Table of Contents
Podcast Transcription
Dave Dubeau [00:00:09] Everyone, Dave Dubeau here with another episode of the Property Profits Real Estate podcast today zooming in from all the way from beautiful Utah. We’ve got Chris Miles. How are you doing today, Chris?
Chris Miles [00:00:20] Fantastic, Dave.
Dave Dubeau [00:00:22] That’s good. So folks, Chris is an interesting fellow. He is the first and only financial planner that I am interviewing on the show. Usually, this is all about real estate real estate investors. Chris caught my eye because he calls himself the anti-financial advisor, but he is actually a financial advisor and asset. So I really like his concept about, you know what? You don’t have to wait 30 or 40 years before you can start seeing the fruits of your investing labors. He’s really focused on, Hey, let’s create cash flow. Let’s do this sooner rather than later, and let’s help you escape the rat race and live whatever financial life it is that you want to live right away. My on the right track there, Chris.
Chris Miles [00:01:11] One hundred percent. Yep.
Dave Dubeau [00:01:12] Awesome. Very good. So Chris, why don’t we just get to dove in there? Tell me a little bit about why you like this label? The Anti Financial Advisor.
Chris Miles [00:01:23] Because I had to repent,
Dave Dubeau [00:01:26] you know,
Chris Miles [00:01:27] almost 20 years ago, I actually I wanted to be an entrepreneur. So I was looking for something to do and I didn’t realize that they take anybody off the street to be a financial adviser, right? As long as you pass a couple of tests. They’re like, You’re awesome. So I actually started being a financial adviser almost 20 years ago. The mainstream stuff, the person that says, pay off our debt, save everything, spend nothing, save it forever and crappy mutual funds. And hopefully someday, if you’re lucky, you might be you might have some kind of retirement, right? I mean, that’s the basic message, you know, of every financial advisor.
Dave Dubeau [00:01:58] Just to give you a heads up, Chris. I actually looked at getting into this business myself almost 20 years ago, switching careers. I went, took all the tests pass. The test was learning about my big brother had been a financial planner for like twenty three years. So he’d been in the business a while and I was looking at this and I was looking at mutual funds and really kind of learning about that. And up here in Canada, it’s even worse in the states. Oh yeah. Not that. The highest from what I understand, the highest expense charges of any civilized country kind of thing. So Canadians make even less money than our American counterparts on our mutual funds. I thought there’s no way in hell I’d buy one of these things. Why do I want to try and schlep these things to people? So I switched courses, but I digress. So you’re repenting from having done that for a while?
Chris Miles [00:02:49] Yeah. See, you’re just smarter than I was. It took me four years to figure it out, right? And it was it was interesting because it wasn’t. I mean, I started to see some problems because like you, I started really looking at the reality, right? I like to look at evidence and as I start to see it, as time went on, I realized even people I was inheriting as clients from decades of financial advice. They were much better off than the rest of Americans. You know, like they had accounts and such. But I mean, half of them wanted their previous advisors to go to jail because of Y2K, because that’s when I came in. The business was right after everything crashed and tanked from 2000 to 2002, right? So they all wanted those guys in jail. They hated financial advisors, you know, and I sort of look at the numbers I realized, Wait, if I look at real returns of the market, not the average return, right? Because average returns are deceiving because if you lose 50 percent in the fund, you will think even as advisors, we got quizzed on this and we all got it wrong. Like someone asked and I said, If you lose 50 percent of fund, so you go from $10000 to say under $5000, you lost 50 percent. And then the person asked, the trainer asked us, Now what do you need to get back to 10000? And we all said 50 percent, right? Because that’s not, yeah, you’re shaking your head because, you know, it’s not true because you do simple math. You’re like, No, it’s 50 percent. All you see is 7500. You haven’t got back to breaking even you need 100 percent because if you lose half, you got to now double, so you go from May to 50 to 100. He says you do the average on that over two years one hundred minus 50 50 divided by two years. Twenty five percent a year. And it was a big epiphany. This is like 2004 when we really brought this up and I started to really dig deeper and I realized, like, wait a minute, the market has an average 10 or 12. Well, it’s averaged 10 or 12 percent, but it hasn’t yielded 10 or 12 percent. Its real ROI yielded closer to seven to eight percent. And then you take out fees, then you’re like, if you get maybe six percent right and therefore
Dave Dubeau [00:04:42] more for if you’re
Chris Miles [00:04:43] Canadian and if you have inflation, then you’re like, I’m not making anything, you know? So that was a big epiphany. And but again, my pocketbook was tired of it. I didn’t want to separate from it, but there was a guy who was a friend of mine that I actually trained that business that left to do real estate investing right. This isn’t the end of 2005, beginning of 2006, and we started this debate about what’s better stocks or real estate, you know? And he finally just asked me, said Chris, how many of your clients are financially free? Like where you’re not worry about money, not just retired, but not worry about money? I said, well, none because they watch stupid news programs like CNN and nobody can live in faith or, you know, they’ll all be in fear if you watch any kind of those news programs. So I’m like none. They’re all financially in bondage to some level is like, Well, there’s know. Good job, Chris. There’s Checkmark number one you struck out on. Well, how about this? How many of you guys, as financial advisors, are financially free, not off the commissions but actually off of doing the investments you’ve been recommending? And I thought about it was like, well, none. He says there’s a problem like these guys have been doing since the late 70s and they still can’t retire. So what makes you think your clients will be able to retire? And it was like a shot between the eyes and I was like, Crap, do I do? And I remember he told me to get a book by Kiyosaki called Who Took My Money, the lesser known rich that book right, that rips into my mutual funds. And then he had me list this radio program that real estate investors were doing. And I’ll tell you, it blew my mind open because and this is where I became the anti-financial visor. I vowed never to do financial planning. After this, I quit. March 2006, I said I would just teach ballroom dancing and I’ll be a mortgage broker. Like that was going to be my path. But people want to keep asking me questions, and I was actually able to retire myself because I realized it wasn’t about accumulation, right? Which is what every adviser tells you is accumulate, accumulate, accumulate, then live on less than the interest. And there’s that whole dumb rule about the four percent rule, which they say has been proven, but it was proven based on all the interest rates they haven’t updated it to where it’s really more like three, if you’re lucky. So if you want to live on $100000, your lifestyle to live on three percent, you’re going to have three point thirty three million saved up. But if you start putting in real numbers like we put in the market, say you only earned six or seven percent in the mutual funds you put in. What you’re saving, you’ll find out, is really hard to get to three point thirty three million unless you’re saving a nice chunk of change. Oh, and that’s if that’s if you retire today, you throw in inflation now that three point thirty three has to become like 10 million. Right? And then it’s like impossible, and it’s depressing. And that’s why I had to leave because I couldn’t be in integrity and teach that stuff anymore. Well, when I realized it wasn’t about accumulation, it was about cash flow, right? It’s about what kind of income streams can provide you. And when I started to focus on that, I started to see what was possible like within real estate. Wait a minute. I get it like in the United States here, like when I do like turnkey single-family homes or duplex and things like that, I go for at least a 10 or 12 percent cash on cash return. Right? I want that, you know. And that does include growth, you know, tax benefits, all this other stuff we get here in the in the U.S., I mean, the states, we could pretty much get tax free income from our real estate, right? Which, you know, as we’re getting our tax rates looking closer to Canada is right. We got to have some tax breaks. And so as a result, as like, wait a minute, I can make 25, 30 percent a year doing this, but most importantly, is creating cashflow because if I can make one percent a month on my property, I don’t need three point thirty three or even $10 million down the road. I’ll have to have been basically a million bucks and I can have one hundred thousand. Actually, that’s ten thousand month lifestyle. That’s one hundred twenty thousand. But yeah, eight hundred thousand to a million bucks. And I can basically have about one hundred thousand your lifestyle. And that that epiphany blew my mind to the point where financial planning just seemed like a joke. It wasn’t planning at all. It was just financial sales, and I realized I was a salesman in a suit. And that’s a shift that everybody has to have. Everyone’s got to get away from the mainstream, where billions of dollars are marketing being advertised to you to go and throw money in these cruddy, mediocre, high risk mutual funds, right, that you have zero control over. And when you have zero control, you have zero freedom. You can’t have freedom where there’s no control because you can never sleep at night. And that’s the thing that, you know, when you talk about real estate and doing these other kind of, you know, really doing more alternative investments. Oh, my goodness, it’s so much of an easier world to live in.
Dave Dubeau [00:09:03] Well, that’s awesome. That’s fantastic. And I think most of the people watching you’re listening to this are already sold on the idea of real estate. That’s why they’re listening to a real estate podcast. So what would you what would be some of the other alternative investments that you recommend people take a look at in addition to real estate investing?
Chris Miles [00:09:25] You know, honestly, I think real estate, whatever the best place to look if you’re a business owner. I mean, definitely look at your business to see if you can make that more profitable, because that’s one of the few places that people get stuck in the rat race there, too. Right. I deal with a lot of business owners, as well as high paid professionals, you know, people that are like doctors, you know, that are just employees, but they make a lot of income in the same trap. Applies to both is that both of them are businesses and in jobs where there is no freedom, there is no exit. So, you know, if you had a business, for example, you want to build it to where it’s profitable enough and systematize enough that you could exit out of it, even sell it for a higher multiple than what you will get paid for it right now if business rely upon you. That’s one it’s like. Definitely core business franchises is another way. If you don’t have a business, could you buy a franchise where maybe you can get some of the tax benefits off of that right, where you can get some of those write offs, especially you’re an employee? You know, I do it warning, though there are passive franchises out there, but I would call them semi passive, right? Because depending on if you’re an activist in real estate, you get this right. Like as if you’re an activist investor really is
Dave Dubeau [00:10:30] always this thing is as passive income. And no,
Chris Miles [00:10:34] no, I mean, the most passive, I guess if you put money into syndication, right? Or, you know, turn. She is close, but even I call that somewhat passive because it’s tough to go through the loan process or whatever in the title
Dave Dubeau [00:10:44] to check up on things, you’ve got to keep an eye on things.
Chris Miles [00:10:47] Yeah, you got to manage it, right? Yeah, exactly. So. And same thing with a franchise you might spend. And I actually looked into this last year for myself. You might spend 20 hours a week for a couple of months, right? Getting to the point where you can get down to five or 10 hours a week but could create a six figure income. Yeah, it definitely could. Where you’re not in the business, you’re working on the business at that point. But there definitely could be some upfront work and a learning curve that’s there. But it’s nice because it’s a system, right? So it’s there. I’ve got a friend who’s the land geek. You know, he talks about flipping land. You know, that’s another great thing you could do to where there’s high ROI. Sometimes it’s in the ballpark of pretty close to a hundred percent on that or why they’re even. You know, I have one client. He was in Hawaii, he said, Chris, I absolutely despise real estate. I don’t have anything to do with it. Mike, not even the not even like a syndication. I’ve been a part of the deal. No, I don’t want to deal anything with real estate. It just seems like a headache to me. So we started looking around for him. We found oil like oil investments. Now there’s definitely a degree of risk and speculation in there. He was kind of doing it the wrong way at first. He was like, I’m going to buy an individual well. So he bought like three individual wells, which kind of diversified, but it really doesn’t. And so I said, now let’s I mean, you could do that, but that’s a hit or miss. I guess you could strike out on that stuff. Let’s look more like a syndicated type of fund where maybe they got 40 wells inside that portfolio. You invest there instead. And so that’s what he’s doing. He’s like, I don’t want to do anything with real estate, but oil. I’ll do that all day long. It’s like, right,
Dave Dubeau [00:12:15] well, sort of course. Forgive me. You say you got out of the business a number of years ago. I was listening to you talk and you talked about clients and advising them. Yeah, sounds like in a way you still are advising people financially just doing it at a very, very different way these days. So what? Yeah. You know, in addition to the passive investing that you do personally, what do you do for other folks to help get them investing better or help them accomplish their financial goals?
Chris Miles [00:12:44] Yes, I’m semi-retired. Every time I try to retire, people want me back out of retirement, right? Because they want
Dave Dubeau [00:12:49] a boring retirement anyhow. Who the hell wants to retire?
Chris Miles [00:12:52] Exactly. It’s boring. It stinks. And people say, why? Why don’t you retire? Like, you’ve never been there? You would understand if you were, you know, but you know, like it’s yeah, I mean, I have more part time consult. So I help people create a game plan and I connect them, right? So like, like Guy wants to do oil is like great. I know to do it. I’m not recommending it. I don’t ever tell people, you should buy this or invest in this, right. I stay away from that line, but I do say, hey, based on your objectives or your timelines and stuff, right? Because even in real estate, there’s so many variances that you can do. So you got to figure out which one actually fits what you’re trying to accomplish. If you change copy trying to retire in three years or get financially free in three years, we may not want to go into a six year deal. Right? We might want to look at more shorter time frame or something that’s more regular cash flow quickly. You know, vice versa. If you’re looking more for growth, there’s other things you do on the growth side, you know, and so really just helping them strategize, you know, map a game plan so they can say great, here’s how to get there quickly and safely to do what we want to do.
Dave Dubeau [00:13:50] So are you? Because there’s all sorts of different kinds of professional that provide financial advice. So the typical financial planner, quote unquote, or financial advisor, doesn’t charge directly for their fees, but they get a nice commission, right? Shady mutual funds, they say. So that’s one way. And then there’s a financial professionals who are fee based to charge you a fee, but they don’t make any commissions. So theoretically, you’re much more objective about the offer about the different options are recommending to you. Is that kind of more along the lines of what you do these days?
Chris Miles [00:14:29] Yeah, I felt closer to the latter, right, where it’s more of just charge consulting fee to say, Hey, we help map out a game plan. Ultimately, you call the shots, but hey, I help you strategize, connect, you know, bounce ideas off me. You know, the one thing that is I always tell people is, Hey, if you ask me, should I invest in this? And most say, can ask me that question, but I will tell you this if it’s bad, I will definitely tell you, because if it looks horrible, it might say, here’s the warning signs I see. Here’s the pros and cons, but I’m definitely not going to say on sorry. Yeah, that’s right. If you hear a lot of opinions that I mean, going to be a lot of cons, most likely, right? You know, most like when people say, Hey, what do you think about this property? I’m like on this property right now, what do you think? Proforma and everything? I’m like, Hey, it looks good. I make points, you know, they’re like, OK, that’s why I need to know, right? You know, and they charge ahead.
Dave Dubeau [00:15:15] So it’s basically like a sounding board for people to point them in the right direction. You got a lot of, you know, it sounds like you’ve got a lot of experience me these days, especially with passive real estate investing saying you have an objective set of eyes. Looking at that very, very cool because time flies when we’re having fun for sure. We definitely are having funds will have to go. If you’re up for it, do it again sometime in the future. However, you got a little bit more down, but if people want to find out more about Chris, Chris Miles, I know you’ve got a great website, you’ve got podcasts, you’ve got all sorts of great training materials out there. What should people do to find out more?
Chris Miles [00:15:54] Yeah, either of those two places, either one. Find my podcast The Chris Miles Money Show. That’s on iTunes or other podcast apps or two. You can go to my website Money Ripples dot com. That’s all replies dot com. And there’s great blogs with lots of information on there as well.
Dave Dubeau [00:16:10] Fantastic. Chris has been a lot of fun. I’m glad you’ve repented. You found the flight to left your wicked financial advisor ways behind you. That’s fantastic, and sounds like you provide a very, very valuable service because, you know, for the average person, it is so hard to find somebody who will just objectively take a look at their situation without a hidden agenda. Right. That’s right. That’s that I think is very, very valuable. It sounds like you’ve done very well, you know, following your own advice, listening to your friends, you know, chastising it way back in the day and saying, Hey, that makes sense. So hats off to you for doing that, and I appreciate you sharing some of your insights.
Chris Miles [00:16:57] Such a pleasure, Dave. I really appreciate it.
Dave Dubeau [00:16:59] All right. Take care, and we’ll see you on the next episode. Well, hey there. Thanks for tuning into the Property Profits podcast if you like this episode. That’s great. Please go ahead and subscribe on iTunes. Give us a good review. That’d be awesome. I appreciate that. And if you’re looking to attract investors and raise capital for your deals, I mean, I invite you to get a complimentary copy of my newest book right back there. There it is the money partner formula. You get a PDF version, an investor attraction book dot com again. Investor attraction, book dot com. Take care.