is one of our VIP members.
(01:51)
He’s working with us on the client side. He’s also done infinite banking. But I was really interested in hearing Bob’s story here, not just from a personal level, but to be able to really see kind of his perspective, what is he doing, what got him to take those next steps to be able to start doing these strategies that we talk about in the show so often. So I wanted to make this really real for you guys. Just to let you know a little bit about Bob here. Now Bob is out and he’s got the co-owner of Michelle’s products that’s on Amazon as well as going on walmart.com. At the same time, he’s also been in the Louisiana and Texas Army National Guard coming on retirement in just a few months here. So really excited for him that way. He’s been doing alternative investments really since 2016. Some of these things like private lending and whatnot, working as a scientist in environmental engineering and things like that. So really excited to have him on today. So Bob, welcome to our show today. Thanks
Speaker 3 (02:41):
For having me.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
So give us a little bit more of your backstory. Tell us more about who Bob really is.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Bob born and raised Louisiana. Just a simple guy. That’s all there is to, I’m not anything fancy. I’m one of those guys that nothing came easy to me. Everything it seemed like was always harder for me. I always had to work extra hard to learn it, to get involved. Yeah, that’s pretty much me. I grew up in a small town Louisiana and just moved to Texas in 2000. Got married and been married since then in 2024 going on 24 years of marriage. Congratulations.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
That’s great.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
So basically since I moved to Texas, I’ve been working for consulting firms like you mentioned earlier, and I’ve always been striving to do what, I’ll just call his name out, call it the Dave Ramsey Method. Always put your money away, always strive to retire. And I followed those business models since 2001. I started investing in stock market and I’ve always heard his promises from brokers and from everyone about if you put this much money away, you’ll get this much money in return. Well, I’ve been doing that since 2001. Wasn’t very rich. We were never really making a ton of money. We made good money above average money, but not like what I hoped would turn out for let’s say retirement and put money in my 4 0 1 Ks. And so I started brainstorming over the many years watching YouTube videos and I finally dabbled into private lending and had all this excess fund.
(04:06)
And that was kind of the eyeopener for me was getting away from the stock market basically. And so I didn’t get a hundred percent away, but I kind of pulled a lot of the money out of the stock market and started private lending with my brother-in-Law who flipped houses. So after I saw the successes in that, I felt I had more control. And so that’s kind of where my simple life started. I just always followed the crowd initially of work hard, live cheap, live poor, put all your money in retirement, and in the end I really wasn’t seeing the performance that I was constantly promised by the, I went through probably four different broker companies and all I could get when I inquired back in 2008, why I lost all this money and never was told, all I get was you got to ride the wave. And I kept seeing these numbers pumped out by everyone about the s and p has been performing all these years. It will grow by the time I’m 60. Well, I’ve been investing since I was 23. Most of the money I got in there is the money that I figured a way to get the grow, not the stock market.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
Oh, that’s insightful right there because I mean really, I know there’s a lot of people that fit that category where if they’re really honest with themselves, wait a minute, the whole reason I have as much money as I have is I saved that money, not because I mean the market might’ve helped a little bit at least it’s really, it
Speaker 3 (05:24):
Did help a little bit disciplined. It did help a little bit. I took advantage of nine 11 when the market crashed. I took advantage of that. I took advantage of Covid on a little bit things here and there, but I just see more people in my life, and it might be different from a lot of people, but I see more people in my life where they’re about to retire and they had to come out of retirement because of the stunt market, because of the crash and because the number one thing that I noticed was they didn’t have control. They were just being told what to do and follow the crowd. And then the number one thing that kind of caught my eye when I would go meet with these brokers and I’ll present my financial records and my money that I have that I’m trying to get to grow, Hey, you’re doing better than 80, 85% of American people. And that kind of was an eyeopener. And that’s when I kind of started looking to private lending.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
What got you that faith to do something like that because a big leap to go from saving, following financial advisors, following Dave Ramsey, to all of a sudden not just investing alternative investments with someone that maybe had many, many years of experience. You actually put it with your brother-in-law flipping properties, which is
Speaker 3 (06:26):
Higher
Speaker 1 (06:27):
Risk in some ways.
Speaker 3 (06:28):
Yeah, correct. So the difference that I noticed was Tangibleness physical assets. He hit me up a few times a couple years prior to that. I didn’t feel that he was ready to do that personally, but eventually I pulled the trigger with him and what kind of was the eyeopener was sitting down reading up on, it’s a physical piece of property as opposed to a piece of paper, part ownership of Apple or any kind of stock company. And so if he defaults or doesn’t pay my money back, I get that house. And as long as the house value is worth more than what I gave him, I’m fine with that. So I knew enough from the background of how to go to a lawyer and get legal advice about how to take a house back. Well, I didn’t have to do that. He paid me 10% interest from 2016 all the way up until we’re still doing business now together.
(07:19)
He’s just a smaller, small time real estate agent. So he was helping me grow some of the money but not all of my money. And I wanted to see the goal of all the money growing. So the whole leap of faith for me was fiscal assets. And the other main thing that kind of motivated me was the fall, the crowd of put X amount of dollars away from your paycheck into a 401k or a mutual fund statistically for me, never worked. And a lot of people would tell me that, oh, you should have went with this company. And I said, well, I went with four of the top four companies in the world and none of ’em worked out. And in fact, if anything, they took fees from me while I was losing money. So I wish I had that kind of job where I could take your money and not be successful and still have my job. So that was the whole plunge. I just got to jump into it. But you still have to do your vetting. You still have to do your due diligence. And the one thing that kind of got me into private lending on that part, and also with you guys was it’s in writing and it’s tangible. And if anything goes wrong to a certain degree of promise of a way of getting my money back somehow some way, it just depends. Not all of ’em like that. But if it’s tangible property, I like that.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Well, I know you’ve started to invest with some of our vetted investors that we have within our group as well, and is that kind of the same feeling you had as when you’re looking at these deals, you’re thinking, I want something I can claim it has some tangible asset behind it. What are the kind of questions you’re asking yourself now?
Speaker 3 (08:49):
One of the things that, and Craig introduced me to Book Hands Investor. Yeah, I guess basically when Craig presented what y’all do, and then when I started listening to these companies and I saw what was, it is real easy to look up a company anywhere and look at their background or any kind of SEC claims against them as long as you’ve vetted it. And then I don’t see those issues. And I didn’t go with every one of your vetted. I looked at some of your companies and I was like, ah, that’s not for me. I don’t quite understand it, but there’s like three to four companies I’m working with. They made perfect sense to me. They’re simple, straightforward, simple interest. They are going to pay me interest monthly and quarterly, and no one has missed a beat yet. I did my due diligence on all of them and researched.
(09:36)
I couldn’t find any negative claims or Ponzi screens or anything like that. I mean, I probably spent two days, three days straight just researching, reading up on ’em, looking how much skin they got in the game. If they go under, they’re going to lose everything too out their own personal life. You just don’t jump in and don’t do what Chris MOAs tells you to do. You still have to do your due diligence and research. And I’ve done that, like I said, on probably a third or half years, I’ve looked at ’em. They’re good companies, but does it fit my portfolio? No, I did not decide not to do that.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
That’s one thing I think is so good to know because when I’ve talked to certain people, they’ll say like, well, you just open up your investor group. I was like, well, yes and no. We have a whole buffet. But that’s the problem. I see a lot of companies will try to throw a whole buffet out there, and a lot of ’em don’t really do very good due diligence on those companies anyways. They often will just connect with them. They pay ’em money to promote them. Really unlike those buffets, we try to make sure that you get narrowed down to what actually fits for your objectives for your investing style, so to speak, which is why we have to have 20 plus operators for you to maybe narrow down to four to six.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
And that’s all you really need for the most part. Now my goal is to keep growing, but yeah, you’re absolutely right. It is all about vetting. And that was the problem I was having while I was private lending. I was stuck with my brother-in-Law, loving to death, but I just had so much other liquid cash that needed to be working. I want a hundred percent of my money working. I do keep a surplus of cash within our business, so if anything goes wrong, the economy tanks, we can feed the family still while we try to resolve the issue. It’s all about being like a prepper. You have food storage, you have money, you have access to cash as a contingency, but in the meantime, I don’t want to hoard the money in the bank and just let it sit there and not work mean, hey, you have 200 grand in a bank and then 10 years later it’s only worth a hundred thousand dollars in buying power.
(11:34)
And so that was my concern and I had that issue. I had a lot of money in the savings account that we would put away and I’ll put a certain percentage stock market, and it just wasn’t growing fast enough. And I’m at 46 now and people are, oh, you got two years 60, 61. I said, yeah, 15 years goes fast. And I don’t want to be in that position of trying to fix an issue at 60, 61 years old, and I don’t want to rely a hundred percent on social security. The goal is to set myself up where I’m not going to rely on social security at all. And if I get it, I get it. If I don’t, I don’t prepared. So I’m trying to change that mindset too. Not only is being my own banker, but also not rely on the government. They don’t have good batting percentage when it comes to being successful on profiting or making cash. They’re more about taking money.
Speaker 1 (12:22):
It’s a good thing you’re retiring soon because they can’t get you on that one, right?
Speaker 3 (12:27):
Yeah. In fact, I’m taking all that money and money, it’s constantly being reinvested. It never really goes to a bank. And that’s how I’m funding my whole life is through my military paychecks or paying for my whole life premiums. And as it grows and as my cash value grows on my whole life, then I’m immediately pulling that cash value that I’m allowed to borrow against. And investing with you guys
Speaker 1 (12:52):
Is, or one,
Speaker 3 (12:54):
And I’ve got a combination, got my board of multiple, all the companies I got listed where I got cash and it shows where I’ve got cash with these guys, and I actually have a WL for whole life. This is whole life money. So if I get paid 12% interest, all I got to do is subtract what the interest that I borrow against, and that’s my profit. And so this whole numbers game, it’s real straightforward and easy.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
Well, you kind of brought up an interesting point that I never considered before is that we talk about the ripple effect on the show a lot, right? You’re talking about, well, the government, if they can’t spend their money really well, at least whatever money there’s investing in me, at least I can then invest that, make it bigger and better, right? Which correct. No, it’s kind of making me feel even more of a responsibility for this ripple effect. If we can get the government money, even if it’s being blown and crappy stuff, which anytime you want to make something more expensive, just give it to the government, they’ll find a way to make it double the price. But for the fact that money gets invested in someone like you take that money, you make more with it, you become a wise steward of that, money just gets better. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
And I feel bad. I’ve been a little bit frustrated with, for an example, the school system or just basically the American way of life keeping up with the Joneses. I think that if we can reeducate ourselves or I took the initiative to reeducate myself and my children that when you get a paycheck, be wise with it. Spend your money wisely, spend what you want, get your needs, not what you want, but put that money to work and it’s nice. And so even within a few months of working with you guys, it’s been a blessing in disguise because the goal was on my end is with my whole life for the past few years, I always poked fun of myself and my wife will poke for me too. So all that premium you put in that whole life, that’s a lot of money you put in there to pay your premiums that we could play with.
(14:47)
So I set small goals. And so for an example, the money that I get paid by the military, I said, alright, that’s covered my premiums for my whole life plus the money. I pull money out from the business to pay for my premiums. And the goal was to take this excess money and whole life cash value, but all this excess money that has sitting in the bank account still and put that to work. And the goal was to cover, my first goal was to cover my annual premiums with the other money. So the interest that I’m getting paid monthly and quarterly is now actually I’ve already in a few months has already covered the cost of my premium. So not only am I paying my premiums annually and the cash value growing and a death benefits growing on one end, on the other end, I’m receiving cashflow monthly and quarterly to cover that. So now I’m not short of money that’s going towards my premium, actually, it’s a breakeven and now I’ve got more money to play with and I can do two things that money I can play with that’s now being covered by the passive income that you guys have helped me acquire through these investments is I can reinvest it or I can play with the money, the end, or I guess you make it a third one, emergency money.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
And that’s a great strategy. That’s one that I find that when we talk about it, it’s the opposite of what you hear from a lot of the other infinite bankers out there when they’re teaching that strategy. Because a lot of them will tell you, Hey, just scrap together whatever little scraps you have and just throw everything in here and make it a bill pay account, pay your bills with this and all that kind of stuff. Where we’ve even had people come to us with that perspective, he’ll say, oh, so I’m just supposed to take all of my money and throw it in here and then I invest it. No, no, actually you put some of your emergency fund in there maybe for the first few years, but really you’re going to be investing your money in that first year or so, getting that money, paying you cashflow, and then that helps fund a policy for you so that it doesn’t have to come out of pocket. And not to mention it’s still, even though it might feel like an expense, the truth is almost all of it’s going to cash value anyways, and after a couple of years, it does go to cash value. So it’s really just a savings account you’re just building up into to then reinvest and make more with it and just get that acceleration cycle happening as it builds faster and faster.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
And that’s what it is all about, the acceleration. So the first, I think I’ve seen people talk to people about their whole life and they’re kind of like, oh man, that’s a lot of money put away. I say, yeah, but here’s what I’m going to be doing with that money, or this is what it’s going to be doing for me on the backend also. And so once I explained that, oh, okay. And so it’s all about the way I look at my life is like a graph. I’ve always want to see my numbers game on my end to come from not only me and my wife, but also my children. That’s what motivates me is my family. But I always want to see an uptrend graph. I always want to, as long, I don’t care if it’s 2% growth, as long as it’s growing in the uptrend manner for the rest of my life till I’m dead.
(17:43)
And then the trust will carry over to the children and then they do the same thing hopefully. But that’s how it’s supposed to be for me, is an uptrend. I don’t want to be receiving money and spending money and seeing my numbers in a downtrend or even let alone a flat trend. Flat trend is better than a negative trend downtrend. But yeah, exactly. The money should be always growing all the time and stop keeping up with the Joneses and trying to get the bigger house. We are a very conservative livings lifestyle. We don’t buy lavish cars. I never bought a new car. Well, I’ll tell you, we bought one when we first got married, and that was the mistake. We buy simple, used good cars to get us around and it saves us a ton of money. That’s just the way we do it. A lot of people are like, oh, you need to buy new, but just, I don’t want my money tied up in a house. I don’t want my money tied up in a car. I don’t like that. If I become a millionaire, then okay, I’ll think about it then, but I’m, I’m not a millionaire technically. So
Speaker 1 (18:43):
Yeah, not yet, but you’re getting there pretty quick.
Speaker 3 (18:47):
I actually kind of surprised myself once I sit down with Craig and I was crunching the numbers. I was like, oh, I got more cash than I thought or worth, more than I thought. So that kind hasn’t motivated too, and that kind of took the jitters off the plate. That’s
Speaker 1 (19:01):
Great.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
But yeah, since I’ve been with you guys since, gosh, may, I’m loving every bit of it, the vetted program that you guys have provided to us on the monthly programs, sitting down with Craig and taking advice from him, there was a lot of things that I thought I knew what I was doing. And then once I talked to you guys, I was like, oh, I was not quite a hundred percent correct on certain topics, but he helped me clarify. And it’s just a matter of building up. If I had my advice for anyone that’s sitting on the edge of the fence to go with you guys to go with the Money Ripples effect, and they had the cash that’s there to do it, then I would highly recommend doing it because like I said, we freed up two, $3,000 a month in cashflow because we are now working with investors that’ll pay us a certain percentage passive income I working with them.
Speaker 1 (19:55):
That’s awesome. That’s great to hear, man. I was actually going to ask you that. I was kind of wondering what made you pick us versus, I mean, almost anybody out. I mean, not that there’s a lot of people that do exactly what we do on the one-on-one side, but there’s plenty of people that do infinite banking. There’s plenty of people that say, Hey, I’ll help you with create passive income. Well, what was it about us that made you feel different about this?
Speaker 3 (20:18):
It’s funny you say that. It’s all about the one thing I always tell people, and I’m going to throw this in there real quick. The one thing I tell people all the time, or as best I can, it don’t matter if they’re listening to me or not. Always have your head on a bobble. Always be observant, always. If you sees something on a billboard, read it and then look it up on your phone, whatever. The way I found you guys was actually when I used to invest with another company that had an ai, you were actually going to be a speaker there at a guest conference, a guest speaker, who is this guy? And it had a little snippet about you. I was like, yeah, okay, let me read it. So I went on there and I looked you up on YouTube and I started watching your videos.
(20:57)
I was like, this is the guy I need to talk to. Because for a year, almost two years straight, I’ve been so frustrated, like who do I talk to? Continue to do private lending, to invest in syndicates or to invest in properties? I wasn’t going to jump in and just watch random news on YouTube, dues on YouTube and go off of what they say, I need to get involved in a program, a club where I can put this money to work with tangible assets and not some made up dream that if you put your money here, it’s going to grow. And so that’s when I made the contact to you guys and immediately between you and Craig and your company, the communication was there, the information you presented was simple, straight to the point and how it’s going to work. And basically, you had a good plan laid out.
(21:44)
Out of all the programs I looked at for many, many years, money Ripples were straightforward, simple. And I did not, and I’m very cautious to a certain, I’ve been scammed here and there in the past, but money Ripples just the way y’all laid it out to me is what I was looking for. And it’s just basically get the freaking money to work, and that’s what they’re supposed to do. I’ve always heard about it from Warren Buffet, Donald Trump, how they put the money to use, and it ain’t the stock market. Well, Warren Buffet’s stock market, but he does a lot of other things.
Speaker 1 (22:12):
He ends up owning the businesses. He doesn’t just play with them. He doesn’t stock trade.
Speaker 3 (22:18):
Yeah. And that’s where I get frustrated, and I hate to throw him under the bus a little bit. Dave Ramsey, he talks about, put your money, meet your phone, meet your phone, meet your fund. But it’s real easy to look him up. Majority of his money, it’s just out in real estate, tangible assets. And I’m like, well, I don’t get it. And I don’t like that kind of bss where you’re going to tell me to put all the money in one basket, but you’re not doing the same thing. Then why should I do what you tell me?
Speaker 1 (22:42):
Amen to bet. Well, Bob, I appreciate having you on here today. It’s been a great conversation, man. I can’t even believe how much time has flown as you’ve been talking. So yeah,
Speaker 3 (22:50):
I apologize. We dragged it out a little bit too long.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
Yeah, I mean, you already gave some great, great, great nuggets. Any other last words or advice you would give anybody who’s just on this journey, maybe they’re early on, maybe they’ve been searching, what would you recommend to them today?
Speaker 3 (23:04):
If you’re in your early years and you’re wanting to get to this point, follow the method of get a good job and put some money away. You can’t just pull money out of the air, get educated. There’s no dumb question. Ask a thousand questions. I’ve asked the dumbest questions on purpose, even though I know the answers, just to see what their response, and I’ll always find something new. So always ask questions. There’s no dumb questions. And don’t follow the crowd. I’m sorry, you can follow the crowd, but if you’re going to follow the crowd, make sure you have about two or three other paths to follow, because I did that all the way to 2016. I was following the crowd and I stuck with that one path. And then when I keep hearing these brokers say, you’re doing better than 80% of American people, that’s not what I want to hear. And something’s wrong with that. And so diversify. So yeah, if you want to keep working, go to college. Yeah, absolutely, go for it. But don’t just rely on that one path and follow the crowd debt, that one path you need to have about the way I say, you need about five different path of cash flow. That’s the way I look at it.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
That’s great advice. That’s wise advice. It really is, Bob. So again, thank you so much. And everybody, again, if I were to recap what I heard Bob say as well, I mean, like I said, you can get educated, in fact, get educated, be curious, ask good questions, always be asked questions, always be learning, and always be looking for ways to apply that learning too, so that it actually creates real results in your life. And he’s living evidence of that, right? I mean, now he’s going to have brokers that wish they could do what he did, and that’s what’s going to start happening. So again, Bob, thank you so much for your time and everybody else. That’s the thing. It’s like keep learning, keep educating yourself, keep growing, and then at some point when you’re ready, take action. But make sure you’re taking the right, deliberate, intentional action so that you get the life that you have always dreamed of. Guys, make it a wonderful and prosperous week and we’ll see you later.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
I’ve seen more people in my life where they’re about to retire and they had to come out of retirement because of the stock market, because of the crash, and because the number one thing that I noticed was they didn’t have control. They were just being told what to do and follow the crowd. And then the number one thing that kind of caught my eye when I would go meet with these brokers and I’ll present my financial records and my money that I have that I’m trying to get to grow, they’re, Hey, you’re doing better than 80, 85% of American people. And that was an eyeopener. And that’s when I started looking to private lending.