Chris Odegard is Dr. Brad Miller’s guest on Episode 206 of “The Beyond Adversity Podcast.”

Chris grew up in a family of employees like most people. All he knew was that you went to school, you go to college, you get a job and then work and hopefully you get a pension by the end.

That’s all he did in his life until he went through a divorce with a 19-year marriage and lost 55% of his assets because of it.

He changed the way he invested his money and moved away from conventional investments like stocks, bonds and mutual funds to investments that are not publicly traded.

Nine years later, he made back the assets he lost and multiplied it many times over. Because of this, he never had to work for anybody ever again.

Chris believes that yes, money can’t buy you happiness but neither can poverty. Having money makes a lot of things easier for you. That life is so much easier with it than without it.

It’s not the money itself that is loved but the things it can do for yourself, your family, and your community.

He also believes in a study that up to a certain point and amount, money increases your quality of life and happiness but once you go beyond that point then there is no correlation anymore.

One time, his friend Bill told him about a book that he should read. It was “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kiyosaki. It took him a long time before he started reading it but when he did, he was inspired to change how invested.

Because of that, he went to a free seminar of Robert Kiyosaki’s company. His car won’t start when he was trying to go but he managed to find a way to go anyway. By finding a car rental company that would drop a car off. He was really motivated to go to the seminar which is why he did that.

He always thinks about how if he was still married, he wouldn’t be where he is now. Because his wife would always talk him down on things he wanted to do. Sometimes you just have to take a leap of faith.

Episode 206 of The Beyond Adversity Podcast is a must listen for anyone who’s trying to invest while going through adversity, whether it’s depression, a divorce, a massive debt, etc. You should not give up hope just because of a few bumps along the road. Persevering towards your dreams regardless of adversity is key to having a happy and hopeful life.

“The Beyond Adversity Podcast with Dr. Brad Miller is published weekly with the mission of helping people “Grow Through What They Go Through” as they navigate adversity and discover their promised life of peace, prosperity, and purpose. 

Website: https://theprolificinvestor.net/

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Our guest today is Chris Odegard.

He has a story of having some success and some challenges in his life.

And he has some lessons to teach us in the area of investing.

His website is a prolific investor. And his book is Get off your asset manage your money,

while you need alternative investments. We welcome to the podcast today, Chris Odegard.

Hey, Brad, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it. Looking forward.

Pretty awesome, thank you so much for joining us and

you're sharing with our audience some of your insights.

You were in your life kind of cook along okay in the corporate world and doing okay.

And then ran into some challenges in life.

And you kind of had to make some, some pivots.

So, tell us a little bit about your story, some of the things you had to face,

and then how you will we'll take it from there.

Yeah, well, I was, you know, I was raised. If you've ever read Robert Kiyosaki's Cashflow Quadrant,

I was raised in a family of E’s: employees. And that's all.

That's all I knew, you went to school, you got a college education, you got a job,

and you work for the man and hopefully had a pension and 401k.

And so that's what I knew. And that's what I did.

And it was going about, as well as that path goes for anybody until about my mid-40s.

And then my adversity was the end of my 19-year marriage,

which probably hits on about three of your, you know, divorce, depression and debt, or finances.

And I don't know that I did very well with the depression, and the divorce part of it.

But I managed to come out pretty good on the finances.

I lost 55% of all my assets and 1000s of dollars a month in cash flow because of the divorce.

And, of course, it could be you know, people have those kind of situations

for all kinds of reasons, mine just happened to be a divorce.

And I changed the way I invested and moved from conventional investments,

stocks, bonds, and mutual funds over to alternatives, which is pretty much everything that's not publicly traded.

And lo and behold, nine years later, I had made up that 55%

and multiplied it many times over and I did what I affectionately call fire the man

and I never have to work again, if I don't want to.

I want to get into some of the details of that in just a second here.

But just the reality is whether, you know, especially the last few years,

we've had a time when people have been challenged not only in their relationships,

but also on their financial situations, businesses have closed or shifted,

and all kinds of ways and therefore people's and you know, in the last 10 years or so,

we've had several ups and downs in the market and things of that nature.

So, people have lost their fortunes or filed their fortunes,

or had devastation and certainly debit divorce is one of those things

that can just knock people on their rear end, financial, among other things.

But I do my acknowledge when you have issues in life,

whether it's mental health issues, emotional relationship issues.

If you got financial problems, it just magnifies them.

Don't you think if whatever issues you have, if you don't have money,

if you're struggling in there, it just compounds do you agree?

I totally agree. And you know, Americans have some weird concepts about money,

you know, people will say, well, money can't buy you happiness.

And I remember Zig Ziglar saying, well, you know, money can't buy you happiness,

but neither can poverty. You know, so if you can take, you know that one thing off the table,

it makes a lot of things easier. And you can do incredible things with money, whatever that may be.

Life is just easier with it than without it. So, I agree completely,

that if you add that into the mix of other problems,

it's just a huge multiplier in a negative way.

If you're obsessed with money, then you have a value system that's not complete.

And yet there are people who can be obsessed with money who have no money, right?

You know, you can be poor, and you can be the person who's standing in line at the convenience store,

trying to get the hit the big time in a lottery ticket.

And that's your financial plan. You're still obsessed with money,

but you don't have any what you're sharing here is that you can have prosperity in your life,

and still have, you know, keep your values and keep things right side up and other aspects of your life.

You believe that's the case?

No, I don't think this way. Nobody loves money. You know, you're holding a piece of paper in your hand.

It's what money can do for you or what you can do with money for yourself and for your family in your community.

There was a study one time that I read that said, you know, up to a certain point,

and I don't know what the exact number is, but up until a certain point, let's just call it $75,000.

Every dollar that you make, you know up to $75,000 proportionally increases your quality of life and your happiness,

but once you get beyond a certain dollar point, there's no direct correlation ship anymore.

Most of your things are taken care of, and happiness doesn't grow proportionally above $75,000, or whatever.

So, I think what I'm hearing you say, and I have heard that said before, as well,

Chris is to use with Maslow's hierarchy thing, your basic needs are met.

Your food, and your shelter and your transportation are basically at a certain level.

And after that, you're just kind of adding to it, you're expanding things.

And so, what they do matter, it does matter.

And I've been privileged to travel in some pretty poor areas of the world.

I've done some mission work and some pretty better as world included in our country.

In terms of their economic deals and their situations, and seeing people in just abject poverty,

still have a good attitude. But I've also seen some people who have a lot who are pretty miserable.

So, what I want to talk to you about here today is how we can kind of turn things around

in our financial picture and start to move things

and still maintain a little integrity to still have some value driven things in our life.

And you went to some alternative matters of investment and so on.

And so, I'm interested here, you mentioned how you set aside some kind of traditional aspects of financing.

So, let's talk specifically for a few minutes, Chris,

about where you were when you were kind of at your worst place?

And what were some of the actions that you took on river action by us and what I like to teach?

What are some of the actions that you took to turn things around?

I was like most Americans that conventional investor stocks, bonds and mutual funds through four, that's where I was.

And over the history of the s&p 500, the average annual return of the s&p 500 is somewhere around 9.8%.

But studies have been done and investors only get somewhere less than 6%.

In today's inflationary environment, if you're only making 6% annual returns on your investment,

you're not even keeping up, you know, maintaining bought buying power.

So, I switch to alternatives, which is pretty much everything that's not publicly traded.

I mean, that could be anything from real estate to precious metals,

and in all aspects of real estate, private shares of small businesses.

But I guess in terms of action, there were a handful of things that kind of happened to me.

And I think the thing I could, as I look back, is that I continue to say yes to everything

that kind of kind of came across my path.

Around the time that I got divorced, a friend of mine, his name's Bill, he said:

'Chris, there's this book you ought to read.'

And I bought the book and I promptly set it on my nightstand

and it sat there way too longer than it should have.

But the book was Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

And like millions of others, I read that book and I was inspired to move investing in a different direction.

And then one day, so I read that book, I was really excited.

And I was sitting in my "van down by the river post-divorce condo" if you've ever seen one.

Chris, living in a van down by the river, and he's the inspirational speaker, motivational speaker.

He was homeless, basically.

So, I was living in that kind of a situation.

And an ad came on the radio, and it was it was Robert Kiyosaki's company.

And they were having a free seminar some week, and I was like,

Okay, I got to go to that I registered for that.

And the day that I was to drive 25 miles north, to go to this thing.

My car wouldn't start, I have a thing for a certain vintage of pickup trucks.

It's a '92 F150. I still had it, but that day, it wouldn't start.

And so, I managed to find a rental car company that would drop a car off.

This was way before Uber existed.

And I managed to get to that, that seminar, and there were others.

Just a second, you see that you were really motivated to do this.

Because a lot of people when the car would start, they would say,

Okay, that's it. You know, I'm just here that would be in a store,

but you really wanted it. So, I think that kind of goes to motivation.

Oh, yeah. That leads to the action. So, I'm sorry to hit the pause button there on you but I wanted to touch on that.

Yeah. And then they talked about going to REIA, which stands for Real Estate Investor Association.

And these are just real estate investment clubs all over the country.

And there's one in just about every town I said,

Okay, well, they said, I should do that. I'll go do that.

And from that point, I started to meet people, you know, and I met a guy and he said,

Hey, Chris, you do would you like to work with me? And we could do some things together.

And he said, you should listen to the real estate guys podcast.

And my first question was, what's a podcast?

And this was quite a quite a while back.

I mean, and so I figured out what a podcast was and got it on my phone,

and I started listening to that, and it just was one thing after another,

that led me down this path of learning and growing.

And I can actually, I actually wrote an article where I did a family tree of all the different people

and things that I met. And on one side, you have time on the one.

On the other hand, you have net worth growth, which went 5.6 times over this nine-year period.

And so every time somebody said, Hey, you should try something, or you should listen to this,

or you should read that I said, Okay.

So here's what a couple of things I heard.

What you're saying there, in terms of your action points here,

Chris help me out, if you see if I'm right or wrong here.

You were, you were motivated a little bit about your pain that you felt in it,

you've gone through the divorce, and you were way behind in your finances, you're in the hole there.

You're motivated by that. But there were also some emotional elements going on here.

I take it, you read the book, you somebody suggested read the book, you read,

Kiyosaki his book, and you went to a seminar, and you started meeting and networking with people.

Is that some of the things that you did there? Yep. And then you applied what you learned, right?

Yes, I did. I tried to, you know, I tried a whole, you know, I went down a whole bunch of different investing paths.

And most of them were paths where I thought, I tried that, I never want to do that, again, that doesn't suit me.

And, you know, today I'm at the place where, after going down all these dead ends,

I finally found the kind of the, the, the alternative investments that I like

and work best for me and my time and my skill set.

So there might be another thing in there that people have said to me,

Well, Chris, if you were still married, would you be where you are today?

And I thought about that. And my ex-wife was one of the types of people if I said

Hey, I just read this Robert Kiyosaki book, look at all this, this stuff that he talks about,

she would have told me the 53 things that could possibly go wrong.

So she kind of rained on the parade and not only did I have all these new people coming into my life,

but I had kind of this in one-way, mental boat anchor removed from my life as well.

Yeah, it's interesting how we have this yin and yang in terms of relationships.

And, you know, there's, I think your seasons for certain relationships.

And there's, sometimes people just don't get it.

And sometimes we do need to listen to people come from a really pragmatic standpoint.

But there come times for a leap of faith.

And I'm going to go with you here, maybe a little different place here.

But it seems to me you had some fortuitous relationships happen.

You went with your gut your intuition; you did some things.

Do you think there is any aspect of this, Chris?

And if you don't have to answer if you're not comfortable about it,

that was kind of a bigger than yourself type of thing.

Whatever you want to say, I got a connection, bigger than yourself that was going on here.

Yeah, I didn't think about that. You know, my friend, recommending this book, the ad coming on the radio,

the car not starting. I do think about that.

Because I think there is something to be said here in terms of being a good listener in a discerner.

Of what higher power does say to us, and my particular case, I'm a Christian, and I believe in God.

And I believe that if we, I sometimes call those holy moments or God moments when you kind of listen.

And if you don't feel comfortable with it, if you do it any most time, many times it works out well.

We need to be a good listener there as well.

But I want to go with you just for a second about these relationships that you began to generate here, as well,

as it sounds like these relationships, regenerating both interpersonally

and people in the real estate world and other aspects and in kind of alternative financing.

And also, virtually or, or kind of mentorship stuff to talk about the books and tapes and events,

you're going to tell me about how that some momentum, or some energy was generated

by developing this kind of new set of relationships and how has that helped you in terms of succeeding yourself?

Maybe teaching others?

Well, I'll give you I'll give you an example.

So through some of this networking, I joined some investment kind of mastermind groups.

And one of the guys said to me, and as a conventional investor,

most people have a lot of their money wrapped up in their employer's 401k.

So and that's stocks, bonds, mutual funds, so if you decide

Hey, I want to go start acquiring rental real estate or, you know, precious metals, or shares of private businesses.

You typically can't do that because your money is locked inside these plans, and you can't move it

because there's all kinds of restrictions, and they only let you invest in a handful of things.

And this, this guy who ran this group said to me,

Hey, Chris, can you do an in-service transfer with your employer's 401k?

And like the podcast, I said, What's it in service transfer?

They said, well, that's where your employer will let you take money and

move it out of their 401 K plan that administrator and move it to an outside administrator,

and we can move it someplace where you can invest that 401 K money in real estate.

And at this point, I had worked for my employer for probably 25 years,

and I kind of went, if that was possible, certainly, I would have heard about that before.

And so you know, I go up on my merry business and kind of push that off to the side.

And then one day, I checked into it, and I'll be darn,

my employer would let me transfer out all of their matching contributions over the years,

which was in the six-figure number.

And that gave me a jumpstart, on moving in the investing direction.

And so, you know, I kind of say, you need to have a childlike curiosity.

And when something sounds, Mike, it might be too good to be true.

If I had walked away from all those, you know, those ideas that were brought to me,

that sounded too good to be true, I would have left a ton of money on the table and

I wouldn't be where I am today. So those type of things.

You wouldn't have known about that if you weren't in this network of people

and to kind of make you aware of it and you learning from different ways

rather than the kind of traditional way and it's awesome that you're able to do that.

Just curious, are you still an employed personnel? Are you on your own? Are you self-employed?

No, I'm semi-retired, I write my blog and try to educate people about how to improve their financial situation.

I don't work for anybody; my schedule is my own.

You made these changes here, you took some action, you made some changes,

and you were being in the net network and make some shifts over.

And I'm going to talk to you in a minute about some specifics about investments here

about how you when you shift some money over, but let's talk about disciplines now.

But I like to call this the cognitive part to help you apply things.

So what are some disciplines maybe that you do now that you didn't do before,

maybe you teach in your book, and so on.

So in different disciplines or habits, rituals, things like this people can do to be helpful in their life.

So the one that's kind of a recent newcomer, and it doesn't apply, it applies to anything.

There's a book called The One Thing, and it was written by CO written by Gary Keller,

who started Keller Williams real estate.

And I actually heard an interview with a co-author on the podcast.

And before I even read the book, I was impacted and started doing

and I have heard many people say that to do lists are just a waste of time, that you really need to schedule things.

So he said, every day, you need to work on the one thing, and I have an action item list,

that's probably 20 things long. And every day, five of them get knocked off.

And some of them are important, some of them are art.

But without even looking at that list. I already know what the one thing is.

So and I know probably what the second one thing is after that.

So that has really increased my productivity by not spending time on what I call the administrative BS,

and really just going, the one thing is the thing that's going to make everything that you're trying to do easier,

or even eliminate some things that you were going to do, or thought you needed to do.

So that's one of the things and I guess another one is just continuous learning, you know,

I think people are, are designed for, you know, productivity and improvement.

And it's interesting that so many people leave formal education, whether that be high school,

or some level of college, and then, you know, their learning is kind of over.

And even if they do learn, they wouldn't consider that 10s of 1000s of dollars,

or even more than that, that I spent on seminars and training classes,

they wouldn't consider that real education because it doesn't come with a diploma from some university,

but I never would have learned the stuff that I learned. It's not taught in any university.

You learn certain things in school, you'll know how to apply them in seminars and other things like that.

Now that's not true. I have to say, you know, that's not true with all you know, degrees.

If you're going to be a medical doctor or a counselor or a lawyer.

There are some places where that college education is very, very specific

and you need that, but that's kind of not most of.

The things that you can certainly get your degrees medical degrees

and I got a doctoral degree on the well behind me here from the work I've done,

but you certainly don't have to stop learning and you can apply even if you have formal education,

you can apply non-formal education to your life to enhance everything I believe,

and you just don't stop learning, I believe that you learned and also you learned from

all kinds of folks and situations, you know, you can, you know,

I've learned from my I learned from the 16-year-old kid who's out shoveling my driveway right now,

it'd be in a little bit of an entrepreneur making some money because I'm in a head, right seven is snowfall.

Were here yesterday. And you know, learning from him with just a little bit about some financial being a go getter,

and that kind of thing. Let's talk about your book a little bit now and about what people can learn in your book.

And particularly, I'm interested here, Chris, and how what you teach can serve others,

particularly as someone who's kind of wanting to break the pattern in their life,

if somebody's kind of wanting to not invest conventionally,

or they want to have some creative way to do this.

They want to make a dent in their life.

Maybe there's somebody you know, you said, you're semi-retired,

I'm semi-retired as well, maybe someone who's approaching retirement,

it's thinking they're looking at that 401k or they're looking at that pension plan, they're gone.

Okay, that's okay. But man, I would like to do a lot better.

Or they're in a situation where they have medical expenses, or they have a kid in college, whatever it is, I'm okay.

But I could do a lot better. So what are folks going to learn in your book, how you serve others with your book here.

So I mean, if you there, there are numerous statistics out there about the financial health of the country.

And I'll just give you a couple, you know, 34% of Americans have zero savings 69% have less than 10,000.

You know, 46% of Americans have zero retirement savings.

So you don't have to go very far to see that.

The average Americans finances is just not good at all.

And everybody has subscribed to this, what I call the 401 K path to mediocrity

to invest for your employer's 401 K.

And then someday you're going to have this big, this big mountain of money.

But it's with the average investor earning somewhere under 6%, before taxes and inflation,

they're just never going to get there. And so in the alternative world,

it's common to routinely to get annual returns above 20%,

before you even consider the tax advantages that some of these investments come with.

And so in the book, I tried to show people the difference between the conventional investments and the alternatives.

And I've created, you mentioned Maslow's hierarchy of needs,

I created something called the prolific investors hierarchy of investors,

where I have the conventional investments down in the shadow of the pyramid.

And then once you get on the pyramid, there are all these different types of alternative investments.

And I compare the conventional investments against alternatives in 13 different categories.

And the alternatives are better in 11 of the 13 categories.

And so I go, why would anybody be on this 401 K Highway to mediocrity,

because it's so inferior in 11 of these 13 different ways.

And I give a real-life exam, I give real life examples of investments that I do and how they perform.

So that I'm not just using some kind of, you know, kind of a book research kind of thing.

Like, here's an example. And I use that example, across all these different categories

and show how the alternatives are better.

And let's be specific about some of the alternatives.

Right now you're talking about real estate and some of the things as well,

what are some of the alternatives that are out there?

So everything that's not publicly traded, so that's all that's every category of real estate.

Single family, multifamily, you know, apartments, warehouse centers, precious metals,

cryptocurrency, business equipment. One of my investments is ATM machines, I own ATM machines.

And I make, you know, make money on every month on those, and you could be a private lender.

And believe it or not a specifically type of cash value life insurance

is what I believe should be the foundation of every serious investor’s portfolio in the air

that you didn't hear any stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs,

All this stuff that would normally be in your 401 K or in your pension plan, that kind of thing.

I'm not hearing you go on there so much.

And yet, so it sounds like it's not just a theoretical or not just an academic exercise.

It's out of your life and the life of people you've encountered and that type of thing.

So it is a hot topic and lots of ways, but you mentioned crypto

and there I know there's NFT's out there that type of thing.

Just give us your take on, that seems like a very volatile thing to do.

I'm involved with a little bit and but what's your take on that to help people to understand that aspect,

some people have a basic handle of real estate and some other things like it? I'd like your take on those,

I like to invest in things that are mostly relatively stable.

So just yesterday, you know, the down was down 400 points,

and there's 24/7 talking heads about what's happening with the stock market,

how much it went down what the earnings per share was, and you know, what?

The ATM machines that I own, and the apartment buildings that I own?

They just keep putting money in my bank account every month.

And does the value of them go up or down?

I don't know, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't.

But it doesn't make any difference to me that the only time the price of the asset matters is

when you buy it or when you sell it.

And because my investments produce cash flow.

I don't like stocks, bonds and mutual funds,

I don't have to sell a piece of my portfolio to generate cash,

I have an asset that's growing in value and generating cash.

In a pretty steady and reliable, I assume from your apartments and from your ATM machines and so on.

Yes, exactly. And so I look at that, and I go

God, these poor people that are you know, they're watching this stuff and wondering about their return.

It's an anxiety producing way to invest.

But sorry, you mentioned crypto, so I like to invest in things are relatively stable for the most part.

And day trading and buying and selling all kinds of these different alt coins is not investing, it's speculating.

And it's a job. And as soon as you stop trading, you stop making money.

So that's not investing. And there's nothing wrong with that people can do that.

And I piddled, around with some of the altcoins for a while,

and then I kind of stopped and I'm very bullish on Bitcoin.

That it's here. And it's going to be kind of changed the world in a lot of different ways.

And so every Monday, I buy a set dollar amount of bitcoin, regardless of the price.

And so I just think it's, you know, it's kind of like the advent of the Internet.

It's something it's a life changing kind of thing, I believe. So we'll see

I do as well have some experience with it.

But I'm hearing you say stuff that I find very interesting.

And I think it can be applicable to our audience, we're looking to break out of adverse life conditions,

you have a system, and then you're trying to avoid speculation and you more about investing.

And that kind of put the nuances of those terminologies out there,

you're investing with kind of a thinking process here, and with a plan a strategy,

in terms of just speculation, and I love that.

You know, everybody should have an investment crisis,

because there are so many things to invest in, right?

So here's mine is something like this,

I mean, you could drive yourself. It's the shiny object syndrome, so everybody should have an investment criterion.

I like appreciating assets that have a built-in tax advantage in case of real estate, that's depreciation.

And that I can use leverage on are the words I can borrow money against

and provide a decent ROI somewhere north of 15%.

So, but I do also, but there's a couple of exceptions.

Well, sometimes you got to take a small amount of your money and swing for the fences, the home run.

And that would be, you know, the Bitcoin, or maybe I do some small, publicly traded stocks,

or some pre-IPO type stocks with small amounts of money, because one of those that hits,

it's not going to take a lot of money to make a big difference in your life.

But it could also go to zero. So you have to do that in a measured fashion.

Let me ask you this Chris, risk tolerance and that type of thing.

Let's just say that there's a person or situation who comes to you with basically this kind of deal, Chris,

I love what you're saying. Makes a lot of sense to me, but I don't have any money.

All my money is wrapped up in my 401 K are my pension plan, or there's too much month at the end of my money.

How am I going to save us money? What did realistically, Chris, what does somebody need to find?

What does somebody could somebody get started in the things you're talking about?

For a minimal amount of money? I mean, $1,000 $300, a couple 1000 whatever it would be,

can you really legitimately do that? Or what?

Just give me your kind of your scenario on this. So that person who says I can't do this.

You can, and we all have to start where we are, right?

So if I was going back to my 20s when I first came across the 401 K,

and if I had known back then what I know now I wouldn't have put a dime in the traditional pretax IRA.

Well, real estate seems like it's a really high barrier to entry.

And when you own rental real estate, you've pretty much, especially if you're managing yourself,

you've pretty much taken on another job.

So there are what are called turnkey housing providers across the country.

This is a company that works in specializes in a single-family rental in a particular market.

And they buy or build houses where the end uses are to go to a landlord.

And they also have a property management company and a construction company.

So they go find a house, they buy it, they fix it up, make it durable for renters, they screen the tenants,

they put some good quality paying tenants in there, and then they turn around and sell it to you.

And all you have to do is show up with your down payment in your bank loan.

And now you've got what's called a loaded rental.

And, you know, for, you know, in some places that country, you can buy houses for under $100,000.

So a down payment, you could get into some of these houses for, you know, maybe $20,000, or something like that.

And, you know, if you didn't have $20,000, you could do it with a friend or a relative, so but it you know,

I mean, people start, you know, making these contributions to their 401k, I would say,

don't even do those, right, until you can, you know, get to this, this hurdle.

So it's possible to do and the other thing is that we all only,

the only money each of us has to invest is the money that exceeds our living expenses.

So if you make $70,000 a year, and your living expenses are $70,000 a year, you've got no money to invest.

So everybody needs to be the best at whatever they do.

So they're the person that gets the raises, just promote promotion,

and the more money that they have above their living expenses, the more the better their off going to be.

So you got to focus on what you're currently doing, maximize that.

So you've got more money to invest and maximize the investing.

And sometimes somebody can leave that job behind and do whatever you want

Excellent advice. Now let's apply it more directly to somebody else.

One of the things I love to do is, you know, what you teach can be applied to someone's life and change their life,

sort of in people who have been impacted by your book,

or by your teaching or by something, you know, the network that you're in,

that you've seen some change happen. Tell us about that.

Give us kind of a testimonial, as someone who's been influenced by your teaching,

I guess most recently, I first of all, the reviews of the book are just very flattering, I'm humbled.

They're just over the top positive except for one scathing review. So I'm not sure what I did to that guy.

Always one in there. There's always one.

It's almost like I don't know. Well, I had a guy who worked for the same company that I did,

and retired and he had a pension. And he took the lump sum instead of the pension.

And he found himself with a whole bunch of money, and no cash flow.

And so I've been working with him on a regular basis to try and help him figure this out.

And we're working through a process to take all this cash and some home equity,

and move it into these cash flowing investments.

In this case, it's apartments syndications, which is my main thing, so we're just working through that.

So yeah, he's seen some progress and sounds like that's good.

He's just at the very beginning, but he sees what I'm doing.

And it's not just me, it's other investors in some of these mastermind groups,

and we're all kind of doing the same thing.

And we're learning from each other.

I can give you an example, one of the one of the apartment buildings that I'm a part owner in Atlanta, Georgia

is going to sell this year. And I think we've owned it for maybe about three years.

And the average annual return on that apartment building is 24%.

And then there'll be no taxes on those earnings

because of the depreciation that came with that apartment building and others.

So you look at 24% annual return that's tax free compared to the stock market investor

who's getting somewhere in the 6% range. I mean, it's life changing stuff, not comparison.

And it's not in, you know, I was going to say, I happen to have seen this apartment building

because I was in Atlanta, and I went and checked it out.

But most of these places I've never seen, you know, I've never seen him, I'll never see him.

They're all managed by other people.

Well, Chris, some fascinating things here that we've learned a lot here today on our podcast episode.

If folks want to get a hold of you, or more about your website or about your book,

or about your conventional wisdom quiz,

how can people get connected with you and learn more about your get your book?

The website is theprolificinvestor.net and there's a number of ways you can interact with me there.

All the social media links are there.

There are some YouTube videos that go along with some of my articles.

There's a 10-question conventional wisdom quiz that people can take,

and it'll give you my answers versus what your answers were.

There's a coffee cup right there on the homepage.

And for anybody who wants to have a conversation with me about personal financing or investing,

they can schedule a free 30-minute virtual coffee with me. I do those on Thursdays.

So, there's a link there, and you can pick up a place on my calendar that works with you.

And of course, there's a big flashing star right there.

That'll link you to an Amazon place where you can get the book.

You could go directly to Amazon as well and you'll get to the book faster

if you just type in my name Chris Odegard, rather than the title.

If you type in the title, you it'll be down there but if you type Chris Odegard in, you can find it.

Yeah, so the website, theprolificinvestor.net is the place

We'll put connections to all of that on our website, drbradmiller.com.

Thank you for being with us today. Some good stuff here from Chris Odegard, theprolificinvestor.net.

Thank you for being our guest today on the Beyond Adversity Podcast