21 Ways Money Makes Your Life Feel Ridiculously Easy

When somebody says money makes life easy, you picture a yacht and it's a Tuesday. It's the $20 you didn't spend, the $12 that you circled the block to just avoid, and the $60 appointment you pushed to next quarter. And nobody says this part out loud. Most of you aren't priced out of an easier life. You're talked out of it by a version of yourself that sounds responsible right up until you count what it's really costing you. I know exactly what that voice sounds like. I know what it sounds like because I listened to it for years. And at one point, it talked me into something so stupid, I'm still a little embarrassed to tell you. Stick around. It's coming in the first few minutes. This is Building Your Money Machine, where we help you master your money, eliminate financial stress, and live a life of choice. And I'm your host, Mel Abraham. 21 of them. Your hours, your body, and your problems. By the end, you'll know which one you're buying back this week. All right, let's do this. 21 of them, some small, some not. And I bet real money right now that you can already afford about half of this list. You just haven't given yourself permission. So let's jump in. First set with the hours. Let's start with the stuff that you could literally change this month. Not someday, not when the business hits, but like right now this month. So number 1, Somebody else cleans your house. Years ago, I had a house. It was 3,500 square feet, 5 bedrooms, 3 full baths, more windows than any sane person needs, and hardwood floors that collected dust like it was their job. It was just me and my son Jeremy, 2 bachelors in one really large house. And I had a brilliant idea because I got so tired of cleaning up the dust balls on the, the wood floor. And I thought, hmm, I have an electric leaf blower in the garage. Works great outside. I thought, why am I sweeping and mopping these floors every single week? So here's what I did. I opened the sliding glass door. I fired up that leaf blower just to blow all the dust and the little dust bunnies right out into the yard. Here's the thing. What happened is I created an indoor weather event. The dust cloud went floor to ceiling, and in my own living room, it was a mess. I didn't Solved the problem. I basically aerated it. It just launched. Now I get it. And the embarrassing part isn't the dust cloud. I had 3 good reasons to hire that out from day one. One, I hated doing it, mopping and dusting and everything. That's one. 2, I didn't have the time for it because I was building a business. And 3, as you can tell, Mm-hmm. I was actually bad at it. And so all 3 were true the day I moved in. All 3 were true the day I used the leaf blower. So I finally hired a crew and at $150 a visit every other week, $300 a month, I got my days back, not hours, days every single week that I'd been spending just trying to keep up with a house that was beating me. So Why did it take me so long? It wasn't that I couldn't afford it. I was doing the math and the math said, hey, $300, it could go somewhere else better. But the math was wrong. Not because $300 isn't real money, but because the hours were never on the page. I was running the comparison with half the ledger missing. I was solving a math equation when I should have been solving a life equation. And hold onto that one because it's underneath all 21 of these. All right, leads me to number 2. Number 2, somebody else does the yard and the pool. Listen, I don't mow, I don't edge, I don't skim, I don't brush, and I don't test chemicals. I tried mowing the lawn with an electric lawnmower once, ran over the cord. You see a pattern here? But here's the thing, add up what this is on a Saturday— mow, trim, blow clippings, the, the pool— and put it all away. That's most of the morning gone before you've even done anything that you can remember. And nobody has ever kind of laid in bed on a Saturday night thinking, thinking, man, I really nailed that edging on yesterday. Here's the thing, you end up buying back a Saturday morning, a Sunday morning, the Saturdays that you have because there's a supply limit by doing it. So I started to look at things that I could outsource just like that. Number 3, the laundry goes out and comes back folded. I used to send all my laundry to a dry cleaner, to a laundry shop, and then it would just come back folded. Because again, I am not that domesticated. This is telling you a lot about me. You know, when I was doing the laundry, it would sit in the basket till I had to wear it. Then I had to press it. But that was the way I used to do it. But then I found wash and fold. They dropped it off, they picked it up. Usually it was a dollar or 2 per pound. And I looked at it and said, here's why this is worth more. The laundry was never done. It was a subscription that I never signed up for and I couldn't cancel. There was always another load. Taking that off my plate, off your plate, doesn't just save you the hour. It removes a run— something that's running in the background, a process from your brain. It relieves the brainpower. Number 4, the groceries show up. You drive there, you park, you shop, you wait, you load, you drive home, you unload. Call it 90 minutes. And if you go to Costco, it's worse. But here's the thing. While you're in there wandering, you buy $40 of stuff that you didn't come in for. It wasn't on the list because nobody in history has ever walked past a warm bakery smell with any discipline intact. Now I get it. The delivery costs may be a little higher, maybe $10 or $20. I looked at it and said, I got 90 minutes back. I stopped the impulse buying of the pretzel bites and the other snacks that I probably shouldn't have had. And so I looked at it and said, ah, let's simplify it. Let's make it easier. So from time to time, groceries get delivered. Number 5, some nights dinner just shows up. This one's a big one, especially when, when working and traveling. And you think about it, it's 6:40 on a Wednesday. Everybody's fried. You're tired. There's chicken in the fridge that somebody's supposed to do something with. We're either going to grill it, we're going to do something with it, but nobody has it in them. That's a $20 problem is the way I look at it. $20 for the delivery. I just order it in. $20, maybe $25, and the whole thing just evaporates. No shopping, no cooking, no 45 minutes of cleanup while everyone else drifts off to their own screens or Or to sleep. And nobody at that table is gonna look back in 10 years and say, remember that Wednesday you seared the chicken yourself? So what you bought when you do that was an evening with people you'd otherwise have spent resenting. Not every night though, because that habit actually gets expensive. So I'm not saying we do it every night. We'll do it once a week probably, but on the nights that it's clearly worth the $20, stop pretending that it's a test of your character to keep pushing through it. If you want to, if you want to do it once a week, once every other week, great. Give yourself that, that gift. Give yourself that time back. Number 6, the handyman handles the thing you've been getting to all the time. You know the thing, the door that sticks, the fixture that's been half installed since spring, the shelf that you wanted to put up. It's been on the list for 8 months. It's a $200 afternoon for someone who does it professionally, who knows what they're doing. And I've learned this. I've got my limits. You probably know this already from what you've heard, but I'm not gonna do some of the handiwork repairs because that's just not who I am. I don't enjoy it and I'm not good at it. So a lot of times, you know, I look at it, I say, spend more than $200 worth of that walking past it and feeling bad. And it's a tax that no one really counts 'cause I see it, my wife sees it, and she's thinking, God, it's undone. And these undone things They charge interest in guilt daily. So we have a handyman. We call him up when we stack up a bunch of things. He spends the day, cleans it all up. Done. Okay. Number 7, you take the nonstop flight. I get it. 2 connections saves you $150. It also costs you 4 extra hours. And let's not forget 2 more chances to get stranded or arrive somewhere as a worse version of yourself. So what'd you do? You sold 4 hours of your life at about $37 an hour and then paid taxes on it. That's what happened. Number 8, you pay for parking. Let me tell you about my uncle. See, he brought my mom to see me speak. Now I'm up on stage and it was one of the first times she's seen me speak. And I'm in the middle of my presentation, I look at the back of the room and there they are, my mom, my uncle, And my wife. And I finish, I come off stage, I get the applause, I answer the questions, I shake the hands, I say hello to everyone, and I go looking for my mom and she's gone and my uncle's gone. So I find Stephanie and I ask her, I said, where's mom? And Stephanie tells me this, your uncle got tired of putting quarters in the meter outside, so they left. They left before the end. They didn't see my clothes. They didn't see the crescendo. They didn't hear the room stand up. They didn't, See any of that. Now I get it. It's not a complaint, but my uncle wasn't broke. He had the quarters in his pocket. He was running the math equation though. The meter was expiring and that costs something. So sitting still through the end costs nothing. So he optimized correctly. I get it. And he traded watching his nephew get a standing ovation for about 75 cents. Now, I've given some talks where that worth was about 75 cents. That wasn't one of them. Here's the thing. You've done this. Circling a lot for 20 minutes to avoid a $12 garage. Parking 6 blocks out in the rain to save $8. In those moments, you're paying with the only currency you can't reorder. That's the first H, hours. All of them, every single one of them is inside your reach for most of you watching right now or listening right now. So now I want you to go— you go from your calendar to your body. We've talked about hours, we're going to talk about you, and this is where the numbers get almost insulting. All right, now here's the thing before we get there. If you want to understand what your actual life costs, not guess, I built something called the Lifestyle Cost Calculator. It's totally free. Go to MelAbraham.com/Lifestyle. Run your numbers. Get an idea so you can get it all dialed in. Now, let's go to your body, the next group. So, I'm gonna be personal for a minute because I earned this section the hard way. I got blindsided by cancer twice. And when you get blindsided once, you spend the rest of your life making sure you never get blindsided the same way again. Not from fear, but from information. So, let me show you what, what I spend to stay ahead of my own body, to make sure that I am healthy, to be able to take advantage of the life I'm building and the wealth that we're creating, to be able to serve, to be able to be here with you. DEXA scan, $60. There's these mobile DEXA scans. For $60, I know exactly what my body composition is, the body density, the lean mass, the visceral fat, all of it. Not a guess from a bathroom scale that tells me a number and nothing else. $60 to stop guessing. And talking with one of my doctor friends and physical therapists, he says the body composition structure is more indicative of your longevity than any of the other numbers. And $60 got me to stop guessing it. And so I do that every 6 months. So $120 a year, $10 a month to make sure that I know what my body structure is and that it's not declining, whether it's the lean body mass or, or my skeletal. Number 10, full blood work on a schedule. I run a comprehensive panel and they don't get anything for this. I don't get anything for this, but I use Function Health. It's $365 a year. That's a dollar a day. But I get this battery of tests, like literally 128 biomarkers that tell me what's moving, what's trending, what's worth a conversation before it ever becomes a diagnosis. Remember, I got diagnosed with cancer in 2019. I hadn't seen a doctor in 7 years. Now, would it have eliminated the cancer? No, but we would have detected it far sooner before it became a 7.5-centimeter tumor and put my life at risk, my bladder at risk, my prostate at risk, and my kidney at risk. And so I look at things through a proactive lens these days, and this is why I use something like this to baseline and keep Following the trends. Number 11, the bodywork. I will put in between 17,000 and 25,000 steps in a day, especially when I'm on stage and I'm, and doing those things. So the body needs to get repaired. The body needs to rejuvenate. So I do a massage. It's about $100 or $120 regularly, not as a spa day, but as a maintenance and maintenance on my equipment so I can serve. And I want to keep doing this for a lot of years. And so I want this body to be able to do that. And that's what we— what I do. Now think about this. Add it up. $60, $365, $100 here and there, a handful of hundreds of dollars a year, and I get clarity. I get peace of mind. I get a very good chance of never again hearing news I could have seen coming. That's the cheapest insurance policy I know. And it isn't Sold by an insurance company. All right. Number 12, second opinion. When something's off, you see the specialist you want, not the one your schedule or your wallet negotiated you down to. And when the answer doesn't sit right, you get another read. The doctor that took care of me during the cancer was not the first doctor that I met. In fact, the first doctor we met, we walked away from, even though he gave us the diagnosis and gave us the solution. We didn't trust him. We didn't believe in him. He didn't seem to be that concerned about my well-being. He was more concerned about, oh, I do this all the time. Let's just get in there and do this. And we didn't do it. So it's important for me and for you to look at and say, how can I make sure that I, I get a second opinion when I need to do it? I mean, we'll get, we'll get 4 quotes on a bathroom remodel, but we'll accept one guy or gal's opinion on our own liver. There's something wrong with that. Just saying. 13, the dental visit you don't skip. Sit with this arithmetic for a second. A cleaning runs you somewhere about $100 to $200 if we start to look at the national dental cost average. A root canal averages $949 from what I saw. And the crown that follows it runs another $700 to $2,000 more. That's crazy. So, You save $150 today to not go to the dentist appointment and buy yourself a $2,000 problem 18 months from now with interest and a worse afternoon. Notwithstanding the fact that all the organisms in the mouth become also impacting the rest of the body. So get in there, get it done. 14, food that costs more. I get it, I get it. And food has gone up, but better protein. The produce that isn't the cheapest thing in the, in, in this case, but you know that it's the cleanest. It doesn't have all the chemicals and the other things in it. The thing that you eat because it's good for you and not because it was 2 for $5. And over a year, I get it. That's real money and it starts to add up, but it also is the fuel that you put in your body that allows you to do the things you do. The fact of the matter is that it does you no good to build wealth and not have the health to enjoy it. Then number 15, the sick day you actually take. This one separates people fast. There's a version of you that stays home. It sleeps, is fine, and it's fine on a Thursday. And there's a version that works right through it, takes 11 days to recover, and hands it to everyone in the office on the way out. See, one of those people can afford to be sick. That's the whole difference. So these 7 items, and almost all of them cost less per year than a phone. Now we get to the part that I think lands the hardest because it's the one that, that you felt personally in the last probably 12 months. And that's this: when problems become nuisances. So let me tell you something that doesn't get said enough on money channels. Being broke is expensive. Not metaphorically, but literally. See, there is a surcharge on everything, and it's charged daily to, to people that are the least able to pay it. You buy the $40 shoes 4 times instead of the $200 pair once. You overdraft by $5 and then pay a $35 fee for the privilege, which means that you just paid 8 times the price of whatever you bought. You hire the cheap attorney and then you pay the good one to clean up the mess after the cheap one got done. And one number frames the whole thing. Fewer than half of the Americans have enough liquidity to cover a $1,000 emergency. That's by a survey by Bankrate.com just recently. Fewer than half. So for most of the country, every one of these next items is a crisis. Money demotes your problems from emergency To simply errands. So 16, $2,000 car repair is a bad Tuesday. Here's what I mean. Same repair, 2 households. In one, it's annoying, you're irritated about the rental, and then you forget it happened just a month later. In the other, it's a family meeting. It's a car that's already near its limit. It's whether somebody can get to work on Monday or not. It's the same transmission. But it's a completely different week. This is why in the Wealth Priority Ladder we say, let's get a comfort fund in place. Let's get $1,500 or one month's worth of expenses so this doesn't derail you. 17, the air conditioner dies in August and you replace it. You don't ration it. You don't nurse it through one more summer with a box fan. I remember my dad, we had a swamp cooler on top of our roof and he would get up there every year and patch it with epoxy cement. Here's the thing, that when something happens, you can make one call and it's handled and you never think about it because of the peace of mind, because of everything that, that comes into place. Number 18, this one hits home for me. The dog needs surgery. And the first question isn't how much. Emergency surgery for a dog can run anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000. Heck, our neighbor, we just took their dog in. They ended up spending over $10,000 for an emergency surgery. That saved the dog's life, but he didn't even question it. And that's the thing. There is no worse feeling in the world than standing at a counter, looking at an animal that trusts you completely and trying to do the math. Money won't make you, you love your dog more. It just spares you from ever finding out what that love costs. Number 19, you hire the right expert the first time. The attorney, the CPA, the contractor, you know, You cheap— cheap expertise is the most expensive thing you'll ever buy because you pay for it twice. Once when you get it wrong and again to get it fixed. We're in a situation where I gotta fix something in the home. I got bids, but I'm not necessarily going with the lowest cost bidder. I want to get the best person on the job for the price. Number 20, you make an expensive mistake and it doesn't reroute your life. This one's underrated, and it's a, it's a real reason that wealthy people look like they take more risk. See, what looks like courage is usually just a bigger margin for error. A mistake becomes tuition instead of a detour that takes 4 years to recover from by having that liquidity to be able to put some things in place so you can take care of it and take care of it right. And number 21, the last one, you fly home when someone you love needs you. See, a while back, I had a flight to Sydney, 10 PM departure. Bags were ready. I was ready to walk out that door. That afternoon, the phone rang. Stephanie's family called her. Her father had a stroke. She was out in the field when the call came in. She, she called me and came straight home. And I want you to notice what happened next because it's the whole reason I'm making this episode. We didn't have a conversation about money, not one. We repacked the bags. I canceled Sydney. We booked a flight that night and we went. $350 in change fees and the original tickets were nonrefundable, so I ate it. I redeployed it as a credit later, but we ate it. We spent the next 2 weeks there. And I told the few people who mattered, I'm gonna be in the hospital. I'm not reachable. Then I went dark for 14 days. Nothing broke. That's it. That's the whole payoff of everything I've spent 30 years building. Somebody called and the answer was yes immediately with no arithmetic in the room. Now put that next to my uncle and the parking meter. He walked out over 75 cents. I walked away from an international trip without doing the math. Same decision, opposite equation. So that's 21. And I want to tell you what they add up to because it isn't a lifestyle. You can wait. You don't have to take the first offer, the first job, the first buyer. You can change your mind. The decision you made last year doesn't have to be a life sentence. You can leave the room, the job, the, the client, the situation you're only in because you need Friday's check. You can help when your kid calls, when your parents need you, when a friend is underwater. You can recover from the mistake, the bad year, the thing you didn't see coming. And you can go when the phone rings at 2 in the afternoon and somebody you love is in the hospital 800 miles away. 1,000 miles away, you can just take off. And one last thing, and it's the one I want you to keep. Go back through that list. Really go back through it. See, most of you can afford half of it. The cleaning every other week, the nonstop, the $60 scan, the parking garage. You're not priced out. You're talked out by a version of yourself that's still running the math equation exactly like I was in that big house with a leaf blower in my hands. And a dust cloud in my living room. And that version of you is very persuasive. I get it because it sounds responsible. But the hours were never on the spreadsheet. They never are. And the hours are the only thing that page can't ever earn back. So pick one, not all 21, just one, one you've been talking yourself out of for the last 3 years. Buy it back this week and see how it feels to run the other equation for once, to give that gift to yourself, because that's what this is about. Not the money. It's about the life the money makes possible. Listen, if this one hits you, do me a favor, hit subscribe so you don't miss something else that's coming and share it with someone else in your life who's still out there in the yard on a Saturday saving $12 and spending the morning that they're never getting back. Give that a chance, all right? And until I get a chance to see you on the road, on your path to financial freedom, always, always strive to live a life that outlives you. See you in the next one. Cheers for now. Cheers.