002 How to Achieve Financial Liberation

Hey there, real quick before we jump into the episode, listen, if your earnings treadmill hasn't set you free yet, running faster won't either. Listen, hustle without principles just going to burn you out. So here's what I want for you. I want you to join me for my money machine experience live. It is three free trainings. Deep dive into how to escape the treadmill and build a money machine that actually works for you. All right, Grab your spot here by going to moneymachinelive.com and I'll see you in the free training.

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 to get financial liberation. All right, I'm intentionally using the term liberation and not freedom. And here's why. What I've noticed is that the idea behind liberation versus freedom is liberation is a journey and it's a path. It's a process of getting there, whereas freedom is a state of being. It's something of a destination. In fact, I found a wonderful, wonderful definition, and I'm going to read it because I want to make sure that I get it right around liberation, liberty itself. Okay? It says that liberty requires power. Liberty requires power. But this is where the beautiful part is. But it is not the power over others. Rather, it's the power to affect personal progress, to change one's circumstances for the better. Okay? It's the power to affect personal progress to change one's circumstances for the better. Okay? So that's why I want to use the term liberation. And one of the things that I talk about is this whole idea of financial liberation is that what I want us to be on is this journey to be completely liberated. As affluent entrepreneurs, we live a financially liberated life. We live an affluent life. And we talked in the, in a prior episode about what an affluent life is. Well, let's talk a little bit about liberation. What does it take? How do we achieve financial liberation as we move forward? And to do that, I'm going to introduce you to a portion of the affluence blueprint framework. Because here's what I think is that it's important to understand the reality is that if we truly want to live an affluent life, a liberated life, to be an affluent entrepreneur, no longer be the treadmill entrepreneur that maybe you are right now. I mean, what I mean by a treadmill entrepreneur is that you're on the treadmill and you're running. And as long as you're running, the money's coming. Now, maybe it's a lot of money, maybe it's a little money, okay? But the only way that you can get more money is to run faster, longer on the treadmill.

Some of you might be relating this, because I know that I did this for a while, is that I said, okay, I don't want to get off the treadmill. Because if I get off the treadmill, stuff stops. So you're in this treadmill of sales, of getting customers, of marketing, of operations, of collections, of creation, all of those things. And you're just saying as long as I keep going, as long as I keep going. But I got news for you. You can't keep going. Treadmill entrepreneurs will get tired, they'll get burnt out, they will get hurt, they will get injured. It's just not possible. So if we truly want to find financial liberation, if we truly want to find freedom, if we truly want to do that, we can no longer live the life of a treadmill entrepreneur. We must, we must look for a way to find the life of an affluent entrepreneur. And that's where we're going to go. So here's what I found over the years that I've worked with affluent entrepreneurs and helped build the businesses and help them get to the point of being an affluent entrepreneur. There was three critical outcomes that we found in those three critical outcomes. There's richer lifestyle. Okay, the first one is richer lifestyle. This is about the lifestyle. Remember in the, in the prior episodes I talk about lifestyle. Lifestyle is a big deal. In fact, every single business equation, every single equation has a variable in it called lifestyle. Sometimes we don't see it though. In other words, every time we take on a project, every time we take on a client, every time we take on a team member, every time we take on something, it affects our lifestyle and the lifestyles of those that are impacted by us. I learned this lesson the hard way, okay? At the hands of a six year old boy. See in now I'm going to go back, I'm going to date myself here, okay? We're talking about 1996. And my son was about five and a half, six years old. It was just before his sixth birthday and I was a single full time dad. Him and I living together, doing our thing. I was building my business. I had just got pushed out by my. I had a partnership breakup. So I had no cash flow, I had no backlog of clients. I had no clients.

And I was $300,000 in debt. I was in a place where what I needed to do is figure out how the heck I was going to keep the bills and the roof over our head and how was I going to take care of the greatest gift that was given to me, and that is to be a dad, to be a father, to be a parent. And so I was working hard, and all of a sudden I started to pick up clients. All of a sudden the cash started to come in. All of a sudden people started booking me, people started hiring me. Things were working, things were working. And then Jeremy comes walking in, running in from school one day. Daddy, daddy, daddy. I drew a picture of you at school today. So I knelt down and he hands me this, this picture that he drew. And it was in blue felt dip pen. There I was in his best stick figure. And I was standing in front of two computer screens with a phone in each ear and the one on the desk ringing. See, it wasn't us playing ball. It wasn't us at Disneyland. We weren't having fun. His vision of his dad was working. And that was it. See, it was that moment where I started to look at things and say, wow, wait a second. Is it possible.

For my dream to be an impactful entrepreneur? To coexist, to be able to impact people's lives, to coexist with the gift of being a dad. And that was when this whole idea of people talking to me and saying, hey, Mel, if you really want to do this, you're going to get work life balance. Figure out how to get work life balance. And that was the thing that was a struggle. Because this whole idea of work life balance, I don't know if you've ever felt this, that you're living for 6, 7, 8, 10 hours a day in your work bucket, and then you jump out of the work bucket and you run home, and now you're in your home bucket for four hours, or you're in your hobby bucket or your relationship bucket, and you're living these separate little microcosms of life that never come together. And that incongruence, that shift, that stress.

Is what takes away the Peace in your life. See, what I found at the hands of a six year old is it isn't about work, life balance. It's about work, life harmony. It's about understanding that everything we do is life, every decision we make affects lives, whether they're in the business or outside the business. My son wasn't in the business, but everything I did in the business affected him. See, it would have been easy for me to look at him and say, hey kid, this is the way that I keep the roof on. This is for you. This is so, so you can go to a good school. This is so we can do the fun things. But we weren't doing the fun things. And I could have said, the prophets are all about that. And he would have looked at me and said, dad, I don't need, if you understood it, I don't need your profits. I just need your presence, man. And that's something I couldn't live with. And so this idea of a richer lifestyle becomes really important. A lifestyle that's built on experiences, on feelings and connections and yes, material things, but not just material things, a richer lifestyle, that's the first critical outcome. The second critical outcome is to have a deeper impact. The deeper impact. And when we talk about deeper impact, yeah, impacting the people you serve as an entrepreneur, the services you render, the products you create, the problems you solve, all of that matters, all of that makes a difference. But there's more impact than that. And sometimes we don't think about it. And that's the impact we have to those that are standing by our side, the loved ones, the people that care about us and looking at it and saying, am I intentionally having a positive impact on them at the same time? And then there's one more impact that we need to think about and that's the impact you're having in the mirror. In other words, when you look at yourself in the mirror, who are you becoming in the process of becoming and being an affluent entrepreneur? Because when we know that we're having a deeper impact, an impact that's holistic, that's impacting externally to the people we serve, to the right and the left, to the people we love, and internally to who you are, now we're making a difference that that matters. Now we're, we're leading to deeper impact. And the third critical outcome, the third critical outcome is complete freedom. Now this is where people look at things and say, oh, financial freedom. Yep, Mel, it's financial freedom. And you're right, it is financial freedom. But that's the base. Because trust me, financial freedom is simply the commas in the bank account, the number of zeros. It doesn't matter because finances and money alone do not create the happiness. There's studies that have shown this, but I've got colleagues and people that I know that are worth 200, $300 million and miserable as hell. They're not even fun to be around. Their health sucks, their relationships suck, their. The way they treat their employees is awful, all of that. And you might know some people too. See, it's not the numbers in the bank account that matter. Only I need to have financial freedom because of what it gives me in the sense of money. But if that is the sole focus, it's going to be a problem. The second freedom that we need to look at is, is time freedom. And I, I truly believe that this is one of the biggest freedoms that, that we can create is time for the freedom to take control of my time back. The freedom to sit back and say, I get to choose. I get to choose what I'm going to do, when I'm going to do it and how I'm going to do it. See, I think that it doesn't matter how much money you got in your bank account, if you don't control your time, you're still poor. I want to be able to choose what I do, when I want to do it, how I want to do it. And that to me, is where freedom comes from. And then the last freedom is mind freedom. The peace of mind to know that everyone, everything and everything and everyone that you love will be okay when you have those freedoms. Those three critical outcomes, richer lifestyle, deeper impact and complete freedom. That's what's living.

And affluent life is all. But that's how we do it. Now. How do we get there? Well, there's three pillars now. I'm going to go to my iPad real quickly. I'm going to bring this up so you can see, see it. Those of you that are watching on the video, you can see it. If not, you can download this. The drawings from the show notes. We'll make sure that you have access to them. But like I said, affluence and liberation is based on richer lifestyle, deeper impact and complete freedom. But what does it take to make that happen? Well, there's three things that we need to have in place to make that happen. The first is this. We need to have a system that generates income that scales income that scales your cash flow. Here's what we're trying to get at. I'm Trying to move you from a drift step to a flood of cash flow. Because if we don't have cash flow coming in, if we don't have cash flow coming in, then how are we going to build wealth? So this is about how do you make it? How do we scale your income? So you need to have a system to scale your income, scale your cash flow to bring that in. Now, many entrepreneurs, many entrepreneurs are really, really good at this piece of it. They can make a whole lot of money. But there's a whole lot of entrepreneurs, and you might know some, that the money comes in and the money goes out, and the money comes in and the money goes out and they got nothing to show for it. They're living basically check to check. It might be a bigger check, but they're living check to check. But you know what? I saw an interesting statistic recently, and that is that the majority of entrepreneurs, based on a study, their average annual take home is less than $50,000. Well, that tells me that they're not taking a lot of money in, a lot of money out. But the idea is that we want to scale it. We need to have a system generated. The question is, do you have a system to generate income on a consistent basis? Income that allows you to scale yourself to get your time back, income that gives you choices, income that gives you options to do the things that you want to do. And then once we have that, we get to the second pillar of this, and that's second pillar is now how do we accumulate it? See, here's the thing. If we're good at generating, we gotta get good at keeping some of it. So this is about profit optimization. We'll talk about that in another, another session. But really, it doesn't matter how much income you create if all of it's going out the door. It's a matter of how much you keep and what you do with it. Because what we're doing is we're going to convert our income into assets. And we convert our income into assets. What that does is, is that multiplies our wealth. So if generate is about making it.

Accumulate, it's about multiplying it. It's about how do we start building the machine. As I talked about in some of the previous episodes, the machine that gives you the perpetual income, that gives you that freedom to step away when you need to. Okay? So that's one of the elements. And then the third element, which unfortunately we need to have in play. So to, to be affluent, we're going to generate, we're going to accumulate. And once you're generating and accumulating, you get a target on your back. So we need to have a way to insulate it. In other words, how do we protect you? How do we go from being exposed to protected, how do we go to shielding? And how do we go from making sure that the market, the lawsuits, the things that might occur, can't occur? We reduce your exposure to losing what you're creating and how you're creating it to the. The craziness of life. I mean, we live in a litigious society. It's very cheap to file a lawsuit. I mean, you can do it for $50 in most states. So it doesn't cost a lot, but you end up having to defend it. So how do we one, reduce risks or eliminate risks so they don't exist? If we can't do that, how do we protect ourselves? By putting walls around it. And those walls can be in, in licensing, copyrights, trademarks. It can be in structures and asset protection. It can also be in insurance. So there's certain kinds of insurance. We'll talk about insurance at another time. But the bottom line is that we need all three of these to truly live a financially liberated life. We need to be able to have a system that generates and scales our income, have a system that accumulates and multiplies the assets, and have a system that insulates and protects them and shields them from being taken away. So hopefully that helps you. And if you want to continue these conversations or if you have questions about it, I'd love to hear from you. One of the things that you can do is join our private community. We've got a community on Facebook called the Affluent Entrepreneur Facebook group. Join that private community. Do me a favor. I'll put the link in the show notes. We'll give you access to that. Jump in. Start a conversation. If you've got questions, comments or anything like that, please post them. Send me a dm. Let's have a conversation and let's see what we can do to get you to live that affluent life and become the affluent entrepreneur you desire to become. So I look forward to seeing you. I look forward to hearing from you. And again, if you have questions or think, post them. Because we're going to also do some Q and A shows where I'm going to bring those questions on and answer them and I might even bring you on to answer your questions live. So I look forward to seeing you. In the next episode of the Affluent Entrepreneur show. I'm Mel signing out Cheers.

Thank you for listening to the affluent entrepreneurship 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.

And that's it for this episode of Building YOUR MONEY Machine where we help you learn how to master your money, eliminate financial stress and live a life of choice. If you found this valuable or helpful to you, here's what I'd love for you to do. If you do me a favor, go to Apple, Apple Podcast or wherever you're listening to this podcast and rate and review the show. It helps us tremendously to keep us at home the top of the list so we can continue to get this information and this message out to people because I truly believe that financial freedom is your birthright and I want to help each and every one of you claim it. Thanks so much.