Produce more than you consume. This is a principle to follow with money and with life.
We must be wise stewards of our cash if we want to grow our wealth and build an amazing life. This doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice, not take on debt, and save every penny.
Actually, it is quite the opposite. You have to make smart money moves, not keep your money in prison.
In today’s episode, I review part 3 of “The Secret To Building Wealth,” focusing on the key aspects of stewardship and how this principle is key to becoming financially free.
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This is why stewards don’t fear debt. Remember, this is the big important thing. One thing that’s tripped up a few of our clients is that, and I can go on for hours, literally hours on what it means to be a wise steward. The best thing I recommended is obviously if you have money and you want to be a better steward,
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.
Hello, my fellow Ripples. This is Chris Miles, your cashwell expert and anti Financianal advisor. Welcome to our Schultz for those that work so hard for money just like you, but you’re now ready for your money to start working harder for you today. You want to become work optional where you work because you want to, not because you have to have enough money coming in and passive income so that you have the option to be able to do what you love with those you love. And more importantly, guys, you’re not just here to get rich, but you want to live a rich life because as you have more money that blesses your life financially, you now have a greater capacity to bless the lives of those around you. Thank you for tuning in because that allows me to do the same for you guys as well.
Thank you for again making this show, one of the top money podcasts in the country. All thanks to you. Thank you for tuning in. Of course, and thank you for sharing. As a reminder, if you haven’t done this already, guys, if you’re wondering where do I save, where I can get my money working harder for me today and maybe even get my money work harder in two places at once, go check out on our website money ripples.com about infinite banking, the max ROI, infinite banking, one strategy, one tool that you can use to amp up your money. In fact, improve your passive income when you invest, or even if you’re a business owner and how you invest in your business can also work there too, so go check that out today. Okay guys, so I’m now going to go into the third and final part of this, really this stewardship series here because man, this mindset is important.
If you don’t have the principles, it’s a one-two punch. You got to have principles, you got to have strategies, you got to have both. You can’t just have principles and be an awesome philosopher, but you also can’t just have strategies and be screwing it up all the time, right? Because it’s not about the strategy, it’s about the mindset that goes behind it. Whenever I read a book, this is a pro tip for you. Whenever I read a book from somebody that’s successful, I focus not so much on their how to but the way they think because the way that they think, their perspective on what they see and what they have changes their behavior and what they do. That’s why I tell my clients all the time. It’s like if you guys want to know truly, if you’re like, I wish I could do this more like Chris, well, Chris did this because he learned these basic principles, these tenets that I’ve been using to really guide my life.
By the way, focusing on principles. Here’s one thing that you hear all the time, Dave Ramsey will say that principle is pay off your debt. That is not a principle. That is a strategy. Now, I’m not saying the strategy is bad, but strategies can change based on circumstances and time and seasons. Strategies are not always the right answer, so paying off debt. By the way, even infinite banking is a strategy. It’s not a principle. Passive income is a strategy, not a principle. Here’s the principle. If you’re looking at the principle behind debt, the true principle that you might hear Dave Ramsey teach that as the only principle is that you should consume less than you produce or produce more than you consume. You should be profitable in your life. This is true even in relationships. How do you give more than you try to receive, right?
How do you do those things? That is a true principle that works in all areas of life. By the way, here’s another pro tip. Do you never notice that the right principles, if it’s a true principle, works in more than just money? For example, I’ve talked about the law of attention. Whatever you put your attention towards expands and grows, but there’s also the law of atrophy. Whatever you ignore will decay, right? If you pay attention to your teeth and you brush ’em and floss ’em and stuff, they stick around. If you ignore them, you lose them, right? They atrophy and decay and then you lose them. If you do that with your family, if you pay attention to them, then they stick around. If you ignore them, they leave you. Money’s no different. If you pay attention to it and you’re a good steward of it, you have more of it.
If you ignore it, it leaves you and many, many times people will mistake principles and strategies and that’s why they lose money or why they never truly attain that freedom that they want. That is where we’re going right now today. Now I’m going to bring up this same diagram I’ve brought up the last two weeks in a row now about the spender saver steward. Remember, the two money mindsets that are in scarcity are spenders and savers. The only one in abundance is the steward mindset, the steward mindset, and that’s where all the wealth is and that’s where the wealth tends to collect. You talk about the richest people in America, the reason they’re that way is because they’ve learned to become wise stewards. That’s it. Now, there are varying degrees of stewards. There are some that are better than others, but my favorite example of stewardship is actually in the Bible.
Funny enough, isn’t it funny that Jesus Christ talks about debt in the Bible as a good thing, but Dave Ramsey says it’s bad and that he’s all about being Christian. What do I mean by that? Well, have you guys ever heard of the parable of the talents, right? You ever talk about the three servants that were given sums of money? Those sums of money are called talents. They’re given these bags of money, these sums of money to go and use, and the master said, you need to go out and do something with this. Make more with it. That’s your stewardship. So the three go out and they do their thing. The one that was given five sums of money, these five talents, he went out and came back. When it came time to report to his master, made five more for a total of 10.
The master says, well done now, good and faithful servant. You’ve been essentially steward over a few things. I’ll make you a master of many come into my kingdom. So he gives him that reward. The one with two comes back with two more for total of four, and he says the same exact thing, well done thou good and faithful servant. I made you a steward of a few things and I’ll make you a master of many coming to my kingdom. Notice that the one that had two got the same exact reward as the one that had five. Doesn’t this kind of apply in life as well? Some of us are given different talents than others. Some of us are given different sums of money than others. It’s not about how much money you have guys, it’s about what you do with it. But then there’s the third guy, the third servant now, his name was Dave Ramsey, and Dave Ramsey went out and he had that sum of money given to him, one talent, and he said, you know what?
I don’t want to lose this. I hate being in debt. He goes, debt is dumb, cash is king, so I’m going to bury my cash in the backyard. And so he buries it. He buries that money when it comes to that time of reckoning, when he got a report to the master, what he did with money, he got it back. He dug it back up, returned all the money. He paid off all of his debt, and they didn’t charge interest, so it was good. 0% debt, paid it all back to his master, but unfortunately to his surprise, the master wasn’t happy with him. The master said, no, that’s not right, and of course the guy comes back to him and says, here’s your money. I know you’re a hard man. I know you can be a little bit shrewd, and so therefore I didn’t want to lose the money, so I’m paying all back to you.
And Ash says, you knew the charge I gave you. You were supposed to go do something with it. You could at least put it to the exchangers. You could have done some of this money and you didn’t do it. Therefore, get out of here. I’m going to take your one. I’m going to give it to the guy that made 10 because at least I know he’ll do something with it. Obviously, I’m paraphrasing a little bit, right? But if you read it in the Bible, it’s actually not too far off. That’s pretty much the story. So the ironic thing is the guy that was the saver, the one that didn’t lose the money, now there should have been a fourth servant. He gave him the sum of the money. Maybe that person was given three talents and then that person blew it all and came back with zero, right?
He could have thrown that person in there as well, but he didn’t, and many times I hear people say, well, they’re just talking about talents. No, this is a financial principle or true financial principle of stewardship is that stewards have an abundance mindset. They are looking to make things better. They’re looking to increase and multiply. They want to edify. They want to really magnify the blessings, including the money that they have, no matter how much it is, they want to make better with it. They want to figure out what’s the highest and best use of the money that I have. That is what a steward does, and that’s why the stewards have all the money. It’s not because they got lucky, it’s not because they got in the right time. It’s because they made their own luck by being wise stewards. They were focusing on being in this abundant mindset.
Now, I’m going to stop sharing the screen so we can get back to my little beautiful face here, but here’s the real point, guys, is that stewards want to make things better. What’s the best use of my money? If we’re going to talk about in money terms, this is true of your time, what’s the best use of my time? How can I make more use of it? How can make the best use of my relationships? Not using relationships, but giving back again, serving how do I make the most of everything? This is a spiritual concept as well as a physical one. This is something that’s a way of living. It’s an abundant mindset because instead of having fear, you have faith. You have faith in principles, knowing that as long as you keep creating value, it comes back. Guys, did you know in my deepest scarcity and poverty was, of course during the recession of 2008, right?
2008, 2009, I was flat broke. You don’t think it was hard for me to stay in abundance? Here’s the deal, guys, you’re never going to be a hundred percent in abundance. You’re always going to have scarcity creeping in. The difference is that stewards choose abundance even in the face of scarcity, and so yeah, I had a lot of scarcity. In fact, if I was in a more abundant mindset, I think I could have pulled out of my financial hardship a lot sooner, but again, I was just struggling to survive, so I was focusing on survival, providing for my family, feeling like a fraud and everything else. But I’ll tell you, every morning I talk about doing that morning ritual, that morning, routine, miracle morning, hour of power, power hour, whatever we would call it, whatever that thing is for you. That’s what I was doing to try to stay in a more abundant state of mind.
Now, the thing I realized too is that I knew the principle is that dollars follow value. How do I create value for people now? I want to keep my integrity intact, so I stopped teaching people how to get out of rat race. I was now back in the rat race myself, so I pivoted. I started teaching people how to find money, how to get resourceful, because that’s what I was doing. That’s what I had to do for myself and my own situation. I could speak from firsthand experience and a lot of people, the complaint was because I’m always listening to what people want and what their problem is. The complaint was, Chris, I would love to pay for you to learn how to create passive income, but honestly, money’s tight right now in this recession, and so I’d said, well, if I can find the money, would you pay me?
They said Yes, and so that’s how my little experimental thing that worked on just me started with other people as well, and that’s literally how we actually pulled our business out of near bankruptcy. The company that I was working with at that time with Gary Gunderson called Freedom FastTrack before it became Wealth Factory, that’s exactly the thing that saved it, the philosophies and stuff. It was so philosophical, it was miserable. It was all about, it was purely just about sole purpose and protecting yourself by buying a bunch of insurance in all kinds of insurances, but there’s nothing really other than investing in yourself, which is kind of like a pretty little latitude. It was not really about how to do it. Once we got it to something that was real and tangible and people could actually get cash in their pockets, that’s why our company went from almost bankrupt to all of a sudden making 5 million in 2010.
That was the key. It was about creating value for people. That is a key principle. Focus on those principles when you’re a steward. Exchange creates wealth. I talked about that one a little bit a few episodes ago. The reason I bring that up all the time is because the faster the rate of exchange with people, the faster the money comes in. There’s only so many resources. There’s only so much money you could pass around a $20 bill one time in a day, and that person made 20 bucks. Well, if you pass around that $20 bill to them and then they feel abundant enough to spend that, it’s a wise 20 bucks to somebody else and they spend 20 bucks to somebody else, and again, always use it for increasing their stewardship and making their lives better and improving things. What happens is that not only does everybody make 20 bucks, but ideally you should be making more than the 20 bucks if you’re going to be using that 20 bucks.
That’s what a steward does. How can I make this money do more for me, not just in invest it guys, this is a core principle even in your personal life, is to be in your business. Even in business, if I invest 20 bucks, I mean, I wish I could only invest 20 bucks in my business, but even if it’s 20,000 bucks that I might be investing in my business, obviously I want that to return at least 2, 3, 4 fivefold maybe tenfold. I want those higher returns, otherwise it’s not worth spending in my business because it requires too much energy to do so. So again, how can I use that money to make it better? That is what a steward does. This is why stewards don’t fear debt. Remember those three servants all had debt. It wasn’t their money. They were borrowing the money from their master.
They still had to go and make it work for them, but that’s what they did. They said, how can I create arbitrage where they can make more interest than what they had to pay, which they had 0% interest, not hard, but they still had to make more with it, and that’s why those others came back with double the money, and of course as a result, they were rewarded. Same is true for you is what can I do with this money? That one, I could protect it, but then two, also grow it. That’s the thing is that I care more as a steward about a return of my money when I do investments. I want to return of my money, not just return on it. Give you an example. I haven’t shared this too often, but I remember one time there was a woman that came to me.
She was someone who had talked to me about becoming client, never did, but she came and she said, listen, Chris, I’m raising some money for two things, so she told me the purpose. She said, one is I’m going to become Mrs. Utah. I’m working on that and I need to raise some money for that. And then two is I’m also doing this business development program as well, and so I need $10,000, but Chris, I’ll pay you 18% a year or one and a half percent a month in that money. So you do the math, 10,000 bucks. It means you’d pay me 150 bucks a month. That’s a pretty darn good return for just 10,000 bucks. Now, if I were just a gambler, which is kind of on that spender spectrum, I’d be like, cool, let’s do it. But no, I said, well, I’m a steward.
I want to control these variables and I don’t want to be hyper controlled like OCD that way, but how do I ensure that my money comes back to me? I care more about the money coming back. So I asked her, I said, listen, when do I expect that 10,000 to come back? She said, well, what do you mean? I said, well, I imagine you’re not going to pay me interest forever, right? So you’re going to eventually pay me back principal, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, we can put that in the contract. So red flag number one, she wasn’t even planning to pay me my money back. She was just going to pay me 150 bucks into forever, I guess, and so I was like, well, no, I want that definitely in the contract. I said, two, I don’t know what your financial situation’s like. If you’re willing to hire me as a financial coach and I can keep you accountable so I can ensure my investment, then yes, I will do it.
And she said, no, that’s not going to happen. I said, well, then no deal. She was not happy about that. She was not thrilled at all. Ironically enough, is it ironic or maybe it’s not too coincidental. A year later, I found out that her and her husband filed for bankruptcy. I would’ve lost that money easily, and again, it’s nothing against her per se, but she was thinking that all I cared about was a return on my money. She thought that’s all anybody cared about. She never thought about If I’m going to be a wise steward of my money, I want it to come back. And by the way, at that time, it was during the recession. I wanted every dollar to come back. Now, I was wanting cashflow. I would’ve loved it, but I wanted to make sure that my money came back. That wasn’t just a loss.
So remember, stewards want to protect their money, but they also want to grow it. They want to put the better use. This is why real estate’s so easy. By the way, real estate, I can focus on where the value creation is. I’m providing something of value investing in a stock, I’m not providing value at all. I’m literally writing waves because you think my little, I don’t care if you put in a couple hundred thousand or even a million bucks into a stock, they won’t give you the time of day unless you’ve got some sort of penny stock that has no shares, and then you’re likely to lose it all anyways. But if you’re put a million dollars into Google, they don’t give a crap about you and you are doing nothing to help their company. All you did is probably maybe slightly buy a penny artificially inflated their price if that most likely you just actually inflated somebody else’s price that they bought lower than they sold off to make a profit off you, and then the price dropped as a result.
There were bigger fish in there, but that’s the thing. You’re really just riding waves. You’re gambling. It’s almost a zero sum game in that sense. So where’s the real value there? That’s why it’s gambling. Even if you go to gamble in Vegas, you’re literally not creating value. You are gambling. That’s how you know somebody’s a gambler. If they’re always trying to play the odds, that’s not the way to live life. You should be doing something that says, Hey, based on this, there’s an economic reason for this investment to exist. There’s a reason to do it. So again, stewards want to, they live in a place of faith, not fear, and they try to foster that to make sure that happens. They also are not just trying to get rich. They are patient. This is the big important thing. One thing that’s tripped up a few of our clients is that sometimes they get a little bit too impatient.
I know I had one client in particular where again, this guy was on it. This guy was willing to take action. This guy so proud of the amount of action he would take. Now, the only problem was is that as he started to get a taste of it and he started to start make some money in the real estate game, and he thought, well, I’m making money here. I can make money almost anywhere. So then he started to do stuff with crypto space and Hey, this secure coin or whatever it might be, right? I’m going to get paid 9% a year off this crypto savings account that eventually went bankrupt and he lost a lot of money there and then went to go do another investment. That was again, high risk. Again, high risk does not create high returns. Stewards know this. Stewards know that they take low risks to create high certain returns.
Again, 90% chance of losing does not equal 90% chance of winning. If you have a 90% chance of loss, that means you have a 10% chance of winning. I’d rather have the 90% chance of winning, wouldn’t you? That’s what stewards look for. It doesn’t always mean you get paid less. Sometimes it does, but again, just because something pays you less money doesn’t make it lower risk. I saw an investment that they were paying lower returns and everybody was like, well, they’re only paying 4%, so this is guaranteed. Guess what? The guy lost their money even paying them 4% a year. It didn’t make it more conservative. It’s always about those kinds of things. In fact, that’s when you’re looking at investments. If you are looking at investments like that, again, I’m not giving investment advice any specific recommendations right now, but when I look at investments, and I would suggest that you do this kind of due diligence as well, I look at what kind of steward are they?
How do they view money? What’s their perspective? Do they have a scarcity perspective around money? Do they think that high risk has to create high returns? If so, don’t invest money with them. They’ll lose it, right? You don’t want to be in that place, and so again, stewards look for ways to create more. They look to do it, and they look to do it the right way. They’re not impatient. They’re not trying to get rich fast. They don’t try to take shortcuts. They do it the right way. Now, they might do it. I’ll tell you when I say not take shortcuts, it might look like a shortcut to you if you’re used to the super duper slow lane of saving your 4 0 1 ks and IRAs. If you’re used to that, it might look fast, whatever they’re doing, but they’re not the type of people. They’re flashing the pan, right?
They’re just like, here today, gone. Tomorrow they made tens of millions dollars overnight and then they’re gone. That’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about people that build their company. They might build it quickly, but they build it wisely. They build it responsibly. That is what a steward does. Steward does not fear debt. I’m going to come back to that one again. Steward don’t fear debt, but they do respect it. They don’t don’t abuse debt, but they do respect it that it can’t help or hurt them, but they’re going to use debt if it’s a wise thing to use. Give you another example in my life. I remember my very first business loan I got when I launched that business with Garrett Gunderson, I took out a $25,000 SBA loan. That 25,000 loan was 130 bucks a month payment, 130 a month. Now, if I put 25 grand in my business, if I cannot make 130 bucks a month, I should never be in business.
That just means that that’s not my stewardship, that I should just go get a job. Obviously, I can make more than 130 bucks a month of that 25 grand. I didn’t fear that debt, and I love the fact that it was a low payment. Now, if that payment would’ve been, say 2000 bucks a month and maybe some incredibly high interest, well, now I might have a little bit more pause. Now I have to make sure how would ensure that that money comes back to at least service my payment and make sure I can at least make my payment and ideally not just make my payment, but then have a profit. This is why I buy a real estate’s kind of fun with a mortgage because if you buy it the right numbers in place, you buy a property. Not only do your renters pay your mortgage payment for you, but then you have still extra profit after all your expenses are paid, that comes home to you.
That’s good sense. That’s a wise use of debt. That’s a wise use of money, but if you’re using that money to go throw away into some scam or deal or like I talked about last time or a couple episodes ago about that, the guy came to me saying, Hey, I’m getting, and it’s not just one guy. I’ve had multiple people with the same type of investment saying, this person’s doing options trading. They’re paying me 10% a month and it’s been awesome, and they pay out. They’ve got clients that have been paid out for years. Now, okay, get ready for it to blow up. It may not be today, but it will be soon guaranteed. That is too good to be true. That’s ridiculous, and so those kinds of things that starts to happen when you start to see that stuff, that’s where it’s unwise. If somebody tries to cash out that do that, it doesn’t make sense.
I’ve even told people, even with something that’s guaranteed like infinite banking, right? Using whole life insurance, they don’t lose money, but still when somebody’s like, I’m going to use my home economic credit to fund my premium and then I’m going to pull that money out and then invest it, yeah, you can technically make that work, but now you’ve created more complexity. You got now two different interest rates you’re paying on. That’s a little bit too complex. Here’s a simpler way to do it. Here’s how you can use it, and I talked about that in the velocity banking before recently, right? So that’s what I mean. Again, stewardship. You want to be wise with it. Take the best of the spender and the saver is what you’re doing. The saver, the good thing is that savers at least are willing to think about it. Unfortunately, savers sometimes think about it and never stop thinking about it, and they never take action.
Sometimes they just get stuck and they’re used to throwing money in something and let it sit there. In fact, sometimes the mistake they make when they go into alternative investing is that they want to throw it into some fund they don’t have to think about, but then they also don’t really do any due diligence. They want to just be brain off and not be a steward of it. They don’t want to watch and manage it. Just so you know, even a passive investor still manages their money because a wise steward will still watch their money. Remember, whatever you pay attention to expands and grows. Whatever you ignore will leave you. We made that mistake already with one of our properties where I said, Hey, honey, you could take care of that property, and then for two years we didn’t look at it and found out we weren’t making about half the cashflow.
We were only making about half the cashflow. We expected, not because the investment was bad, but because we weren’t being wise investors, we weren’t not being wise stewards. We just were turning a blind eye and we were being charged for things by that representative with that property management company that should not have been charged to us, and therefore we lost money. It costs you money. You lose it when you’re not watching it, so be careful. You need to be a wise steward, so that’s the key right there. In stewardship, and I can go on for hours, literally hours on what it means to be a wise steward. The best thing I recommend is obviously if you have money and you want to be a better steward, and I can go on for hours, literally hours on what it means to be a wise steward, the best thing I recommend is obviously if you have money and you wanting be a better steward, reach out to us.
Go take that passive income calculator on our website. See if you can make at least 15,000 a year, it probably makes sense to talk. If not, keep saving. Keep building that money. Actually be a saver because again, savers are willing to be wise of their money as long as they’re willing to use money, which is what spenders do. See, if you take the best of spenders, saver, put it together, you get a steward. Stewards are willing to use money. They’re not afraid to use money, but they want to use money in a way that comes back to them to 3, 4, 5 fold. They want to increase that stewardship, whatever that is. It doesn’t mean you have to become a billionaire. You might barely become a millionaire, and that’s just fine. That’s the key. That’s my big focus is you need to be a wise steward, and once you understand these principles of abundance and stewardship and you start to really master them in your life, it becomes so much easier to do this investing.
You actually start to realize this investment feels right. In fact, now this investment makes perfectly logical sense, even though the vast majority of Americans don’t believe it. Why? Because they are still living in scarcity. They cannot see past that lens that blocks their view from what’s possible, and again, I’m not talking about pie in the sky, and I’m not telling you you’re going to get rich overnight, nothing like that, right? And yeah, even as a good wise steward, things can still happen. You could still potentially lose money, but I will promise you this, when you have an abundant mindset and you’re rooted deeply in the right principles, that money, even if you lose, some of that money will come back quickly. In fact, it might even come back quicker than it did the time prior when you lost it. That’s the difference, guys that stewards, they learn from the mistakes.
They don’t become victims. They take full responsibility. They’re stewards, they’re agents to themselves. They know that everything, whether they succeed or fail, is to them. They don’t control all the elements of the universe, but they do control how they respond to it, and that’s how even in my own life, I was able to bounce back when people say, how are you able to retire twice? Well, I screwed up the first time, but I learned from the mistakes I made to make sure that I could do it a second time to prove it my own life. To prove to you, again, results may vary. Stewards do vary, and as a result, that’s why results too vary. But I can promise you that the wiser and the better steward you become, the more you focus on that abundance mindset and really truly applying that in the financial space.
Just like we talked about here today, you will prosper even if you don’t use us, right? Even if you don’t hire us, you will still find a way to prosper. You’ll become a better business owner. You’ll become a better employee. You’ll find ways to prosper yourself and people will be in your life more because you’ll be a giver, a value creator, not a value taker. You’re not a consumer. You’re a producer, a creator of your very life that you have, and that my friends, that is the key to freedom. When you can create, you become a creator. When you come from an abundance mindset, no one can take that freedom away from you. That’s when you become free, regardless of what it says in your bank account, regardless of what everything else says, even if you’re not free on paper or in your bank account, it will get there and it’ll get there faster than those that refuse to change that mindset and stay in scarcity. You will never be free in scarcity. Financial freedom is not possible in scarcity. You will always be broke, even if it’s just in your own mind. The best way to do. It’s to become a wise steward. Again, if we can help you in any way, shape or form, be sure to reach out to us@moneyripples.com, but I want to challenge you to be become a steward, become a master of that. Go and make it a wonderful and prosperous week so you can create a prosperous life as a wise steward. We’ll see you later.