103: Money Mindset: Locate Money Leaks, Create Prosperity and Freedom with Chris Miles

Robert Plank: Today we're going to talk with Chris Miles, the cash flow expert. He's a leading authority on how to quickly free up and create cash flow for thousands of his clients. How are things today, Chris?

Chris Miles: Just fantastic, man. How are you doing?

Robert Plank: I am super. I'm fantastic times a thousand. So you say you're a cash expert. I don't really know what that is, and when I think of cash flow expert, I think of Suze Orman, Dave Ramsey, Robert Kiyosaki. Is that kind of along the same lines or is that different?

Chris Miles: Take Dave Ramsey or Suze Orman and then totally do the opposite of the advice that they give, and that's basically what a cash flow expert is.

Robert Plank: All right.

Chris Miles: Closer to Kiyosaki, yeah. What I really help people do is one, increase income, and then two, make sure we get expenses down any way we can but not to the point where you're living on rice and beans.

Robert Plank: Okay, so not as crazy as Dave Ramsey gets?

Chris Miles: Definitely not that crazy. It's really about how to have lifestyle freedom, be able to really enjoy the life that you have and get your money working for you so you're not always working for your money.

Robert Plank: I mean, that sounds good to me because you never know. Any day you might get hit by a bus or something crazy might happen.

Chris Miles: Exactly. Yeah. That's exactly it, man.

Robert Plank: I'm seeing that your average client finds $33,000 per year laying around, and I'm seeing that you have all these skills and all these things you can do for people. The thing that really jumps out for me is you can tell people how to find $4,000 in 45 minutes. That's pretty crazy.

Chris Miles: Yeah, it's actually not too hard. That's the funny thing. Especially if you're a business owner. Business owners, they leak more money than anybody that I've seen. It's not just what you can lose at home, it's what you can lose in your business. I'll tell you, sometimes the biggest money leaks we have is the money that we never make in the first place, the money that we don't earn, the lost opportunity cost, right?

Robert Plank: Right.

Chris Miles: Things like that. When I'm working with somebody one-on-one, typically I find about $33,000 a year or so. That's pretty average.

Robert Plank: Where the heck does $33,000 come from?

Chris Miles: It comes from two places. Well, two general places I mention. One, increasing income, or two, maximizing the expenses you're doing. For example, one place that's easy that almost everybody will find something is starting to track your money. It's interesting because a lot of business owners that I work with, they'll say, "Hey, you know what? Chris, I always thought that the way to financial freedom is just make more money. If I just make more money then I'll solve any money problem I have," but what they're finding out is that as time goes on, the more money they make, the more they end up spending, too.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. I've noticed that, too.

Chris Miles: Yeah, it's Parkinson's law. It's human nature. We tend to have our expenses rise to meet wherever our income is, right? Even if we free up money, you'll end up finding a way to spend that later on and say, "Man, wasn't I just like this a little while ago? I feel just as broke as I was before." I get a lot of people that say that, so what I have them do first and foremost is to start tracking their money.

A great way to do that in your business, first and foremost, is use things like QuickBooks to kind of track your expenses and income and everything coming in. Don't just look at your expenses, by the way. Don't just try to be cheap, because that's just the broke, crappy way to wealthy. Nobody saves their way to wealth. Nobody saves enough money in their little piggy bank to become wealthy. It's about also making money, too, right?

Robert Plank: Right.

Chris Miles: We want to look at both ends of the spectrum, make sure we are wise with what we're spending, be wise stewards, but make sure we're also making more money, too. We look at both. We look at what's coming in and what's going out, both in the business and also at home. When you're looking at home, I recommend tools like Mint.com, which is a free website you can use or phone app you can use as well. The great thing is, you get to see all your finances in one place. Everything downloads there. You can see all your transactions. You can see how much you're spending in which categories, which is so cool. You can see what you've spent for the month and how you're doing and all the kind of stuff. Seriously, it takes only a few minutes a week to do all this.

It's funny, because I had one client where she was out in the Midwest. With them, she was spending a couple hours a week just doing their finances with their business and home. In fact, she was spending so much time on her business, she didn't even worry about the home, which stunk because then they lost money at home, too. Once we had them do that, I said, "Hey, listen guys. You shouldn't be spending more than 15 minutes a week, 20 minutes max on both the business and the personal." I cut that down, saved them hours and hours and hours a month just doing that.

Robert Plank: Just by using the app, you mean?

Chris Miles: Yeah, just by using Mint for personal and then QuickBooks for business.

Robert Plank: You're saying that, before this person was using Mint, was she tracking it on paper or something like that?

Chris Miles: Yeah. She was using spreadsheets, Excel programs and things like that, trying to track it that way. Doing it old school. Looking up the bank account statements online, which if you think about it ... Think about how many times you go to gas up your car. You're going to check out how many transactions you have, and you're trying to add it up on a calculator or put it in. You're entering all that in. What if you mess up? Then you have to start over again. It's a pain in the butt. I seriously time myself on Mint, just for my personal expenses and income. From logging in to logging out, it took me four minutes and 17 seconds to update a week's worth of stuff. Four minutes? That's nothing, you know?

Robert Plank: Right. How does Mint save time? I've heard of it. I've never used it. How is that such a time-saver as opposed to going back and looking at the bank statements?

Chris Miles: It downloads all your transactions in one place, even loans. Any loans, credit cards, savings accounts, checking accounts, everything can show up in one place. You can see your balances all real time. You don't have to log into different websites to do that. That's one. Then two, with your checking account for example, if you're looking at your expenses and your income, you can actually see all the expenses.

The nice thing is, it remembers how you categorize things. Say, for example, you go gas up at Chevron or ARCO or something like that. You gas up there, normally it's probably going to guess, "Oh, that's gasoline." It's going to put it into that category for you. You don't even have to teach it half the time. Occasionally, you might have to tell it, "Oh, it's this category or that," and then it remembers what you categorized it as. Say the next time you go grocery shopping at your favorite store, if it didn't get it the first time, the next time it'll say, "Oh, groceries."

What's cool is, you're not doing any of the adding up. It does it all for you. It'll say, "Hey, here's what you spent for the month." It has even a little bar thing that shows you how close you are; if you want to create budgets on there, you can do that, too. You can do all that stuff. It tracks it all for you real time. You just have to go in, make sure that it's categorized right. That'll take a matter of seconds, if not a few minutes max. Then voila. You can see exactly what you've spent in every area.

Robert Plank: I love that because I've tried doing that before with all these different bank websites. They try to help you with that, and you have to do it manually. Same thing, they try to guess, but they never remember. If I manually set something, I have to go and set it for every single thing. I have different cards and different banks and there's different websites, different passwords, different interfaces. I hadn't even thought about until you just mentioned that even just logging into the different banking sites, even that time is saved, let alone the category and all the importing and stuff like that.

Chris Miles: I've had people actually say, "Hey, I really like using my bank's site. It's cool, because they do the same thing." Yes and no. They can only track what you do through that bank, but if you charge on a credit card that's through something else, you won't ever see that in your bank. This says, let's take everything and put it into one place. If you're trying to look at your loan balances, you can see exactly as you're paying it down what the balance is. No more logging into five, six, 10 different sites. You can see it all right there, real time. It's so awesome.

Robert Plank: Cool. Kind of along the lines of what you mentioned a couple minutes ago, you mentioned that there's a difference between being a cheapskate and being wasteful, I guess, right?

Chris Miles: Yeah.

Robert Plank: Could you explain that or unpack that a little bit?

Chris Miles: Yeah, you bet. My big thing is, I teach people about being wise stewards. If you look at it, there's really three perspectives around money. There's the spender perspective, which we all know. That's all in scarcity. That's where you blow money. If you're given extra money, you blow it, or you blow more than what you were given.

Robert Plank: Like the college years, right?

Chris Miles: Exactly. Now, the hard thing with college years, if you were probably broke like most people were, it's not that you maybe didn't want to have money, you just didn't have any.

Robert Plank: But if you had 100 bucks in the couch cushions, it was gone the next day, right?

Chris Miles: Exactly, yeah. It's that easy come, easy go. It's not ... I'll tell you, some people think they're spenders, and sometimes they're not. For example, I had somebody tell me at an event, they said, "Well, Chris, I'm a spender." I said, "Well, how do you know?" "Well, because I hate spending money." I just said, "No, no, no. You're not a spender; you're a saver," which is also in scarcity. Spenders do like to spend money. Savers don't. Savers will even say, "I had to spend money on bills, so I'm a spender." No, that just shows how much of a saver you are. You're so much in scarcity, you're desperate. You're the type of person that would make everybody pay for you.

Robert Plank: Right. You're the kind of person that would fight someone at a restaurant just to get $1 less if you're eating out with a group or something.

Chris Miles: Right. You're the Black Friday person that beats the crap out of people.

Robert Plank: Yeah. I think that ... In my own personal life, friends and family and stuff like that, I see a lot of people just getting way into debt or buying a fancy car they don't need just to show off. Then on the saver end of the spectrum, every now and then, I'll see some news article about someone who survived on ramen noodles and crackers for 10 years and rented out every room in their house just to pay off the house by the time they were 20. I'm thinking at first, "Woah, they must be a really financially savvy person." Then I read the whole story and I'm thinking, I hope that that era of their life is done, because if they keep watching every penny, that seems like a really stressful way to live.

Chris Miles: Exactly. That right there ... You can never have financial freedom in that place. I know, because I was a financial advisor back in the day. All financial advice is taught from that saver perspective. It's all in scarcity, and scarcity does not put money in your pocket; it only takes it out of your pocket. When you're living in a place of limit and lack and fear and everything else, there's no way you'll be financially free. You could put any number in your bank account and you will still be scared. In fact, the more money, the more scared you become. Money is only a magnifier of your soul. It only makes you more who you already are. To think that, "Oh, if I just have more money, then I'll be abundant," that's a bunch of crap. It's not true.

That's why you have to be a steward first. See, the stewards, they're in the middle. They take the best of the spender and the saver and they put it in one. At least savers are willing to be wise. They do want to do the right thing. Usually their default is, "I've got to save it all," or, "I've got to pay off all my debt." That's their whole focus. They've got to save it all, pay off my debt, and they'll never save enough. They've just got to keep saving.

But a steward says, "Okay, I'm willing to use money, but I want to use it wisely in a way that comes back to me at least more than one-fold." They're investors, in a way. They're people that are business owners the way it should be. Whether you're at home as an online entrepreneur, or whatever you do in your business, you obviously want your money to grow and improve and magnify. You want to be able to put that back in your business ideally so you can go and serve more people, because dollars follow value. The more people you serve, the more money you can make.

That's what a steward does; they let money flow. They don't let it just sit there and grow and compound for five million years in hopes that they become a millionaire. No, they're saying ... They're like my brother-in-law, who taught me a good lesson when I was a financial advisor. He came from a wealthy family. I remember him telling me, after I gave a nice little presentation, he said, "Chris, you're telling me if I give you $10,000, you say you might make me 12% a year, or 1,200 bucks in a year. Is that right?" I said, "Yeah, isn't that awesome? Think about what that'd be like in 40 years. You'd be a millionaire," even though he already was.

Robert Plank: Nice.

Chris Miles: He's like, "Chris, but I can take the same 10 grand. I can turn around and a few months later make $20,000 out of that in my business, so why would I invest with you?" I remember thinking, "Well, you should be diversified. You shouldn't put all your eggs in that basket. That's risky to put all your money in your business." He just kind of looked at me and smiled and said, "All right. Well, cool, thanks for your time. That was great." That was it. Didn't do any business with me, which was the coolest thing he could have ever done.

That's how stewards think. Stewards think, "What's the best use of this money and the resources and the time that I have to be able to serve more people in a way that the natural byproduct is more money." Then they can take that money and do it again and keep multiplying it and growing it. It's not about letting it sit in some crappy mutual fund or IRA or 401K and let it compound. It's about how do we make more money with it and create it fast. How can we Mark Zuckerberg it, right?

Robert Plank: Right, and invest in yourself.

Chris Miles: Exactly, exactly. Invest in yourself. Invest in your business. Then when you get to the point where a lot of my clients get to, then they're like, "Okay, I can't even invest this much in my business. I've got that extra money sitting around. How can I make that money make me money, so then I can create other streams of income as well." That's the things that I work on as well. That's the fun part. There's so many cool things you could do. When you live in that world of being an abundant steward, you're wise with your resources. You're not just gambling it. There's a big difference. Gamblers will think they're stewards, but in reality, high risk does not create high returns. It's low risk, investing in things that you can control and that you know you can create more with, that is what a steward does.

Robert Plank: If someone is a spender or a saver and they want to become a steward, is there an easy way to get there? Are there a set of steps or guidelines, or is it just a judgment call kind of deal?

Chris Miles: Yeah, absolutely. The best thing you can do is ... Let's say you're a spender. The best thing you can do is become more like a saver. If you're a saver, the best thing you can do is become more like a spender. Spenders, for example, a lot of times they don't let money ... They need to almost learn to let money sit for a few months. Just sit there. That's the best thing you can possibly do is, if you're a spender, start to grow a little bit of a savings account. It might just be an emergency fund, but just let it grow. Start putting some money away.

Robert Plank: Let the hot money cool off a little bit, right?

Chris Miles: Yeah, exactly. Some people, like I mentioned, some people get confused. They think they're stewards, but they're really just gamblers. I can perceive there might be some people listening right now saying, "Oh, yeah, I'm a steward. I'm going to take some money and go make money with it," and then they blow it all and they lose it. That's not being a wise steward. Wise stewards make money. They don't lose it. Spenders got to understand, hey, it's okay to let money sit. Like you said, let it cool off. Actually build some peace of mind. You'll find out that you'll hit this new level of abundance that you've never hit before.

On the flip side, if you're a saver, you don't need to save more money. In fact, you need to do the opposite. You probably need to see what you can do and take that money and make more with it. Stop sitting on it so long. Granted, if you don't know what to do, this is the big thing I teach a lot of my clients. If you don't know where to put your money, the best thing is putting it somewhere where it's safe and it's guaranteed you're not going to lose it. Don't throw it in your IRAs or 401Ks. Keep it in savings. Keep it somewhere where you know you can get to it, even if you just keep it in savings. If you're a saver, it's okay to spend some money.

I had one client in North Dakota. He was a chiropractor. I remember his big thing was, they didn't have much money. They were pretty much paycheck to paycheck. We were actually able to free up over $6,000 a month for him. What was so cool is that after we had done that, he finally gave himself permission to buy a $6,000 four-wheeler. His wife bawled. I finally got to meet them face-to-face, and she was just bawling in gratitude. She said, "You don't understand what this means. He would think he always had to keep working his tail off, never give time to his family, and now he's giving time to his family. That four-wheeler, some people might say that's an unwise investment because they're thinking he's blowing 6,000 bucks on a toy, but no, that was family time. That means so much more to us than anything he could have spent his money on."

Robert Plank: As opposed to just growing a number, which ... First of all, what are you growing the number to, and what does that get you? If you have $6,000 in the bank vs. $6,200, what's the dang difference?

Chris Miles: Exactly. It's really about ... Especially if you come out of that saver paradigm where he didn't give himself permission to ever spend money. That was big for him. That broke a big, huge fear barrier in his mind. That allowed him to loosen up and become more like a steward. I'll tell you, it makes a world of difference. When you're willing to let money flow, whether if you're a spender, let it flow a little bit differently, or a saver, at least let it loose a little bit, what happens is that you'll tend to find that you have more income starting to come in, too. They're all tied together. How you spend money also determines how you make money, too. I don't want to get too deep into that, but let's just say that, just like water, just like blood, money's meant to flow. If you stop that flow in any way, shape, or form, or you let it bleed out, that's where you run into problems. If you want better spiritual health, if you want to have a lot more money in your life, just learn to do it in a very healthy way.

Robert Plank: There's these two ends of spectrum, it sounds like, a spender on one and saver on the other, stewards in the middle. Would you say that most people are one of the extremes, or are most people in the middle? What are you seeing?

Chris Miles: Most people are at one of the two, I would say, one of the two sides. They're in scarcity, and either a spender or a saver, but there's different varying degrees of that. I wouldn't say they're so far extreme they're using up flat Coke to make bread and things like that. Not Depression-era, quite. There are a few of those people, too.

Robert Plank: Cleaning your own motor oil or something.

Chris Miles: Seriously. Reusing your own motor oil somehow. No, it's not like that at all, but most people are on those two extremes. Very few people I ever see have really mastered being a steward. That's okay. If you think about how most of us are raised, we're usually raised by parents that are one or the other or both. My parents, my dad was a saver, my mom was more of the spender. She had some steward-type inclinations, but she hadn't quite mastered it yet. I had to learn from two different parents who, like most parents, most couples I work with, they usually come from different ends of that spectrum.

Robert Plank: That makes sense. I think that with me, I think that both of my parents were savers. Somehow my sister became a spender. Then I was a saver for a long time and I didn't even realize it. I had a period of time when I had 40 grand in the bank, and not even in the whole bank but just in savings, and I wanted to buy a $2,000 couch. I delayed it for years and years because I couldn't stomach it. Then finally, I just put it on a credit card and paid it off over four months, and then that way I had ... It seems like you're alluding to, use money as a tool. Even though you could pay off all of the debt, or you could go super crazy, you kind of manage what you have. Almost like you're saying, you figure out what you are and then go in the other direction and go against your nature because it's better to have the best of both worlds.

Chris Miles: Absolutely, yeah. It's interesting. There's always a price vs. cost to money. For example, just this last year, I went through a divorce. You ever want to have a way to rock your financial world, just go through a divorce, right?

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah. Permanently. Not only the lawyer fees, but then that recurring income. You've got to pay that alimony or whatever.

Chris Miles: Oh, absolutely. For me, it was then being on my own for the first time in years. I've got six kids and everything. I was pretty much strapped down. Then being on my own ... I remember one time I was thinking, "You know what? I haven't bought good whole foods, eating really healthy." We didn't eat bad; we always cooked at home and things like that. We weren't eating horribly. But then all of a sudden I'm like, you know, I could get more fresh vegetables and fruits. I haven't given myself permission to do that ever, even when we were married. I just thought, "I'm going to eat more fresh."

It's funny now ... Of course it raised my food bill a little bit, but I'll tell you, it wasn't nearly that much. It was mostly in my head that those things were happening, because I had those saver tendencies. You hear your dad's brain in the back of your mind saying things, or hearing their voice, and you're like, "Oh yeah, got to keep it cheap." I'm like, "No, let's get this grocery bill up higher." I'll tell you, my productivity and what I do in my business, I work less and make more. I feel better. When you feel better, you tend to make more money. In business, that's huge. That's why investing in vacations and time away from your business sometimes can be the best investment you make in your business, you know?

Robert Plank: Oh yeah.

Chris Miles: Be aware of those things. Be aware of what makes you most productive, what makes you the best producer possible. Really, the other way I find money for people is how to get them to create more value for people. Where can we do that? Dollars follow value. If you want to create more money, stop asking how do I make more money. In fact, remove that question from your brain. Never ask how do I make more money. Only begin asking, how do I create more value for more people? There's a lot of different ways to do it that sometimes are in your business but also outside of your business, too, and how you take care of yourself and how you allow yourself to be the best producer possible in people's lives.

Robert Plank: That makes a lot of sense. I hadn't even thought about it in the way that you're explaining it, how not only is there following the money coming in, the money going out, but also all this interrelated stuff. Almost like you're ... whatever that money personality, or your relationship to money at home affects your business and vice versa.

Chris Miles: Oh yeah. They're all intertwined. Your physical health affects your money. Your spirituality, your mental state of mind, your state of being, things like that. All these things are intertwined. Your relationships. Everything. They're all interconnected. When you're looking at trying to create real wealth, you've got to look at it in more than just with money. You've got to look at it in all areas of your life. I've seen friends who went from having $100+ million empires to nothing because they couldn't take care of their health, or they went wayward and they let their mind take over and do some crazy things. Next thing you know, the money's gone.

I've seen also the reverse. I've been in situations where I've been in the hole $1 million, $16,000 in the hole each month. I've been in those places where I had no money, no credit, no savings. I had to battle back and pay off over $900,000 in three and a half years. That required a lot of mental and emotional discipline. That was huge. That was the stuff that I did with ... That's not even stuff that you do with money, because I didn't have money to make money. You don't need money to make money, but you need to be really resourceful to make money and to really focus on how you provide value the best way you can to other people. When you start to understand those true principles, and you start to combine the strategies with that, that's when everything just works like magic.

Robert Plank: Could you explain that a little bit? How do you make money without money?

Chris Miles: We all did it. You mentioned college, right?

Robert Plank: Yeah.

Chris Miles: If it really did take money to make money, we would all be dead. We would be trying to search in our couch cushions for money. The thing is, if you think about it, a resume for example, when you maybe first created a resume once upon a time ... When you did a resume, you're putting the things that don't require money. You're putting down your skills, your experience, your education, your work history, your references or relationships. All those things are part of what make up who you are. The more valuable you are, the more you can charge people for that service, for that work, for that job.

It doesn't take money to make money. Like I said, don't ask the question, how do I make more money. Ask instead, how can I create more value in such a way that people want to exchange money with me for that value. You have to be really good at figuring out how to solve problems and serve people and add value in such a way that they say, "I want that in my life, because having you in my life makes my life worth more than not having you at all. Let me exchange these pieces of paper so I can have more of you in my life." That's really the secret to making more money.

Robert Plank: It reminds me of Think and Grow Rich and specialized knowledge and stuff like that.

Chris Miles: Yeah, absolutely. Specialized knowledge is huge. Generalized knowledge is huge, too, when you're a business owner, because if you become the CEO of your company, you've got to be able to speak all the languages of your different departments. You've got to speak the language of sales. Even if you're not the one selling all the time, you've still got to understand that language and that world. You've got to understand the financial world and speak that language. You've got to understand the operations world and all these other things, all these things that help make up your business. You've got to be able to speak those languages when you're the CEO.

It's specialized knowledge, creating that niche to make you rich, so to speak. As a business owner, also having enough general knowledge, too, so that you can turn around and be able to communicate and work with those relationships. It is through those relationships that you can create more production, more money, more value for more people. You can't do it on your own. You can try. You can go so far doing it on your own, but eventually you're going to need more people to leverage to be able to create something that's bigger, something that's more of a legacy that lasts beyond you.

Robert Plank: Like a really good reason why.

Chris Miles: Oh yeah. You've got to have a great purpose, you've got to have a great reason why, and great people around you to support you.

Robert Plank: If someone was trying to get in that frame of mind, get in that state, and they were ... If someone was ... I don't know how even to ask this question. There's a lot of people out there who just kind of, they've been going on a certain path for a certain amount of time, just stuck in certain habits. How would someone get from just a place that they don't want to be into being this person in a good money mindset?

Chris Miles: It does take practice. That's why with my clients, a big part of what I have to teach them is looking at money differently. That's why I even have my own podcast. I have The Chris Miles Money Show that I do as well just for that reason, because there's a lot behind that between business and money and everything. I'll tell you, one of the coolest strategies that I teach, it's something that you can do every day and it doesn't have to cost you a dime ... That will help you change your state each day, is doing what, if you've ever heard of Tony Robbins, the Grand Master of personal development ... Tony Robbins, he teaches a thing called "the hour of power." Some people call it "power hour" or "morning ritual." Whatever you want to call it.

The thing is, first thing when you wake up in the morning, don't go to your computer. Don't go to your phone. Don't go onto technology. First and foremost, get out. Get your body moving. I notice when I move my body, better ideas start to show up. I start to feel better. When I feel better, I get better ideas. When I have better ideas, then I can create more value, and that's where I make more money. I focus on the physical aspect, make sure I get up and work out. I do maybe more intense stuff than some people do, but heck, if it's just a walk or it's just going up and down your stairs, whatever it does that gets your blood pumping. Do that. Wake your body up. Then do things to help control your mind. Start listening to things like podcasts or reading good books and things like that. Meditating, or whatever you might need to do. Then even spiritual-type disciplines, too, like prayer or reading a scriptural text, or again meditation, journal-writing, whatever you do.

It gets you sharp right from the get-go, first thing of the day. You'll find out that you'll get into that top percentile of whatever you're doing compared to everybody else. People don't do that. People usually just roll out of bed and get their cups of coffee in, and then the next thing they do, they're just getting out there, they're on the computer, and they've lost the whole ability to create and make more money. To switch things around, especially if you want to change your state, you've got to start changing what you're doing each day. Some of those habits or things like that, doing something simple like that each day. It doesn't have to be an hour. It could be a half hour. Whatever it is, doing that ...

That's the thing that helped me get out of my mess and stay in a good enough mental state so I didn't have to declare bankruptcy, even though I could easily have done it. In fact, I've had bankers in the past say, when they looked at my credit history, "Yeah, we want to see your history." I'm like, "Oh yeah, I've got some history. Check this out."

Robert Plank: How much time do you have to look at this thing?

Chris Miles: I know. They look at it like, "Wow. Man, if I saw your situation, I would have told you to file for bankruptcy." I'm like, "I know, but I didn't feel like I needed to." Unless somebody's going to threaten to throw me in prison, I wasn't going to do it. It was a hard battle. It was much harder than filing for bankruptcy, but I'm glad I did, because that's the resourcefulness that I learned that allowed me to find extra cash flow for my own situation to dig out of a $16,000 a month hole, to getting back into positive cash flow. That's why when people come to me ... Every entrepreneur will come to me and say, "Chris, I'm a little bit embarrassed about my situation." Doesn't matter how many thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year they make, they'll still say they're embarrassed. I'm like, "Listen. You can't have been any worse than I was." I'm probably the one financial guy that'll say I've been worse than anybody that I've ever met with, and that's okay. I can't judge you for it. That's why I can see it from a very optimistic angle.

Robert Plank: Right, because you've been there, and you've been worse than where they were.

Chris Miles: Oh yeah.

Robert Plank: Would you say that, to dig yourself out of that hole, would you say that having those better habits and having that better resourcefulness was the reason for that, or was it something else?

Chris Miles: I really do. I think that was all part of it. I did have certain things that I had to say in my head. Some days were more challenging than others. There were days I just woke up in despair. That's why I had to get out and do something, get my body moving, meditate. I remember I had to do a walking meditation, just deep breathing while I'm walking after doing a little workout. I remember exhaling the words, "Be still and know that I am God." Then taking off one word at a time. "Be still and know that I am. Be still and know that. Be still and know. Be still. Be. Be." Doing that as I'm walking, just to try to calm my mind down because I'm freaking out. Just like Kung Fu Panda. Have you ever seen that movie?

Robert Plank: No, I haven't.

Chris Miles: I've got six kids, so now I just quote kids movies instead of cool ones like Tommy Boy and stuff. In that movie, the kung fu master said, "There are no accidents." It's that law of synchronicity. There are no accidents. I remember saying that to myself. "Okay, there's no accidents. This is all happening to me for a reason. I don't know why, but I know that I'm going to come out on the other side of this. I don't know how that's going to happen, but I know I will." That was critical for me. I had to tell myself there was a higher purpose. I just told myself, I said, "Hey, listen. If I can help at least one person benefit from all the crap that I went through, if my pain could be somebody else's gain, then that was worth it." I'll tell you, it's led to now tens of thousands of people's lives that it's helped because of it. All because of the crap that I went through and that struggle.

That's the thing I think is key is that, you start to realize that everything happens to you for a reason. Even if you think something's crappy, you don't know if that might be the better path for you. If that hadn't happened to me, I can guarantee I wouldn't be where I am today. I wouldn't be as wise as I am today. I wouldn't be teaching what I teach today and helping as many people had it not been for that. Up to then, I thought I had the Midas golden touch. No one could stop me. Since then, since learning that hey, I am fallible, I can violate principles like every other human being, and I need to make sure that I am wise with what I'm doing ... That's led to so much more wisdom and patience, and it's allowed me to guide people and save them. Literally, I think I'd probably say in total in the last six years of people I've worked with, I've probably helped them make or save at least $100 million cumulatively.

Robert Plank: Cool. It sounds like it all connects. You think just looking at it, if someone's really deep in debt or makes really bad financial decisions or doesn't have a lot of cash flow or has a lot of cash flow but then the Parkinson's law catches them up, you think, "Oh, they just had bad luck or they just had bad decisions," but it seems like what you're saying is it's something deeper. It pretty much connects to everything. It connects to your morning routine, your mindset, your relationships, all that good stuff.

Chris Miles: Everything. There's definitely strategy to it, but the mindset's huge. If you don't have the right mindset, your strategies will create something different than what you want. That's key. I see people out there that teach only strategies that try to be financial gurus. That's all they teach, and then they wonder why people aren't getting results. On the flip side, you've got people that teach only mindset, but then people don't know what to do with it. You've got to have both to be able to figure out that one-two punch of, okay, I've got the right abundant mindset, that steward mentality. Add that with some strategies now, and now we're more intentional. Now my business improves, and that grows and I start making more money there. I bring home more money. I actually have more time. I'm more free to do what I want to do, which is the whole reason why I became a business owner. That's why most people do. They wanted more control, more freedom. Not to live the American nightmare but to live the American dream.

Robert Plank: Yeah. All that makes a lot of sense to me. On one hand, if it's all mindset, there's nothing concrete to do, but if it's all steps and strategies but there's no ... you don't fix the root of the problem, then you're just going to find yourself in a worse hole. You don't have a better way of going about things. You increase the income and then you get in even more debt, even more of a hole than you were when the income was low, right?

Chris Miles: Exactly. That's why I have even my own clients come from all over the U.S. and Canada to my own live events, because I'm like, "You guys got to make sure you learn the mindset." Even though I give them audios and stuff to study, still I'm like, "You need more of this because this mindset stuff is huge." At the same time, the strategy is, where I teach people tax strategies where the average entrepreneur finds at least five to 10 grand a year that they save in taxes, or how to pay down debt the right way, not the way that everybody else has been teaching, but in a way that actually creates the biggest bang for your buck and best rate of return. How do you make more money in your business, and all that kind of stuff. How you save money on insurances, all that kind of stuff that I look at.

That strategy has to be there, but if I don't have the mindset piece with it, I've watched that people don't get nearly the results. Especially if I'm teaching them how to make more money. If I don't give them the mindset piece too, they screw it up. They end up gambling their money away, and then they lose money instead of making money.

Robert Plank: They backslide back to the person they were before they came to you.

Chris Miles: You got it.

Robert Plank: We covered a lot of really cool stuff today. My favorite part out of all of this ... My second favorite part was the Mint.com thing. I'm going to be signing up to that. Then just the way you laid it out about spenders, savers, and stewards, and all those little nuggets of the meditation, Tony Robbins, power hour, all that stuff. Aside from all those cool little tidbits, is there one big mistake you're seeing over and over with all of these clients you're helping out that you just ... It's the number one thing that you always see happening?

Chris Miles: I would say definitely tracking the money is the thing that they're not doing. I very rarely ever find someone who's tracking their money properly, to where they feel so confident they know exactly how much money they have, where it's all going. That allows them to move faster in business, too. Doing that properly. They might be doing it a little bit. They might be looking at their balances, but they're not tracking money. I'll tell you, if you ever say you're too busy to do it, you're losing at minimum $500 a month, or $6,000 a year right there. I've had people where ... I had one lady in Silicon Valley, California, who was making a quarter million a year but still broke. Found out she was spending $5,600 a month eating out. $5,600, you know? That's crazy. It's California, but still, we both know California's not that expensive.

Robert Plank: Right, it's not like Dubai or anything.

Chris Miles: No. Even another guy I worked with, a dentist in Virginia. He was great, but he was just focused on making money. We found an extra $16,000 a month in his practice, just in his business, on top of the $6,000 a month we helped him free up. In total, we helped him save over 300 grand that year. That's the kind of stuff that, if you're aware of what's going on, you're watching what's happening, that's a great start. If everybody would do that ... Man, when I coach them, it makes it so much easier.

Robert Plank: They can at least find the problem. Isn't that what the drug addicts and stuff say? The first step is knowing you have a problem, or admitting you have a problem?

Chris Miles: It's that awareness. Once you're aware of what's going on, it's such a big eye-opener. People find money just because they track. Not because they spend less, but because a lot of times they'll say they're just more accountable. Whatever extra they have, they'll say, "You know what, maybe I'll put that money away. Maybe I'll keep that in emergencies, just in case." Especially if you're a business owner. It's not just emergencies; you need it for opportunities. A lot of times you miss opportunities because you don't have the money laying around.

Robert Plank: Oh yeah.

Chris Miles: That costs money there.

Robert Plank: I notice that, too. I probably haven't gone back as much as I should, but I notice looking back in bank statements, because I don't have Mint.com set up, looking back at memberships I'm not using and stuff like that, and little $80 a month things in my business. My attitude used to be, "Oh, whatever. It's 80 bucks a month. Who cares what that adds up to?" Then I say, once I actually drill down, there's 10 or 20 of those things that are dinging me 80 bucks every single month. What is that every year? What could that have built up to for five or 10 years, like you said, not just to get a higher number but to have the peace of mind to be able to use it for whatever opportunity. Just kind of a different way of thinking.

Chris Miles: It all adds up. I had a graphic designer who, we found an extra $1,500 a month from the little things that just added up. We didn't have to sacrifice their life at all. They still were able to be free and do stuff, still go out and eat, things like that. $1,500 a month. That's 18 grand a year back in your pocket that you didn't even know you were losing in the first place.

Robert Plank: Imagine over a lifetime how many cars that would buy or how many college educations for the kids or something.

Chris Miles: That's true. I mean, 18 grand a year, after 15 years, that's over a quarter million dollars, right?

Robert Plank: Yeah. Phew. All right, so you have all these cool success stories and all these cool strategies. I want to send people over to you so they can find out all about what it is you do, what it is you sell, about these seminars and this coaching stuff that you do. Where can people find out more about you?

Chris Miles: If you want to hear some actual, real specific strategies, kind of like what we mentioned today but a few more, even how to pay off debt and things like that, you can go to www.moneyripples.com. Right there on the front page you can actually get the e-book called Beyond Rice and Beans: 7 Secrets to Free Up Cash Today. That's kind of my slap at Dave Ramsey right there.

Robert Plank: Nice.

Chris Miles: Then also, if you like podcasts, go on iTunes, look up The Chris Miles Money Show, and you can listen to stuff there, too.

Robert Plank: Cool. The Chris Miles Money Show. While you're doing the power of hour and the mantras, perfect complement, right?

Chris Miles: Absolutely.

Robert Plank: Awesome. Well, cool, thanks for being on the show, Chris, and sharing all your cool knowledge and wisdom.

Chris Miles: Yeah, you bet, Robert. I appreciate it.