Title: “The Importance of Staying Liquid and Paying Yourself First”
Episode: 227
“Get profitable and pay yourself first.”
If you want to become smarter financially and know where your money is going, we have a perfect guest!
In this episode of Profit First for REI podcast, we have Chris Miles. Listen as he talks about the thought process of people around money. He also shares some tips on how you can pay yourself twice in your business and utilize passive income in your business to get the freedom you want. Enjoy the show!
Key Takeaways:
[00:45] Introducing Chris Miles
[02:35] The Ultra Penny Pincher
[06:20] Retiring at the age of 28
[08:12] Jumping into real estate investing
[11:19] Life Before Profit First
[13:32] Follow your gut
[16:32] Paying yourself twice
[26:45] Business as your number one investment
[27:42] His advice for real estate investors
[28:41] Connect with Chris Miles
Quotes:
[05:49] “You can make better cash flow and income with real estate even if you are on the passive side.”
[13:32] “Follow your gut… If something doesn’t feel right, don’t go for it just because you can get a lot of money.”
[28:08] “Just get to the point where your business is an actual business. They can operate even without you, and you can get enough passive income that you don’t need it either; to me, that’s the true definition of freedom.”
Connect with Chris:
Website: https://moneyripples.com/
Tired of living deal to deal?
If you are a real estate investor or business owner who is tired of living deal to deal and want to double your profits, head over here to book your no-obligation discovery call with me. Either myself or someone from my team will hop on a short call with you to get clear on your business goals, remove any obstacles holding you back, and map out a game plan to help you finally start keeping more of the money you work so hard to make. – David
Transcript:
Speaker 1 (00:00):
So I learned again, stay liquid, get my money out of that prison. Don’t lock it up in 4 0 1 KS. Don’t lock it up in your house. Those kind of things. Keep it liquid, keep it available to use. And then of course, make sure you pay yourself first. Get profitable and then pay yourself first.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
If you’re a real estate investor who’s sick and tired of living deal to deal, then welcome home. Hear from everyday real estate investors just like you, and discover how they’ve completely transformed their business by taking a profit First approach. This is the profit first for REI podcast, where we believe revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity. It’s time to start making profit a habit in your business. So here’s your host, David Richter.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
If you want to become smarter financially, really knowing where your money’s going or where in the world you can get that help. Have a great guest for you today. Chris Miles, he, we’ve had him on before, but this time he really dives deep into not just his background, but the thought process a lot of people have around money and what his thought process was. And then we also go into how can you pay yourself twice in your business and really utilizing passive income in your business to get you the freedom you really want. It’s a great episode. If you’ve been following to me for any amount of time, this is one that can really help you get to that next level. Thank you for listening. Enjoy the episode. Hey, you have Chris Miles again here. Super excited to have Chris back on. He is the anti financianal guru out there. I love your stance out there of just the traditional financial people that try and help people, but I like how you put it, the salesman and in suits. You’ve got a lot of the great one-liners from that industry, and I’m just excited to have you back on because I think this is always a relevant topic. So thanks for being here, Chris.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Yeah, it’s always a pleasure to be back on, David. I know we’re going to have fun today. That’s for sure.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Fun. That’s for sure. We get to talk about money and we get to talk about sometimes the sides that people don’t go down or they should be going down, but they don’t. You came from a traditional background, right, where you were a traditional financial advisor in that role, correct?
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Yeah, I was. Yeah, I mean, I started off, I didn’t know anything special about money going into that industry because I went to college, but college doesn’t teach you squat, but I knew I wanted be a business owner. I knew I didn’t want to be the kind of guy that works the nine to five and someone tells me how much money I could make. So I went into business and all I knew about money was save it all, spend nothing. I was like the ultra penny pincher because that’s what my dad was and that’s what he taught me to do. He would be like Dave Ramsey’s older brother that Dave Ramsey said I should be like him someday. And then he did. And so I was doing that. I was a financial advisor. I taught that same thing of spend nothing, save everything, save it forever and hopefully someday you’ll have something.
(02:54):
And I did that for four years. And of course after four years, then my dad came to me and said, Chris, when you become my financial advisor. So I sat down with him, sat at his kitchen table, same one where he told me to be cheap and to save lots of money, sat down at his kitchen table and I’m looking at everything for the first time in my life, he never wanted to show his money. He was always very guarded with it. And I’m seeing that he’d stuffed money in his 401k for decades. He’d paid off his house early. He was totally 100%. And after I looked at it, I said, dad, you’re 61 years old right now, but if you want to retire today, you better hope you die in five years because that’s when you’re going to run out of money. He said, okay, well what else can I do then?
(03:36):
I don’t want that option. Give me another option. I said, I don’t know because you did everything right according to what I teach as a financial advisor, you actually have been saving, you paid off all your debt. Dave Ramsey says you should be free. You should be on his radio screaming right now, fruit him to Braveheart music. You should be doing that, and it’s just not enough. And so it bugged me because I realized that he was kind of the inspiration for me to go into that industry in the first place because I figured worst case scenario, even if that business didn’t work out, I would learn about money and then maybe I can give him some of the years of his life back. Because he would always tell me, he says, Chris, I’m going to die working. I know the stress of this job will literally kill me because he had strokes in his forties, heart attacks in his fifties, and now he’s 61 years old and he can’t retire.
(04:23):
So I was bugged and I didn’t know what to do. And I remember a few weeks later I called up a friend who I trained to be a financial advisor, but then he went to go do this crazy thing called real estate investing. And so he’s going doing flips and stuff. And I thought for sure, oh, this guy’s probably broke. Maybe he’ll beg me for a job to work with me again, exact opposite situation came out of it because he told me, he says, Chris, listen, my life is amazing. He’s like, my dad and I have partnered on some deals and we’ve now doubled his income as a professor at the local university. I was like, oh, come on, that’s too good to be true. There’s no way you could do that. Stock market’s better than real estate, all this kind of crap that you hear from financial advisors.
(05:02):
And finally he stopped me. He says, Chris, how many of your clients are actually financially free where they don’t worry about money? I said, well, they all worry about money. Even the retired ones, they always worry they’re going to outlive their money. Okay, good job Chris. Way to help nobody. Okay, how about this? How many of you guys are financially free as financial advisors? Not off the commission’s journey, but actually doing these mutual fund investments? As I was really honest with myself, and there’s probably over a hundred people in our office, and I knew that there’s some of them had been working there since the late 1970s and still couldn’t retire. I said, well, maybe none of them. There’s your problem, Chris. All of a sudden I popped a little matrix red pill, the real estate red pill went down that rabbit hole and realized there’s this whole other world of alternative investing that could actually make more money with less, right?
(05:49):
You can make better cashflow and income with real estate even if you’re on the passive side, let alone be on the active side. But even on the passive side where even if you’re just somebody lending your money to active real estate investors, you could still make more than being in the stock market. And after that, I couldn’t make it work. I couldn’t make it work anymore where I could stay in integrity and keep working as a financial advisor. So I quit a few months later. I said, I’m done. I’ll never teach about money again. I’ll just be a ballroom dancer. I’ll teach ballroom dancing and I’ll do mortgages because in 2006, anybody could be a mortgage broker. So that’s what I did. But the cool thing is later that next year I was able to retire myself when I was 28, almost 29 years old, doing these same strategies of passive income and things like that and got to the point where I was work optional.
(06:31):
I was able to work because I wanted to, not because I have to, and by the way, I’ve learned retirement is overrated, it sucks. Doing nothing is not a cool plan for life. So I’ve realized that if you’re going to do anything, do what you’re passionate about and I love teaching and I know you are the same way. I know you love teaching as well. And that’s kind of what pulled me out of retirement in 2007. I started teaching people how to do what I did of how to get out of the rat race. And even when the recession hit and I got hit hard, I went from millionaire to upside down millionaire during that time I had to dig my way back out without filing for bankruptcy. And that’s where Profit First really comes into handy, by the way, huge. Especially before you get to those times even better by the way. But it’s been a huge blessing to me and be able to come back from that and was able to be financially independent again by the end of 2016. And so that’s my whole thing, is teach people how to break free of those chains and actually become work optional and follow their passions wherever that might lead them.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
I think obviously there’s a lot there that we could go down, lots of different rabbit holes, but I thought it was very interesting what you said up front. You became a financial advisor, but really didn’t know much about money. They didn’t teach you that in college, didn’t teach you that anywhere else. So I guess that’s a question I have is what took you down the path of even becoming a financial advisor? Was it because of what your dad had taught you mostly growing up like save and then it was kind of that same plan but now in a business form. So I don’t know. It sounds funny too because then you jump in, it doesn’t sound like they’re really teaching you as well at the actual place that you’re working too. So that to me was That was an interesting point. I know it was at the beginning, but can you speak to that a little bit of jumping into that type of role?
Speaker 1 (08:15):
You’re right, because in high school I was one of those weird nerds that took banking classes, accounting and things like that. College I did, and I was a sociology major in college with a triple minor in ballroom dancing, Japanese and psychology. But my goal was to actually become a business consultant. That was what I was going to do. And so right before I was getting my bachelor’s, I realized I said, I’m going to eventually go transfer to another college, get my MBA, but do I have real life experience? If there’s anything my dad taught me, it was like get real life experience in the real world. So I said, alright, well how am I going to do that? And so I actually took a sabbatical from college. I had one, not even a class, it was an independent study course where I was supposed to take my thesis, publish it in a journal and we’d be done.
(09:00):
So I had maybe a thesis written, I just had to condense it, put it in a journal and I would be done. But I took a break. I said I should probably start some business. So I didn’t know what business to start, but I eventually had a friend that we were chatting one day and he just said, yeah, I just got hired by this financial firm and it’s really awesome. I’m learning about money and all this and investing and for whatever reason, I mean it kind of intrigued me and it could be because I remember being, I was probably like seven, eight years old, if you ever remember the TV show in the eighties called Family Ties with Michael J. Fox? Yeah, with Michael Fox. He was an economics major, and I remember somebody would drop money on the ground, he’s like 78 cents, he would know how much money dropped.
(09:41):
And I was like, that’s just kind of cool. So there was just something about money that intrigued me. I even had a little thing that you put dimes into that saves up to $10 and I would take it to the bank, get it all rolled up. Just that stuff was fascinating to me about money. I didn’t know why. It just was intriguing. So when he told me that he got hired, I said, well, dude, get me an interview. And I didn’t realize it was so hard. It’s only because he was such a bad guy on the follow through and getting me connected that it took me so long I thought I was having to impress them, bring in a resume. They take anybody off the street. As long as you could pass a test with 70% and you don’t have a criminal record, you get hired in this industry.
(10:20):
So I didn’t know it was that easy. There was such a low barrier of entry, but I did it and eventually of course, I think the thing I loved about was being my own boss, being an entrepreneur. And that’s why eventually that died out when I realized what I was teaching and what I was really selling wasn’t working, then I felt like I was a liar and a deceiver and my integrity is number one, I have to keep it intact. I can’t BS anybody. I’m a horrible salesperson. If I don’t believe in it, it’s obvious. So I have to make sure that I’m actually doing something that aligns with my integrity.
Speaker 3 (10:50):
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And it’s just funny that all those things we’ve learned up to that point, it’s like it’s not the real thing that helps us or other people get to and it feels like, yeah, we should be learning this stuff from these different places and we’re not really learning it. I did wanted to latch on a little bit to what you said about profit first of like, okay, what would your life have looked like before Profit first? Do you think you would’ve become an upside down millionaire if you would’ve had something like that in your life beforehand?
Speaker 1 (11:19):
Yeah, I learned some big key lessons from the last recession. When I say the last recession, I’m not talking about Covid recession. I’m talking about like 2007 through 2009, right? The big thing I learned was one, of course that your ambition of your twenties can catch up to you in your thirties. Don’t be all offense, all risk taking. For example, I had cash reserves, so I had money set aside thinking I was pretty smart. I didn’t have enough reserves on the side. I know you see this a lot when you’re working on people’s financial situations too, is that you’ve got to have cash on the sidelines just in case. But I also wasn’t monitoring what I was spending. So once I got to the point where I was out of the rat race and money was flowing in oxygen, it’s like you never count your number of breaths until the oxygen’s taken away and then every breath counts.
(12:04):
Well, that’s what happened with my money when it was flowing in. I just got lazy. I stopped tracking how much was coming in, how much was going out, and it wasn’t apparent until all of a sudden, I remember in 2007 I noticed that my savings account balances were decreasing and my checking account balances are decreasing and my credit card balances started to increase. And when I really got honest with myself and monitor it, I found out I was in the whole 15,000 a month between my personal and my business life. So if you add those two together, really I was in the business, I was maybe bringing in and we were suffering because we were working with real estate flippers who were then suffering by mid 2007. And so I’m like, we’re only making maybe four or $5,000 a month in the business, but my expenses were like 21, 20 2000 a month.
(12:49):
So I realized that I had to start really getting honest and seeing where I am. So tracking my money was number one. Number two was of course, having good reserves more than you think might be necessary, hold onto it. And in fact, I’ve been building my reserves just like Warren Buffet is. Warren Buffet just got his own cash reserves, 167.6 billion. I mean just end of 2022, he was at one 25 billion. He’s already increased it by over 40 billion in last year. Why? Because he’s waiting to pounce. He’s not just doing it for protection’s sake, but he’s also doing it for opportunity’s sake, right? He’s waiting for some of these better opportunities to show up because people don’t have cash. So that’s a big thing. The other thing I learned too was really follow your gut. That’s the big thing too, is make sure you’re following your gut.
(13:37):
If something doesn’t feel right, don’t go for it. Just because you can make a lot of money. And I tell you, I got into bad habits because being in the hole 15,000 a month, I mean obviously digging out of that hole was pretty tough. But then after that, the hard thing I had was paying myself because then I was just like, well, I just got to pay off debt, pay off debt, pay off debt. So I also was overaggressive and paying off debt. In fact, even before the recession, I had thrown a ton of money into the equity of my mortgage right into my house, not realizing that I wouldn’t be able to get out later because in 2006, 2007, as a mortgage broker, you think, well, they’ll give a loan to anybody. So if I ever need that money, I can just pull it back out.
(14:15):
But I can just stuff in equity, just like Dave Ramsey says, pay off, take down the house. Worst case, I get a cash out refi. Well, what happens if the banks are hurting so bad? They won’t even let you do a cash out refi, especially if you’re a business owner. That’s a big deal. So I learned, again, stay liquid, get my money out of that prison. Don’t lock it up in 4 0 1 Ks, don’t lock it up in your house. Those kinds of things. Keep it liquid, keep it available to use. And then of course, make sure you pay yourself first. Get profitable and then pay yourself first. And I love what Mike Mitz had said when we were at a meeting together where he said, listen, if you guys are always reinvesting money in your business, you’re not profitable. You’re just spending money. Somebody with profit takes that money home. They don’t just keep shoving money back in the business, even though early on it might be necessary to a degree still take profit home. I think that’s so important.
Speaker 3 (15:07):
Yeah, which is funny. It’s like for-profit business, we got to make sure we’re profitable, first of all. And I feel like a lot of people lost sight of that or have lost sight of it. And I think it goes back to what you even said, where’d you learn this stuff? Where do you learn the basics of especially business finance? It’s like maybe it’s a little bit more complicated, but not that much more complicated, at least at the foundational level of, okay, the plan of just saving, not spending doesn’t work in business either. So it’s like the two extremes where you spend all the money and you don’t have any there. Or if you’re just saving it all and you can’t get to where you really want to, it’s like I really think that ties into what you said upfront that I became a financial advisor, went down this road, and really no one ever had taught me any of this stuff really about how money works.
(15:55):
So that’s why I like what you said too. You’re a teacher. That’s why you now teach retirement is boring because retirement, you’re not doing anything. At least now you get to teach to help other people with a lot of this mindset of this mentality, and I love what you do. So beforehand, you had mentioned a couple items that you could talk about and I really want to talk about one or two of those. How about paying yourself twice from your business? How can investor, because obviously I resonate with the pay yourself first, but I really like this. Okay, how do you pay yourself twice in your business? So I think that was a very interesting topic, especially with what we’ve gone down so far.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
Yeah, a lot of people hear that and they mix up two different things together. There’s two strategies I use hand in hand. It’s almost like this one two punch, right? One is investing for passive income, which is huge. That’s why probably taking profit is so important because one common problem I see with business owners, and I know you do too, is that they create their own rat race within their business especially. They could just keep reinvesting in their business. They keep doing that over and over, they generate more revenue. But what happens for their freedom at home? Can they ever really walk away from that business? Right? Exactly. And there’s business systems of course you got to have, but at the same time, they never really take that profit. I like to take that profit and then invest it to generate passive income. And that’s why I go in the real estate route because it’s a real asset.
(17:18):
It’s not like Bitcoin, which is a bunch of crap. Again, I have some, but I gamble with Bitcoin. I don’t invest in Bitcoin, if that makes sense, right? Yeah, sense. Same thing with the stock market. Stock market to me, even though I used to teach people how to trade stocks and options, I did it myself still. I don’t even like to touch stocks and options, especially right now where the market’s just ridiculously overbought. So I stay more in the real estate game where I have real assets and it generates real income. Now, one thing I can do as well, and this even works whether you’re doing real estate or not, but this strategy that helps enhance the throw a little extra fuel in the fire, it’s called infinite banking, where you can essentially get what’s called a whole life insurance policy. So not your typical term insurance, death insurance, that doesn’t work.
(18:03):
That’s just death insurance. But whole life, it does have death insurance, but it also has this tax-free savings account that’s a part of it that you can use that pays you more than point nothing percent like the bank does. And by the way, you never get a tax form, which for me lately, the less tax forms the better. I’ll tell you that much. Yes, I agree. I just hate tax time because not because of I have to pay taxes, it’s because of all the filings, right? All the tax forms you get from all the investments and everything else coming in, including my own business, the p and l is the easy part because I keep up on that at least weekly. But man, everything else, tax forms suck, but at least this one thing I don’t get taxed on, I never have a tax form for it.
(18:43):
So it pays you more than point nothing percent. It never gets taxed. It’s also 100% protected from lawsuits and creditors in case of lawsuits, in case somebody wins and sues you and they win, they can’t get to this money, they can get to your savings account, they can get to almost all your investments, but they cannot get to this money. In most states, there’s a few states like California that suck, but most of ’em, you can’t get to it. So for this reason, so that alone, just protecting my money if I’m going to hold it in reserves, especially for my emergencies and things like that, if I’m going to stay liquid, I can keep it there and make much more than point nothing percent at the bank and get taxed on that point, nothing percent. But here’s the cool thing. It can also not just be used for a defensive position, but it can be used for offense.
(19:26):
Whether I’m using it for business, whether I’m using it for investing or whatever it might be, I can also get a line of credit against the cash that’s in this policy. So just like you get a home equity line of credit against the equity of your home, you can get a line of credit from the insurance company or from a bank, but insurance companies are cheaper right now. Get a line of credit from them where you can use that money from the insurance company to go and use it however you want. You can blow it in Vegas. Technically, I don’t recommend it. It’s not a great strategy, but you could can invest it anywhere if you invest in your business. The cool thing, if you still get the tax write off, see the problem is people stuff money in 4 0 1 Ks and IRAs, and then you’re like, well, my number one investment is my business.
(20:05):
Well, you just now raped and pillage your money away from your business to put in something that’s locked in prison. You can never get to if you ever say, well, I want to use my IRA for my business. No, you can’t. They won’t let you unless you buy a franchise, they won’t let you use that money. And so it’s locked away investing in all these other crappy companies that you have no control over that you make a worse return on. It’s like high risk mediocre returns when you can have that money in your business. Well, what if I could keep this money liquid, but also use it in my business where I’m making money in my business too? So not only what’s cool because you get that line of credit from the insurance company, you don’t pull the money out of your account, your money’s still all there, this compounding interest tax free while you’re using their money to go and invest in your business and make whatever returns you make in your business, you actually make money in two places at once.
(20:50):
Now the lie you might hear, hear a lot of these guys that are infinite bankers out there, they’ll say, oh, you pay yourself back. That’s a bunch of bs. You literally do pay the insurance company interest just like you would a bank. But here’s the cool part, you pay it back however, whenever you want, there is no monthly payment you would get with a home equity line of credit or a business line of credit. No. You know how you always have to pay monthly income on that even if you haven’t seen the results. So if you go invest in marketing for example, it takes nine months to get that turnaround time on your marketing. You’re paying for that money. In the meantime you’re losing money. But here they’ll charge you interest, but there’s no minimum payment on it so you can pay it back. However, whenever you want, the deadline for paying back that loan is your death.
(21:34):
And guess what pays off that loan, your death benefit, and then the rest of it pays your family tax free anyways. So it is kind of nice to be able to have that flexibility, that protection of my money, but it can play offense and defense at the same time. But yeah, the hardest part that I see out there is that most of these guys are infinite bankers. What most people don’t realize that you actually overpay on insurance costs, and this is probably why, if you’ve ever looked into it as a business owner, it hasn’t made sense because well, one, they tell you to lock the money away in there forever, don’t use it, just let it sit there forever and until you’re going to retire, then it becomes tax free income, which is true, it’s tax free. It could do that. And then there’s even others that say you can invest in real estate, but still they’ll charge you too much in commissions and fees, insurance costs, which is where their commissions come from.
(22:22):
And as a result, it takes longer to grow your money. And so you don’t get this good ROI on it. And the whole reason in 2017, even though I’ve been licensed since 2002, so 22 years now, the whole reason I came out of retirement the second time to then bring it in-house in our company is because I couldn’t find any friends to refer to that was going to do it. Right. Anytime I refer to somebody, they would always figure out a way to charge more in costs, insurance costs so that they could pay higher commissions because that’s how they make their money. I didn’t need it. So I’m like, I’m already financially free. I don’t need a dime of this commissions. And so I started doing that internally in house and found out we’d end up doing it better than everybody else for that very reason. We would lower the cost as low as we could possibly go while still keeping it tax free. And ever since then, the crazy thing is we never intended to become have infinite banking is part of our company. It was more like a necessity just because the market didn’t have it, but now it’s actually we’re becoming known for it, which is crazy,
Speaker 3 (23:21):
Right? That is so interesting because you help people with the passive income side just thinking about passive income, but then from there it’s being the most efficient with your money. And I love everything we were talking about there. It’s too bad that there’s some of the bigger names out there like Dave Ramsey and other people, poo-pooing the whole life thing and stuff where I’m like, I definitely hardcore where whole life’s horrible, all that stuff. Then someone put my eyes to this. Yeah, sounds, yeah, it sounds like we had some of the same upbringing on that stuff, but then someone opened my eyes to it and was like, oh, okay, I totally understand and I really liked this. And like you said, there’s so many other benefits that you’re just kind of listing off in the list. And even though our main topic was like, how could we pay ourselves twice?
(24:10):
What’s infinite banking? What’s that? It’s like you were like, oh, you get the death benefit and it’s tax free and you’ve got some other things over here. It’s like the list just kept growing. It’s like, this is why this is, then it’s okay. You never have to really pay it back. And I see some of those things, it’s like these are great boosts for someone who understands where their money’s going and flowing and helping them. And then that’s why I like what you do too, because you’re really teaching people about money. It sounds like if you have too much bandwidth there, you could go to Vegas and you could blow it all. It’s like, oh, hold on. Let’s have a plan for this money. What should we do with it and how should we pay it back? And like, okay, you are doing a marketing campaign nine months from now.
(24:54):
Do we need to start paying this back? It’s like having someone like you, you’re helping them with that. So I love that as well too, because a lot of people don’t have that discipline built in or they don’t have the education around money just in general. So love what you’re doing. I love that overview. That was a really great overview and we’ve had people on before talking about infinite banking, and I like how you clarified that. If there’s someone who is truly out there to help you, they’re trying to get the cost as low as possible so that way you can have as much benefit as possible. And I like how with your business, it’s just no, this is how we’ve built it in to everyone we work with. So that was a lot of great stuff.
Speaker 1 (25:33):
It’s funny. It’s funny when you get all those people making all complex and complicated. In fact, there’s one guy that said, I saw an email from one of our new clients just yesterday, and she’s like, here’s his reply. And he’s the guy that’s kind of popping into space. He’s got a lot of YouTube videos on it, and he was like, well, nobody does it better than us. We do it the best and nobody can understand it. He’s like, it takes him a while to figure it out. And I’m reading his emails, I’m like, I know I’ve been in the industry just as long as this guy, almost as long as this guy, so I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen his stuff. And the truth was is that he still couldn’t address the concern that the client had, which is, yeah, but I’m paying $13,000 more a year for your plan.
(26:15):
It’s costing me. It’s not like I’m making 13,000 more. It’s costing me $13,000 more. And you say you do it the best. He’s like, for us, the answer is simple. Make the cost as low as you can. So the ROI grows as fast as it can. The lower the cost, the more money you have to play with and more money you can use in your business to then accelerate. And that’s the key. The more you can get money flowing through your business, right? Again, we do take profits, but using that money to flow in your business, to invest in good things and investment your business should be the number one investment where you got the best ROI potential, get the money there, use it there, use it wherever you can to get the best return. But yeah, if you can use a little hack here, a little strategy that can give you a little extra leg up and make a little extra interest along the way. Sweet. Do it that too,
Speaker 3 (27:03):
Right? Yeah, exactly. No, that’s really good. I really have enjoyed this because we just need more people to educate, like you said, educate people on finances, on how money really works. A lot of the stuff that we didn’t or in growing up or we had one mindset, like you had said, save, don’t spend. I had that same mindset. A lot of people, they’ve got the other side where it’s just spend everything you’ve got. So we see that in the entrepreneur space a lot too. So this has been a breath of fresh air. Is there any other last question here? Any other advice you’d want to give to the real estate investors or the people listening to the podcast?
Speaker 1 (27:42):
I would just say this, no matter what business you’re in, really focus on how do you get yourself free, how you get yourself to the point where you can fire yourself, whether it’s generating enough passive income on the side, which is what I’ve done as well, and I’ve done both. Getting enough systems in place so that you’re kind of expendable to some degree, not as a leader, not as the person that way from a culture standpoint, but just get to the point where your business is an actual business. It can operate and run even without you, and then you’ve got enough passive income that you don’t need it either. To me, that’s the true definition of freedom, is that you have freedom from your business, freedom from your finances and your money, and then you have options. And when you have more options, that’s where freedom comes from.
Speaker 3 (28:25):
That’s really good. Then you’re really working on what you want to in the business, outside the business, whatever that freedom means to you. So that was really, really good. Just take his advice to heart. How do people get ahold of you if they were like, okay, I need this help inside of my business
Speaker 1 (28:41):
General through Carrier Pigeon. You put a little note in that kid’s Beacon.
Speaker 3 (28:47):
Best answer yet.
Speaker 1 (28:49):
Actually, I’ve never given that answer, but I like it. But no, honestly, you just go to money ripples.com. We’ve got tons of free education on there, and there’s ways to contact us and even our podcast. Feel free to follow that. The Money Ripples podcast that we have, we’re now in our 10th season, so feel free to join us.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
And you just recently crossed recording your eight hundreds, 800th episode, correct?
Speaker 1 (29:10):
Yeah, yeah. You’re number 8 0 4, so yeah.
Speaker 3 (29:14):
Yeah, I was going to say, you’ve been doing this a long time. You’ve got a lot of great listeners and you’ve got a great following there, so make sure you head over listen to the Money Ripples podcast. He’s got not only just great guests, but great content, great education there, so follow him. Follow him on the social media, all the different places as well too. Chris, this has been amazing. If you’re out there listening to this and you’re like, I need the basics of what he was talking about, profit First, I don’t know where money’s going, I just need the foundational steps. Head over to simple cfo.com. We can at least give you those first steps, and then maybe we might be introducing you to Chris as well too when no matter where you are right now. So thank you so much for listening. Remember to make Profit a Habit in your business. And Chris, thanks for being a great guest on the show.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
It’s been such an honor, David. Thank you.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
This episode of The Profit First for REI podcast is over, but there are plenty more where that came from. Are you ready to learn how David and his team can help implement the Profit First system in your business? Schedule a discovery call@simplecfo.com right now. We’ll see you next time on The Profit First for REI podcast with David Richter.
