From Fire to Financial Freedom with Jason Nightingale

Speaker: 00:00:00

Maartje van Krieken: Hi. Thanks for tuning in. Welcome to this episode. We have a absolute fabulous guest today. His name is Jason Nightingale. He is based in Idaho, and so this is a scar episode. Jason definitely has scars to talk from and solutions. So ideal guest for this podcast. I'm at the laugh because I found on this profile under education, and he wrote down and he went to the Life School of Hard knops, which I think shows that you have plenty to share with us of use to our listeners today. So thanks for being here. You're the founder and owner of save money solutions. You've been an entrepreneur for 30, over 30 years, of which part of it is this business which grow out of probably one of the biggest business emergencies you've encountered in your career? Is that, right? Jason,

Jason Nightingale: 00:00:54

yeah, yeah.

Jason Nightingale: 00:00:56

Maartje van Krieken: So yeah, that's also, I guess, the story. So welcome Jason, and tell us, well,

Jason Nightingale: 00:01:03

thank you, Marcia, it's nice to be able to come on your show. Glad I met you. Yeah. So like you mentioned, you know, been an entrepreneur for over 30 years, but in August of 2015 we had 100 days with no rain in our area. Was very hot and dry for a long, long time, and the air was just full of smoke, because there were little fires here and there, but a dry lightning storm came over the valley, and lightning came down with no rain. So we ended up with us on a ridge, about six miles apart. The lightning hit the ground 14 times, so there was about 14 little spot fires that burned together as they went down the ridge and created a huge Inferno, which ended up turning into being 85,000 acres before they got it contained. Well, in my area of Idaho, as that storm come ripping up the valley, they put an evacuation order in place, so we all had to leave. Well, when I got back to my property, everything was black except the house. Nothing else was standing. I had six outbuildings, and one of them was my furniture shop that I had lived, used for my living for 28 years, and so that burned completely to the ground. And they had all my life's investments and tools in it. You know, that's where, every time I had extra money, I sunk it into that business. So I had a lot of nice, you know, machinery. And the biggest problem was also burned up. My 10 digits per month cash flow. You know, when you got a business that's supporting you and your tools burned down, you've got no more way to make that cash flow. And so that was a huge catastrophe. I knew my family was going to be. It was very emotional, very tough, because at that time, you know, I wasn't really prepared. I didn't have a lot of cash flow within a couple of months, you know, I was really starting to bite. So I called my bank and I asked them if I could access my business line of credit. And guess what? They told me, nope, nope. They said, We have froze up all of the business lines of credit on anybody who's been through the fire, any homeowner that's been through the fire, their credit lines are frozen because we don't know who can pay us back and who can't. So, and I mean, I tried, you know, arguing with them a little bit, and they said no. So I hung up the phone in frustration. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? So I was trying to, you know, weigh out all my options. Things were just flashing through my mind like crazy. And as I was sorting through my ashes, you know, taking pictures of things for my insurance, I thought, you know, I've been paying extra on my mortgage. I'll just call back and ask about, you know, redrawing those funds, because I know I doubled up on my mortgage enough to hit 20 or 30,000 back, you know, because those payments weren't due. So I called back to the bank, and I asked him if I could advance those extra payments back. And guess what? They told me, nope, no. I said, What do you mean? No. And here's her words. I guess you just don't understand amortization, do you? And she said it in a real snotty voice that really ticked me off, because, I mean, I've been with this bank since I was young, 20 years old, and here they were, like in my very most time of crisis, turning me down, not wanting to help me, and I and I really didn't know that I had any other options, right? So, I mean, I was very frustrated. I go, this is very discouraging that, you know, here I am needing help, and you get nothing. And I know the way out, right? Yeah, I think they offered like $500 there was, like, the Chamber of Commerce, or somebody had taken up some collection somehow, and there was a little bit of money for, like, food or gas or something. And, you know, the Red Cross came in. But it wasn't like, you know, pay your bills and get your business back online. And so I was thankful for the tiny little bit of help that we did get. But it wasn't nothing about, you know, replacing your loss. Income or business. So as a person who has been an entrepreneur, pretty much most of my marriage, I've been married 35 years, this was devastating. I wasn't a regular, you know, I mean, I could go get a job, but I was used to having, you know, being self employed, and so those words about mortgage amortization really bothered me, because I never did like that word Mort it means death. Mort gage means death. Pledge amortization. I had to look that one up. And it meant the loan that never dies. And I thought, you know, in my frustration with her turning me down and saying, You don't understand an amortization. It was the fire that the fire finally went out in the valley, but it was lit in my heart, right? It lit a fire in me to find out more about financial things, how, how a mortgage actually works, how amortization actually works. Why was I not able to draw those funds back? Why can't I have an account where, if I pay extra, I can get them back? So I started Googling, and I couldn't sleep for about nine days march. It was pretty, I can imagine, pretty intense. And so I started discovering things about Austrian economics and things that they do over in Australia, and thing places that they do that are different than the United States. And I started realizing I didn't even have to have this type of lending. I could have lit for my house in a different way, and I could have the features I wanted to be like when my clients would write me a check, they would hold them for a couple weeks. Well, we don't know you know Marcia. We're going to hold this check. They don't know her, and they wouldn't let me have your check. They'd keep it like hostage. Now, whatever you had in savings, if you had 5000 in savings, they'd give you 5000 of it, but pledge your savings in case the check didn't go through. Well, what really got me about that was PayPal, Cash App, Venmo, none of the electronic payment services hold your money ransom. They give it to you instantly. So I thought this is just robbery. They are wanting to collect float on my money, meaning that they could take my check floated through their account for a week or two and get interest on it and then give it to me. I thought, that's not right, because who are the investors of the bank? They're you and me. We're the ones giving them. In America, it's $19 trillion a year going through checking accounts, and they pay us nothing less than six tenths of a percent when I started looking it up. And so I look back on my own statements, and I went back 10 years. I had put a million dollars through that bank, and they gave me $900 in interest, less than a 10th of a percent. That ticked me off, because this was the fire that was burning now in me, if you are an investor in my company, I would surely pay you eight or 10% rate of return?

Jason Nightingale: 00:07:42

Maartje van Krieken: Hey, so And Jason, in a situation like this, because you're saying there was lots of people affected, right in the same Yeah, and lots of another 50

Jason Nightingale: 00:07:51

buildings and owners built businesses and 75 homes.

Jason Nightingale: 00:07:56

Maartje van Krieken: Matt, am I understanding correctly that it's likely that even if it would have just been you, right? And you would just have had a local fire on your premises, and it would have just been your your workshops and your outbuildings and stuff, it would have been the same answers you would have gotten as well.

Jason Nightingale: 00:08:13

Oh, yeah, I would have, I would have been just as frustrated. I'm sure the bank would have treated me the same way. Yeah. So

Jason Nightingale: 00:08:18

Maartje van Krieken: if this is, this is what happens if you have a fire or something like that. It's not, it's not just because this was associated with a natural Yeah, natural disaster. This would have happened in a one off case as well. Yeah,

Jason Nightingale: 00:08:33

and all the insurance company ended up paying was to replace the building in the contents. They didn't bail out my business. There was no business insurance. There's

Jason Nightingale: 00:08:42

Maartje van Krieken: no rebuilding money in that and all the downtime. Yeah, that must have been, can you talk a little bit about this, how it felt, because you have, you run your own business for that long, right? You're, you're in control of your own destiny. It's what, yeah, what you what you put in, is what you get out. And it's your hard work in your own efforts, and suddenly you had it felt like no control, right?

Jason Nightingale: 00:09:05

Yeah. Well, what it what it ended up, you know, ultimately driving me to do was to come up with a banking strategy for myself. I figured out how to not have to rely on banks. Was the net result of what I figured out and and it was working so well, the 14 years left, we have left on our mortgage. We paid it off in 30 months, and all our friends wanted to know what in the world we were doing. And I live a middle of nowhere March i i live 38 miles from a stoplight, 68 miles from a Walmart, three hours from an airport. And I did when someone said, Well, you need to get a webcam. I never even had a webcam before. I didn't even trust them. I thought it was a way they could spy on you while you were on the internet. I didn't know. Somebody said you could do zoom. And I'm like, What's a zoom? What do you mean zoom? They go, you know, like, like, what do you call it Skype? It's kind of like Skype, like George Jetson how he could see his boss on the phone when he was telling me, get to work. You know, the cartoon. You're Yeah. And I'm like. Like, Oh, okay, zoom. So I all these referrals. People are wanting to talk to me and my within the next 22 months, we helped 1500 people put this banking strategy that I created for myself into effect to get them out of debt 70% faster. So I call it my Beauty from Ashes story. I mean, I turned a situation that I thought was impossible into a way to beat the banks at their own game legally. And it just feels good because now I'm being able to I'm able to collect an interest rate on everything. I'm paying out for gas, groceries, I'm and I'm canceling interest on on money. Anytime I have to borrow money, I get it 70% cheaper because of my strategy. So if I have a 15% credit card, it's now 4.7 if I have a 30 year mortgage, it's now like nine years. If I have like a 24% credit card, it's now 7.9 it just lowers everything because of the system I created. But I had to get extremely frustrated, and I had to put that frustration into action. Yeah, I couldn't let it defeat me. I had to let it light a fire in my desire to fight harder. And it's kind of like our body knows when we get scared or we get hurt, it releases adrenaline. Yeah, that's what happened in my sink tank, I had adrenaline dumped in there, and I just really had to knuckle down and figure out a way, because I did not want to go down with that fire. I wanted my business to live to see a better day.

Jason Nightingale: 00:11:31

Maartje van Krieken: Yeah, and I often talk about that, right? I call it panic to power, and I'm a skipper. I also know that sensation that there's this calm that comes over you is like, Okay, well, I've got to do it right there. And and I also often say that when you're with your back against the wall, people sometimes when they're still in the in the panic, say, I don't know what to do, or I don't know where to start. But in reality, there's usually only one or two things to do, right? Like, in your case, like, well, not having any money or not getting access to any money is not an option. So step one is leaning into that and figuring out where I can get it from. And then yeah, and then step two and step three. And with every step comes to progressive insight and new solutions. Yeah? Well, I

Jason Nightingale: 00:12:22

think of it like this. Have you ever seen how you can throw crabs in a five gallon bucket, but they can't get out? Yep? Because whenever one starts crawling, another one drags and pulls it down. But I wanted to be that crab that could use the other crabs to get out, right? But, you know, there's only one way to look when you're in the bottom of the barrel, and that's up, yeah, there was only one solution. I had to climb out of that, yeah,

Jason Nightingale: 00:12:43

Maartje van Krieken: yeah. And then I mean, yeah, it's, you've had immense success as a result of, of, yeah, what was disaster, right? And I don't think that that's necessarily replicable for everybody, but I do believe that good things, really good things can come from climbing out of these situations. I want to talk a little bit about the concept itself, because it's actually quite often when there are major, major situations in organizations or in businesses, particularly smaller businesses, that cash flow becomes an immediate problem. Right? It can be because you have a key staff member who has a heart attack at 46 and is out of the business and you don't have access, or it could be because, yeah, your supply chain has an issue. Or there's quite a lot of reasons why suddenly this can get cut off, right? So is there something really specific, preventative that organizations can think of to at least, you know, have have something, yeah, ideally, everybody comes in and does an overhaul of their financial planning, right, right, right? Well, yeah, is there? Is there somebody simple or a bare minimum that people can do or should do, to at least have some a line of credit somewhere open for a rainy day. Yeah.

Jason Nightingale: 00:14:09

And here's the big problem, though, that I discovered, okay, if you had to dig a hole in your yard, would you rather use your hands, you know, something that's been around for 1000s of years would you rather use something a couple 100 years old called a shovel? Or would you rather use something modern, like Abaco? Just get in and let it dig the hole? Right? Banks are giving us a over 100 year old tool with our finances. It's called a checking and savings account. Those are clunky tools that Rob wealth, and so I would definitely encourage people to learn. And we have a free webinar that we have, we put on, we have a masterclass that we give, and we actually teach people how interest is applied in credit lines, how they're applied on credit cards. You know the pitfalls of paying cash for things? Did you know that you should never pay cash for things? Of course, it's if you think about it, if you've if you put, I'll give you a couple freebies that come from my masterclass. If you put your charges for your expenses on your credit card all months long, even if the card is 29 or 30% if you pay that card off monthly, how much interest can they charge you? Zero, not a penny, right? Because you paid it off. So you just used someone else's money marcha all month long for free. Could you be any smarter if you tried now, you could leave the company's money in an increase bearing account, making money on your money while you let Oh, Joe Schmo over here, let you spend his MasterCard, Visa. It's a smart thing to do, but you need a system to get liquidity. And what I figured out was the place that I'm storing it, when I access that capital to pay these over here to zero that I didn't upset the compound interest going on so that I could really build massive wealth. I wanted my money to be able to be in two places at once, over here, fighting my debt, over here, building wealth, and I wanted to do it all tax free, and I wanted to be out of debt fast. I mean, I made a large ticket for myself. So here's what I had to do. I had to reach into two or three different industries and pull different concepts together to make a trifecta so that I could get what I want. It's kind of like when you're making a soup or a stew. You keep tasting it and adding something to it till it tastes just the way you want it to. I wanted my system to be easy to use, palatable, and we're good and efficient. And it is. It's amazing. And so I you know Henry fired Ford, he did when he invented the car. He didn't invent the steel, he didn't invent the wheels, he didn't invent the glass. But marcha, he took inventions that already existed and he put them on paper. And he figured out, if I put wheels under this thing, and I make the body out of steel, and I put a combustion engine in it, we don't need horses anymore. We can have the auto mobile. We can be mobile automatically the automobile. He did. He wasn't even thinking about the fact when he created the car that he was going to create commerce and trucking. Look at the trucking industry still exists today, doesn't it? Well, when the Wright Brothers made the first airplane, they weren't even the guys that were funded. There was some guy that government was giving money to. It wasn't the right brothers. I don't remember his name. They weren't even thinking about the Boeing 737, that came out in the 50s, that wasn't supposed to fly, by the way. Look at the look at the opportunities that those industries, those inventions, opened up. If I went back to you in 1980 with this cell phone, and I showed you all the things this phone could do and all the things in your home you could throw away, you would look at me like I was from Mars. My point is, if your phone is changing every year or two and getting better and better and better, what are you doing for your finances? I figured out a way to keep it real, keep it fresh and beat the bank at their own game, where you could be a nemesis to the IRS and the big banks legally because they haven't changed banking for 100 years, checking in savings is what they use for you to store your money in. Is so clunky, so archaic.

Jason Nightingale: 00:18:17

Maartje van Krieken: I love I love how passionate you are about what you do, right? And and you were passionate about what you were doing before, right? But what what you then started doing after the fire, clearly also ticked boxes for you. And so you never went back to the furniture business, correct? You

Jason Nightingale: 00:18:36

know what it took a year to get my money from my insurance company? You know, I did get it rebuilt, and I did a few jobs, but by 2018 which was what, two years after the shop got rebuilt, I closed the doors forever, because it was part time. By then, I had to focus on this new business that I was building back up, because this was a part time business when the fires hit, and I had to make this a full time business. So I never really went back to it, because guess what happened when all my friends looked to know what we were doing with our strategy, when they saw that I could pay off my 14 years mortgage in 30 months, we helped 1500 people within 22 months with this, we have saved them 230 million bucks. So maybe somebody's listening to this and they're saying, Yeah, but that's not my story. Well, if you're chaos, if your moment of chaos in your business is financial. Let us show you how to put modern tools in your favor so that you can turn it around absolutely as mathematically as fast as possible.

Jason Nightingale: 00:19:32

Maartje van Krieken: Yeah, and I hear a few lessons here, right, that in the moment, if, when the disaster strikes, right, yeah, use the if it's anger that you have, or sadness, or whatever it is that you have, the emotions that you have, you can use that as a power. You can use it as Energizer to get going. And it's one step at a time, right? You did also one step at a time, two, the other, the. Thing I think we learned from this is that it's very likely that most of us don't, haven't actually thought through our financial setup as well as you have, right? Or you learned to do after the fact. And it's worse having a look at that, right? So if you're not in chaos, and you have the time, or you can make time. You should make time and have a look at where things are at. If you're in the unfortunate situation, that's a Yeah, disaster already struck. It's not too late, right? It's never too late. It's better than to start today. Ideally, you would have started a year ago or two years ago. But if today is the day you start, then today is the day you start, and you are the example that there. There is somebody out there who knows this stuff. So if it's not your forte, if this is not your thing, or if you could use an external set of eyes on this to speed up the process and get your house in order quicker, because your attention is better spent on other things, then contact somebody like Jason. So Jason, where do they find you?

Jason Nightingale: 00:21:09

SafeMoneyJason.com right here. Or they can scan that car code if they're not watching, if they're listening, they can go to SafeMoneyJason.com and there's all kinds of links on there, where they can either sign up for the webinar, if they're shy and want to learn more, if they want to be direct and contact me directly. There's a calendar link, there's some videos on there, some resources. And we also have our regular website, your safe money solution.com, but safe money, Jason's probably where I would direct people to go, perfect.

Jason Nightingale: 00:21:39

Maartje van Krieken: Yeah. Then they can then reach out to you through you got over all your objections versus zoom and Skype and computers and virtual meetings, you're still in the middle of nowhere. Idaho, no, oh,

Jason Nightingale: 00:21:52

yeah, but we got clients in eight countries of the world now, and we've, we've trained over 1000 advisors, so in 46 states. So we can, we can help wherever, whether they're a big corporation or small entrepreneur, our business is made up of all sorts. Non profit doesn't, doesn't matter. We can help them all,

Jason Nightingale: 00:22:11

Maartje van Krieken: okay, right? I think this is a fabulous story, and, yeah, perfect example that there's opportunity in chaos and opportunity in in disaster, right? Yeah, and some doors preparing

Jason Nightingale: 00:22:22

now before the stuff hits the fans, so that when there is a cash flow problem, you've got a solution. You don't have to rely on the banks exactly

Jason Nightingale: 00:22:30

Maartje van Krieken: all right. So thank you very much for joining us today, Jason. And before I let you go, we always close our guest episodes with a chaos theory. So do you have some words of wisdom to share for when people experience chaos that have helped you? Maybe? Well,

Jason Nightingale: 00:22:49

I've always heard it said that, like if your child goes out in the street, the first thing you do is you grab that child, and you might go, what are you doing? I told you not to run out in the street. Your first emotion is anger, and then you clutch that child, and you're bawling, right? You're crying, oh, my god, almost lost my son. The truck whizzes. By now it's time to cry. So my point is, if in nature, anger is so closely related to passion, don't forget that when you get angry or you get sad or you get passionately crushed in your business, some chaotic thing happens. Let that spur your energy, to appeal to your senses, to to take the proper action to come out of that. So, yeah, that's something that was meant to crush you do that use that energy to for good. Does that make sense?

Jason Nightingale: 00:23:44

Maartje van Krieken: Yes, total, total sense. All right. Thank you so much, Jason. Thank you for tuning in today. I look forward to seeing you back here next time. SafeMoneyJason.com and all his information will also be in the show notes and in the comments, wherever you're listening to this podcast, bye. Thanks.