286 - Discovering Alternative Investments: Your Path to Faster Financial Independence with Money Ripples' Chris Miles

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Chris Miles, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the founder of a business called Money Ripples, found at moneyripples.com. I'm really intrigued to hear about you and your stories, but welcome to the show.

Thanks. I, I feel a little inadequate here cuz you're gonna be asking me questions, but I feel like I should be the one listening to at least be aligned with your show here.

We'll talk about listening in a moment because I'm, I'm sure that learning how to listen is a critical skill that you probably developed in order to work, get where you are today. First of all, MoneyRipples. I went to the website. It, let me see if I can summarize it from what I can understand and then you can correct me. It looks like You help clients purchase whole life policies that they then can— they're large enough policies that they can then borrow against and put that money that they borrow into passive investments that give them an annual return of 8% to 10%. From the income generated off the, off the whatever the passive income is, it goes back. That's what pays down the debt. And eventually it's a virtuous cycle And it highly leveraged, but virtuous cycle that eventually takes care of itself. And all of a sudden you've got free cash flow to use for other things. Is that basically what you're doing?

That's one little strategy of the main thing. I would say the main focus is pretty much what my shirt says, which is love passive income. There you go.

Who, who wouldn't?

Yeah. It's funny because the whole infinite banking, like you're talking about there, became more popular in recent years. And so people started finding us that way online unintentionally. But definitely the whole core theme is really about becoming work optional. It gets to the point where you work because you want to, not because you have to. And, and that's why lots of people talk about retirement, but I've noticed with the younger generations lately, more and more people don't want to fully retire. They just want to have a life of meaning and purpose. And so that's why we switched to being, how do you become work optional, right? You have enough passive income to pay your bills. You could take months off work. You can keep working, you do whatever you want. And that's where real freedom comes in.

So how did you get to this place? Tell us your backstory.

Yeah, so I did it by doing the opposite and doing it wrong. That's, uh, that's a good way to learn. That's a good way to start. So it was interesting because I went to college and I actually wanted— I realized I wanted freedom pretty early on, and I knew that looking at certain professors, I could see the path of freedom versus the path of really bondage. And I noticed that the professors that more had their own consulting businesses were the ones that seemed to be a little bit more free, where the other ones that were relying upon that income, they were more like W-2 employees, were stuck. So I thought I should become a business consultant. I should become like the Bobs from Office Space, if you ever remember watching that movie back in the late '90s. And I thought I would just go in, consult businesses on how to do business and treat their employees, and then walk out with a big paycheck. I figured if I'm going to do that, should I have real-life business experience, not just an MBA? So I actually took a hiatus out of college. I said, I'm going to find some business to start. I have no clue what that business will look like, but I need to get some business experience in real life. And the first thing that came up was being a financial advisor, because I didn't know at the time it was so easy to get in, because all you had to do was pass a test with 70% and just not be someone who's gonna steal or kill someone. And if you don't have a criminal history, you're fine. And so I got hired on a— in a financial firm, and I started doing that. I started really enjoying being on, on that entrepreneur path, to the point where I never went back to college. Now, understand about money, I was not an expert about money. I was raised by my dad, who taught me good values. He taught me, like, your word is your bond. You work hard, you do what you say you're going to do. Don't half-ass anything, as he would say, or those kinds of things. And, but the thing he didn't teach me well about was about money, other than you should just save a lot of it. He was the ultra penny-pinching saver, the guy that would only buy things on sale. He'd always tell me things like, hey, we can't afford this. What do you think I am, made of money? Money doesn't grow on trees. Those kinds of phrases here growing up.

Right.

And so I didn't, I didn't want to live that way. So, uh, I said, all right, I'm going to. I'm going to at least learn about money for myself. And at best, maybe I'll even help my dad because my dad would also say things like, my job will literally kill me. Like I'm going to die working from the stress. Because already by his forties and fifties, he'd already had strokes and heart attacks by this point. And so I wanted to rescue him in a way. Right. And so I got into that business and I started enjoying being my own business owner. And I was drinking the Kool-Aid that you set it and forget it. You save forever. You're in it for the long haul. Take high risk to create high returns. And I just keep putting money away. And eventually if you put away $100 a month for 40 years, you'll have $1 million too. Those kinds of things. 4 years in, my dad finally reaches out to me, says, Chris, are you going to advise me at some point? So I sat down with my dad. First time ever saw his money. He had paid off all of his debt, including his house. He paid off about 18 years. He had also started saving all of his money in his 401, getting the match, doing everything that good boys and good little girls should be doing. However, I said, dad, you're 61 years old. If you want to retire today, you better hope you die in about 5 or 6 years because that's when you'll run out of money. He said, well, that's not what I want to hear. What else do I do? I said, I don't know. You did everything right. You pay, you're debt-free. You've been stuffing money in your 401, just like Dave Ramsey says to do. You're doing everything that all these, that I've been teaching. It's just not enough.

He wasn't investing the money or he wasn't investing it aggressively or what?

Oh, he was. Yeah. In fact, that was the problem because Y2K at that point had just hurt him. This is in 2005 when I sat down with him. So it was, the market was just recovering from Y2K. And of course we already know what happens if we flash forward a few years later after that, right? Anybody who had money in the market in 2000, and I know this because I had lots of clients that said this, they didn't actually get their money back until about 2014 or 2015, depending on how big the fees were coming out of their mutual funds. Right. So it took people about 15 years to finally have the money they had, only to find out they probably lost over half of it to inflation anyways. So it was really like, after 2020, when people finally said, I'm finally back up to where I was 20 years ago with inflation. And so my dad was no exception to that rule. And he was a baby boomer, obviously. He'd— Vietnam vet. But man, no matter how much he saved, it didn't seem like enough. He had to pretty much save into his 70s. And, and even then, he's still to this day— he's actually alive at age 80. None of us, including himself, never thought he would be alive today. Thank goodness for hospitals keeping him alive, keeping on my good diabetic-free diets. And so as a result, he's actually extended his life longer than he ever anticipated. But that's also a dangerous thing because our biggest fear, of course, and when people get to retirement is, will it last me? Will I run out of money before I'm dead? At what point does this run out? Anyways, long story short, I was pretty, pretty frustrated after I sat down with him because I realized the person that inspired me to want to help give him some freedom. I couldn't give him any freedom. And when the student's ready, the teacher appears. And about 2 weeks later, I reached out to a friend of mine who I trained to be a financial advisor, but then he quit to go do real estate investing. And I asked, and I called him up just thinking, oh, he's probably broke doing that real estate investing thing because that's high risk. Stock market's not high risk at all, which is a bunch of bull. It's the highest risk thing you could probably do. And I could reach out to him. I was like, how are you doing? He says, man, my life is awesome. My dad and I have partnered on some real estate deals, and I've now doubled his income as a professor at the local university. I said, hold on a minute, you just started doing this thing like 4 or 5 months ago. That's too good to be true. There's no way that my little financial advisor brain could accept this as reality. He said, Chris, let me ask you a question. How many of your clients are truly financially free where they don't worry about money? I said, they all worry about money, especially if you turn on CNN, you're going to worry about money all the time.

Right?

You're going to think the sky is falling if you turn on CNN. And he's okay, good job. 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 mutual fund investments. And as I was really honest with myself, and there were people in my office working since the mid to late 1970s, yet none of them were even close to being financially free enough to say I can retire. And so I said, none. There's your problem, Chris. Okay, then give me the answer, Chris. I won't give you the answer. You just got done arguing with me that stock market is better than real estate. I said, come on, give me something. All right, Chris, if you're really interested in learning about this, and I don't think you are because obviously you just argued with me, go get this book by Robert Kiyosaki called Who Took My Money, which is a lesser-known Rich Dad series book. Like, go get this book, Who Took My Money, and then listen to this AM talk radio show. It's pre-podcast era, right? Go listen to this AM talk radio show live every morning. At 9:00 AM here in Utah and listen to these two real estate guys talk about real estate and wealth and founding fathers and how that all ties together. So I did, I got the book, realized that mutual funds are horrible. And I was already starting to question it already by this point. And then of course, I'm listening to these guys talking about wealth and financial freedom and real estate investing and things like that, where just a few months later, I realized either I keep working as a financial advisor, even though I know it doesn't work because my paycheck relies upon it? Or do I keep my integrity intact and quit and do something else? And so I chose the latter. I actually quit there in March of '06. I said, I'll never teach about money again. I'll just be a mortgage broker and I'll teach ballroom dancing on the side. Yeah, because I was one of the nation's top amateur ballroom dancers in the early 2000s.

Wow, good for you.

Dancing with the Stars and that kind of stuff. So I was doing that kind of thing. So that's what I was doing, but I had to know how these real estate guys, these guys in their 20s and 30s were financially free and multimillionaires at that. And so I started learning what they were doing. And by the, by later that next year into 2006, I was actually able to become financially independent myself, where I was almost 28, almost 29 years old. I didn't have to work anymore. I actually had enough money to pay my bills each and every month. And that kind of put me in a different place. I wasn't sure what to do with because I, what do you do when you're 28 and you don't have a job? When you don't need a job anymore, you just keep working.

But the crash happened in 2008, 2009, and real estate went in the tank.

That's right.

How do you, how, what happened?

Yeah, so that's the, as, uh, what was it Paul Harvey used to say? The, that's the, the other part of the story. What do we, what do you call it? It was the, uh, it's been too long since I've listened to Paul Harvey. It's like, here's the rest of the story, I think it was called, right? But yeah, so in 2007, I decided to come outta retirement, teach people how to do what I did. How to Get Out of the Rat Race. And there's some other partners that got together to do this kind of thing. And we're on a mission to rescue people. Of course, like you said, mid-2007, I started to see it firsthand because the people we were teaching were real estate flippers. And flippers were the first ones to get affected because it was the credit market that changed first, right? Banks are changing the rules. I felt it because I bought my little McMansion. But even though I bought it, I was stuffing all my money into the equity of my house, believing Hey, I'll pay it off, but because I'm a mortgage broker, I can just get a cash-out refinance whenever I need it. So I never need the money. I'll just do a cash-out refinance. I remember July of '07, cash flow was getting a little tight. Plus I realized I had a lot of equity because there was a lot of appreciation in my property. I had $150,000 of equity in there. I thought, I'm going to get that money out. And the bank said, oof, you know what? If you just get your score up 2 more points, literally just 2 points more, We'll give you the loan. Come back to us in August. I went back in August. My score went up over 2 points. They said, oh, you know what? We just changed the rules last week. If you do X, Y, and Z, we'll give you the loan in September. September rolls around. I said, I did everything you guys asked me. Can we get this loan done or what? They said, we're sorry, we just changed the rules. There's no more cash-out refinances allowed. And, and all that equity was in that property, as you well know. Of course, we hear about 2008. That's when everything started to hit the fan after, you know, going into 2008 with Bear Stearns. By the way, my mortgage was actually with a subsidiary of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, right? Actually Lehman Brothers, not Bear Stearns, but Lehman Brothers. I did get a $300 settlement for mortgage fraud from Lehman Brothers, but that was about it. After they foreclosed, I had eventually foreclosed on that house when everything got tight because I ended up going in the hole $16,000 a month because not just because of my real estate, but because I had a new business that all of a sudden now all these people that used to be able to pay us couldn't pay us anymore. They're all real estate investors going broke at the same time. Our company's almost in bankruptcy. Personally, I'm almost going into bankruptcy. I was— in fact, it would've been easier if I filed bankruptcy because I wouldn't have to pay off all that debt. But I'm too dang stubborn. And, and something just spiritually told me, said, don't do that. Hang in there. You'd be glad you did. I didn't know hanging in there meant 2 years of pain and torture, but I did. I had collector calls calling all the time. Friends stopped calling, but collectors never stopped. And, and eventually. I started teaching people not how to get out of the rat race, but how to find money, how to get creative, how to get resourceful, how to find money you didn't know was there. Because that's what I was doing. I wouldn't tell them that. I wouldn't tell them I was flat broke and I was on welfare, but I would tell them, hey, if I help you find money, will you pay me? And they said yes. And so that's where I started a new business model of doing to the point where eventually by 2009, we're almost bankrupt. 2010, we made over $5 million that year because just, I just happened to hang in there long enough for the right relationship showed up, especially in chiropractic and dental. Communities, the right relationships came in. We helped them find on average like $34,000 a year.

And, and that was the time to buy too, because the property prices were so depressed.

Oh, exactly. Now, I didn't have any money to buy anything at that time. I wish I did. In fact, I remember my house when it foreclosed, I bought it for $612,000 and it eventually appreciated up to $740,000. And, and then of course I'd pay down the mortgage too, so that's why I had all the equity. When I foreclosed on that property, it sold for $342,900. Geez. And I thought, man, I wish I could have gone to the courthouse and bought my own house for myself. Cause that was way better price than even $612,000 when I originally bought it at 3 years prior. Any case, it is what it is. And it taught me a lot of good lessons, taught me how to be much wiser investor. I had to lose a lot of hair and add a lot of gray as a result of that. But it got me to the point where eventually by 2016, the end of 2016, I was able to have enough passive income to then say, I've done it once more. I'm now financially independent. I can pay my bills. And now anything I make in my business is just gravy. And that's where I've been since. And still teaching people how to do the same thing, which is why I have the Money Ripples podcast that we've had for the last 10 and a half years and everything else.

Do you just work by yourself or do you have a company with employees that you work with?

I was so just more self-employed for a while, but with the podcast and everything else, it started to gain some notoriety and stuff as such. I got to the point about 2020, 2021, where there were so many people coming in, I realized, okay, I'm part-time here. And that's when like the infinite banking thing with the life insurance strategy started coming up more often too. That was almost by accident. Um, but it just started to blow up, and I either had to get to the point I had to tell people, no, I'm not going to help you anymore, or two, do I end up more living a mission of helping more people, and that's going to require me having more help? And so I chose the latter, and now I have a team of about 10 people. That work with me and at this point and help me take MoneyRipples much larger area than I could have done by myself.

What do you think it is about yourself that, first of all, as you look back on all this, what is it today that gets you up in the morning and gets you excited to do what you do?

Yeah, so the name of my company is MoneyRipples, as I've already mentioned. That name actually came while I was on a run. I'm actually a marathoner and I was actually on a run one morning, and this is in 2012. This is when I worked with that other company. And I was feeling like this pull. I was feeling this pull that something might end with that company and I might be doing something bigger. And I was trying to come up with a name, and I was still thinking, would this just be like a side project? It wouldn't be like an actual company. I would just still stay with the company I was at because I was planning to take over that company and lead it. I remember just thinking, what do I call this company? What kind of website should I buy? What's the domain? I was trying to think of something with cash flow in it. And of course, anything with cash flow in it was like $10,000 minimum to buy for the, the The domain. And I remember just going for a run. I was like, what's my real vision here? And I remember thinking like there was hundreds of people we had already served just in the last few years. And I thought of one couple in particular. They were from North Dakota. We had helped them free up $6,000 a month doing nothing with investing, just purely with tax savings, creative ways to pay off debt, things like that. And with that $6,000, the very first month, the husband went and bought a four-wheeler. And the wife said, she's like, Chris, I know people will judge us for this, but you don't understand. My husband as a chiropractor thought that he would have to keep working 5, probably 6 days a week, and by the time we got him on the weekends, he was exhausted. This $6,000 a month we freed up, it's now given him permission to take off the weekends. And what's the thing we go do every weekend? We go four-wheeling. He's out with my kids. We're really— this $6,000 a month didn't just buy that four-wheeler, It bought our lives back. It bought my husband back. My kids have their father back and I have my husband back. And she's saying this like tears in her eyes. And I realized that's the thing. That's the why behind what I do. That ripple effect. It doesn't just affect him and her, but it affects a new generation, a legacy that he could pass on to his kids of something better, of more hope and freedom. It also helps that if they have more money, they're also— they stop being so narrowly focused on themselves like so many of us are. When we're just trying to pay our bills, and you can look at the community and what can that do for the community? And what does that do for the state of North Dakota? What does that do for the country of the United States? And what does that do ultimately across the world? And that's when that— the term money ripples came out of my mind.

Interesting.

Bought it for $7.95 from, from GoDaddy, much cheaper than $10 grand. And that's really what gets me out of bed every day is that ripple effect, is that you never know the lives that you can bless, right? As you're financially free, it's like With great power comes great responsibility. Spider-Man, right? It's the same thing, is that I could just sit back and live a comfortable life, or I can do something more that blesses more lives. And I really feel like God's put me on this planet to do more than just take care of myself and sit on a beach and drink mojitos or whatever. It's really about how do I go about blessing lives and then get them to do the same as well.

That's right. That's interesting. It's You sound like me talking when I teach people how to stop fights and arguments by how they listen. Yeah, I tell them, every time you listen to somebody, you listen them into existence. You're throwing a pebble in the pond of peace, and if enough of us throw pebbles into that pond, the ripples become a tsunami of peace, and we change everything around us.

So true.

Same idea.

Absolutely.

So what is it about you, Chris, that you think you personally that makes you, has made, makes you unique that you've been able to do this?

I think the one of the biggest things is perseverance. I'm persistent and I persevere. I'm, I, like I said, I'm a marathoner and the way I run my life and my business is like that steady, like just keep going one foot in front of the other. I'm not flashy. I'm, there's definitely more charismatic people in this industry than me. But I think that's part of why a lot of people also like me too, that they know I'm real, like I'm authentically who I am. One thing that actually was one of the biggest compliments I've ever received from somebody was, was a client that invited me out to lunch. He came out here to Utah and he said, hey, let's do lunch. And as we're sitting down, he said, Chris, I'll be honest, I actually asked around about you and I talked with one of your clients and I said, is this guy really true? Is this guy legit or is he just full of crap? Is he like most of these money guys that are just talk about a big game, but really behind the scenes they're just a jerk, right? Or there's just arrogant, egotistical idiots or whatever. And he said, and then he says, your, the client of yours said that no, the way that you see Chris on, on the podcast is the way he is in real life. He's, now I'm sitting with you at lunch, that's so true. And that for me was like the biggest thing. I don't care if anybody gave me awards and accolades. I don't even care about having stuff. I had stuff. I care about stuff when I was in my 20s and I didn't have any confidence in myself. I didn't have any self-worth. So I bought things to show people, to hide my lack of self-worth. But after losing everything, that's when I realized I had everything. I didn't have to try to be somebody else. I could just be me. And so I think there's that level of authenticity that people have abused to this day about the whole word authenticity, right? I am who I say I am. I try to be. It doesn't mean I'm perfect. Doesn't mean I'm definitely a flawed person. I make lots of mistakes. I figured a few things out because I never gave up. I just kept moving forward and I really care deeply. Like I really do have a, I really do care about other people, want them to succeed. And that's why I tell my team all the time not to threaten them. Tell them like, hey, I can shut this business at any time. I don't need this business. Honestly, my life would be simpler without my business. At the same time, my life wouldn't be as fulfilling without it either. That's the thing that keeps me going and keeps me wanting to spread this message of freedom and hope.

So along the way, you learned how to listen. Obviously, I can tell you're a pretty good listener. So tell us about that journey.

Yeah, you say that. I want to reject it because I think a lot of ways I'm not a good listener.

I can fix that. You really think you're not?

I have worked on a lot lately. I will tell you that much because you're right. It does create a lot more peace. And harmony. And, and I wasn't— I have not always been that way, especially when ego gets in the way, right? Yeah. I'm now going through Ego Is the Enemy for the second time just because that stoicism and everything else— oh, you know what, I need to take in that, internalize that a lot more. But definitely those crucial conversations people have had with me, sometimes I have to get in my face, just like my friend Doug did when he asked me, how many of your clients are financially free? How many of you guys are financially free? And one thing he knows about me and, or he found out about me is that yes, I do like to be accurate. I like to be correct in what I'm doing. And that means I have to admit when I'm wrong. And my wife finds that out all the time. She, trust me, she points that out at me constantly and telling me, hey, you messed up here, buddy. And it's true. But I think that's the biggest thing is that you have to listen, even opposing viewpoints. Like I'll still listen to guys like Dave Ramsey. Because sometimes there's things I agree with him on because I'm not the opposite polar extreme. He takes things to a very far extreme. I try to come in the middle where I'm like, yes, here's some truth that he says here, here's the rest of the truth he's not telling you. I'd like to do that. And I think that's what also ticks people off a little bit. I get some trolls, of course, especially when they see my little video shorts because then they hear only a portion of the context of what I'm teaching. But like, I had a guy tell me, hey, I've saved money in my 401 for years and I'm debt-free, and I max fund my 401 every day and anybody can do it. This is dumb. You say that people don't become millionaires. And I said, that's just arrogant of you to say that. Because how many people you think right now reading this comment saying, I don't have enough money to max fund? By the way, my dad was a guy who's trying to save every dime he could. He worked dang hard. He couldn't totally max fund his 401, but he saved as much as he could. And are you going to tell him that he did a poor job, that he's just making excuses? He's a whiner. That's a jerk move. Like, that's a jerk thing to say, actually. That's very insensitive. Like, I'm just trying to give people a little bit more hope that even if they can't max fund their 401 all the time, and even if they do, those people still come back to me later saying, I max funded it and it still didn't work for me because I still don't have income coming in. I just have a lot of money. And needless to say, he didn't have anything to say after that. But that's the thing is I understand where that guy's coming from and I have to listen to those viewpoints a little bit. But you also have to, like, listen to all viewpoints around just to get that a good assessment of where you are. Otherwise, if you're not listening to viewpoints, you just get a bunch of yes people around you. I think that's the most dangerous thing you could possibly have, is people that just say yes around you, and you never have any opposing viewpoints to correct you on.

Interesting. I teach people how— a different kind of listening. I teach them how to listen so the other person feels heard. So when it's listening, we're talking about ego. In, in the kind of listening I teach, there is no ego. It's all about service, making sure that you, Chris, feel deeply heard and understood, like, and validated like you've never been heard before in your life. Right. And that's the secret to relationship, in my opinion. So true. And so that's the kind of listening that very few people understand, very few people engage in, but it's the most powerful kind of listening because when you listen another person into existence and they feel heard and validated, They trust you, they like you, and they feel they'll follow you anywhere because, because you're the only person that really hears them and understands what they're saying.

And that's, so you just do the same thing that I've spent thousands of dollars in marriage therapy trying to learn.

It's not that hard to learn. And like I said, most of my clients figure it out in about 6 to 8 weeks, right? Spending an hour a week with me. It's just knowing. It's knowledge like anything else. And the knowledge that I, skill. The knowledge, the skill, and the knowledge I teach is not, it's not, you're not gonna find it anywhere out there other than through me because I was the only one crazy enough to go out and study the neuroscience to understand how all this worked. And I did that out of desperation as a mediator, cuz I needed to find a way to calm people down when I, I get engaged and people pay me a lot of money to come in and help resolve a conflict. And I didn't have any way to calm people down. And that kind of motivated me. It's very similar to what you're talking about except in my own domain.

And don't we need that more every day? More now. We do. I think since 2020 it's got worse. I mean, even 2010s, I remember making comments on social media saying, man, like people just need to listen more and stop and like calm the heck down. But we can post 2020, it's worse.

That's right. That's right. And, and the thing is we can, once we learn how to listen to each other, we don't have to agree with each other.

Yeah.

I don't have to agree with some politically polarized person whose views I find repugnant, but I can listen to them and I can make them feel heard and respect them even though I disagree with them. And that's all I need. That's all we need. And the other beauty about— the other beauty about listening is that it costs you nothing to do it. It costs you nothing, 90 seconds of your time. So it's a pretty cool thing.

So it really is.

So I'm cur— I'm, you, you've got me a little bit curious. So what you're doing now in terms with Money Ripple is you, what do you have an online course that people take or they come in and coaching program? And what is it exactly that you're providing people? How, with, how do you deliver the help that you're delivering?

We have both. We do have the online more for those that are just trying to get started.

Mm-hmm.

For those that usually have at least $150,000, $200,000 saying, how can I get this money working harder for me? So I have to work so hard for my money.

Right.

Then we have one-on-one consulting and things like that. And that's, Typically what we do is we try to help them. We don't, we're not investment advisors. We don't say you should put your money here or there. We don't cross that line, but we do act in some ways like a financial advisor loosely, because financial, anybody, almost anybody can be a financial advisor. You could be a Dave Ramsey counselor and be a financial advisor technically. But, but we do help people strategize with their money and figure out what's the best way I can get my money to get lean with it, get it liquid, like getting that money in my hands and then get it out. To produce passive income. And that's really what we help people do and strategize. And a lot of times people come to us because they're saying, you know what, I can see that there's this whole alternative investment world, right? They call it alternative investing, although it should really be called Main Street investing because it's the kind of investing that's been done for thousands of years versus Wall Street. That's very recent in history, right? Main Street's, hey, I'm gonna invest in something like real estate. It could be in business, it could be in something of a varying degree. Even when we talk about real estate, it's not like buying a property in your backyard. It could be buying a property across the country where somebody else manages it for you, right? You collect the checks, you're part of an LLC or something. Yeah, exactly. You're a limited partner lending money to an investor, right? Like you lend money to them and then they pay you back interest on that. So you become the bank. It could be you buying with other investors, go into an apartment building or self-storage units. It could be even to car wash businesses, or it could be oil and gas. It could be like a partnership I have where we have a raw land partnership where we buy and sell raw land to people and become the bank. Like we have a mortgage with them. I have $450,000 invested in that. That's paying me $11,000 a month right now. Those kind of things you can do that I'll tell you, I, as a financial advisor back in the day, never knew was even available. I knew about buying a house and renting properties, but I never knew to the scale, the grand scale. There's so many options out there and it pays you so much more money. It's got a client in California. His name is Dan. Oh, his name is Dan. He's still alive, but he's been on my podcast a couple of times and he's talking about how he's one of the top ranking military officials. And he came out at 60 years old and he goes to his financial advisor. He says, all right, I've got exactly $1 million in my 401. What do I do with it? And the financial advisor says, well, if you keep investing with it, maybe rebalance it, yada yada, you can live on $30,000 a year. Because financial advising now says you should only pull off 3% a year of the money you have. And Dan said, wait a minute, I'm a millionaire and you want me to live below the poverty line in the state of California? That doesn't sound like a good deal for me. And so he eventually was listening to some podcasts. He eventually found me on one, came, listened to my podcast, and reached out to us. And between things like a couple of duplexes, investing in apartment buildings, things like that, again, hands-off investor, not like somebody who's actually actively doing anything with those. Between all said and done is making over $100,000 a year with that same million dollars, not $30,000 a year. And that's the kind of thing that excites me. That's the thing that got me excited in 2006 when I first learned it. I said, wait a minute, I just realized that now someone has $100,000, they lend it out at 1% a month or 12% a year, which are several of those deals out there, they're making $1,000 a month, not $3,000 a year, $250 a month. It's now $1,000 a month. And that, and that's what excites me is that when people start to realize, wait, I actually have some hope. In fact, I might be able to have that freedom much, much faster, maybe even decades faster than what this financial advisor was telling me. That's what gets me excited.

One more question. I'll let you go. You've alluded to a couple of things, but we'll go a little deeper. What's one thing about yourself, Chris, that we wouldn't know about unless you revealed it to us?

Oh my goodness. I'm sure quite a bit. I'm trying to think, what have I not shared on hundreds of podcasts I've been on, right?

Yeah. There you go.

I joke with people. I got 5th place in my 3rd grade spelling bee, but a few people have picked up on that one. Darn that word piece. P-I-E-C-E, not E-I-C-E. I would have been 2nd place. It's like Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite. I think other things, like I'm actually a pretty introverted person. That maybe only like my closest team members know, but I'm not like— I'm like an extroverted introvert, right? Like, I do being around people, I like serving, but then I like to be alone. People are like, oh, so you're a marathoner, you probably like to run. I'm like, I do that in the morning. What do you do when you're like traveling out of— like when you're out traveling or doing stuff? And I'm like, I go back to my hotel room and I turn on Netflix. Like, nothing sexy or exciting at all. I have to live a very kind of quiet, peaceful life that way, even though I've got 6 kids plus 2 bonus kids.

Wow.

When I get alone time, I want to be alone.

You'll be interested knowing that— I don't know, I've done— you're— we're pushing— I've lost count of how many we have. I've been on for 10 years. I've been on for about 2, 2 and a half years, but I've got done over 170, 180 podcasts.

Wow.

The vast majority of leaders that I've interviewed are introverts.

Interesting.

Isn't that interesting? Very few.

Yeah.

Are extroverts. Everybody says exactly the same thing. Yeah, I can go out and be with people and do all that stuff, but when it comes to my time, I want to be by myself. Really interesting.

True. I remember hearing that the first time when I, I was doing speaker training, like live stage speaker training. And the, and the guy had actually said he's what guys like Les Brown, who's one of the most famous live speakers out there. Les Brown's an introvert. He's— in fact, some of the best speakers I know personally, he said, they're introverts. They're not gregarious or hugely extroverted. Right. They're introverts. And it doesn't mean an extroverted person can't be great that way. But I think we just assume that everybody's like this big extrovert because they can speak.

Because I'm an, I'm an introvert myself. And I was a trial lawyer for 22 years, tried a lot of cases, but I'm an introvert.

Yeah.

So Interesting. So interesting. I, I've really enjoyed the conversation, Chris. Thanks so much for taking time out of your day to be with me.

Yeah, same here. I really appreciate it.

Absolutely. Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.

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