When Money Isn't Enough
“True financial freedom isn’t about what you keep, it’s about what you’re finally able to give.”
Retoro Capital Investments
Financial Freedom Leads to More Giving
Are you a high-earning professional or entrepreneur looking to reach a point where money is no longer the challenge? Once your focus on building passive income becomes a reality, what do you do with the freedom you are building?
Some choose to retire early and focus on giving back through volunteering, donating, and focusing on building family or community. Others find purpose and fulfillment in paid work and build businesses to support a spirit of giving back. It takes all kinds to make a better world.
This holiday season, we take time to reflect on how we are doing with our goals to achieve and share fulfillment. In the next few issues, we are sharing highlights from partners who dedicate their time to giving back in big and small ways. This fits our investing philosophy and hopefully gives ideas to you ideas on ways you can do more giving.
At Retoro Capital Investments, we invest with a clear mission
Deliver High Returns
Deliver With Less Risk
Deliver Financial Freedom That Fuels Giving Back
Our founders and partners at Retoro are living proof that financial freedom provides the resources, time, and headspace to find fulfillment giving back in big and small ways.
Thinking Big, Doing Big
Retoro founder Chris Borden has faced that moment, wondering what it was all for. Chris had already stepped away from a successful CEO career after achieving every financial milestone he thought he should. He and his wife, Harmonie, had relocated from Hawaii to Utah to retire from corporate and focus on spending more time with their adult kids, who had also moved to the mainland.
They started investing in real estate right away with hard money loans (private real estate loans to property flippers) to replace their corporate income within months. That created breathing room and success to think about how to give back and pay it forward, which then created a passion to educate and serve other families reaching for financial freedom.
Together, we co-founded Retoro to support other families who also value giving back the financial means to do so. Because the type of investors we work with share this value, already donating their time and money, we saw that once our investors reach a level of personal financial security, they start giving more away.
Chris and Harmonie learned firsthand that when money is handled, time and energy become the new currency. They chose to spend their time not only uplifting other families to financial freedom through their online Financial University free group, but also cleaning sewers, teaching classes, and watching single mothers become breadwinners through their non-profit Elevate Côte d'Ivoire.
They are living examples of that third pillar of Retoro in action: giving back.
Education Built for Real Jobs
What is Elevate?
Chris and Harmonie had a chance meeting with fellow investor Stéphane Akoki, who grew up in West Africa, and together they created a non-profit that combined their passive real estate incomes into hands-on programs that now support more than 1,200 families across the gold and ivory coast regions.
Right to Left: Stéphane Akoki, Chris Borden, Harmonie Borden
Elevate is a registered non-profit focused on economic empowerment. West African nations such as Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and Nigeria produce highly educated university graduates, yet local job markets cannot absorb them. They've completed years of traditional schooling with little opportunity to find employment or start a business using marketable skills that pay.
"Everyone wants to be a teacher here," one program participant told me when I was volunteering teaching English. "It's one of the only jobs we can rely on." The local systems are turning out a great number of educated individuals with a lagging local economy that cannot reward that schooling.
Elevate bridges that gap with practical, paid training programs delivered online and in local learning hubs. They receive paid training, paid work, networking, and growth opportunities.
Once certified, the program matches them up with paying remote jobs as virtual assistants in accounting, content creation, marketing, customer service, coding, finance, real estate, and more.
They volunteer together in local cleanup projects, donations, and family events. They also build local agriculture projects, empowering farmers with opportunities to grow and sell more crops.
And Elevate is thinking even bigger with a new brick-and-mortar school on the way! A local, live classroom teaching practical, applicable skills to get them into careers fast. Earning 5x the local minimum wage, they bring that to their local communities to lift the entire region.
The individual stories from participants tell the real impact.
A widow with three young children had no steady income. Eight months after starting Elevate’s program, she manages her own remote team and fully supports her family.
Orphanages used to spend nearly every donated dollar fixing broken plumbing and sewers. After weeks on the ground cleaning and repairing, those budgets now buy food, books, and school supplies.
Elevate team members and top graduates routinely hire neighbors, friends, and family into their new businesses. One single mother told Harmonie, “I used to pray my kids wouldn’t go hungry. Now I pray for bigger clients so I can hire more people from my village!”
Chris and Harmonie personally fund the majority of Elevate’s operating budget with the same passive quarterly distributions Retoro investors receive. No corporate donation is required. Financial freedom simply gave them the time, cash flow, and energy to show up.
And now they share Elevate with all of us to volunteer in the training program, donate through the registered non-profit organization, or, most importantly, hire skilled workers in your own company.
Chris and Harmonie show what becomes possible when passive income is truly on autopilot:
You gain the margin to repair sewers across the world one month and celebrate a big family achievement the next.
You turn investment distributions into more than just taking care of business and family: they can build classrooms, clean water, and lift families out of survival mode.
Final Thoughts
You don’t have to fly to West Africa to live by Retoro’s third pillar. You simply need the same vehicle they use: consistent, low-risk cash flow from private investing.
Two easy ways to move forward today:
If you'd like more information on supporting Elevate through donations or virtual assistants with a supportive structure, please reach out soon, or reply or DM "ELEVATE" to receive the Impact Summary with Hiring, Donation, and Volunteer links.
If you'd like to see if Retoro fits your giving-back goals and invest with those who truly value making an impact on our communities and worldwide, schedule a 30-minute call to see if we are a good fit. We’ll look at current fund performance, upcoming deals, and how the model can fund whatever higher purpose matters most to you. There's no pressure, no annoying, relentless follow-up, open to accredited investors only.
P.S. Next issue: Troy & Emma Powell's story on how an IT guy and real estate photographer built an 8-figure portfolio, kept family first, and still found time to impact lives.
P.P.S. The sooner you get started, the sooner you'll wish you'd started sooner!
