Are you curious about turning your finances into a powerhouse of wealth? Join us on the Conquer Local podcast as we welcome Chris Miles, the Cash Flow Expert and Anti-Financial Advisor.

Tune in to discover how Chris teaches entrepreneurs and professionals to make their money work for them today. With his proven strategies, Chris has achieved financial independence twice, helped clients increase their cash flow by nearly $300 million in the last 12 years, and was featured in US News, CNN Money, Entrepreneurs on Fire, and Bigger Pockets. He has a proven reputation with his company, Money Ripples, for getting his clients fast financial results.

Don’t miss this episode as we explore Chris’ journey and his secrets to financial success!

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Discover the Secrets to Financial Success

Introduction

Jeff Tomlin: Welcome to the Conquer Local Podcast! Our show features successful sales leaders, marketers, thought leaders and entrepreneurs who will inspire you with their success stories. Each episode is packed with practical strategies, as our guests share their secrets to achieving their dreams. Listen in to learn the highlights of their remarkable accomplishments and get tips to revamp, rework, and reimagine your business. Whether you’re a small business owner, a marketer, or an aspiring entrepreneur, the Conquer Local Podcast is your ultimate guide to dominating your local market. Tune in now to take your business to the next level! 

I’m Jeff Tomlin and on this episode, we’re pleased to welcome Chris Miles

Chris Miles, the Cash Flow Expert and Anti-Financial Advisor, I love it. He’s a leading authority teaching entrepreneurs and professionals how to get their money working for them today.

Chris has leveraged his knowledge twice to become financially independent where his passive income exceeded his expenses. After the last recession, he successfully paid off $1 million in debt without filing bankruptcy. 

His expertise has garnered recognition, with features in US News, CNN Money, Entrepreneurs on Fire, and Bigger Pockets. He has built a reputation for himself through his company, Money Ripples, delivering fast and tangible financial results for clients, with his personal clients collectively increasing their cash flow by almost $300 million in the last 12 years.

Get ready Conquerors for Chris Miles coming up next on this week’s episode of the Conquer Local Podcast.

Chris Miles, The “Anti-Financial Advisor,” Shares his Journey to Financial Freedom. 

Jeff Tomlin: Chris Miles, welcome to the Conquer Local Podcast, man. Thanks for taking some time out of your busy day to join us. How are you doing?

Chris Miles: Man, I am awesome. Definitely excited to be here today.

Jeff Tomlin: Hey, well, I’m excited to have you on. There’s a saying that cash flow is king. I think this is going to be a relevant conversation to absolutely anyone who’s listening. First off, I love the moniker “the anti-financial advisor.” Sot tell me the story around that.

Chris Miles: Yeah, it’s because I used to be one, and then I realized I was just a salesman in a suit is really what I was. Taking it back, I mean, I wasn’t a financial genius growing up. All I knew is that my parents taught me there was never enough money. “You can never afford it. Hey, it’s too expensive. What do you think I am, made of money? Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know,” and all those kind of phrase you hear growing up. And so when they taught me about money, especially with my dad, it was all about save everything you can get. That was it. That was my financial strategy to save everything. Well, of course, after college I wanted to become a business owner, so I was looking for some business to start before I became a business consultant and become a financial advisor was on the table. And I thought, well, I’d like to learn about money. That’d be great. And so I did that. Then it’d be my actual entrepreneur journey. I started as a financial advisor learning about spend nothing, save everything, save it forever, stuff it away in the stock market and hopefully someday you have something, right? Well, as years go by, my dad then says, “Hey, why don’t you sit down and meet with me? Why don’t you become my financial advisor?” And so I sat down with my dad, saw his money for the first time in my life, because he’s always the kind of guy that was guarded, close to his chest. He didn’t want anybody to know how much money he had. Well, I see his numbers. He said, “I’m 61 years old. I want to retire.” He had paid off his house early, so he was totally debt free. He had stuffed money in his 401. I mean, he was like Dave Rand’s poster child. And guess what? I told him, I said, “Dad, if you want to retire today, you better hope you die in five years because that’s how long it’s going to be before you run out of money.” “Okay, well what do I do, Chris?” “I don’t know because you did everything right from what we teach as financial advisors.” And that bugged me a lot because for someone that… Essentially I’ve been selling the dream for the previous years before that as a financial advisor. If you stuff your money away, pay off all your debt, you’ll be able to retire happy on a beach or something like that. But that wasn’t the reality. The reality was that nobody was able to do this. It got pointed out to me by a friend who was a real estate investor. I actually hired him to be a financial advisor, but then he quit, went to do real estate investing. I talked to him. He said, “Chris, well, how many of your clients are actually financially free where they don’t worry about running out of money?” I said, “Well, even the retired ones worry about running out of money, so that’s everybody. So nobody’s financially free that way.” “Okay, great job, Chris. Well, how about this? How many of you guys as financial advisors are financially free? Not off the commissions you’re earning, but actually doing the investments you’ve been recommending?” As I really was honest, brutally honest, I looked around mentally, kind of had a mental image of all the people in our office. Some had been working there since the late-1970s, and yet none of them could retire.

And I said, “Well, maybe none.” “There’s your problem.” And so that got me on a different quest, a different journey, almost like taking the Matrix red pill. I started looking at things that were outside of what financial advisors recommend. And next thing you know, I’m starting to do real estate investments and whatnot. And later that next year after I quit being a financial advisor, I was able to retire myself when I was 28 years old. And that blew my mind that it could be that simple, that it didn’t take a financial genius. It didn’t require me to find the right mutual funds or stocks. It was about doing the right things to get the right results. And that’s the thing that since 2007 I came out of retirement, started teach people how to do what we’re doing today. We have our Money Ripples Podcast and we teach a lot of people and try to create that ripple effect through people’s lives. And that’s thing that’s been fun is that we’ve had a lot more people doing the same kind of thing that I did, which is they become work optional. You work because you want to, not because you have to.

Financial Myths Debunked: High Risk, Rate of Return, Debt. 

Jeff Tomlin: That’s so interesting. I remember fairly young in my career or early in my career, I recognized that, man, if I put this savings plan into practice and I do the right thing, I save a little bit of my income every single month, I put it away, and then what I have at the end of the day, I’m still not going to be able to retire on that if you do the math. And then I looked around because I’ve got a buddy who’s a financial advisor, really successful one, and got talking to him about, well, how many people can actually work this program and how many people that are putting money away in their savings get to this point where they can retire and retire with the same lifestyle that they’ve been used to living? Not many people could do it. So yeah, that really resonates. I wanted to ask you, what are some of the myths about financial advice that you’re looking to debunk through the things that you do now?

Chris Miles: You hear a lot of interesting teachings. You hear things like high risk creates high returns. You want to be able to really make it big with your money. You got to take all these risks. You got to gamble with it essentially. But think about that from a real life perspective. The definition of risk is chance of loss. When did a higher chance of losing become a higher chance of winning? Because if that were the case, the most riskiest investment with my money I could do is buy a whole bunch of Powerball tickets. So we should just all cash all of our money or cash in your house, sell your house, sell off all your assets, and all of us go in together and buy a lottery ticket. That’s what we should be doing. But no, that’s not the case. The only people to tell you to take high risks are those that want your money, and they’re going to take low risks with your money. For example, if you put your money with Fidelity, for example, notice that Fidelity never stops paying themselves if you lose money if the market goes down. They will always take out their fees whether you make money or not. They get the guaranteed fee. They take low risk, or they let you gamble all your money in the stock market. That’s the one thing that I don’t like is that they teach you one thing so that you put your money with them and keep it there forever, so they keep making money off of you forever. Another myth. You hear people talking about the rate of return of the stock market is 12%. I even hear guys like Dave Ramsey preach that over and over. Guys, it has never been 12%, and at least not for a long period of time. The 2010s broke 12%. But over 30 years, even the last 30 years, even with the market hitting up near all-time highs, right now it’s only been just under 8% for the S&P 500. And most people’s mutual funds don’t even get that close. In fact, if you have a Fidelity 401(k) with your employer, well, guess what? Those target date funds that 45 million people have access to across the country, those target date funds do 2% worse than the stock market average.

So if they’re doing under 6% and then they have a three-quarter percent fee coming out, you’re lucky to make 5%. So even if you get a little match, you’re not making enough. So you have all that kind of stuff out there. And even saying debt’s always bad, well, yeah, if you’re a bad steward of your money, it is, but is it really? It’s just all these things about money that we’ve been taught that really just keep us in a box. They’ll put our money in prison. It’s throw your money at the advisor.

Don’t ever take it out because you’re in it for the long haul. That’s another myth. Just got to put it in there. And if it goes down, just leave it in there longer like my dad did where he literally worked until his 70s before he was forced into retirement. Then he’s just now trying to stretch out his money as long as he can. So all that stuff is really leading people to put their money in prison, lock it up in your house, whatever it might be. But when you need the money, you can’t get it out like what happened in the last recession, things like that. That’s just ridiculous advice. We could be doing so much better with our money than that.

Jeff Tomlin: Hear, hear. We were talking about this in the preamble a little bit, you’ve got a framework, Seven Secrets to Free Up Cash. You want to dig into that a little bit? How can people free up cash?

Chris Miles: Yeah, so interesting thing that happened to me during the last recession because I retired and then I came out of retirement and I was starting a new business with some partners and we’re kicking that sucker off in 2007 right when the recession is about to hit. And of course, everybody we were focusing on at that time were real estate flippers. They were flipping properties, which those are the people that got hurt the worst in the last recession. So as a result, my own finances started going downhill, especially because all that money I put in my business, now we’re shelling out money. I’m basically working for free. My investments are going downhill. The next thing I know, I’m in the hole, $15,000 a month. So at that point in about 2008, I stopped teaching people how to get out of the rat race because I was back in the rat race myself. So instead, I started teaching people what I was doing, which was finding money, how to get resourceful with it.

And so that’s where those seven secrets came from is actually what literally pulled me out over a million dollar debt hole, got me not only to do that, but then by the end of 2016 was able to once again become work optional where I was able to retire if I wanted to. For example, one of the things I always tell people do is start tracking your money. Because when I was making a lot of money, I didn’t worry about tracking it because money was like air. The only time you count your breaths of air is when the air runs out or it’s getting in short supply. Same thing with money. A lot of times if we could just start really to track our money and be wise stewards of our money while things are good, when things get bad or if they ever get bad, you are always prepared. You are in a better position. I’ve had people, especially business owners, I’ll tell you, business owners are the funniest people because they have money leaks all over the place. Most of them don’t ever track their money, whether it be in their business and/or their personal life. And so I had people do both. And what’s interesting is that I had one woman, she was a contractor. She did a lot of graphic design work and whatnot, and she’s like, “I’m just too busy to track my money.” I said, “Try it. Watch what’ll happen.” She did it, freed up $1,800 a month without sacrificing her lifestyle just because she was watching her money. She was just a little bit wiser with it. They still ate out, they still went on vacation, they still did fun stuff, but they just stopped blowing it in different places. 1,800 a month, that’s literally over 20 grand a year that’s back in their life. I had another woman, Silicon Valley, California, her and her husband making a quarter million a year, but paycheck to paycheck. They started doing this, found out eating out alone, they were spending $5,600 a month just eating out. And by the way, this is 2010, so you almost double that number now with inflation. That’s how insane it was. Needless to say, we freed up over 70,000 a year for them just between that, tax savings. There’s a lot of things, especially if you’re a business owner, you could free up a lot of money with tax savings too and tax strategies. That’s another one of those secrets we talk about too.

Tracking Money and Paying off Debt through Measurement and Prioritization. 

Jeff Tomlin: When I was really young, we just got married, one of the things that always stands out in my mind is I wasn’t tracking my money religiously and treating it like I should have been. It’s insidious how it starts to leak, and there’s a moniker in marketing, you improve what you measure. And so if you actually measure things, you start paying attention to it. And I remember one year after several years, my wife and I, we were lucky enough to have a line of credit, but we always consistently spent a little bit more than what we made, and so we started incurring debt because I think that convenient thing was there. And one year we decided to hunker down, measure what we were spending and cut into it, and we paid off $25,000 in debt. We weren’t making much at the time, but that sticks out in my head. I mean, your story resonates with me. If you pay attention to it and you measure it, it’s amazing what you can do, isn’t it?

Chris Miles: It is. It’s interesting you mentioned debt because debt’s an interesting one that a lot of people either taught, one, you aim for the highest interest rate, or two, the lowest balance. And sometimes it works out. But I’ll tell you from my experience, when I was in the hole, I didn’t care what the interest rate was. I cared about how much was coming out of my pocket each month. That was the thing that hurt the most is month after month, what’s killing me? Because if you can at least get to the point of breaking even, you can get ahead on debt because you’re always paying principal and interest. Well, one equation that I’ll teach you guys right now that I learned was doing what’s called a cash flow index. This is something I figured out, I was actually working late into the night because I was trying to figure out how to dig out of my hole. I couldn’t sleep, and I started looking at my debt like it was an investment. If I pay off this loan, what’s my rate of return? Because I was also doing passive investing. I was like, well, if I got this much cash, do I invest it or do I pay off debt? What’s going to give me the better month on month cash that I need to have? Is it the paying off the debt that frees up the money, or is it investing in investment that pays me income that could more than pay for that payment? Well, eventually I created the index, which is I take the balance of the loan divided by the minimum required monthly payment, I’ll get a number. I’ll get that index. So for example, say that you’ve got a $10,000 car loan that’s $500 a month. Maybe it’s a low interest rate, but it’s 500 a month, but you also have the $10,000 credit card that’s 200 bucks a month. Well, if you were to ask most people which one they tell you to pay off if all you have is 10,000 bucks, they’d say credit card, right? Pay off that credit card. Get rid of it. All that interest is horrible. But I beg to differ. I know that the stress in most people’s lives, and it’s more psychological when you’re trying to battle money, it’s really about what that payment’s doing to you, because that payment is what puts you on bondage, right? And so I told him, I was like, “No, I would pay off the $500 a month car loan even if it’s lower interest because I now have more freedom. I have more options. Because if I have the extra 500 a month, I can always put on that credit card and pay 700 a month and I’ll still pay it off in less than a year, hardly charging me any more interest anyways.” But so many people get caught up on, oh, it’s a credit card, I got to pay that off first. No. Pay off the one that has the highest payment with the lowest balance ratio, which is that cash flow index. So if you do that index, 10,000 minus 500 divided by 500 is 20, versus the credit card, 10,000 divided by 200 is 50. So I pay off the lowest index first and then I do that whole little debt snowball using the index to free up that money.

Create Multiple Income Streams to Achieve Financial Freedom and Success. 

Jeff Tomlin: Ah, smart. I love that. One of the things, by the way, that strikes me is in today’s day and age, even double income families, a lot of people are struggling to make ends meet. You’d think typically in the past you have two incomes, you should be doing good, especially if you’ve got relatively good incomes. But people are still struggling now even if they’ve got two pretty good incomes. So from the lens looking, and you’re talking to entrepreneurs or you’re talking to professionals, how are different ways that they can create multiple income streams to help not just make ends meet, but start getting ahead of the game and get to where they want to go?

Chris Miles: You can really separate it into three different types of income. There’s active income that you basically work for. There’s residual income, which works in business where that’s like passive income in your business. You have to put some work in up front, but then it’ll pay you over time. And then there’s passive income, which that’s where you get your money to start working for you instead. It’s like having your own employees, but they’re your Franklin’s, right? That kind of thing. Active income, a great way to do that, and that’s what I had to do myself to dig out of that hole, is I had to figure out how to get my active income up. You can only cut your expenses back so far or you’re living in a cardboard box, right? So it’s not all about expenses. Expenses are limited. Income can be limitless. So I started really going back to that fundamental principle I teach all my clients, which is dollars follow value. If you want to get paid more money, find out how you can create more value for more people. How can you add more value? How can you solve people’s problems? How can you serve them in such a way that money’s just a natural byproduct? See, as a financial advisor, money was always mysterious to me. Even though I taught about money, it didn’t really make sense. Because I would think, well, you either got to be lucky or you got to get in the right time or something. It was always some scarcity type of belief. But in truth, it always came back to, how am I serving people? How am I solving problems for them to where they know that it’s better to have me in their life than not at all? Once I flipped that script, that’s when everything changed. That’s when making money became formulaic. It became easy. So do that on the active side, it’s really easy to do. And that would even tie in with the residual. If you’re a business owner, what are things you can do that maybe you can automate? What are things you can do that doesn’t require you to have to always be working and being awake? Do you have monthly memberships you can be doing? Do you have intellectual property products or something like that you can offer and sell that you can get paid on even while you’re sleeping? Those kinds of things. Those are the kind of things we talk about with residual. And then my favoruite is passive. Passive is when I’ve got money and I’m like, what can I do with this money to work for me so I can actually stop working myself if I chose to? By the way, I don’t ever intend to stop working necessarily, because I’ve been able to retire twice and look, I’m here today, aren’t I?

Jeff Tomlin: Here you go.

Chris Miles: But it’s so nice to know that I can shut down Money Ripples at any time and I’ll be just fine. Now, my employees don’t like hearing that, but I tell them that they’re safe. I like doing this. This is a passion project for me. But passive becomes great. For example, I had a client, he had $1 million from his retirement account being in the military for several years. He goes to his financial advisor, and like all financial advisors, they say, “Well, you have $1 million,” or any amount of money for that matter, “you can live on 3% a year and you shouldn’t run out of money before you’re dead.”

Think about that, $1 million living on 3% a year. He’s living on $30,000 a year in the state of California. That’s what homeless people live on in California, right, because it’s so expensive. It’s so hard. So instead, he came to us, he said, “All right, what can we do?” And so we looked at different things that are backed by real estate, not throwing it into stocks, hoping and praying it works out, but things that are backed by real estate, whether it be properties that somebody else manages for them. It could be apartments, could be duplexes, things like that. But again, you’re hands off, even oil and gas and different things, lending your money out to get a contractual rate of return, usually at least 10 or 12% a year. And so his million dollars went from 30,000 a year to 130,000 a year and not even touching of his money. That’s just the interest that kicks off. That’s the difference. That’s the kind of stuff that if you’ve got money lying around, let’s put it to work so then it gives you some break. Even a guy in Hollywood, we’ve heard about the writer’s strike, not to mention 2020 they shut down for a long time too, he’s been out of work on and off for the last three years. The cool thing is he’s got just a few hundred… It was almost to the point where he’s financially independent where he could actually just stop completely. He’s only a few hundred bucks short every month, even if he doesn’t work a job at all. But luckily, we got a little bit of emergency savings perhaps in that few hundred bucks a month, but he’s got almost $4,000 a month of passive income coming in to cover his expenses. That’s the difference. That’s the freedom it gives you. And I’ll tell you, if you’re a business owner especially, if you have those other streams of income coming in and you don’t have to make money, the ironic thing is people want to pay you more money. When you’re not desperate for money, that’s when everybody wants to pay you.

Strategies to Free up Cash: Track Money, Pay off Debt, and Sell or Donate Items. 

Jeff Tomlin: That’s funny. I want to make sure I cross some things off, because a lot of this is gold and I can tell it’d be super, super helpful to anyone that’s listening. You’ve already talked about this a little bit, but I’d like you to walk through bullet point a couple of quick strategies that people can use to free up cash right now. And like I said, you’ve talked about a couple of them, but maybe if you can enumerate a few of them, then we can jot them down and people can jot them down and move on. Then there’s a question I want to ask you about infinite banking after that.

Chris Miles: You bet. So number one I mentioned was tracking your money. That’s always the basis. Number two I mentioned was how to pay off your debt. Don’t fear debt, but do respect it. And so using that cash flow index is a key way to know if you’re to pay off debt, I would use that. And by the way, here’s the bonus with that index, only really accelerate or pay off the debt faster for those that are a 40 or less. It’s higher, pay minimum payments. Don’t worry about it. And don’t throw extra payments on all your debt. That’s something that really just doesn’t add a lot of freedom to your life and can actually create more stress. So just focus on one debt at a time. Lowest cash flow index first. The third thing I would say is basically get rid of stuff. Sell stuff, donate it, whatever it might be. My mantra is if you’re not going to use it, lose it. You can sell things online for dirt cheap just to get a little bit of extra cash. You can do that. Actually that’s how I weathered through the last part of my last recession, all the crap I was going through. The last thing I was doing was I started selling off stuff, cleaned out the garage so we could actually park our cars in the garage. As I did that, we made a couple thousand bucks that summer as we sold off our stuff. That got us through. That helped us to start paying off some of those debts until I was able to get that income back up again. Also, even if you just donate it, you can donate things and get that write off on your taxes. Who doesn’t want to pay less in taxes? So that’s a great way to do it too. And by the way, bonus, if you happen to have a local library and you’re trying to donate DVDs, CDs, anything media based like that, you can actually get double the write off on your taxes. Again, I’m not a CPA, so I’ll put the disclaimer out. Talk to your local accountant about that. That’s something I discovered just the last few years,

Jeff Tomlin: By the way, so I like that, I’m shocked and amazed if you start decluttering and getting rid of stuff, how much it can add up. I’ve got this deal with my son. My son just turned 16, and so I told him that I’d help him buy a car. I’ll pay for half of it, but he’s got to come up for half. When he was small, he had a paper route, so he squirreled away a little bit. But if he wants to get something that’s roadworthy, he’s got a bit of work to do. So I started saying, “Hey, you can sell some of our stuff. Here are some things that if you get rid of it, I’ll let you keep the…” And I’m shocked at how much money he’s starting to add up in his little bank account there. It adds up quickly, doesn’t it?

Chris Miles: It really does. It doesn’t take a lot, but it’s like a lot of little efforts that can create a bigger result. And that’s where people get lost. Most people never take that first step because they think, well, it doesn’t move the needle that much. Well, that’s maybe true, but remember, every steps in a mile, it just starts with that first step, and the next step, and the next step. And the next thing you know, just walked or ran a 5K. You didn’t even know it. So that’s the thing to remember is that every little bit counts. And when somebody keeps making excuses they don’t want to do something, that might be your opportunity to step in and do it. It reminds me of in a neighbourhood I lived in, there was kids that would go around the neighbourhood saying, “Hey, we’ll pull out your trash cans for you.” Oh, great. How much is it? Two bucks a month. I’m like, I don’t have to remember about which day is trash day? Take it away. They pull it out and take it back. Eventually, I even told them, I said, you know what? Based on psychological conditions when it comes to sales and things like that, actually just bump it up to $5 a month. No one will bat an eye. And the funny thing is they never did it. They were too scared, but the other neighbour kids bought it from them. And guess what they did? Bumped up to five bucks a month, kept all of their neighborhood clients, more than double their income.

Jeff Tomlin: Entrepreneurs.

Chris Miles: It’s the simple stuff. It’s the stuff that people never think that somebody would pay for. That, again, if it solves a problem or serves somebody in some way, there could be a way to make money from that.

Infinite banking is a tax-free savings account using whole life insurance. 

Jeff Tomlin: Tell us about this concept of infinite banking. What’s this all about?

Chris Miles: Yeah, it’s really a tax-free supercharged savings account when it’s designed the right way, when it’s set up the right way. The interesting thing is this is money that I can be able to use not only to just save and have tax-free and it’s liquid to use whenever I need it, but it pays more than point nothing percent at the bank, and I can even use it with my investments to get it to pay me twice, pay me in two places at the same time. Now, the vehicle you use is actually a whole life insurance policy, which when I first heard about the concept, especially after being a financial advisor, I said, “Okay, come on. This has got to be a bunch of crud here because there’s no way something as boring as a whole life insurance policy to do this.” Now, I was just reiterating what other financial advisors told me. I didn’t know anything about it. But when I started to learn about it from other investors and how they used it and how I was able to, again, get paid on this cash that’s inside of it, not the death benefit, not the thing that you’re paid on when you die, but the cash savings account that they have in there, you can actually reduce the costs in it so that most of it goes right to your cash account, and then it grows and grows. And you can use that money to invest while it’s still in there growing. So there’s some really cool things you can do with it where you can actually leverage using the insurance company to get access to that money and let it grow in two places at once.

Jeff Tomlin: It almost sounds like magic.

Chris Miles: It is when you first hear about it. And then when you see it, you’re like, oh, this has been used for years. I mean, have you ever been to Disney World? If you’ve ever been there, it was evidence of doing the same strategy, because Walt Disney had to do it just to get the banks to give him money for Disney World. So he did the same thing. He actually cashed out money from his house. He got a mortgage on his home, and he used the life insurance policy as collateral so the bank would give him more money to be able to create, really build Disney World and get that investment going. Pampered Chef, if you or your spouse ever used Pampered Chef, that was started with that seed money. Ray Kroc used the same thing to pay his first executives after he bought it from the McDonald’s brothers. So he did the same thing too. So it’s not a new idea. Even JCPenney used it to pay their employee wages during the Great Depression. I mean, this is something that’s not new, but it’s always been bigger corporations or richer people have used it, but now there’s ways for even people in the middle class can use it too.

Actionable Steps to Free up Cash – Get Lean, Get Liquid, and Get Out. 

Jeff Tomlin: Nice. So it was super helpful walking through some of your bullet points on how to free up cash. So if we’re thinking about takeaways now for the audience, what are some of the actionable steps and the place where you want people to start if they want to start getting into a place where they’ve got freedom and they free up cash and get to the place where they want to be in terms of lifestyle, what are some of the actionable steps that you tell people to start with?

Chris Miles: If we were to basically summarize this whole thing here, it’d be get lean, get liquid, and get out. Get lean, get liquid, get out. Get lean, like we talk about tracking your money, understanding where are good productive expenses in your life, where are expenses that maybe aren’t worthwhile. So make sure you’re getting lean. Make sure that you have extra cash you can use and do things with. Get liquid means where are you putting your money into prison? Are you stuffing money into those retirement plans, whether it’s the RSP in Canada or 401(k) in the US, or whatever it might be? Are you dumping cash in those places, but then you can’t get to it when you need it? What if you’ve got that money and put into a savings account instead or in that infinite banking savings so you can actually allow that money to be used? So that’s what I mean by get liquid. Don’t pay off this house extra early when you can’t get the money out of the house when you need it. Because the time the banks will give you money is when you never need the money. So get liquid. Make sure you have cash available. And then get out is when you get that cash available, how do we get it out to start working harder for you?

Getting in Touch with Chris Miles to Continue the Conversation on Money Management.

Jeff Tomlin: I love it. That is a great way to wrap things up with the last word. Hey, I want to thank you so much for being on the Conquer Local Podcast. Chris, if people want to continue the conversation with you, how do they reach out with you?

Chris Miles: Yeah, two ways. You can either go to moneyripples.com, which is our website there, lots of free information and education you can get there, or just follow our Money Ripples channel on YouTube or our Money Ripples Podcast on iTunes, wherever you tend to consume content like that.

Jeff Tomlin: Hey, it was an absolute pleasure. Thanks for taking time out of your busy day to join us in the Conquer Local Podcast. Best of luck to you. I know you don’t need luck now, but I do hope you will come back to the podcast and we can catch up with you another six months, a year down the road and see how you’re doing, see what things have changed, and pull a little bit more wisdom from you and share with the audience.

Chris Miles: I’d be honoured. Thank you.

Conclusion

Jeff Tomlin: So, wrapping up our conversation with Chris Miles, we’ve gained some valuable tips on reshaping our financial mindset. It’s not about taking big risks for high returns, as Chris debunked that myth. Instead, he highlights the strategic management of debt and the importance of clearing up financial misconceptions.

But it doesn’t stop there. Chris leaves us with a practical approach, encapsulated in his mantra: “Get Lean, Get Liquid, and Get Out.” I love it. It’s about tracking expenses, avoiding financial imprisonment, and strategically investing available cash for long-term growth and independence. 

If you’ve enjoyed Chris Miles’ episode discussing Financial strategies, keep the conversation going and revisit some of our older episodes from the archives: Check out Episode 641: Mastering Success in Finance: Insights from a Renowned Business Coach with Geraldine Carter or Episode 632: Transitioning from Hourly Billing to Effective Pricing Models with Jonathan Stark.

Until next time, I’m Jeff Tomlin. Get out there and be awesome!