Business Innovators Radio - Chris Quintana: Revolutionizing the Financial Industry

Episode Date: February 16, 2024

In this episode, Nina Hershberger interviews Chris Quintana, a financial strategist and estate planner based in sunny Florida. Chris brings a fresh perspective to financial planning, offering a unique approach that sets her apart from traditional financial planners.Quintana’s credentials and expertise in the field of financial planning make her a trusted source of information. After a personal experience with a deceptive financial professional, Chris took it upon herself to learn about money management and educate others. She started a club to help women become financially independent and eventually became a licensed financial advisor herself.During the interview, Nina and Chris discuss the importance of alternative investments, particularly real estate, in building wealth. Chris shares how she helps clients become the bank themselves, lending money to developers in between projects and earning a piece of the profit. They also touch on the benefits of tax liens as an alternative investment strategy.Who should listen to this episode? Anyone tired of the rollercoaster ride of the stock market and looking for alternative investment options. Chris offers a fresh perspective on building wealth and provides insights into unconventional strategies that can lead to financial freedom.To learn more about Chris Quintana and her innovative approach to financial planning, visit her website at CQconsultingservices.com. You can schedule a call and explore her proprietary program, the Financial Freedom Formula. Chris and her team provide a concierge service, guiding clients through the process and helping them implement strategies that align with their financial goals.She also is offering listeners a free copy of her book, the Less You Know The More They Make, by going to https://cqconsulting.kartra.com/page/Free-ebook-download.MegaBucks Radio with Nina Hershbergerhttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/megabucks-radio-with-nina-hershbergerSource: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/chris-quintana-revolutionizing-the-financial-industry

Welcome to Megabox Radio. Conversations with successful entrepreneurs, sharing their tips and strategies for success. Real-world ideas that can put Megabox in your bank account. Here's your host, Nina Hirshberger. Welcome to today's show. My guest today is Chris Kentana. Chris is located in Florida in the sunny south. I sure wish I were there right now, Chris.

I'm up in Indiana. So I'm jealous that you're enjoying a little bit more warmth than we are up in the cold north. Chris is a financial strategist and a state planner, but what I like to say is she does things different than every other financial planners you and I probably have been involved with. And I'm excited to be able to talk to her. So Chris, welcome to today's show. Thank you so much for having me. So let's go back in time. You know, I mean, anybody could become a certified financial planner or a strategist if they take, you know, classes and pass tests and stuff.

But you're unique. Tell us how did you get into this industry? Well, that is an interesting story because I never dreamed that I was ever going to be in this industry. I was actually taken advantage of by a financial planner or a financial professional. And after that happened, I decided I was no longer going to let anybody help me with my money. And so I needed to figure it out myself. So I started studying and researching and trying to figure things out for myself. And the things that I was learning, I became kind of upset because

I didn't understand why we weren't taught this stuff in school, certain things. You know, there are certain simple things that could have been taught to us that were never taught. And it kind of upset me and it kind of put me on a track. And I started telling all my friends or anybody that will listen to me about the things that I was learning. And then they started bringing their friends to me and it just sort of became like it kind of grew on its own. and I started a club and just bringing women. It was for women. I wanted to help educate women because I felt that women, you know,

I was a woman and I was taking advantage of and I want to make sure it didn't happen to other women. After doing that, go ahead. After doing that, I met a woman financial advisor that I really liked and I liked what she stood for. She really, she didn't even have to work. anymore. She did it because she wanted to help other women. And I liked that about her. So, but she kept telling me, Chris, you need to get your licenses. You need to, uh, you need to, you're

missing out. You're just leaving a whole bunch of money on the table. And I'm like, well, first of all, I didn't think I was smart enough to go and get a financial, you know, advisor. I thought I was going to have to go back to finance school and I didn't want to do that. So I was like, No, that's okay. And I kept bringing clients or clients. And then finally one day she showed me our paycheck and she said, this is from your clients. And I was like, really? But I still was, you know, I was holding my own self back.

I was just like, it's okay. I'll, you know, I don't need the money. Because I had created, I had bought a bunch of real estate during the recession. And it just, that's what changed my world. But I really didn't realize that I knew something that most people didn't know because I had, even though I didn't have financial education in school, what I did have was a father that taught me how to save money. So I was really good at saving money. I just didn't know how to make work for me besides real estate. And I knew that I didn't want to have all my eggs in one basket.

So that's why I went to the financial planner that took advantage of me. And honestly, whatever she showed me the money, you know, was like she said, I will help you. I will mentor you. I will help you do this. Well, that was good. That was all great. But when I started studying for the licenses, I started learning things. And I started realizing the reason why they speak jargon is because they don't want us to understand.

If we understood and they spoke in regular English, we wouldn't need them. So that kind of really upset me. And then I also worked with a lot of people in the industry that, you know, they took advantage of people. I watched them take advantage of people. And they were actually trying to teach me how to do the same thing. You know, it wasn't that woman I was hung up, but it was other people. And I realized right away, I just, I did not want to be a part of that. I actually sort of wanted to be a whistleblower and tell everybody all the things that I was learning.

And that's where the book came in. you know, the more they make. And you can flip that script. I wanted to show everybody how to flip the script on the financial industry and the government. So that's kind of how that started. Sorry, I sort of went off on a tangent, but it is a long story how I actually became, got into this industry. Well, no, I think it's a fascinating story. So what you're saying is in 2008, when everything was crashing around us,

is when you stepped into the real estate market. Exactly. Because remember, my dad taught me how to save money. So I knew how to save. So I had money sitting in the bank. I just never knew what I was going to use it for. Exactly. And I always asked him, what am I going to do?

I should be able to spend this money. And he's like, you know what, you're going to have money when there's an opportunity that comes around when other people don't have money. And when that started happening with the housing market, I figured it out. I realized that's what the opportunity was for me. So it actually is what changed my world. Do you have a particular favors kind of? I mean, you talk about, I know before we started the show, you talked about alternative investments, one being the real estate market. Do you have a particular kind of real estate that you prefer?

Well, for higher returns, because I want to show my clients how to make money like the banks. And the banks, if you think about it, how do they make the most money? They take our money and they loan it to other people and make money off our money. And then they offer us pennies for it, right? So if we can do the same thing, we can actually become the bank. We can make more money. But the thing is, we don't want to just be loaning our money to. just anybody that needs our money.

We want to have somebody that's been vetted already. We know that they pay what they say they're going to pay. They, you know, they have a great track record. And so basically I work with developers that they need money in between projects, similar to a bridge loan. So you end up they need money from one project to the other. We loan them the money for a nice day, say, and we get a piece of the pie, not just a percentage. We actually get a piece of the profit for the money that we loan them.

So we're able to pay our clients a nice return much higher than the banks. Are you ever worried about having a real estate bubble again and during those 90 days, you know, saying tank or anything, does that ever concern you? Well, of course. I mean, nothing ever is 100%, 100%. However, if you learn how to pivot, that's when you make the most money. It's like when things turn around, it's like, for instance, myself, the one that when the market was crashing and people were losing their homes, everybody was losing.

It's like, well, that was the time to buy. if you're prepared. And so it's the same thing with real estate. So if it's time to buy it, that's when we buy. If it's time to sell, this one we sell. If it's time to develop, that's when we develop. It is, it's all about pivoting. We learn how to pivot.

And like I said, not everything is 100%, but we like to work with people that actually have been around for a long time. And one of the developers that we work with has been around and went right through the recession because they know how to pivot. So they didn't lose money. So I know you talk about that you're done for you process as a proprietary process. Tell me what that means. Okay.

So we have, I developed a program. It's called the Financial Freedom Formula. We call it the FFF. app and is we create a GPS plan for our clients. When I say GPS, I mean growth protection, growth protection and savings. And the reason we do this is because not only are we able to help our clients make more money, but what we, since we're making them more money, we can cause us. tax problem. So they have to know how to keep it. We don't want them to be, you know, making more

and having to pay more on taxes. So we use tax strategies that help them keep more. We also want to protect them, protect the assets that they have by creating an estate plan for them. And so it's more everything, it's pretty holistic, everything that we do. And I call it done for you because we, most of the people that we work with are very busy professionals. They know they've been good with money they've tried to do everything that they think is the right thing to do however they are um they don't have time they know there's other ways to do things they just don't have time to go and do the research themselves so basically we bring it to them we don't we don't like say here's where you're going to put your money here we show them some

options we show them some ways some different tax strategies that we can use we let them make the choices on their own but we don't like you're going to put your money here we show them some options we show them some but we bring them to them and it's a we call it done for you because it's something that you're not going to find anywhere else you go we have we have hired people to be our concierge our client has a concierge that helps our clients step by step and the reason I chose to do that is because I've been in several, several programs where I get into and they blast me with amazing information, but I don't know what to do next. And there's nobody to really help me.

Or they tell me that I can call and make my own appointments, but then when I got to make my own appointments, there's nobody to talk to. And it just became very, you know, it's a stressful thing. You pay all this money, and then there's nobody to help you implement it. And so that's what we do is we not only did. you the information and show you have to make the you know give you a step-by-step plan based on where you want to be but we help you implement it we don't just leave it to you to go and take care of does that make make sense so yeah that doesn't

make perfect sense do you in the portfolio that you're helping people do do do you do some traditional stocks or mutual funds or any of that kind of stuff as well you know what we actually have licensed professionals, licensed advisors that we work with that use really great strategies to help clients like mitigate losses. However, I don't personally do it, but like I said, if that's what they want, most of our clients are looking for a different way, though. They're, they're tired of the roller coaster ride. Yes, we have somebody, if they want to stay on a roller coaster or if they want to keep part of their money, you know, in the stock market, we have somebody that can definitely help them with that.

But the goal is, are you a fee-based or do you take a percentage of the profits that they earn from those real estate transactions? Actually, we don't get paid. Well, we do get paid by the client and it is just a fee. We have a fee that we charge for us to do everything. And the reason why we do it the way we do is because what I have found is that you can tell a client they need an estate plan. They need to speak to a lawyer. They need to set up their trust.

They need to protect themselves, but most people put it on the back burner. Or they'll create a trust. The lawyer will create the trust for them and they never fund it. They never put anything. There's been so many people I've spoke to that have a trust and nothing's in the trust because the lawyer. You know, they didn't help them implement it. They gave them the box, but they never helped them put the stuff in the box. So we actually purchased these different products for our clients, the tax plan, the different strategies that we're able to use.

We actually do, we purchase them for the client so that they're in the program and they are walked through each one of them. So they actually get everything taken care of. And they also have access to the private opportunities that are available because they're not advertised. These type of opportunities are not advertised. So it goes back to the concierge, though. So let's say I'm somebody that's listening to this podcast because it's going to be syndicated all over. And I'm thinking, yeah, she kind of makes sense. I am tired of just the standard rat race and going around on that.

that, you know, up and down and up and down. So what is the process of somebody wants to at least consider what you have to offer? Does this start with a concier you talked about? Actually, it goes to, if they go to my website, they would just sign up to hop on a call. And actually, on the website, CQ Consulting Services, there's a link there that says financial freedom formula. They click on that. They could see everything that comes with it. how the program works, and then there's a button there that says, like, learn more,

start here, they click on that, make an appointment with us, and we will call them, talk to them, and just see if it's, you know, if it's something that could work for them. Because, you know, our, like I said, our whole thing is not only to help make more money, but be able to keep more money, and we don't want to be an expense. We want to be like an investment, an investment pay you back, at least the investments that we like. So basically we want to get you your money back. When you're working with us, we want to get you your money back as quickly as possible. So you talk about alternative investments.

Is the real estate the only alternative or do you have even others that you recommend? No, we have others that are available. A lot of it is in real estate. If you've ever noticed, I'm sure you've noticed that. Most of the millionaires in the world or billionaires in the world have become rich with real estate. So real estate, you can, there's different ways of making money with real estate. Another way is we use tax liens. And tax loans.

So that's a totally different way. It's not actually totally just making money with the actual tax liens. But they're not we don't send them out to go buy their own tax lien. We work with a group of Professionals that this is all they do is they work with tax liens. They buy tax liens In bulk kind of but they go out and look at every single property. They don't just buy it off the internet and It looks good on Google, but when they get there it's been burnt down or but they also work with the people that are paying the tax liens for They want to see if these people they want to help people they want to help them. people. If they can, if they can pay it off, they go and check with the,

with the people that they're paying the tax liens for ask them, do you think you're going to be able to pay this back? If they're honest with them and tell them, you know what, I don't know if we're going to be able to do it. They will actually offer them money to walk away from the home because otherwise they end up losing the home for the price of the tax loan. So it's, um, if they're smart, they will take the money and walk away. And the returns are amazing for this company that does the tax liens, which then in turn gives our clients a great return. So in other words, they might go in and do a little bit of rehab on the property and then flip it and make more that way?

Yes, that's what I mean, yes. But they're doing that with a lot. It's not just one at a time. I know when I first started around 2012, I was like, I heard about tax. liens and I wanted to learn how to do it by myself. And I could go in and I could buy a few tax liens by myself, but then it's slower. It's a slower return. These people have, it's like a year-round thing.

They got tax liens. They got all kinds of projects going on, like non-stop. So it's not stopping. You know, they may be holding on to this one property for a while, but it doesn't really matter because they have these other ones that they're working on. So it's not just one at a time. Well, that's why you call it done for you. So in other words, as a busy professional who thinks this makes sense, I don't have to go out and find the real estate deals.

I don't have to find the tax liens. I don't have to find you have vetted and work with these professionals to bring it. And then, of course, I get to make the decision, but you vetted these people. Is that how it works? That's correct. I actually put my money into anything that any of my clients ever put money in, they know my money's in it or has been in it because I have, I will use it for a year or two years before I ever even tell my clients about it because I need to know that it's going to work. And believe me, there have been some that I've put my money in and I've lost money. And my clients never even heard about them because, you know, I was vetting it out.

And I lost money. They didn't lose their money. I prefer not to lose people's money. It's hard whenever. You have to make that call and say, well, sorry, you lost money? Yeah, that's the worst. That's the worst. And, you know, like I said, not everything's 100% guaranteed, but if you work with contracts versus state,

I call it contractual wealth instead of statement wealth because you put your money in the stock market and you don't know exactly. I mean, if you think about it, we have to put away money for 45 plus years and possibly have enough to retire in. According to traditional conventional math that they do when we're when people are when we're talking to the clients, Tell them if you want to live off of this much money a year, we have to make you this amount of money for you to be able to live off 4% of your money for the next 30 years. So, I mean, the math and plus they have to make up for all the losses when the market goes up and now up and down. Every time we lose money, if you were during the recession and you lost 50% of your money, you couldn't just gain 50% of your money back. You have to gain 100% of your money back, and that is just a 100% gain is what I mean to get back to where you were. You can't just get a 50% return.

It has to be a 100% return. And how fast does that happen? Not usually very fast. It took a lot of people during that time, you know, a long time, some 10 years should be able to get back to where they were when they. and I felt bad for people that were about ready to retire because took half their retirement away. You know, you say that, but what's even more closely to my life is my mother's in an assistive living. I mean, we never know what the future brings. And living in retirement is one thing, but living in an assisted living,

more long-term care, that's a whole number of ballgame, you know, and the amount of money you need to have. Right. And the thing with that is if you have the right estate planning, then, you know, you can, I know, in my own personal experience, my grandmother, she had a, she had everything in her name, and she was 98 years old when she passed away. But it was like, everything was in her name.

And if she would have had it in the name of a trust, if she would have had it in something that was not in her name, we could have got her, she didn't want to go to an assisted living. She didn't want to go anywhere. She wanted to stay in her own home. But we needed to be able to pay to have somebody come in and help take care of her.

Well, if she, she, and she did not want us doing that. She was very stubborn woman. She's not want us to. And I think that's why she lived to be 98 years old. Probably could have lived longer, but she was tired. But she, we could have paid somebody to come in and help. Or we could have used Medicaid because Medicaid actually will pay to have somebody come into your home and help you versus Medicare. All Medicare will do when you go home is give you hospice.

I hated that for her. I hated that, you know, we couldn't get Medicaid to come in and pay to have her, have somebody coming in help, and she would not let us pay. If we paid, she kicked the people out of the house. So it was just like, it was just one of those things where I learned. She was going to have to use all her money, everything. And they put liens on your property. They would not help pay for anything.

All that Medicare was willing to do was give her hospice. And she just said, give me hospice. I'll go on hospice. I'm not, I don't want to spend every, I don't want to, she had left property to her kids and she didn't want to, you know, she didn't want to lean on that. She didn't want to lose it all. So she was just like, okay with going on hospice. And I hated that.

It was the worst thing to watch. Well, Chris, this has been fascinating, but I am looking at the clock, and we are out of time, but I know for a fact that there's going to be some people that listen to this who say, this woman sounds different. I like what she's saying. I like the possibility. I know you wrote the book, and we chatted before we got on the call, that you're going to offer that for people that would like to read the book first. You've also talked about that they can go and they can schedule a chat with you or your concierge or whomever. I will put in the show notes below the link for them to get to the download of the book. But, you know, I'm so appreciative of you taking the time. This is open to my eyes. It's really been a fascinating interview, and I appreciate you taking the time.

Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. So tell them once again where can they go to find if they want to schedule a call. So my name is Chris Quintana, CQ. So my website is CQ Consulting Services.com. And on the page, the first page, you can actually click on it and make an appointment. Or you can go to the Financial Freedom Formula, click on that and read about it. And there's a link on that page also that you can make an appointment.

appointment. Okay. Well, thank you so much. So until next time, I would challenge anyone listening to this. Go to Chris's website. Until next time, this is Nina Hirshberger. Thank you for listening to Megabucks Radio with Nina Hirschberger. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or to listen to past episodes. Visit megabucksradio.com.