Many think financial freedom will solve their problems and ultimately give them what they want.
But is that really true? Which freedom is MORE valuable than financial freedom? Chris Miles shares the secret here. Tune in to find out more!
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Which Freedom Is Most Often Overlooked
I want to talk to you today about real freedom. What’s the true wealth, the true freedom that you can have? I’ve talked about this a little bit already in episodes recently. We’ve been on this kick of digging into the psyche because it’s not just about the strategy. I tell you this all the time. The strategy is easy. What’s hardest is your mindset. What’s hardest is how you perceive your money and what that creates for you on an emotional level.
We get a lot of clients that come in. They usually have at least $150,000 to $200,000 of money. They’re saying, “I want this money to do something. I want it to work harder for me so I don’t have to work hard for my money, like you say on your show, Chris. What can I do with it?” When you get down to what they’re saying, what they’re saying is, “Chris, I have a decent amount of money. Maybe I even make good money too that’s helped me have this money, but it’s not enough to just have money or have a good income.”
That’s a deception. Many people believe, “If I make a lot of money, then I’m living the high life. I’m living free.” I’m not saying having a good income doesn’t help improve your quality of life. The truth is once you get to a certain point, a certain income, it doesn’t matter. What you want and what most of our clients say that they want is time freedom. They believe that money freedom will give them time freedom. It’s not the money that you ultimately want. It’s what you believe that money will give you.
Having a good income certainly helps improve your quality of life. But in reality, once you get to a certain income level, it doesn’t matter what you really want. Click To TweetTime is a big one for each of them. How many of you would love to have more time with your family right now? How many of you would love to have more time for your passions, for your hobbies, or for that time to step away? Some of you make great income. I know this because I’ve been this person. Sometimes, I even go back to being this person. I have to keep working, keep myself busy sometimes.
In truth, can you take off 1 week, 2 weeks, or maybe 1 month and still feel free? That’s not a lot of time if you think about it. If you take off a month away from your job or your business, would you feel free right now? You might have certain situations where you might realize, “My job requires me to be there, so I’m there.” We get that, even business owners.
I was speaking with a dentist recently. She has a similar problem I’ve had before too, which is, “If I step away from my practice, if I step away from my business for more than 1 week or 2, it’s going to fail.” The truth is I’ve done it. It doesn’t. That’s sometimes created in our minds. Notice that that restricts our freedom right there. We don’t allow ourselves to be free. We end up thinking, “I have to be stuck here.”
That’s a different situation than time freedom because understand, you could have money freedom, have all the passive income you could have, but not give yourself permission to enjoy it. That’s a whole other issue I’ll address here in a little bit. I want to get back to what you’re ultimately thinking you’re buying which is time. You want to buy your time back. You want to be able to at least have the option where you don’t have to go to work, where you don’t have to keep slaving away, day in and day out.
It doesn’t matter if you have a good high-paying job. You know that slaving away is continuous because you don’t know when it can stop. You don’t know because you’ve been putting your money in the crappiest of places. You’ve been putting it to paying off your house and your debts. You’ve been putting it to paying your 401(k)s or IRAs, only to realize that there’s not a true end in sight and that is the trap. That is the place that we got to break you away from.
Get Lean
I’m going to offer some advice here that gives you that time freedom today. That advice is simply this. It’s advice I’ve given many times before, which is to get lean, get liquid, and get out. For example, get lean. Start tracking your money. Know where all your money is, where it’s going. This is why for those that are in the Wealth Accelerator Academy of ours, or even our VIP clients, we have the Cashflow Optimizer you can download. Some of you guys were on the webinar recently. You got a copy of this.
This Cashflow Optimizer has you track your income and expenses. It has you looking at your assets and your liabilities. What do you own versus what do you owe? We’re looking at these things. Why? It’s because whatever you measure will grow and expand. It can improve, but whatever you ignore will leave you. It’ll decay. It’ll become worse. If you ignore your muscles, they will decay. If you ignore your teeth, they’ll fall out. If you ignore your marriage, that’ll decay and leave you.
Everything leaves you when you don’t pay attention to it. Therefore, we have you pay attention to the very things that you want to improve. That’s got to be income and expenses, which is ultimately your cashflow, as I call it. Many people talk about cashflow. They make it synonymous with passive income, but that’s not the case. Cashflow is how much more income you have than expenses. That’s a very different situation here because that gap there creates more relief. It creates more freedom.
Who cares if you make $500,000 a year if you’re spending $550,000 a year? You live in a bad, big rat race, don’t you? Vice versa, if you made $500,000 a year, but then you’re only living on, say, $250,000 a year, that means there’s $250,000 a year you could be taking and using that to generate more passive income to also buy you more time back.
The problem, however, is that there’s this Parkinson’s Law that says, “Whenever there’s a rise in income, there’s usually a rise in expenses.” In other words, if you go from an energetic place, the Law of Vacuum. In science, they talk about the vacuum. Space abhors a vacuum. It always tries to fill a vacuum. The same thing is true with your money. If you’re always making more money and you then spend more, you’re falling trapped into that very thing. The way to get out of that trap is to capture it, to keep those expenses smaller than your income.
Notice I didn’t say stay cheap. I didn’t say live on rice and beans. Bless your heart, Dave Ramsey. I didn’t say that at all, did I? I said keep your expenses lower than your income. That also implies you may want to increase your income. Find ways to increase income. How do you deliver more value for your employer or in the business that you’re in? Look for ways to be more profitable if you’re a business owner. How can you be more profitable and use that money to help you create more freedom within your own business? Otherwise, you create a bigger rat race, don’t you? You create a bigger trap.
You might look great from the outside. Everybody else might see that your life looks wonderful, but I’ve talked to hundreds, if not probably thousands of you. The thing is always the same. It doesn’t matter if you make millions in your business. If you don’t have that passive income coming in, you still worry in the back of your mind about how you’re ever going to be free. You still worry, “Will I have to keep working like this forever?” Even though you know that you make a great living, you have freedom, you could post on social media about the trips you did and everything else, how your kids are playing sports and they’re in private schools, or whatever it might be.
I know the truth. You think this may never end. That you’re going to have to keep working and slaving away to create that life. You built your own prison. I get this because I’ve been you. The best way out of this is to start by getting leaner with your money. It doesn’t mean you cut out all the fun and enjoyment of your life. Quite the opposite. Instead, it’s prioritizing what brings you the greatest joy. Put your money there. I don’t care if you make 50,000 a year and you spend 30,000 a year, that’s 20,000 you could put away. You could come out freer than the person that’s making $200,000 to $300,000 a year. Do you get my gist?
Find a way to have as much profit as possible, as much gap between your income and expenses so that money then has a job so that you don’t fall prey to Parkinson’s Law. That money has a job to then go and work for you. Get that money working for you instead of running away. You’re wondering who’s left working, which is you. If you can get your money captured, you can get ahold of them, and get them almost like this Army working for you. Getting this money to start working as your employees. Get that money out and work for you. That’s where it gets better. That’s what I mean by getting lean.
Get Liquid
This also implies to get liquid. Get liquid means get that cash in your possession. Do not trap your money in a bunch of equity in real estate. Do not trap your money in 401(k)s and IRAs. Place it where you get your hand slapped. That includes annuities. We’ve had clients recently where they’ve put their money into annuities. Not only do they have to worry about how to avoid taxes if they try to cash it out, but also, they’ve got surrender fees because the insurance companies will charge separate fees on these annuities, which are like mutual funds, but they’re different.
They’re almost like a savings vehicle like a CD. Those things, even though they could be tied to the stock market, could also lose money. Even if they couldn’t lose money, still you’re in bondage. It’s locked up because of that certain time period before those surrender fees are gone. You need to make sure you have your money liquid and available.
This is why we talk so much about infinite banking, not because that’s the answer. That by itself is not the answer. It’s a nice place to store money where you can get paid a lot better than you would let it sit in a bank account earning point nothing percent. You get taxed on point nothing percent. That’s a great strategy to use to build liquidity, to build up cash, to then use to get it out.
Get It Out
That’s the third thing. We say get lean. Watching your money, making sure you have more income than expenses, living well within your means, and then taking that money and using it for yourself. That’s part of getting liquid. Get your money into liquid places. That means stop funding things that don’t help you become free today.
Don’t put your money in the vehicles that make you wait until you’re 60 or older depending on what the government feels whatever rules they tell you to play by at that time. Get that money, then liquid, and then get it out. That’s where you deploy into true cashflowing, passive income assets. Those that create predictable income for you every month or every quarter. It’s providing that income, which is helping you to buy your time back. That is essential. That is what’s key.
It might sound simple and that’s because it is. It is simple to do. The hard part though is many of you will ask, “Where do I go? How do I get that money working for me? How do I know where to put in the right places? Isn’t the real estate market dangerous right now?” My answer is, “In some places, it is.” There are some markets that I would not even touch with a 10-foot pole. I wouldn’t even touch it with a 10-state pole, depending on which state it’s in. You got to be careful of those things.
The great news is that there are resources out there. There are things available. That’s why our clients meet with people that we’ve vetted. It doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed, but to know that we’ve vetted these people that have been investing for usually at least a minimum of 12 or 15-plus years, they’ve been through these cycles. They know what they’re doing. Therefore, you’re not taking as much risk. Even if you want to buy properties, even if you say, “I don’t want to put my money with other people. I want to control it myself, but I don’t want to be a babysitter on my properties.”
There are ways to buy properties where somebody else babysits them for you. They have property managers taking care of the issues for you, rather than you having to take care of it. Again, there’s good and bad. There are pros and cons to each of these situations. That’s why people will say, “I’ve got this money, but where should it go?”
That’s where it depends. It depends on the situation, depends on where your money is, depends on your goals, whether you want cashflow, growth, or both. There are a lot of goals there. That’s what we help you discover when we work with you at Money Ripples. You can always ask us. You can go to MoneyRipples.com and contact us if you want to know more or even go to our Passive Income Calculator. Take that and you can find out how much passive income you could generally create in the next twelve months. That’s a great way you can do that.
Regardless if you use us or not, this is the key to creating time freedom. You get your money out, liquid available. Make sure you get your expenses down and then get it working for you to create passive income. One more point on that getting lean. One of the reasons we want to get lean is because we can bring your expenses down. It makes it easier for you to become work optional. You have enough passive income coming in to replace those expenses.
Understand that if your expenses are $20,000 a month right now, which is quite a bit of money to be spending every month, you got to bridge that gap by creating enough passive income. I’ll tell you this. To make $20,000 a month, even if you made a simple 10% return, you need almost $2.5 million. What if you get it down to $15,000 a month? Now, you need about $700,000 less to do that. It’s not as hard to achieve that.
My real advice to you is to do all three of these things. Don’t overlook any of them. Get lean, get your money liquid so it’s not tied up and trapped in places. Get it out working for you to create passive income. We can help you with that if that’s something you need help with. I’d recommend reaching out, especially if you have at least $150,000 or so to invest.
Shape A Money Mindset
I want to come back to the point I mentioned earlier. Here’s something I’ve seen people do, even when they get out of that “rat race.” They become work optional. They have enough passive income to pay all their monthly bills. The problem is that you are not free unless you can become mentally and emotionally free, too.
I mentioned that there are people that make great money in their businesses, yet they don’t feel like they could take time off. I’ve seen this true even with people that have enough money to be able to quit their jobs, but still, they don’t feel like they can. There are various reasons for that. It usually comes down to one thing. You try to address the math of your money, but you forget to address the mindset of your money. It’s not about math. It’s about mindset.
How do you address the mindset of your money to stay in a place of abundance versus scarcity? Understand this is why if you’re in a situation where you constantly find yourself in that saver category versus a steward category. Savers, to give you an example, have to pay off debt. They cannot stand debt because they’ve been taught debt is evil. They can’t save enough money because even if they save enough money, they feel like they can never stop. That’s a scarcity of emotion.
Stewards, however, know that they have a choice. They have options. There’s an abundance out there. They’re also patient. They’re not impatient. They’re willing to wait and make it work for them. They’re not willing to gamble as some of the spenders will do. Spenders, when they do investing, will gamble their money away. Why? It’s because they gamble their money away in spending, too. You got to be careful of that.
Often, extreme spenders can become gamblers, but also extreme savers can become hoarders and they can never stop. They can never give themselves permission. I’m going to tell you this. You have permission. Try it out. Let’s say, for example, you haven’t been able to take off more than a week without freaking out. Try a week and a half. Try two weeks. Test your limits. Try it out and remind yourself, “Everything’s going to be okay.”
If you have a job and you’re taking off all the time, it’s possible they might get rid of you because if you’re not delivering value, fine. If you’re a business owner, you have the ability to hire people and create systems to make that work. For example, let’s say you did decide to take off a month. You shut down your business for that period of time. You told everybody, “I’m going out of town. I’ll be back.” Maybe you set up some things in motion in the meantime. Maybe you have a virtual assistant taking care of the basic things with your emails. Have them do that. Let’s see what happens.
I’ll tell you, there was a time where I was going through a divorce. I couldn’t emotionally handle anything. Now this is back in 2015. That fall of 2015 was a rough one for me. Now, I barely even answered my own emails, but I did learn a valuable thing. The company was still there. I get it. If you, all of a sudden, stop showing up to your job, you ghost your employer. Your job may not be there. I get that there’s a difference there. That’s not too different from a business owner, either. If business owners stop serving their clients, they might walk away. I’ve done this with people where I’ve hired them. All of a sudden, they say, “I got to take a break.” I stop using them for a while until I know that they’re legitimately back in business.
You could prepare people mentally for that time you take off. You’re going to have to prepare yourself more mentally to take that time off. I want you to try to give yourself that freedom. Do those little tests. In The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss talks about this, as well. He’s like, “Test them with your employer. Try to take Fridays off.” It’s funny how you talk about working virtually and people are like, “I can’t do that.” After 2020, virtual became another real option.
I get it. Some mindset for employers had to go there. They had to be able to trust. They had to have faith in you too, that you weren’t going to squander your time and not be productive. I’m telling you, there are ways to make this happen. It’s going to require you to have that permission. You need to start it now before you’re financially free to get this permission to work. Otherwise, you’re going to get to the point of financial freedom. You’ll have the ability to buy your time back, but you won’t use it because you’re too scared to do that.
That’s my challenge to you. Find ways to test your limits a little bit. Test those limiting beliefs that you have so that when the money is there, when the monies come in, you can truly be free. Money is no longer determining whether you do or do not do something. Money is not the primary reason that’s stopping you from living your life. It becomes a tool. It becomes something to help you live your life now. That can start today, even when you’re not financially free. You have to choose to do it. That’s my advice to you.
If I spoke to you, thank you so much. Like and subscribe. On Apple Podcasts or something like that, please review and say, “This is an awesome episode.” If this wasn’t your favorite episode, find one that was and review it too, as well. I’m here to tell you that you can make a difference in your life. If we can support you, go to MoneyRipples.com. We can help you out there today. Go and make it a wonderful, prosperous week. We’ll see you later.