Is your financial advisor holding back on you? What higher returning investments will they not recommend because they won’t get paid? Are they just ignorant? Or are they really scared to let you know about it?
Today, the “Anti-Financial Advisor” Chris Miles shares his experience about what financial advisors say behind closed doors about these historically better investments.
Find out the truth here!
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Watch the episode here
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The Investments Your Financial Advisor Doesn’t Want You To Know About
Thank you for allowing me to create a ripple effect through you. I appreciate you tuning in. You have been binging, sharing, and making this show what it is, which is that ripple effect and vision that I have to not just bless your life but your family’s lives, generations beyond you, across your community, and the world. Thank you so much for tuning in today. As a reminder, if you have not done so and you want to learn more, check out our website, MoneyRipples.com. Check out all of our good stuff, and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out.
I want to talk about something that I know personally. It is something that I experienced twenty years ago as the mainstream financial advisor I used to be. If you guys don’t know my story, I started out as a mainstream financial advisor. I started doing that in the early 2000s, right after Y2K. I came into the financial advisor arena. I was drinking the Kool-Aid. I was teaching everybody to pay off all their debt, save everything, spend little, and sacrifice now so that someday they could have that financial freedom that we all talk about.
I bought that hook, line, and sinker. I knew that was the way to go. The way you do it is through the mutual funds that we offer you, guys, through our insurance products, or whatever else we offer. That was what we taught. If you have ever met with a financial advisor, and I know many of you have, you might have discovered what I have discovered. This is something I realized that I was a salesman in a suit. This first became apparent to me when the market crashed during Y2K. It is a great time for me to become a financial advisor that was birthed if that is even a great way to describe it. Financially speaking or even professionally speaking, I was raised during a recession.
During that period of time, the thing is I realized that there are market fluctuations. Market fluctuations can be a problem for people. I saw clients firsthand that I would inherit from a financial advisor that had to quit or die. I remember calling them up and saying, “I’m in charge of your account right now.” They would say, “Is that person in jail yet? I can’t stand that financial advisor. I’m mad at them right now. I lost so much money during Y2K.” That was a hard thing for me to deal with because I said, “I’m sorry that happened. I don’t know their situation right now. I know they are no longer with the company, but I’m here to take care of your stuff.” They said, “No, I am not interested in financial advisors right now.”
I wish more people were like that today. Since 2009, we have been spoiled with a good market. Even with the 20% decline in the stock market in 2022, there has been a little bit of an increase in 2023. People think, “It is fine. I’m good. Financial advisors are doing good for me.” You get complacent and lazy. As a result, that is when you are likely to lose money. This is what happened to these people after the 1990s. Six-year runup, and when the Y2K hit, they were unprepared. They thought the sky was the limit. You don’t lose money in the market. What did they do? They lost money. I saw this firsthand.
I remember a financial advisor came in and said, “Let’s look at this. Here is why you want an indexed product.” He is trying to give us something else to sell. He illustrates and says, “If you have $10,000 in an account and you lose 50%, you now have how much?” We all said, “$5,000.” We are all geniuses as financial advisors. We save $5,000. It is like, “That is right. You lost 50%. That is now down to $5,000. You got cut in half.”
There were a few women in this. Our office was probably about 90% men and 10% women. There were 50 or 60 of us. He said, “What return do you need to make to get back up to $10,000?” Everybody said, “50%. If you lost 50%, you need 50% and get back to zero.” He said, “Wrong. Let me show you.” He showed, “$5,000, making 50%. You only make half. It is not 100% double. 50% of $5,000 is $2,500. You get up to $7,500.” We thought, “That is weird. I didn’t expect that.”
The next thing is we start running those numbers again. Lo and behold, what do we see? It is 100% return, not 50% gets you back to breaking even. That was double. He says, “Look at the average. Over 2 years, minus 50% plus 100% is 50% divided by two years is a 25% average return, but your actual yield is 0%. I’m not including fees coming out.” This blew our minds.
When we started running numbers, and we looked at 1995 to 2005, we said, “Whoa.” Even with the market that was booming during those ‘90s, and even with the recovery after 2002, going to 2003. It was starting to come back up the market. Although there were still more years, people realized that we would have been better off not losing money, not weathering the market, and staying in places that were more guaranteed and ensured that we didn’t lose money.
I remember approaching the guy out in the parking lot. I chased him and said, “I’m in my late twenties. Why wouldn’t we have everybody do this? Why wouldn’t we ever try to get people not to lose money?” He said, “I can see right now. You are young. You can take the risk. You are going to make more money in the market. This is for those people that are too scared to be in the market. It is something else to offer them.” The light bulb went on.
Sadly enough, I am now a salesman in a suit. I realized he was teaching me salesmanship and how to offer a different product. If you guys have ever seen this before, you have probably seen a chart called the Ibbotson® chart. You see it from, in this case, January 1926 to December 2021. At the end of 2022, it hasn’t come out quite yet, or I haven’t found it yet online. This is a 96-year period. When they show you this chart, this gray area is like the value of the dollar. During the Great Depression, the dollar declined quite a bit and made its way back up. It wasn’t until the 1940s that the dollar finally had the same value as it had back in 1926. It started going from there.
$1 invested in 1926, at the end of 2021, before the decline in the market, is worth $16. It is a 2.9% to 3% inflation. You got treasury bills above it at 3.3% at $22. You’ve got bonds. It would’ve been $177. The stocks, large-cap, $14,000. We even have the small-cap, which was over 12% showing an average return of $56,000.
Here is a problem. I have run the numbers, and you can too. You can take the S&P 500 and look at the last 30 years. If you are reading this in March 2023, go from March 1993 until today, March 2023, and you will see you do not have a 12% actual yield if you had $1,000 invested and keep growing, or you take the S&P 500 index number from when it was back in March 1993 and take it until today, you realize that the number is closer about a 7.7%.
I’m guessing, because it does vary from day to day, it could be 7.6% to 7.7%. It has been right around there lately. It was almost 12.2% when I ran the numbers here. It was over 12.1%. That is not happening. That is the small cap. Large-cap, which is like the S&P 500, 10.5%. No, it’s not doing 10.5%. It makes a big difference.
How big of a difference? I will show you. I’m taking the interest calculator here. You have $1 at 10.5%. It was a little bit more. It was like 10.53%. In 96 years, we get that $14,000 in change right at the 10.5%. That is what you are expecting if it is in the stock market. I even take that down to 10.5% to make it an easy number. $14,500 is what your $1 becomes.
What if I knock it down to 3%? Most people would say, “3%, that is 30% less. Shouldn’t that be somewhere in the ballpark of maybe $9,000 or $10,000?” Let’s find out. Three percent is not $10,000. It is $1,035 versus $14,000. This is over fourteen times the difference with a 3% change. Why? Remember how everybody tells you it’s a miracle of compounding interest? That also works against you if you don’t get what you expect. Every percentage does count, not to mention what happens in reality. What is true? What happens here?
Remember how everybody tells you it's a miracle of compounding interest? That also works against you if you don't get what you expect. Click To TweetLet’s take this in a different example. Let’s say you have $25,000 a year. You are putting in between your employer’s contribution and yours in a 401(k). You make 7% on that total money, including the match being invested. Thirty years later, you get $2.5 million. What is interesting is your number is 100 times what you have been paying into it. However, I put inflation at 5%. I put it at that because we know inflation’s much more than that 3% they claim or 2% is their target. We know it’s much higher than 5%. I’m putting this at a conservative number so it is not too shocking. If you do that number, after inflation, you have $584,000.
The 4% rule of pulling out 4% for the rest of your life has been proven not to work. It is a little risky. It might work but in different marketing conditions. The fact you might change your portfolio, 3% is the max you should be taking out in retirement. That means you are living on less than $15,000 a year after an inflation adjustment. You put in $25,000 a year to live on $15,000 is not great.
If you go 40 years, this number doesn’t improve with the after-inflation numbers. If you have 40 years, whatever you are saving per year is what you are able to live on. It’s about $750,000. Three percent means you are living on about $22,000 a year. It is about the same thing, not including your match about what you have been putting in.
What you can derive from this is if you are willing to wait 40 years, whatever you’re putting in per year into a 401(k), maybe even an IRA too. Let’s say that you happen to not get a match, but you are still putting money on IRA. You are going to be living on about the same or less after inflation as the money you have been putting in per year. You are putting it away for a future date. You are delaying your gratification to hopefully have gratification in those later years and hopefully, not run out of money.
Real Estate
Forty years, $25,000 a year, and $5 million is awesome. That is great. We can’t control all those variables. What about now? Here is the thing that your financial advisors are afraid of. When I showed those exhibits and charts going over time and showing you how awesome the stock market was, I didn’t see one with real estate on it, but the one we showed used to show real estate too. In real estate, they would show would be barely above what you would see for the dollar. It was closer to what the treasury bills were.
The treasury bills were $1 made $22. Why? It is because they say, “Real estate is 3% or 4%, not that much.” It might have been. If you are lucky, the $1 you put in makes you $50. That is based purely on appreciation. It has nothing to do with passive income. It was based on home values. Home values do go up with inflation. That is nice.
What I didn’t know as a financial advisor is that it is not what you are banking on. As a financial advisor, I went to a real estate seminar a guy had put on. He was a former laundromat owner. He said, “What if I put a $10,000 down payment on my house?” This is back when prices were cheaper. A $10,000 down payment on this home, and it appreciates $10,000. What happens? Let’s say it was a 10% down. $100,000 goes up to $110,000. He made $10,000 appreciation. He was like, “I made a 100% rate of return on my money.” It blew my mind thinking, “Is that possible? Does that happen?” It does.
History has been showing that it has been proven to be that way forever, even if you thought that mutual funds worked. Let’s look at the evidence. Go back to my past episodes. Go back to last August and September when I had a series of episodes coming out talking about the case against mutual funds and looking for eyewitness accounts. These are real witnesses, people that saved up over $1 million in their actual retirement accounts and how well they were living in their 70s and 80s and if they were still worried about running out of money.
There were four examples. Three of the four were afraid of running out of money. The fourth one was in his mid-80s and thought he would die soon. That is the difference. We let this golden goose lay golden eggs. We never kill those eggs. We never kill off the golden goose. We let the golden goose get bigger while the golden eggs get bigger. That is a different story than what most people are doing with their retirement counts, which is, “I’m trying to cut off little shavings of my goose as time goes on in hopes that there will still be a goose left to lay some golden egg. I’m eating the goose slowly until I die in retirement. I live cheap enough to do it.” That is the problem.
If you remember, I showed this chart before talking about my whole life versus using a savings account. I’m going to take out the whole life conversation. I want to use the numbers. For those who are reading, I invite you to go to our YouTube channel, the Money Ripples Channel. Watch this episode. I know I’m showing a lot of different stuff. If you are more of a visual learner, go to our YouTube channel.
If you like this, like and subscribe. Please do that and show this to other people because this is important. This is what, as a financial advisor, I was refusing to believe. This is also what converted me away from it when I saw it as a financial advisor. As I said before, this stuff wasn’t working. I wasn’t seeing people retiring. I saw people still on as little as possible, trying to live lean in retirement so that they didn’t run out of money. It wasn’t enough.
My dad was a perfect example. He did everything right. He was debt-free and saved up like crazy in his retirement accounts. Yet, if it wasn’t for Social Security, he would only have five years of money until he lost them in his lifetime. That was it. If he lived more than five years, he would be out of money. Notice this yellow section. This was somebody saving %30,000 a year on top of the $250,000 that we had already invested in making a 10% return.
I’m going to make this simple. This person is saving $55,000 a year. I’m also going to compare this to saving in a mutual fund earning that 7%. What we got over time is that $55,000 keeps compounding and growing. That cashflow becomes $30,500 the next year, and so on. After ten years, you get to $112,000 of actual cashflow. That is $112,000 of actual cashflow. Depending on where you invested, this could also have tax advantages where you pay less taxes than you would in throwing money into an IRA.
Taxes aside, it is still $112,000, which is over $9,000 a month. It is nothing to be embarrassed about, especially after ten years. This is why when people say, “Is it possible to have $100,000 a year of passive income? It is, depending on where you are starting from. If you are starting from zero, it is going to be a little tougher. It could happen. I’m doing this off a 10% per year type of simple growth, in which we have several different options of people we know in our network that have investments that pay, sometimes contractually, 10% to 11% plus.
We are not even talking about all the appreciation you get from real estate. We are not even talking about the fact I have a property that did over 300% in five years, and when you factor in all the returns that come from it. We are keeping this very conservative in comparison, which you could do with actual real estate. $112,000 making a simple 10% return, which sometimes certain funds, lending opportunities, or even certain investment opportunities can give you and decide the alternative investment space.
If I go over here, it is the same thing, %55,000 saved per year, starting from zero, 7% per year for ten years. We are not even going to factor in inflation because I didn’t on the other example either. You got $813,000 or living on 3% means. You are living on over $24,000 a year or about $2,000 a month. Depending on where you invest, it could be taxed as well. Here is the difference. Do you want over $9,000 a month in ten years or about $2,000 a month in ten years? That is assuming the market smiles at you the right way.
It Comes Back To Cashflow
Nothing is guaranteed here. I’m not saying there is no risk on the alternative side, which we would refer to more as Main Street versus using Wall Street with mutual funds, but this is a big difference. It comes back to the cashflow. Cashflow is what is truly important here. It is not about the end number, although the end number does help. What comes down to is how much income you can draw in that scenario. Sometimes, people ask me, “With these infinite banking policies set up, could we use these in retirement versus using them to buy real estate?”
Real estate will kick its butt hands down when you use your whole life with real estate. Even if you use it as a retirement vehicle earning maybe 4% to 5% net after fees tax-free, you can usually pull off about 8% a year of the cash value and have that money last the rest of your life, assuming dividends are low. That is not bad. That is better than 3% even, but that is a different scenario.
I’m not comparing retirement that way because I know on the alternative side, you will kick the crap out of anything a financial advisor recommends. How do I know? I was that financial advisor recommending not to do real estate. I would tell people, “Hands down. Look at the chart and historicals. The stock market always wins. It makes more. It is between 10% to 12%.”
Past performance is not indicative of future results. That is always a disclaimer. Put on those charts. You would say, “That is what history said. You are more likely to get that return than you would in buying real estate and making inflation. That is what we are trying to show people.” That is not true. It is all about that cashflow and what income is coming in because the difference is, even if you made 7% in the stock market, you are not going to pull off 7% because you might have down years.
You need to pull off less in case the market goes down and you still have enough money. Don’t kill that golden goose. They call it disinvesting. When the market goes down and you pull money out, it goes down much faster. Even if the market recovers, it has less money to recover with. Therefore, you make less money, and that money runs out faster.
Understand that down years when people tell you, including financial advisors, say, “Keep investing in the down years.” Pull out a little bit less money. You still pull out money while it’s going down. That is dangerous. This is why I even talk about the insurance side of things. Universal life can be dangerous because if costs are going up and you are pulling money out, that is like disinvesting. It accelerates the amount of money that you pull out and therefore have less money to grow. You could run out of money much faster than what they showed you in those charts where they showed straight up.
It is the same thing in financial advising. They show charts going straight up. They don’t show the negative years. They say, “Here is the average.” We already know the average is crap. It is not the actual yield. It is based on averages because negative and positive throw those numbers off. Therefore, about $2,000 a month, you could pull off of this retirement account in ten years versus $9,000.
I’m not saying any of these situations are guaranteed. It could be more or less depending on what that ten-year period does. You could be better off on the real estate side. You could potentially even be better off on the stock side or the mutual fund side of things. It is possible. History said, “No, but it is possible.”
Buying Properties That Cashflow
Here are the investments your financial advisor does not want you to know about. When I mention real estate, I don’t mean buying the property in your backyard. That is where people usually go wrong. Yes, they might get lucky over time, but that is not what I’m referring to. I’m talking about buying properties that cashflow. Sometimes you are not even buying a property. I’m not talking about buying a rental. That is one option.
That is why we talk about turnkey real estate as a great option. You don’t manage the property. You can buy it anywhere in the country. Somebody else manages it for you. You take the profits. Even today, with higher interest rates, those profits can still be, if you are in the right markets, at least 5%, 6%, or even 10% plus cash-on-cash returns, not including any appreciation, tax benefits, and the fact when they pay your mortgage down.
If you start throwing a pain in your mortgage down at tax benefits and everything else, even the ones that don’t cashflow amazingly well could still get you potentially high single to double-digit returns. That is still possible even with that scenario. Even if I took out those variables because appreciation is the icing on the cake, I like to know what is the actual profit coming from those things. They can still produce easily 5% to 6% plus in the right markets.
There are even some double-digit scenarios, but even today, it has been less as of early 2023. Later this year, that could change once again. I’m giving you the reality as it is today, but there are other scenarios. There is lending. You can lend money to real estate investors that might be fixing and flipping properties. They might be wholesaling and doing different things. They need that money for a short period of time. They pay you back with interest. In many cases, they will pay you low double-digit interest on that.
I know guys in our network that will pay a flat 10%. Some will pay 10% plus an extra percentage point on top. Even if it is half a year, they might still pay a full percentage on top of whatever they pay you. Let’s say it is six months. They pay you 10% plus a percentage point. You would get that percentage point plus 5% over six months because half of 10%. You make 6% in six months. Not too shabby. There are things like that out there.
We have mentioned oil and gas before. I was looking at the numbers as of right now when we are getting our money coming in. My R fund hasn’t done as well. We have done like 8% in the last year, but I see a lot of my other clients are getting over 20% the last year. It depends on what investment you are in. I got other partnerships I have talked about before. I got business partnerships in real estate where they are doing a lot of buying, selling, and seller financing, doing note type of investing. We have been over 40%.
It is not guaranteed. The results will vary for sure. Your situation could be better than mine or worse. I got clients who have better results on certain investments than I have, and vice versa. I got investments that might have better results than my clients have. I’m investing in the same things they are doing. It depends on timing and what you are investing in. Sometimes deals go amazingly well, even better than you expect. Sometimes, not as well.
There is so much that varies, but in my opinion, when you are buying a real asset like real estate, those risks diminish. They don’t go to zero, but they do lessen quite a bit, especially if you could bring in other factors. For example, if I buy a turnkey real estate property, one of the things I try to do to lessen my risk is I will make sure that there’s a home inspection report done. It doesn’t mean the home inspector is perfect, but I want to make sure they look for anything. They can be wrong with the property because it is. I don’t want to deal with it, or I want it fixed before we buy it.
When you are buying a real asset like real estate, those risks diminish. Click To TweetAlso, with renters, I want to make sure a renter is in the property where we have a lease signed and agreed to before we close on the property. We know that we’re making X amount of dollars per month. We know our numbers before we close on the deal. That helps lessen risk. It doesn’t always happen that way, but I like that to be the case. I also like to put in a down payment. I like to put 20% down or more, not too much more, but if you put 20% down, even if there are fluctuations in the value and if something were to go wrong, you got to sell a property. Generally, it is not going to lose 20% during the last recession, be in the exception of some areas, but we like to go for boring markets too. That is another one.
I don’t like to put down at least 20% on those properties. Give me a buffer in case I need multiple exit strategies if something goes wrong. Also, having a good property manager is in and of itself a good thing to have. That is probably one of the best things to have. I mentioned key areas as well. I’m going for areas that are pockets that aren’t affected. They are not huge boom towns. These are not like Phoenix, Arizona. We are not going for Tampa, Florida type of areas. We are going for the areas that are outside of those big markets, the ones that don’t fluctuate as much. They don’t make big appreciation gains, but they also don’t sink if things turn around. I like to have that flexibility.
That is the thing that is amazing. This was the Matrix pill that I took that got me to wake up. When I saw that it was all about the cashflow and how much income could come in, my life was changed. It was changed for the better. This is how it gets good. This is why our clients get results. They have thousands of dollars coming in per month. Sometimes tens of thousands of dollars come in per month. They are able to be financially independent and/or work optional. Even if they are not work optional, have options where they can have more time freedom.
That is where I want you guys to be. True freedom is that you can still work if you want to, but you don’t have to. You work by choice. You have the power in the situation. You have freedom versus what most people do. They keep slaving away and hoping that someday that dream may come true. Their prince might come to save them. There is no prince and knight in shining armor who come to save you in those mutual funds. It is not going to work. This gives you the best odds of success.
If you want to know how to do that, I will welcome you. Check out the calculator we have on MoneyRipples.com. Take the passive income calculator. See what you could do in the next twelve months. If you got more questions, reach out to us. I’m here to tell you that financial advisors don’t want you to do this because they don’t get paid a commission off of it. They have their little square peg. They are trying to jam in your round hole. That is not fit for you. The fit for you is if you want freedom, you want to do something that works. Use that right peg for what you want to use today. Make it a warm, fun, and prosperous week. We will see you later.
Important Link
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