Building Financial Freedom & Affluence for Personal Trainers w/ Mel Abraham

What's up, coach? Today's video. I'm sitting down with a financial wizard, Mel Abraham, and we're talking all about building financial freedom and affluence. Are you ready? Let's get started. What's up, coach? Thanks so much for pressing play today on this video. Today is a interview that I did on the podcast with financial wizard Mel Abraham. Honestly, I'm going to keep this short because this interview is about to blow your mind. So if you like this video, be sure to hit subscribe, tap like and tap that bell to be notified when the next latest and greatest video is available on this channel. So without further ado, let's go ahead and roll that interview. What's up, Mel? Thanks so much for joining me on the show today. How are you?

Oh, my gosh, Beverly, I'm doing awesome. So, so grateful to be here and to be part of this, really.

Honestly, like I said earlier in this. Earlier in this show, having you here has been. Is such a pleasure and a privilege because if you guys get a chance to see Mel speak, it will change your life. Literally 15 minutes will change your life. So hopefully you guys are just as excited as I am to dive in. So, without further ado, Mel, can you share with us a little bit about who you are, who you serve, and how you got there?

Oh, my gosh. So I had an unconventional journey, but I am a CPA by education, so primarily I focus with business owners and folks like that, helping them build their businesses. But I started out in the traditional role, but decided that there was no way that I wanted to continue to do that. It just was something that I was unhappy with. It didn't give me joy. It didn't bring me joy. And so I left and. And I went on my own, actually. I went to Japan for a little while, and then I went on my own, which is a whole other story, but I went on my own. And what I found was what was really important to me was helping people take their entrepreneurial dreams and get them out of the corner again, take them out of the darkness, shake them out, and bring them to life. Because I truly believe that the entrepreneurial dream journey is the vehicle that we can use to find not what I call financial freedom, but financial liberation and affluence. And it's about really, how do I live a richer life, how do I have a deeper impact, how do I create complete freedom? And that is kind of the journey I've been on. It certainly wasn't a linear journey. I've lost more money than some people will make in a lifetime. I have remade it. I have built, bought and sold businesses. I've had detours, left turns all around, and it's in the dust and the mire and the potholes. I stepped in that a lot of the lessons have come about, and it's really my focus today is working with entrepreneurs to help them become what I call an affluent entrepreneur, to help them understand the money side of business. How do you create something that gives you the freedom and doesn't shackle you to a business? And you say, wait a second, I thought this was going to be me. And I had control and all of a sudden it controls me.

That's so important. And I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about, you know, what it means to be an affluent, an affluent entrepreneur. And how do you know if you, when you get there? And the reason why I'm saying that is because so many people that I work with, we are used to that dollar for hour. We are used to grinding in the gym. We are used to serving those physical therapists sessions and bound by what insurances will let us do and let us not do. And so I feel like so many people in this audience feel like that whole concept and idea of what it means to be an affluent entrepreneur is so far within reach.

Yes. Oh, my gosh. So, and I know that you're tied. You have some limitations with respect to, you know, insurance and all that stuff. But the first thing to realize is that, is that the timesheet, if you will, was created in 1919 and it should have been burned at the stake in 1920. It's the worst business model you could ever create. Swapping hours for dollars is horrible because you commoditize the value that you bring to the industry. I came out of that. That's what accountants do. They take their timesheet, attorneys, accountants, and all that stuff, and they're ticking the time and they're selling time. The problem is that when you do that with a customer, when you do that with a client, they see the time. They don't see the value. They need to see the value. I'll give you a for instance. I happen to be backstage and I was announcing from backstage and I was going to go on stage and for some, and I was hopping up and down, and all of a sudden I felt like something took up. Someone took a baseball bat to my calf, end up on the ground. Now, in the spirit of the show must go on, I'm laying on the ground doing the announcing until I could get this next speaker on stage. He gets on stage, and then someone says, what happened? And I said, I don't know. I thought someone kicked me. I turned around and no one was there. But point being is that someone else that was backstage, the husband of another speaker, looked at me, says, you know, my physical therapist is in the audience. Would you like to talk with him? Because they took me to an emergency beforehand. Before that, they took me to emergency. They put a brace on me. They said, you popped your calf, you might have torn your Achilles and this and that. So here I am back there, going on crutches. And so this physical therapist, Frank, comes over, and he looks at me, says, first things first. He said, you're losing the brace. Because from what I can evaluate, this is not a tear. He says, you're losing the brace because of the fact that not what it does to the leg, but what it does to the mind. He said, when you take that brace off after six weeks, after eight weeks, we are going to have to work on the mind to allow you to use the leg again when you can use the leg now. So let me give you some exercises. And literally within 24 hours, I was back on my feet doing the things that I was doing. Now, look, could have charged me for a physical therapy session and would have charged me this 100 bucks or 150 bucks. But you know what the value was to me to be back on my feet at a live event? It was huge. And too often we forget about that. And so I think the first thing is to start having conversations around the value and the transformation and the difference you make in people's lives and not just their lives, but the parade of lives that come beyond. I just found out recently, my wife and I just found out recently we're going to be grandparents for the first time. So. So I'm going to be granddad. I am not old enough to be a granddad. At least I don't think so. But I do know that I'm not mature enough to be a granddad. So here's the thing that I realized is this, is that I was sitting there talking with my wife, and I said, you realize now that we have at least 80 more years of Abrahams that we need to think about taking care of. Because when you understand how to build affluence, when you understand how to build a business, when you are creating legacy in the moment, you don't create it for yourself. You create it for the generations beyond. And we just added a generation. So I looked at it and I said, when you talk about affluent entrepreneur, there are three critical outcomes for an affluent entrepreneur. The first is that they live a richer lifestyle. And this is based on all the work that I've done. They live a richer lifestyle. In other words, they're not keeping tabs on their wealth in the sense of. In sense of wealth is a statistic. It is the number of commas in a bank account. And yet what they're truly looking at is the richness they have in their life. And that's feelings, that's experiences, that is the richness they bring to themselves and those around them. And so they're living a richer lifestyle from an experience standpoint. That doesn't mean lavishly, you know, private jets and all of that stuff. That means what is rich for you? It could be a yacht in Monaco, it could be a tent in Montana. It doesn't matter. But what is rich for you? Forget the social media. Forget what you see on the media. Don't look at what your neighbor's driving. Ask yourself the question, what's rich for you? What's rich for your wife, your husband, your significant other, the people around you? And live that life. Live that life. And so that's the first thing. The second thing that I think an affluent entrepreneur has is what I call deeper impact. And deeper impact is that, look, you're working with someone one on one, you're having an impact on them. That's clear, that's easy, that's fundamental. However, there's also other impacts. There's the impact that you have on the people next to you, the people you love, the people that are standing by your side. But more than that, the bigger impact is who you become in the process. And then the affluent entrepreneurs, I think they realize that there's multiple levels of impact, and they look at who they become, who they are, they look at who they affect to the right and left, the people that they love, and they look at how they can have an impact in the community and society, and they have a deeper impact. It's not about what you leave behind. That's a legacy. It's what you create in the moment that's the legacy. And then the last piece is that they have complete freedom. And I look at freedom, and they look at freedom pretty much the same way, in the sense that too often we think freedom is a financial number and that's independence, but it's not freedom. Because there's plenty of people that I've got colleagues that I know that are worth 200, $300 million. I got one that I'm thinking of now that has five airplanes. Lord knows why. You can only fly one at a time. And yet he's miserable. He's horrible. He's miserable. He's not fun to be around. His health sucks, his relationships suck, his attitude sucks. Yeah, from the outside he looks great. He's got private planes and he's got all these other things, houses and cars, and it looks like he's got a great life. But you know what? He's living in a prison cell. Now, his might be a well decorated prison cell, but it is still a prison cell nonetheless. And so freedom, Freedom is complete freedom. Yes, financial freedom. The ability to do the things that you want to do and not necessarily be concerned about how I'm going to pay the next bill. 78% of people are living check to check these days, and that's a travesty and we need to fix that. But the other freedom that we need to think about is the freedom of time. The ability to decide what you'll do, when you're going to do it and how you're going to do it. To just sit back and say, I bought back my time. The reason I want to make money, the reason I want wealth and everything, everyone's life is not because of the wealth, but because it allows you to buy back your time and it allows you to buy options. It allows you to have choices in life. And then the third freedom is the freedom of mind, peace of mind, to know that things are taken care of. In 2019, I was diagnosed with cancer and I lived a healthy life. I was working out, I was eating healthy other than a sweet tooth, I was eating healthy and I thought that I was doing well. I didn't smoke, I didn't drink and all that. And next thing you know, they find a 5 centimeter tumor in my bladder. And, you know, once I got out of the depths of despair and the darkness that comes with the realization that I had cancer, which I never thought I would have because I had none of the risk factors, because I wasn't a drinker, I wasn't a smoker, I wasn't around chemicals, I didn't have any of that. And no one in my family has ever had cancer. So this came out of left field, out of left field for me. And what it did is it made me realize the importance of making sure that you are set up properly financially. Because I knew in that moment that once I got off my knees, once I got up and I said I needed to move forward, that I would move forward and say I needed to now have the opportunity to say, I am not going to be as active in my businesses. I'm not going to be as active in some of these things because I need to be proactive and active in my healing, in my. My ability to get through this. And. And so I needed to pull myself away. And when you think about least hearing those three words, you have cancer, which most people, God forbid you ever hear it, it's not about the cancer that matters. It's about is your life set up when life decides to take left turn. And so what this allowed, what I realized is that I needed to deal with the cancer emotionally, I needed to deal it energetically, I needed to deal with it spiritually, I need to deal with it physiologically, but I didn't have to deal with it financially. And that took a tremendous amount of burden off of my shoulders, my family's shoulders. I had the choice of doctors. I was able to do the things, but it was because of the work that I did that 30 years before and 20 years before and 10 years before. And it's the choices that I made financially. And I didn't realize the importance of those things. I did, but I took them for granted until that hit. Until that hit. And I had the luxury and the blessing to be able to pull back. And then I think about it and I go, well, the cancer was just a dress rehearsal for the pandemic, because it's easy for someone to say, well, I won't get cancer. But I said, you know, we all got the pandemic. We all had to deal with the economic blackout. So the real question again is not, are you running your business? Are you running your life? And God forbid you get cancer, it's actually, are you running your business? Run your life in a way that when they take. When it takes a left turn, you're prepared to handle it. That's the key. Now I guess we'll close the loop on this, just so you know. 18 months of three surgeries, four tumors taken out, 28 treatments, and as of November, they declared me completely free of cancer. They had not seen anyone fight it the way I fought it. And it was a 7 1/2 centimeter tumor when they went in, not 5. But I feel great. And we are now we're no longer on defense. We are on offense. And we're gonna make sure that we keep this little bad boy. You can go find another home.

So great. I'm really so Happy to hear that. And I remember when you shared that story with us at BBD last summer, and there were two things that you said that I thought were really important and compelling. And it'll bring us to my next question, which is you said, and I think it's a quote from Buddha, you know, we think we have time. We always think that, you know, you know, it's not going to happen to us. Or I just need to get to that 10k, or I just need to get to 15. I just need to start saving a little and then I'll handle it. And that comes from this assumption of believing that tomorrow's coming, but the truth is that no time is promised to us ever. No, I think, you know, and I know as someone who used to operate from that space of, I just need to get to this, and then I'll take care of it. You know, that was one of the things that had that big. One of the biggest impacts that I learned from you is recognizing and, you know, really getting tapped into, hey, we need to be prepared now. So what would you say to someone who was maybe in my old state, that state of, I just, you know, when you've got 78% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, what are some of the first things that we can do to start preparing ourselves?

I think the first thing, and this is. This can be tough for some. It's a little tough love for some people. But I think the first thing we actually do is we have to examine our life. We literally have to look at it and say, why am I living paycheck to paycheck? Because we think it's an income problem. And often it's not an income problem. It's an expense problem. It's a. Put it bluntly, it's an ego problem. It's a status problem. It's something that we're trying to put on a show because we're worried about what people will think. We want them to think something about us. You know what? I just want them to think I'm a good person. I don't care about the car I drive now. I drive a nice car, but I don't care. And if what they're doing is loving me or following me, because, oh, my gosh, I got a Lambo, which I don't. But, you know, I got a Lambo or I have a private jet or I have any of those things, they're following me for the wrong reasons because those are not meaningful. So I think the first thing is to examine our life and. And examine it in this way. I want you to take 12 months, at least, of your credit card statements, 12 months of your bank statements, and I want you to spread them out on the table. You might want a little wine with this. I don't know. But. Because here's what I'm going to ask you to do. I'm going to ask you. I'm going to ask you. I'm telling a bunch of fitness professors to start drinking, because here's what I want you to do. I want you to start to look at all the statements, and I want you to have two color pens. I want you to have a red pen, and I want you to have a green pen. And I want you to mark all the things on those statements that are absolute needs in green, those that are wants in red. Okay? Now let's be clear. What is a need? A need is something that keeps the roof over your head, keeps you fed, keeps you clothed, keeps you protected, and keeps you safe. So as much as you might think so, Netflix is not a need. The mani pedi isn't a need. The technology around me isn't a need unless it's necessary to generate income. And then look at the wants. Because on the want side of the equation is the place that we might be able to find where you're leaking cash and you're leaking wealth. Now, I am not one and anyone that looks at the way I live my life, you know that I am not one that's living off of ramen and Mac and cheese and doing those things. I live good, I live well. But I do it with three characteristics in mind. I live fully aware, fully conscious, and extremely intentional with every financial choice I make. So when we decide that we're going to do something, or we make it with intentional choice, what do I mean by that? Here's why this is important. Let's do some math. Because I'm a math. I'm an accountant, so I got to do a little bit of math, But I'll do the math for you so you don't have to freak out that, oh, my gosh, I got to get a calculator out. So let's just do some math. Let's assume for a moment that all I did was find $200. $200 in expenses that you don't need. It's a subscription service. It could be cable. It could be some other things that you don't need because you're not using them. And we take that $200 and we save that money and we put it into a high yield cash account and over time, we actually invest it. If I invest that $200 a month, $50 a week at 8%, in 30 years, you have over $300,000. Okay, $200, $300,000. Take it to $500. That's going to put you at 7,800 thousand. I don't know the math on it. 7, $800,000. 15. $1,800 will put you at over $2 million. But point being is that we get so caught up in thinking that I gotta hit the ball out of the park. I gotta make thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. No, you're too focused on the making. Now, making is important. We'll talk about that. The question isn't what you're making. The question really is what you're doing with what you make. See, entrepreneurs, they come into the game and they say, I'm gonna generate income. There's two sides of the affluent entrepreneur journey. There's two primary sides. There's a third side too, but there's two sides. There's the income generation piece, and most of them get it good. Okay, but then there's the wealth creation piece. Most of them miss the boat on that because they're so focused on making the money that they're not focused on keeping the money. Here's the interesting thing. The mindset and the skill set to make the money is not the same as the mindset and skill set to keep the money. So that's, so that's what I would do first is examine it, see if I'm leaking cash somewhere else. Then second, I would look at scaling income. So are there things that I can incrementally do? For instance, can I create a product, a program or something that doesn't take my time so I'm no longer swapping hours for dollars that I can sell on an ongoing basis. And like we just. You did the numbers. Let's say I created something that I'm going to sell for a hundred bucks. If I sell two of those and that money goes into an investment account, two pro products at 100 bucks a month gives you 300,000. So we don't need to do a lot if you want to see what happens. There's a book by Chris Hogan called Everyday Millionaires. Now, he's not talking about now 82, 88%. I remember the stat off top of my head. 88% of millionaires do not inherit their wealth. They're first generation millionaires. In Other words, they created it. The interesting thing is that many of them are not what you would think. They're not the dot com, they're not the Internet millionaires. They're not these stories that you hear where they make it overnight. First. It's never made overnight because if it's made overnight, it's usually lost overnight too, because we're not in the right comfort zone. But what you'll find, what you'll find is that it's just the everyday person that does the right thing with the dollars they have over time, that gives them that over time. It's when you sit back and say, I want to do this in five years, I want to do this in two years. Where you take risks, you put blinders on and you make mistakes. I've done it. I've done it. I lost one third of my net worth because I made some bad decisions and ended up in a Ponzi scheme. Well into the seven figures. Well into the seven figures.

Oh my gosh, this is just so mind blowing. Okay, so you said three things that I, you know, that I. Three things I want to talk about. Number one is that the, the language of wealth and the skill set of wealth is different than generating income. I definitely want to go there because I know that you're the person to go to when it comes to learning that language. So we'll definitely go there. But something else that you said to speaking of generating income is there is this idea, and I'm curious to know your thoughts, your perspective on this. When you know, how do you discern taking calculated risks? Because one of the things that you said was that you're going to make a conscious financial decision. So how are you both discerning with how you're going to use your money? And also abundant.

Yeah. So for me, I actually look at risks now. And the way you'll look at risks actually will change as life changes for you. Okay, I, as we sit here today, I'm 59, will be the 16th of September. My wife says I act 12 still, which is totally fine. So my day is not complete unless she rolls her eyes at me at least once. But the reality is that someone like my son, okay, my son is 30 years old now. He's got a wife, 27 year olds and they're young, they have the capacity to take more risks than I do. Because now when I say capacity, they have the Runway. They have the time to correct their mistakes than I do. Because if I look at it this year, I turn 60 and I'm not the type that's going to retire, but let's say that I wanted to traditionally retire in five years at 65. I don't want to take risks with what I am doing to the point that it puts in jeopardy what I have done and what I've created. Whereas if I know that I've got 20 years to retirement, 10 years to retirement, it's a little different game. So I look at the, so your risk tolerance, as they call it, and the way you evaluate risk may shift depending on your life situation. Whether you have kids, whether you have grandkids, whether you're, you know, higher in age, lower in age, whether you're single. All that goes into play. However, that being the case in general, when I look at an opportunity or the risk of an opportunity, the question I do what I call worst case planning. So I ask myself, what's the worst that can happen and what's the cost and the consequence of, of that worst case planning? You know, people have asked me recently, oh my gosh, are you in cryptocurrency? I mean, if you just put it all in cryptocurrency, you'd be, you'd be a kabillionaire. And I go, yeah, but think about the risk you took on. Are you prepared for that? And it sounds great in hindsight to say it hit 40,000, right? But you know, the next day it dropped by 4,000. Now if you got in at 3,000 and now you're at 40,000, who cares? And that's fine. My point is that there's different investments or different possibilities that carry different risks. And you need to look at that. I'm a conservative investor. I'm one that says, let's slow and steady, let's stay on it. I will allocate a piece of my portfolio, a piece of my life to more speculative things. But it's a thin, narrow slice. But more specifically to, let's say, a business opportunity that comes in. The thing that I would look at is say, all right, what's the possible return? What's the possible revenue that I'm going to generate from this? What's the cost of generating that revenue? So what's the profit? Too many people get caught up in the top line, say I can make, I can make a million dollars doing that. But, but if in the process it's going to cost you 800,000, I'm going to look at the 200,000 versus the million. So I want to understand that. Then I want to ask myself, what's the Probability that I can make that. What's the probability of success here? And, and then there's. There's another question that most entrepreneurs fail to ask. There's this concept that I talk about that I say, most entrepreneurs, especially when they get in this game, they have what I call sandbox syndrome. Sandbox syndrome is that kid, and maybe you all had it where you had that kid and you're playing in the sandbox. And there's this one kid, the kind of bully kind of kid that goes and collects all the toys in the corner of the sandbox. Doesn't matter that he or she doesn't want to play with them. Just going to collect the toys because he wants the toys in the corner, and you're stuck not playing with toys. Entrepreneurs do the same thing. They collect opportunities. An opportunity comes their way and say, oh, this is a great opportunity. I'm going to take it. And they do that, opportunity after opportunity, and what they find is that they dissipated their resources in a way that they can't dedicate any time enough to an opportunity to make it make sense. The question, and I sit on a board, a board of directors of one of the companies I sit on. This company was founded in the 1880s. And we had this conversation because we had a business development team that was going out and spending millions of dollars traveling, looking at all these opportunities. And I asked them, I said, which ones are in our core genius? Which ones have the highest profitability and which ones have the highest probability of success? Those are the diamonds. Those are the ones that we need to go after. So I would ask you, when someone comes to me, so I've got this opportunity, a client that I'm mentoring. So the first thing I ask them typically said, is it in alignment with your vision and your values, the position and where you're going. And if it isn't, I think you take it off the table unless it's such a great opportunity that you're willing to change directions. Okay. Then we look at the profitability, the probability of success, and one last piece, and that is lifestyle. What you mention it, we have a specified amount of time here. So the question is, in every business equation, every opportunity, every business equation is this little variable that no one talks about, and it is lifestyle. In order to take advantage of this opportunity, what impact is it going to have on your lifestyle? I'm literally right now getting ready to launch my own video show, my own podcast, all around world, the.