How can you make more money or have more time with less effort?
How about ways to leverage your time, so you’re not constantly working your tail off?
What are some specific strategies you can use to create leverage?
Host and Cash Flow Expert, Chris Miles, will be teaching you some actual strategies to create leverage, including some financial strategies you may not have considered. Check it out!
Chris Miles Bio:
Chris Miles, the “Cash Flow Expert,” is a leading authority on how to quickly free up and create cash flow for thousands of his clients, entrepreneurs, and others internationally! He’s an author, speaker, and radio host that has been featured in US News, CNN Money, Bankrate, Entrepreneur on Fire, and has spoken to thousands getting them fast financial results.
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Listen to the podcast here
The Power Of Leverage Part 2
I’m welcoming you to another great episode. As a reminder, check out our website, www.MoneyRipples.com. If you’re reading this, we’ve got an event coming up where you could be with me live, learning some of the amazing ways to leverage your money. That is the topic of this discussion, but we’re going to go more in-depth with that at the event. You can check that out. You can email me at Chris@MoneyRipples.com. For details, go to WEI1017EventBrite.com.
Here is a quick shout-out to our sponsors, American Homeowners Preservation. I know you have heard of them before. If you want to invest as little as $100 and, at the same time, be able to make a big difference in people’s lives while making a great return on your money, this is a great thing to check out. Go check out their website, www.FundingAHP.com.
Generating Wealth Through Leverage
In this episode, I want to talk about leverage again, but I want to get more specific. I want to give you some more examples of how you can create more leverage in your life, both financially and otherwise. We talked about processes, systems, tools, people, and ways to leverage that way, which is fantastic because it buys back your time. I want you to find some other ways to do this, too, but get a little bit more specific, especially ways that can generate more money. It’s not just to give you more time, but also to give you more money.
I know some of you might be in a place where you have a shortage of time and make a lot of money. That’s great too but sometimes, making a lot more money can also free up some time. It’s that one-two punch. I’m going to give you that second punch here. It’s the one that’s going to give you the knockout and going to take them out for the count. Here we go.
First and foremost, I want you to get out a sheet of paper. If you’re driving, don’t do that please. That would be very dangerous. This is an exercise you can try at home. In this paper, I want you to list your assets. What is it that you have? On one side, you can list the financial assets. That’s always the easy place for people to go. This would be your money, your savings, and your stuff. It’s the things that you possessed.
Your education experiences, ideas, and everything else can be turned into money. Click To TweetIf you have a home, there are a lot of things there, but it’s the house itself. If you have investment properties, that’s great. This would also include even things like furniture, computers, cars, boats, if you got it, ATVs, or motorcycles. List out all these things that you have. You don’t have to list out your socks. I don’t care about your underwear. I don’t care about that stuff. Maybe there’s something you could do there that you can create leverage. If so, fantastic power to you. We’re talking mostly about the bigger things. It’s the things that might cost you a little bit of money. It’s usually over $100, or it may not be over $100. It could be something else too. I want you to list those things out.
On the other side, I want you to list out your human assets or human capital. We mentioned ideas, relationships, talents, gifts, and things like that. These are things that make you unique, like experiences and education. Lists those things out on the other side as well. I want you to list these things out and consider these. I’m going to do this in reverse order. I’m going to start with the human capital or the assets. I’ll start from here and then work towards financial assets. For financial assets, there are pretty easy strategies. The human capital’s a little bit harder for people, so I want to start here
I started thinking, “What’s the best way to teach this?” I mentioned that your educational experiences, ideas, and everything else can be turned into money. One thing I tell you all the time is that if you want to increase your income, the easiest, safest, and surest way to increase your income is to create more value for more people. It’s simply being in that attitude and space of creating value. It’s that place of abundance where you know that you’re here to create value for people.
Leveraging Your Unique Experience
This can happen in a variety of different ways. The great thing is there’s no one unique way. I invite you if you’ve seen the Find Your Divine Genius that I had done in 2015, check that out. There is some great content there. I want to give you an example using my own life or my own experience, which is where I speak best from.
In fact, that’s why I always like to teach you guys. With this show, for example, there are a lot of things that it brings to the table as unique. Aside from the fact I have about sixteen years of experience in the financial world and I’ve broken out of the chains of traditional financial advice, there’s a lot of experience I’ve had with investing in businesses.
I’ve had a lot of experience with thousands of people I’ve worked with one-on-one. I have thousands and hundreds of thousands more that I either taught from the stage, from shows, even in groups, or whatever it might be. There’s a lot of experience I draw from that allows me to be where I am. It gives me a unique experience. You also know I teach in a very different way.
In fact, it shocks people sometimes that I have knowledge. People start to ask me questions, and I do have some knowledge here. The reason that it shocks people is that I speak plainly. I don’t like to over-complicate things and speak over people’s heads. I’ve learned over the years that that doesn’t work. People don’t take action. My big thing is I want you to take action.
I’ve learned to speak simply or teach simply from two different places. One started in junior high because I was sick and tired of people trying to copy my homework or get answers from me off tests. Back then, I wanted to be the popular kid, so I wanted to get into the guys I was playing sports with. I was a smaller guy. I wasn’t the most athletic, but I was smart. The kids would be like, “Let me copy your paper or copy your homework.”
At first, I was flattered. I was like, “They think I’m smart.” After a while, I was like, “Go do your own homework. Don’t copy mine.” I didn’t want to get beat up, so the other option was to say, “It’s this.” Instead of trying to sound smart,” I’d say, “It’s like this.” I tried to teach it simply. They were like, “Okay,” and then they write down their own answer. I started out teaching like that.
It helped too because I went to Japan. In Japan, you don’t have extensive language. I would speak in Japanese even though I was fluent. It wasn’t like I would speak over people’s heads, so I spoke simply and plainly, almost like I was a kid. I could use bigger words that even some of them didn’t know. It was more in a religious sense because it was more of a religious missionary volunteer that I was being at that time.
The easiest and safest way to increase your income is to create more value for people. Click To TweetA lot of times, I had to teach people very simple, especially when I was teaching about certain concepts. A lot of the concepts were foreign to them because it was more of that Western culture, not Eastern. A lot of those habits led me to teach the way I teach. I’ll tell you that one thing I’ve started doing has been so much fun. It has given me so much more joy in my work.
A lot of you guys have been reaching out to me. We’ve been able to start getting you guys started by helping to coach you. Some of the people I’ve been coaching have been awesome. I’ve even taken another branch where I started doing a lot of things more actively with life insurance. You’ve probably heard me over the months teach about life insurance here and there, but I don’t focus on it.
Let me tell you something that has given me a little niche. This is the key. The phrase goes, “The niche will make you rich.” The more you can narrow down the people you’re serving and talking to, the more you can narrow down what you’re doing. That’s where you get a niche. I’ve found a good niche with people that are successful business owners or very high-paid employees. These are people that are usually high-paid professionals that want to put away at least $15,000 to $20,000 a year towards investing but want to do it differently. They don’t want to do the same old thing.
They might have done their 401(k)s in the past and were like, “This isn’t working. I’m just forking out money. Other than hoping to ride the stock market, I don’t have any guarantees. In fact, what if it goes down?” I started talking about this specific niche of a market. Here’s the thing. Life insurance is interesting because there are at least tens of thousands of insurance agents in the US alone. An insurance agent, especially life insurance agents, they’re a dime a dozen.
The question is, “How do you narrow that down? How do you get more unique and create a niche?” One, how many insurance agents have been in the industry for about sixteen years? Not many. That’s a much narrow niche. I’m the first person to tell you that the number of years in the industry doesn’t matter as much as how much you think outside the box. That comes to the next point. How many people think outside the box with it? How many people know ways to do life insurance where, for example, you reduce costs, do things to work, and create a better rate of return? You’re getting to a much smaller number. It’s not even the people that know how to do it. It’s how many insurance agents are willing to do it.
For example, I can cut my commissions back on my insurance policies by at least 75% to 80%, which is astronomical for most people trying to make a living as a life insurance agent. The cool thing is I have streams of income coming in from passive streams and residual streams where I don’t even need the money. It’s cool. Already, right there, there’s such a narrow or slim market of agents that even fit this category that would even be willing to do this. I know because every time I’ve had competitive cases, I’ve talked with over 50 or 60 people about life insurance with this narrow group of people that are investors or people that want to be investors.
It’s amazing because they’ll come back. Only one person said, “They pretty much matched what you did, and that was it. They matched you.” I’m like, “They won’t be it. It would be very hard for them to do so.” That already narrows the niche right there. There are a handful of people that do know what I know. They know the narrow group or a very tiny fraction of 1% who even know how to do that. The part where I set myself apart is my perspective about investing, business, and things like that, knowing that I want people to invest outside of that thing.
I teach people not only to make money within their insurance but also to make their money in two places at once. They’re making money on the insurance with the equivalent of at least a 5% savings account and making money on their investments. They’re probably earning at least 10% to 12%-plus a year on their investments. A lot of that is monthly cashflow they’re creating. They’re not only building compound interest, but they’re making monthly cashflow with the same money. Already, right there, you’ll have that perspective of thinking like an investor and a business owner like myself. There’s hardly anybody that fits that category.
If you want to narrow it down, even more, no one that I’ve ever met can also say, “I also understand the cashflow perspective. I understand how the whole big picture works.” It’s not looking at the insurance perspective. It’s how does it work with everything? How does the whole plan work together where you’re not only doing insurance but doing the investing and it all works together?
What’s interesting is that not only does that get me into a niche that has a lot of human capital I can use to benefit people dramatically in their lives and change their life completely, but it’s also fun for me. It creates joy because I’m doing something unique and something that’s awesome. That’s the same thing with you, too. We each have our own unique experiences and education. We have our unique abilities and talents that we can put to use and leverage.
Leverage your human capital as well as your financial capital. There are plenty of ways to do it. Click To TweetWe were leveraging processes or tools. I mentioned that in a lot of the things I’m doing with the insurance stuff, I had to leverage other people and systems to help me even teach 50 or 60 people because that’s a lot of freaking work. Trying not to hit the park of full-time at 40 hours a week level has been pretty difficult. I’ve had to leverage that. The great thing is that it’s freaking amazing what I’m able to create for people. It’s been fun for me. It’s hard work, but fun. That’s where you want to be with your abilities. I could go on about that forever, but I want to keep this short.
Financial Leverage
Let me jump now to the financial stuff. What can you leverage financially? You’ve got different stuff. This even applies to your ideas and knowledge. If you’re not going to use it, lose it. It means if you’re not going to be using something in your home, go and sell it or donate it, or give it away. I say donate because you could donate to charity and get a write-off. You could also give it away to somebody. It’s fine to give it away and say, “You’ll use this better than I will. Here you go.” Give it to somebody or offer it.
You can use Facebook to say, “Does anybody want this?” There are yard sale pages. You can sell things on those yard sale pages or those Facebook groups that are sales groups. You can go on Classified Ads. I don’t mean the Classified Ads in the paper because I don’t think anybody reads those anymore, but you can go to Classified Ads, I mean Craigslist and certain websites like that.
For example, my wife sold my last phone. We ended up getting a brand-new phone. It was a buy one, get one free, so I got a new phone. We turned in mine since I have a new phone. We sold it for $150 with the chargers and everything. People were offering $100, but one person said, “I’ll do it if you throw in the chargers and everything else.” We said, “That’s great,” and gave her a better charger. It’s $150 off that.
I’m even selling my vehicle. The thing is I’m trying to sell the van that I had for my kids. We bought a new one, so we don’t need that one anymore. I call it the celebrity vehicle because that was the one that my five-year-old daughter was born in. It made the top news story of the day for the local news. I’m trying to see if that might raise the price a little bit. Those are things you could sell.
I’ve got sports cards or trading cards that I’m trying to sell off. My wife had a brilliant idea. It came from somebody that requested it. Someone said, “Do you have it organized by teams?” I have football, baseball, and basketball cards. Football season is in force. The people were saying, “Do you have the Raiders?” My wife asked me, “Do you have the Raiders?” I’m like, “Let’s separate it out.” I went through hundreds of cards, separated them all out, and grouped them together. People are buying those for at least $5, $10, and sometimes $20-plus.
My Dallas Cowboys went for a lot because their dad was a big Dallas Cowboys fan. In fact, they were grateful that I sold it to him for only $20 or $25. They thought it was going to be $20 per card because they were cards from many years ago. Sell that stuff off. They might be clutter anyways. We had extra books we donated to a library. The library gives you a little bit better of a donation than some other Goodwills. Still, there’s Goodwill and all kinds of things there. There are aspects. You can sell off vehicles. You can sell off homes. If it’s not creating something for you, get rid of it.
I’ve had people sell off extra ATVs or boats. They were like, “I’m not using these things. I can rent it for a few days out of the summer for way cheaper than the money I can make off this. I’ll put that money to use.” I had a guy that had a cabin he used two weeks out of a year. I was like, “You have $80,000 equity in this cabin. You used two weeks of the year, but you can go and rent a cabin anywhere, lakeside or otherwise. You have that freedom and you don’t have the $15,000 a year mortgage payment and everything else. Why don’t you do that?” It saved him $15,000 a year in cashflow and gave him $80,000 to play with. There are things you can do with that.
Stuff doesn’t matter. The fact is how you can use it to create more for yourself. There are great ways there. Now here’s another creative way. You can use some things. This deals primarily with houses or vehicles. There’s the whole thing with Airbnb and Vrbo or Vacation Rental By Owner. There are all those websites where you can rent out your home or a room.
If you’ve got extra space, find a way to rent it out. There are ways you can, depending on your city ordinances. You’ve got to check on city ordinances to see if it’s even allowed to do that with your home. A lot of times, you could rent out whether it be short-term or long-term. You decide what you want to do, but you can rent out your home. Depending on your area, you can make some pretty good money. That’s one possible option. If you’ve got extra rooms, put them on Vrbo or Airbnb. Airbnb can do rooms pretty easily.
The other thing you could do too is if you have a vehicle, maybe it is a vehicle you’re not using. It doesn’t have to be super nice. It could be used, but the nicer, the better. You can go and rent that vehicle like you’re a rental car agency. You do it through a service called Turo. Turo is a great app. We’re going to Hawaii. Instead of me renting from a rental car agency where I pay at least $40 or $50 a day for a small vehicle, I can get it for about $25 or so a day for that same kind of vehicle. In fact, we’ve got a nicer vehicle for about $27 a day. I said, “This vehicle is nice.” It’s got a nice Infiniti, which you probably pay at least $50 a day for a normal rental car agency. I saved half the cost.
I remember the first time I did this. I had to get a vehicle for my kids. I was transporting them. It was just for a few hours. I was like, “I need a bigger vehicle.” I found that service. I can’t remember who referred me to it, but I found it. I was like, “This is gold.” I rented a vehicle for seriously three hours. The guy was nice. He didn’t even allow me to gas up. He said, “You only drove 40 miles out. We’ll absorb the cost.” I paid $50 for that vehicle for that few hours.
I asked him, “How do you like using this service?” He said, “First off, you’re the first person that I didn’t have to pick up from the airport. That was pretty cool. You were in my area.” You can have the option to pay a little extra via a free drop-off fee and they drop off the vehicle. He dropped it off to me. When I asked him, “How much have you made?” He said, “It was cool. I had one person rent my car for an entire month and it was $1,600 for this car.”
I guarantee his payment was not any more than $400 or $500 a month, but to make $1,600 a month is pretty awesome leverage there. That’s what I’m talking about. You have leverage all over the place. You have potential everywhere. It’s as creative as you want to make it. Even my equipment, I’ve even rented this out for $25 for using it for an hour or so for somebody to record stuff. I’m like, “Use it for $25.” I use it all the time, but if I’m not going to use it every single day because I only use it about once a week or so, you can use it that way.
That’s the beautiful thing. There’s always leverage everywhere. Look to leverage your human capital as well as your financial capital. There are plenty of ways to do it. I hope this gives you great ideas and great ways to be able to create more time, more money, and a lot more leverage in your life. Have a wonderful and prosperous week. We’ll see you soon.