Financial freedom is a word that is thrown around VERY loosely these days.
You are not financially free if you’re saving away day after day to make income to pay your bills. Even if you make a lot of money, if that job or business isn’t around, that “financial freedom” you think you have disappears. To debunk this myth and also talk about the right way to create passive income, generational wealth, and overall financial independence, I brought on my friend and former client, Whitney Elkins-Hutten.
Whitney has been wildly successful in her passive investing ventures and her skills have been noticed my huge real estate companies such as Bigger Pockets.
Today, Whitney will be discussing her journey to financial freedom and the ways you can achieve it, as well.
Whitney Elkins-Hutten Links:
Book: https://store.biggerpockets.com/products/money-for-tomorrow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/whitneyelkinshutten/
Generational wealth is closer than you think!
Take our Passive Income Calculator and see your potential for freedom: https://bit.ly/4cUe0VO
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TRANSCRIPTS:
Speaker 1 (00:00):
What if I die young? What if I can’t teach them in time?
Speaker 2 (00:03):
That’s a word that you put in my vocabulary that I was just like, steward. What do you mean by steward? There’s financial education and then financial capacity, and I think of people confuse the two. So financial education is really about
Speaker 3 (00:18):
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 anti financianal advisor you deserve. He’s jumping behind the mic right now, ready to make waves. Here’s Chris Miles.
Speaker 1 (00:49):
Hello my fellow Ripples. This is Chris Miles, your cashflow expert and anti financianal advisor. Welcome to the show that’s 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 want to become work option where you work because you want to, not because you have to where you make money today, not in 30 or 40 years. So you can live that life that you love with those you love. But guys, we know it’s not just about getting rich, it’s about living a rich life because as you are blessed financially, you now have a greater capacity to bless the lives of those around you. Thank you so much for tuning in, allowing me to create a ripple effect through you guys, and more importantly, thank you for not just tuning in but actually doing something with this information.
(01:26)
And you’ll hear from today’s episode that’s an essential part of what we’re going to talk about today. So be sure to do that. Now, as a reminder, if you haven’t done this already, go to our website, money ripples.com. We’ve got lots of great free information on there as well that we could support you whether you’re looking at passive investing or you’re looking at infinite banking, especially if you want to get the best ROI possible, go ahead and check that out right now. Okay guys, so I’m bringing back a guest. I’m trying to remember if it’s the second time or third time. It might be the third, but I know it’s at least the second. But we have Whitney Elkins Hutton here with us today. Now Whitney actually somebody I’ve known for several years. We’ve worked together on various things and welcome her back. Some of you guys, if you follow BiggerPockets, you might have seen her there. If you follow passive investing.com, she works there as well. And guys, she also just wrote a new book that we’re going to talk about today called Money for Tomorrow, how to Build and Protect Generational Wealth that she actually published with BiggerPockets and has just released here recently. Not to mention guys, she has got so much different real estate experience everywhere from flipping to doing syndications and being involved in literally thousands and thousands of doors. So excited to be able to welcome Whitney back here today. Welcome back, Whitney.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Thank you so much for having me, Chris. This is going to be fun.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
I know. Try to get me say welcome back Whitney like 10 times apparently. That’s a really tough thing for me to do.
Speaker 2 (02:42):
It’s a tongue twister
Speaker 1 (02:44):
I guess it is for me. Well, anything’s a tongue twister, that’s for sure. So for those that haven’t seen our episode, I think our episode was actually like 543 or something like that, and we’re now beyond 800. Tell us more about you and your story.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Yeah, yeah. I’ll try to give you the synopsis. So I’m currently where I’m at. I am the director of investor education@passiveinvesting.com. I’m also the founder of Ash Wealth, but I didn’t start off in real estate. I didn’t start off in helping people build financial capacity in their lives. I started off simply as a person who owned a house with a significant other and then their relationship crumbled. And that was over 22 years ago. And when that relationship fell apart, I was just beyond and beyond. I’m like, what am I going to do? This house is going to sink me. So I stuck it fully. Roommates completed the rehab on the property and guys, we were talking about green shag carpet, psychedelic daisies from the 1960s painted all over the walls. I mean it was bad. Paid my friends in sushi beer and pizza. And we rehabbed this property together and I had my roommates paint an income stream to me and then sold the property 11 months later and was finally like, oh, that thing’s not going to sink me.
(03:59)
And that was really kind of my first foray into real estate because I was like, wait a second, I just made $52,000, haven’t been paying for any of my housing expenses, been putting cash in my pocket every single month and all this money is tax free because of the 1 21 exclusion under the tax code, which we can talk about too. I was like, how many more times can I do this? So did several projects, live and flow projects by myself and also with my husband. And then we ran into a problem. We had great equity coming in, we had bad cashflow, we had no cashflow. And guys, this is where Chris and I started working together and Chris helped me really kind of reorganize our finances and really start understanding how we could scale through buy and hold residential real estate. And so I’m a good student.
(04:51)
So instead of buying just one or two properties, I think that first year, Chris, I bought 10 that we worked together something crazy like that. The next year started doing rehab bur rehabs on those properties. So went from 10 to 36 and then eventually started getting into larger multifamily real estate, being the GP on larger multifamily deals and all of this with us trying to figure out how to create leverage with our time and our money that we had. And not to create money just for money’s sake because money is a tool. It was about creating a hundred percent choice and freedom on how we spent our time. And so where we are today, we have, my husband and I personally have over 6,500 units individually and in partnership we have 2200 self storage units and then various other cash flowing businesses. And so we’re super excited to bring our knowledge to the podcast here today.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
I’ll tell you, this is probably the first time you’ve heard it and probably the first time our listeners heard it too, but I’ve told my own team internally, I was like, listen, if Whitney ever becomes disgruntled where she’s working, I need to hire her for our company. She is just incredible. I mean, you’re incredible teacher for one, but two, I know even when we sat down in Denver when I came to visit and we had breakfast, I’m like, you have a brilliant business mind. And I don’t think a lot of people realize that.
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Oh, well, thank you. Yeah, I think I can be a little overwhelming at times for context here, we’re sitting down over at breakfast and Chris is just like, Hey, I just wanted to meet you face to face and get you to know you a little bit better. And I’m laying out, okay, Chris, this is how you take your knowledge and amplify it. You want to create a ripple effect, this is how we’re going to do it. And he was like, whoa, hold on.
Speaker 1 (06:45):
Let me swallow my avocado toast first. Come on.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Exactly. Exactly. And he was like, I haven’t even gone from my run yet. And I’m like, but I already did. So we’re good.
Speaker 1 (06:54):
But it’s true because I was just a solopreneur really at that time. It was just Chris and that was it. Now I have a team of nine people including myself, and so I’m now seeing the things you were already talking about, but it was like, oh, I was just going to be nice and relaxed and just kind of coast my way through. But that’s the thing with having a mission, right? Is when you have a mission you think, no, I can’t just coast my way through. If I have a ripple effect I want to create, I better actually own up to it. And absolutely you’re one of those little sparks that I realized, oh, I need to do something more than just be comfortable and just be out of the rat race and just see, I’ll just do my podcast and coach a few people here and there. Thanks to you, and obviously other experiences as well. Money ripples is now what it is today.
Speaker 2 (07:41):
Well, and thanks to you, you created a ripple effect through me and now through this book. And so just think about the impact there. So it’s like what I say a lot of times when I’m coaching people about how do you get time, freedom and choice, they were like, well, what do you do? Where do you volunteer? I’m like, I start at home. If I can make sure that my daughter is knowledgeable, has financial skills, has relationship skills, negotiation skills, and can just be a generally good person in this world, she’s going to impact tens of thousands of people. And so I do want to do what I do with other people, but I’m moms like, I got to start at home because that’s where I’m going to have the most impact.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Yeah, that’s one thing I remember, there was a quote I heard once where it said, if you teach a man, you teach a man. If you teach a woman, you teach generations, right? That’s kind of the ripple effect I see. Talking about right here, isn’t it? It’s starting in your family, within your own walls first.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Absolutely. I mean, when we were doing our work together, we talked a lot about health, spiritual health, physical health, emotional health, other pillars as well. But there was a really, I think one thing that you imparted to me and you were like these areas of your life, they don’t bounce, they break. And so you have to take care of that first. And money is the tool that allows you to do that. And it’s really odd because it’s a chicken or ed thing. If you don’t have money, it’s hard to take care of all these things at home. But if you’re pursuing money for the sake of money and you ignore the oxygen math that you need to have at home, you’re never going to be satisfied or fulfilled on what you do in your investing or in your business growth. So
Speaker 1 (09:33):
Tell me what really inspired you to write this book.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Well, oddly enough, my daughter we’re going through scaling our portfolio and I was like, wow, my husband and I are thinking, are we going to leave her all of this, everything that we’ve built, or are we going to leave her the knowledge? And the thing was the knowledge is scattered everywhere. It’s in books and podcasts. It’s in my coaching and mentoring relationships. I really couldn’t find a one-stop shop to have this all compiled in one spot. And we were talking before the show. Chris has been such an instrumental influence in our journey. Of course, there’s tons of threads to that book on Chris’s knowledge and wisdom, but we stack upon that pulling from other areas and other mentors that we’ve worked with to really build out this plan. It was like, I want this all in one place, and of course we’re going to add to it over time.
(10:27)
But I wanted to be able to hand her that because even if she does get the portfolio, all of the portfolio, she needs to know how to steward it, right? That’s a word that you put in my vocabulary that I was just like, steward, what do you mean by steward? You were like, spender, save her. I’m like, well, there’s something in between. You were like, yes, steward. I wanted her to be able to steward that wealth moving forward. So I was like, okay, I can’t find anywhere. I’ll just write it myself. And so started writing that book. And then as I’m going through this process of just compiling all these notes, I would notice people that I was working with, investors I was talking with, they were like, I really wish I could solve this problem. I’m like, Hey, take this chapter out of my book.
(11:08)
Let me know what you think about it. And they’re like, oh my gosh, that’s fantastic. And eventually I was writing, I’m still writing with BiggerPockets. They were like, you want to come talk at our conference? I was like, sure. And by the time we got to the end of the conference, the room is packed, my conference talk, the room is packed. And the editor came up to me at the end. She was like, I really liked how you opened up the last section and your talk about let’s talk about how to die properly. And I was like, that was actually, I misspoke, but okay, what did you like about that? And she was like, we don’t have a blueprint for people to follow and to help them understand that it’s not just about creating wealth and growing it, but how do you keep it and pass it on effectively and efficiently?
(11:55)
And this played out in my life over and over again. It was like, what do you call it, insanity when you’re learning the same thing lesson over and over again. And so I really wanted to help people understand that you can build this beautiful portfolio that provides you all the five freedoms in life, financial freedom, time freedom, location freedom, freedom of choice, freedom and impact in the world, but you don’t know how to transfer it to the next generation, not only through wills and trust, but also through education. It can kind of be a lot. She can lose a lot. There’s a lot of wealth that is eroded in that end of life transfer. So why did I write the book is that I wanted people not to go through those situations. We should stand on the shoulders of giants. And of course my daughter’s going to make her own mistakes. I wanted her to have the freedom to go make her own mistakes and not repeat the same things that my family has done or I have done.
Speaker 1 (12:55):
Oh, I love it so much. And before I better ask. Now I guarantee that people are already thinking it. Where do they find the book? Where do they find money for tomorrow?
Speaker 2 (13:03):
Yes. So if you go to biggerpockets.com, there’s a suite of tools that go along with it. Or if you like it on Amazon, you can download the Kindle version there. Also, you can get the hardback version as well. So biggerpockets.com/money for tomorrow or Amazon. Either way.
Speaker 1 (13:22):
It’s interesting your reasoning behind making the book because it’s the same reason I did the podcast in the first place. Even the one before this one was, I remember in 2008, 2009, thinking I’m just in my early thirties. What if I die young and my kids are all young at that time? What if I die young? What if I can’t teach them in time? And so I started recording the podcast for them. Then I started recording it for clients like, oh, they keep asking the same question. How can I just say listen to that for the next 15, 20 minutes and then come back and ask for clarifying questions just so we can reduce our time of having to talk about this the whole time and me feeling like I’m just a broken record. But then that kind of led to what it is today creating a bigger ripple effect in people’s lives. And it sounds like your book is very similar.
Speaker 2 (14:07):
It is. I mean, it’s very densely packed with information and we open the book a lot with mindset because there’s financial education and then financial capacity, and I think of people confuse the two. So financial education is really about the how do you organize your budget? How do you, you have four ways to keep wealth. I’ve tacked on a couple additional ways on top of that, what are the mechanics and capacity is really digging into, okay, now that all this information, how do you actually put it to use when you’re moving to how to put it to use, you have to address the mindset. What are those things, those little saboteurs that are going to get it in the way? How are you going to be really critical or judgmental of yourself? Do you even have an abundance mindset? Do you think the world’s out to get you or is it conspiring for you? We go through a series of questions to really help people understand and orient to the world so they can actually start adjusting their mindset. And if they don’t already have a stewardship mentality or an abundant mentality even that they can start really going through some exercises to demystify that and see what that path looks like. And even just those mind shifts alone is going to make the implementation of the tools so much simpler.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
Oh, absolutely. And like you mentioned before, when we talk about steward mindset versus spender or saver, you don’t have an abundant mindset. It doesn’t matter what strategy you’re taught, you’ll find a way to probably sabotage you.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Oh, absolutely. But I mean it’s even just the vocabulary, right? Back to our work together. I remember you said stewardship and I was like, I got to get the dictionary out. What does Chris mean by that? I don’t really fully understand. And that was for me, it really hit home. It was like, I need to be able to flip. I need to be able to do both save and spend. I need to look at it. And it’s hard because you’re going to hit up against situations when the going’s great, it’s easy to be a steward, but when we’ve been in a challenging market, we’ve been in the past 12 months, it’s easy to revert back to that old belief system and get into that scarcity mindset. Either you’re going to be like, I need a scri and save and not spend anything. Or you’re just like, the world’s ending. What does it matter? I’m going to spend it all right? But how do you stay really centered and understand that you still are walking this tension between the two?
Speaker 1 (16:47):
And that might kind of blend in or blend in. Transition to my next question here, which is, and there’s a lot of people here looking for more freedom, right? Many of ’em aren’t working with us, they’re just doing whatever. They might be learning this to try to figure out how they can create more freedom, time freedom, money freedom, even just have something more in their life. What would you be your advice to them? What would be your advice of how to be able to accomplish that?
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Yeah, so there’s a framework that I love working people through, and it’s three questions, pretty simple, and this is a framework that I learned from another mentor of mine, but it’s what do you want? Why do you want it and who do you have to become to get it? And so what do you want? It is going to come in two flavors, right? You’re going to have what you’re kind of running from, I don’t want to be at a desk job. I don’t want to be in debt. I want to be able to take the family on vacation. But the other part side of what do you want is probably going to be the five freedoms. I want financial freedom. I want time freedom, I want choice, I want impact. Why do you want it? We’ve got to attach that emotion to it. Hey, it’s not just as simple as what do you want? Because the want is going to keep you motivated day to day. The emotion is going to keep you motivated over a lifetime,
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Especially when times get tough.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Exactly. And I’ll tell you, for me, that was kind of on my evolution because I’m an executor. I go from want to do, somebody says T in motion to it. I’m like, yeah, I’ll do that later. That’s just not my thing. I really struggled with that for a few years because I was like, okay, now I have all this income coming in. I have this, my bank account’s healthy. Is it enough? What’s enough? What’s fulfillment? What does this even look to me? Really, I had to go back and is it really truly not working anymore? Is it working 30 hours a week, 20 hours a week? And it was when I was challenged to go back and attach emotion to each area of these lives, that’s when I really began to understand fulfillment. And for me, my emotions, I want to feel strong. I want to feel light, and I want to feel connected.
(18:59)
And if you ever play around with the word light, it’s really interesting. It can mean bright lights. It can mean not heavy. It can mean free and flowing, energetic. And whenever I play around with all those words and emotions combined, it really helps me understand what I truly want in the world. Now, I know we just went completely esoteric. Somebody might be like, she needs to go back to her meditation session for the morning or whatever, but I kid you actually, I don’t kid you. You would need to define what you want. Why do you want it? Attach that emotion to it because that emotion is the north star. It’s going to let you know when you’re pointed in the right direction. And then how do you get it? Well, what mindset do you need? What skills do you need? Who do you need in your world in order to achieve it?
Speaker 1 (19:52):
Amen. I couldn’t have said it better myself. That’s so true. It sounds simple, but it’s amazing how few people actually go that deep in that work to really solidify themselves, center themselves, as you said, so then they can then achieve it even faster. And I’m so glad you mentioned that. I don’t think you can focus on mindset enough. And I even know, and I mean with our own clients too, I always expect our clients want like, oh, they want the how to, but we give them the how to. But the one thing that always comes up when we do our live events is they’re always like, how do we stay abundantly minded? How do I deal with this? How do I deal with that? It’s almost always emotional, hardly ever dealing with just the skillset. It’s almost always the mindset.
Speaker 2 (20:35):
And people, I think it’s scary for them. They have a problem to solve. And so they think that that work can be done later or maybe it doesn’t have to be done at all. And it’s kind of like the money being the tool to help you get the health, the spirituality, that type of wealth. It’s really interesting. If you can sit with those questions, not just once, but every four months or six months even, and for years, it’s going to be like peeling back the layers of the onion. Then eventually you’re going to land on your answers to those questions that are going to help propel you forward.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
Yeah, I love it. Now, I already know we can get the book at BiggerPockets. How do people want to follow you if they want to follow you, Whitney?
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Yeah. So if you were wanting to talk about the book in more depth, you can reach out to me at as wealth a SH wealth.com. If you’re interested about investing in real estate, passively seen or open deals and multifamily self storage, express car washes and real estate debt, you can find me at passive investing with whitney.com.
Speaker 1 (21:48):
Awesome. Love it. Yeah, and I know a lot of our clients love you too. Really appreciate you being back here again today. Whitney,
Speaker 2 (21:55):
Thank you so much for having me here, Chris
Speaker 1 (21:57):
And everybody else. You heard it mindset along with the money skillset, it goes in tandem. You can’t have one without the other. You try to do one, the other one fails and vice versa, right? You’ve got to have both and get ’em working at the same time, and then you can accelerate your journey towards freedom and getting the things that you truly want out of life. So be sure to follow Whitney. Be sure to check out her stuff. We have all the links and everything in the show notes for you so you don’t have to pull over a crash or anything like that. You can go find that right now. So guys, remember, go make it a wonderful imposter week. Be the hero of your own story, and we’ll talk to you later.