I used to be an inflamed, out-of-shape, and unhappy penny pincher. Yes, me.
The guy who now runs marathons for fun, eats organic every day, and speaks to you about living life abundantly. I had to train myself to see that quality costs money, BUT lasts a lot longer. I did this in my personal, professional, and financial life.
Listen to today’s episode to see why I care so much about living a life of happiness and how choosing the best is the only way to get there.
Check out the passive income calculator now and start living a life of abundance – https://bit.ly/3S7WPrj
Listen on Apple Podcasts: CLICK HERE!
Watch on Youtube: CLICK HERE!
TRANSCRIPTS:
Speaker 1 (00:02):
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 financial. 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 2 (00:33):
Hello my fellow Ripples. This is Chris Miles, your cashflow expert, anti financial advisor. Welcome to this show. That is your show, show that’s for you. You don’t want to keep working so hard for your money. You want to get your money working harder for you today. You want that freedom and cash flow not 30 or 40 years from now, but you want it today so that you live that life that you love, but those that you love most. But guys, it’s not just about getting rich, it’s about living a rich life because as you start to be blessed more and more financially, you now can have the greater capacity to create a ripple effect and bless the lives of those around you. Thank you for allowing me to create a ripple effect in your life today. Thank you for tuning in and sharing this with others.
(01:10)
You guys, I’m telling you, you are. Honestly, it’s like seriously, some of the best people ever, some of the best listeners, and the reason I know that is because I’ve been talking to some of you lately. You’ve been getting a surprise all of a sudden that I’m talking on calls with you. That’s not permanent. In fact, by the time you watch this, it’s probably not me anymore. I have been surprising a few of you by actually talking with you, and I just want to take a time out to say that you inspire me, right? You really do. You inspire me to do this mission right? To really help more and more people and give you guys that opportunity to really buy that time back, to have that time freedom through money, freedom through passive income and cashflow. Hey, how amazing would it be if you could create monthly cashflow, passive income from making at least double digit returns on your money and get this, it’s only a thousand dollars or more that you need to invest.
(02:01)
Guys, that’s exactly what secured Investment Corp does. They actually do short-term lending to real estate investors. That’s backed by real estate that you can actually earn double digit returns on. That means 10% or better. It’s also IRA friendly and you can even reinvest those monthly distributions to create compound interest on your money too. So guys, if you want to learn more about that, go check out secured investment corp.com. That’s secured, S-E-C-U-R ed and investment corp.com. And so I want to share some thoughts with several, the conversations I’ve been having with many of you about what often is one of the big missing pieces in this. I’m probably title this something to the effect of the best costs less, right? The best costs less. And what I mean by this is I remember it being in a scarcely world when I was shopping in the past and I’m talking about when I was a newlywed married guy.
(02:54)
Heck, even before I was a newlywed, I took up some of the habits for my dad, which is spend nothing, try to save whatever you can. Basically that ultimate saver mentality, I was like the guy that Dave Ramsey would’ve been proud of himself, but the thing is, is that I was always looking at price and I’m the guy that quickly calculates in my head the math to see what’s the cost. And then of course it was a wonderful thing. It was a wonderful thing when all of a sudden they would show you the price per ounce. And so I’d be like, Ooh, let me look at this, and even if it’s a sale price, is this better on sale or buying in bulk or buying it individually? And I would pride myself on the amount of money I would save it like the grocery store or when I would buy things and I would always buy the cheapest.
(03:34)
Now, as I started doing this in my twenties, I thought I couldn’t figure out why my metabolism was changing. I thought it must be something about old age. When I was 25 years old, I’m like, wait, I’m starting to gain a little weight here. I was super thin. I could never gain weight. Now I’m starting to gain a little punch. If you know what that is. My ballroom dance instructor taught me. It’s that little belly. Little did I know that belly is coming from leaky gut, right? It’s coming from not having the right nutrition, eating typical breads and things like that have GMOs in them, and that was starting to affect me. Even though I was burning off calories like crazy, I was getting this little belly. I’m like, I couldn’t figure it out. Well, why? I was buying cheap. I was buying stuff with cheap ingredients and I was getting that cost by the time I was in my thirties, and not many people know this, but by the time I got to about my mid thirties or so when I really started to, by the time I launched Money Ripples, so this was about my mid thirties, what happened is pretty soon I’m in pain every single day.
(04:31)
My body’s inflamed. I’m alternating every day between ibuprofen and Tylenol, and I’m taking that each and every day for a year straight. I’m taking that now. I thought, oh, it’s just me getting older, right? That’s what happens when you get in your thirties and you hear people talking about all the time, but it wasn’t until after I went through a divorce, I got remarried. My wife starts teaching me about health and nutrition, realizing what GMOs and gluten and a lot of those things can do to your body specifically, especially if it has a lot of those things added to it. It was starting to affect my health. Well, when I got off of those things, what happens? I dropped 30 pounds and not only did I drop 30 pounds, but the pain went away even to the point where I was actually able to start running and racing again.
(05:13)
I started doing half marathons, started winning first, second, third place my age group, and then as a result, now I’ve done marathons myself. The whole point I’m bringing up here is that I was so hyper-focused on price. I was ignoring value. Understand that when you’re in scarcity, you look at price and that’s what you pay attention to, but in an abundant world, when you have a view of abundance, you don’t care about the price nearly as much as you care about the value. What am I getting for that price? What’s the cost of me paying less and sometimes paying less costs you the most? Because I’ll tell you with plenty, even though I wouldn’t go to the doctor that often, there are still plenty of doctor’s visits. I’m taking antibiotics and things like that. Guys, my primary care physician has been dead for eight years.
(05:59)
I haven’t been to a physician other than sprained ankles, things like that, and I’m not saying of course, that I’m healthier than a doctor. I’m not saying this right? I’m not saying this to brag. I’m just saying this because when I started to spend a little bit more money on organic non GMO foods, this got better. And this point of this whole story is not to tell you, Hey, buy organic non GMO foods. Although that’s not a bad idea in my opinion, it’s actually saved us more money. Even though I had to spend more and trust me, the first time I did it buying, I had to start with organic bananas. They were only like 20 cents more per pound, so it was a less of a hurt, but I’m the guy, and you can ask people on my team too. Sometimes I nickel a dime over the littlest expenses and even in our business sometimes I’m stepping over a dollar bill to pick up a dime.
(06:44)
I try to be aware of that. I try to keep that scarcity out and focus again on abundance and what’s the value. I’m bringing this up because many times we are raised, whether it’s by our parents or grandparents, society, whatever it might be, we’re raised and even commercials, they focus us on price, but what’s the cost to it? I have a BlendTech blender. I’m not saying that’s the best in the world, but I like it. A sure heck of a lot more than an Osler Oster blender, if you know what I’m talking about. The 20 $40 blender that you might get from Walmart, those blenders, they break. They don’t even chop it up that well, so you’re swallowing chunks if you make smoothies. It’s just horrible. It’s just not good. Now, yes, I would save money doing that, but I save so much more money buying that $300 blend tech where I know that if it breaks, I can turn it back in again.
(07:33)
Yes,
Speaker 1 (07:36):
. Not to mention it’s just a better quality of life. What I’m seeing is this, is that sometimes people focus on price versus value. Let me give you another example. In our business, if you do infinite banking, yeah, you won’t pay anything, right? You’re not paying out of pocket. You are paying for the policy, but in then we make it the cheapest possible. Now, we also are trying to do it in a way that gives you the most value too, so it’s not like you’re just getting a cheap policy that doesn’t work. It has less costs and therefore gives you a better ROI. But that’s not always the case because for example, if somebody hires us to be one of our VIP clients, to have us help consult them and figure out what’s the best thing they can do a situation to have one-on-one support and help to look at their situation, figure out what to do, people will hire us that it’s not the cheapest thing out there.
(08:24)
I’ll tell you that much. We’re definitely not the cheapest, nor do I ever want to be. I was at that at one point, but what I’ve noticed is that people got worse results because if they didn’t quite hurt enough financially to, I’m not saying it was hurting, they lost a lot of money, quite the opposite. We don’t really even take you on as a client. We have to pre-qualify you to make sure that we can usually make more than what you pay us within that first year, so we always want that to be the case that you’ll always make more than what you pay us. That’s kind of our own internal code. The thing is that some people will say, Ooh, wow, how many thousands is that? It depends on which level you’re coming in at. It could be anywhere from like 7,500 to 15 grand depending on what you’re paying us.
(09:03)
One-time fee, it’s not ongoing every year. Some companies will do, but it’s a one-time type fee and some of ’em will pocket that. I had one person that she said, you know what? That sounds good and all, and I do want support, and I would love to have that one-on-one help because telling you, most companies at best, they usually put you in a big group with a bunch of people and say, here, good luck, and if they even happen to have investments in their group, you’re paying usually an annual membership to be in that group, and even then you’re not even told what to do for your own situation, how to find the money and use it, which cash you should be using and which investments work best. That kind of cash, whether you’re putting IRAs or if you’re using just cash or using infinite banking policy and how to make that all work together.
(09:41)
People don’t do that. They don’t give you that kind of guidance, so obviously we charge premium for that because it takes a lot of manpower and help to do that kind of thing. Well, she’s like, I have a friend that has a hedge fund and that might make me one or 2% a year or one or 2% a month. It’s like, cool, all right, but it’s a hedge fund. You want to return on your money, but more importantly, you need to have return of your money. You need to make sure that money’s protected. It’s in an actual real asset. She’s like, oh, well, they invest in different real estate type things and other things too. Well, it’s the other things, I worry about it even when they do real estate investments, are they pairing it up with partners and operators that maybe aren’t the best?
(10:21)
Maybe they’re good salespeople. They sucker that hedge fund in and then they lose that money and then they end up not making that much, and anytime somebody tells me, oh, I’ll make one or 2% off a hedge fund, cool, good luck to you. See if it works, but what if that’s not even all the money she could be making? I had another guy I talked to and he’s one of those guys that I know he’s going to probably hire us tomorrow from the time I’m recording this because it’s just a no-brainer and the guy’s actually open. He’s willing to take action, and I told him, I was like, if you’re open, you’re willing to take action. You’ll get results. It won’t even be an issue, right? You’re going to get results and we never want to take anybody on unless we know we can get ’em results, right?
(11:00)
Well, I started talking to him. I said, well, yeah, you’ve got a couple hundred grand we can invest. Well, that’s 20 grand a year right there. Even if you pay us 15 grand, you’re still making more, but guess what? You also have a business. We could probably save you on some taxes, not to mention the money you pay us. It could be potentially a tax write off as a business expense when we’re addressing taxes and other things in your business to generate income, so just all the things you’re talking about. Well, if even we save you 10, 20 grand a year in taxes, make you an extra at least 20 grand a year, year, and by the way, some of your investments are underperforming, what if we got those to pay you more, maybe an extra 25 grand a year. Now we’re up over like 50, 60 grand a year and his whole goal was a couple thousand a month to at least be financially independent, 10,000 a month just to be fully free to do whatever the heck he wants to have that life of freedom and I was like, dude, you can get halfway there within about a year or so, potentially.
(11:47)
Now that right there, that’s the difference, and not to mention there was other things like, well, what if there’s ways we can just on the tax saving side alone, I mean just having the right CPA could be a big difference for you to help you save more money. Yes, you might have a CPA, but is that CPA conservative, right, where they just don’t know what it is. They don’t really know the tax laws that well, and so they make you overpay on taxes because they just don’t want to take all the time to research the right rules to know how to save you more on taxes, right? That’s what it usually is when they say they’re conservative. What about the sense that I had one guy we were talking to the other day that he said, you know what? I’m a dentist. I think I’m overpaying on a lot of my malpractice and other commercial lines of insurance.
(12:28)
I said, great, we’ve got somebody we can refer you to and they could potentially reduce your burden right there. What if that frees up a thousand bucks a month? You don’t have to invest a dime. That’s an infinite ROI right there because you save money, right? Same thing with infinite banking. I get a lot of you guys that are doing infinite banking policies with other companies, overpaying on the cost on the insurance costs. Then you should be. Now, some of ’em were decent where we say You did it. Yeah, it wasn’t exactly as good as what we would’ve got you, but it’s good enough, right? But I mean still just having that team approach and having that approach to always look for the best because the one thing that I know that we do better if I’m to have our own horn is that not only do we do the best infinite banking policies out there, like the best ROI, the lowest cost better ROI policies out there, but we also give the best one-on-one guidance so that you can actually have a game plan to help you create passive income to get you work optional where you now can go to work because you want to, not because you have to.
(13:26)
That means you back off the part-time hours, great. That’s what we want to do. We try to do that as safely and efficiently as we can. I don’t know anybody else out there that does it better. If they did, I would just say, well, forget it, and we don’t have to do that in our company. It’s just a waste of time and effort. Let’s refer it to them. Let’s let that company do what they do best. I just haven’t found it, and so that’s why I’m saying those two things we do best. Best is less best cost you less the best will give you the better ROI. Now, you might’ve heard me say this before I learned this from really working with a dance instructor is that it’s not about working harder. It’s not about knowing the right moves or the strategies. It’s not about doing it smarter where you start to really learn those things and practice it over and over as you’re working hard with it, but it’s about doing it right.
(14:07)
It’s about practicing the right disciplines, the right strategies to get the best results. That is the difference. That’s why, by the way, when the guy was talking about it, he’s like, I’m paying down my mortgage. I said, you might want to stop that. You might want to stop paying down that low 4% or 3.5% interest rate mortgage and redirect that money elsewhere to earn 10 plus percent with that money, and then you’re making more money there, and you could still pay off your house faster if you wanted to. He said, well, what about these investment properties I have? Well, what if that equity in that property could perform better elsewhere outside of the western half of the us? He’s like, I’m open. If that’s the case, let’s do it. That right there, guys, if you have that kind of attitude, you say, you know what?
(14:45)
I could see that. I’m not going to be stubborn and say it’s going to be this way or nothing else. I’ll just tell you, right? You’re not going to succeed. You’ll get there, but you’ll bump and bruise and it’ll be painful and very, very expensive along the way. I can’t remember the exact JFK quote, but he said, pretty much the most expensive price is ignorance, and that’s true as well, is that ignorance will cost you way more than knowledge, and not just knowledge, but knowledge gain that can be implemented to give you the max result. That is what you do. That’s why when I hire other consultants and other people for myself or my business, I do it because I want the best. By the way, I’m going to do a shout out to one of you. I won’t mention your name. We like to keep everything anonymous, but I know we got a C-level executive that’s been looking at us and five, six other companies, and I’ll just reiterate again, we’re the best for what you’re looking for.
(15:39)
That’s what we do, and we do it best, and that’s all we do. It’s what we do well, everything else, we let somebody else do it. I’m not trying to do this to toot my own horn, but I want to come back to having this abundance mindset because you can never be financially free from a place of scarcity if you’re always just focused on price. You will never, ever be financially free no matter how much passive income we make you. It requires you to have a different perspective to open up to abundant perspective to say, yes, I’m very aware of the price. Well, what’s the value I get in exchange, and that is what I look for. What’s the ROI on that investment? All things being equal. If I got the same value, of course I’m going to go for the less expensive thing, right?
(16:20)
I mean, no, no-brainer. The truth is, in reality in our lives, all things are not created equal, so focus on value. How do you get the most for what you want to pay for? Do you want that $300 blender or you want the crappy $20 blender that’s going to break in a couple of weeks anyways because you put too much ice in it or too many frozen fruits in it and then you broke it already? That choice is up to you. That’s the painful way to learn. I like to recommend that. Yes, I would love a $20 blender. That also gives me the BlendTech type of results, and so that’s why I went to Costco and I bought it there. I got it for a little bit less, right? But the thing is, I still went for the more expensive blenders versus the cheaper ones.
(17:00)
The same thing’s true in your life. Find those things that actually give you more value, that enrich your life, that makes it better. Invest your money there. Invest your time and energy into those things. Heck, think about how we could apply this to family. I mean, look at the price versus cost on that sucker, right? I mean, you got kids, you’re not getting paid back, but you do know that you invest that time and energy and even money into them in hopes that you create a much brighter, better future for them. You’re creating a ripple effect in their life too, not just the life in your own life that my friends, that is what we focus on. How do we get the best with what we have? How do we get the best of value, and then price is secondary. I want to leave you with that. Go and make it a wonderful and prosperous and abundant week. We’ll see you later.
Speaker 3 (17:54):
Thank you. Yes. Hey,
Speaker 1 (18:03):
Visit us online@moneyripples.com for more resources to help you fix money leaks and get your money working harder for you. Now.