Chris Miles - The “Anti-Financial” Advisor | How to Become "Work Optional"

I find myself going from millionaire to upside down millionaire. I'm really in debt and million dollars. I was losing everything. What if everything you've been taught about money was wrong? Chris Miles, the cash flow expert, has helped thousands achieve financial freedom by debunking myths and teaching strategies. Traditional financial advisors won't. 2006, I get to that point. I'm like, well now what? What am I going to do with my life? I thought about starting up like a dance studio and I was actually about to close on that studio and then some just told me, don't do it. So 2007 we opened up this new business. Now I had these different streams of income. But after a few months they're like, hey, you know you got the all these little different side households and you know things that you're earning money from. You really need to like just focus and go all in with our company. And the next thing you know after about a year or so of doing that, it caught fire. And in 2009 we started getting with a tire practice in Dentist and our company went from almost bankrupt to 2009 to like exploding in 2010. Don't invest more than you're willing to lose. It comes to things like Bitcoin. 2018, December it was starting to hit a high of like 20,000 every time I Bitcoin and I said, you know what? I predict it seemed to crash and it did. And whenever it was scared of Bitcoin, that's my Bob Bitcoin. Money doesn't change you. Money actually just makes you more of you already are. If you're always reinvesting all of your money back in your business, the thing is you're not profitable. Retired at just 28. Chris now empowers entrepreneurs to create wealth quickly and live life on their terms. This is Chris Miles. Welcome to success story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. They have great podcasts, but they also have great tools for entrepreneurs. That's why I've worked with them for over three years now. I want you to picture this for a second. You're at a party and someone asks you what you do as a marketer. And this is a lesson for marketers and even people that don't classify as marketers because at the end of the day, everybody has to figure out how to talk about the product to grow their business, whether or not you're formally trained or you're a solo printer, you have to market. Now marketers have a tough job because it's really hard to describe what a marketer is because if you think about what a day in the life of a marketer is, you have to generate leads, you have to score them, you have to contact them, you have to create content, you have to gather data. And tomorrow, you have to do it all over again. And then you have to wonder if it's even working. Marketers are spread way too thin. Anybody that does marketing is spread way too thin. Now, HubSpot has a collection of AI tools called breeze to help marketers. They have features like content remix, return one piece of content into all these different assets. You can also pinpoint the best products with predictive lead scoring so you can know who's actually going to buy your product or service. You can level up your campaigns with KPIs and analytics. So your day to day as a marketer becomes less busy work and more driving revenue through the roof. So remember, everybody at the end of the day has to be a marketer. And more importantly, you'll have a way easier time describing what you do at parties. If you want help marketing your product or service, if you want to grow your business, visit HubSpot.com slash marketers to learn more. Chris, you went from financial advisor to becoming the anti-financial advisor. You retired twice by 39. So what was the thing? What was the inflection point? What was the major event that made you realize that traditional finance and the traditional financial path was broken? It actually comes back to my dad. I was raised in a typical middle class household. My dad was in the automotive industry selling auto parts. My mom was a loyal painter trained by the same master painter that trained Bob Ross, the happy little trees and all that kind of stuff. And so they taught me good values. He taught me work hard. Your yard is your bond. Don't have to ask anything. That kind of stuff. Where my mom was like, follow your dreams and that kind of thing in your heart. And so naturally, I wouldn't say agree upon because they were eventually divorced. But the one thing that they definitely had in common was that when it came to money, it was scarce, right? Even though they had different perspectives, everything was about scarcity. Hey, we can't afford this. What do you think I am? Made a money? Money doesn't grow on trees. You know, all those kind of things you're here growing up. My favorite one was for my dad where he said, you know, because I had you kids, you know, because I wanted to be a father, I gave up that core bet. It's like, wow, thanks, dad. Dude, that's that's some early trauma. That is some early trauma. So yeah, so naturally I didn't want to live that kind of life as scarcity. I mean, the one thing that didn't impact me as well, you know, kind of in a traumatic, I mean, I wouldn't say traumatic for me, but I could tell it affected him dramatically was he would always say, you know, this job is literally going to kill me. I'm going to die from the stress of working because by his 40s and 50s, he already had strokes and heart attacks. And I vowed I never wanted to live that kind of life. So like every, every person that's looking to strive to live their dream, I went to college, right? And I was almost through my four years. And my point, you know, I was a sociology major is going to be triple minoring and in ballroom dancing, Japanese and psychology, you know, kind of a little known fact, those on the nation's top amateur ballroom dancers about 20 years ago and 20 pounds ago. And so I was doing that. And then I realized if I'm going to become a business consultant, that was kind of my goal. I should have real life business experience. I shouldn't just get go get an MBA or something and then walk out as this, you know, arrogant little 20 something year old kid, trying to tell people how to run their businesses. So I took a sabbatical. I actually stopped one, that one project, not even a class, one project short of getting my bachelor's degree. I said, let's take a year off and then come back and finish it up. But I wanted like, get some real life business experience. And for a few months, I wasn't sure what that business looked like. And the first opportunity that kind of sounded interesting to me was a financial advisor because I had a friend that was doing that and he said, oh, yeah, we're learning about money and investing. And I was like, well, you know, that sounds pretty cool because worst case, I walk away knowing how to make more money, right? How to invest and grow my money in my wealth. So I interviewed, got hired and started to do that. I didn't realize it was so easy to get in because to be a financial advisor, all you have to do is pass a test with 70% and not, you know, be a mass murderer, right? If you're as long as you're not a serial killer or you haven't robbed people, you can parents become a financial advisor. And so, uh, so I went down to that path and I stayed there for four years. I actually never went back to college and stayed dropped out. Um, I never finished that bachelor's degree. Um, and by the way, it's not because I couldn't cut it. I actually had a 3.85 GPA. I just like, I just realized like entrepreneur, or you can make so much more money. And so, but you were successful. You started to make some money because by the way, just on a side note, yes, there's as many financial advisors as realtors. And I don't know what the stats are exactly, but it's something like 70 to 80% of them barely make 35 grand a year. So it isn't easy job to get into, but it's hard to be successful at it. Yep. And I was in that group, you know, I was in that group, you know, barely making maybe three grand a month. If that, you know, um, I mean, I even got promoted in the company because I stayed around long enough. I was in there for four years. Most of them never last the first two, kind of like realtors, as you're saying, right? So I was doing that for a while and just trying to teach middle class families, you know, how to save and all that kind of stuff. Well, eventually my dad, you know, he said, well, Chris, when are you going to advise me? Now, I never, I never expected my own dad, the guy that cheesed my diapers to ask me for money advice because he was always one giving me money advice, usually from that scarcity perspective. And his advice was always save everything, spend nothing. You know, it's kind of like, you know, be as cheap as possible. He would say frugal. We all call them cheap, you know, even cheaper than cheap sometimes. You know, and so, uh, so, you know, I'm sitting down with him for the first time ever, you know, I'm looking at his numbers and everything. And I said, all right, dad, you're 61 years old. I see you've maxed fund your, your four win K, you're getting the match and everything. You've paid off your house. You've, you know, you paid off all your debt. You're completely debt free, including your mortgage. However, if you want to retire today, you better hope you died about five or six years because that's about the time you'll run out of money. Okay. What do I do? I don't know. You did everything right from what I teach as a financial advisor, right? You paid off your debt, you've been stuffing your money and your, your retirement plans. This is everything I've been teaching. And he's like, well, should I do something different? And I was like, well, I could put him in this or that. But what if the market goes down? I don't want to be the one blamed for losing my dad's money. And this is 2005, by the way. And so, I was like, I don't know, you know, I really don't know what to do. And that bothered me so badly because I was selling the dream, right? I was drinking the Kool-Aid. I was trying to get other people to drink the Kool-Aid too to, you know, to live on Hopium as I call it. Like they're smoking Hopium, you know, hoping that someday they'll be financially free. But it wasn't even working for him. And it was even worse because just a few weeks later, it's like when the students ready the teacher appears, I had a friend who I trained to be a financial advisor, but then he left to go do real estate investing, you know. And I thought, okay, good luck with that, you know. And so I'm talking to him on the phone. I call him up. It's like, Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. It's like right that week in between Christmas and New Year's of 2005. And I have a thought he'd be saying, oh, yeah, I'm not doing great. I'm like, good, come back to work for me. That's what I really want. And, you know, to say to him, right? But I get the opposite response. He says, Chris, my life is amazing right now. My dad and I have partnered on some real estate deals and we've now doubled his income as a professor of the local university. I said, hold on a second. You just started doing this in August. That's too good to be true. There's no way you could be making it. He could be making that much money. By the way, I had sat down with his dad just that previous July or August, trying to sell him on mutual funds. And then he decided not to go do that dumb real estate investing thing, right? And so I'm all pissed off. And so I started arguing with him that stocks are better than real estate. And if I stopped, he's like, well, Chris, how many of your clients are truly financially free? Were they don't worry about money? I said, well, they all worry about money. Even the retired doctor is still worried about running out of money or living too long. Okay, good job, Chris. Way to help nobody. How about this? How many of you guys as financial advisors are financially free? Not off the commissions you're earning, but actually doing these investments. And as I thought about it, and there's probably about 100 guys in my office. I said, well, there's guys been working here since the late 1970s. Maybe none. And he said, well, there's your problem. And so, you know, I was like, okay, well, give me something. Give me something, you know, to learn more. He's like, I don't believe you are. You're just going to argue with me that stocks are better. I'm like, no, I'm serious. You got me listening. Give me something. He's like, listen, if you're serious and I don't think you are at this guy, like the biggest best takeaway selling. I don't think he even knew it. You know, he just really was convinced I was not going to listen to him. And so he's like, if you're really going to do something, go get this book by Robert Kiyosaki called Who Took My Money, which is a lesser-known rich dad series book. Now, basically, if you want to save the three hours of audiobook, mutual funds suck. That's pretty much what he explains in three hours. And then he's like, and then go ahead and, and then, and listen to this radio show. This is pretty podcast, and you know, AM talk radio of these two real estate investors that were local here in Utah. And so I started listening to him every day, two hours every morning. I'm listening to these guys five days a week. And most of the time, they're not even talking about real estate, which ticked me off. But they were talking about financial principles, right? Like, we're the principles of wealth, you know, and the things you have to shift and change your mindset to make those investing, that investing work. And, and over the next couple of months, I realized, I can't do this anymore. Like, I can't make these two worlds work together, being a financial advisor, but then also what's actually creating wealth. These guys are financially free, and they're in their 20s and 30s. So, you know, obviously, the evidence is heavily in favor of real estate, not definitely not with the, with, you know, with the financial biasing and stuff. And so I left March of 2006. I said, I'm done. I'll never teach about money again. I'll just be a mortgage broker because everybody was a mortgage broker in 2006, kind of like 2021. And, and then I'll teach ballroom dancing on the side. But while I was doing that, of course, I wanted to know like, okay, what do these guys know? How do they invest? How do they do stuff? Cause I want to learn for myself. And so really, I started to learn more about real estate investing, you know, even how they did their little flipping type process. Even though it wasn't huge on doing flips, I was doing more like cash flowing or rentals. Cause I was the big shift, right? Like the impetus was meeting with my dad and then talking with my friend who got me to open up this whole other world was like the matrix, even though existed. You know, and then of course, switching my mindset away from this accumulation mindset, the financial advisor's teach to a cash flow where I call it acceleration mindset, which is it's all about the income. Cause that's the thing that got me excited. Because I'll tell you March of 2006, I quit going out to lunch with some friends that they're like, Hey, Chris, you bought them Mercedes yet? Oh, you know, I just kind of joked around. I'm like, how do you know? Like, I'm actually planning to sell my car in July. I'm after I knew it, the registration. I'm going to sell in July and get a Mercedes. And wipe that smug little smirk off that guy's face because I was so confident it was going to happen, even though he's like, well, how much money you making? Nothing. Like I haven't made any more money, but I can now see the light because before as I get a hundred thousand bucks, right? You're supposed to fall off three percent. If you're going to go with mutual funds, that's $3,000 a year, a hundred thousand bucks. But what if you got what paid one percent on a hundred grand? Now you're getting paid a thousand bucks a month. And also, I'm looking through my old clients and my, oh my gosh, this person could actually retire. They don't have to wait 20 or 30 more years. They could actually do it in the next year or two or so. And that's why I open up my whole world. And in fact, later that next year, that year in 2006, I was able to retire myself on this 29, creating those passive income streams. Here we're going to talk about what happens after 29 because it's a fun story. But it's very interesting. So I thought about this a lot. And this is actually what sort of pushed me on my entrepreneurial journey. And I'll give you some context why this sort of ties in and it resonates with me so much. So all of our parents, not all of our parents, a lot of our parents had pensions. And that's how they retired. And they had a defined benefit pensions. And there's also defined contribution pensions. But they like, for example, my dad, he's going to make 70% of his best years, of his five best years, I think, until the day that he dies. So say for easy math, a hundred grand a year, he makes 70 grand a year until the day that you die. Great. That doesn't exist for 99% of the jobs that are available anymore, especially not in private industry. Maybe if you were for the government. So growing up, I was looking at what he did. And I was like, okay, that's not going to happen. And then this actually pushed me into the mindset of I got to make a ton of money. Because if I retire, I have to have tens of millions or at least 10 million in the bank. If I want to retire at 65, I do have different views of the retirement now. If I want to retire at 65, never work again. I'm doing the math. I'm going to live through 100. Hopefully God willing. This is how much money I'm going to need every single year to maintain this lifestyle. And just you make a lot of money. Now I chose to go entrepreneurial. Now I invest in real estate as well. And I do a couple of other things. But I feel like what happened, not everybody had this sort of aha moment. And it radically shifted their career. What happened is people are now working nine to five kind of like their parents are emulating what their parents did in terms of like their work. And they make some money, but they're not getting a pension anymore. Maybe they're getting 401k contributions, but also if you're getting 401k contributions, the company is skimming some of that as well in fees. And you have really no understanding of what's actually happening with your money. And then financial managers sort of fill the gap in the market because they realize that people don't have pensions anymore. They still want to retire. They have no idea how to do it. And education teaches nothing about finance. So let's fill that void with whatever we tell these people. They're probably just going to listen because no one else is telling them any differently and they're scared about retirement and they're scared about money. So I don't think many people do it maliciously. I just think that even the financial advisors are ill-educated about the realities of what's going to happen when people try and retire in 40 years. And it's really scary. I don't know how many people are going to do it. Like you said, that example, the 3% on neutral funds, that's not retiring anybody. So what's going to end up happening is if you don't think into the future, if you don't think sort of forward-looking, you're going to be working till the day that you die. And that's really it. I don't see a way around it following the traditional non-pension, go work with a financial advisor path that I think a lot of people take. I think it's scary. I don't think it's a good spot that the majority of 9-5 W2 people, I don't think they're in a good spot right now because I don't think they know what they're doing. Yeah, totally agree, Scott. I mean, it's true. I mean, we think about like the way the financial limitations taught, you know, financial advisors for the vast majority of them really have good hearts. They really do want to help people just like I did, right? There's nothing against them for wanting to help people. The problem is, and this is what I realized myself, is I discovered that I was just a pawn in a larger game. Is that all the financial education that's taught out there, come from the financial institutions, they come from the fidelities and the marital inches, they come from the big banks like Wells Fargo, who have self-interest in letting you set it and forget it as they would say, right? You know, put your money in with them where they get paid guaranteed fees, right? If you think about it, like they're telling you to save everything, save it forever, you know, save as much as you can, as often as you can, and take out as little out as possible. Why? Because they make those fees on that money, right? That's the guaranteed commission they always earn a management fee. So when you have that involved, of course, they're going to tell you, put it in there, live on less than the interest, right? So that you don't write out of money. And, and on top of that, I mean, they're even telling you high risk creates high returns. Why? Because they want you to take all the risk so they can take as little as possible. Because real investors try to figure out how to take as little risks possible, as much calculated risk as possible, so they can maximize the returns while minimizing their losses. If a bank will really take high risks that say, let me throw in all my own money in the stock market, not your money, but my own money I'll put in the market. And I won't take fees unless you make money. That's the one thing I think it's kind of crooked in the industry is that they get paid with you make money or not. They're always getting paid. They're the ones that will always come out winning, even if you don't. And, and that's where the financial visors just kind of got roped in that system like I did. And, and some are waking up to that. Unfortunately, most of them, just like, I mean, I had that choice too. I either could put my blinders on and keep doing what I was doing. Or I kept my integrity intact and say, I'm out of the industry. I'm going to do something else. Didn't know exactly what, but I was going to try to do something. And, you know, you mentioned about pensions too. It's fascinating because I was teaching like a in my old neighborhood. I was teaching this retirement type course, right? This retirement investing course. And these people knew I had retired early twice by Thomas 39, which we'll talk about how, you know, two times and not a good thing. I mean, you screwed up the first time. But, but it's interesting because like they, they knew I retired before I was 40 the second time twice, you know. But there was a guy in the group that was like in the 70s also retired, even was in the financial industry for a little bit, selling like insurance and stuff. And they would always look to him because he's the old gray hair guide. I mean, I've got some gray hair. I'm almost 50. But still, you know, this guy was in it, he was about 70s. And so this is during 2022. So during the year 2020. So it was kind of fun too. And so anyways, they would look to him. And then the funny thing is when they would ask him details about his money situation, right? Especially when 2020 hit, you know, March when everything was tank in the market, they were starting to panic a little bit. They're like, whoa, what's happening to you? Because you've got money in the market. They're assuming all of his money is in the stock market in retirement accounts, just like them who are younger than him. And he said, yeah, I lost a lot of money in the market so far. But I mean, I really don't rely on that money at all because I get income streams from a pension. I also have a military pension that's coming in. So he had a pension from an old company, a military pension, and he was still getting paid from the stuff he sold as an insurance agent. So he's getting residuals off that. So his, the only thing he actually made pure money on is in business, like what you talk about, right? Like in business and doing that kind of active stuff, that's where all his money was come from, not from the investments. And he could tell like their, their heart's kind of sunk in that moment saying, oh, well, it doesn't even affect him at all when he has social security too, right? So really, he's getting paid left and right. He didn't even need the money in the market was just play money for him. That's not case for people anymore. As you said, right? Like it really is. So that people are 100% going in, relying that those 401Ks are iris going to save them and the harsh reality is it's not. Yeah, it's very scary. So, okay. So you went down the path of investing, and you figured it out, quote, unquote, you're going into real estate. So you say, so explain, you were going to real estate investing. You also were doing, you were a mortgage broker, so you were getting fees from that as well, but you were putting your money into real estate. And I'm assuming you put enough into real estate by the time you were 29, that it was, it was generating some quote, unquote, passive income obviously. So I have to manage to a degree or you can hire somebody, but you were making it now for your like, okay, I've kind of figured at the money game, I could always increase my lifestyle. But for now, if I, if I don't do anything else, this is good. That was sort of where you're out of 29. Yeah, I like it. So a few things were going on there. So yeah, I had my own property, my starter home. It's kind of like a burr for me, but I did more creative deal on that one, where I sold to an investor at full appraisal, stripped the equity out of it, went to invest the equity with other investors to make passman come by lending out my money. And then, and then I was also renting out like I was leasing back the property from the investor I sold it to and then sub leased it out to create rental income off of it. So I basically stripped the equity out, sub leased it, you know, when I leased it back from them. So I was renting from the owner, the new owner now, sub leasing out by renting it out, trying to make cash off that. And then of course, I had the other money outworked for me as well that was doing with lending and whatnot. And then, yeah, like mortgages was interesting because I had a friend that gave me an interesting idea because I never considered not doing mortgages in the sense of not being the mortgage broker. But I had a license, of course, and I was doing them, but I hated doing the paperwork. And my friend said, well, once you find a nerd that likes doing paperwork, I might wait, I could do that. He's like, yeah, to split the commissions. And it was, it was like a big epiphany because in scarcity, especially when I was a financial advisor, I try to be the every guy, like everybody, you know, the one-stop shop. So I try to be the guy that gave you, you know, mutual funds, insurances, mortgages, even like debt pay down plans, you know, things like that, right? Trying to be everything to everybody, which was okay, but it was kind of just vanilla, you know, in my, in my mind, looking back now, I was like, I was good, but it wasn't that good. But, but I realized like, and also, but when I was mortgage broker, because I was in a scarcity mindset, I thought, well, it's a win-lose game. So in order for other people to get a good deal for me to be a good person, I have to lose, right? Because either I make money and I screw people over, or I help them, and I just take it, you know, take it in the teeth, you know, which is great when you're married and have a family, because your spouse really appreciates you trying to minimize your value. And so I went to the guy, he was a, he was a very good, you know, I asked in the brokers, I said, who's a good guy that just likes to do paperwork? You know, who's your nerd, right? I said, oh, his name's Clark, which of course, of your name's Clark, you are a nerd. And so, 100% like Clark, he's as much as Clark can. And then we all know, right? But even he pretend to be a nerd. So anyways, I go to Clark and I say, Clark, listen, if I just send you people to do the mortgage, basically do all the work for me, will you pay me 50%? And he said, of course, the violent, the fine people, you're just spoon-feeding me, I'm like, yeah, like I'll teach him like how to strip equity out to go and invest in real estate and stuff. And then just send him on to you to do all the work. He's like, yeah, I'll do that. So I'd spend maybe a half hour or so with people to teach him like, hey, here's how you can actually get your mortars to pay you, right? By taking that money out and then making a higher rate of return in real estate. And then, and then like, cool, what do I do next? I'm like, talk to you with Clark, let him do the work. And then I get a check in the mail for like a month or two later for that, for that deal closing. And I'm like, well, that was easy. So I was getting a little bit of residual income from that plus I have the real estate income income coming in. And then that kind of help accelerate me getting there faster. Because pretty soon, I'm like, wait a minute. Now the active like work I was doing, you know, even I even was like doing like stock coaching on the side. All the stock coaching I was doing on the side was like pure gravy. I didn't even need it anymore because I was making four or five grand a month between my real estate and even a little bit on the residual from the mortgages. And so that's where, you know, that's where I realized like, wait a minute, I could legitimately quit working at this point, right? I can, it was almost like I could live the three to four hour work week by a couple of years before 10 Ferris wrote the book, you know. And it was kind of cool because like it was a big epiphany. I didn't think it would be that easy to have shoes of income coming in where I didn't have to work my tail off like it was as a financial advisor. How long do you think is a good timeline to set for somebody to achieve that kind of success? Because again, something didn't work out yet to redo it. But when people get into this game, expectations are also important. So when you get into investing, what is the time on you should give yourself? And I always look at it from the lens of set yourself up so that you aren't worried about paying your rent or your mortgage or putting food on the table in six months from now because you just quit your job and went all in on something. I'm a big fan of de-risking investing, de-risking entrepreneurship, de-risking, anything. So from your experience, because you did it and it could be a little bit different in 2024, you can speak on that. I don't know because I'm not as big into real estate as you are. But how much time should you give yourself? It really depends on where you're starting from. And that's one thing I try to tell people to, because your situation does matter. People think, oh, can I do it less than a year? Yeah, you could, but most don't. It usually takes longer than that, at least a few years if not five to 10 years or a little bit more. Because in my situation, I only need 3,500 bucks a month to live. At that time, I only had barely two little kids. I was living in a cheap house at the time and everything else. So it was a lot easier to hit that because my expense, my burn rate was so much lower. And it's different for everybody because I get dentists and guarantee they're going to want 30,000 a month or more to live on, right? Because their center to living is higher. It's a, you know, I'll give you an example. I had a woman that I was talking to that she has a lot of farmland of whatnot. Didn't have a lot of money to invest. But she did have a lot of equity. You know, she was technically a millionaire based on her land, right? And she's like, well, I just, you know, she was at my annual event, like mastermind with all my clients. She was the only non-client there. And she's like, there's people who got like millions of dollars are investing. And I don't have millions of dollars. And I'm like, yeah, but some of those people with millions of dollars also want to live on like tens of thousands a month before they could quote unquote retire. But you, you only need 5,000 a month. I said really with your situation, the land you had, if you were willing to sell off a little bit your land, take that and then either do like lend your money out to to real estate investors or whatever you might do syndications or whatever, right? Even if you made a temporary term, you could actually get there in the next year, where some of these guys might take a couple of years to get there, even with their millions or multiple hundreds of thousands, you know, because again, they have a higher expense, you know, to hit, you know, that to be able to pay their bills. So it really is case by case. So for her, and she finally like got the light, saw the light as she started working with us. And she realized, oh, okay, I can see that now. And yeah, I could actually be there very quickly next year or two. I could legitimately be financially independent. So it just depends on where you start from and really what, how much of expenses you have to replace to get to where you want to be. But I'll tell you like it's not hard. I mean, we're, you know, I had like one client, for example, he was in California. He did save his retirement plans. And this guy was like, the, he did this better than almost anybody ever seen. He actually pulled his money out of the market right before way to K. And again, right before 2008, right? He had pulled his money and it wasn't like he just predicted anything. He was like, I think I'm going to pull my money out now. So he just happened to time the market perfectly. And even after that, you know, he was the fourth, the fourth highest ranking general in the state of California in the national guard. So he's got all this stuff going on. He finally, he actually saved a million bucks. I mean, so it's funny how like Dave Ramsey tells you, save for 40 years, a hundred bucks a month, you'll be a millionaire. Bull crap. This guy timed the market perfectly, got a high rate of return than most people. And still by the age of 60, he was barely a millionaire. And of course, he goes to his financial advisor, he says, well, pull off three percent a year. He can live on 30,000 years. I live in California. There's nobody that can live on 30,000 year unless you're homeless, right? Or you live away on the east side where it's dirt cheap. And so he's like, no, I can't do that. And so that's where he went, found different podcasts like yours, mine and whatnot. And and then he's like, as we start working with him, it's like, well, what if we get that to even make a 10% a year? Well, now that's a hundred thousand dollars a year, you're making passively not being the active investor, right? So that's a big thing is like, how much money do you have to work with? That's liquid. Many people, if they love their money in 401Ks, they can't touch it, right? Until they either quit or change jobs or get fired or something like that just a few weeks. So I actually had a client that literally we've been banking on her at some point where like, we don't want her to get laid off, but obviously it'll help if she ever does change jobs. So I'm like, don't don't quit your job. Don't do anything to screw up your situation. Well, she just got laid off a couple months ago. And and now this quarter of millions free and available to use like, well, good. That quarter million can generate at least 2000 to 2500 a month for you that you didn't have before. We can take you from, she was roughly about 500 bucks a month with a rental that she had. This, but this can now take you over 3000, maybe 3500 a month more, you know, so it just depends on what you're starting with. And it's also about, I mean, like, yes, so you have to know your situation, you have to know your burn rate, you have to know your numbers. These are sort of the the homework you have to do before you do anything. But when you know those things, and you can take these calculated risks. Okay, but I do want to understand, um, why did you unretire? What happened when you were 29? And what were some of the lessons that you learned from not not being able to stay retired? Right. Yeah, the second time around. Well, so 2006, I get to that point. I'm like, well, now what, what am I going to do with my life is almost like, what do I want to be when I grow up, but I was almost 30, right? And, um, and I kind of played around with a few different ideas. I thought about creating a dinner and, you know, like a, like a starting up, like a dance studio. And I was actually about to close on, on that studio. And then some just told me don't do it. And this is like towards the end of 2006. Now, even when it's a go, I was even going to go buy this like old theater. Like, yeah, I'd watch the majestic. They had Jim Kerry in it. If you remember that movie, you know, I'd watch that movie. I'm like, I'm going to refurbish this old town theater. Like, it's like a main street, like type of theater. That was actually in like different TV shows and whatnot, right? They've filmed there. I was like, I'm going to take this theater, turn around. But then I looked at the renovation costs, everything. I'm like, now that's a money pit too. Like, why can't I find something? I was just going stir crazy, not having something to do. And, and so at the end of 2006, I had a, you know, I had a guy that was a friend of mine that approached me. He said, listen, there's a Southern guy. His name Garrett Gunnerson. I don't, some people might have heard of him. He wrote a book called Killing Sacred Cows. He's like, hey, there's this guy Gary Gunnerson. He's a partner of mine. I told him, I won't be a partner with him unless you come on with me. And so there's a handful of us all gathered together. And we said, you know what, let's teach people how to get out of the rat race, right? Like they have a legitimately do it. He's like, and all of you guys have basically done it in various forms, right? And so, so basically, like we're going to help save the world, you know, kind of like, you know, rich staff poor guy, but we actually teach you how to do it. And, and so anyways, so 2007, we opened up this new business. Now, I have these different streams of income, but after a few months, they're like, hey, you know, you got all these little different side hustles and, you know, things that you're earning money from, you really need to like just focus and go all in with our company. So even though we're all independent contractors and really like, you know, partners, we're throwing it all over our money to start up this business. They're like, yeah, you should really be all in, you know, even with your time, not just with your money. And so I'm like, okay, fine, I'm going to cut off my income streams. The stake number one, you know, if you're telling people how to get out of the rat race, don't cut off your income streams, right? That's kind of hypocritical. Two, there are markets, all the people we were talking to were real estate flippers. The people get hurt the worst and the first, I didn't mean to make that rhyme this time, but the previously got hurt the worst were flippers because when that bank started to restrict their money access flippers with ones that couldn't turn around and sell it to sellers as easily anymore, right? Especially when they used to do stated income loans and things like that. That was starting to go away. I even remember trying to cash out equity from my house because I bought a brand new house in 2006, you know, I bought a show home because I wanted to wow people. That was another mistake too is like, you know, my, my ego, I realized that more money money doesn't change you. Money actually just makes you more of you already are. If you have a delicate ego, right? If you feel like you're less than or whatever it might be, like you're just not worthy, you know, like what I did as I would try to buy the stuff, I bought the Mercedes, the shit, you know, I bought it in May, not in July, I bought it two months sooner, and then I bought the great house because I wanted to wow people. Now, did I make any money from that? Heck no. Like I had a few young kids that want to lick my rims of the car, you know, people came to my house that were wowed, but it didn't mean I made it any more money, right? It was just stuff. So I ran up my burn rate a little bit more obviously, you know, my burn rate was in fact, between my business and my personal, I found out my burn rate was about $20,000 a month now. Okay. So that's significantly more than three grand for sure, right? And on top of that, because things were getting a little bit tight, I was only making about six grand a month in the business. So now I'm finding myself in the whole 15,000 months. So I'm going to try to get a read cash out refi because I was just dumping all my extra cash in the house because I thought I'm a mortgage broker. If I ever need the equity, just cash back out because at that time, they were stated and come loans. They had cash out refi is up to 100%. I mean, it was ridiculous. I mean, they even had loans you could get over 100% value, right? I mean, it was just a wow, wow, wow. Yeah, that was a wild time. That was a little bit of crazy time. Yeah, well, that's where we had the negative amortization loans. You could literally pay less than interest only on the for pay option. I've never saw a couple of those. And, uh, and here's the crazy thing is like, of course, when things started to dry up, I go to get a recharge or refi. They're like, Oh, we'll boost your score up two more points and we'll do it next month. And I go in August of 2007. Oh, you know, we just changed the rules. Do X, Y, and Z. And then we'll give it to you in September. And then I get to September did everything they asked and they said, we're sorry, we don't do cash out refinances, especially if you have a business. And so all my equities trapped in there because that wasn't just me with happened to have everybody. I watched all the equities appear as the as the values can crash and down, especially because if you buy a, you know, higher than average priced home, those are going to be swing bigger, right? It's the lower price ones are a little bit safer. So anyways, long story short, I'm in the whole 15, 16,000 a month. Uh, I can't get access to my equity. I'm watching my equity disappear. My, my rentals now doing great. The renters not paying me on time and everything. And they even had government help coming in and things like that. And, and so long story short, like I find myself, like going for a millionaire to upside down millionaire where I'm over, I'm really in debt a million dollars, especially as I'm running up credit cards, depleted savings and everything. This is a stressful time. It was like, you know, it's kind of stressful. You know, friends stop calling me, but collectors never stop calling. They were awesome. They, they call me day and night, you know. And I mean, I remember the worst, the worst one that that burned in my memory was, was a guy calling about my Mercedes. Like, I, when I just saw the writing on the wall, I turned my Mercedes even before I was 30 days late. I just said, listen, I'm not going to make this payment anymore. Just take it back. Well, then they auctioned off for $30,000 less than it owed on it, which shocked me. I was like, holy cow. And they're like, well, now you've got to pay the $30,000. Like, really? This is not like a house. I can just four clothes on. And so they did. And of course, I get a collector call. It was about six or seven o'clock at night. It was, I was actually burning the midnight oil off the office trying to make money. I was stressing out. And I get this call. I answer it. And the guy says, yeah, like I'm here to collect a debt on this Mercedes, you know, it's $30,000. Can you pay it? I said, no. Obviously, that's why you're calling me now. That's why I couldn't pay it. Well, can you make monthly payments of $1100 a month? I said, do you understand that that was exactly what my payment was before I lost it? If I could make that payment, you wouldn't be talking to me right now. And then the guy just said, he's like, Chris, you're like, I mean, he probably didn't call me a Chris, but he just said, you know what, you're the reason why we're having problems in the economy right now. It's your fault. It's people just like you not paying their bills. And I was like, I was, I saw red at that point. Like, I don't usually yell that guy got personal real. Oh, it did. Yeah. And I was just like, are you kidding me? Like I just, I've hired people just like you who spent $100,000 hiring people and put money in the economy and doing everything else. You have the gumption to tell me that? Like, I'd like screw you hang up on, you know, and, you know, and that, but that tick now, and I think it ticked me off not just because it was kind of on call for, but because there was, there was a piece of it that I believed to be true, right? Because I felt like crap. You know, I, I mean, I was losing everything. You know, I hadn't lost my house yet. I did eventually four clothes in my home in 2009. And I didn't expect that to happen. I was trying to short sell the house. They wouldn't even let me short sell it because lo and behold, lean the brothers on my mortgage. And Liam brother, we've used your cell. You had zero luck. You had absolutely zero luck in this time. Yeah, at all. Yeah, it's like, it's like the perfect storm, but in the George Clooney movie way, where like everybody dies. Are you spoiler alert? It was like that. It was like, it was like, nothing could go right. I mean, even my wife at that time, like she was talking about moving in with her sister and like maybe going to help me till I give me some time to figure my crap out. I mean, culture calls are calling left, you know, day and night. I'd like to say that. I mean, I was feeling like a hypocrite because I was teaching people to get out of the rap race been on back in. So I stopped teaching people how to get out of the rap race. I actually started pivoting in my business to teach different stuff. I started teaching people how to get resourceful because that's what I was doing is finding money. I wouldn't tell them I was broke. I wouldn't tell them I was in a worse financial situation than they were. But lo and we're telling me in the recession, they're like, Chris, I would like to pay you to learn the things you've learned. I just don't have the money. Like it's tight right now in the economy. And in my mind, I'm thinking, well, you're better off financially than I am. So I instead, I would tell them, well, if I can help you find the money, will you pay me? They said, yeah, I'll do that. Like great. Here's what you need to do. And I tell them like different things like, here's ways to free up money, especially with their business owners. Like here's ways you can free up on taxes or creative ways of pay off debt. That's outside of like the Dave Ramsey method and things like that that worked for me as I was trying to pay off my debt and get out of that hole. And next thing you know, after about a year or so of doing that, it caught fire. And we got it with the right people. End of 2009, we started getting with the tire preachers and dentists and our company went from almost bankrupt in 2009 to like exploding in 2010, you know, and which helped me, of course, earn more income to help pay off more debts, you know, and that kind of thing. I just want to take a second to thank the Housebot podcast network for supporting today's episode. Now, if you like success story, you're going to love other shows and the network. One of my favorites is the hustle daily show hosted by Juliet Bennett Ryla, Rob Literist, Ben Berkeley, and Mark Dent. It's brought to you by the Housebot podcast network, which is really the audio destination for business professionals. Now, the hustle daily show brings you a healthy dose of this a reverent offbeat and formative takes on business and tech. I was just listening to an episode to give you an example of what they talk about. So they broke down how this hundred year old organization has created one of the most successful business models in the world. Not only does this organization teach young entrepreneurship, they generate over a billion dollars in annual cookie sales. And what I really love about the show is they take these stories and these businesses that we think we know. And then they reveal these surprising angles that we never consider. So I really think that you should go listen to the hustle daily show wherever you get your podcast. It's one of my favorites. You're not going to regret it. No, of course. And then this is this is sort of the first version of like present day what you what you teach now. This is like that rebound out of the out of the recession. Now, you can make the argument that if the recession never happened, the strategies you were deploying in your life and what you were teaching our sound and some of them like still are like investing real estate is not a bad idea. You could so you could still create passive income out of that. But forget pretend the recession. Pretend we would hit another recession, which can always happen. What are some ideas that you teach now that are recession proof that you wish you had done before the first recession before the 2008 2009 financial crisis so that you could have survived regardless of what happens with the economy, the market, the banks, anything. Yeah. Well, that's where you kind of kind of heard the endertones of it in that story, right? I remember in 2020 when we thought, okay, this is it. This is the this is the actual black swan event that's going to create the recession that we were already expecting in 2019 because we were predicting 2020 would be the year of real estate would actually get hit and possibly depreciate. And then it didn't because they serve print money like Willy Wonka Chocobars, right? And uh, yeah, but that's not, but that's not good for the future, right? No, like that's, you know, this makes the bubble bigger that, you know, it's like blowing up that bubble, you like, get this nice little bubble gun bubble and you're like, oh, that's big. Let's just keep going and it's all of your hair and stuff, right? That's yeah. That's kind of what I'm expecting too. And so in 2020, it's the same advice I even get people today, which is these three things is Git Lean, Git Liquid and Git Out. So Git Lean means, you know, make sure that you're tracking your money, right? Track, if you're a business owner, it's even in real estate or wherever it might be, track your money or business, using QuickBooks or whatever you might use. Zero is another one like XERO is another one that's like QuickBooks you can use too. In the personal life, make sure you track in your personal home as well. Uh, track things, you know, you can use like rocket money or a monarch money or good tools you can use to track your money. Um, but start really watching what's coming in, what's going out? Don't just watch your spending. I mean, that's important too. But watch what's coming in and going out, know the full flow of your money, how much positive or negative cash flow are you? And, and understand that on a very, on a very solid level. Don't just do it once a month or at tax time once a year, you know, do it like, I would say, if not weekly, at least every other week, you know, really start to understand your money and where it's going. Don't even worry about creating budgets. If you've never done this before, track your money for like at least six, twelve months, then you'll have enough evidence and enough data to figure out how to actually create budgets at whatnot, which by the way, I hate the word budget, I like spending planned because let's be honest, that's really what it is. Um, so that's a big one. So get lean and get rid of the expenses that just don't serve you, right? Things that, you know, it could be a subscription. That's not serving you very well. Maybe it's like, you know, maybe it's like, you're just going out to eat one to many times or probably more like 10 to many times, if anything, right? Or whatever it might be, like just try to find ways to, to be a wise steward of your money. Um, then get liquid that, see, that's the problem. I, so first I did, I was a track of my money, you know, in 2007, I was, because money was so abundant, it was like air, but also like air, when it disappears, you count every breath, don't you? And the same thing with money, I didn't start counting my money until it was already too late. I was, I was already, I was reactive, not pro pro active. And so track your money for one, two is get liquid. Get liquid means make sure you have liquid reserves in business. Man, you gotta, you better make sure you have at least a few months of, of, of expenses for your business. Now, if you're a real estate investor, like, like, I was talking on Steve Triang's show recently, we're talking about this. If you've got like marketing strategies that could take nine months to finally deliver results, then you might want to have nine months of reserves or more, just in case, because if it's going to take a while for that to kick in to start producing some income, you, you don't be left high and dry, because then I'm one failure in business is not because people just suck a business. It's usually because they lack the capital. They've usually haven't planned appropriately to have enough reserves. So have good cash reserve in your business, have reserves of home. I found as a business owner, I recommend at least 12 months is pretty of your monthly expenses. So if you already know your expenses are, say, it's 10,000 a month, you probably want to have about $120,000 you don't touch. In my own life, I have 400 grand that I keep between, you know, typical bank savings, high yield savings, and then life insurance that I keep, you know, most lines share there just so I can diversify my money a little bit. But make sure you have those reserves. And don't tie your money up in those IRAs and forewing case and whatnot. I mean, I know that's counter to what everybody else wants to teach you, and even in the real estate space, how some people say, oh, no, it's good to get the solo forewing case or get the, you know, the self-directed IRAs. And if you already have them, that's one thing. But if you're trying to put new money into these plans and you're thinking, oh, yeah, I don't want to, I don't want financial freedom before I'm 60. No, screw that. Like I want to make sure I'm at least 60 years old before I have any kind of freedom. Well, then good, keep putting money in those plans. We want freedom before you're 60, because you don't have to deal with 59 and a half penalties and things like that. Well, then get your money liquid. You know, have it outside of that. And then that's where I will say that then get it out. And especially if you're an active real estate investor, one of the biggest mistakes I've seen, and I'm in several mastermind groups where I mean, there's like high level investors, you would never think we'd go out of business and are today one because they didn't have enough cash reserves, but two, because they were all in on their business. And so Mike McCallowicz, that's another great book. If you ever read Profit at first, great book to read and then implementing that system into your business and make sure you actually have Profit, if you're always reinvesting all of your money back in your business, the thing is you're not profitable, right? You're spending money, you know, and I'm all about growing a business and making it bigger and bigger, but not if it means that you stuff to keep working as a slave in that business forever. I like to be work optional, right? I work because I want to not because I have to because I've been able to retire twice and I just can't do it because I get bored, right? I just I have to have purpose. I can't just sit around my beach or go golfing because I don't golf. That's big reason. You know, sorry, I know you're a Miami. I know they've got great golfing out there too in that direction, but you're not defending me. Listen, I grew up in Toronto. So golf was the necessary side effect of playing hockey in the winter. That's all we could do. But outside of that, I'm not a big golfer. Yeah, I'm just not lying. It's indoors in that, you know. Yeah, listen, after moving down, I'm still acclimating to everybody loving football and basketball over hockey. So that's fine. I'm getting used to it eventually. But yeah, no, I also don't think that people completely should completely retire, but that's besides the point. The point is do you have the option to retire? Do you have the option to work if you want to? You're your family safer, especially if you have other students who haven't come outside of that business. So when you have that extra profit, take that and invest in things that do generate passive income for you. And that's a kind of a debated word about passive because is anything truly passive? Not necessarily, because you still have to manage it. You still have to be a steward of your money. But it's nice for me. Like I like to be able to, well, here's an example. Like several guys in this high level wholesaling flipper group that I was in the match mine with. You know, I don't want to say their names out, you know, out here, but they're great. A great group. But in that group, there's a lot of guys that were like all in on wholesaling. They're doing great. And I kept saying for years. And I wasn't the only one, even the leadership was saying the same thing is take the chips off the table. And, you know, even if you got great deals, maybe keep them for yourself instead of flipping that property. Maybe you keep it and you rent it out, you know, or whatever it might be. Like, get additional streams of income. And there was one guy in particular, he was out in in Pennsylvania. And he was even like, dude, how do you have so much passive income? He's like, I would love to have like 10,000, 20,000 a month. I was like, well, dude, just even if you're an active investor, cherry pick. Now, cherry pick some of your best deals. Keep them. Don't, don't flip them all. Like, yeah, it looks good on the on the ego numbers, you know, for revenue and such. But keep, maybe keep those properties and cash flow and dude, when 2020, especially going to 2022 and 2023 hit, which was even worse than 2020 for us, right? I mean, 2020, 2020, 2023 hit. He was one of those guys left standing because he finally decided to take some of the chips off table, cherry pick and keep some of his properties. His rentals literally saved his whole sailing business. If they were for that, he would be out of business today. But because he didn't have to keep taking our family, because he knew he can maneuver and pivot and do certain things, he was okay. And even had some of the business owning some of those rentals too, so that the cash was still coming in even if wholesaling had dried up. And so that's where it's very, I think that's, that's the big thing I learned. That's why the second time around in 2016, when I was financially independent again, you know, and I don't do active stuff. I'm not the type of person to go and wholesale or flip is really anymore. Like, I let other people do it. Now I just use my capital to go out and work for me and let those guys do all the work, right? Because they're younger and full of life energy. I think that it's, so this is something that I see with entrepreneurs as well. They, they build a business to the point where then they make a ton of money with an exit or an acquisition. And then they just start investing. Then I'm a big fan of invest along the way and take money off the table a little bit earlier. So you again, it's the same concept, right? You come from a real estate world where it's all active, active, active, I come from a background in tech where it's all active building and raising the next round. And whenever you have the opportunity, start to learn how to invest because a good entrepreneur or a good active, uh, somebody's actively participating in real estate wholesale flipping, it doesn't mean you're a good investor. So you have to learn, you have to practice. It's not something they teach you in school. And I think that if you wait until you have this huge windfall, this huge amount of money and that's when you start, that's when you can make some super costly mistakes as opposed to if you're just playing with, you know, a couple 10, 10,000, couple tens of thousands as opposed to doing really large investments before you've ever really had experience doing it. And what I see how often is people who become good at making money and they make a lot of it, they think that they're going to be good at investing. And then the mistakes they make are in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, which is horrible. I mean, they can probably afford it, but that's not the point. Those mistakes could be made completely, uh, those mistakes never had to happen. If you just start acclimating yourself and and and learning how to invest at a very small level and something that can generate income all you sleep, um, make early money and money and growing wealth are two very different skill sets. Very much so. And for some reason, they get conflated as just one, one idea, and which is incorrect. When you put your money and you park your money into something, there's another point or an idea that we have to discuss, which is say it is something passive, is there ever a point when you should pull it out? So for example, you sort of saw some signals that the market wasn't going in the right direction. You mentioned that guy, the the general at a California that just by chance took his money out of the market at two very specific points. And he had great returns. So it can be invested for the long haul for a period of time. Are there signals that you should maybe liquidate and take some of those, uh, sort of longer term investments and just maybe hold that cash that you've seen? There are. Um, the thing I often teach our clients is is I tell them not to ignore the news, at least from the standpoint of taking any advice, but listen to what people are saying, not just the news, but even like what might be like the person that barely graduated high school that you went to school with, right? Or even the person that's like on the street or you're Uber driver for that matter. I mean, if they start talking about a certain investment as being like the best investment right now, that is probably investment to start selling. I have for example, um, I remember, you know, there's been ups and downs in Bitcoin, right? Now I'm not a big fan of like Bitcoin as a wealth building strategy. I think it's kind of a fun thing to play with, you know, great gamble with money, but don't be, but don't be mad if you lose it all, right? That's kind of I say, like don't invest more than you're willing to lose when it comes to things like Bitcoin. Same thing with stock investing and whatnot. Well, I remember, uh, this is in 2018. It was in December. It was starting to hit a high of like 20,000 everybody's talking about Bitcoin. And I said, you know what? I predict it's going to crash and it did a crash because why every time I Bitcoin, um, and then it started to sort of rear back up again, you know, towards like 65,000 remember that like in in 2022, right? The spring of 2022. And I actually bought it when I crashed down whenever he was scared of Bitcoin, that's when I bought Bitcoin. It's kind of like that Warren Buffett thing. Like, you know, whenever things, whenever he's greedy, be fearful, whenever he's fearful, be greedy, right? So I always do the opposite wherever the crowds running away from or running towards I run the opposite direction. Well, same thing happened again. So I bought like a 6,000 Bitcoin. Now it's going up towards 65. And then everybody starts to say how to buy Bitcoin. I even remember on Facebook, I had friends that barely graduated high school saying, how do I buy a Bitcoin? And where do you, I mean, where do you buy it? Do you get it from a store? Like I was like, oh my gosh, this is the time when dumb money's in right now. This is it. This time to get out. So I sold right around 50,000. And of course, I came crash down like 16,000, right? And and that's and that's the thing. Like now real estate isn't much different. Even real estate tends to be a little bit more stable. And that's why I liked store most of my wealth in real estate backed investments. But same thing can happen, right? If everybody's saying everybody buy real estate, which I haven't seen that day really happen, I've I've always heard people be scared of real estate ever since 2008, right? Like it really everybody's like, oh, I don't know, real estate's going to come crashing any minute. But you don't really hear that about the stock market. Summer just keeps going up up in a way more than it ever has in history for these last 15 years. Now going on 16 years. And yet people are still like, oh, yeah, that's where you put your money. That's where you go. Yeah, put in stocks. It's great. Put in the S&P 500 index. You know, don't even pay the extra fees, right? They all say the same thing. That's when you know something is overvalued. So now whenever it's fearful, like right now people would be fearful of buying apartment buildings. Like it's finally got to the point where people now been burned so badly in last two years, this might be a good time to start looking at apartments again because the value has to come down. Self storage, not so much. Self storage is still a little bit overpriced. Nobody's really said self storage is a bad deal, right? So when people tell you it's a bad investment that's usually when it's good, when they tell you it's a good investment, that's usually when it's bad, at least for the timing. Just one one thought when you just tying back to that first that sort of that first period in your life where you lost everything you were in tons of debt. After this question, I want to keep moving to sort of some of the stuff that you work on right now. But why would you not declare bankruptcy at that point? Is that a useful tool for people? Because I don't think people really understand that that tool very well and you chose I'm assuming not to. Yeah, I'll tell you, it would have been easier on me if I filed for bankruptcy in some ways, right? Having to hit the reset button going to zero would have been way easier than trying to negotiate with creditors, trying to you know, negotiate like, you know, paying the debts for less. Like, for example, that Mercedes, eventually I was going to negotiate down to about 7,000 bucks and then pay it off and full once I had the cash to do it. But I mean, it was like a year or two of them trying to collect a debt and then then getting desperate saying, okay, we're about to lose this. What will you offer? Mike, offer, you know, 20% and they took it. I'm like, yes, God, you know, you know, so I did a lot of that kind of stuff. But, you know, hit the reset button can be good. Now, the thing is I think bankruptcy has kind of an emotional and a spiritual component to it as well, because I knew a lot of people that did go bankrupt during that time. And for them, some of them never emotionally recovered. Like, they never, they almost like lost their mojo after they filed for bankruptcy, right? Now, I could have lost my mojo, you know, doing what I did. I hacked Dave Ramsey. I mean, that's his whole story is about how he went bankrupt doing this high, high risk flipping strategy he was doing in real estate. I mean, he was taking, he was gambling big time on market conditions. And then for him to come out of that say, debt's always evil, right? I mean, that's a trauma response is what that is. And that's why he doesn't teach according to principle. He teaches according to his emotions. Where me, I came out of it. Yeah, I had some trauma, but I learned about debt. It was that that's not evil. It could be good or bad. Either it's your it's master or you're at slave and you have to be a wise steward and know how to use that money appropriately in the right places and at the right times. So for me, I came out of it like, Hey, be careful with debt. You know, be responsible with it versus just, Hey, you know, the sky's limit. Let's just get as much debt as I can, which was what I was kind of thinking back then. So there's there's definitely different things that come out of it. But I think bankruptcy can work in some situations. I am glad in hindsight, I didn't, even though my credit score was way worse because of it because ironically, your credit score is better after bankruptcy than it is after just going late and just trying to pay collections and judgments over years. My credit score, actually, I saw the like the little history like, you know, 2010, your credit score is a 510. I mean, that's almost like an STT score for getting your name right, you know. But you know, I eventually got it back up, you know, now to where it's, you know, like 830s in that kind of thing. So it can come back, but it just was a longer, harder road. But there's a part of me that I think part of me, the reason I didn't do it personally is because whether it's consciously or subconsciously, or just that deep impression, that spiritual impression was listen, like, this is going to be part of your story. You know, if you can dig out of this hole, you know, this million dollar plus that hole you have. And you can even come back and become financially dependent a second time. Man, wouldn't that be an awesome story? You know, and I was even thinking that in 2008, 2009, you know, it took me all the way till December of 2016 to get there, right? So I think that's for me, I'm glad it didn't, you know, that it would, it would been for me emotionally, maybe it would have been harder if I had filed for bankruptcy, but I'm definitely not opposed to it in the right situation if you've tried everything possible and you just can't dig out. What changed, I mean, we sort of touched on this, but if there's any other big changes in how you invest after that first period and that has really benefited you, like some major fundamental shifts in how you think through investment. I mean, definitely cash flow, cash flow, cash flow, right? I mean, like, just like I mentioned, that rental property. I mean, that that rental property would get horrible renters. I realized that was a bad property manager. So if I do buy properties, I generally don't want to property manage them because I know I'm a pushover. So I love getting property managers. Yeah, it costs me money, but I get that time freedom. I get that really that mindset freedom too by not being the one responsible. The hardest thing is, of course, getting a good property manager, but if you find a good one, hold on to them, use them as much as you can, right? They're great. And so I've actually, that's why I became more of a passive investor versus an active one is that I realized that for me, I just didn't enjoy it. You know, I think anything you do in investing, it should be something you really enjoy. So if you're an active, say you're an active investor, right? Maybe you're an active real estate investor. Great. If you love it, it's like you love the hunt that it gives you life. Keep doing it. Don't stop doing it. You don't have to do it 24 seven, but definitely, you know, keep doing what you love. The other thing too is also when I invest, I like to go for what some people, well, some people think it's risky. If they've only known mutual funds, I love people that say, oh, that seems risky doing real estate. Mike, you do mutual funds. You have zero control over your life. And you think that's just because, you know, just because two billion people in the world do it, doesn't mean you should too. You know, it doesn't mean that's a safe thing or a good idea, right? There's a lot of people that eat crap and think it's a good idea. You know, they think they're eating healthy and they're not. So same thing with money too. And so for me, like I like to make sure I lower my risk, you know, so even when I invest, like if I'm going to lend my money, being first position, make sure that I'm the first person that gets paid back. I've also learned that even being an equity investor is always good. Like, you know, when people pull their money together to go buy an apartment building or, you know, or something like that, that's not always a good thing. You know, being an equity investor, you get paid after whoever holds the debt, you know, and I think one of the biggest problems of that in the society is that you've taught that ownership is a good thing. Now, I'm not opposed to it. I still like to have ownership and control, but again, it comes back to that control. If I'm investing with somebody else, I could be an equity investor, but think about it. You have a mortgage on your house. If you have a mortgage on your house, you sell your home, who gets paid first? It's not you. It's a mortgage company. Debt gets paid first, then equity gets paid second. So to be an equity owner isn't always the safest way. Sometimes being a debt owner or control that debt, especially if you're in that top position, you know, to get paid back first can be a safe way to do your money. And so, I've been doing a lot more debt investing lending and things like that because it's paying better than rentals are right now, especially. I'm doing raw land. You know, I've had some really good success with that. Again, I'm not the one doing it actively. I got partners that know how to buy and sell and flip raw land and do all that stuff. And I just, I finance it. I finance it all, you know. So those are big lessons for me. How do you find, I mean, so that's a great, that's a great conversation to you about the fact that you don't have to be actively doing it yourself. But now you're, you know, you're an experienced investor. How do you find the right partners to do these kinds of deals? Because I wouldn't know the first thing about doing a raw land deal. And I was actually going to ask you about that. But the secret sauce is finding somebody who can do it, which is can't be sometimes just as hard as doing the thing yourself because there's a mind field of people out there promising this that and the other. So how do you vet? Oh, still we can take this in both directions. Originally, I wanted to ask you how do you vet and understand and do due diligence on some of these opportunities. But then secondly, how do you vet, understand the due due diligence on the people that are doing the opportunities? Because I think that that's also a, I think that can also be an interesting way to invest. Whether they're not it's a, a rate or some sort of fund or a raw land deal trusting people. It's probably one of the harder things to do when you're figuring out where to put your money places, right? So how do you do it so that you don't get screwed over? Absolutely. I mean, there's, there's two different types of people. There are the actors, you know, the people that are just, you know, just trying to screw you over. And then there's the people that maybe get lazy, you know, on their rules. They're just bad operators, right? They're good people. They just didn't make good business decisions. And there, there really is nothing that's zero risk. Anybody who tells you otherwise, just selling you something, right? I mean, there's always risk, even in real estate, even though you have a, an actual asset there, anything, you know, anything can happen, you know? And so when it comes to that, you know, that network of knowing who to invest with, because who is definitely more important? Like, you bet on the jockey enough of horse. I think you bet on both, obviously. But the jockey definitely has got to be there. And, and you can either one, do it yourself like I did over the years, build that network or two, you borrow somebody else's network, right? That's what a lot of our clients do with us. They say, well, you know, it's not, I know it's not recommendations, Chris, but who are you using, right? Or who do you use for this or that? And so I have a my own network that does that. For my own network, I realize that birds with feather flock together. That's a big thing. So mastermind groups have been very helpful for me. People that share a lot of the same values. I'll tell you, like there's, and not even a mastermind group. So there's people that have offerings that would love me to promote them to my people. But I just get this weird feeling off of my, I personally, I just have a pretty good intuition. It's not 100%. I can always be duped like the next guy. But usually I have a pretty good feel for people. And I know there's one guy that's switching from real estate to oil and gas. And I've just never had a good feeling about it. Plus it's, I don't like when people switch from one kind of investing to another. And then they say, hey, just give me all your money. I'm not really experiencing this field, but give me all your money, right? I had another friend that did that same thing that, you know, I'd sent several clients to and he, he always had his own quote, quote, vanilla deals, you know, like he would do that. We're like multifamily in Alabama. And that was like his thing. But then all of a sudden, you know, getting into 2021, 2022, he couldn't really find good deals in Alabama anymore. He started venturing out, you know, many is like looking at like coffee farms and he's looking at things like hotel conversions and Phoenix, Arizona, which I'm like, dude, Phoenix, I wouldn't even touch that. It's too hot. You know, just like Tampa was, right? You know, you know, you're there. But I mean, like all those things like once they got so hot, I'm like, I wouldn't want to touch that. It's just two dang hot. And, and of course, you win on all those, those markets with these chocolate deals instead of his plain old vanilla. And the next thing you know, like he's losing money left and right. And not just his money, but investors money left and right. And he's still doing stuff now. I hear like he's going into private equity. It's like, oh my gosh. Now, yeah, it's not enough to pivot into something you didn't understand. They're pivoting into something else you don't understand. Like, what if he just froze operations, you know, and actually have a friend that's, you know, in contrast to this, I have a friend that has done multifamily in the southeast and lives out actually near Tampa. And he's like, I haven't seen the good deal in a year and a half for two years. He's like, so I'm just not going to do it. If it doesn't fit my buy box, I'm not going to do it. That guy, I trust much more. Now, he's got more gray hair too, right? That helps. I do like him. People have experienced some full market cycles. So that usually means about pre 2011 pre 2010. If they've had that experience, that gives you a little bit more certainty. Doesn't mean it's guaranteed, but they've they've had a maneuver more. They've had more experience to know how to make things work. And they've might have even been kicked in the teeth with some bad deals that then now they've more experienced on the back end, just like I got kicked in the teeth financially, right? Same thing for them. So I look for that. I actually look for, have they had bad deals? Have they had experience? Do they just focus on one area, one kind of investing versus trying to branch out to something new, you know? Yeah, I stay away from things like a lot of people ask me over the last several years about ATM funds. And then I've had people come back saying, yeah, you told you warn me about that. And now I found out it was a Ponzi scheme, right? You know, or you know, certain types of oil investments and whatnot. Like I actually have money in, you know, like mineral rights and oil investments and whatnot. But again, I found somebody who's got like 35 years of experience in that field versus someone who's just trying to show up recently, you know? Shows up overnight with the new opportunity, which is always a red line. Regardless of their great marketer and they sound amazing. Like I cut through the BS there and then it's like, well, who are they? Like, are they actually sound? And that kind of comes to the other point, too, is are they financially sound? That's the harder part to see because you can't always find their numbers. But going beyond just the performance that they send you, right? It's saying, here's what it's going to do. I don't care what the performer says because they all look great. They all look the same. They almost look like they took the page out of the same books and just copy to put their name on that pasted it, right? Oh, wait, I've actually done everything. It's not really done the right. So I don't want that. Like I want, you know, I want to know like, hey, do they have good cash reserves? Do they have their own money, invest in the deals, too? Because like there's one guy, you know, he's been doing, you know, in the more of the private lending, private lending space, he has a huge fund now, right? That does lending and in real estate, a little bit in business and whatnot. But with his fund, he's like, yeah, I've got $700,000 of my mom's money in this fund. It's like, well, okay. Now he could still lose it and try to pay her back, right? But, you know, he's got his own money in there, too. He's always putting his own money into that fund as well to let him know that you're kind of yoked together. So if you go down, they go down versus those that just say, I'm charging nice little management fee of this deal. Even if it goes under, I don't have a money to lose. I just got my management fee because I'm doing the work, right? And they make money regardless of the, oh, exactly. That's like a financial advisor, right? I want to take a second and thank Range Rover Sport for supporting today's episode. Now let's talk about tools that match your ambition, that match the ambition of everybody who's listening today, who has taken risks, who has upleveled their personal professional development, who has tried to build their own thing. Everybody listening gets it. There is a moment when the thing you're trying to build, the challenge that you're taking on, it finally starts to take off. There is like this rush of excitement and possibility and that feeling, that feeling that you get when you get behind of the wheel of a Range Rover Sport because we've all had that perfect drive when the road, the car, and you, you're all in perfect harmony. But that's not just by chance. The Range Rover Sport is designed to make every drive feel that way and the Range Rover Sport is not just from pressing others, it's how you feel behind the wheel. It's how you feel when things are going the way they're supposed to go. Whether or not, you're navigating city streets, you're exploring back roads, the Range Rover Sport combines refinement with a sense of adventure. It matches your own versatile lifestyle with features like adaptive off-road cruise control. You can tackle challenging terrain with confidence. The dynamic air suspension always makes sure you get a smooth ride. It responds to road conditions for optimal performance. So from daily commutes to weekend getaways, the Range Rover Sport is ready for whatever you have planned. It's more than just a vehicle. It is a companion for all of your journey. So if you're ready to elevate your driving experience, visit Land Rover USA.com and configure your Range Rover Sport today. So our incentives aligned. Is there history? Is there track record? All the things that we should look for, but we get we over looked because of great marketing. That's not that's not good. I was going to ask. So now you focus on in terms of what you do personally. Massive, diversified portfolio. How do you help people now? Because you are not investment advising and we can talk about, I think we can do like an entire episode on infinite banking and all of that as well because the whole other can't or is it good on that rabbit hole. But when people come to you right now, how do you help them? But also what problems is the average person having with money, finance? What's the thing they're trying to solve? Yeah, the vast majority of people that are coming to us are just saying, listen, I want to do what you talk about Chris, which is become more optional. How do I get the point where I work because I want to? Not because I have to. And I feel like I've been saving. I tell you, we get a lot of the Dave Ramsey poster children, those that like save and save, they've been paid off their dead, maybe even paid off their mortgage. They're totally debt free and they're saying, wait a minute, I've got a couple million dollar net worth, but I have zero income coming in from it. How is that going to help me? And some people see the writing on the wall before it happens, fortunately, right? So they're usually coming to me and funny enough, they're not all business owners. Some of them are actually like, you mentioned IT, like I'll tell you, I don't know why we get a lot of IT guys that hire us too. Like they're just in the tech industry, they're looking for something different, you know, they're researching a lot and they want an alternative path, right? And that's what really what we do is that we kind of that's why I'm known as like the anti-financial advisor because people are like, what do we call you, Chris? Like you're not a financial advisor, obviously, what are you guys like? It's almost like you're an anti-financial advisor. I was like, who I like that? Let's keep it. And I like that too. Is it true? I like that. We're trying to like undo all that training and brainwashing you've had over the years to say, let's see if we can get this money out, you know, get a liquid for you and get it out to invest. And so we're really just strategists and connectors. We're not investment advisors, like we don't ever try to give investment recommendations or anything like that. But we do help them strategize to figure out what money could they be using? Where are some of the best places they could place it? And of course, you know, if people want to use their connections, they can use that, they can go do their own investing. You know, we've got those kind of options too. So we give you an example. Like sometimes people will say, hey, I've got like, I've got like money sitting in savings, this sitting there doing nothing, losing to inflation. I've also got money and there's an old 401k or his IRA. I'm not sure what to do with it, right? Well, we can kind of say, well, based on this, did you know you could self-direct that IRA? You know, you could self-direct it and actually invest it almost anywhere you want. But don't put in these kind of investments if you don't want to lose the tax advantages because you might want to use your liquid cash for this because, like, you do buy a rental, for example, you get the tax benefits. But if you buy a rental using your IRA and it's got a mortgage on it, well, guess what? You have a possibility of getting taxed again because you got you bit tax and things like that that you may not expect. So instead, let's take your IRA money. Maybe we invest in places that have no tax benefits like lending or into certain types of funds wherever it might be back in building, grow your money. Well, if you're also focused on cash flow, how do you do that? Because some people are like, I don't even care about the cash flow. I just want to grow my wealth and then maybe eventually I have cash flow. Cool. Well, then we might look at these strategies instead where, yeah, you don't get paid great cash flow upfront, but there could be a bigger back end payoff down the road in like five years or so. So it's really this very strategic, very one-on-one customized to help them create that game plan and even help them implement it and figure out what to do to really get their self-to-app place where they work because they want to, not because they have to. Well, it's also because you aren't tied to a certain set of products. That is like, I think that incentives matter and I think that people don't realize that if you go to a financial advisor at a bank, like they get compensated and they are told, these are the products you sell and this is what we do and this is all we do and they're not going to give you conflicting advice. They're not going to get themselves fired. They're not going to sell you products. They don't make them money. Like incentives really do matter. So when you have somebody that's not tied to anything, you can sit down and be like, hey, these are 2000 options. Let's figure out which one works for you actually because it doesn't really matter to me at the end of the day as long as it serves you versus the traditional financial advisor model. True. There's a lot of fee-based planners that claim to do the same thing but the problem is that still when they get their training, it comes from financial institutions. Even if they're independently brokered, they're still getting all the same training, the brainwashing, which is why I kind of refused to want to ever go to those things. You know, I never want to go to those trainings that are put on by fidelity is like really trying to teach you. Here's how you actually sell for us, even though they don't say it that way. They're like, here's how to make a suitable product for your client. Then they show you all the different options that they can offer as suitable options, which is only what they offer. But they'll never say, hey, here's a great real estate option that could actually get you financially free faster and probably safer than this market option. In what you say to reminds me of another thing because there's other people out there that have, since I have matchmind groups, I have some people that are like, oh, well, I don't do one-on-one coaching, but we have the matchmind group and we get a whole network of people we can invest with. The problem is those a lot of times, even though people might pay to be in the mastermind, there's also they're getting paid on the back end from those operators, those investment operators, right? So they're getting money from the client, the person that wants to get the connections, but then they're also getting paid on the back end. I don't even know if guys that are financial advisors or investment advisors, they're doing the same thing, and they'll promote a particular investment because they get paid on the back end. And that's one thing that I decided early on, no, I don't want to get paid based on somebody investing in a certain place, right? Because now, how do you know my intentions aren't being biased towards that? And what if that's the deal, the very deal that you lose money in? And I know from a liability standpoint because I've watched it happen in the previous recession, is that if you're promoting something because you get paid a commission on that or a finder's fee or wherever they want to call it, right? But then you lose your money in that deal, guess what? You're going to be suing that company and then find out, oh, they paid my need to that person to that. Basically, that's as a broker. So now we're going to sue them too. And so it's a massive, you know, mess. And I just like to stay clear of that. No, I think I think the way you approach it, smart. When you, when you look at analyzing someone's finances, when somebody comes to you, like, what are you looking for? What's the first thing that you look at? First thing is really the cash flow, right? Really like, what's coming in and what's going out, which is why we have them actually detail out the different categories of where they're spending their money and what income's coming in to see what the cash flow is like. And that can really determine a lot of what we do. I give an example, I had a woman and an interhusband, a couple that came to us and they're like, came to us primarily just to say, you know, we've got $5 million in stocks, you know, specifically like Google and, you know, Facebook and things like that was like, okay, that's high risk right there. That's like usually if one tech company goes down, they all go down at the same time. And so she wanted to diversify a little bit more. And before we even got into the investing, we were looking at her cash flow, we said, hey, we're noticing your cash flow and we're looking over here. We have this like a special like way to pay off debt called a cash flow index. And that's like based on this cash flow index, if we actually refinance your house to a cash out refi, pay off a bunch of these loans, we can actually free up about $3,800 a month with zero out of pocket. So even before we invest, let's do that first. So we did that, you know, free up almost $4,000 a month. And then right after that, realized that because our business owner just said, let's have you meet with the CPAs we have connections to. And now the CPAs found we can they're actually overpaying by over 30 grand a year in taxes. So we started saving over 30 grand a year. So even before they even invested, we've already improved their cash flow by about 75 grand a year. And then of course, after that, it's like all gravy, right? Because now even they cash out $2 million of their stocks to go invest in real estate, even makes 10%. That's 200,000 a year on top of the 75,000, right? So that's the kind of stuff that we do is we are looking at kind of the full picture, right? Looking at everything of, especially what it relates to, how do we get you to the point where you have enough, you know, not just passive income, but even just improve your cash flow situation on a month-to-month basis. And then of course, we're looking at the other stuff as what is this, what money could be used to invest where you have money to sit on the sidelines or even equity at another client in California where he didn't have him. He had a little bit of money on savings, but he was like the strict saver. I have a lot of Asian clients and they're all like amazing savers, right? And he was no no different. And he said, Chris, my plan is he's like, I want to actually pay off my mortgage and my rental properties mortgage in six years. So he's like, I'm taking all my money and aggressively paying these down. And I say, okay, if we do that and let's take out tax insurance because you'll still pay that even if they're paid off, if we free up principal interest, how much do we free up? That I was $4,200 a month. So 50 grand a year is not bad. That's an improved cash flow. And so I was looking at, do we pay it off or not? But then I noticed I said, hey, your rental property has $700,000 of equity in it. What if we so am I, by the way, what's your net profit on that property? 200 bucks a month. I said, do you realize you're making like a 0.3% return on your equity? Like you, you could sell your property, put it in a bank savings account, even a high yield savings account and make more money than you're making right now. And he's like, yeah, but you can't do that. And it's an asset. I own this asset. He was like, I'm married to it. This is the first and only rental property we've ever had. And so it took me two years to convince him to finally sell it. And he sold it. He 1031. You know, it did a tax freeze change of that equity into about six properties in Louisiana into rentals. Well, now it's a few years later. This would be year five. He's not even at year six yet. This next year will be year six. He's at year five. So he would have not even paid off his mortgages yet to free up that 4,200 a month. He's already at over $8,000 a month of income from just selling out one property from those rentals because he kept buy more rentals of that cash flow over the last couple of years. And that's the difference, right? It's like that acceleration versus just accumulation, right? He was so focused on just trying to pay off his debt. And that was the strategy he was going to use like Dave Ramsey taught me, right? It's like, no, you could do so much better by selling this. You know, that's where I get people all the time, like, which I cash out refinance equity for my rental property or for my house to go and invest in this. I'm like, well, no, you're destroying your cash flow. Just sell the house, like, sell the rental property. But everybody says to refi, screw whatever he says on freaking social media, they're they're they're just idiots sometimes. You know, they just have time. They've only been doing it for a couple of years. Anyways, like, no, the numbers work out better here. Look, you know, and I show them those numbers and voila, you know, that's what it is. So that's, that's kind of where we, I mean, I'm kind of nerding out a little bit, but that's kind of where we have fun, right? No, no, I love it. This is, this is the audience to nerd out too. Please don't, don't apologize. It's very good. No, I'm taking some notes. I'm going to, I'm going to talk to you after and figure out what I'm doing with some of the stuff that I have. But no, this is amazing. This is really, really good. Um, what would be, so that's, that's how you analyze. We've, we've gone over a few cardinal sins that people have about money. Are there any other major misconceptions or how would I say it? Mistakes that people make with money that you just want to, you know, you want to slay these sacred cows or whatever it is, you want to just make sure that people don't do these things with their money, with accumulation, with wealth building. Well, this is good dirty. Let's talk about the 401k, right? Okay, we've talked about the 401k, yeah. Yeah, because I mean, go for it. That, that will probably be the hardest sacred cow to slay for people. I mean, some people kind of get like, okay, debt, I can leverage, you know, maybe debt's not always bad, right? But the 401k, especially if you're an employee, that gets a match. Now, if you're, you're a business owner and you're throwing in your own match in 401k, to me, it kind of seems stupid, right? Like it's like, well, I don't get any benefit. Like I'm just, you know, delaying my tax down the road and simply with IRAs, right? You're kicking the tax can down the road, hoping and praying that the government's going to have less taxes in the future, even though historically in the last 110 years, we're at the one of the lowest tax brackets after the previous Trump tax plan, right? We're one of the lowest tax brackets we've been in and people think, oh, I think taxes will go down. I think I'll be tax less in the future. Why are we doing that? Why are we trying to get a tax advantage today to only pay taxes down the road when the government's probably literally banking on you, waiting till they can raise rates on you, right? That's one problem. But the other problem is the match. I call it the myth of the match. I even done podcasts on this on my money ripples podcast as well, because everybody thinks, well, if I get a 100% match, I get a 100% rate of return. I will challenge you to do this, right? You know, I'm not going to screen share with you guys right now. But if you go to like a compounding interest calculator, go ahead and put in like say that you're putting in 20, you know, say it's 10,000 a year. You're putting into your 401k and say they match 10,000 a year into that 401k, right? So that's 20,000. So that's, you know, like 100% return. So put in 10,000 as which are contributing annually, but put in that 100% rate of return, you know, add your, you know, you think it's like 10% or 12%, which is a bunch of BS to the market. It's not, it does not return that high. But let's just say that's by the way, the average market last 30 years, the actual yield is about eight and a half percent, not 12. On top of that, most people never get that, especially in their 401ks. But if you put in 10,000 a year into a calculator and just do it for 20 years, add 108% rate of return, you'll find out you're richer than Jeff Bezos in just 20 years. I don't know about you, Scott, but I've never ever seen anyone say, oh, man, like I got, I mean, people like, how did you become a billionaire? Like the life of hard knocks guys, like interview people street, like, oh, I say my money, my 401k got my 100% match. Like nobody ever gets that even after 30, 40 years, the real rate return might add about an extra, when you thought the topic, the reason it doesn't work is because it's not compounding and doubling your money, right? All your money is just doubling your new money. So when it comes at the longer you save, the less that rate of return that X return becomes in that 401k because that rule is 72, right? How long does it take to double your money? Only thing it does, if you get 100% match, it just doubles your money at whatever year you finally get that money. So if you save for 40 years, rule 72 means you might get a barely maybe a 2% return, right? If you only save for 20, hey, cool, maybe you get about 3.5% extra return. But here's the problem. I was actually looking at fidelity because I like to pick on fidelity because they're big. They got 45 million users. This should be evidence enough for you. One is out of 45 million account holders with fidelity. Only $810,000 have at least a million dollars. That's a 1.8% success rate, if you're to call a million dollars in an account at a success rate, 1.8% of people have at least a million dollars. By the way, this is when Dave Ramsey says you save $100 a month for 40 years, you'll have a million bucks, right? Or he says 1.1 million, which even got those numbers wrong. But think about it this way. If only 1.8% do it and then Trans-America did a separate study of these same people have over a million dollars in their accounts and said, what are the chance of you being financially free, right? 35% of those that over a million dollars say it'll take a miracle for them to be able to retire. A miracle. They don't think they can do it. So think about it. The 1.8% means really only about 1% things they can. Maybe there's another success. Yeah, that's not success at all, right? And so that's the problem is that if they were working that well, why aren't they getting it? Well, I also studied fidelity. I looked at like their target date retirement funds where it says, if you're going to retire it, 2055, 2060, 2065, like you can throw your money in those different accounts, right? Well, I looked at the last 10 year performance. It underperformed the stock market by over 2% was 2.1%. Ironically, the match adds roughly about a 2% or so return on your money. So what that means is like, yeah, you get the match, but it only make up for the bad performance of those funds that you could just be doing investing on your own. So I tell people, it's like, well, really you can actually be investing in the SP 500. Like a lot of people do suggest on social media today and you would probably do better than getting a full 100% match or even worse when somebody max funds are 401k and they don't even get a full match, right? They're not even getting that high of a return. So you could actually do better just investing your own outside of the 401k. Now, I don't think you should, right? I think you've just invested in SP 500. There's already plenty of evidence that that only does so much. That's the 4% rule. That's another myth, the sacred cow that especially young people in the fire movement. I actually got kicked out of the fire group. I got kicked out because I dropped truth Brahms too many times. And so the fire movement didn't like it because I didn't realize the fire movement. I thought fire movement was like people like me who actually did it financially independent, retired early and I did it twice. That's what it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be, right? So I would share my, I would share that stuff. But I realized most people in that group are investing in mutual funds and they're young. They're like 20s and 30s. So they'll say, Oh, it's okay because you got to live on 4% right that 4% rule, which by way is not a rule. It was actually a number that was created from looking at history up in through 1976, 1976, 1976. Do you know what happened in 1974? We were taking off the gold standard. Inflation started to skyrocket after that time and people are living longer, which is why like the 4% rule would work great back then, you know, when people lived less time, they didn't live as long and inflation was as high. Inflation is, you know, consistently higher than it was back then over that 50 year period. And people are living longer. Therefore, I tell people if you're retiring at a retirement age like in your 60s, 3% would be a safer number. And I've shown that on my podcast, too, sometimes where like Dave Ramsey says, you should be able to pull 8% a year and I showed like how you actually run out of money like 15 years if you did what he recommended. Even if you get the market averages, you just have to have one down year for every three years and you're gone, your toast. But even then, like I was in the fire, but I said, no, it's not 4%. It's more like, if you're trying to do it young, it's more like 2%. And they hit in the before, like they like kicked me out of the group. The admins did because they're like, oh, no, no, you can't say that. Because I had a friend who was, you know, even markets to real estate investors and he's like 30 years old and he's like, yeah, I'm actually financially a pennant. I've got enough money in my mutual funds to pay my expenses at 4%. Like, well, you're 29. You can't live on 4%. It's going to be like 2% of your rely on mutual funds. He's like, what? That can't be true. Like, well, what I know, I started in this money game when you were in first grade, but what I know, you know, like, you know, and he didn't want to believe me. Like, okay, fine, but you'll find out eventually. Like, that's what people find out. Usually, unfortunately, too late when they get into 50s and 60s, and they say, oh, crap. Now it's not enough, right? And that's that. That's very sad because then it's like, okay, so then what do I have to do to make it up? And then they start making these super high risk decisions and they lose even more money. I don't know why people have such, it's like this, this, this, like, this fervor for these financial, in my opinion, like not, I don't know, scams, not scams, but not well-presented facts is the best way to put it. Like 401k is just, there was a guy who came on Andy Tanner and he spoke about the sort of the history of the 401k because he interviewed the guy who, I guess, was responsible for the legislation. And I don't think if you actually go back to the legislation that introduced the 401k, I won't remember the exact numbers, but say regular legislation that impacts finances, like say, 100 pages, something like that. The legislation that introduced the 401k is like a couple paragraphs, and it was never meant to be as taken as seriously as it actually is, and it was never meant to be the thing that it turned into. And the guy that created it, like he was shocked that it was, and it was because companies realized that this is a great way to get people to be distracted and not realize that we're not investing in their pensions anymore. And this is a great way to sort of, you know, dangle the carrot over here and say, oh, we're going to take care of you with this 401k. Companies were leveraging this government tool that was never meant to be taken this seriously as a way to just basically pay people less. And this is what happened. And now, I don't know how many people I could attribute a 401k. It's probably, you know, millions and tens of millions of people. Yeah, but it's not a good tool. It's like a really bad tool. Canada, I'm Canadian. They have RSP as well. Same difference. That's right. Canadian is RSP. Exactly. Same thing, right? And yeah, when we get Canadians, I mean, it's funny because like at least you guys will have better interest rates on bank savings, but still, that's, you know, that's about it. Plus you have tax receivings accounts too that we don't get unless you use life insurance. But the other thing too, I'll tell you, like that 401k is true, because the legislation initially was as executive plan, right? It was really because back then, the top federal tax rate was about 80%. So they were saying the same thing that we're saying today, right? Which is, oh, it's okay. Because if you, and by the way, when I had a 401k over 20 years ago, I worked in corporate America before I came a financial advisor. I remember the HR person said this. She's like, and she was kind of interesting. She's like, so here's the thing. Here's the 401k. And it's the best thing ever because you put money in, but you don't get taxed until you retire. But it's okay because when you're old, you don't spend money anyways. And that's, it's going to be great for you. You know, like she's, she's talking about all this stuff. And even I was like, somehow this doesn't seem to make a logical sense to me. Will I be spending less when I get older? I would think I'd be spending more. Yeah. But she's, of course, 30 some odd years old at time. So she didn't really see it. But you know, those, for those back then, when the top rates like 80%, and if you can delay it and get your tax to a much lower tax bracket, and then when you retire, because you are living on less, because you're getting paid so high as an executive, you will live on less down the road. Then yeah, it could make sense. The problem is, uh, is, of course, the financial institutions got embedded with the politicians, right? They said, wait, we can make this a win-win here. Because listen, you know, such securities going bankrupt, you guys are on the hook for that. We also want to have more people put more money into savings. Why make up for when K plan available to the public, right? So then everybody can have access to this thing. And we'll even tell them, hey, it's okay, because you'll be taxed less in the future, right? Because of course, that always happens with the government, because you know, we're not going in trillion dollars of debt. Like, you know, it seems like almost every day, you know, or every month we're building another trillion of debt, right? And so, so of course, they're telling us this stuff, right? So in 1985, it became open to general public. But I've seen people have had four cases in 1985, and they're not anywhere close to what, you know, anyone who we've had a financial calculator back then would say they would be out today. Because it's not because they weren't saving. Now, that's the thing that pisses me off when people say, oh, it's because they're not saving enough. People just need to save more. But you know, back in those days, they're saying, save 10%. You'll be fine. And then it went up to 20%. And now they're like, well, save all your, in 100% income, and maybe you'll be okay, right? It's just ridiculous. And, and you're right, like that's, it's, yeah, I don't blame financial advisors by blame that they, they turn their brains off and just accept whatever they're taught. And I'll tell you, there are people that do turn their brains on, even in that industry. I mean, Dave Ramsey, I rip on him a lot, but he has a co-host named George Campbell, right? He's kind of a nerdy guy with glasses. I know he's, he's coming on, and I think the week after Christmas, he's coming on. That's awesome. Because if that's the case, tell him hi for me because I think he was a rock star for doing what he did last year in 2023, because he, here's what happened. He, uh, he actually came out saying, people should pull off 3% a year. Just like I've been saying for years, he said it. And, uh, and the crazy thing is, I actually did a react clip on my podcast about this because someone called into Dave Ramsey's show, and the caller was distressed. He's like, I don't think I've saved enough. I don't have enough money. And, and he's like, yeah, like if I only pull off 3% a year and you see Dave do his usual face like, yeah. And, uh, like what are you talking about? He's like, well, yeah. Well, George has said on another episode recently that, you know, we should only pull off 3% a year. And that means I haven't saved enough. Dave was like, what is he, what the hell is he saying? I don't get it. You know, like, this, that's ridiculous. You make 12%. You should be able to pull off 8% a year. You know, and he's like going off and all pissed off at George for doing it. I think George eventually came and re-nigged on it or whatever. You know, I tell you like George was right. Dave was wrong. But that's the problem is that some people get so invested into saying things are certain way or doing things, you know, that, and that's one thing I try to make sure I don't do is I don't try to have so much ego that I'm not willing to adjust and say, you know what? I wasn't right there. I was wrong. You know, this is what's more true today. But those guys like, they don't have any responsibility. He's a, he's a TV personality. He has zero risk, you know, for people suing him because he's just a TV personality. Everybody knows that you shouldn't listen to him anyways. But so many people do literally banking their lives on that as being truth when they're finding out it's just not working. It's a minefield out there. I really wish. I mean, there's, there's, there's a lot of people that put out a lot of financial education, which is a good thing and a bad thing at all at the same time because some people mean well. They put out the stuff that's actually going to help people. A lot of people either don't know what they're talking about or just pure malicious. Like, I mean, I just to clarify, I do not consider Dave Ramsey to be malicious in his intent. I genuinely think he's trying to help people just through the lens of what has worked for him. But I do agree that you should, uh, you shouldn't be so naive to other ways of doing things. I think that it that's actually important because then you can understand how what has worked exactly for you may not be the exact strategy for other person at a different stage in their life, at a different season in their life. In my mind, if, you know, we were talking about financial advisors being so myopic and so blinders on and what they offer, if Dave has the same attitude, he's no better because he's, he's only educating you on one thing in the world. Two two ideas can be correct at the same time and to have the best chance of helping people, you have to have the widest array of ideas to understand all these different circumstances that somebody might be going through. So it's not, it's not like anybody that we're talking about is malicious in their intent. It's just, it's just not the best way to approach education. I don't, I don't like, I mean, you can make the same argument for a lot of online content. I guess it goes as I said, you shouldn't trust a lot of the stuff that you just, you're on online, like you have to vet and you have to do due diligence and you have to see, you know, the person teaching it what their experience is, but the same would go for like fitness education and what not that, you know, some people are so, so devoted to their one idea of how you lose weight or put on muscle or your diet or whatever. And there's a million different ways to do it. So I think that that's a really smart attitude. Just be open to different ideas. That's the best way to help someone. Well, bring a full circle. You're absolutely right. I mean, that makes it harder on us, right? When we're trying to educate people, but there's so much other education out there as a listener, it's hard to know what is true. And that's where I was come back to what I said earlier is like, I like to see evidence. I like to know what actually works, right? I've known a lot more people, even in people that hire us even, right? Accidentally become millionaires owning real estate than they ever have owning a mutual fund hands down 100% of the time, like and starting a business and start business. And that was going to be my next thing. That was at my exact next point too, because you know, I talk about Dave Ramsey, right? And you know, maybe he's kind of like my, you know, I'm he doesn't know who I am, but he's kind of like a nemesis to me in some ways. But again, going back to evidence, how did Dave Ramsey create all this wealth? Now he's claimed that recent interviews, he's worth like $700 million or whatever. That's BS. When I went to try to research, I actually thought it was true. But then I went to research and found out he's closer maybe $200 million, which in my mind is still like amazing. Why would he over inflate his number, right? The 200 million would be incredible. So anyways, so that's one thing is just like he's like even somebody on on their podcast, he even said, oh, he's a billionaire now like they like, they just keep inflating his number bigger and bigger. So I thought, okay, maybe we're 200 million. Where does he keep all his money? Where is his net worth? Because I want to know how much does he have invested in all his mutual funds? He keeps recommending, right? He keeps telling us what everybody else should do. If I wait, you should never buy a rental property unless you pay all cash for it. So you got to save up for many, many years, chasing inflation like a Dalmatian after fire truck. So you finally get it. And then you can buy that property, right? Well, I look at his net worth about 50 million arguably is the value of his business, right? Because remember, his business was the economic vehicle to allow him to buy the other 150 million of a net worth, which is real estate. He has very little negligible amounts in the stock market. Most of it is in real estate in his business. That's where he made all of his wealth real estate and business, right? And I would even argue it was his business first that he took the profits from that to then use that to buy the real estate he keeps talking about. So then that actually grew his wealth even bigger along with the valuation of his company too, right? And that right there, guys, like if that's not evidence enough, it's like don't do what they say, do what they've done, right? And I really believe the two best investments, I mean, number one, the best investments in yourself, your business, wherever you can control and how you generate, make money. Then number two, if you're going to gamble on anything, if you can have at least the right education to go with it, real estate. Like I think real estate is one of the safer places to store and keep your wealth and even grow your wealth when you do it the right way. So that's that's the biggest thing I would say is comfortable circle is that you remember even financial visors, remember when my friend asked me, he said, how many financial visors are financially free, not the commissions you earn, not if you're business, but actually off the investments, none of them are off those investments. It was all off of the commissions. The number one investment that financial visors offer is trying to hire people to become financial advisors. That was the only investment you see pay off with financial visors is becoming one of them. Unfortunately, you have to keep perpetuating the lies to become one of them. And so you have to kind of ask yourself, do I really want to do that or not? I love it. Okay. Chris, we went into a lot. What would be, I always like to ask this before we wrap up, what would be anything that we didn't go into that you wanted to cover or a question that I should have asked you that I didn't? Well, I think I discovered it now. So I kind of blended it in. But I mean, no, I mean, we covered a lot. You're right. I mean, I don't think there really is a question. Well, here's a question. If I were to, if I were you to just sum up more of what else can create more wealth, this is what changed for me in 2006. It wasn't just the investing in real estate. Remember, I mentioned those guys are talking about money and creating the abundance mentality and things like that. If you were to say, what's the number one way to create and make money is to stop thinking, how do I make more money? Instead, start asking, how do I create more value for more people? How do I solve problems? Serve people add value in such a way that money is just the byproduct of that service rendered or promise to be rendered. That for me is when everything changed. But I realized that money wasn't just about getting lucky or exploiting people like I used to think it was. Money was all about how do I serve people and show up in such a way that they say, I will give you these dollars to have you or whatever you offer your product, your service in my life. And especially if you're a business owner and even if you're an employee, you realize that everything comes back to how you create value for the people that pay you and you focus on that. What can I do is solve problems for you, serve you. What can I do that would merit me a raise at my job? What can I do for the company that would make me earn and worthy of a raise? I will do that. If you do that, you will always find out that money is formulaic. It's not by chance. It's not by luck. You don't have to get lucky or get in the right time of that right opportunity and all that kind of stuff. Get in the ground floor of that pyramid scheme. No, you can actually do it from anywhere you're standing by just focusing on how do I serve people, solve problems or create value in such a way that money is the byproduct of that. I love it. If people want to reach out to you, where do you want to send them? And also anything you want in the show notes, so we'll put link to the podcast website, socials, anything else as well. Just let us know on live on the show and then we'll also drop it in the in the show notes as well. Anything money ripples, right? That's ripples with a S on the end, right? Or IPP LES, not money nipples. That guy said that yesterday on the show on his podcast. Like, wait, I almost misread that. Sorry, it's money ripples. Like, nope, that's that's the other website. Not money. No, so money ripples. That's not that's not your website. That's someone else's right that I should buy it. I don't know. Just just make sure nobody gets confused there. But money ripples, that's at money ripples on all social media money ripples.com and even the money ripples podcast. Okay, perfect. Last question I like to ask, you know, you've had an incredible life you built. You've gone through sort of two times in your life, you've retired, you've built businesses, you've created wealth, you teach people. If you were going to leave one lesson out of all the things that you've learned, it could be business, it could be a philosophy life lesson, it could be a money lesson, you have to pick one lesson that you want to lead your kids with. What would be the most important lesson that you'd want them to really internalize? It probably goes along with what I just shared about the the vibration. But even going deeper than that is that people are the true assets, not things, right? It really is. I mean, even things they would have no value if there were no people on this planet, right? No one would care how big your house is or what it's worth or what kind of pool you have if there's no humans on the planet. That's the thing. It's always about really like you come to this earth of nothing, you leave with nothing, everything in between a stewardship. What are you going to do with that stewardship? What are you going to do with those resources? What are you going to do with that time that you have, right? What are you going to do with your talents? What are you going to do and how can you show up and serve people and leave a legacy of that? And so people are really the true assets, not things.