Do you ever feel stuck in the rat race ? Life doesn't have to be that way. If you're willing to put in the work in “bigger vision”, Chris Garrison helps you discover the keys to abundance, freedom, and personal growth that let you live the life of your dreams. And now here's your host, Chris Garrison.
Chris: Welcome everybody. It's Chris Garrison. I'm glad you made it to the “bigger vision” podcast where we talk about mindset, business and investing. And today we're going to talk about your financial thermostat. That's right. You got a thermostat, you got an internal thermostat and a part of that thermostat is your finances. I have found that in my life personally, I have seen so many individuals. And if you talk to anyone and you say, would you like more money? They're going to say yes, but so few make it to a high level financially, a place of financial freedom, financial freedom means you literally do not depend on someone else. (01:17)
If you miss a paycheck, you're not going to suffer. You're not missing anything else, but that paycheck, you're not dependent upon someone else like the government, getting your tax returns at the beginning of the year. Matter of fact, when you make enough money and you truly get financially free, you don't get a tax return, a refund rather, you are doing everything you can to avoid paying in.
That means you're having to study the tax law, or you're going to have a great professional DPA that understands the tax law to tell you. Hey, if you buy this, or if you do this, this keeps you from having to give your money away. The gain is to keep as much as you can of the money that you have spent your time and your knowledge to make. So I started in my twenties, broke, lived on the government with an EBT card is what I mean by that. And it was because of my choices, not because I wasn't able, and I'm not saying that everybody that's got government assistance in any way is just their choices. (02:20)
Some it is their choices that got them there, but sometimes they need that hand up, but it's not there in my opinion for you to stay on. I'm not trying to get political there. It's just an opinion. Please don't write a review killing me over that statement. So in my twenties, I did depend on the government, but I shouldn't have had that hand up.
I should have been making better choices and doing better for myself, but then I begin to make some money and a lot of people will hit their six figure income and then they level off, some never make it to the six figure income. I hope you do. You're definitely capable of making it to the six figure income, you're capable of making it to the seven figure income, but it does take some things like knowledge, know how to be able to get to that. When I began to make good revenue with my business out of great hustle and hard work, then I began to level off and I got hungry and I started to research as a hungry person does to find new information so that I could grow. (03:34)
The biggest thing that allowed me to grow is when I began and to get around individuals that were making more money than me, individuals that were doing bigger things than me, individuals that had better questions than I had. And how I did that is I began to network. I began to get into rooms that I saw people driving nice cars, being able to take the vacations they wanted. Owning businesses, and have some money on the side and not be living paycheck to paycheck. Don't get me wrong.
You can live paycheck to paycheck, even on a seven figure income. It all depends on your standard of living. There's a concept that is gained through your process of acquiring massive revenue that you learn to budget. Budget doesn't mean that I'm putting all this money back to a savings account. (04:34)
I'm talking about budget means you do not give out more than what you're taking in. You do not spend more than what you have coming in. You sit there and you qualify what you're spending on. Yes, I'm going to spend some money on lifestyle. I'm going to spend some money on enjoyment, but I am going to make sure that the bulk of my money after my necessities, like a roof over my head and food in my belly is taken care of.
Bulk of my money is going to go to other investments to make new revenue, to make money. What I did is, I got with these individuals that were making massive gains moves, seemed like they were just fearless and it made me want more. It made me even more hungry. So I would listen to [bar lingo]. I would listen to what they were interested in. (05:33)
I was just on a webinar last week, about forex trading, where I had no clue what forex trading was. And then I heard forex, So what do you do?
You hop on Google. And then you're going to find out what the answer is. If you read enough information, forex trading is foreign currencies being traded because I was in the room and someone mentioned this and the gains that they were having on this particular broker account, that was because I was in the right room.
It had absolutely nothing else to do with it, except for the fact that I was in the right room. I was hungry enough to take my time away from Netflix and chilling away from the bars or whatever the case that you might spend your time on. And I spent my time in a room and this was a whatsapp chat room. This was not even physically in the room with them, but I was gathering information. There's two ways to increase your thermostat. One, is to take massive action. (06:34)
If you want to increase your thermostat immediately, and you're in a position where you can increase your volume of tasks, whatever those tasks may be. Let's just say with my cleaning business, when I first started it, I was broke, but I had time. So I went and knocked on as many commercial doors as I could and asked for the opportunity to give them a free estimate. Before I even asked that I wanted to know where their mindset was, where their state of mind was with their current cleaner. So I said, can I speak to the person in charge? making the decisions for your cleanings on this building? Then once I got in front of that person, I would say, hi, I'm Chris Garrison with “absolute cleaning and restoration”.
I wanted to ask you if I could give you free estimates and take just a little bit of time walking through your building. Before I do that, are you happy with your current cleaner? They would either say yes or they would say I'm open to another estimate, that right there let me know I had my foot in the door. (07:36)
If they said yes, then I would say, great. Tell you what, I'll check back in six months. And I hope it stays that way. If they said yes, I would still give them the estimate. If they said we're not interested in changing, that's when I would say, Hey, I'll check back in six months. I began to take massive action. Then that increased my financial thermostat because I was able to bring in more revenue because of the massive action that was taking.
Here's the second way to increase your financial thermostat. You get around individuals that have a hotter thermostat than you. That means you get around individuals that know more about money than you. Because at that point you can soak it in like a sponge and you can see what the successful are doing and what you are not. And that's what I've been doing. I've been getting into rooms with the right people. I've been spending money to get in those rooms so that I can make more money. What is that spending money? That is an investment. (08:36)
It is the best return on investment that you can ever make in yourself, invest in yourself. Then you do not have to be dependent on someone else. So take massive action or just get around individuals that are doing it right? There's so many ways out there to increase your finances. We all know that money makes the world go round because we live in an economic society. Once you have that money, then you begin to be able to have choices. Then once you have choices, then you start to feel freedom.
Then you start to feel happiness because now you're not chained up by anything. Once you've got choices, it's all about getting the choices. It's not about loving money. It's about what money will bring, it's about what money will allow you to achieve. That is why we go after money, because it is the climate that we live in. You've got to increase the temperature on your thermostats so that you will be able to have those choices. (09:38)
I said, there's so many ways to make money. Here's my path of making money that I found so far. I had a $500 investment and I started my cleaning company. My cleaning company morphed into a cleaning and disaster cleanup company, meaning I had restoration equipment for water, fire, and mold. Then I began to take revenue from that business and pour it into myself instead of just free content that I'd been soaking in off the social media internet platforms.
Once I began to take that revenue and put it in myself, I began to increase my financial literacy. I began to understand the velocity of money. I began to understand what an ROI was. I began to understand what “cash on cash return” was, which is pretty much just ROI. What's your ROI? So I would sit there and I would look, if I take this amount of money and I'm able to make this amount from that money. (10:37)
What is that ROI? I would say, just for example purposes, I can make $10,000 on a hundred thousand dollars investment. So that's take 10,000 and I would divide it by a hundred thousand. And what did that give me that gave me a 10% return. Then I was able to judge whether it was a good return or not. I began to learn about arbitraging. I was able to sit there and say, if I've got good credit and I've got some collateral, sometimes you don't need collateral. Or if I've got a network of people that trust me, know me and like me, then I can take their money and give them a good interest rate.
Then I can deploy it over here and make a higher interest rate, a higher return on my money. It's not even my money that I'm using at that point. I'm arbitraging someone else's money. If I can go to the bank and I can get a 4% interest rate on money borrowed from the bank, and then I can deploy it over here into this other asset, into this other venture and get a 10% at that point, the spread is 6%, 10 minus 4 is 6, right? (11:52)
6%, I was able to arbitrage on that. This is how the wealthy think, this is how money is able to have a higher velocity. All that means is how quick can I take money and deploy it into something and then get a return on it, into deploying it into something else, there's many different vehicles. You got to make sure that you find the right vehicle because some vehicles are not going to give you. For instance, a bank account, you got a savings account, right?
That's a vehicle to make you money. You got an interest bearing savings account, but that only gives you right now around 0.5%, not even a percent of a return. You are losing money by your money sitting in a savings account, because the rate of inflation is higher, much higher. You're losing money because your dollar is losing its value compared to the amount that you're earning. So that vehicle is a crap vehicle. (12:51)
Matter of fact, it's lost its transmission and the engine's about to die on it. Let's find a different vehicle, maybe real estate, if you can borrow money from someone else, if you don't have any, but you got the skillset and to know how to find the real estate to rehab the real estate and then resell the real estate, then you're able to arbitrage someone else's money. Maybe you can get the loan for 6 to 8%, but you can cover a 25% gain on that money. Another area is cryptocurrency. Start learning about some cryptocurrency.
There's massive gains in that right now, because it's the early adopters that are going to really get stinking wealthy, another opportunity that I have just jumped in and I mentioned it earlier, the forex trading that is a fairly high return on my money monthly. So I could take a 12% loan and deploy it into that. And then I get roughly about a 10% monthly return. (13:56)
What is 10 times 12? That's 120%. so I'm making 120% ROI. And I'm only having to give 12% to the lender that I borrowed from. That right there is a 108% gain that I just made on that money. It's financial literacy that you have to have. It's getting creative and here's the deal. The more financial literacy, the more understanding you have of money, the braver you are at deploying that money and not fearful of losing it.
There is an element of risk to every venture in life you get in your vehicle, there is risk that you might have a wreck, but calculated risk is what you want to take. You have to get in the right room and you've got to take in the right content and understand what you are doing. (14:56)
Then your confidence will gain, so many people lose opportunities just because of the simple fact that they are fearful of loss. Let me tell you, failure is the best thing that can happen in your life because once you fail, you know what not to do and anybody that's successful has failed before, failure is the catalyst that brings you to high success.
If I had never failed, then I would've never learned anything because it is the greatest teacher. So don't be scared of failure, be scared of not taking the risk, be scared of regret so that when you get to the end of your life, you look back and you realize the potential that you had, but was never taken. At the end of your life, you want to look at your future self, your potential self, and you want to say, Dang! That's a good looking person right there, because I look just like them. (15:55)
But if you're the skinny and malnourished, just lacking version of what you could have been is because you didn't take the opportunity, plain and simple. You didn't take the opportunity. I don't care if you're in your sixties, your seventies, or if you are a teenager, or if you're in your twenties or thirties, listen, the opportunity is there right now. Today is the best time to start.
Yesterday is gone. Today is the best time to start, and start moving forward so that you can hit your potential. That's what it's about. So many people leave their potential laying behind. I heard somebody say “one of the richest places in the world is the graveyards” because of all of the potential that's lying there, that was never used. I want you to live in success. I hope you received some value from this podcast. Please give me a five star review. Give me a like, give me a share, subscribe on whatever platform you're on and leave some reviews. (16:55)
Let me know what you think. Did you love it? Did you hate it? What kind of topics would you like to hear, discuss, and then hop on Facebook. If you've got a Facebook account, we've got a Facebook group called “bigger vision” and it's a free group. We've got some great content that gets dropped daily there. And it's just a place where you're going to be able to increase your mindset, your business understanding and your investing knowledge. Also you can find me on the internet at www.myvision.com.
That's where you'll be able to find a link to all the podcasts as well. You can share that with a friend and they'll be able to press play and find all of my podcasts on a plugin I've got there, but it also gives you some real estate content as well. So be blessed, live in success. And remember let's increase our financial thermostat by taking massive action and getting into the right rooms. (17:54)
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