That million-dollar stock portfolio is your someday money. You are hoping and praying that will be enough to retire by 65 and live a good life.
Don’t bank on it. In fact, what will a million dollars look like in 40 years anyway? Will it be enough?
Stop waiting for someday, and start living life now – Find out how in today’s podcast episode.
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TRANSCRIPTS:
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now what this is, what people told me was financial freedom. Financial advisors really teach you financial dependence, not financial interdependence, but I’m telling you, it’s a way that’s already been proven to not work. Where today you can easily feel broke as a millionaire, which is why 35% of them say you really want to be that person. That said, I got to delay my life and my life with my family and with my children another 5, 10, 15 years because stupid stock market,
Speaker 2 (00:33):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
Hello my fellow Ripples. This is Chris Miles, your cashflow expert and anti financianal advisor. This show is for you. Those are working so hard for your money and you’re now ready for your money to start working harder for you today. Why? Because you want to be able to live and do what you love with those that you love today, not 30 or 40 years from now, but you want that life right now. You want the ability to be able to create not just a lot of wealth for yourself, but create a ripple effect through the lives of others because as you are blessed financially, you have a greater capacity, the bless the lives of those around you. Thank you for tuning in today. Thank you for joining our show because I promise you we’re all here to serve you. If you haven’t done so already, go check out our website, money ripples.com.
(01:42)
There’s actually a passive income calculator you could try out there right now to see how much passive income you could create with your financial situation today to be able to get out of that rat race. So go check that out@moneyripples.com. Today I want to really talk about why financial plans fail. What is it about them? I’ve mentioned on this show many times that Fidelity, when you look at their statistics, really only a million dollars, those that have at least a million dollars, it’s only about one and a half percent. 800, 10,000 people have at least a million dollars in their 4 0 1 Ks or IRAs out of 45 million clients with fidelity. Now, is this Fidelity’s fault? Not necessarily, although I’m sure they don’t help either. But why is it that so many of us are trying to sacrifice suffer, suck our entire lives away trying to save something in hopes that someday we’ve got something left or got something that’s significant?
(02:33)
I got a lot of S’s here. I there’s a lot of S’s because either your life can either be amazing or it can suck. There’s another one, but that’s the truth is like what is it about this that created such a high failure rate? Now I say failure because you might think a million dollars is successful. I’m going to do a separate episode on what does a million dollars really mean. But the truth is, if you’re living on a traditional financial plan, you’re only supposed to be pulling out roughly about 3%. So if you have a million dollars saved up, you’re living on 30,000 a year, which is why of people surveyed in 2023 of those that actually had over a million dollars, 35% believed it would take a miracle for them to be able to retire. Why is it going to be a miracle for them?
(03:15)
Because it’s just not enough. So why have these plans failed and why have we heard more about this? So let me dig into that, right? Because I know from being a financial advisor over 20 years ago, I did that business for four years and actually in the grand scheme of things, if you last four years in financial advising, you’re among the top fewer percent. And I’m not saying I was the best financial advisor by any way, shape, or form. I thought it was pretty average. If anything, I just don’t quit. But what got me to quit is when I realized it wasn’t working, and there’s a few things I had to understand about that. First and foremost, when it comes to financial plans, there’s a lot of assumptions about numbers. You get these numbers to tell you you’ll make 10 or 12% a year and look what it’s going to be down the road.
(03:58)
And so you got guys like Dave Ramsey saying You save a hundred bucks a month for 40 years making 12%, you’ll have 1.176 million, although he did the numbers wrong. You put it into a calculator, you’ll find out it’s 979,000. So which can you imply that if you’re getting 12% a year in the stock market, if you save a little over a hundred bucks a month, you’ll actually become a millionaire. But that begs the question, what will a millionaire be like in 40 years? The truth is you’re probably going to be very middle class and you could still be a millionaire. There are already people that are middle class that are millionaires in the 1980s. I know when I was growing up watching TV shows like Benson and Mr. Belvedere and who’s the boss? Maybe you watch those shows too. I remember thinking, oh my goodness, if I make so much money, maybe I have that nice house in Connecticut with a white picket fence or whatever it might be, and I’m going to have a live in Butler or Maid or maybe you can afford Charles in charge to work for you and babysit your kids and all that kind of stuff.
(04:56)
But the truth is that yes, a million dollars 40, 50 years ago was a significant amount of money. Being a millionaire meant something where today you can easily feel broke as a millionaire, which is why 35% of them say, I think it’ll be a miracle before I’m able to retire. Because they know in that traditional model, you’re not supposed to pull out too much because what if the market goes down? What if you’re not in the stock market but you’re in bonds and things like that and interest rates are down, that means you can’t pull off as much and with inflation happening all the time, I can guarantee in 40 years a million dollars will be worth nothing to you. And so we know it’s not a hundred bucks a month. I pretty much figured out when you factor in inflation, whatever you save per year today, especially if it’s in a 401k with a match, whatever you save per year today is a pretty much what you’ll be able to pull out per year to tomorrow, especially down the road in 30 or 40 years.
(05:49)
So if you’re maxing out your 401k, putting in about 20,000 or so a year, you’re going to live on about a 20,000 year lifestyle unless you have social security. Again, this is why it’s not the new thing. Just so you know, next year in 2025, it’ll be the 40 year anniversary when the general public had access to 4 0 1 Ks. They started becoming more accessible in 1985, but yet that still hasn’t been enough for a lot of people. That’s why a lot of people are getting outside getting IRAs and other things like that. They’re trying to do steps or whatever it might be. They’re trying to save more and the Roth IRA, what a joke, right? You can’t even save enough into the Roth IRA by itself. So you have to hope that the politicians won’t take away your ability to do what’s called a back to Roth ira, right?
(06:31)
Where you convert your IRA to a Roth IR later, and so you’re trying to frantically figure out a way to make it work. This is what was hard for me. This is what was hard for me personally because remember, I was selling the dream. I was selling that you were going to make 12%, which by the way, you’re not, when I mentioned you save a little over a hundred bucks, a million dollars, that doesn’t, assuming you make 12%, but I found out as I started running real numbers, 8% was definitely a much more realistic number than 12%. Also, other issues too, they tell you to pay off your house. Well, I’ve seen so many people that have come into our doors, come to Money Ripples asked us for help saying I’m debt free, or I’m just about to be debt free, but I can already see the trajectory.
(07:12)
It’s not enough and I’ve got money in the market. I’ve got money over here and I’m pretty much debt free. And now what this is what people told me was financial freedom. And so here’s the problem is that when you have financial companies that literally spend billions and billions of dollars trying to promote their agenda and how do they do it? All the financial stations, right? All the financial channels, even like Fox Business, things like that, they’re going to sponsor the financial shows, right? They’re going to sponsor mad Money and they’re going to try to convince you that the stock market’s in place to do it and that mutual funds are the safe diverse place. You’re going to be diversified to do that, right? Only realize that you have these lackluster mediocre returns with high risks, and especially if you want to try to retire that next year and the market goes down, you think, oh, great, that’s it.
(08:01)
And just so you know, people will say, Chris, listen, and I’ve had somebody tell me this just recently. They say, well, Chris, when they get close to retirement, we’ll just move it all into bonds. Well, guess what? Bonds went down in 2022 as well, as well as stocks. They both went down. And here’s the other problem, people that put their money only in bonds, guess what most financial advisors are telling you today, and I’ve watched this trend happen more and more in the last 10 to 15 years ever since the last recession, and as the market came back up, financial advisors got a little bit too egotistical and comfortable because what’s happened since 2009, we had only one down year, and someone might say, well, Chris, actually 2016 wasn’t that great. Yeah, it wasn’t. It was pretty much a flat year, but 2022 was the only real down year in 15 years.
(08:49)
Think about this, and not to mention 2024 is already an up year. So we’ve had all these up years when the averages, the average, where you bring in the balance is typically where you have about two years up, one year down. So if we’ve had 14 years up one year down, what does that tell you? It doesn’t mean it’s going to happen this year. It doesn’t mean it happened next year, but it’s going to happen at some point where again, those markets come back into balance and that could actually destroy your money. That could actually slow your progress, and that’s why you end up being like people that say, I just waited 40 years to find out it’s not enough. Do you want to be that person? Do you want to be someone that says, I need social security, I’ve got to have it. I’m not going to make it otherwise, or I’ve got to work longer.
(09:32)
Do you know, I just read that the CEO just said recently of a particular company said he thinks people should go for longer. They should actually work past age 65. This is the BlackRock, CEO. I find it interesting that BlackRock, which is also a financial company, right, says you should work longer. Oh, so you’re saying we should keep more money with you because why? You’re going to advertise and pitch your crap to us, right? You’re going to say you should put your money with us and leave it there so that you make the guaranteed money for longer versus pulling it out and actually trying to take control of my own life. Oh, heaven forbid that ever happened, right? You ever notice that financial advisors really teach you financial dependence? Not financial interdependence. What do I mean? This is, you ever hear about codependency and marriages and relationships, right?
(10:18)
Nobody likes codependency. At least I don’t maybe codependent people like it, but I’m a very independent person. I have whore codependency. I think I hate it. Okay, let’s be honest. I don’t like it. I don’t think that should exist with our money either. How do we become so codependent, almost really dependent, not even codependent, but really just absolutely begging and dependent upon financial advisors to tell us what to do. It’s our money. Should we be the boss? Should we be the ones taking control? Now, you might think they know more than you, but the truth is, I was a financial advisor and I was around other financial advisors that were in longer than I was, and I’ll tell you, they don’t know jack squat. They know about products. They know about their realm. They might even know different terms. They might even sound intelligent, but when it comes to creating real wealth, real money outside of the income that they make in commissions or assets under management from the fees that they charge you, the truth is you’ll find out they really don’t do a great job growing their money.
(11:17)
They do a great job making money if they’re good salespeople, but they’re not good at growing their own money. That’s why they can’t retire either without the help of the income that they make off of you and why? Because that’s passed down from the companies that spend billions of dollars advertising to you saying, this is the way, this is what you got to do. But guys, it’s not the way. It’s a way, but I’m telling you, it’s a way that’s already been proven to not work, and it’s not just about hitting the million dollar number or whatever it might be because the truth is if you want a hundred thousand a year, you better hope in today’s dollars you have at least three to 4 million saved up, so you can do that. Do the math on that and how much you have to save starting today to be able to get to that goal and it might depress you.
(12:01)
Here’s the good news. You don’t have to choose that sort of path. The problem is, again, with financial advisors, they’re teaching the same thing. Rule 72 and compounding interest, set it and forget it. Let it sit there. You’re in it for the long haul, so even if the market goes down, ignore it. Just let it go down and then it’ll eventually come back up, which is true, it does eventually, but don’t be like the person in the year 2000 that said, I’m going to just let it sit there and wait for the long haul, and then 2015 rolls around. You say, finally I’m back to where I was again. Do you really want to be that person that said, I got to delay my life and my life with my family, with my children another 5, 10, 15 years because stupid stock market or get to the point where like, man, I’m so physically unable now.
(12:47)
I can’t do anything, so I’m just going to have to pretty much sit at home. I’m not going to have much of a life. What if things happen in the world, and this is a concern I have. What if things happen in the world where all of a sudden that country you want to go visit, that place you’ve always had on your bucket list to go visit won’t open their borders. Maybe it becomes war torn and you can’t go there anymore. What if it doesn’t exist anymore? I mean, it’s happened with us in the US with Twin Towers. What if you wanted to go see a major landmark or something like that only to see it just destroyed or for whatever reason, maybe there’s an earthquake, it destroys it, right? What if it happened? You’ve always been putting off someday. Always think, well, someday I’ll be able to do this.
(13:27)
You know what? I’ll just hang out a little bit longer. I’ll just let the stock market a little bit longer only to find out that longer never ends. What would happen to you if that were the case? Well, how would you feel about that? How would your family feel that you delayed your life forever in hopes trying to take care of them and that you’ll have freedom someday? Wanting to find out that freedom never ever came, guys, there’s hope, but it requires you to do it differently because what I’m describing is not just some made up story. This is true for millions and millions of Americans, millions of Americans that say, you know what? I just got to go a little bit longer. They’re happy. The stock market’s going up right now. They’re like, okay, good. Go, go, go, go. It’s like being at Vegas and hoping that you roll it one more time.
(14:08)
That’s going to work only to realize that eventually you’re going to get it wrong. That’s what’s going to happen with you and your money if you constantly just stay put doing the same thing your financial advisors always told you because they work for financial companies that want to make more money off of you and they make the best money off of you because you can put your money with them forever and they will keep charging you fees forever, and they’ll even teach you fear to not pull out too much so you don’t lose to inflation because you don’t want to run out of money like I showed another episode recently, right? You can actually run out of money if the market goes down a few times and that’s not good either, so they’ll tell you, take out as little as you can, put in as much as you can and then take out as little as you can.
(14:48)
Does that sound like a recipe for success for you? I hope, and that’s what we’re trying to rescue you from, right? Again, I’m not saying I have all the answers, but I’ll tell you, when I was able to open my eyes when all of a sudden I realized that in the alternative investing world, which really should be the mainstream investing world, wall Street should be Wall Street, what we should have Main Street here with what we do with real estate backed investments, real investments that are backed by real assets that pay real income. That is the key to freedom. That’s when my mind was blown because when I realized as a financial advisor, it wasn’t just put your money in and then we’ll see how you do and we will put numbers in the calculator and this. They’ll put numbers in a calculator. They’ll project eight, 10 plus percent a year and they’ll tell you, here’s how much money you have and if they ever use an inflation number, it’ll be a really low number for inflation.
(15:38)
I know I did the same thing because it was too depressing to show you real numbers of inflation, but they’ll show you that little number and say, well, here’s how much you’ll live on. Here’s how much you need to save. Oh, you just need to save more. Oh, you need to save more. They keep telling you that every year, every time you have your annual review with your financial advisor, you know why you have an annual review with them. It’s because they already know. Once you go and do your plan with them, it’s obsolete because they have no control of the stock market. They have no control of what happens to you. It’s completely obsolete. That’s why when we work with our clients and we don’t work as financial advisors, we work more as coaches. We’re trying to help walk beside you in this game because you’ve got to break these patterns.
(16:13)
In fact, the hardest thing is going to be for you is breaking the patterns. I know some of you’re probably going to be like, Chris, you shouted me out today. The truth is there’s several of you said the same thing, which is Chris, I’m having a hard time breaking free from the brainwashing I’ve had from years about mutual funds being the way 401k being the way my IRAs being the way, it’s the only way, and that’s because that’s the only way they make money off of you. They don’t make money. If you go and buy a real estate property that actually makes you more with less risk than putting their money in, gambling it in the stock market, will they tell you that? No, because it takes money out of their pocket and it puts it into your own. You need that money back in your pocket.
(16:50)
That’s what we try to do. We try to get the point. It’s like undo yourself, unshackle yourself from those chains that they keep you fricking busted, busting your butt all day long just so you could freaking make it, and that’s just dumb. Even those of you, I know those of you, many of you make multiple six figures a year and still you’re like, how am I going to make it? How am I going to actually have a life and when is it going to be? Is it going to be after all my kids are long gone, they’ve got their own lives. They’re too busy for me and then I get to live my life? What if I could live it today and you might feel guilty? Then you’re like, well, I spent money today, but that just stopped me from making more tomorrow. Yeah, that’s true, but that’s because you’ve been going into that same traditional place.
(17:29)
What if instead we figure out how do we improve cashflow? Now, it’s not about growing your investments per se. It’s about how do we improve the money that’s going out of your life? Can we reduce your money in taxes? Can we reduce the money that’s going to debt that maybe is not worthwhile anymore? Maybe there’s some debt you want to keep and instead invest that money to be able to get that to work harder for you. Many of you’ll ask, Hey, I’ve got home equity. Do I do something with it? Maybe, maybe not. Depends on who you are as an investor because if you’re going to gamble it, no, but it also depends on market cycles. Maybe it’s not today, but maybe later this year, it might make more sense depending on where that money goes. It could make perfect sense. By the way, we just actually are showing a client right now where if they use their home equity line of credit to pay off two of their business loans, which are actually low interest loans, they’ll go to a higher interest rate, but they save $3,000 a month, and then if you take that 3000 a month and you go and invest it, guess what?
(18:20)
That starts generating more hundreds of dollars every month, and that starts to get to the point where you could pay off that debt sooner anyways, but now you’ve got control of your money. You can make a higher return doing the same thing that banks do to you by taking your money and then they go in and lend it out to somebody else and make more with it, right? They go and invest their money, but they don’t invest it in gamble at the stock market. No, no, they don’t do that. They let you do that for them. They let you take all the risks in the stock market while they still take their guaranteed fees. No, you actually get to take control of your own future in your own life. That’s where you don’t have to be a codependent. Just begging to let the financial advisor to boss you around and basically verbally abuse you, sometimes telling you you need to do this or if you don’t do it, you’re an idiot.
(19:01)
Actually, that sounds like Dave Ramsey, doesn’t it? Okay. Well, it’s not like that. That’s not what you do. It’s about how do we find the best opportunity to make your money work for you right now, not waiting for retirement, which you may not even live long enough to do. I hope you do, but you may not be alive. Then what can you do to benefit your life today so you can help more people today? How can you benefit your life today so you can have more time with your family now? How can you have more time to be able to homeschool them? If you want to homeschool ’em? How do you have more time to be able to give them experiences and new experiences? Teach them the things that you wish your parents would’ve taught you, but they were too busy working their tails off, hoping and praying for something to work in their lives.
(19:38)
When does it end? This is where it ends guys, and the great thing is this has actually worked for a lot more people than even Fidelity. There are literally millions of us doing this where they’re infidelity. When you look at those kind of people, not so much. They can’t even get a million people to make over a million bucks, even out of 45 million. That’s the pathetic guys. Don’t follow the path that’s already been worn out. Like Robert Frost talks about. It’s taking the road less traveled, taking that road because that has made all the difference. It’s made the difference in my life. That’s what got me to the point where I was able to be financially independent at the age of 28 and then again at the age of 39 after I lost it all. That’s the thing. This path works. Not only have I proven for myself, but there’s others have done it just as well, whether it’s our company or even people that have done it outside of us.
(20:27)
There’s been plenty of us that have done it follow that path, the path that’s been proven, but it’s not worn out. In fact, most people are wearing out the same old path and they’re going to have the same old ordinary life. Why would you want that? Why would you want that life of just survival, hoping not to outlive your money when instead you can live a path that actually blesses your life now and gives you the hope that you can have a better future as well and gives you that ability to buy your time back, gives you that ability that even if you work, you feel like you work for a purpose, you work because you want to, not because you have to feel like that. You actually have the ability to be able to pursue passions that maybe you couldn’t have done before because you’ve bought your time back.
(21:04)
You can now pursue something greater than you. It’s that next level, that next level of creating that ripple effect in people’s lives. That’s what I’m talking about and that’s why we exist. I tell you all the time here, there’s only two things that we do better than anybody else out there is one, make sure figuring out how you actually get coached to create passive income. Very literally, the passive investing, not the act investing, but the masquerade is passive investing doing that, passive investing in coaching and infinite banking. Nobody gets it better than us. If they were, I guarantee you this, our company would refer it out to them. So much of a hassle to have to do it yourself, but those are the two things. My mantra is this, if I can’t do the best job, then I find somebody who does. We have to be the best at what we do.
(21:50)
Now, I’m not saying you have to use us, but if you want the best in either passive income consulting or you want the best with infinite banking, that’s us. Otherwise, there’s plenty of people. If you want wholesaling, there’s better people out there we can refer you to for wholesaling or flipping properties. That’s not us. We’re all about how do you create passive income now without taking your time and attention away from your family time and attention away from your career or your business, that actually is your economic engine to be able to create more passive income. Now, you can’t have those distractions. You got to have something that actually works when you don’t work. That’s what’s important, guys. Anyways, if you have questions, you always reach out to us. Money ripples.com. Guys, I’m just challenging you. Question the status quo because a status quo person is living in survival. They’re hoping to not outlive their money, but when you do something different, you create freedom. You unshackle yourself from the bondage of what everybody’s taught you as a financial advisor and those financial companies, they’re in it to win it for themselves, not for you. It’s time for you to choose you and your family now because if anybody needs to get paid, it’s you and your family. You deserve the freedom, not those guys. Go and make it a wonderful prosperous week. See you later.