001 How to Live a Life of Affluence

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This is the affluent Entrepreneur show for entrepreneurs that want to operate at a high level and achieve financial liberation. I'm your host, Mel Abraham, and I'll be sharing with you what it takes to create success beyond wealth so you can have a richer, more fulfilling lifestyle. In this show, you'll learn how business and money intersect so you can scale your business, scale your money, and scale your life while creating a deeper impact and living with complete freedom, because that's what it really means to be an affluent entrepreneur.

Hey there, Mel Abraham here, and welcome to this episode of the Affluent Entrepreneur show. And in this episode, we're going to talk about how do you live an affluent life? You know, I guess we ought to talk about it. Considering the fact that the show is named the Affluent entrepreneur show, we might as well figure out what is affluence? What is an affluent entrepreneur? And how does this all come into play? What does it mean to you? So here's the thing. When I look at. At some of the things that we've dealt with, this is it's really easy for people to look at affluence and start to think, oh, you're thinking about just money, money and wealth and. And those types of. Of challenges. In fact, I had someone tell me that they thought affluence just meant, like, it was something kind of stuffy and regal and something that doesn't apply to people. I hope by the end of this episode you're going to sit back and think differently, because I look at affluence differently. And this is the way this show is going to be built. It's going to be based on this definition of affluence that I'm hoping you'll take into your life, because here's what I know is that it doesn't matter the kind of money you make. I mean, it does, but it doesn't in the sense that if we don't have the right lifestyle, then the money really doesn't matter, because what we're really looking at is lifestyle. Now I'll give you an idea for me is that everything that I do is lifestyle driven. And this is really even more true today than it was before because of the journey that I've been on with the cancer, that it started in June 2019 and we're out of it now. But at the same time, the reality of how life settles in, when you face mortality, when you start to realize that things can happen, that life can happen when things are going well and that type of thing, you start to shift things. I had someone ask me the question of, well, I guess when you got diagnosed, it changed your priorities. I said, it certainly did. It changed my priorities to one priority, a single priority, and that is life. Life is the priority. Now, that doesn't mean that money and material things and possessions and stuff aren't meaningful. They are. But when it comes down to all that we do as affluent entrepreneurs, as people that want to live with affluence, there are a couple of things that I think that. That you'll see that are more meaningful than just the material things. In fact, the money. The money actually is just one little piece of affluence. And I'm going to give you a framework. I'm going to give you a framework called the affluence life paradigm that was going to walk through some things. Now you're going to realize that if you're new to the show, and this being one of the early episodes, if you're new to the show, you're going to realize that I do a lot of drawing and I create a lot of frameworks, and I think in frameworks, because frameworks are powerful tools. And so every once in a while, I'm going to jump to my iPad and we're going to walk through some things. And those of you that are not watching on the video, if you want to get access to it, just go to the show notes. We'll give you the links down in the show notes so you can watch the video. But all my notes, everything that I'm drawing on the iPad and all that stuff will be in the show notes also. So you can download them and you can have access to them just the same. So here's the thing. I don't believe that it is about just material things. It is not about just money. It is about money in some sense, but not just about money. Hopefully that makes sense to you. It's about business. Yes. It's about impact more and it's about money less. Realizing that Money is a result, it's not a purpose. It serves a different things. Now here's the thing. I'm going to jump to the iPad right now. I'm going to talk through this whole idea of the affluent life paradigm. Because when we start to understand this, I think that you'll start to see things through a different light. Because living an affluent life is about a couple things. And I think the first thing that we need to understand is that to me, affluence and an affluent life starts with living a meaningful life. I'm going to give you an idea of what I think the meaning or the way I see the meaning of an affluent life is. And then what do you need to have in place to make it happen? So you have some things that you can do. So the first thing is that you want a meaningful life. And truly this idea of a meaningful life is something that is near and dear to your heart. Here's the interesting thing. There was a Harvard study, a 2017 Harvard study of 4,000, 4,000 millionaires. And what they found that first off, the majority of millionaires are first generation millionaires. What does that mean? What that means is that they made it themselves, they didn't inherit it, they didn't win it in some lottery or some contest. It wasn't handed to them, which is really beautiful to start to understand that one, you have the opportunity in your hands, if you choose to take it, to become wealthy, to become a millionaire, to become a multimillionaire. Because if 78%, 79% of millionaires are self made, self, first generation, okay, first generation, then you can be too. So here's the thing. In this study of 4,000 millionaires, Harvard found one of the key characteristics and one of the things that drove their happiness. So they started measuring the level of wealth and the level of happiness. One of the key considerations that increase the happiness, increase the happiness the most, was the fact that they were the ones that generated the wealth, that it wasn't handed to them, that it wasn't inherited, that it wasn't handed down or anything like that, that they truly did something that mattered, that they did something that made a difference, that gave them the opportunity to live a wealthy life. So what really happened in that study? One of the findings in the study was the fact is that how they created their affluence, how they created their wealth mattered. And it mattered to their happiness because of the meaningfulness that it gave them in the process. And so I think we need to understand that. So the first thing that comes into place in the affluent life paradigm is it should be a meaningful life. The second characteristic of this is that it should be an impactful life. And most of the time when we look at this, it's about impacting others. It's about looking at things and saying, just like I said in this last quadrant is, is that I needed it to matter. I needed to make a difference. That the fact is, is that people are better off for what I have done while I'm here, that I'm having an impactful life in the process of doing the things that I want. Now, the third characteristic. So we have meaningful, we have impactful. Now, mind you, we have not talked about. We have not talked about money yet, okay? We haven't talked about the wealth. But that comes into the third characteristic because they believe that if we don't have the meaningful life and we don't have the impact of life, the last P or the third piece of this is this idea of we want it to be fruitful, okay? See, that doesn't empty, empty, empty existence if it's not meaningful and if it's not impactful, at least that's what the studies are finding. And that's what I have found working with many multimillionaires and people that are just starting and moving into the millions and building something that matters. In fact, that's one of the things we do in the affluence blueprint, and that's part of what this show is all about, is to help you and allow you to give you the tools to build an affluent life, to become an affluent entrepreneur that has a richer lifestyle, a deeper impact and complete freedom. And so one of the things that we understand is that, yeah, it needs to be fruitful. I need to be able to make money, I need to be able to pay the bills. But that alone does not create affluence. And this is the mistake I think a lot of people make when they start to think about an affluent life. They think in terms of money, they think in terms of material possessions. That's not what really drives affluence, at least not in my book and in. Not on this show and not with the people that we get to work with and the people that we blessed to attract. So that leads to the fourth and final piece of the affluent life paradigm, and that is this. If it's meaningful, it's impactful, it's fruitful. The other piece is it needs to be peaceful. Okay? Now that doesn't mean that there's not going to be Any challenges. But what it means is that you have a peace of mind, that you have a freedom about you, that you have the ability to know that things, even though things may happen, they're going to be okay. They're going to be okay. And I think that's the thing that we start to really look at and say, how does this work? How do we make this work in that way? So what are the four things? Each one of these. Each one of these, the meaningful, impactful, fruitful and peaceful. There is a strategy, there are tactics, there are things you need to have in place to allow those to happen. So let's look at those real quick. Because in order to have a meaningful life, one of the things that we use and one of the things that I want you to consider is do you have what I call an affluence plan? Okay? A plan that really actually looks and examines your life. This isn't a financial plan. I mean, it is a financial plan in the sense that we'll reduce it to figure out what the numbers are to make that happen. But until we understand, until you take the time to understand what you want your life to be, what you want it to look like, what you want it to feel like, and then move towards that intentionally, then it's not going to happen. And if it happens, it's haphazard, it's coincidental. But if it's coincidental and haphazard, we cannot necessarily guarantee ourselves that it's going to be duplicated and replicated over and over and over again. Now, hopefully this is making sense to you. So here's the thing when we look at this is we want to have a specific plan in place for, for the lifestyle and the process we need to do to get there and have that happen. Now, this is much, much bigger than just some vision board. This is much, much more detailed than just a vision board. This is about a true plan with executable steps, action steps, and milestones and outcomes that you have in place. So we need to get ourselves an affluence plan in place. And then to have an impactful, impactful life, we need to make sure that we have an affluence of vision. What's the bigger vision? What's the thing that is outside of you that matters? What's the thing that is the why? That is the thing that when things are tough, it's going to draw you forward, that it's going to move you forward, that it's going to pull on you and keep you moving forward. Because I Promise you things will get tough at times. Life happens. Life will turn things upside down, life will make U turns, life will make left turns, right turns when you don't expect it. And so what is that thing? Do you have a vision that is a vivid, emotionally compelling vision? A vivid, emotionally compelling vision. Something that isn't some mundane vision statement that you created because you took it out of some consulting book or you looked it up online, but something that every time you read it, you get goosebumps. Every time you read it, it makes your half pound faster. That is an affluence vision. It's something that people can get behind. It's something that people will crusade for. Okay, so that's the second piece, is that making sure that you have an affluence plant and you have an affluence vision which then leads you to this whole idea of okay, that's meaningful, that's impactful. How do we make it fruitful? Well, in order to be fruitful, we need to have something that I call perpetual income. What I mean by this is that we need to create a system or a process that's going to produce income that allows it to be produced with or without your effort. See, too often we get into business or we get into our world of income generation and we think that we, we get into it and we're, we're on a one on one relationship with things. We're, we're always looking at things from a one on one standpoint. In other words, one unit of effort brings me one unit of reward. It's what I did. Listen, I'm a CPA by trade, by education and the traditional CPA model, which is horrible. Horrible. Okay, the traditional CPA model is I'll swap an hour and you swap a dollar. In other words, you pay me for my time. It's a horrible model. If you're using that model, get off of it as quickly as possible. We'll have other episodes where we talk about the value exchange and ROI versus COI and all kinds of other things so you can get off of that one on one relationship. So the idea here is this, I need to create more income, more reward for my inputs. So in other words, my effort and my reward are not necessarily tied. I need to create a perpetual income machine. This is something we'll talk deeper and deeper about as we go through the show. It's something that we build in an affluence blueprint. But the point is, is that, that I want you to start thinking about how do you create an income stream that doesn't require you. Which actually leads to the fourth thing, and that is when we talk about peaceful. One of the things that'll help you with peaceful will also help you with fruitful is this, is this idea of creating the five incomes. And I have a framework that's called the five incomes. And one of the things to realize is that too often we rely on a single stream of income. It's our salary, it's our business income, it's our contracting income. Whatever is it might be launches whatever it is, it's in your business, in your income generation. If you have a single path to income, single path to income, wages, business contracts, launches, single path income, you're in a precarious position. You can't find peace in that. Because what happens when it gets shut off? What happens when you can't run with it anymore? What happens when life happens like it did with me? Okay? When I was diagnosed with cancer, life got flipped upside down and I had to pull myself out of my business. I had to pull myself and say, I need to focus on my healing. I need to focus on the things that truly mattered. I needed to focus on making sure that we beat this bad boy down and business had to take a backseat. But if it was my only source of income and I told business to take a back seat, where would I be? I'd have been selling assets, I would have been selling the home, I would have been selling my wife's shoes, which would have been a fake, worse than the cancer, I promise you, okay? We would have been dipping into savings. We would have been dipping into all kinds of things, but for the five incomes, okay? Because here's what I know. What we can think of is that when we have income that is coming in, this goes back to the perpetual income that isn't driven just by our effort, but we've leveraged our time back, in other words, and I. There's five incomes. There's active income, which is 101. You've got business income, which is more leveraged but still requires you. You've got asset based income. You've got residual based income, you've got portfolio, portfolio income. Those are the five incomes. The key is this. I want to be able to support my lifestyle with just three of the five, even though I'll use all five. But the three of the five are asset, residual and portfolio. As long as I can support my lifestyle with those three, then my active role in generating the other income doesn't matter. And that's what happened. And so I think it's important for you to understand that. So we need an affluence plan. We need an affluence vision. We need to create a perpetual income machine, and we need to think in the terms of the five incomes. And when we do this correctly, here's what's going to happen. Okay, so if I look back at this, when we have an affluence vision and we have, I mean, an affluence plan and we have perpetual income, what that creates for you is a nest egg. It creates a nest egg for you. It's what's going to give you the wealth that you're trying to build. And when you have the proper affluence plan and the proper affluence vision put together, what that's going to do is create intentional direction. In other words, you're not at the mercy of some of these other things, whether it's the economy, whether it's legislation, whether it's other elements that you're intentionally making a decision saying, that's the direction. This is the plan I'm going to go execute. And when we have the affluence vision and we get the five incomes in place now, we create legacy because the vision creates impact. The five incomes creates the cash flow to fund that impact. That creates legacy. And when we have the five incomes and perpetual income machine built from them, this is what gives you the liberation that you're looking for. And so that's the key. And so here's how I look at this whole idea of the affluence life. How do you live an affluent life? We make sure that's meaningful. You make sure that it's impactful. You find a way to make it fruitful, and you find a way to make it peaceful. Now, I've given you some things to consider, some things to look at. Here's the deal. I want us to continue to have conversations like this. One of the places that we have conversations is in my affluent entrepreneurs Facebook group. We'll put the link in the show notes, make sure that you join and get there so we can have a conversation. It's a community of people, like minded people just like you, looking to live an affluent life, to make a difference in people's lives while doing it, and have safe, sane, proper conversations around money, wealth and making a difference. I hope that makes sense to you. I look forward to seeing you in another episode. But in the meantime, here's something I'm going to ask you to do. I want you to come to the show notes, if you're not there already, I want you to download the Affluent Life Paradigm framework and I want you to look at it and say, all right, how do I make it meaningful? How do I make it impactful? What am I going to do to make it fruitful? And what does it take to be peaceful? Figure that out. Then do me a favor. Let me know in the comments. Let me know in the Facebook group. Shoot me a dm. I'd love to hear from you and I look forward to chatting more soon. See you in the next episode. Cheers.

Thank you for listening to the Affluent Entrepreneur show with me, your host, Mel Abraham. If you want to achieve financial liberation to create an affluent lifestyle, join me in the Affluent Entrepreneur Facebook group now by going to melabraham.com group and I'll see you there. Foreign.

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