12 Unsexy Habits That Made Me Serious Money

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. 80% of Americans say they feel behind financially, but here's the kicker. Most of them don't have an income problem. They have an awareness problem. See, they're bleeding money slowly, quietly, in small, normal ways that feel harmless in the moment, but cost thousands over time. So that's where habits come in. Not the flashy kind, the unsexy kind. And in this video, I'm going to give you two 12 of them. 12 unsexy habits that helped me build my wealth. Okay? Helped me create freedom, and helped others do the same. I'm mel Abraham, and 30 plus years as a CPA, an entrepreneur, and a money mentor, it's taught me some things. Wealth isn't just math. It's behavior. And behavior starts with a habit. This is building your money machine, where we help you master your money, eliminate financial stress so you can live a life of choice. All right? So if you're ready to. To do that, let's go. Let's jump in and let's do this. All right? I can't tell you how many times I hear people coming into me say, I just got to make more money. I just got to hit this one out of the park and then I'll be okay. But they won't. I've seen it over and over again. And so what they think is that they need that one home run to make it happen. But. But they don't. They need the right habits, the strategic habits, the things that they can do repetitively over time to make that happen. And I'm going to break this down for you. I'm going to give you 12 of those unsexy habits. They may not be fun, they certainly aren't sexy, and you're certainly not going to see movies made about them, but they're going to create wealth and financial freedom for you if you follow them. And I'm going to break them down into three categories. One about building wealth. The other category about managing money is. And the third category about increasing Your income. And so here's the thing. Let's start with the wealth building ones first. This is like grown up money moves that really matter. And some of them you might go, well, I know this. The question isn't if you know it. The question is, are you doing it? Because if it's common knowledge, but it's not common practice, then there's where the, the leak is in your, in your wealth building. And so the first one is to track every dollar you touch. At least at the beginning. Okay. And I'm not saying some of it. I mean not just the big stuff, I mean all of it. Like every single dollar, everything that passes through your hands, through your accounts, through your credit cards. All of it. Yes. Even the $6 oat milk lattes that you bought. Just running errands. Now, I am not coming for your latte. I'm coming for your awareness. It is truly important that you know where every dollar is going. Because the mistake that I've seen most people make is that money comes in, money goes out. And if I ask them where it went, they don't know. See, our job is to define where our money goes before we ever get the money in the first place. In other words, creating a plan that drives it. And the only way we can create a plan is if we know where it goes. So this is the place where you need to, to, to build in that first step, the action step here is for the next 30 days, or up to 90 days, track every single expense. Use an app, use a spreadsheet, use a notebook. I don't care how you do it. But here's, here's the thing to think about. The awareness gives you power. Okay? The question here is that if you don't do this, your money is writing your story instead of the other way around. It's time for you to write your money story. That leads me to number two. Number two is auto invest. Before you can screw it up, think about this. The government, when you get paid, they take out their taxes before you can go spend the money. They know that if they give you the money, trying to collect taxes from you is going to be a problem. So they get it first. That's what your financial future needs to do. Your paycheck hits. And before you even see it, there needs to be money that moves into your investments. That 401k, that IRA, the brokerage accounts. One of the things that I do is that every time money moves into my account, a percentage automatically goes into the investing process. So I no, no thinking about it, none of it. It just happens in the background. And so if it's sitting, if your money ends up in a checking out, and it's just sitting in the checking out, let's be honest, you'll find a way to spend it. And that's where the problem lies. We want to make your investing as easy as possible. So here's your action step here. Automate a Transfer into your 401k or your Roth IRA or your index fund account on payday, not next week, but now, okay? That, like, literally get that automation in place. So there's no effort, there's no thinking, there's no pulling levers, there's no turning dials. It happens without you thinking. Every time that money hits the bank account, it's automatically building your financial future. Okay? It leads me to number three. And this is, this is my 5050 rule that I talk about. And this is about windfalls. Reinvest every windfall into your financial future. Now, I'm not telling you to invest 100% of it. I am actually generous. There are some people that would say this, but I want you to invest at least 50% of every windfall. You get a tax refund, you get a bonus, you get an unexpected check, you get a lump sum. I want you to take 50% of it and I want you to send it to your future, Put it in that brokerage account, get it invested, okay? The other 50%, you can use it to upscale your life a little bit, to celebrate it, to take care of other things like debt and that kind of thing. But the first 50% needs to go towards your financial future, okay? And you can do that. And it's what I call leapfrog funding. And this is what I've done over the years that I would get projects where they would get. I would get paid 50,000 or 100,000 for a project. I didn't need all the money right then, so I took the majority of it and pushed it off to building my financial future. So it leapfrogged myself ahead. So if you come into a windfall, use the 5050 rule leads me to number four, increase your savings rate by 1% per quarter. This is the 1% rule. Okay? Now here's what I mean by this. The most important statistic when it comes to wealth being the most biggest predictor of your wealth building isn't your income. It's the percentage of the income that you're putting to work for you. And so I want you to increase your savings and investing rate as Much as possible. We say that in my book and my programs, the Money Machine blueprint. I want you to be putting 20 to 25% of your income away. Now, I get it. Most people say I can't do that. I can't afford to do that. So let's not make a dramatic leap. Let's not go on some financial starvation diet. I don't want you eating beans and rice the rest of your life. But let's slowly increment it by 1%. So start wherever you can. Maybe it's 4%, maybe it's 5% that you can start, maybe it's 10%. But then every quarter, push it up another 1%. Just small, sneaky increases that grow over time without freaking out your nervous system. So here's your action step here. Every single 90 days, bump your automatic savings or investing by 1%. Put a reminder in your calendar right now to start doing it. You won't miss the 1%, but you will be very grateful of the stacking of those 1% over time. All right, now we're going to transition now into the managing of the money. You know, without losing your soul. This is part two of this. Is that okay? How do I manage the money? So habit number five under managing money is this. Give every dollar a job. Don't hope that your money behaves. It's like a crazy puppy dog. Okay? Give it a job before the month starts. This isn't about budgeting. This is about planning. This is about strategy. This is about giving a job description to every dollar. A dollar before it comes in. It's either for the mortgage, the rent, your food, your clothing, your transportation. What is it for? Don't wait till the money's in your hands, because now temptation is in your hands also. So your action step here is to use what's called zero based planning. Okay? Income minus all your expenses, including your savings. Investing should equal 0. No freeloading dollars, no dollars that are, that are just left astray in there. You'll have entertainment, you'll have contingencies. You'll have all the things that you need to do. Follow the wealth priority letter in chapter 12 of my book. If you're not sure how to, how to prioritize it. But the bottom line is this is to make sure that every dollar has a job description, a specific purpose that you decided before it ever comes into your life. That leads me to number six. Say no more than you say yes. Now I get it. This is a hard one because your, your peers, your friends, they're off Doing their things. They're buying the nice cars, they're, they're doing the crazy vacations. But you want to build wealth, you got to start by saying no. No to brunch every weekend. Maybe, maybe you're doing it every other weekend or once a month. No to that one. Click. Amazon dopamine hit. Okay, say no now so you can say hell yes later. Here's the thing. One of the things to help you say no is to make sure that you're aligning your spending with your values versus the temptations or the peer pressure or the social media or the cool things that you see. So it makes it easier to say no. And it also gives more value to what you're spending. So here's your action step here. And for the next seven days, I want you to delay every single non essential purchase for a minimum of 72 hours. Okay? Watch the magic happen because after 72 hours you will see that a lot of these non essential purchases become never purchases. And that money is available for you to now use to build your future. Okay? Once I started to delay things, it made it easier. And one of the other things to make it easier is take your credit cards out of all of the purchasing apps you use. Whether it's Amazon or, or other other apps, you take it out of there. So is physically you got to get that credit card number and put it in place. Okay? Then number seven, check your net worth quarterly, not daily, okay? You're not looking at a stock ticker that will drive you freaking batty, okay? But your net worth, all the assets that you own, less, all the liabilities that you have, the things you owe, okay? I want you to check that at least quarterly because we want to see an upward trend in it. We want the net worth to grow. Now let's be clear. There's two kinds of net worth. Total net worth, which is all the assets. That's your clothes, you know, your cars, your home, all this and the investments. And then there's investable net worth. The investable net worth is more important because that investable net worth are only the assets that can create cash flow and support your lifestyle. So it's not the car, it's not your clothes, and it's not your residence because residence is your home and is a lifestyle asset that's costing you. You still need it, but it doesn't allow you to live and doesn't pay for that lifestyle down the road. It is a lifestyle asset. So I'm not saying it's not an asset, but I want you to track two numbers, total net worth and investable net worth, okay? Because ignoring it for a year and not knowing where you are, that's financial blackout, okay? Quarterly, at least. Quarterly gives you clear, calm, and you're in control. So your action step here is simply this. Track your assets and debts, everything you owe every three months. Do it in a spreadsheet, do it in a, in a journal, do it in, in some sort of tool, in some sort of app, adjust it, keep it moving upward. Leads me to number eight. Do an audit of your subscriptions and your expenses and negotiate annually. You're not broke because of Netflix, but when you stack up those mini money leaks that creep in, oh, it's just $10 here, it's $20 here, it's $50 here. Before you know it, all of a sudden you're drowning in a thousand payment plans that you didn't realize. And a single money leak doesn't really create a problem. But when you stack them all together, you, you're overtaken by them. So, so listen, when it comes, when it comes around, you start to look at all the subscriptions, all the monthly expenses, all the things you have, because often we have subscriptions we don't even think about. This is a time to start cutting, adjusting, and negotiating. I will, on an annual basis, go to some of my key providers, my, my phone, my Internet, my cable, all that stuff, and, and I'll renegotiate with them. And I have left providers that don't want to negotiate if they don't want my loyalty, if they don't want to keep me happy and, and take care of me for my loyalty, then, then I'll go somewhere else where they'll give me a better deal. Okay? So here's the thing. You know, it all adds up. So your action step here is this. Pick a date on the calendar. I happen to do it during the holidays because they usually run a lot of deals during the holidays and people are, are more jovial and, and giving during the holidays and we can get, get through it. So I usually do it during the holidays, but once a year, put on the calendar a money cleanup day. Cancel the junk, call your Internet provider, ask for a better rate. Don't be afraid to threaten cancellation. It works. Ask to go to the retention department. Escalated, escalated until they're willing to give you what you want. And if they're not willing to budge, then they don't deserve your business, frankly. And you have options and use those options, okay? Now when we go into this next Piece I want to start talking about. Okay, great. We've got the wealth. We've got the money management. What about trying to get a bigger shovel of income? How do I increase my income? And what were the things that I did to increase my income? These are all habits that I have used in my life, my clients use in their life, and I want you to use in your life. So increasing income without. Without having to be this. This constant hustler. So number nine on this list is this. Keep a wins and impact file at work. Okay? That raise you want, it doesn't come from working hard. It comes from showing receipts. It comes from showing what you're doing. And this isn't about bragging. This is about making sure that it is really clear of the value you bring to the company that you work for, to the clients you work for. In a time of uncertainty, those that will win are those that have positioned themselves as indispensable and invaluable. And the way you do that is make it really clear about the value you create in their world, whether it's a client or whether it's a company. And one of the ways to. And we tend to forget about the little things and the things that we've done is to create this wins and impact file. So you have it. You may not show it to anyone, but before. Before you go in to have the conversation, before you change and look at renewing a contract or asking for a raise, you can go through it, and it helps you put yourself in a position to have a conversation that's more value based. Instead of saying, well, I've been here longer and I'm just raising my prices. No, I'm raising them because the value I bring is worthwhile. Different conversation. So. So here's your action step here. Weekly write down what you accomplished that week, how it helped your team, your company, your client. And this file becomes your pitch file before you go in. It's. It's kind of the cheerleading file for you before you go in and have the conversations. All right? Number 10. Learn a skill that solves expensive problems. This one was a big one for me. All right? Don't just get a big Better at your job. Those are incremental shifts. Get better at solving painful, profitable problems at your job. Look for the things I made a habit of looking for, the things that other people didn't want to do, the projects, okay? So when you do this. Okay, when you do this, and you not only get better at your job, but you find a way to solve more Expensive habits, more painful habits, and you elevate yourself that way. It's not incremental exponential. And this is what gets you promoted or it gets you poached. All right, so here's the thing. Your action step here. I want you to pick one skill at your company or for your clients that they value. It has to be something they value, not you. And block two hours out this weekend and start the learning process. The more you skill up and the more you can solve bigger and more painful, profitable problems, the better positioned you'll be to get paid more. All right, and bringing this home, let's think about this. When I left my firm, when my partners pushed me out in the 90s, they were getting paid $150 an hour. I was getting paid $180 an hour because of the kind of work I was doing. And literally a year later, because of the kind of work I was doing, the problems I was solving compared to what they were doing, they were getting paid $170 an hour. I was getting paid almost $400 an hour. Complete difference, because it's a value conversation, not an hours for time for money conversation. That leads me to number 11. Volunteer for projects that give you visibility. In fact, volunteer for the projects that other people won't volunteer for. Okay, not the busy work, but the strategic work. When I was working for that downtown consulting firm in downtown Los Angeles, I would take on every single project that no one else wanted. And so a project would come in that was unusual, was. Was weird, and it wasn't the typical thing. They literally would say, give it to Mel. He'll figure it out. And when you get that reputation, you get more opportunities, you get more growth, you learn more, and you're more valued. And that's what happened. I was on fast track to partnership, and I got bigger raises and I got more opportunities. That's what we need to do. And so this one is for you to look at and say, what? What can I volunteer for? What can I do that's going to give me visibility and build value strategically, not busy work. Okay? So your action step here is this. Ask your manager, what's a high impact project? I can support this quarter. That's instant elevation when you do that. That leads me to the final thing. And this was a big one for me, too. Create your own personal board of directors. Okay, this one's slept on. This one people don't even think about, okay, you, you need to have a few smart, no bs, people around you who will challenge your thinking. Call out your excuses. Friends are great, I get it. But friends won't always tell you the truth. I have a group of people that I have around me that literally will call me on my crap. Sorry for the word, but that's what they'll do. They'll say, you're better than that. You can do more than that. They will do that. They'll also call me on the things that I've claimed I was going to do. I said, here's my declaration. And they hold me to it. A board of directors. The reason companies have boards of directors, to get differing perspectives, to get support, to get their knowledge, knowledge. And, and do that, build a personal board of directors that will elevate you. Not by just propping you up, by pushing you to be all you can be. Okay, so here's your action step here. Identify three to five people you respect. Reach out to them. Schedule one, check in with them, a quarter. Ask for guidance, not validation. That's what you're looking for. I have a dear friend and we do a once a month lunch, same place, same lunch every month. We do it and we'll sit there for an hour. Sometimes we'll sit there for two and a half hours and we talk about life, we talk about business, we talk about our relationships, we talk about everything. We need those in our life. And if you don't have that, and many of these are not family, they're outside family. And if you don't have them, this is the time to get them. So there they are, the 12 unsexy habits that allow me to build wealth, accelerate my income, and put me in a position of financial freedom. And when my clients did these, they helped them do the same. So this is the same for you. So none of this is sexy, none of this is flashy, but this is how people build real wealth. So if you're still sitting there thinking, okay, this is cool, but I don't even know where I am financially. Well, let's give you one more step to do. And that first step is to go take my financial Freedom zone quiz@yourfinancialfreedomquiz.com. it's free. You'll find out exactly what phase of the financial freedom journey you're on. You'll understand. You'll get a report that'll tell you what to focus on, what your next steps are, and get yourself dialed in. But then I want you to go and pick one of these habits, just one, and start one this week and then stack another next week. That's how we build momentum, your behaviors will drive your wealth more so than your money. And so this is the game I want you to play. Unsexy, but it is effective. So if this video hit home, do me a favor, subscribe to the channel. Let me know. Also, remember, your journey to financial freedom is so much more fun with people you love. So share it with someone you care about, someone who might be stuck in money purgatory. Let's get them out of that, too. All right, let me know what you think. Okay, which habit you're starting with today. Drop it in the comments. Drop it in a dm. I'd love to hear from you. All right. Until I get a chance to see you in the next episode or the next video or on your path, thank you for listening to the Affluent Entrepreneur show with me, your host, Mel Abraham. If you want to achieve financially liberation to create an affluent lifestyle, join me in the affluent entrepreneur Facebook group now by going to melabraham.com forward/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 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.