094 What to Do to Build Wealth in Your 40’s!

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 than living with complete freedom, because that's what it really means to be an affluent entrepreneur.

Hey there. Welcome to this episode of the Affluent Entrepreneur show. This is the beginning of a special series. You know, often I get asked, you know, what do you do in your 20s, your 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s? What do we do depending on your stage or age in life? And the reality is that you can't figure out your wealth journey, the things you should be doing with your money if you don't look at it from the context and the construct of where you are in your life, how much time you have left, and those kinds of things. So I decided to create a special series called wealth by the Decade. And so I'm going to walk you through some of the key elements that you need to consider as you start to look at your wealth, depending on where you are in your life now before you go jumping ahead and saying, well, I'm not in my 20s or I'm not in my 30s or I'm not in my 40s. And skipping those parts of the series, there's some valuable elements that build on each other going through the whole series. So I'm going to invite you to go through the absolute whole series, no matter what your age is, no matter what decade you're in. You know, it can also help that maybe you have children or grandchildren that need to hear some of this stuff. So I want you to go through all of it and take the notes. I'm going to walk you through a couple of things each decade. We're going to talk about the theme of that decade. We're going to talk about the focus for that decade, we're going to talk about the priority for that decade, we're going to talk tactically about what you need to do for that decade. And, and then we're going to talk about some cautions. What are the things you need to watch out for in each decade. This is going to be powerful. This is going to be incredible, I think, because it's, it's one of the things that I, I get asked most often. But before we do that, I want to set up kind of the whole idea of wealth creation, at least the fundamentals, because no matter what your age or stage or whatever decade you're in, this applies. And so I want to talk about the wealth triad, the wealth drivers triad, and what are the stages, the, what I call the journey, the financial liberation journey, so you understand where you might be and what to do. So in order to do that, I'm going to actually jump to my iPad and walk through some of the things that I think we need to bring into. Into bear. So here's the thing. When we start to look at this and we start to look at what drives wealth, because this is going to impact everything that you do, is that there are truly three wealth drivers that we can have that drive things. And so the first, and this is the thing that most people think that they need, and that is this. It is all about money. And I get it. We need to have money, we need to have income. We need to have money coming in to make that happen. But if you've watched me for any length of time or if you've seen some of the work that I've done, it's not the money that's the sole contributor to building wealth. Look, we want wealth not because we want wealth. Now, some people may, but not me. I want wealth. So it allows me to get behind the causes, to move my missions forward, to create a movement, to have the moments in my life and to control those moments. Maybe you're the same way. The reality is, is that the reason we want money, money is a result. It is not a purpose, is to fulfill a purpose. It could be to take care of our children, our grandchildren, to get behind the movement. It could simply be to sit back and say, I just want to control my life. Whatever it is, there's something beyond the money. And so although money.

Is a necessary ingredient to building wealth, it's not the only ingredient, because we can have lots of money coming in, and if we have lots of Money going out. We're not building well. So. So that's the one ingredient. First ingredient. The second ingredient that. That we need to consider is time. And. And that is. This is that. And I hear this all the time. You know, people that are younger, they're in their 20s or 30s or even their 40s and say, I got time. I got time. Or I hear people that are in their 50s and 60s and say, it's too late. I don't have time. Well, the fact of the matter is time is what it is. It's. It's. It's a factor we can't control. We are either. We are at a certain age and stage in our life, period. End of story. But, and I want you to hear this really clearly. It is never too early to start, okay? It is never too early to start building wealth. Time is the greatest lever you have to creating wealth. So the earlier start, the easier it is, the less money we have to bring in. You know, it goes back to my whole Emily factor when we talked about my granddaughter being born. And the fact is that if all I did was put away, you know, 100 bucks a month, $20,000 over 20 years, and just did that, she'll have a million six by the time she was ready to retire. And it's because time did the heavy lifting, 20,000 to a million six. If we started that at 30 or 40 or 50, it's a little bit of a heavier lift. Time is the greatest lever when it comes to your wealth building. Now, that. That also means this the best time to get into the investing game. The best time to get into the wealth creation game.

Is now. If we didn't do it yesterday, then. Now, because here's the thing. If we don't get into it now, then it's just going to shorten the Runway and it's going to make it a bit more difficult as we get older. Now, it doesn't mean it's impossible, okay? It just means it's more difficult. So why do the heavy lifting? Let time do the heavy lifting for you. So money, time. And number three.

That nasty word, discipline.

Let me tell you this, this is the place where I think a lot of people fall off, is the discipline. You know, there's a study that was done. 10,000 millionaires, it was done. And literally the majority of those millionaires, they weren't like entrepreneurs. They weren't, you know, mega entrepreneurs that sold their companies for hundreds of millions of dollars. They were wage earners that consistently and persistently put money away over time in their 401k in their investment accounts, everything. And they ended up becoming millionaires over time. Discipline is one of the greatest catalysts to building wealth. Here's the thing. Remember I say wealth is not about the money. It is a behavioral issue. Well, discipline is about your behaviors. If we don't get in the game early, or if we don't get in the game now, whatever the age or stage you're at, and stay disciplined in the game of wealth creation, then what happens is you make money, you lose money, you make money, you build wealth, you lose wealth, you build wealth. But what happens is it's an up and down and you don't necessarily get ahead. So when you have the three key ingredients of money, time and discipline, things shift for you. Now let's look at what, what happens when you have these things in place. Because if we truly have.

Money and time, what it gives us is leverage. It gives us leverage. The time does the heavy lifting. Now I don't have to be feel the burden of putting so much away. Time will do it. I'm going to give you some numbers as we go through each of the decades here. Okay? Now, when we have money and discipline, in other words, the discipline of our spending, the discipline of our earnings and the discipline of our investing, we have money coming in, we have money going out, and we have money staying home, hopefully. And it's the money that's staying home, what we do with that that starts to create the wealth. Building the money machine that's going to give you the freedom, the wealth machine that gives you the freedom to choose to have the option to work because you want to, not because you need to, to be able to decide whether you're going to take a project on or not. To decide that you're going to take a month off, like, like my son and his wife are doing, and go to, going to Portugal. We're going to join them, you know, so those kinds of things and, and what that means is that when you manage your income, your inflows and your outflows effectively and what's staying at home, you're creating margin in your life, but you're doing it from a financial standpoint also. And so this starts to really drive things. Now when you have discipline and time.

What happens is you start to create habits and those habits give you consistency. And this, this, my friends, this is the key. These are the three wealth drivers. When we start to understand how to manage all of these and time is always going to be defined as now it's never too early. It's never too late. It's now. Okay, so hopefully this makes sense to you. Now. There are stages to go through, and I've had so many people that say, you know what? You know, what's my financial freedom number? Okay, what's my phi number, my fire number, all that stuff. And sometimes those numbers can get really large, which means that they feel so far away. And so you're in many cases sitting back saying, I. I don't think I never get there, but I want to. I want to. I want to bring something to you. I want to give you kind of this. The four stages, the four steps you have to go through. Because let's face it, whether you're in debt or whether you have hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars.

If we need to get to $1,000, we pass through $100. If we need to get to 10,000, we pass through a hundred dollars, then that thousand dollars, then $5,000, and we get to 10,000. If we need to get to a million, we have to pass through the hundred, the thousand, the 10,0001-000005-00000 to get there. Realize that it's a journey. It's not a destination. And there are. There are milestones in this journey that I call the financial liberation journey. And I think that when you start to understand that all I'm trying to do is get to the next milestone, then I'll worry about the next milestone. And then the next, when we turn around and say, I got to get to 5 million, if that's the number, it feels lofty and unreachable and impossible. And so, too often, we stop. We stop. But what we need to do is put little milestones that say, oh, I'm on track, I'm doing well. And then before you know it, your discipline, your money, and your time get you to the 5 million, and you go, gosh, how did I get here? There? Well, you got there by moving through the four stages of the financial liberation journey. So let's look at them. Because here's the thing. When we talk about the financial liberation journey, and this is. This is. This is financial liberation. This is the journey, the path. And, and so here's the thing. We have to move through each of the stages, and you might find yourself in one of these stages, and. And none of them are good, bad, or indifferent. It just allows you to understand where you are, what your focus is, and what to do next. And so hopefully that this will start to make sense to you and give you Some, Some, some ways to look at it, the very first stage that we have to pass through that, that hundred dollars, if you will, is, is what we call, what I call financial stability. And what is financial stability? Financial stability is when you have enough assets generating enough income that it actually covers your necessities. And I mean necessities that mean it. That means the roof over your head, the food that you're eating, your medical, your transportation, your shelter, your clothing, the, the necessities, the bottom rung of the, of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Once we have that, that's the stability. Those are the things that we need to take care of. Now all of a sudden you say, I'm stable. My necessities, my survival is covered, okay? And if we have our survival covered, it gives a level of peace of mind. We know that we're okay now. It may not be the lifestyle we want, it may not be the lifestyle we, we have currently, but at least we're not on the street. At least we're not in debt. At least we're not struggling to just survive. So we need to get to that stability line first. And so if you're in debt or you're struggling, you're living. Check, check. There's some things that we need to do to get some things dialed in. We'll talk about those decade by decades and then, because then once we get to the stability stage, we can move to the next stage. And that next stage is what I call financial security. And financial security, if, if financial stability is your necessities, financial security is your current expenses that. Your current lifestyle expenses, if you will. And so if I look at it and let me just throw some numbers to it, if my survival, my rent or my mortgage, my medical, my, you know, my food, my clothing, transportation, let's say that that was $2,000, okay? So I would need to generate enough income. $2,000. If I did that, then I am at the financial stability line, but that's just the necessities. What about things like Netflix and Mani Pedis and other luxuries.

And the gym membership and all those things? Those are lifestyle expenses. Those are lifestyle expenses. They're not necessity. Now I get it. You might say to me, mel, it's necessary. I get it, all right? But the reality is they're not. But those are lifestyle expenses. This is where we have to get to for financial security, where we can support our current lifestyle. Hopefully this makes sense. So our current lifestyle is then supported. Now we have financial security because now we sit back and Say I can keep living this lifestyle without having to worry. And so if our necessities were $2,000 and let's say that in order to continue our lifestyle, including the necessities, it's $5,000. That means that I need $3,000 more. So your financial security is a total of $5,000, which is the 3,000 for lifestyle and the 2,000 for financial stability. Now we're doing well. Now we're at the security line. Now we know that our current lifestyle is safe. That leads us to stage number three. Stage number three is financial independence. So stage number three, financial independence is where we have enough income being generated to replace 100% of the Inc. Income that we currently have. So let's keep with the numbers. $2,000 for necessities, another 3,000 for, for security. So that's a total of 5,000. But let's say you're earning $7,000 a month. Well, financial independence replaces the income that you have, which is $7,000, which allows you to pay for the expenses that are necessities and lifestyle. And have money left over. Okay. And have money left over. So. So financial independence here is replacing the income. And let's say that that is $7,000. Okay? So that is the financial independence line which then leads us to this last place, which is what I call financial freedom. The financial freedom is when we have the opportunity and the ability to fund our, what we call an affluence vision. When I work with people in the affluence blueprint or with my one on one clients, we create the vision for their life, the ultimate vision. So this is the, the lofty goals that allow you to do the things you want to do, get behind the missions, the movements and do things without concern. This is the big, the big kahuna, the big number that you're looking for. So it supports everything. So you're completely free, you can live life on your terms, the way you want. Okay, that number could be anything. But we have to figure it out. Too often we don't know what our target is. So we just keep running. I did that. And so the idea here is this, is that to understand that this is a journey that requires you to go through stages. And it's not just you jump up to financial freedom. So when we do this and when we look at the stages and the decades of our life, we start to look at it through these eyes to understand that I'm going to be, whether I'm at the stability stage or security stage or independent stage or Freedom stage. We're at different stages. Totally fine. The fact that you know what stage you're at allows you to know what the next milestone is. So that's the financial liberation journey. And I think when you look at the three wealth drivers and the journey now, you understand some of the elements that come into play with building wealth. All right, so with that, let's jump to the decades. Ah, let's keep on going. Welcome to the fortunate 40s. This is a cool decade. This is kind of an interesting time in, in people's lives. And so let's. Let's hit on this one. What if. If we are looking at this, the wealth by the decades, and now you're in your 40s, what are the things you need to focus on? What are the things that we need to consider? The priorities, the tactics, the cautions. What happens if we're behind? We're going to talk about all that in this session. So first things first. What is the theme when we're in our 40s? And so I'm going to jump here. You'll get a chance to see this. The theme here is to optimize. You've been working a while, your family's around, your kids are growing up, all kinds of things that are going on, but this is the time to optimize. Optimize your income, optimize your expenses, optimize your life, optimize your health. Optimizes the theme in the 40s. We should be starting to settle into a groove to make that happen. So in order to do that, we're going to come back to our focus. We're going to start with the focuses again. Some of these we've already talked about. Okay. And they still exist here because they're important. For instance, the first focus is what's your why in this stage of life, in this decade of life, what's your why? Has it changed? Has it. Has it morphed a little bit? Which it might. Because in our 40s, all of a sudden, our kids are getting grown potentially, they might be considering moving out of the house soon. They're. You're going to start coming into that. That space. Okay, so, so what's your why? Revisit the purpose behind what's driving you to build wealth to. To see what that is. Second, which is again, the focus that we've had in the last two decades, and that is education. Continue your growth by podcasts, shows like mine, books, courses, mentorship, guidance. Keep growing so you have. You feel like you've got your hands on the Wheel of your financial shift. The third focus here is this is a time where you need to find. We talked about margin, but we talked about margin in the sense of money in the prior decades. Here's where I want you to find margin, but I want it to be time margin. I want you to find time for you to live.

More fully. The tendency is that we start to allow time to get away from us. And as someone who stared mortality in the face with cancer, time is the most precious thing you have. And so this is a time to revisit and say, am I spending my time the way I want? Do I need to find more margin in my time so I can live more, to live more fully the people that I care about? The fourth focus is during this time is navigating the family changes. Like I said, kids might be growing up, they're getting into their teenage years, they're getting into sports, or they might be leaving the house, going to college. And so there's going to be some family changes, there's going to be some family dynamics. And how do you navigate those? How do you navigate those financially, but how do you navigate those psychologically, too, mentally? You know, sometimes that impacts people because they feel this loss that all of a sudden the kids are gone and grown and they're having a hard time letting the kids go and do their thing. So navigating the family changes becomes a focus here. And the last focus here is this harmonizing your present and future responsibilities. See, during this time is when we start to really start thinking about, ooh, what is retirement going to look like? It may still be off in the future, but we start thinking about what that might look like. What are my medical needs, what are college needs and costs? What are those future responsibilities and my current responsibilities, and how do I. How do I mesh them? How do I harmonize them so they work together? And I know that I'm taking care of both of them. So those are the focuses. What are your priorities? Well, in this decade, in the, the, the fortunate forties decade, this is a time where you start to completely define and be more definitive about what you're finished like, looks like. In other words, what's your number? We had a number potentially in our 20s and 30s, but now we need to refine it because it's not. It's a couple decades off. So now is the time for us to really get clear on what do we want our lifestyle to look like. You know, too often I'll sit down at this stage with, with clients and, and I'M working with people, and now we start to detail out, well, how much do you want to travel? Where do you want to live? Do you want multiple homes, just one home? Do you want to just travel the world in an rv? What does that look like? You want to pay for the kids? Do you want to get behind a cause? You know, generosity, contribution, charity, those kinds of things. And you start to do it without regards to, can I do it financially? Because that's the second question is, after that, we said, if this is what we want to make happen, how do we make it happen? And so we need to know our finish line. And part of knowing your finish line is to control this next priority, because the tendency is that we have something called goal drift. In other words, we're drifting on our goals. By detailing out what that finish line looks like, we can avoid and control goal drift, where we're sitting back and saying, being a little flexible on our goals, I want you to be flexible, but I want it to be with intent, not because of circumstances. If our goal is to hit a million dollars, that's our goal, to hit a million dollars. And the reason we're hitting a million dollars, because it's the kind of lifestyle we need, we want. It's the generosity, it's all that stuff. But I don't want that goal to drift and go, I'm okay with 800. Unless you decide that's the case or you, you pass the million, you say, let's go to two, let's go to three, and you're just kind of chasing it for the sake of chasing it.

What I'm concerned about here is the quality of your life as we start to move through this. And so goal drift can start to impact the quality of your life if we're not careful. And it's happening unconsciously and not intentionally. So as long as it's intentional and you're aware of it, I'm cool with it. We can change our goals every day of the week, but I don't want it to just happen flippantly, okay? That means that it comes to this next priority. Control the control begin. What can you control about your expenses, about your living, about the way you do things, your health? All those things start to come into play. And then the last priority at this stage, this is a beautiful time, and even earlier, depending on the age of your children, is to start teaching your children about the financial journey. Look, I started teaching Jeremy about money when he was 10, 11 years old. We started talking about. He started to make a Commission. And he knew he started to learn what he needed to do with the money, how to, how to, to navigate it and pay for expenses. Like he paid for his school lunches and his clothes and everything he would give to charity, he would put money in savings. So he understood that. And we would have conversations around it. And this is a beautiful time for us to start teaching our children. Listen, this isn't about you building some big asset pool that they're going to inherit one day. I truly don't believe that you ever give assets to a child.

Without giving them the skill sets to handle it. Now, I'm okay with letting them inherit it, but give them the skill sets first. I've watched. I had a family that two boys came to me after mom died. They came to me after mom died. They were worth $5 million. Said, what do we do? And in having a conversation with him, I found out that dad died five years earlier. Five years earlier, when dad died, they were worth $180 million. They wiped out $175 million in five years. You actually have to try really hard to do that. But the fact of the matter is, the reason for that is dad didn't pass on the skill sets to mom and the kids. They made some bad decisions, they got into bad investments. They had some people steal from them and they lost the majority of the wealth. Now that's not just them. Money magazine published a study that, that following following some statistics where over 80% of millionaires are first generation millionaires. Meaning they created it on their own. You have the ability to create it on your own. It's not about inheriting or winning a lottery or, or anything like that. 80% of the people are first generation millionaires. But Money magazine showed that 70%.

Lost it by the second generation. Why is it? It's because we don't concern ourselves with transferring the skill sets. This is a perfect decade to start working to transfer the skill sets. Late in the, in the 30s and into the 40s, to start working with the kids to transfer the skill sets so they have the ability to navigate if they get the assets. I'm not saying they get them, but if they get the assets. Here's the deal. By giving your kids the opportunity to take a hundred dollars and make it a million, it's a far greater thing than giving a million dollars with no skill sets because they're going to make it 100. Hope that makes sense. So those are your priorities. What are the tactics at this stage? Okay, so there's a couple things I want to do here tactics again. Emergency fund has to be in place. The peace, well, peace of mind fund as we call it. I want you maxing the retirement. You should be saving 20, 25, even 30% into your investment accounts right now. If you are late to the game and you haven't been doing it through the 30s, you want to be pushing that 30% now. I want it on autopilot and I want to be driven by your financial plan. In other words, I want you to know what your target, what your finish line looks like so you know you're, you're going towards a thing. You're not just putting 20, 30% in with no, no target. Let's get the target in place. But I, but in all likelihood at this time, you still want to be putting between 20 and 30% in. I want it on autoplay and.

Net worth tracking. Continue to track your net worth each and every year so you know where you are in the process. And you couple that with a detailed plan. A detailed plan of what you need financially as you get into the next couple of decades and your retirement or as you start to go into those later years of your life. Do I need a million? Do I need 10 million? Do I need 100 million? I don't care what the number is, but know what the detailed plan is to get you there so you know what you need to do to get there. I can't plan a journey without knowing my starting point and my ending point. That detailed plan is going to give that to you in that process. When you have that detailed plan, you can now adjust your savings and investing to hit those targets, those milestones. During this time, during this stage, if you're in a lower tax bracket, I want you to max out the Roth or the tax free types of investments so you can pull that money out completely tax free when it's time, and that you should be matching and maxing the match from your employer. Still, you can use low cost ETFs and index funds here and target date funds like we talked about in some of the prior decades. It's easy, it's straightforward, it's diversified. But here's where we start to think about I should be accumulating enough wealth that maybe I get some specific advice with the detailed plan that might want you to be more specific with the ETFs, index funds that you use, or the investments that you start to, to put into the portfolio to build your financial machine. Okay, now we start to look at, at how you're allocating all your assets much in much greater detail because your risk tolerance and your risk capacity is shifting here. Our Runway is starting to shorten. We want to look at things differently. So this is a time for you to get advice, get a mentor, get a financial coach, get a financial planner, someone that can help you walk through this in, in making that happen. Real estate is an investment that you probably have in your 40s and you might be getting more in your 40s. This is a time to be careful about over leveraging, over buying, putting you in stuff into, into debt. Because remember if I'm, if I'm purchasing a home at, at 45 and I'm putting a 30 year mortgage on it, that's putting you to 75. Do we really want the mortgage that long? Those kinds of things we need to think about here because of the plan still doesn't mean that you don't get it. We just got to be smart about doing it. And then the last tactics that I think come into play here is this is that you have the ability to invest in a tax free account like a Roth, an after tax account like just a regular brokerage account and a tax deferred account like an IRA or 401k where you invest starts to impact your ability to get access to that money tax free or with tax down the road. This is the time that you start to look at those locations for your investment saying am I maximizing what I can do here? Again, typically requires a little bit more detailed analysis. This is when you start to get an advisor, someone that might can help you plan, a mentor that can work, walk you through some of what makes sense, what doesn't make sense, the nuances. I don't expect you to know it all, but know that there's some things that you can do. All right, last two things. This is a time you might need to adjust your insurances. Either increase them or decrease them depending on what's going on in your life. So review your insurances, the life insurance, the disability insurance, your umbrella policy and, and that type of thing. And then reviewer estate docs, there might be adjustments there. If kids are grown and come out of the house, maybe you don't need some of the provisions in the trust that you had before and you can change that to fit. There was life changes. Maybe you got married, maybe you got divorced and remarried, maybe there's other kids. All those things will lead to an adjustment to those estate documents. All right, so I got two things that I want to finish this up with. One is what are the cautions. And two, what you can do if you feel like you're a little behind.

In building your wealth. Okay, so the first thing is the cautions. There's, there's a couple of them to consider. One is this lifestyle creep which we talked about. Allowing our lifestyle to just creep and grow without control, without intent can get us in trouble. That's when we start to over buy. That's when we start to over leverage. That's when we start to finance lifestyle and those things catch up with us. So, so we want to be, be deliberate with how we live our life and watch lifestyle crew number two, we want to watch complexity creep. Too often we start to get into complex investment structures. And complexity breeds problems. Doesn't mean that you're not going to be in complex structures and everything, but you don't need to. Most investing needs to be simple enough that you understand if you don't understand the investment, you shouldn't be in it in the first place. Simple as that. Okay. We don't invest in things we don't understand. But complexity creep can be a downfall if we're not careful with this. So watch the complexity, keep it simple. Watch the impatience. This is a time where all of a sudden you go, oh, you're starting to see the finish line coming up in a decade, a couple decades or whatever. So you get impatience, impatient, and you make an investment like I did and it turns into a Ponzi scheme. Or you, you buy into something that's really speculative and you lose a lot of money. Impatience can cost you dearly, dearly. I lost one third of my net worth in that Ponzi scheme. Now granted, I was able to rebuild it. I don't want you to have to go through that. So watch the impatience. And then lastly, don't live leverage. Okay? Those are the cautions in, in this, this fortune of 40s. Now, I just want to touch on some things. If you feel like you're behind with respect to wealth creation in this decade, in the next couple decades, here's some things I want you to consider. One, income has to become your priority. So I need you to start to look for ways to increase your income, scale your income and scale your cash flow. That might mean that you have to develop a side hustle. You might become a gig worker where you're taking on contracts that are, that are separate, apart when you're doing to bring in extra, extra cash. It may be temporary, but it's to get you over that, that hump. Or you might have to take on a second job. And I know none of this probably sounds great except that if you're trying to do a side hustle that you're going to convert into a more permanent thing, but we're trying to solve a problem of saying I'm underfunded right now. I want to try and catch up. So income becomes the priority at this stage. The second thing to consider is expense management is the next priority. That means I want you to review every single dollar that's going out the door to see if it's necessary. Not that it's desired, but it's necessary. Am I using it? Am I getting value out of it? Do I need that subscription? Do I need that? Because if it's not necessary, we can get rid of it and we can use that money towards our investing, towards our wealth creation. And I want you to look at your living expenses. Say, are there things that I can do to reduce my living expenses? In other words, am I living in an expensive place that maybe if I move a couple blocks away, a couple miles away, I can reduce my living expenses? Do I have a car? Like I've got someone that they just actually went down to do one vehicle because they weren't driving, they didn't need two vehicles. Saves them $800 a month. That money's going directly into investments. And if they need another car, they'll go buy another car. But, but point being is to start reducing your living expenses. So income's priority one, expense management priority two. If we're behind number three. This is really just about you trying to find some cushion. And that is looking around for non productive assets that can bring in cash. That means selling stuff. Okay, If I went around and looked at some of the technology that I have sitting in my, in my studio, my office that I'm not using and haven't used and probably won't use and just listed it, I could bring in probably thousands of dollars and then take those thousands of dollars and put it in an investment account and start, jump start or move forward or leapfrog my investing. So, so look for non productive assets that we can liquidate and bring money in. And then, then the last piece of this during this time is that all savings and additional income that's coming from priority one. Priority two, that means your income and your, your expenses and even the selling of the non productive assets needs to go into a separate account for investing automatically. Out of sight, out of mind. This is the way you're going to jump start and then start move yourself forward. Now we can go into more details about how do you do the side hustle, what do you need to do? But we just need to get our mindset and our, our the way we're looking at things correct. So if you're behind income is priority number one, expense management priority number two. Look for non productive assets we can liquidate and bring cash in quick, quickly. And number number four is you making sure that all the savings from the expense cutting the additional income coming in is automatically going into investment account. This will go a long ways to helping you move forward and jump forward in your wealth creation and your money for retirement. So hopefully that helps. I hope that this is something that, that you're finding valuable because the next stop, oh my gosh, it's the flying fifties. Here we go. All right, I'll see you in the next episode. Cheers. Hey there. Before you go, I've got something special for you as part of this series is that I've got a special training that is coming up and a special training that I've done and I want to give them, give you access to both of them completely free. The first is my affluent entrepreneur live that is premiering. It's I do it once a year. Once a year it's going to be live a deep dive on the priorities, the processes, the principles that you need to build your wealth machine. The second is my 10 days of money momentum. That one is something that, that I filmed already. It is a product, it's a program that we sell but I want to give you access to that for free. All you need to do is click the link go or go to affluencelive.com and you will get a chance to to register for the upcoming live event and automatically get access to the free training. I look forward to seeing you, helping you build your wealth but get your, your mind right, your tactics right, your strategy working and build the financial machine that you need. Define financial growth. I look forward to seeing you. Cheers. Thank you for being a part of the affluent entrepreneur show with me, your host, Mel Abraham. If you want to achieve financial liberation to create an affluent lifestyle, join the affluent entrepreneur facebook group@melabraham.com group and I'll see you there. Cheers. Bye.

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 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.