The Cash Flow Expert: From Millionaire to Debt & Back (And How to Avoid It)

Megan - 00:00:20: Welcome back to CFO Weekly, where we're talking with financial leaders about how to build efficiency in their teams, create time for strategy, and ultimately get results. This podcast is brought to you by Personiv, the trusted leader in finance and accounting outsourcing for over 30 years. See how Personiv's customized solutions can help you streamline your operations with teams that start as small as one. Visit the website at personiv.com to learn more. I'm your host, Megan Weis. Let's jump right in. Today, my guest is Chris Miles. This cashflow expert and anti-financial advisor is a leading authority teaching entrepreneurs and professionals how to get their money working for them today. Chris has used his knowledge not once, but twice, to become financially independent, where his passive income exceeded his expenses, not to mention paid off his $1 million in debt after the last recession without filing bankruptcy. He has been featured in US News, CNN Money, Entrepreneurs on FIRE, BiggerPockets, and has a proven reputation with his company, Money Ripples, getting his clients fast financial results. In fact, his personal clients have increased their cash flow by almost $300 million in the last 12 years. Chris, thank you so much for being my guest on today's episode of CFO Weekly.

Chris - 00:01:41: Yeah, I'm so excited to be here, Megan.

Megan - 00:01:43: Yeah, today we're going to be talking about why mainstream financial advice sucks. And this sounds like a really fun topic with some good stories behind it. And I'm excited about this both personally and professionally and looking forward to learning about you and your experiences. So let's get started.

Chris - 00:02:00: Let's do it.

Megan - 00:02:01: First, and just that we have some idea of who you are, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your professional experiences to date?

Chris - 00:02:10: My professional experience, I was actually planning to go into business consulting. I was a sociology major in college with a triple minor in psychology, Japanese, and ballroom dancing. And so I was going to go more the business consultant route. Have you ever seen the movie Office Space with the Bobs? The Bobs are there, like, trying to consult the company. I wanted to be the Bobs. And I figured if I'm going to do something like that, I should probably have real life business experience. That was something my Dad always taught me is get real life experience. None of this just book smart stuff, even though that was easy for me. He's like, no, you need real life experience. So I actually dropped out of college really about the time I got my bachelor's. I was about to get my bachelor's. I decided to take a one year break, get some more experience. So then by the time I got my MBA, I would have more real life experience. Well, as I did that, I was looking for some sort of business. And I ended up becoming a financial advisor, like a traditional mainstream, sell you the crappy mutual funds and all these other kind of products, annuities and everything else. I actually did that for four years and then realized at some point that it didn't work. And we can get into that story a little bit later. But anyways, I had done that for four years. That's back in the early 2000s. Since was able to leave that industry and did more with real estate investing and was able to retire when I was 28 back in 2006. Then the recession kicked my butt. I went from millionaire to upside down millionaire. And eventually was able to dig out of that million dollar debt hole and actually retire again, the second time in 2016, teaching people basically what I was able to do, which is find and free up cash flow. What you teach on the business side. I did that on the business, a little bit of the business and some of the law on the personal side. And then eventually start teaching people how to "get out of the rat race". As Robert Kiyosaki teaches, enrich that poor Dad and help people create enough passive income where they work because they want to, not because they have to. And that's really what I've been doing ever since.

Megan - 00:03:51: And talk to me about your aha moment when you realized that traditional financial advice wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

Chris - 00:03:58: Yeah, it really came down to it was a few key events that happened that were pretty sequential there. One of them was actually about four years into my journey, right before I quit, actually, a few months beforehand. My Dad actually asked me, he says, well, Chris, are you going to advise me at some point? Now, I never thought my Dad would ask me for advice because he was the guy that was like, said, I know everything. He would say that all the time growing up, like, I know everything there is to know. And so, of course, when he reached out to me for help, I was kind of shocked. Now, I understand that he was kind of the one that inspired me indirectly to become a financial advisor because he would always say things growing up, like, we can't afford this. What do you think I made of money? Money doesn't grow on trees. And he would even talk about how his job, he'd say, my job will literally kill me. I will die from the stress working. So, when he reached out, I knew that this was kind of my chance to give him his life back. And so, I sat down with him, looked at all his finances. The guy stuffed the money in his 401k, got the match and everything you're supposed to do. Like, good boys and little girls paid off all of his debt, including his mortgage. He was like Dave Ramsey's dream come true, right? And as I'm looking at everything, he says, I'm 61, Chris. I need to get out of this. When can I retire? I said, Dad, if you want to retire today, based on what you have, being debt-free and stuffed all this money in your mutual funds, your retirement plans, you better hope you die in about five or six years because that's when you're going to run out of money. Okay, that's not what I wanted to hear, Chris. What do I do then? I don't know, Dad, because honestly, you did everything right. Like I could try to put you in this stock type investment or that one. But now the truth is, I don't know if the market's going to go up or down. By the way, this is end of 2005. So two years later, yes, the market went down. But I just didn't know what to do with them. I couldn't guarantee. I was like, you got a house, you got equity, but I wouldn't dare invest that in a stock market. Plus, it's illegal to pull out equity and invest in mutual funds. So you can't do that anyways. So I really just, I was stuck. And just a few weeks later, a friend of mine who I actually trained to be a financial advisor, but then he quit on me just four months prior to go do real estate investing. And I called him up and I was hoping he would actually say, yeah, Chris, like, I need to come back and work for you again because this real estate deal isn't working out. I got the opposite reaction. And I asked him how he's doing. He said, Chris, my life's amazing right now. Between my Dad and I, we've been able to invest and we've doubled his income as a professor at the local university. And I said, wait a minute, you've only been doing this for four months and you've doubled your dad's income as a professor. Yeah. Come on, that's too good to be true. There's no way that's possible. And so we started arguing back and forth, what's better, stocks or real estate? And he finally just stopped me. He said, Chris, how many of your clients are truly financially free where they don't worry about money? Well, none of them. They all worry about money. Even the retired doctors and everybody, they still worry about running out of money too soon. He said, all right, Chris, well, good job. I didn't expect you to answer it that way, but okay. How about this? How many of you guys as financial advisors are financially free, not off the commissions you're earning, but actually doing these investments you've been recommending? And as I was really honest with myself, and there was literally over a hundred different advisors I knew in that office. Some of them had been working there since the late 1970s, yet none of them could retire. And I said, well, maybe none of them. There's your problem, Chris. And that kind of got me on a journey looking for something alternative, right? More alternative investments in the, like the real estate backed investments and things like that. Realizing there were so many more options than just buying a rental property that were available to me. And as a result, I couldn't make the two worlds work anymore. And a few months later, I quit. I vowed never to teach about money again. I would just teach ballroom dancing on the side and do stock trading and things like that and be a mortgage broker. Because in 2006, anybody could be a mortgage broker. It was so easy. It's like 2021, you know? And of course, as time went on, as I started to learn what they had known, later that next year in 2006, I was able to retire myself when I was 28 years old. I'm having enough passive income to pay for my small family and the expenses that we had. And that blew my mind because I went from this accumulation mindset, right? Because that's the thing. People always ask, what's the difference? Well, in the traditional financial world, it's always about the accumulation mindset. It's always about set it and forget it. Let it compound. Compounding interest is the eighth wonder of the world, which, by the way, Einstein never actually said. But people like to twist his words and make it work for them to sell more financial products. But anyways, like it was always about set and forget and compounding. So, like, for example, my own personal goal was, I remember in the early 2000s, I thought, if I can just save $2 million and then live on 3%. I know some people still use the old 4% "rule", which is not really a rule. But 3% was more realistic. And what people have actually said, it works better for retirement. So, if you live on 3% of $2 million, I would have $60,000 a year or $5,000 a month, which over 20 years ago was a decent lifestyle. It's like living on 10 or 12,000 a month right now. So, I thought I'd be living the dream of 5,000 a month if I just happened to save up $2 million by the time I was in my 40s. And that was my goal was just be as cheap as possible, turn off the heat in the winter, turn off the AC in the summertime, just scrimp and save every little dollar I can. Throw at my mutual funds. And hopefully the market smiles on me just right. I'll have enough to retire on that 5,000 month lifestyle. And then also what shocked me was it was not about accumulation. That mindset and really that strategy has not worked well at all for people. But on the flip side, when we start talking about an acceleration mindset, as I call it, or more of an income producing mindset, you start to focus on passive income and assets that do produce income. Well, I thought of the same thing as like, well, if I had that same $2 million, but then I get paid 1% a month by lending my money to a real estate investor. Well, guess what? Now I'm making 20,000 a month off that $2 million, right? Which is almost a quarter million a year. And that shocked me because all of a sudden I started to look back at my old clients and said, wait a minute, holy cow, like some of these clients who maybe had a half million dollars, they're making 1% a month, they could live on literally $5,000 a month. They would at that point be financially free on a quarter of what I thought they could have. And so I started to have hope. I started to see that there was actually an answer here. And that's what eventually, after I retired in 2006, I can't fully retire because I get bored and get depressed too easy if I do. And so eventually in 2007, I came out of retirement to start teaching people how to do this kind of stuff.

Megan - 00:10:07: That's amazing. Before we get into the meat of our conversation, you mentioned being a ballroom dance instructor or having majored or minored in that in college. So can you talk to us a little bit about that and how your athletic experience plays into your mindset when it comes to coaching?

Chris - 00:10:27: That's a really interesting question because I don't think about that very often. But I'll tell you this. I mean, so dancing was never part of the plan, but when I got to college, I'd already taken two semesters of calculus when I was in high school. And so as they were telling me, no, you still don't have enough credits. You got to take a math class. I thought I'll just take a basic algebra class, something easy. Well, then I get there. They said, well, you don't need that math class after all, we changed your mind. And not having a class would put me just one credit away from being full time. So I needed at least a one credit class, even if it's a PE class to get me there. And I was looking at trying to add classes and I heard this girl. By the way, this is pre-internet. So this is back in the days when you have the paper it puts up on the wall with all the printout, the edges of the paper. It goes -that kind of stuff from the computer. So those are print-up on the wall. And this girl tells this guy that was nearby saying, you should do this class. There's a lot of girls in this class. And being an 18 year-old hormonal boy, I said, I don't know what class it is, but it's the one for me. So I kind of snuck around to see what she's pointing at. And it was a social dance class. So I took it. I added that class and was horrible at it, but I had fun. I enjoyed dancing with the girls. So I took another semester, got better. And eventually I got on the ballroom dance team for that college there in Idaho. And eventually transferred down to, when I did my junior and senior year, transferred down to Utah where the two best, the world championship ballroom dance teams exist, right? And they're within five miles of each other. And so I went to one of those schools where that very same year we won the Blackpool World Championships. So I was actually on that tour team, that world dance team.

Megan - 00:12:01: Wow.

Chris - 00:12:02: And I competed individually as well with my partner and did all kinds of stuff. So I actually became one of the nation's top amateur ballroom dancers, never professional, but amateur. So that was one of the things I loved. And I'll tell you, one of the things that I learned from that, that I still apply to this day, was I remember I had an instructor. And this is when I moved to Utah. I was thinking, I was feeling pretty good about myself. Because in Idaho, I was like, okay, I'm decent. I knew I wasn't the best, but I knew I was pretty good. But then, of course, I'm coming down to where the really world championship dancers are, right? And I'm there. And I remember this instructor said, she's like, Chris, you're good, but you're not great. Like, if you could actually, like, right now you're doing okay. You might get semifinals, maybe get to the, like, sixth place in the finals on certain dances. But you could probably start winning if you change just one thing. And she just started teaching me about my center, my center of balance and gravity and everything else. And just controlling that center, which people in ballet know all about. I mean, they do it all the time. And so when I control that center, all of a sudden I could turn sharper. I could dance better. I looked better. And I started to win competitions. And what I've applied that in both business, finances, and everything in life is that it's not about working harder and it's not even about working smarter. It's about working right. Because everybody can work hard. Like in the dance space, working hard would be you practice the moves over and over. But you could be practicing moves. Even if you learn new moves, even if you learn new steps, if you're not doing it correct way, you won't get the results you want. You got to do it right. It's just like people, if they use profit first, right? Like in the financial world, use profit first. Yeah, yeah, I got my buckets or whatever. Yeah, but if you don't use those buckets, it doesn't matter. And if you don't know how to use them correctly, if you don't even know how to improve the profits in your business, it won't matter. Like you're still going to be a slave to your business every single day. So it's not about working harder. It's not about learning new strategies and hacks and things like that. It's about how to apply those correctly to get you the best results.

Megan - 00:13:58: And you mentioned the advisor that you'd taught and who left to go into real estate. What was that person doing? Were they flipping houses? Were they investing in rentals? Like how in four months did that person replace their dad's income?

Chris - 00:14:15: Yeah, they're doing two things. They were doing a lot of flipping. But then with the profits, they would also take some of that money and they would invest it as hard money loans. They would lend their money out to other investors. Now, that time, 2006 and 2005, 2006, I mean, anybody can make money in real estate. It was kind of like 2020, 2021. Very similar times, probably even worse in some ways back then because it was way more out of whack. So there was people that were paying on hard money loans like 3%, 4% a month, things like that. I mean, just ridiculous amounts of interest they would charge or that people would be paid because you can make so much money by flipping property so quickly. So that's how he was making a lot of the money. He was really doing that, flipping properties to make some bigger cash deposits, so to speak, more active investing. But then you also do some passive investing by doing hard money loans and whatnot to get paid some significant interest.

Megan - 00:15:05: And you've emphasized that mainstream financial advice sucks. So what are some of the common myths or misconceptions that you've seen in traditional financial advising that you think hold people back?

Chris - 00:15:16: Yeah, I mean, one, it's always based on faulty numbers, right? Because they'll say the stock market's returned 12% since 2000 BC and things like that. And the truth is, I mean, like the S&P 500, which now people are saying, you know, and people are waking up to. I'm happy about this part is that people are waking up that financial advisors typically don't even get market returns, like average market returns. They usually do worse. And it's not just the financial advisors, it's the funds that they pick. Mutual funds, for the most part, underperform the stock market. So now the trend, especially on TikTok and Instagram, are always talking about just invest in the S&P 500 index, right? Which is better. But even at that, the last 30 years, it's only averaged 8.5%. Not 12% or 10, 10.5, 11%, whatever people are claiming. It's about 8.5. Now, some people will say, well, you reinvest dividends. Okay, it might get it up into the nines. But that's about it. And the problem is when people are starting to put in their calculators 12%, and I did the same thing as a financial advisor, it looks really good. But then you also start putting in other numbers. Like, well, what about inflation? Oh, well, you know what? I remember as a financial advisor, I used to get depressed if I put in real inflation rates, if I put in like 4%, 5% plus a year. So I would go back down to like 1% or 2% and say, oh, good. Now it looks like they can retire. It's what Ben Stein, if you ever know who Ben Stein is, he's the actor from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, says Bueller, Bueller, right? The clear eye guy, his Dad, who's a Harvard economist, his Dad would say to him at one point when Ben was debating him when he was in school, his Dad said to him, he says, Ben, figures don't lie, but liars figure. And that's very true, especially in the financial space. You can manipulate numbers to make them look like whatever you want, but the reality is people aren't doing it. So one, there's faulty numbers, right? That's another big one. Two, I mentioned the 4% rules another myth that people talk about, but really, if you're trying to retire at a usual retirement age, it's really 3% now. They've debunked that myth a long, long time ago. Why? Because that number was created from a study going from 1926 to 1976. This study is now almost 50 years old that they created this 4% rule that then came more popular in the 90s. The problem is that we got to take it off the gold standard in 74. So that changed. So inflation is higher than it used to be back then, and people are living longer. So as a result, you've got to lower that number, and that's why 3% is the rule. And if you're in the whole FIRE movement, that's another one I have a big beef with. By the way, I actually was FIRE, the Financial Independence, Retire Early. I technically did it twice because I had to dig out of a million-dollar debt hole in the last recession to retire the second time, become financially independent the second time. So I did it. I got kicked out of the Facebook FIRE group because I started dropping truth bombs like, hey, 4% rule is false, it's debunked. Oh, and you can't do this, especially with mutual funds. And if you're trying to retire early, it's not 3%, it's 2%, right? And as a result, they kicked me out of the group because they said, oh, that destroys our whole narrative. So they kicked out the one guy that actually was FIRE, ironically. They fired the FIRE guy. But that's one of those things, too. Another thing is they talk about the whole set and forget it or you're in it for the long haul. And they'll say things like, hey, even if the market goes down, what happens next? Well, your long haul just becomes longer. This is what happened to my Dad. He was just starting to build up some cash. The market was recovering after Y2K. I met with him just after Y2K. The market was recovering. A few years later, what happens? The Great Recession, the global financial crisis hits. What happens to his stocks and his mutual funds? They go down. He's delaying again. Now, all in the meantime, of course, inflation is going up, right? And if you look at it, like in the year 2000, the market never came back until about 2013. But for most people, because fees are coming out of their funds as well, most people I talked to over those years that had money that they invested at the beginning of 2000 didn't get their money back till about 2015. But guess what? Because inflation, they still lost about half of buying power. So really, it's like they got back to breaking even, but really they lost half, 50%. It wasn't until after 2020, people finally said, now I'm back to where I was in the year 2000. How long does your long haul have to become because the market swings at the wrong time? Because you might have to retire at the wrong time. Even things like debt's evil. Is it really evil? I think debt can be, if you're a wise steward, debt can be a great thing. In fact, it's a great way to create a lot of wealth, especially in business. I mean, my first SBA loan as a business owner was for $25,000 and the monthly payment was $140 a month. Now, any of us that are business owners, we know if we can't create $140 a month from 25 grand, we should not be in business. We love to use money and capital in a way that's, again, if it's wise, it's used responsibly to create a lot more growth and acceleration. So when I talk about that acceleration mindset versus accumulation, people tell you, oh, don't do that. Pay everything off. I mean, Dave Ramsey even tells people, don't even buy a real estate property. Like only buy it in cash. Well, think of that. That's not even rational.

Megan - 00:20:18: Yeah.

Chris - 00:20:19: You got to, one, you got to make sure you're maxing out your 401(k)s and Roth IRAs. And then two, if you decide to do some more, you do something like real estate, then you got to buy it all in cash. Well, all the meantime, you're trying to save up that money. What's the price of real estate typically doing? It's going up.

Megan - 00:20:34: Yep.

Chris - 00:20:35: You're chasing after like a Dalmatian chasing after a FIRE truck. So by the time you finally get there, then you finally buy it. Maybe once double or more the price. Well, what if you had just got a mortgage and bought it right then, locked that debt by locking the price in, and then was able to pay the debt down with the profits or whatever from that rental property? And not to mention then appreciates and does everything that it was supposed to do anyways. You just made a huge, amazing investment decision, which I've done myself. It's ridiculous to follow some of these people's advice that are out there that are just kind of idiots. And you start to wonder, are they really that dumb? Or is there some financial incentive for them to tell you otherwise?

Megan - 00:21:12: Why don't more people know that maybe the stock market isn't the answer? Who is behind that? It's the financial institutions.

Chris - 00:21:20: It's the Fidelity's, the Merrill Lynch's, right? The big banks of the world, the Wells Fargo's. I mean, JPMorgan Chase, right? All these companies have financial self-interest. If you really think about the rules, you really are taught these five basic rules when it comes to money, right? It's one, you're supposed to save. Well, one, you're supposed to save as often as possible. Save as much as possible. Save for as long as possible. Take as little out as possible when you get to that point, right? That's why you take 3%. And then you take as much risk as possible because high risk creates high returns, right? But the truth is the banks follow the exact opposite rules. Because they want you to put money in as often as possible, as much of it as possible for as long as possible because they get paid fees off of that money. And then they want you to take out as little as possible so you don't destroy all the fees that they're making on your money.

Megan - 00:22:06: Yeah, plus they're investing your money.

Chris - 00:22:09: Yeah, they're not even investing your money in the stock market. They're letting you invest your money in the stock market while they take the guaranteed fees. And that's the fifth rule, that lower risk. I believe that low risk is what creates high returns or managed risk creates higher returns. Even in business. I mean, we don't take unnecessary risks to just try to see if we swing for the fences and it's going to work. No, we take calculated risks. We take risks that we know we can control in business to get a desired outcome. We don't just say, here, I'm going to... That's the thing that's so crazy. We're told to invest in other people's companies, aka stocks. But they never say you should invest in your own business. I mean, now we as business owners know this, but the financial advisors out there who are broker than most business owners anyways, that's why they call them brokers, right? Financial brokers. They're the ones telling you, no, no, you should put your money over here. I mean, I remember telling that to my brother-in-law who came from a successful business family. Like they were the family that eventually sold off all these dealerships to the owner of the Utah Jazz. And they were multimillionaires. By the way, his Dad was homeless at 16, got his first dealership at 19 and was a millionaire by 21. And this is the 1960s. So, I mean, this guy was legit. And I remember talking to my brother-in-law when I was a financial advisor, telling him, hey, you should put me on your mutual funds. And my brother-in-law said, well, why should I... Okay, let me get this straight. If I give you $10,000 to play with, you're saying you can make me maybe 12% a year. I said, well, there's no guarantee. Past performance does not indicate future results. He's like, yeah, but Chris, okay, that's 1200 bucks a year, but I could take 10 grand, put a down payment on a semi truck, turn around and flip it a few months later and make a 20 grand profit in my business. So 20 grand profit a few months versus 1200, maybe in your investment in a year. So why should I put my money with you? And of course I came out with a nice little brainwashed answer that I was always taught and everybody else has taught, which is, well, you should diversify. You should put all your eggs in one basket besides. Business is risky, right? And of course he didn't invest with me, which is good because the truth, he was right. It's like your business should be the number one investment. Now you shouldn't have all your eggs in that business, meaning that you shouldn't just keep plowing money back in. Like when people keep "reinvesting" money in their business, they're not profitable. They're just spending money, right? They're going to lose. They're not going to have profit. That's okay in the startup phase. But as you start to mature in your business, that should actually start to come back to you as profit. You should be bringing money home. You should be able to take that money home, not just to blow it and have a great lifestyle, but then use that to buy cash flowing investments that then create time freedom for you as well. So create time freedom through business systems and tools and processes and people in your business, but then also create additional time freedom by having passive income cover all your personal expenses where no matter what, your family's protected. Even if your business goes under, you're safe. And that's what I realized is really the thing, not, throw your money and lock it away in these 401(k)s and IRAs where you can never touch it. And if you try to touch your own money, they slap you with 10% penalties and taxes and everything else. It's ridiculous. Really, you should have your money liquid and available to use to generate cashflow and money right now, which is why so many business owners have a hard time with financial advisors because they're always telling them to lock their money away from them when they know they could make better returns and profits in their own business.

Megan - 00:25:16: What are some of your favorite forms of passive income?

Chris - 00:25:19: My favorite ones, like I said, I like to have them backed by real estate in some way, shape or form. It's not that you can't make cashflow and passive income in other places, but I like stable places that I know I can sleep with at night and not worry about. So one that is not as much lately, but I've enjoyed in the past are turnkey real estate properties, meaning I'm not the property manager. I go to this turnkey real estate company and they're usually in different markets around the country. I live in the Western half of the United States where rentals out here suck. Okay. But if I go out more East, if we're talking about like Oklahoma or even like Tennessee, North Carolina, Indiana, Alabama, places like that, where you can buy properties for cheaper and the rent, the profits are much better. I can buy a property anywhere in the country I want because I'm not the one managing the property. I have a company that they help me find the properties. I know exactly the numbers I'm going to make before I buy it. And then when I buy it, I'm paying them the property management fee, but I get all the profits. So I'm really more hands-off. That's a great one example of a great strategy that doesn't require you to have to be involved. Like I have rental properties that I honestly don't know the renter's names because I don't deal with that. I know how to log into the portal and see how much money is coming in. I see the checks coming in, but I'm not the one having to deal with the daily minutia. Other things I'd love to do. I love lending money out, especially right now. That's probably the number one cash flowing investments I'm seeing today, at least consistently, is being a lender, being the bank for real estate investors. Because they can go to a bank, but you know how it is going to a bank. You have to jump through all the red tape and the bureaucracies and stuff, and it's just annoying. Well, there's a lot of real estate investors say, you know what, I will pay a higher interest if I can avoid the headache of dealing with banks. And so I can make easily 10, 12, sometimes 15 plus percent a year lending my money to them. And the cool thing is that the real estate property, if you do it right, you actually are, you're able to have that as collateral. Just like when you get a mortgage on your own house, the bank lends you money. If you don't pay them, what do they do? They foreclose, right? They foreclose on you. Well, you could do the same thing with the investor. So if they know, one, they have incentive because maybe they're trying to renovate the property and then turn around and sell it for a big profit, they're more than willing to pay you that payment. But if they ever stop paying you, guess what? You can foreclose on them, take that property back, and then you sell it and take whatever gains in addition to what they owed you on that property. So just like the bank, you can do the same thing. That thing, I didn't realize that was even possible until after I left being a financial advisor and I realized, hey, I can actually lend my money and make money off this. That's incredible. Other things to invest in just really quickly, like oil and gas investments. I'm going to have to pay more of the gas pump. I might as well make some money on it at the same time. There's things like you can invest in apartment buildings, but rather than buying it yourself, you can pull your money with other investors and go into what's called a syndication where you can go and buy things like apartment buildings or Amazon warehouses, or of course, Amazon's doing all their operations out of where you can invest in car wash franchises or self-storage units and things like that. I mean, there's so many different things you can do in that front. I mean, there's even business partnerships. I have a partnership with some investors where they buy and sell raw land. And again, they sell it on terms like it's a mortgage. And so we buy it at wholesale, sell it at retails to them, and then we get paid interest on top of that. I mean, I usually make at least roughly about a 20% per year return on that partnership with the cash flow that we make. And so there's just so many things you can do in the alternative investment space that's outside the stock market that can make you better returns and have less risk because they're backed by real assets, not some arbitrary stock that goes up or down depending on what Elon Musk decides to tweet on Twitter that day.

Megan - 00:29:00: And what's your view on 401(k)s? Should we have them at all or should we just pull our money out and invest in other things?

Chris - 00:29:07: It's not like they're always bad, but I would say the vast majority of people, not worth it, especially if you're a business owner. I mean, the one argument that seems legit is that people will say, well, I get the company match. Okay, well, if you're a business owner, you're just paying for your own match. You don't get any tax benefits because the one problem with 401(k)s and IRAs is that you still have to pay taxes some days. Now a Roth, like a Roth 401k, okay, it's a little bit better. Yeah, you might at least can get tax-free benefits down the road. But again, here's the biggest problem. Is that, and you know this, I mean, you're a CFO here. I mean, you know that the biggest issue that people have is liquidity, right? Having proper capital available at that time. The biggest problem I see with 401(k)s and IRAs and all those kinds of things is that they, again, lock it up. And 401(k)s are even worse. If you have a 401k at work, they'll say, no, you can't get to it. Maybe you can borrow up to $50,000, but you cannot get this money out unless you shut down the entire 401k plan, which might take off some of your employees or if you're an employee yourself, you have to quit your job or change jobs even to get access to that money. And so that to me is just horrible, right? That's a horrible thing to do, especially when you're putting it to mutual funds, which by the way, Fidelity, I was looking at the performance of their mutual funds that most people pick, the target date funds. Did you know they underperformed the stock market by about two plus percent, which ironically enough, even for those employees that get a match from their employer long-term. Even if it's a hundred percent match, long-term", it only adds about 2% or 3% a year onto the rate of return on their money. Because you don't actually get 100% per year rate of return. I hope people realize that. You would be richer than Bezos in 20 years with a tiny little 401k plan. And that doesn't ever happen. So you really only make an extra 2% or 3% just to make up for the bad performance of the funds that you're investing in the first place. So to me, the match is negligible. It just makes up for the bad performance. But on top of that, you're locking your money away. And so I prefer to have my money liquid. A lot of business owners we work with, we talk about things like infinite banking, using whole life insurance, which now is paying like 6% a year tax-free, much more guaranteed, and is protected from lawsuits and creditors in most states, 100%. You can have money in savings accounts and people, if they sue you and win, can get to it. But this money, you can literally store millions of dollars in here and people cannot get to it even if they win against you. So I'm seeing more and more of our business, our clients like myself, who are storing a stash and put cash in here to protect it. They could grow better than 0.0% at the bank. And of course, I can use that money to also invest where I can make money in two places at the same time.

Megan - 00:31:43: Yeah. Talk to us a little bit about infinite banking. What is it?

Chris - 00:31:47: Yeah. So as I mentioned, like using a whole life insurance, which is the most boring life insurance you've ever heard of. Just so you know, when I was a financial advisor and I started to learn about real estate, I started hearing all these real estate investors talking about this infinite banking concept. And I was like, I've never heard of this before. And I'm a financial advisor. What is this? They said, yeah, you use whole life insurance and it builds up the cash value, that tax-free savings account inside there. You build it up and you can use it by borrowing from the insurance company. I said, wait, whole life insurance? That thing's boring. Like you only make like what, one or 2%? No, I didn't know because I was just taught that from other financial advisors in my office that whole life insurance sucks. Little did I realize, even at that time, I was paying like 7% or 8% because interest rates are a little bit higher than they are now, right? And so I started to wake up to it. Now, here's the problem is that most of the time you hear about infinite banking and these people offering it, these are usually insurance salesmen. By the way, I actually, when I bought my first policy, it was from one of these kind of guys. It was all about infinite banking, right? Well, the thing is, like, I remember looking at it and saying, man, this is expensive. These first few years, everything I'm paying is going to insurance costs because it's front loaded, right? And then it gets cheaper over time. Kind of the opposite of term insurance. Term insurance, you start out cheap and then it gets more expensive as you get older. Whole life does the opposite. I said, well, this is really expensive up front. Can we do some things to this? Can we pull different levers and make it cheaper? And the agent told me no. Two years later, we're into the recession. I'm in the hole about 15,000, 16,000 a month. I can't keep paying that $1,000 a month. I'd pay about 25 grand to those policies and I had to lose it because I couldn't afford to pay the premium. So I lost everything that I paid into them. I found out later, he lied to me that he could have actually pulled some of those levers to make it cheaper to where I would have had cash in it to the point where it would have been self-sustaining. I wouldn't have to keep paying into it every year. And I would have been able to weather that recession storm that I went through. And it would have kept going. It would have had cash enough in there to keep paying for the insurance and even keep growing at that. Well, I confronted him about it. And finally, he just told me, he's like, Chris, I did it that way because I couldn't afford to cut my commissions. It kind of pissed me off, needless to say. So I kind of made it my mission over the last really almost 20 years now to find ways to pull different levers to make it cheaper to do it like how I would want to do for myself. And then we do that for our clients. We actually do that in-house. But here's the thing about infinite banking. They always tell you it's about creating like your own, pretty much like paying yourself back by borrowing money from yourself. That's a lie. You don't borrow money from yourself. The cash that's in there, this tax-free savings account, yes, you have the death benefit. This is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the tax-free savings account inside of it that the extra money is going into. This tax-free savings account can be used as collateral. So you can actually, what you can do with the insurance company or even with a bank, you could say, listen, can you give me a line of credit against this? And by the way, if you do it with an insurance company, they don't even pull your credit. It's not on your credit reporter at all. It's a private loan. And even the payments, you pay it back however, whenever you want. There's no monthly payment. You just pay it back. It's almost like a student loan and deferral. So you just pay it back at least by your death is the deadline. And they just take out the death benefit. That's the case. But basically, you're able to get this collateralized line of credit because they use the cash in here that's guaranteed to keep growing. They use that as collateral and then they give you a loan with their money. So if I have $100,000 in cash in this account, it might give me a loan for like up to $95,000 that they give me out of their cash. So my 100 grand is still in there earning tax-free compounding interest. While they're able to lend me their money, the insurance company or even a bank, lend me their money. And they'll charge me some low interest rate on that. And then I can go turn around and invest it into my business. And by the way, if I do that, then I'm also writing off the interest too, like I do on a credit card. I can also invest that in real estate and do things. So if I'm cash flowing from that, using the cash flow, the profits from what I'm using that money for, use that to pay back the line of credit, what ends up happening is this, because I never pulled my money out in the first place, it's still growing and compounding in the policy. And at the same time, I'm also making money from those investments or from investing in my business or my real estate. So I actually make money in two places at the same time. I'm earning interest or returns or profits in really two places at once. So it becomes a great strategy to use. I've even had guys use it as collateral to buy their building for their business and then lower the interest rate by like 2% or 3% from the going rate. I mean, I had one guy that was a chiropractor. He literally bought his building and for like 375,000 with the build out and everything, mortgage was like 1800 bucks a month because he only had paid a couple percent interest a year. It came down from like 6% down to about 3%. And from there, then of course, once he was able to build it out and get it all done, they had the lien on the life insurance just to say, hey, this is extra collateral here. But once the building was done, they took the lien off the life insurance and then he had that extra $300,000 to use for whatever he wanted, but they kept the interest rate the same. So still kept it down lower.

Megan - 00:36:46: Wow.

Chris - 00:36:47: So he's able to save on huge amounts of interest. Plus, by the way, he was renting out some of the units so that the renters were actually paying his own building for him. So his practice really was rent-free for himself. Things like that. People will use it for, in the replacement of the 529 college savings plans, they'll use that instead because if their kids decide not to go to college or they get a full-ride scholarship or something, then you're like, what do I do with this 529 plan? If I use it for anything else, they penalize me for it. Well, cool, you can use this for whatever you want. That's why I say you can use it in business and keep all the tax advantages that you get too versus 401(k)s and IRAs, you cannot invest your money from a 401k into your own business. The IRS will not allow it. So it's just a great place to store money that's liquid and available. I can get to it in about a week. My wife wants to keep 400 grand that we never spend. That's just for emergency reserves for our family. And so I told her, I was like, well, let's keep 300 grand in the life insurance earning 6% tax-free because that's 24,000 a year right there or 18,000 for the 300,000. Let's keep 100 grand in the bank that we can go get today. Because it'll take about a week to transfer for my life insurance. So we have the short-term money for the bank, which made her feel happy because she doesn't trust the FDIC because she's like, I don't, I have a feeling that maybe the FDIC doesn't have enough. I'm like, no, they don't. They only have one and a half percent of the total savings out there to cover. So if 10% of banks fail, just like in 2020, when you're waiting for the EIDL loans and stuff, you're going to be wait for your money too. So. So we try not to keep money in the banks where we earn 0.0% and get taxed on it anyways. We keep it over here instead.

Megan - 00:38:16: And what's your advice for someone who's just starting out and maybe wants to take this journey themselves? You always hear it takes money to make money. So what's your advice for freeing up cash and getting started?

Chris - 00:38:30: I said this to my 18-year-old daughter who just started college. I was like, yeah, you ever hear people say it takes money to make money? She's like, yeah, it does, doesn't it? I'm like, well, if that were the case, how did all of us survive high school? We were a broke high school or broke college students. How did we make it? No, it doesn't take money to make money. It takes value to value exchange, offering value, creating value, solving problems, serving people so that you get paid to do that, right? That being said, of course, if I want passive income, then yes, it does take capital, take money. Because if you're not putting in your time and energy, then yes, your money would be doing the work instead and somebody else's time and energy is involved. So when you say like, what about people that say it takes, you got to take some money to make money. Well, remember I was over a million dollars in debt. I was broke. Some of the things I did, and I have like a whole cashflow secrets thing that I teach that really like kind of like the top seven strategies that my, my own clients use as well as myself to get out of that hole. One is tracking your money. Like you've got to be tracking your money personally and in your business. If you're using QuickBooks or whatever you're using to track in your business, don't be looking at that once a year when it comes to tax time. And then you finally evaluate, you should be looking at stuff weekly. If not, if not biweekly, at least weekly. That's I prefer to do. I try to do at least once a week where I'm analyzing and see what's going on. Cause I've noticed the more that I watched my money, the more money I save. It's crazy. I had one business owner that she was like paycheck to paycheck, stressed out, always running around ADHD, I swear. And she's just like, Chris, I don't even have time to track my own money. I said, trust me, you do. In fact, you'll get your time. If you do. So we finally got her and her husband to start tracking their money, both in their business as well as at home. And I kid you not, we freed up $1,800 a month without sacrificing their lifestyle. It was literally just money that they're paying on stuff. They didn't realize like subscriptions, right? Like things like that, like they're paying $300 a month for Comcast to watch football. I was like, you realize that you can stream football for a lot less, like you don't need that. Just get a couple of subscription services over here and then you'll free up a couple hundred bucks a month. We had even like eating out, like they were just so busy and doing stuff. They would go eat out and just really weren't keeping track of that. I had one, by the way, I had one business owner. She literally was eating out, paying $5,400 a month, eating out.

Megan - 00:40:47: Wow.

Chris - 00:40:48: I was like, how are you doing this? And this, by the way, was in 2010. I was like, I'm like, are you eating steak for breakfast? And she's like, well, actually, that's not far off the truth. I was like, no wonder you're making a quarter million a year and you feel broke. Like, let's start tracking this. Let's cut it down to only, quote unquote, a thousand bucks a month for eating out. Not including groceries that we kept at a thousand dollars a month too. And man, we saved them like $6,000 a month on that alone between the groceries and the eating out. And not to mention taxes too. That's another one. Of course, you got to make sure you're, have a great active accountant that actually strategizes with you, not just takes your numbers and says, here's your bill, right? And that's another one, too. So again, tracking your money, make sure you're using your money productively. It doesn't mean you have to be cheap. You don't have to live on rice and beans as some people claim. No, you can actually enjoy your life, but just be a wise steward of your money. Other things too, like debt. I'll tell you one strategy I use for debt. Is called The Cashflow Index. And this is actually a strategy I created. It's actually starting to get out popular on the internet now. It's actually when I created it in the last recession when I was broke and I had very little cash and I was wondering, should I invest it or should I pay off a debt? And so I started looking at debt just like an investment. And instead of focusing on the interest rate, because I realized the interest rates were deceiving, because you can have a high interest rate, but a lower payment, depending on how the credit card companies calculate it. And so I started looking at, I created a cashflow index where I take the balance of a loan and divide it by the minimum monthly payment. Not the payment you're paying, but the minimum monthly payment. And I get a number, I get the cashflow index. The lowest number is the one I pay off first. So for example, just to kind of put it in real life scenarios, say that you have a $10,000 credit card that's charging you $200 a month, but you also have a $10,000 car loan that's low interest at $500 a month. Hands down, you ask any Dave Ramsey person or anybody else, if they say, if all you have is 10,000 bucks, they'll say, pay off that high interest credit card, right? I would say bull. Because just like all of us have realized in business, it's all about cashflow. It's about the profit. It's about how do we free up that cash that gives us more options. And with more options comes more freedom. So instead I say, well, no, if I divide 10,000 to 200 on that credit card, I get a 50. Not bad for a credit card. But if I divide 10,000 by 500 on that auto loan, I get a 20. That means it's two and a half times more productive or two and a half times the payment, the monthly payment, because it's 500 a month versus 200 a month, that I'm going to free up. So common sense would tell us, pay off the car loan to free up 500 a month. We can always take that extra 500 and apply it to the credit card and pay it off in a year anyways. But the great thing is that if something goes wrong, which sometimes happens in life, we still know we don't have to make that $500 a month payment. We're only making the $200 a month payment. So we have more options and flexibility. The problem is every time to put in a calculator says, oh, this is better. But the truth is that life isn't meant to be put in a calculator. You're not meant to be put in a calculator. And sometimes, by the way, even if you do it this way, I found out in real life application, people still pay off their debts faster. And so I teach that strategy is a great way for people to kind of manage and figure out debt. By the way, if I have a mortgage that's like over 150, no, I'm not paying that sucker off early because that's cheap money. I'm paying very little payment for the money. Student loans, I get so many people freaked out about their student loans. And then we do the index and we find out it's 100. I said, why are you freaking out about the student loan? That's by the way, you can also put in deferment at different times if you wanted to and focus and pay off some of these other ones that might have an index of a 30. It's three times more productive to pay this sucker off than worry about your dumb student loans. But again, people freak out because if it's not the media getting their emotions going, it's a balance because they're like, I got 200 grand, I'm a dentist, and I've got like 300, 400 grand left to pay off on this loan. It's like, who cares? If you're paying 2,000 a month on that 300 grand loan, that's amazing. You know, that's cheap money.

Megan - 00:44:43: Yeah.

Chris - 00:44:44: Which is money elsewhere. And maybe if you do have extra cash, maybe you actually instead invest it to make more interest than what you're paying on that loan anyways, which is what I did with my student loan. I took 15 years to pay that sucker off until the index got so low, it just made sense to pay it off finally.

Megan - 00:44:58: Talk to us a bit about the million dollars in debt that you dug yourself out of. First of all, how did you get into that situation? And secondly, how did you pull yourself out?

Chris - 00:45:08: Yeah, it sucked.

Megan - 00:45:09: I bet.

Chris - 00:45:11: So it was like the perfect storm, but not in a good way. It was like the George Clooney, I'm gonna die on a boat way. That's what happened with me in the last recession. I did a few things wrong. One is I actually started throwing all my extra cash into my house. Because as a mortgage broker back in 2006, 2007, at the time, as long as you had a heartbeat and a decent credit score, you can get anything you wanted when it came to mortgages. So I figured, you know what, just pay down my house. If I ever need the money, just do a cash out refinance. Well, that proved to not be right in the middle of 2007 because all of a sudden they started changing the rules. And then by September 2007, because I know I was literally trying to get out a cash out refinance from July through September, they kept changing the rules on me every time I went back in each month. And finally in September, they said, sorry, we don't do cash out refinances for business owners. And I had all this equity trapped in my property. And as you well know, real estate prices, because the banks locked up the money, caused those prices to even sink further to the point where people couldn't even qualify to buy a home. So even when I tried to sell my house to get the equity out of it, I couldn't do it. And all in the meantime, I'm watching that equity disappear because the prices are sinking. And I had a little McMansion. And so they sank faster. So I got to the point where I was trying to short sell the property. I couldn't even short sell the property, which means you sell it for less than what you owe on the mortgage. I couldn't even short sell the property because the bank that had my mortgage was owned by Lehman Brothers.

Megan - 00:46:35: Wow.

Chris - 00:46:36: And Lehman Brothers insisted on everybody just foreclosing eventually, which is what happened to me about a year and a half later. And I did finally get a settlement check for the mortgage practice fraud that they had for like a whopping 300 bucks. That was awesome for that class action lawsuit. But yeah, like, I mean, I ended up losing like, literally there's 150,000 of equity that was gone really over the next year or so that I couldn't even get to. And then I had money I owed anyways. So that was one thing is I locked up my, I had cash reserves. I had a savings account, like your six-month reserves. But I'd say as a business owner, you need at least 12 months reserves atleast. That's in your business and personal, right? And you got to have, now you may not need 12 months in a business depending on, unless you have marketing strategies that might take nine months to pay off. Then you might want like nine-month reserves or so. But I always try to tell people like have at least a few months of operating expenses for your business. Plus atleast probably 12 months of reserves at home too. Just in case you can't take a check out of your business. Well, in doing that, of course, like I had cash reserves, but it burned through because I started going negative cashflow. I started up that brand new business. The market we were focused on were real estate flippers, which of course in 2007, they were the first ones to feel the pain. So they couldn't pay us. So our business was sinking. We had an hour. We had more expenses, our business more making an income. And of course, I saw my expenses at home too. And funny enough, the partner told me to cut off my multiple streams of income to focus all on one income on that business, which is ironic considering we were teaching them how to create multiple streams of income. So I also learned definitely live in integrity with what you teach and especially have those multiple streams of income. It's very important. Long story short. I mean, business was suffering. Real estate was suffering, including the rentals and things like that. I had, I was watching values tank and everything else. I'm now in the whole like 15,000, 16,000 a month, which also adds to my, cause it burned through my savings. And then I'm eventually I'm running up credit cards and that put me over a million dollars in debt in total.

Megan - 00:48:29: Wow. That's what's like the perfect storm.

Chris - 00:48:33: Yeah, it was a horrible storm. I mean, collector calls, calling every single day. Eventually, I started turning my attitude around and started calling them I love you calls because at least the collectors called me every day where friends stopped calling because I didn't have money anymore. You know?

Megan - 00:48:44: When you know who your friends are.

Chris - 00:48:47: You really do. Yeah, it's amazing what happens when you lose money, right? You get to find out the true friends versus those that aren't. Now, how did I get out of it? Well, funny enough, I stopped teaching people how to get out of the rat race because I was back in it. I can't teach something I'm not doing. I did teach people how to get creative and resourceful, just like that cashflow index. I was stressed out up at late at night trying to figure out how to pay off my debt or get out of my situation. And how do I drum up more business and everything else? I'm stressing all night long. That's where I created that formula that's now helped me and thousands of other people too. But I mean, I was really doing that. I was trying to track my money again because all of a sudden when, it's kind of like air. You never count the number of breaths you take until the air is taken away. And same thing with money. You start to really count your dollars when the money's not there. So I started tracking my money again and made a habit of doing that even when I do have money again, right? As I do now. Just doing all those kinds of things. And then I started teaching people how to get resourceful. And then that pivoted my business, started to turn things around because it was kind of what was needed for a lot of people at the time. Like, because I really, we would literally find people on average about $2,800 a month of income, or not just income, but ways to free up on expenses and things like that. Even tax savings. That was another big strategy and things that we started doing too to help people out. We weren't the accountants, but we had accountant work in our building that would help people find that. And so that just kind of took off. Eventually it created a life of its own. And eventually the right relationships came in. 2009, we started turning things around. 2010, we went from 2009 almost bankrupt to 2010, making over 5 million that next year. And just really, that of course helped me dig out of my hole. As I started to make more income, I was managing my expenses. I was able to pay off a lot of that debt, negotiated a lot of it too. I had a Mercedes I turned in, they auctioned off for 30,000 less than I owed. So I was able to negotiate that down to like 6,500 bucks and pay that off. And so I just, I did everything possible to try to pay off those debts. And then as I got that under control, started investing in passive real estate investments so that eventually by 2016, by December of 2016, I had enough passive income that I didn't even need the business income anymore.

Megan - 00:50:48: We'll leave this as the last question. So you've been on BiggerPockets twice now. What is your favorite real estate investment story? Like what is the smartest investment you feel like you've made to date?

Chris - 00:51:02: Boy, of the passive investments?

Megan - 00:51:04: Yeah.

Chris - 00:51:05: I would say it's kind of a toss up. I would say there's between two. I would definitely say early on, not so much today, but before buying those rental real estate properties, those turnkey properties where I'm not managing them. I mean, man, the rate of returns on those are hard to match.

Megan - 00:51:20: Yeah.

Chris - 00:51:21: For example, I bought a property in Memphis, Tennessee a little over six years ago, about six and a half years ago. And to this date, that $32,000 down payment that I invested is now is generated over $160,000 between the cash flow, the revenue, the equity appreciation, and everything else, right? Where if I had that same money in the stock market, I would have doubled my money. I would have taken it from $32,000 to like $65,000, but not $165,000. So I'll tell you, I mean, having those properties where you can cash flow and earn appreciation, it's hard to do that. The only other investment I know where you can cash flow and with more cash flow also create more appreciation is in business, right? Because the more profitable you are, the better the EBITDA, the better that you're going to make money on the exit too if you want to sell it. And then, of course, the other thing I would say too is recently is I have that business partnership where I mentioned about the raw land where they're literally buying raw land at wholesale, selling it to somebody else at retail, and then they make us principal and interest payments over time. I mean, I've probably put in over a half million dollars into that. This is starting about three and a half years ago we started this partnership. And after putting in over half a million dollars, it's now giving us almost a million dollars of land that we're cash flowing over $12,000 a month on. So I think that's awesome.

Megan - 00:52:39: Real estate is amazing.

Chris - 00:52:40: If I were to go outside of my business, those would be the two best ones.

Megan - 00:52:43: Yeah, those are amazing stories. And I'm just curious for my own knowledge, who is the property manager that you, is there one in particular that you go through to acquire these?

Chris - 00:52:56: It depends on what market. Because there's different property managers. I like property managers that are in those areas so that there's boots on the ground, as they say, right? There's people actually there that can manage and deal with whatever's going on. So it just depends on the area you're in. I would say most of the time, that's all I'll say. If there's ever a negative with having turnkey real estate properties, it's not having a good property manager. Having a good property manager is everything. So yeah, there's definitely some that are better than others, but it just depends on the area. You have to definitely find somebody who's reputable, who's actually gives a crap and really is willing to be great to the tenant and also to you too.

Megan - 00:53:32: Yeah, it's not very passive if you're like having to get involved, which is where those great property managers definitely. It's everything. Yes.

Chris - 00:53:43: Yeah, if you want to be hands-off, it's the property manager. It's always up to them. I've had some property managers where I'm like, wait a minute, is our property doing okay? You have to go log in the portal just to double check. And you're like, wow, no, it's just, it's quiet. Like we have a great tenant because they screened and found the right tenant to put in place. And they've been there for years. And of course they're doing what they're supposed to be doing. So it's kind of nice when you don't get bothered, especially when it's not even on a monthly basis. It might be a couple of times a year at most sometimes.

Megan - 00:54:08: Yeah. Chris, thank you so much for being my guest today. I feel like I could talk to you all day.

Chris - 00:54:13: I know, I think we almost did. So everybody that's been still on here today, appreciate them sticking around as well.

Megan - 00:54:18: Yeah, I really enjoyed speaking with you. And thank you so much for finding the time to be here with us today to share your experience and knowledge.

Chris - 00:54:26: That's such a pleasure. Thank you for having me on.

Megan - 00:54:28: And to all of our listeners, please tune in next week. And until then, take care.