Is Financial Advice as Fake as AI?

Hey ChaptGPT, make me rich quick!

If you asked AI to make you rich, would you listen to everything it said?

My guess is that you wouldn’t! You would probably check what other sources have to say, and see what experienced, financially independent people have done to get where they are. It would be crazy to base your finances purely off what AI has to say!

The problem is you might be doing this already!!

Do you listen to only ONE source for your financial strategies? Or only ONE financial advisor? Or just ONE website or news platform? If you said yes, then you need to reconsider your approach.

Listen to this episode of the Money Ripples Podcast to hear the similarities of financial advisors and AI, the actual numbers it takes to become financially free, plus, my take on financial independence.

Check it out!

Passive Income Calculator: https://bit.ly/3LWCLEg

TRANSCRIPTS

Speaker 1 (00:00):

That’s one of my biggest secrets in being a business owner is that when you don’t need to make money in business, people that haven’t done what we’ve recommended, right? They just went and bought real estate haphazardly and sometimes they still become multimillionaires because,

(00:30)
Hello, my fellow Ripers, this is Chris Miles, your cashflow expert in anti financianal advisor. I’m going to show it’s for you. Those that works hard for your money and you’re ready for your money, start working harder for you today. You want freedom and cashflow right now, not 30 or four years from now, but you want to become work optional where you work because you want to, not because you have to, and it’s not just about getting rich in your life because it’s about living a rich life because as you’re blessed financially, you have a greater capacity to blessed the lives of those around you. Thank you for tuning in today. Appreciate you guys been binging and sharing and be able to really help us to grow this ripple effect in other people’s lives, and you are a big part of that. So thank you so much for tuning in.

(01:06)
Hey, as a reminder, if you haven’t done this already, I recommend go take your passive income calculator right now@moneyripple.com. Now find out how much passive income you could create in your life in the next 12 months or so. Definitely check that out. Fill it out completely, because the more accurate you fill it out, the better, more accurate the results you get. I’m telling you, financial freedom and hope is much easier and much more likely than you might expect. So try that out today@moneyripples.com. Okay, so I kind of noticed lately if you guys have been kind of paying attention to anything about AI at all, unless you’ve been living under a rock, some of the things with AI is a little bit scary, isn’t it? It’s almost like deep fake has now become more mainstream. For example, I know that sometimes I’ll see YouTube videos, I’ll see a trailer for a movie like a sequel.

(01:50)
I’m thinking this would be awesome. And then you realize as you’re starting to watch that trailer, you’re like, wait a minute, this is totally fake. They totally made this up. There’s even AI involved. Sometimes the AI is obvious, other times not so much, and you start to really think, wait a minute, this is completely bogus. This is fake. How do I know what’s real? I mean, we already know. I mean, for example, we’ve been looking at writing our new book, which by the way, I am actually writing a new book with the help of a friend here because I’m not a writer. But he even said, he’s like, Chris, do you realize that we could actually have people read your audiobook in different voices? For example, he’s like, I could have Snoop Dogg read your audiobook without Snoop Dogg reading your audiobook just because of ai.

(02:30)
And he’s like, and it’s convincing. It sounds just like him. He’s got the intonations, it’s got all the voice reflections and things like that. It sounds legit. And you got to realize that right now it’s harder than ever to know what reality is. And I think it’s even become scarier for us because we know how do we know what’s real, what’s fake? I’m seeing this also true in the financial world. It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s fake, isn’t it? Right? Because you’ve got all these people, all these voices out there, all these things you search for you. Here is the path to financial freedom. If you just follow my path, this is it. And maybe you’ve even questioned ours saying like, well, this is what Chris says, but is that really true or not? And so remember when I even became a financial advisor, I was teaching people the same old vanilla stuff about saving forever, putting away mutual funds, diversify into mutual funds, which is ironic.

(03:22)
There is no diversification in mutual funds, but I would tell people to do all that and if they compounded interest enough because that’s the eighth one of the world, and if you do that for long enough, and even if there’s ups and downs, it doesn’t matter because overall the market always averages like 12% returns, things like that. Eventually you’ll be financially free too, and heck, even inflation’s only two or 3%. So it’s not that bad. All of these things are all a lot of assumptions and theory, but not reality. And that’s what got me to leave almost 20 years ago now, is that when I realized that the real results people were getting were fake. They weren’t measuring up. It was all over promise, drastically under deliver. Even after decades of advice, I knew something was wrong. So let me give you an example here of what I mean.

(04:06)
I actually went and researched. I just said, Hey, how to create passive, basically how to create financial freedom is what I said, right? There’s financial independence, there’s financial freedom. It’s kind of interchangeable, I know, but of course the first thing came up were these seven great tips on Forbes. So of course Forbes, that’s where rich people go, right? They’ve got all the answers, they, this is where smart financial people, this is where they go for money advice. Let’s just see what kind advice they give you. Alright? So this seems even better because it’s not just about creating financial freedom, but how to do it early. So check this out. It says Seven steps to achieve financial freedom and Retire Early. So Enoch is going to give us the secrets according to orbs. This is a Forbes contributor. I’m starting to realize, man, I could probably be an awesome Forbes contributor with a very different perspective, but again, I hate writing.

(04:55)
This is why I have help for me writing a book right now. So of course he talks about financial freedom. It looks different for everybody. So the first thing is, what is financial freedom to you? Now, some of this stuff is okay, advice. It’s not that he’s saying a lot of things that are wrong, but it’s very vanilla, isn’t it? In fact, most of the advice I see in the media today is very vanilla. Even if they try to get specific, well then they end up being wrong a lot of times too specific, and then they end up making bad assumptions. So talks about it’s not one size fits all. Totally agree. I kind of like what he says here. Now, financial freedom for me is kind of similar to this. He says, for you to be able to control your finances comfortably, pay for your living expenses and afford many of your life goals, I kind of agree with that.

(05:36)
There’s financial independence. I would qualify as what does it take for you to become, to be able to pay your bills? Can you at least make it month to month just fine and survive? That’s financial independence. Financial freedom is when you can actually have those life goals involved and you’re not worried about money, so it allows you to just drop the worry about whether you can pay bills or not and do the things you want. Now he says, of course, it doesn’t mean you have to be incredibly rich, which is also true depending on somebody’s lifestyle. Now here’s where it gets into these seven steps. One, clearly you define your financial goals. He says basically, the more specific you are, the more tangible it is, the easier it is to achieve. Very true. Now here’s the problem. Just because you visualize what it is and you know what you want doesn’t mean you can achieve it, but it is a good first step.

(06:24)
It’s like your point A, but it’s not the B through Z to get you there, right? So that’s true. Now of course, it goes right into the same old stuff you always hear, right? Track and analyze your spending. So you say make sure you track what you’re spending doesn’t say about tracking your income per se. That’s one thing I think is different. A SR’S perspective is track your spending. A spender’s perspective is track your income. A steward’s perspective is track both income and expenses because you want to be able to maximize both. And when I say maximize both, I don’t mean maximize your expenses to the point where you can’t live. I don’t mean that I maximize the efficiency, maximize the income you can earn, but also maximize the wise use of your money when you spend it. Okay, good, that’s fine. And of course that leads into that third point about creating a budget and it talks about, one piece of advice to give is the 50, 30 20 rule.

(07:18)
Allocate 50% for your needs, so pretty much you got to make double the income to pay for your needs. Then you got 30% for wants, 20% to savings and debt repayments. That’s a great rule of thumb. In a perfect world, some of you can do this better than others. I get this. This is one thing I have is when people try to really make a one size fits all, it gets really difficult. Now, it may be true, you might have to get other streams of income to make that work and it may not be the worst thing in the world for you, but I know some of you guys work your tails off and after you pay taxes and then you got a lot of needs. Maybe you have a larger family than other people have, and you might live in a different locality than other people do where your job is, it might make it harder for you to be able to live off 50% of your money and then just spend 30% on the things you want.

(08:07)
20% then can go to savings or debt repayment, and even if you could do 20% savings and debt repayment, is that enough? Is that really enough to become financially free? That’s one thing they don’t really say here. They don’t say, oh, you saved 20% of your income, you’re going to hit your financial goals. No, because they just said your financial goals are individual to you. It could be more or less. I’ll tell you, depending on where you save, you might need to save a lot more than 20%, especially if you’re trying to bank on mutual funds, right? Here it is, pay off your debt and they say debt’s a big thing. So what do you do? You use debt snowball method or debt avalanche. Debt snowball means you just pay the smallest balance first, roll it to the next one and keep rolling it in or the avalanche goes on interest rate.

(08:47)
What about the cashflow index? That one can actually work even better than those other two strategies, but that’s not mentioned because it’s not as popular. He’s just picking really generic stuff. This is really a financial AI article. I would not be surprised if this Enoch guy actually used AI to essentially Google everything. What the common advice is to give you the very vanilla advice right here. Again, not saying that it’s not to some level useful, but this is the same vanilla advice people have been given forever and it hasn’t led a financial freedom yet. He says, then of course, five, you can start investing now. He says, focus on long-term investments rather than short ones and diversify your portfolio. Well, how do you diversify? What does diversify really mean? He doesn’t say. He says, invest in assets are in line with your level of risk tolerance and be prepared whether the ups and the downs of the financial markets.

(09:37)
So pretty much be aware that you’re going to lose money and probably make money too, but you got to ride these waves and be okay with it and know what your level of risk tolerance is. Well, most of the time financial advisors just give you a little risk questionnaire and then that determines what your risk is and then they just put you in that fund and it makes it super easy like, oh, well, based on your risk level, you’re a moderate aggressive risk. We’ll put you in the moderate aggressive portfolio. Oh, you’re a hundred percent aggressive. You go in the aggressive portfolio. Oh, you’re more conservative, conservative portfolio. Wow, brilliant. You take a little test, they just put you in some fund that they have no expertise or skill in and they get paid for it whether you make money or not. Brilliant. Now, six, I was getting excited about number six when I saw this on Google first because it gave me the list of seven, but as I looked at this, I had a little bit of an eye roll.

(10:22)
It says, create multiple streams of income, I think. Yes, this is what I’ve been teaching on this show so often, and then you read it, it says it’s key to achieving financial freedom, but it says if you have several ways of earning money, so far so good, you can save more and less likely go into debt even if one of your income sources is compromised. And here’s the advice he gives. Aside from your primary income source, you can apply for a part-time job, take up a side hustle, or start a small business from home to earn more money. Now, notice this, create multiple streams of income. He’s literally talking about income streams. You exchange time and energy in an exchange for money. Notice it’s not about passive income, multiple streams of passive income. It’s all active income. I am not opposed to this, just so you’re very clear.

(11:09)
I’m not opposed to this at all. I actually love the fact when people try to find additional streams of income, what I don’t like seeing is when people destroy their lives, throw ’em way out of whack and out of balance, trying to work 80, 120 hours a week just so that they can someday maybe have something and even then it just stresses their lives out. Maybe they get in poor health, they die early as a result of it, there may be no life for them to spend the money. So, so much about financial freedom. If you’re dead because you overworked yourself, you carried too much stress, you gave yourself a heart attack or stroke, not the best idea. So again, create multiple streams of income, but all it’s saying is really just get another job. Get another job or side business. Okay, well that’s not says anything genius here either.

(11:54)
And then seven, save for the future after optimizing your budget, paying off your debt, creating multiple streams, income, yada, yada, all you have to do is just save for your future and get your desired net worth, whatever that’s supposed to be. Well, how do you know what your net worth is? Because you’re just told you’re supposed to live on so much per month. Well, how do you know how much it is? There’s all these little rules out there, and he doesn’t even say some of these things like little fake rules, like the 4% rule, you could live on 4%. Well, if he’s talking about retiring early, you better look at 2% and more likely it’s 3% even if you don’t want to retire early. So you give all this stuff, it gives you this big generic advice. But notice it’s just like ai. This is really an AI article.

(12:30)
So maybe you take it to the next level. You say, you know what? I’m going to figure out what it is. So here’s my goal, and let’s just say that you’re starting from zero, right? And say that you’re young, maybe you got 40 years to go. You say, I’m going to start saving. I’m going to save 20% of my income. Let’s say 20% of your income is 20,000 years. Say you’d make a hundred thousand, right? Nice, easy number. Now if you’re expecting you can make 12% and you’re going to do this for the next 40 years, but you would say, oh, inflation is not bad. It’s 3%. It’s supposed to be two, but it’s like three. Okay, great. You put that in. Well, guess what guys? You think you’re genius because now after 40 years you got $17 million, you’re thinking, how can I not be financially free at $17 million?

(13:11)
Well, let’s see about that. After 40 years, let’s look at this, right? Oh, look, 5.2 million after inflation. So it’s still, if I live on 4% of that, that’s over 200 grand a year. Again, faulty assumptions. This is what I did wrong as a financial advisor. This is when I started to lose hope as a financial advisor and why I quit because there’s a few numbers. If you just tweak ’em by a little bit, it changes everything. So first and foremost, one, it’s not 4% rule that doesn’t work. 3% is much more accurate, even as a financial advisor, that one, the 4% rule would be true. 3% was still more idealistic. And what we realized, because we knew that number came from 1976, it’s outdated.

(13:52)
It was taken into account things before we were taking off the gold standard when inflation got worse. So 3% is more likely. Now 3% of 5.2 million is still, this is still not bad. It’s still like 155,000 or so a year. Not bad. That would be a great lifestyle. So you probably think if I just keep doing this consistently, this should work. But wait, there’s more because that 12% is not true. Like I said before, and I’ve said on the show we’re about 8.4% is the actual average return of the s and p 500, the s and p 500, not even the mutual funds that you invest in your 4 0 1 Ks or your other things. An actual index fund is up close to 8.4%, and that’s on the high end, high end. So even if I got really liberal here, 8% is still very high. When I’ve tracked this for years, and I’ve tracked this over time, it does vary.

(14:43)
So let’s just put it at 8%. Let’s just pretend it is. Well, guess what? Your number just dropped significantly. Only four made a massive difference. Notice that you’re 5.2 million of after tax or after inflation is 1.7 million. Well at 3% that means you’re about 51,000 a year. Not the worst thing in the world, but that’s better, but not the best thing, but 51,000 a year, and by the way, you got to pay taxes on that. So after you pay taxes, guys, you might walk away with maybe if you’re like around $40,000 a year, does that make you very excited to keep saving 20,000 a year to then live on maybe 40,000 a year and for how many years? We don’t know. And that’s the problem. That’s why because of couples that are 65 years old today, the likelihood is one of the two of you will survive to at least age 92, right?

(15:32)
One of you. So you have about a 50% chance more likely the women will last till 92 than men. But even men if they make it to 65, have a very decent chance and make it to live in their nineties. So this is why that 3% rule also become better than the 4% when people were dying sooner back in 1976 as well. So remember, they’re trying to get your money to last you, but remember, we also have inflation. Here is another number, right? Well, what if inflation’s not 3%? You go to shadow stats.com, they show something worse, right? It’s more like, well, it’s actually closer to seven to 9%. I’ll put it at five. I’m going to leave it at five. Watch what happens to your after inflation number here. When you change that, boom, now you’re down about round up to 800,000. Now you’re living on 24,000 a year or $2,000 a month before you pay taxes.

(16:23)
So after you pay taxes on 24,000, let’s just say that you are a quarter of that money goes to taxes. Guess what? You’re left with less than 20,000 a year. How much were you saving per year? 20,000. So you’re literally saving 20,000 a year to then hopefully, if you’re lucky, live on 20,000 a year after inflation. Well, what if it is 7%? Guys? What if it really is what they say based on the real numbers? Notice that number. Now you’re living on like 10,000 a year after inflation. Now it’s even worse. You cannot earn enough. You might say, well, Chris, what if I got eight and a half percent average? Okay, cool, throw it in there. Guess what? You’re still at just over 12,000 a year. Well, Chris, what if we make 10? Maybe you make 10 if you’re really lucky and you’re not likely to see that, and if it is, it’s probably because there is a lot of inflation.

(17:07)
Guess what? 650,000 means you’re living on less than 20,000 a year. Once again, well, Chris, what if it’s 5%? Notice how insane this gets, right? You’re just throwing numbers out there. But again, if I’m being against my point of view, right? If I’m trying to be liberal towards the retirement, traditional retirement thing, that means if you start 40 years ago, you better turn, well save a lot more. Come on, 24,000 a year, living on less than 2000 bucks a month before taxes is not enough. And what would you have to save? You want a decent lifestyle? Well, probably whatever you’re saving per year is about what you’re going to live on per year. But I keep finding this, and I also say this, the 4 0 1 Ks, you might save the match. The match. If you’ve watched my other podcasts, you already know this is not true.

(17:50)
The match only makes up for the bad performance of the mutual funds. Remember, fidelity? This is where we go away from the ai, the fake stuff, right? What’s real, what’s not? Well, what’s reality is of the Fidelity funds, the last 10 year performance, if you look at their funds, they’ve underperformed the market by 2%, over 2%, about 2.1%. That does not include the 0.75% fee on those target date retirement funds, which over 80% of millennials are currently picking in their retirement portfolio. They are doing that right now. So when people say, oh, it’s fine because I got my money in the market. Well, if you get your money in a mutual fund, even if you get the a hundred percent match, if you get the a hundred percent match and that’s all you match to, once again, it only makes up for the bad performance to finally get maybe that 8%.

(18:33)
Okay? That’s really all it ever does. It just gets you back to average. So then you might as well just put your money away outside of your 401k, do it your own. But still, if you don’t have a good enough return, it’s not enough. And so like I said, even if you get 8%, look at that. You got 4 million after inflation at 5%, that’s still, now it’s better. Now you got about 120,000 a year you’re living on. But look, that’s because I saved a hundred thousand a year to live on 120,000, but again, I have to pay taxes. If it’s an IRA or 401k, I’m living on less than a hundred thousand a year. I save a hundred thousand to live on less than a hundred thousand after taxes. And by the way, I think taxes are going up in the future. I don’t know about you.

(19:14)
I don’t think they’re going to get much better than they are today. You see the problem, you see what I have here, and it’s not just financial advisors. It’s not just about all the financial institutions trying to teach you this stuff. Furthermore, and by the way, fidelity, yes, they of course want you to put money in there, but why is it that less than 2% of all of the retirement accounts have less than 1 million in ’em if people have been saving these things? And baby boomers, one of the biggest generations of our time, along with our millennials, two humongous groups and still the baby boomers that have been saving diligently for many, many decades. 4 0 1 Ks, by the way, have been around for the common man since about 1985. It was set up in the seventies, but it was more for just high level executives to save on the income tax brackets because they were up over 80%.

(19:59)
That’s why the 401k was created in the first place, is to help give them a break saying, well, if I can live on less than what I’m earning, earning so much, and I’m at the 80 some odd percent tax bracket, it’d be better if I could be in a 30% tax bracket. So they were trying to put their money away and defer it for future date to live on to have a lower tax bracket. But that’s not the case anymore, guys. It’s not the case at all. There is a big, big discrepancy there. Furthermore, right, okay, so really since 1985, we’re going on almost 40 years, but yet there’s only about 810,000 accounts out of 45 million, 45 million and only 810,000 have at least a million dollars, and still of that, those that have over a million dollars that was surveyed by Transamerica. Now that 35% of them thought it would take a miracle to be able to retire.

(20:42)
You’ve heard me say this over and over. If you’ve listened to the show enough or watched the show enough, you already know this. That is the reality. That is what people are really experiencing and look around in your real life. This is what I had to do when I looked at real life clients. I looked at people that I even inherited from other financial advisors. It wasn’t that the financial advisors just gave bad advice, although that can be true too. It’s because they gave the same advice that this Forbes article was giving you same exact steps. In fact, some of ’em had a seven step process saying these very same things, and yet it’s not enough. It hasn’t worked yet. Not because you didn’t save enough, but because you saved in the wrong places, buying it to the wrong information at the wrong time. Contrast it, and I’ll even throw into this group too, if you’re looking at AI crap, other people talking about financial freedom, then you get the other extreme.

(21:29)
You get the people that are telling you, Hey, if you get into real estate investing, you’re going to become rich. And you’re like, Chris, where are you going with this? You talk about real estate investing, but I don’t talk about getting rich with it. I don’t talk about creating a whole nother side hustle or business talking about flipping properties or wholesaling. Again, you can make money doing that, but that’s not passive, guys. That’s legitimately creating a new business. And yes, if you’re a business owner, oh my goodness, there are so many more things you can do. So many more possibilities you could create if you are a business owner. This is why we love working with business owners because not only can we help them reduce taxes and such and help them get creative with their finances, but then they can also create passive income so that they work in their business.

(22:07)
They want to, not because they have to, which ironically, when you don’t need to make money in your business, that’s usually when you make the most money in business. That’s one of my biggest secrets in being a business owner is that when you don’t need to make money in business, you tend to make the most money in business, but you get all these people out there telling you, Hey, I’ve made lots of money. For example, there’s a guy I’ve been friends with for 15 years. We’re much more distant friends. We’re not like close buddy buddy, but we’ve known each other for 15 years. I’ve known him early on in his business and even later stages, I saw this video where there were interviewing millionaires and they happened to stop this random millionaire’s house, which was his, and they’re talking to him and they said, well, tell us how much wealth he made.

(22:47)
He’s like, I’ve transact over a billion dollars of real estate. I know that’s bs. I know that for a fact, it’s bs. He did not transact over a million dollars real estate. Now, he did have a lot of people buy rental properties that they helped connect them with, so it’d be like a realtor telling you, oh yeah, I’ve done over a billion dollars of real estate, when in reality they sold over a billion dollars of real estate value. That’s the same thing he’s doing here. He’s basically acting like a realtor. It’s like, oh yeah, we’ve done over a billion dollars of real estate. No, you didn’t. Don’t have anywhere close. Even when he was talking about his income, I was like, that could be true, but I wonder if he’s kind of giving us bull here because he might be over exaggerating. There are so much over overexaggeration from people out there today, and that’s why it’s hard to trust people, isn’t it?

(23:38)
Because you don’t know if they’re telling the truth, they’ll say something, but the number’s going crazy. I mentioned just in a recent episode about Dave Ramsey who I thought was worth 600 or 700 million, and then we go find out when we do our research, he’s worth maybe $200 million, not nearly as much, but again, he overinflate everything and tries to make it sound amazing and grand, right, and so it’s hard to trust that, and of course they’ll tell you. Some people say, oh, you get rich quick overnight. No, you don’t. Guys, again, in business, that’s probably one of the easier places to get rich, but I would never say it’s a get rich quick thing. It takes so much more energy and time and expertise and knowledge. Again, you don’t have to be perfect to succeed in business, but it does require a lot from you to create those kind of results.

(24:24)
So don’t for one second tell you people, I just basically sat on my couch and made a lot of money. No, you didn’t. Okay? You still worked your tail off even if it was in those early stages when nobody saw you. Well, that’s what I mean by this financial AI that’s out there, right? Everybody’s telling you about how to create financial freedom and this or that the other, and they’re just not giving to you straight. I’ll give this to you straight. What we teach is not overnight success for people, but it does work. It’s effective because when I left being a financial advisor, I realized I couldn’t teach these things that didn’t work. That’s why I went on my own journey looking for it, and I realized in real estate, now I associate with people that were more real estate flippers, but I started to learn about other strategies.

(25:04)
I started to realize there was things like hard money lending. I could lend out my money to other people and they pay me the returns. I realized that could actually go and I could own the properties, but it’s not the appreciation that I make all the money on, although that helps, doesn’t hurt, that’s for sure, but it’s actually the cashflow and what percentage of income can I make, especially when I’m using leveraging mortgages and things like that, which some people don’t like. Some do, and that’s fine. Even if you don’t leverage a mortgage, sometimes you can still make more money in real estate. I’ll give you an example here. Recently I was talking with a client and he actually had been on our podcast before. Now he’s not quite financially independent, but as we’re reviewing some of his things, he’s been now working with us for five years, since 2019, and he said, Chris, this is the cool thing.

(25:48)
I’m looking at my balance sheet. He’s looking at his assets versus liabilities. What’s his net worth? Now remember, if you’ve watched this show enough that I’m not a huge proponent of net worth is everything, but it’s a great measurement to see what’s working. I think the income side is more important, and yes, he increased his income. He’s not at the point where he could just quit his job yet, although when his job has been put on pause because of pandemics during that period of time, even got put on pause because of strikes going on with his work for literally six months where he couldn’t work, all that stuff was going on. He was still okay. He had passive income coming in and he had some cash reserves that smoothed over, so this actually slowed down his journey, and despite all of that, despite life happening, here’s what he said.

(26:31)
He’s like, Chris, I started with you guys. I started with a quarter million dollars I had in mutual funds. That’s all I had, and then I used that to go buy some properties and he ended up buying, and now in total he’s got like seven rental properties, and so we were analyzing the properties and things he was looking at, and he is almost about 4,000 a month of passive income there between 3,500, 4,000 and even we identified some of the properties because the equity had grown in some of those. We said we could probably sell some of these and get two properties for the price of this one, so we could probably get ’em up to, if you want to go into more properties, probably over 10, and that would actually push him over 5,000 a month. But here’s the thing. He said, he’s like, Chris, I was looking at the net worth.

(27:09)
He’s like, I’m a net worth millionaire, Chris, I’m worth over a million dollars. If we took out the home equity, if we took that out from a credit investor standpoint, it’s 250,000, still got to where his net worth is over $800,000. Think about that five years, and that tripled his net worth. Why? Because he bought a real asset and that real assets. That’s been cash flowing the whole time, and he’s taken some of that cashflow. Although he said interruptions because of work issues, he’s still been able to take some of that cashflow to reinvest and buy more. That is the power guys in five years, think about five years, they say, Hey, I’m now in the top, really 8%, 7% of Americans of having over a million dollars net worth. That’s a big deal For a guy that said, I was just middle class, had a quarter million dollars sitting in my different mutual funds and whatnot, and we use those instead to buy real assets.

(28:02)
Even if he was in the market for those last five years, even then, I mean, he would almost double his money in that period of time, but still more than tripled it, and the difference is he actually has income. That is something I don’t have to worry about all that. Those inflation numbers I do a little bit, right? Obviously, it takes time to build. It’s not overnight, but the faster you can do it, the better. It’s the better. You don’t worry about inflation because you already know you’re already catching up. You’re catching up faster. It’s not about how much money you have, it’s what it’s able to create for you. Yes, he’s got great net worth, but he’s turning that net worth into cashflow. That is the thing that has been proven, and it hasn’t just been proven for me or for this client of mine, but for many, many other clients too, even the ones that are on their journey, they’re still not financially independent.

(28:45)
Still, their net worth has been growing over the years because of this very reason, guys, this is the power. This is where it excites me to see that kind of real results, and I think that’s the thing you have to look for is it says in the Bible all the time, is by the fruits. You shall know them. What are the fruits you’re seeing? The fruits I’ve seen from traditional retirement plans is what Fidelity reported, which is less than 2% of their people have at least a million dollars, and even on that, less than 2% still one third of ’em don’t think they’ll be able to retire ever, right? So think about it. That means only like 1% of people in those plans have made it work. Why would you go for a 1% success rate where what we’ve done here, even people that haven’t done what we’ve recommended, they just went and bought real estate haphazardly, and sometimes they still become multimillionaires because over time it’s worked.

(29:41)
It’s actually worked. Why not go for the thing that’s worked? If you say you’re a conservative investor, why not do the thing that’s actually worked versus the thing that AI and Google and everybody else has sold you? That works because they all work for the financial companies. By the way, Forbes loves to tell you to invest in those things. Why? Because who pays their bills? Forbes gets paid by the very companies they’re trying to sell you on the idea that hasn’t worked. They are selling you hopium. They hope that things will work, but the truth is, the vast majority of you will never make it. Don’t go for the thing that hasn’t worked. Look for the real thing. Buy other fruits. You shall know them. I love seeing the fruits that our clients have created because it actually has worked reality. It’s worked. Even when there’s been some losses from time to time, they’ve still been better off than their counterpart.

(30:26)
The people that are just like them, they’re still stuck in the markets, which by the way, I think the markets will also lose and then will really be having an interesting conversation when that happens. Hopefully you’re smarter than that to not just hold on when things go down, hopefully you’re saying, you know what? Things are really high right now. Should I be selling my stuff off now? When things are at the height when nobody else is thinking about selling, isn’t that the best time to sell? If you could sell real estate at the height of the market 2021, when you have done it, some of you probably did and thought you were a genius. Well, why wouldn’t I do that with stocks too? I’m not giving you recommendations to say you should sell now, I’m just saying the people that are smart are saying, you know what?

(31:03)
I see the writing on the wall. I see that I can make more money by going over here. Instead, let’s see if I can make more money and create more freedom sooner than hoping and praying that these little seven steps that are just basic vanilla crap on Forbes or whatever it might be, might work. That’s the difference, guys. Of course, if we can ever support you, always reach out to us@moneyripples.com, but my challenge to you is think different and think in reality. Find out where the fruit really is. Where is it born? Real fruit versus where is it? Just a lot of promises, but no real evidence. Look for the evidence. Guys. Make it wonderful and prosperous week.

Speaker 2 (31:42):

Thank you. Yes. Hey,

Speaker 3 (31:51):

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