Cash Flow Expert and Anti-Financial Advisor, Chris Miles teaches people how to “quickly create cash flow.” He’s an Author and the Host of his own podcast The Chris Miles Money Show and he shares stories about how he has helped people create quick cash flow by using his "Anti-Financial Advisor" approach.
Cash Flow Expert and Anti-Financial Advisor, Chris Miles teaches people how to “quickly create cash flow.” He’s an Author and the Host of his own podcast The Chris Miles Money Show and he shares stories about how he has helped people create quick cash flow by using his "Anti-Financial Advisor" approach.
Welcome to the Senior Bulletin podcast. Financial Advisors offer advice and guidance that typically includes investing in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, etc. Chris Miles is my guest today, and he's the host of his own podcast, The Chris Miles Money Show. He's a cash flow expert, an author and he's also known as the Anti-Financial Advisor. My name is Darren, and this is the Senior Bulletin Podcast, where we discuss issues and topics that matter to seniors.
Unknown Speaker :You're listening to the senior bulletin podcast with Darren Marlow, the podcast where we discuss issues that matter to seniors.
Unknown Speaker :What is it to be an anti financial advisor?
Unknown Speaker :It pretty much means do the opposite what every financial advisor tells you or tries to sell you to do, right you know we've, we've had decades, you know, if you think but I like evidence, you know, and I started out as a mainstream financial advisor back in the early 2000s, right. So I teach people to save everything, spend nothing, stay in it for the long haul and mutual funds and things like that, you know, and stay there for decades. And then hopefully someday, if you're lucky, you might be able to retire. Right? And the truth is, as I started looking at evidence, not just the work that I was doing, but even from decades of financial advisors advice, which really financial visor only been popular since about the 19, late 70s, early 80s. Right, so it's only been about 40 years. What's happened though, is that when I looked at evidence, people were not retiring. They were not becoming truly financially free. I remember, a friend of mine brought that up. He was the guy that trained to be an advisor, left it he quit that industry to become a real estate investor. And we got in this nice little argument about what's better stocks or real estate, right? Yeah, this is the end of 2005. And, and finally he just said, Chris, let me ask You How many of your clients are truly financially free where they don't worry about money? I said, Well, none, maybe one, well none. And because I thought about even the retired doctors I had, but they were still watching CNN, which of course, watch CNN, you're going to be scared of everything right? So nobody was really financially free because they're watching to see if their money's gonna drop and then in the markets and even if it wasn't the market, would it be enough to last our whole lives? He says, Well, great job, Chris. waiting. We did not help anybody retire. How about this? How many of you guys as financial advisors are financially free, not often the the things are selling people, right? Not the Commission's you're earning, but actually off of doing the investments you've been recommending people to do. And I thought about it. I said, Well, of all the people I know there's a hundreds, none of them. He said, Well, there's your problem. I said, well give me the answer. He said Well, I won't tell you the answer because I don't think you even care, but eventually got to give me a little bit and that's why I said read books like Robert Kiyosaki his book. You know, I had already read Rich Dad Poor Dad, but he had me read a book called who took my money, which was about why mutual funds fail and why they're basically they're horrible. And it wasn't didn't take a whole lot of selling to convince me of that because I was already seeing real life examples right. So in 2006 I quit and vowed to never be a financial advisor again, I was just going to teach ballroom dancing at the local university. And I would do mortgages as a mortgage broker. Small interesting point, I was one of the nation's top amateur ballroom dances around the year 2000 So if you ever watched Dancing with the Stars those were some of my friends that were the professionals on that show people I had actually danced with so. So anyways, so I, you know, so I was doing that, but eventually got to the point where when I learned how to do it differently and turn everything on its head and not focus on just accumulating money and compounding slowly over millions of years, which is what the financial vising way is, but instead create a real passion Income cash flow, right now, you know money that can actually start to pay you each and every month. Because that's ultimately why we were saving in the first place was hopefully we could live off with financial advisors having to live off lessen the interest. So if you happen to save a million dollars in your mutual funds, they'll tell you a good advisor will say, well don't pull out more than two or 3% a year. Well, that's only 20 or $30,000 a year. That's nothing. And so instead when I realized, hey, you could take a million dollars if that even paid you regular cash flow of 10 12% a year that's 100 hundred 20,000 a year. Very different lifestyle and you still have the money you're not eating into the funds because really the stock market's not doing what it says it's doing. It's not doing high rates return like people claim it's only average the last 30 years, seven and a half percent. And if you have fees coming out with you have 401 K's or IRAs whatever, you're lucky to average 6%, not 10 or 12. But six and that is the big problem is that it's all over promised under deliver when it comes to financial advising and so I became the The anti financial visor telling people, Hey, get away from the stock market get away from gambling with your money and making mediocre returns with high risks, but instead go somewhere where it's certain whether it be like real estate investing, whether it be in places where you can actually earn money, like the bank earns off of you, but you do it in reverse. There's, there's alternative ways to do it that have been proven by millions of people, I've done it for years, and you can do the same.
Unknown Speaker :So you teach people how to quickly create cash flow, how quick is quickly,
Unknown Speaker :it could be within the next few months, you know, it could be very immediately it can be within this year, I always aim for people to try to make as much cash flow within the first year as they can. And then that's ongoing year after year, but it keeps increasing year after year as well. So it's a I call an income avalanche, right. Is that you get say you, you can create I mean most my clients usually find at least you know, they usually create at least another two 3000 or more a month right off of the money they have. Well if you take that 25,000 35,000 a year you just made or more, right? You can take that money and reinvest again to then increase it by a few hundred more a month, and now you're making thousands more a year. And then that number just keeps growing. And so it's it's, it's different. You know, I'll give you example, I had a I had a client in San Diego, who, who's on track to try to become debt free, right. I love Dave Ramsey people because they they do the exact opposite of what they should be doing. Right. Dave Ramsey is good. If you're broke, you make 30 or 40,000 a year, and you could try to scrimp and save and do whatever he can to survive. He is great for survival advice, but he is horrible for thriving, right? He's great for surviving but not thriving. If you make a middle class income or higher, his advice actually is counterproductive. It actually makes it to where you will never retire. And I've seen that with the numbers over and over and over. So I get people to say, Hey, I'm about to become debt free, right? I am debt free. But what do I have to show for it? So I had to go from seeing In Diego, where he said, Hey, in the next six years, I'm going to pay off my investment property in California and my house, and I should free up about 40 $500 a month. Instead, I said, hey, let's refinance your house and sell the investment property because a lot of equity champion was making very bad rent. I said, sell it property, take some money from your home as your refinance it. Even though his payment was about 1500 more a month than 800,000, we're able to turn into about a net after paying his mortgage payment of 75,000 extra income passive income every year. And that's just starting today. That's the ironic thing. He's hoping to free up 4500 a month in six months or six years, right. But instead, we got to make over 6000 a month in year one, by year five will be over 10 grand a month. So yeah, it is. Yeah. I mean, and everybody has different examples. I mean, I've had I had a woman who was a health coach, you know, she was better, about 56 years old. She's saying, Hey, I'm single, I don't really need a lot. I said, Well, what do you need? She said I need about 1500 2000 a month to live, which I thought was Wow, that I can't I can't believe you can do that
Unknown Speaker :for her. Yeah, exactly.
Unknown Speaker :I have a kids. I mean, I need at least 15,000 a month, not 1500 a month. Right. You know, but, uh, but you know, with her, like, she didn't need that much, you know. And so I said, Well, hey, what do you have, like, well, I got 200,000 mutual funds. I said, Well, we can take that money, we can actually go and invest even at 10% and make you 20,000 a year. That's 1600 a month, you could retire this year. And the funny thing is, her retirement goal was in 10 years, right? She said if I can make you know that 200,000 have my mutual funds. If I could turn that into, you know, 2000 a month and 10 years, that would be great. And I said, Well, what would you want to do? It's like well, it's still part time keep health coaching, but I'd be done by 10am every day. So I work in the morning, be done by 10am have the rest of the day free. I said well you can do that this year still have your income coming in from your health coaching or not. You could retire from Fully, or stay the same, you know, and, and for her, it was almost unbelievable. But, I mean, it's happened I had another woman from Portland did the same thing moved to Bali, and that she's retired in Bali now doing, you know, just from making 3000 a month on her cash, you know, and things like that. So there's a variety of ways to do it. It's just it has to be predictable, and it has to be certain and way more certain what you do in the stock market, which has no certainty and no guarantees.
Unknown Speaker :Right. Let me ask you, Chris, you help people find and fix money leaks?
Unknown Speaker :What is money leaking? And how
Unknown Speaker :do you fix them? Yeah. So you know, in addition to finding passive income opportunities, right, that's an opportunity cost could be a money leak. If you're not getting your money to work for you. That's a money leak, right? Other money leaks can be the fact that I get people that don't track their money. You know, sometimes they're just not tracking they're just surviving working. And the money is kind of easy. come easy go. It's like Well, can we start tracking money and finding more to go and use to make money for you, right? You know, it's kind of creating grandbabies, you know, how do we create more babies and get grandbabies off those babies? You know? Also, you know, things like taxes, how do we minimize our taxes so that you keep more what you make, and then you can make that money work for you to debt. You know, I actually am not opposed to paying off debt if it's done in the right way. You know, some debts great not to pay off. Others you want to pay off, but it has nothing to do with interest rate, I look at how is it actually affecting your month to month cash flow? You know, how can we get that to be improved? So sometimes I have people refinancing things and do things to lower payments, making it easier. And I'll tell you, I had had a guy from Minnesota he was he was a chiropractor out there. He was 62 years old, three years in a row, right. Three years in a row, his business started to decline. And it wasn't because he was bad at business. He was actually a very good business owner, but he's getting tired, right? He's getting worn out. A lot of us don't want to work forever. You know, like I've retired twice. Now, by the time I was 39. You know, I like it. I like retirement. But I like a balance. You know, like, I actually like to work part time, which is what I do now. Well, for him, he was working overtime at age 62. He was burning out. So his income, his profit, his business is starting to go down slightly over time each year. And I said, You know what? Yeah, I see what's going on here. Like you're burning yourself out, you've lost passion for business, we need to get this turnaround. I mean, either give yourself some relief here. And so we looked at all of his numbers and everything. And I said, Okay, you've got 500,000. See, and IRAs doing nothing. You've got it. I'm like, if we could take 100,000 this money in the IRA, use that to pay off some of these loans, and even help you refinance the house. And this is during the Great Recession. By the way, this is right on the back of the recession. So it's harder to refinance. But like what if we refinance your home, pay off these certain debts? We will free up exactly 40 $200 a month. That's 50,000 a year. He's like Yeah, but how am I gonna retire? I said 100,000 To make 50,000 guaranteed a year by how am I going to retire? But isn't this the point of money and it finally took his wife because it's always usually the woman that figures it out first, she says, this makes sense. And you sell $400,000 in your retirement account, what's the what's the real issue here? So a leap of faith. He says, let's do it. We did exactly according to the plan, freed up 4200 a month. The cool thing is, is that once he did that, he was able to relax, right? He's like, okay, I can breathe. Well, at work when he was talking to potential patients, he started relaxing them. Well, the next day, no, he's making more money in this practice, because he's now having more fun. So he starts making an extra 2000 or $3,000 a month in the practice within a few months, all because he was able to relax and breathe. On top of that we saved him probably about I think, was 15 grand in taxes that year too. So when you add all that together, I mean, even though we free up 50,000 a year between the taxes that made it 65,000 plus another two or 3000 a month, this guy is making you know now net cash flowing, but 80,000 plus a year, right? And that's the thing is like if you find those money leaks, the opportunity of where money can be working better for you. It's it's amazing what happens. And by the way, he was freaked out about refinancing because he said, Wait a 30 year refinance, that's gonna make me 92. I said, Ah, no, first off, you're gonna die. You can't bring the house with you. You're not in the Egyptian you can't take it with you in your tomb, and even the Egyptians got robbed, right? Have secondly, I'm like, the thing is this cash flow, if you want retirement, this is what's gonna make it possible. We can always do other things to pay off the house. You know, do reverse mortgages or even sell it later on and you're free. You know, that whole, you know, pay off your home and your home and own it. You don't really own it because you have to pay taxes on it. You know, if you don't pay taxes, you lose your home, if it's debt free. So you got to eat. It's the thing is like we've been taught all these emotional dump things that banks and money institutions have taught us for years, so that we do follow their rules to make them Money, but not us. And that's where you get to reverse those rules around to work in your favor versus against you.
Unknown Speaker :Absolutely. With so many people out of work and looking for work. What are some of the simple ways to generate income? In 90 days or less?
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, you know, if it's different between working and not working, because if you're working, I mean, you've got some other options you could be doing right. There's things you could leverage. But let's just say you're not working Missy or furloughed, or you've been laid off, you know, really, you can either make passive income, or you can make active income, right? Those are really the two categories. Passive income is where we can take the money you have and get it working for you, like we've talked about before, right? We go and buy some real estate, you know, I, I know a particular contract that I have where you can buy these real estate for 75 $80,000. it'll pay you about 600 bucks a month. That's about it's paying you about a 10 to 11% cash on cash return on your money, and you don't have to worry about banks. You know, You just buy it outright in cash. Not all properties do work that way. Don't just try to go buy any random property because you'll find out you're making nothing, you know, but I've had people do that just to get their income up is let's let's do something with the cash you have still keep money for emergencies, we got to have money to help you weather that storm. But the rest of the cash, let's get it working for you, especially if it's been tied up in 401. KS, you've been furloughed this year, by the way, just so you know, you can access even if you're not 59 and a half yet, you can access and pull out up to 100,000 out of your IRAs, your 401 Ks with no 10% early withdrawal penalty. So if you're in your 50s, and you're saying, Oh, I need access to money to do something with it, this might be your year and this is also the lowest tax year and you can still sprout those taxes over three years. makes it very easy to get that money working for you. So there's raised access some of those Yes, ways to access some retirement funds if you need to. Other things do active streams of income those are passive, right using investment money to make money for you. Could be, for example, can we find part time work? You know, can we become a contractor? You know, I've had some people who say, you know what, this is the push, I needed to finally say, I'm going to create my own hours and my own contract, you know, do the same work I've been doing but do on a contractual basis, and potentially make more money per hour than I was making, working for the company I was working with, you know, it's can we be a contractor? Other things you can do. If you have some cash, you can also buy a franchise, there are franchises out there that actually can pay you with that with or without a lot of hours working depending on how much time or bandwidth you have, right? Just today I had I had a client say, hey, somebody on your podcast is about franchises and we get by no she is and they said yeah, we're looking at buying a laundromat because that's very hands off passive. I said you could you could definitely do that. There's franchise you can do that. Or you're more actively working because you've got the time and you want to do something with your time and energy. Here's a way to do it. You know, you know, there's things like people doing things online businesses, you know, can you create money online, whether it's selling online, whether it's through Amazon or whatever it might be. There's lots of things you can do through that. But here's the key, whenever it comes down to how you make money, it always comes down this one basic principle is that dollars, follow the value create for other people, dollars follow value. If you really understand that every every time you get paid, so because you offer something of value that's worth more to them than the money they give you. You start to realize it's not a it's not a mystery, made people look at money as like this mysterious thing. It's hard to get. I was raised that way, right? My dad, he's now in his late 70s. He was saying I'm going to work until I'm dead. That was that was his belief, you know? And money was just something you just hoard it, you just start it up and hoard it. And then hopefully you had enough that that you did not live your money, right. But what I realized is that when I started realized real true principles, you could take money and money is just not Money is useless money is just a piece of paper, it's just a thing. But if you exchange value for a future offer something, they create a win win. This is how I was able to retire when I was 28. The first time is I obsessed over the question, What can I do to create a wingman for people? How can I serve somebody? How can I solve problems? How can I give something that somebody wants? The money is just a natural exchange for that, that service or for that product or for that value that they're receiving? And when you start to focus on that, money actually isn't too difficult anymore. You know, it doesn't does it's not about having a resume. I mean, even though resume might list out the things that shows how you're valuable, right, or what you've done, it's a value that you could possibly offer. The truth is, is it's already intrinsically within you. How do you get that out to serve people and you'll find that there's a variety of ways to make money whether or not you have a job, or you do it yourself.
Unknown Speaker :And you also have a publication Tell us about it.
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, so I mean, there's books I've written but there's a free book I have on my website, money ripples.com called Beyond rice and beans, seven secrets to free up cash today where I talk about how to find some of those money leaks. So if you're trying to find money to use, it's a great place to start.
Unknown Speaker :And how about your website? What will people find on your website?
Unknown Speaker :Yeah, so money rebels calm you on the website there. I mean, I've got different blogs and things like that you have the E book on there that's that you can download for free. The blogs actually have starting to have video blogs now. Just like you've been doing my podcasts, the Christmas money show, I have it even on video as well, whether it's on YouTube or on my website. Now got my podcasts all through my website now too. Okay,
Unknown Speaker :perfect. Any other advice you'd like to share with the audience?
Unknown Speaker :You know, the biggest advice I would just give is, you know, don't buy into the things that you've thought worked last several decades, right? Especially if you're the type person you've been saving, you've been working hard. You've been doing everything you've been told to do. And now you're still wondering, how am I going to make it out? Right, what am I going to do? Because if this keeps up, either I have to die sooner, or I have to work longer. And neither option sounds great. But the thing is that there is hope, like it's way, way easier than most people realize. It's not It's not something that financial advisors will teach you. Because they don't know themselves. They're not investors. They're not retired. They don't know. It's like, they're just salesmen in suits. But if you actually go to this and say, Wait, what can I actually do that's different? What are millionaires doing? You start to follow that and start finding ways to create passive income, right? things that can actually allow you to work because you want to, not because you have to. That's when life becomes fun. And what better time than right now, because we're not getting any younger. let's admit it, right. You know, I have no I will have no more hair than I have today. You know, I can just do the best I can do right now. And, and that's the thing I recommend is you guys, there is hope, and now is our hope but you have time, like there's ways to create results. Now. You just got to do it differently. You've got to question the status quo and everything you've been taught because when you start doing the opposite what's been taught, that's where you actually have a chance of having a life that other people don't have.
Unknown Speaker :Mm hmm. Well, Chris, thank you for the information you've shared with us today. And thanks again for being on the senior bulletin.
Unknown Speaker :Absolutely. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
Unknown Speaker :You're welcome. Have a great day. You too. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. And if you would, please subscribe. And that way you can enjoy all of our future podcasts. Be sure to visit the senior bulletin comm where you can sign up for our newsletter, connect with our former guests, learn about Medicare, and also get quotes and apply for life insurance. Take care, and I'll talk to you next episode.