Enriching your life through passive real estate investing with Todd Miller

Todd Miller is originally from Hollywood and he took Hollywood over to Asia. And then he decided to make a shift. And this shift is focused on helping people create and preserve their wealth through investment, real estate. And he is on a mission to enrich people’s lives by trading financial insecurity for financial security and perhaps even doing it through virtual ways.

Todd Miller is a Hollywood executive by profession. But he realized that the entertainment business is not so entertaining as a place to have a career. After 25 years of doing the professional thing, he decided that he wanted to maximize his time. And so he became an early retiree. He lives on the beach and in tropical Thailand. And over the past five years, He developed a US property portfolio that finances his lifestyle. And he wrote a best-selling book on wealth, creating wealth and time, money and meaning.

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Enriching your life through passive real estate investing with Todd Miller

Brett:

I am excited about our next guest. He is originally from Hollywood and he took Hollywood over to Asia. And then he decided to make a shift. And this shift is focused on helping people create and preserve their wealth through investment, real estate. And he is on a mission to enrich people’s lives by trading financial insecurity for financial security and perhaps even doing it through virtual ways. And he’s going to teach us how to do that. In this episode. Please welcome shortly Todd Miller. Hey, Todd, how are you doing?

Todd:

Hey, Brett, good morning.

Brett:

What do you have our listeners a little bit about your background and current focus?

Todd:

Sure. So I am a Hollywood executive by profession. But I realized that the entertainment business is not so entertaining as a place to have a career. And after 25 years of doing the professional thing, I decided that I wanted to maximize my time. And so I’m an early retiree. I live on the beach and tropical Thailand. And over the past five years, I’ve developed a US property portfolio, that finances my lifestyle. And I’ve also written a best-selling book Enrich: Create Wealth and Time, Money and Meaning. And this passion project really is about trying to make life delicious. And it recognizes that financial security is foundational upon which then one can create optionality in work and in life and live on your own terms.

Brett:

Amazing love that we’re gonna dive into that here in a minute. But I want to take one more step back and help our listeners to get to know a little bit more Todd. So I believe we’ve all been given certain gifts, I believe these gifts in life or some people call them superpowers, I believe their God-given gifts, but I believe these gifts have been given to us as a way to be a blessing and help others. So I’m curious, I want you to take a step back maybe your high school days, early Hollywood days, what was the one or two gifts that you believe you were given? And how does that help how you help others today?

Todd:

So I’ve had an innate curiosity about the world. And I’ve had that from the earliest stages. But after graduating from college, I knew what I didn’t want to do, which is going down a crude conventional career path in the United States. And so I set off the ratio, and it was curiosity. That led me to age. And it’s really, it has propelled me to always try to investigate and research and go beyond my comfort zone. And I think that really, it’s that curiosity, which is my largest superpower, and one that I hope to share with others.

Brett:

How have you developed that curiosity? Or what? along the journey, right? I mean, what did you do to encourage that in yourself?

Todd:

I indulged, so we all wonder about the world. But I did more than wonder. I acted upon it. And I’ve never hesitated to indulge in interest. And, and so I think it’s that willingness to explore. It’s that willingness to step beyond what might be comfortable, which has led me to have what has been a very colorful business career. But it’s also just led me in so many unforeseen directions that one might never have imagined for a kid from Kentucky. I mean, at this point in my life, I’ve spent more than half of my life outside of my home country. I traveled to more than 100 countries on all seven continents. I am more comfortable and At home, in many countries, I am around the world that I am back in the United States. And so I’m truly a multicultural kind of guy. And for guys growing up in Western Kentucky, you know, that’s just these things don’t happen very, very frequently. But the reason is, I explored, I wondered, I requested, and I gave myself permission at the earliest age to do so. And I would encourage that among everyone who is listening.

Brett:

Absolutely love it. That’s gold, your curiosity outside of the US and to take that curiosity and take action. So would you talk about the moment when you became you know, fascinated, or obsessed with helping others to achieve financial freedom through investment, real estate?

Todd:

Sure. So I became obsessed personally, with issues of work-life integration. When I was in my mid-20s, I was hired by a Hollywood studio to help open up the vast markets of Asia. I was a newly minted MBA, and I basically had a dream job. I thought I had won the lottery when it comes to jobs. And I was fortunate to also learn a couple of lessons very early in those days. And one of those lessons was to never confuse my identity and self-worth with my job. And another lesson that I learned very early on, is to always stay grounded and to never allow work, to overflow, and to pollute life. And because I had that obsession with work-life integration, I started researching, probing, really investigating best practices around all the domains related to this topic, over a number of years. And along the way, I realized that I wasn’t the only one who struggled with issues of work and life and trying to thread it all. And so the more that I discovered that my, my peers had the same questions and the same frustrations, I began giving advice. Frequently, and that advice was career advice. It was financial advice, it was life advice. And at times, it was even parenting advice. And this was, even before I became a parent, and ultimately, all that advice has morphed into this little book called and rich. But that’s how it happened. It was very organic. And it all stemmed really, from an obsessive curiosity about making work and life work together. And that cultivated from my mid-20s. Amazing. So

Brett:

let’s dive into that right now. What are the maybe that one, two, or even three secrets you found to making work in life balance meaningful? And I love the way you said it never confusing your identity and self-worth with your job?

Todd:

I think in terms of identity, one of the most difficult tasks for professionals is that we are, who the business card says that we are. And so what I resolve to myself, is, whenever I’m at a cocktail party, and someone says, what do you do, I’m ready for that person. Because I vowed, and I would challenge this to all your readers define who you are as something else than what you do. And if you can manage to do that, if you can respond to that proverbial cocktail party conversation, then that’s a really, really good beginning for helping to build that identity. But back in my mid-20s, as much as I focused on work-life issues, I failed to grasp one very important point. And that is the urgency of accelerating financial security. And for many years, my life was rocking. My career was rocking. Life is going swimmingly? Well. I never even thought about five financial security, I thought it didn’t have any reason to any, you know, because everything was just humming along. And then years later, as I became more disengaged and more disillusioned with work, and with a big corporate system, I was miserable at work by my financial insecurity, and that, for me is the key insight is that financial security is foundational. It’s not, it’s not the end goal. It’s the starting point. And once one can establish some foundation of financial security, then it’s much easier to scaffold a life of meaning and relevance and all the things that really matter upon that, and it took me 25 years to figure that out. And what I’m hoping to do is to help people take the shortcut.

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