12 Signs That Predict You'll Be a Multi Millionaire

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. Have you noticed how some people, maybe even people who aren't that smart, somehow end up with millions while others seem to be grinding for decades and have nothing to show for it? But here's the shocking part. Research shows that it's not iq, it's not luck, and it's definitely not, you know, hustle, porn, grinding. That makes a difference. The truth is that's a handful of wealth signals that can predict millionaire status long before the bank balance ever catches up. And most people are ignoring them. So I've seen these patterns in my own life, working with entrepreneurs, executives, and everyday folks for the last 30 plus years and in my own journey. So in this episode, I'm going to break this down for you. I'm going to show you the 12 wealth signals that can predict if you're on the millionaire track. I'll back it up with research stories and, yeah, a little bit of sarcasm along the way. This is building your money machine where we help you master your money, eliminate financial stress so you can live a life of choice. Because earning more doesn't make you free. A money machine does. And that freedom doesn't come from the next paycheck, the next raise, or the next client. It comes the moment we get your money to work harder for you than you did for it. All right, I'm your host, Mel Abraham, and let's get to it.

All right, this one's going to be a fun one. I'm going to break down the 12 wealth signals that can tell you, are you on track to be a millionaire? I'm going to break it down in a couple of different categories. Mindset, mechanics, relationships, and behaviors. We're going to break it down starting with mindset, because I think that's the thing that drives everything first. And here's the deal. You start to look at what's going on in that. When I first started teaching and doing this type of stuff, I literally, as an accountant, thought I was just going to give you the Math behind wealth, columns, rows, the formulas, and let you go. The fact of the matter is, I quickly figured out until I dealt with what's in your head, what you're in your heart. I couldn't deal with what was in your pocketbook, so we had to start there now. So the signal number one for the millionaire mindset is the power of no. See, Warren Buffett once said that the difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything. Why? Because every yes is a withdrawal from your future. Millionaires compound their focus as much as they compound their money. And so when you start to understand that, you start to look at and say, ah, I've got to be very, very careful about what I say yes to both in my time, but also with my money. Fidelity research shows that millionaires spend 25 to 30% less on discretionary junk than their peers. Now, they're not cheap. They're just focused. And that's the thing that we need to do. I talk about this in the construct of being aware, conscious, and intentional with our money. When we do that, then our money's doing the things we ask it to do. If we don't direct our money, it's going to direct us, all right? It'll find something to do, and it's usually outside your pocketbook and outside your views. So saying yes to everything, that's like going to Cheesecake Factory and. And ordering the whole menu. I just went there. Oh, my God. All right, so you can do it, but it won't feel good afterwards. That leads me to signal number two. Signal number two is delayed gratification without misery. See, remember the marshmallow test? The kids that were waiting for the second marshmallow ended up healthier. They scored better in school, and decades later, they had more money. See.

The Dunedin study confirmed that self control beats IQ when predicting wealth. Okay? Self control. Because remember, building wealth is a behavior. Self control is about your behaviors, okay? That deals with it. Okay? Why it matters, because if you can't delay gratification, compounding can't do its work. At the very beginning of building wealth, you're in what I call the wealth flatline. That's where you're investing, investing, investing, investing. And you don't feel like you're making progress, but what's really happening in the background is you're compressing a spring. Your money is. Your money is slowly building, building, building steam. And then when it hits that tipping point, it hits the acceleration zone. And now all of a sudden, your Money is going to grow faster and earn more than you do with your, your efforts. That's where your money is working harder for you than you did for it. That's, that's what I call the wealth creation curve in my book. The challenge is that too often we don't have the patience, the discipline, and the behaviors to stay the course in that flatline. Because the only way to get through that flatline is time. Okay? It's the thing that you want to consider. So if you can delay. Now, I'm not saying not to have anything. I'm just saying to be disciplined and deliberate. But with what, what, what goes. When we do a money machine master plan for our clients, one of the things that we do is we tell them, I want you to pick three joy points.

What I mean, joy points is like sustainable, visceral joy, not momentary pleasures. The things that will last for them. And let's make sure that we build that into the plan. Because I don't want you. I don't think you can. You can live a rich, fulfilled life and get yourself to wealth through deprivation. Discipline, yes, but not deprivation. And so our job is to do that where we can enjoy the journey to financial freedom so we can enjoy the destination of financial freedom. Leads me to signal number three. Signal number three is curiosity over intelligence. Here's another twist. It's not the smartest people who get rich. It's the most curious ones. UC Berkeley research kind of looked at curiosity. Literally predicts adaptability better than raw intelligence. Okay? In a world that's changing literally every five minutes, I mean, you just look around us. Adaptability equals wealth. Elon Musk literally didn't wait for a PhD in rocket science. He grabbed the textbooks, he asked questions until SpaceX became a reality. Get curious, okay? Smart people may pass a test, but curious people will buy the company that makes the tests. That's the difference. So being curious will allow you to, to, to grow. Now, if you're looking at these things, say, I'm curious. I do these things. These are little check boxes that says, hey, you just might be on the path to being a millionaire. At least you're on. The signals to be a millionaire. Leads me to signal number four, measuring wealth in time, not just money. This was a big one. Really hit me when I got hit with the cancer is the realization that the true currency of life is our time, not our money. The reason we want the money is so we have agency over time. We can buy our time back. This is where millionaires break the mold. They measure wealth in time, not dollars. Harvard research literally showed people who value time over money, they are happier and more satisfied. Now, Jeff Bezos left his cushy Wall street job. I don't know if it was cushy. It might have been demanding to chase Amazon and using what he called this idea of this regret minimization framework. And he didn't ask, how much will I make? He asked, how much will I regret not trying when I'm 80? And so if there's things that you want to do, are there things that are important to you? Is there regret attached to it if you don't do it? Ask yourself that question. Because if you think you need permission to use the bathroom and work, that's not. Not freedom. That's financial prison with wi fi. And this is why I think it's really important to start to look at the idea of saying, how much agency do I have over my time? The whole crux of a money machine is to be able to give you choice and to be able to have choice and a life by design. Now, it doesn't happen overnight, but when your focus is to look at and say, how much is in my. Am I investing in my money machine, but how much of my time do I control? Now we're building not only wealth, but a rich life. That's the game we're playing. Now, a lot of people don't know exactly where they are on that journey and what it's going to look like. So I got a tool for you that is free, easy to use. It's called the lifestyle cost calculator. You can go in, put your information in. It'll help you calculate what your lifestyle may cost in the future so you have an understanding of the size of machine you need to create. So we'll hook it up for you here. But you can also go to melabraham.com lifestyle to grab it. Now, that leads me to the next group of signals. And these are the millionaire behaviors. Okay, because mindset's one thing, but mindset alone won't get you there. Remember, wealth creation is a behavior, so we got to do something. And millionaires, they do something differently. And here's where the rubber meets the road. So the question is, what do they do? Well, signal number five is comfort with boredom. Okay, it sounds weird, but JP Morgan literally found that the average investor underperformed the market by 3 to 4% every single year. Why? They got bored, they fiddled, they couldn't sit still and allow their investments to run the boredom cost. Them millions. Instead, they, they started. They started doing things versus just allowing it to run. Sylvia Bloom was a secretary. She didn't get bored. She just invested modestly all her life. She literally, she just followed what her bosses did. Her bosses back in the day, she would have to go and buy shares and do all that stuff physically. And so her bosses would send her back in the day to do that. And when she went and did that for her bosses, he. She did a fraction of it for her because she didn't make the same amount of money. But in the end, she didn't get bored. She just stayed in the game. She was patient, and she ended up with $9 million. See, because when you look at this, why it matters, that compounding literally looks boring in the short term, but it is explosive in the long term. Your money working harder for you than you did for it. Wealth is like brushing your teeth. Boring, repetitive. But skip it. It'll cost you way more later. And so what we need to do is get comfortable, not bored, and stay consistent. Signal number six, risk radar. Okay? Multimillionaires obsess over the downside. They ask, how much can I lose and still sleep tonight. They start to look at it through the eyes of, like I do speculative investing. I have lost big money and it hurt and it almost destroyed me and I had to rebuild and find my way again. And it's what gave rise to a lot of the rules and the things that I teach now to keep my students and the people that I work with safe in these investments. But now I start to look at and say, I've got slivers, very small sliver of my portfolio that I play around with and I'll put into speculative investing. The bottom line is, could it go to zero? Yes, that kind of investment could go to zero. Would it? Would I be upset? Oh, yeah, I would be upset. I'd probably eat bad food for. For a weekend and pout, but it wouldn't destroy us. And that's the way we look at it. Ray Dalio is one of the most amazing investors out there. He's actually ran the world's largest hedge fund on this very obsession, okay? Obsessing over the downside, okay? Because here's the thing. If you blow up once, you're out of the game. Now, I was fortunate. I blew up once big, but I was able to recover. But from there on forward, I protect the floor. It's more important. This is why the wealth priority ladder is built the way it is, to give you an unshakable financial foundation from which to grow. So the very first aspect of anything we do is let's give you safety first, foundation first, and grow second, because I don't want you to blow up in a time where you can't recover. Protecting the floor is more important than chasing the ceiling. That's the way it goes. And when you start to live life, the. The YOLO kind of perspective of you only live once, or. Or let's just put everything into crypto and everything that's not risk radar. That is financial Russian lead. All right, leads me to signal number seven. The unpopular path spectrum found that literally 60% of millionaires describe themselves as contrarian thinkers. Translation, they're comfortable with being unpopular. You think about the early Amazon investors, they were mocked. Today they're millionaires, billionaires. Okay, Same with Netflix. You know, by the time the crowd approves, the opportunity is gone. And so if your friends think you're crazy, you're probably not. You're just early, you know? And so one of the things to think about is.

Where are things going? Anticipate to do that, because a lot of millionaires, they see things before they happen and they move towards. It's like what Wayne Gretzky says. He skates to where the puck is going. And sometimes that's unpopular because it is against the grain. It's not what's in the zeitgeist currently. Okay, this is where that whole idea of curiosity comes into. All right, leads me to signal number eight, emotional detachment from money. The Dalbar study is an old study that found that the average investor underperformed the market by 6% because of panic selling, or FOMO. In 2008. Panic sellers lost fortunes. Patient investors, they doubled theirs. On the rebound, it happened again in 2020. We lost 33, 30, 33 or 34% in 30 days. And people freaked out and got out and said, oh, my gosh. And then it rebounded really fast. The people that stayed in the emotional detachment allowed them to stay in the game. Compounding only works if you're in the game. If you stay in, Emotions wreck decades of growth from the moment. So our ability to control our behaviors is huge. Okay? And if your brokerage app is one that gamifies the things that you do, it's either going to make you cry or make you light a fire or something like that. It's the wrong app. We should not have those emotions in play, and we should do it differently. All right, that leads me to the next group, and that is Millionaire Mechanics. Okay, Mindset and behaviors. They set the stage. But let's talk mechanics. How do millionaires actually build machines instead of living on treadmills? Here's what they realize that signal number nine is about multipliers over effort. See, the Kauffman foundation said 62% of millionaires. 62% of millionaires built wealth through ownership, not salary. Ownership, not salary. When they look at. They said, how can I own something? Take control of assets? Because, remember, our job to build that money machine is to have assets that pay us over time. And if we're not. If we're not doing that, then the only way we have cash flow is to be running on the treadmill, the earnings treadmill, which is what we have to get off of, at least. At least by demand. I'm on the earnings treadmill, but it's by choice, and I want us to be there by choice. And the only way you do that is to own assets, okay? Because the reality is that you'll never grind your way to millions on wages alone. Multipliers, businesses, equities, you know, stocks, systems, they. They do the effort for you. They replace your effort. Okay? I learned this as a cpa. Big income, no freedom, until I built my money machine. That's when the income stopped depending on my hours. And so here's the deal. If your money stops when you do, you're not free. You're rented. Signal number 10. Money is a tool, not a trophy. Okay? Another way to say it is. Money is a result. It's not a purpose. Ronald Reed was a janitor. He drove a secondhand car. He lived modestly. He died. And he had an $8 million that he still had. But he still enjoyed his life the way he lived. He lived by his own. His own design. Okay? He treated money as a tool, not a trophy. Now, I take. Take it one step further. I think money is a paintbrush used to paint the masterpiece called your life. See, Ramsey Solutions found that 94% of millionaires don't buy luxury cars until after they're free. See, if money itself is the status symbol, you'll spend it. But if it's the tool, if it's the paintbrush, you'll spend the time multiplying it and not flashing the cash. You'll allow yourself to build something that allows you to have your life the way you live it, the freedom you live by, become the status symbol of choice. Okay? So that's. Signal number 10 leads me to signal number 11. Learning from every dollar. Strombach's 2017 study showed that Self control predicts savings and lower stress. Okay, every dollar is data. Every dollar is an employee. If you learn from what it does, you improve your money skills exponentially. Here's the problem. I know people, including myself, that when I lost or I didn't understand, I backed off and I got out of the game. Yet when we lose money, which can happen in any investment, the question is, why? What did we do? What can we learn from it? Even the Ponzi scheme, I wiped out one third of my net worth. And until I was ready to accept my role in it, I couldn't heal from it. And once I accepted my role from it, yes, I could heal from it, but also I could learn from it. And that's what gave rise to the.

Money rules, the investing rules that I have, that I teach, that I wrote in my book, and everything to allow people to. To stay safe. So every dollar is data, and it allows you to learn from it. One of my clients discovered that he was leaking $700 a month just on subscriptions alone. And then when he redirected, when he understood that he redirected, it became $8,400 a year in investments that grew over time. That's what we need to understand. Okay? So if your money is disappearing faster than the. The cookies at a kid's party and you can't explain it, that's not wealth. That's financial amnesia. Make sure you know what your dollars are doing for you, because they're meant there to work for you, not someone else. All right, that leads me to the last group of these, and that's millionaire relationships, because millionaires know they can't do this alone. Relationships either drag you down or they multiply your success. One of my biggest pet peeves is when people say, oh, he's self made, or she's self made. No, I'm not self made. That's an insult to everyone around me. There's a higher power above me. There's my family, my wife, you, the listener, the viewer, my customers, my clients, my coaches, my mentors, even the people that wronged me allow me to create who I am. And so signal number 12 is relationships as ROI. Because when you even look at the studies, Harvard did a 75 year study that proved strong relationships predict both happiness and financial success. Oprah literally credits her circle of mentors like Maya Angelou and her business partners as essential to her success. So the question is, who are you hanging around with? Who are the relationships? Now, I want to be really careful here. I don't want you to turn your relationships into transactionships. Okay, I don't know if that's a word, but it is now because I'm not telling you to be transactional with people around you. I'm telling you to be relational with people around you. The circle that you create and deepen is huge. Because if you have a circle of friends that will, will support you, will call you out, will kick you, kick, kick in the behind when you need it, help you up when, when, when it's necessary, then that's, that's the key. But if your circle, if you're not careful, your circle becomes your ceiling. And broke bitter friends will equal broke bitter you. And I look at the relationships in concentric circles, and in the center, that's my inner circle. Those are the people that I know I can call, I can trust, and they're going to shoot me straight. Then outside of that, maybe just a little less internal, where they don't get access to me or my emotions and everything per se. And believe it or not, the inner circle may not all be family. And then outside that. And I say just put people in categories, which. All it's doing is helping me define the relationship and the level of input they have into my life. So if your crew is stuck, you're investing. It's like investing in blockbuster stock. Okay, we don't want to do that. And so the idea is to look at your relationships and nurture them in a way that, that you see them as investing in a deeper relationship and that relationship growing, but also supporting you on your wealth journey. Okay, so here's the truth. These wealth signals, they're not luck. They're not genetics. They're simply choices. Earning more doesn't make you free, the money machine does. And the path to it is paved with these 12 signals. And when you look at them and you see, hey, I've got eight of them, five of them in fact. I would love for you to tell me how many signals are in your life. Just send me a comment, send me a dm, and use this as a checklist to say, how can I make sure that I have all 12 working in my life? Because when you do, you might be on the path. Well, on the path to millionaire status over time. All right, let's make that happen. Let's make that happen. Because I think that.

Financial freedom is a birthright. We just need to go claim it. And these signals are the path to make it happen. All right, let me know what you think. And remember to grab my lifestyle cost calculator. It's totally free. You can go to melabraham.com lifestyle so you can figure out where, where you are, what's your lifestyle going to cost you and what that looks like so you can start to move yourself on that path to financial freedom. Let's keep building your money machine together, all right? I hope you found this valuable and I hope that, that you'll take this to heart and take it out. If there's someone that you think needs to listen to this, hear this, watch this, send it to them, give me a thumbs up while you're there and maybe a subscribe. That would be cool. All right. Until I get a chance to see in the next one. As I always say, always, always strive to live the life that outlives you. Cheers. Thank you for listening to the affluent entrepreneurs 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 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 Podcasts, 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.