Have you ever heard someone say (including yourself), “It takes money to make money?”
Guess what? It’s bull!
Join our host and Cash Flow Expert, Chris Miles, as he teaches you how he, and others, have made money WITHOUT money. And why investing with your mind is your #1 asset.
Tune in now!
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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You DON’T Need Money To Make Money!
A quick shout-out to our sponsor, American Homeowner Preservation. If you’re looking for great returns and making a positive impact in people’s lives by helping people stay in their homes, be able to sell their homes or whatever it might be so that they’ll be able to have a place to live and do what’s necessary, you’ll have that option. There’s a great little crowdfunding option with American Homeowners Preservation. You should check it out. Go to www.FundingAHP.com.
In this episode, I want to talk about a question that many people ask. Granted, most of the people I’m talking to right now, or I’m at least working with one-on-one with clients, do have at least some cash or money they can use to invest. That’s one of the number one questions. They’ll say, “Chris, I’ve got this money. What can I do to invest with it? How can I make more money with this money? How can I quit my job, have the option to retire, or be able to work in my business because I love it, not because I need to make money? I have other streams of income coming in.” That’s a common thing I get. I also get some people too, and they are saying, “I’ve got some money, but what can I do in my situation that’s best?”
It may not always be investing. Sometimes, it’s what creates the most cashflow. It could be taxes and ways we could save there. It could be paying off debt or all kinds of things. I’ll tell you the one thing I’ve noticed for several years, and I’ve been doing at least something with the financial industry, whether I was a financial advisor or now more an anti-financial advisor, I’ve been doing this for fifteen years. I’ve watched the cause and effect. I love to see what creates certain results. I’m a scientist at heart. I love to tinker and the mess of stuff. The number one question people get when they hear my story about is either 1) When I was able to retire, it was just $2,000 in my checking account back in 2006, or 2) After the Great Recession, how I was able to dig out of that $1 million debt hole with no money and no credit?
People were like, “How did you pay off $900,000 in about three and a half years?” I’m going to use a quote from Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad. He kicked this off and lead into this because this is how I see it and feel about it. This is what you should listen closely here. Here’s the quote, “You do not need money to make money.” That’s why most people don’t have any. Actually, this is what I said. Sorry, that’s my own personal notes.
What I say is you do not need money to make money. That’s why most people don’t have any. Here’s what Robert Kiyosaki says, “Please hear this as this is the hardest thing for people to understand. You do not invest with money. You invest with your mind. No matter what the field, your biggest asset is your mind. Once you have the knowledge, you find deals, find your team, and use other people’s money.” That’s his quote.
I want you to understand what he’s saying here. I don’t want you to think that’s a nice way to cop out because if you’ve read Rich Dad’s books, you get some ideas, but you don’t know what to do. In fact, I’d probably give you more information on this show than you get from his books in some ways. I like what he’s teaching because this is important.
You’ve got to know the mindset of an investor. Many people I know I’m working with right now, the hard thing is you’re trying to go from a place of throwing your money in a mutual fund, a 401(k), an IRA, or something you throw your money at something and hope that it pays your return. That’s an easy way to make money.
In the mutual fund aspect example, you get paid breadcrumbs. You get the table scraps, and that’s it. That’s why you don’t make a great return. You can make amazing rates of return that are double digits over 10%. That’s easy. That’s not hard to do. There are people willing to pay you that willingly. I advertised one, obviously. There are people that are willing to do that.
The thing is that if you want to figure this out, you’ve got to understand you’ve got to invest your mind. Your biggest asset is your mind. It’s the knowledge and perspective that you have. When I talk about abundance, it is absolutely essential for this. In fact, I will tell you that even for every one of my clients, even the ones that are getting the strategies for me, you’ve got to have two because if you don’t have this mindset, nothing will work.
I came from a place of scarcity. I heard of different deals when I was a financial advisor. I heard of creative ways to make money, but I didn’t believe it could work when I saw what was flawed in it. I saw how people would fail with it. What changed my mind was when it became possible, when I saw that it could actually be real. One of the biggest things I’ve seen is that when we’re looking at money, a lot of times, people think this is what it looks like. We all have this little box or this certain point of view that we can only see so far. If we get up a little bit higher on the mountain and look at the bigger view and picture, we’ll say, “There’s so much more.” I’m telling you, there is so much more. I remember the first time I heard somebody say they could get paid 36% a year on a deal. I thought, “36% a year? No way.” Even when I heard 24% or 18%, I was like, “That’s not even possible, is it?” I then found out it was.
If you’re trying to get that return on your mutual fund, good luck. That won’t happen ever. You might get one year that does that or even two years, but that’s it. It’s done, and then you go back into mediocre to zero to negative returns. That’s how the average numbers work with that, but there are ways to do it.
It’s interesting because I see some of my clients right now. I’ve obviously got a team of people that I’ve got connections to that would be more than willing to take your money. They’d love to do it. This is probably the reason why I stand between you and them because if it were their choice, they’d say everybody should do this. I don’t believe that. I believe that should be the right thing. If you’re trying to find people and connections that can give you good deals, they’re out there. They will pay you decent returns.
Your biggest asset is your mind. Once you have the knowledge, you find the right deals. Click To TweetUnderstand this. The investment they’re letting you be a part of where you do throw money at it, they are using their minds, first and foremost, to create a return. Say you’re getting paid 12% from an investment. If you’re getting paid 12% a year from an investment, you’ve got to assume they’re making quite a bit more than that, or there wouldn’t be any point to it. Granted, if you’re the person that is the one where you have the deal or are able to create the deal and people want to put money into it, the nice thing is you don’t have to necessarily use your money to make money.
Banks get an infinite rate of return on their money because they don’t have to use their own money. It’s because they get you to put money in their little CDs or savings accounts at point nothing percent, then they go and turn around and make more money with that. That’s nice to know, but understand that they’re investing with their minds. When people create investments, they’re using their minds to create that investment, and you’re throwing the money at it.
You’ve been trained your whole life, or at least whole adult life possibly, to throw money at mutual funds. This is where a financial advisor will say it takes money to make money. That’s crap because none of us would have survived college if that were the case. Most of us were teenagers at some point and probably didn’t have much money of our own. We didn’t have that money. If you had help from your parents, which I didn’t have, I didn’t have a lot of help from my parents, but maybe you did. If you did, that money eventually ran out. You had to still create money. That was created in your mind first or from the knowledge and skills you developed that became worthwhile to somebody else that was willing to pay you money.
The people that are investors understand that it’s made in their minds. They are the ones that create that value that then people beg to get their money into. I know a lot of investors that don’t want anybody to deal anything with them because it is a headache to have to deal with other people’s money. Maybe close friends or family, that’s it. They will become little partners. They keep it very small and that’s it. You usually don’t see people go big with these kinds of things. That’s not how it goes. They create with their minds first.
For example, American Homeowners Preservation. They came out with their little securities report. I’m not saying this is who you should invest in. I’m just giving you a real-life example here. With them, they made about 39% last year on their fund, but they only paid investors like you 1% a month or 12%. That was their deal. That’s all they contractually said they were going to do. Even then, they could change the number. They could make it less if they have a harder time making returns, but they made about 39%. Understand that they’re making a bigger difference than what you’re doing. What if you could do that yourself?
For example, I’ve got clients right now who are starting to do some of their own deals. They’ve got connections with some of my real estate people. They said, “I might do a few with them because it’s turnkey and easy. I don’t have to do much, but they’re also doing their own deals.” They also have some education first. They didn’t just jump in head first. They had a little bit information or they’ve already been doing it a little bit. They started out small and then they got a little bit bigger.
I have a few clients that they’ve got deals going on, and the people I have in my contacts can’t compete with their turnkey properties with what they can do with putting a lot of their mental energy into it and some time. Not necessarily physical energy because they might have contractors they hire, but they might be doing some things to fix up that property to get it to a point where they can make a bigger profit on the rental. That’s awesome. I love that they’re creating their investment. That’s created on your mind.
I’ll give you an example on my life. I’ve had to create many different deals. I did real estate deals where I didn’t have the money, but I was able to create the connection. For example, I was able to be the person that found the property and then helped somebody else be able to get the deal. I got a commission and got paid for that, not as a real estate agent but as a consultant to help them find deals. Basically, I do the leg work for them.
I also had times where I was good at doing connections with other people. I was doing connections in the sense of connecting businesses with people. Back when I had a mortgage license, I used to get paid at least $1,000 to $1,500 a month just passing on 1 or 2 people a month to a mortgage company and say, “Go talk to them. They’ll be able to get a killer deal on your mortgage, cash out, refinance it, or whatever you need to do to go invest.” They would do it, and I’ll get paid for that. That stuff was the stuff that was possible when I was heavily in debt, when I was struggling.
Funny enough, after I cut off a lot of the income streams, that’s where I had that perfect storm happens, the Great Recession, where real estate was tanking. Everybody I was talking to or consulting were real estate investors, and nobody could pay me. It was a crazy period of time. I was getting hit left and right. I was in the hole of $16,000 a month and quickly went from having millions of assets to now having $1 million in debt. I sold off some assets. I had to sell some things off. I had to get rid of things, and I helped pay off several hundred thousand of that money.
The rest of it had to be created. I had to create that money out of seemingly thin air. What did I do? I did through a business. I figured out, “What can I do that would create value?” I had to get creative already to that point to break even. I was able to break even, but that wasn’t able to get me out of debt. I had to get creative. I started teaching people how I did. When other people were in a situation like my own, where they can figure out how to make money or they could figure out how to get out of the hole they’re in, I would be able to get a fresh set of eyes and say, “If I were in your shoes, here’s what I would do. Here’s how I had to get creative and be thinking all day long about my own situation and help dig myself out of my own hole.”
This is not what I was advertising at that time because that would seem ridiculous. People are like, “You’re broke,” but I knew that it was valuable, and people did too. In fact, there were hundreds of people that I personally worked with that loved it over the next several years, even today. That’s part of what I do. Obviously, I’m not taking people from being flat broke like I was, but helping people be able to do that. I created money from that.
When you find the right deals, you find the right team. Click To TweetI also created money from other means, “What are other things I could do to help people out?” There have been times I’ve done life insurance stuff. I actually still write life insurance from time to time. I only do it for a very select few people because it’s not something that I want to be doing full-time because I love educating. That’s something that I’ve done as well. That is a stream of income for me too. There are all kinds of ways to do it, and it doesn’t take a lot of effort.
The thing is if you realize that you are the number one investment, you, your knowledge, your expertise, the way that you create value in the world, you’re able to deliver value in a way that solves problems, the way you can do that, there is unlimited potential here. There are unlimited amounts of value. The value that you’re limited to is how much bandwidth you have personally. That’s where a team comes in.
When Kiyosaki said how you’re able to find the right deals, which is absolutely true when you’re looking for the right things. You’re not in a gambler mentality. You’re not trying to find crap out there or trying to find any deal because you’re desperate. That’s where you find the wrong deals. You find the right deals and your team. It’s amazing when I have people I work with, I help them to be part of my team and as part of their team too. We might keep some of their old team, but we bring my team in as well. I might have great accountants, attorneys, a different insurance or investment people that come in to help improve their lives.
I’ve spent over the last decade vetting these people and seeing people who have done it wrong and people who have done it right. A lot of my experiences and things I’ve gone through, and even ways I’ve seen people do it right or wrong, I will be able to create a good team to build and know who’s right or not. When people say, “How do you find a good accountant?” I’m like, “A lot of times, I know I have to talk to them, but obviously, I’m not going to talk to every person’s accountant. I’d have to get to know them.” That’s why I tell people, “Here are a few good questions to ask. Here’s a good place to start.”
Also of course, using other people’s money. This one you’ve got to be careful with. This has a lot of liability but you can use other people’s money. This includes not just borrowing from people or investors or whether it’s equity or deposition, but this could also include being able to borrow money from a bank. This is something you have to be a wise steward over. It comes back to that stewardship mentality and that thing. All these things are combined together to help with this.
Let me give you another example here. I had a client from New York. He was a chiropractor. He had worked in that field for a while and was very successful. He’s working only about a half day a week. He was telling me, “Chris, I’m looking for a good investment. What else can I do right now?” As we started to look into it, we found out that oil and gas was the thing he was intrigued by. For whatever reason, he always loved it.
Notice Kiyosaki talks about oil and gas or real estate. He does it because he’s interested in it. Some people will try to reflect on that and say, “I want to do that too.” No. That’s what he loves. You’ve got to do something that you’re interested in and passionate about. For this guy, it was oil and gas. Naturally, this is a little bit more interesting field. There’s not a whole lot of context I have in that regard. He was able to get a connection from someone who was doing oil drilling in Kentucky. He ended up wanting to invest money with them and he liked it. He liked what was going on.
He realized there were a few holes. For one, he didn’t have any control over the investment. He’s like, “I don’t have much to do with this.” I said, “Can you get on the board of directors?” “I never asked. How would I do that?” Ask them how much money you’d have to invest to do that. He did and found out it was $50,000. He put in $50,000 and got on the board of advisors that he had there. When he’s on the board of directors, he realized that there were some other holes in that business that he could help improve upon. Thinking on his mind, “How can I make it better? How can I make this investment better?”
He realized these guys aren’t great at communicating between the drillers and the owners and things that. He said, “I’m a great business owner. I’m a better business owner than you guys are as the owners. Why don’t you have me? You guys can agree to it, but I’m going to basically appoint myself as CEO.” They agreed to it. They said, “You do have a great experience. Let’s use that.” He became a CEO with a salary. He wasn’t just making money on the investment, he was making money from the oil and gas drilling, but also he was making money from being a CEO for a few hours a week. I think he gets paid $1,000 a month or something like that. He was making students’ income in two places.
That is how you create your own investment. That is how you take ownership and you create something new. He wasn’t the one that created the initial investment, but he made that investment his. You don’t have to have every investment be that way. It does take a lot of mental energy. Sometimes I get people who are like, “I’ve got a lot of money. What can I do to use this? In the meantime, I can start studying up and start doing other things.”
There are options there and you can get your launch pad going. My thing for you as comfort and counsel is that you do not need money to invest, but you do need your mind. You need to have that abundance mindset. You need to be able to look with clarity. You need to be able to figure out, “How I can create and make this investment better?” Focus on that and watch what happens. You can create so much great money. It’s awesome. Anyways, Chris Miles here signing off . Have a wonderful, prosperous week. We’ll see you.