6 Little Luxuries That Cost $0 (Feel Rich Without Being Rich)

You make good money, so why doesn't life feel rich? Well, because feeling rich was never for sale. And today I'm going to give you 6 luxuries to prove it, all of them for free, starting with the one thing that wealthy families guard more fiercely than their portfolios. I've spent 30-plus years inside the finances of genuinely wealthy families, and I'm a 2-time cancer survivor, so I've seen what money can buy and And I've lived what it can. These 6, they're not bubble baths and vision boards. In fact, one of them cost me a $700 a month client, and it was the best money I never made. The last one, that takes 2 dogs, a phone, and 30 seconds a morning, and I'd trade almost anything on my balance sheet before I'd give it up. Stay to the end for that one because it's a big one. This is Building Your Money Machine, where we help you master your money, eliminate financial stress, So you can live a life of choice. And I'm your host, Mel Abraham. Let's do this. So let's start with the luxury I've watched wealthy people protect more fiercely than any asset on their balance sheet. And it starts with what Stephanie and I do every single November. And the first thing is block time for what matters before the world books it for you. Here's the thing. Every November, Stephanie and I sit down with our calendar for the coming year and we block out our vacations 12 months in advance. Then we do something most people never do. We actually book the flights right then, right there, because a plan you can quietly reschedule isn't a plan. It's simply a suggestion. But that one habit costs us nothing extra. The trips were going to cost us what they cost us anyways. But blocking is free. And too often we allow something else to block the time for us. But when we do it, it buys us something money can't. 12 months of guaranteed anticipation, a reconnection point that we never have to fight over, and the certainty that her job and my work will never quietly eat the thing that matters most to us. See, I started this long before I met Stephanie. I learned it from my My son, when I was raising Jeremy as a single dad, I literally would block time on my calendar because I was traveling, I was speaking, I was doing all kinds of things. Not, I'll try to be around. I literally blocked it. It was red on the calendar. He knew when his time with dad was guaranteed. And he also knew that any other color on the calendar, he could change to red and make it his if he needed, because he was that much of a priority. The same way a client knew when their meeting was guaranteed. That's the game. Now here's how you run this. Pick one relationship or one commitment that matters most to you. Open your calendar right now and block time for it before anything else gets in the way. Weekly, if it's a person in your house, quarterly, if it's a getaway or something like that, annually, if it's a big trip, and then make it hard to move. Book the flight, pay the deposit, tell the person. See, most people run their calendar in exactly the wrong order. Everyone else books their time first. The boss, the clients, the obligations, and whatever scraps are left over, they go to the people and the things that you claim matter most. And then they wonder why they earn good money but feel poor. See, I've watched too many people over 30-plus years tell me they'll travel with their spouse when maybe things calm down. They'll take that trip someday. And I've watched the relationships fall apart. I've watched health decline before that someday showed up. The calendar doesn't lie. It's a printout of what you really value. So that's the first luxury, your time on your terms. But none of it matters if you don't have the energy to enjoy it. And that's the second one, the asset no amount of money has ever brought back. Luxury number 2, protect your vibrancy. See, my dad, he had bypass surgery, quadruple bypass surgery at 56 years old. I remember looking at that and thinking, I don't want that. I don't want to go through that. You know, the ripping of the chest open and all that stuff. And then life made the point personally to me twice, because I'm a 2-time cancer survivor. And I can tell you from the inside and inside that fight, when your health goes, the size of your bank account becomes a rounding error. Steve Jobs was worth billions and all of that. And the one thing he needed No amount of money could buy. See, Jobs died in 2011 of pancreatic cancer at age 56. His worth was somewhere around $10 billion. I'm not sure, it may have been more. But that's the thing, it didn't matter. Coming out of my cancer fight, I sat down with my nutritionist and I told her something that surprised her. I said, I'm not worried about the numbers as I am about my vibrancy. Because if the vibrancy in my life, the energy in my life is there, the numbers should play out. Vibrancy is my word for the energy that I can bring to the moment, to the day, to the person, to the people in front of me when I'm on stage, when I'm here doing this. And here's what it costs to protect it. A walk after meals, $0. Moving your body daily, $0. Sleeping like it's your job, $0. Eating real food instead of whatever's fastest and most convenient, Roughly the same grocery bill, but radically different output. I track mine, workouts, eating, the data, not because I'm obsessed with numbers, although let's be honest, I'm a CPA. Obsessing over numbers is the factory setting for me, but I track it because the active life I want, serving people, traveling, the grandkids, all of it runs on that fuel. See, most people, they treat their health like a bill they'll pay later. Well, later is the most expensive payment plan there is when it comes to health. The repair always costs more than the maintenance in dollars, in time, and in the years you don't get back. And you can be the richest person in the graveyard, or you can be the vibrant one enough to spend what you actually built. That's the thing that I want you to look at. Now, if you're wondering what your rich life costs, most people have never even run the number. And it's usually smaller than you think. Now, I built a tool for you. It's called the Lifestyle Cost Calculator, totally free. And it shows you exactly what your life, the life that you want would cost. Go to melabraham.com/lifestyle and we'll get it over to you. All right? The link is in the description. We'll dial you in. So you've got the time blocked, you got the energy to fill it now, the vibrancy. The 3rd luxury is the one that got me in trouble with a client. And it's the best money I never made. Luxury number 3, the unfettered no. Mid-1990s, I'm a single dad. I'm getting ready to travel out, out of town to speak, and I stopped by Jeremy's daycare and I wanted to just say goodbye to him. And the place was absolute chaos. Kids everywhere, noise everywhere. And I look at my son and I ask him, is it always like this? And he looked at me, he says, yeah. I said, how do you get your homework done? And this little boy looks at me and says, I don't sometimes. 2 words, I don't. That's all it took. I told him, I said, when I get home from this trip, you're never coming back here again. So I rebuilt my life. I literally put an office in my house in the mid-1990s, back before anybody was really working from home. People looked at me and said, man, what are you doing? They thought I was joining the circus. I would pick up Jeremy from school every single day. We would walk home together, and he did his homework at the kitchen table while I worked. And I set one rule for my entire practice and business. I don't take meetings after 2:00 PM. One client kept pushing. He wanted a 3:00 meeting. He wanted a 4:00 meeting. I said, I don't do meetings. He got upset. He says, I'm the client. And I told him, I understand that, but But I don't do meetings. I'm with my son at that time. In the end, he couldn't understand it, so I fired him. Now, I remember bracing for it because that was a $700 a month retainer walking out the door. And at that point in my life, it felt tragic. But you know what? I barely felt it. The knowledge that I did the right thing for the right reasons swallowed that loss whole. Here's the thing about a no. Everybody talks about boundaries. Almost nobody prices them. They think that the no costs too much. So they keep saying yes. And every yes to something that doesn't matter is a no to something that does. They just never see the invoice. The unfettered no requires one thing money can't buy: conviction. Being ruthlessly clear on what you want in your life, what you value in your life, and even clearer on what you don't. When you have that, the no stops feeling like a loss. It starts feeling like what it is. The cheapest luxury on this list and the one almost nobody owns. I thought that no would cost me $700 a month. It bought me a son who knew every single afternoon exactly where he stood on his father's priority list. 30 years later, one of those 2 things still pays dividends, and I promise you it's not the retainer. Now, maybe you're thinking, Mel, I don't even know what I'd say no to. Well, good. The 4th luxury answers that in 2 lists and in 20 minutes. So luxury number 4, the fulfillment audit. Grab a sheet of paper. I mean, grab the sheet of paper. Pause this, grab a sheet of paper. 2 columns. I want you to divide it in 2 columns. On the left, I want you to put the top 5 things you absolutely love, even if you're not currently doing them. And then on the right, I want you to put the top 5 things that you can't stand doing. And then? I want you to look at this and do the part that nobody does. Go through your last few weeks and count the hours you spent on each column. That number will confront you in a way that no vision board ever will. See, I had this exact conversation recently with a dear friend, a successful entrepreneur by every measure. Business is growing, money's coming in, and he was running at a pace that was flat out unsustainable, chasing the targets. And I saw it happening because I'd been there before. So we sat down and asked him what really matters to him and to his wife. And it came down to 2, 3, 4 things. That's it. One of them was a home improvement project they'd been putting off. Another was simply something on the calendar for the two of them to do together. And almost immediately when those things went on the calendar, their whole environment changed. Here's the part I need you to truly, truly hear. The richness of his life went way up. Even though the money didn't, because now the money was finally doing its one job, feeding the life they want. This is where all that dreamy romanticize your life content falls apart. It's BS. A vision without action is a wish with a better lighting, but that's it. I'm not against dreaming. We use a visioning process in our own planning, but manifestation without movement is a coincidence generator. That's it. You can desire it all you want. If you don't act on it and it happens anyways, congratulations, you got lucky. And luck isn't repeatable. The audit works because it forces action. It shows you in hours the gap between the life you say you want and the life your time says you're living. Your money should be the feeder for your fulfillment list. And if it's feeding the other column, no raise, will ever fix that. The audit tells you what matters. Now, the 5th luxury is what happens when you go find it. And it's the reason there's exactly one photograph in my first book. Luxury number 5, meaning over purpose. Everybody's hunting for their purpose. One purpose, singular, like it's a set of car keys they misplaced. 30 years in, I've watched people spend a decade looking for their purpose the way I've looked for my reading glasses while it's sitting on top of my head the whole time. I wanna give you a different frame because I think we have multiple purposes depending on the context. What I look for instead is meaning, and meaning changes with the seasons of your life. For me, it's shown up differently as a father, as a grandfather, as a husband, as a cancer survivor, as a confidant, as a mentor. The question isn't what's my one purpose? The question is, what's the meaning my life is going to have in this season? 2006, I took a service trip to South Africa, my first time there. And one of the stops was an orphanage. We brought supplies, clothes, and toys for the kids. Almost none of them spoke English. And there I was standing in there and this one little boy across the room, he saw me, I saw him, I smiled, and this kid came running over full speed across the room. I reached down, he reached up, and I picked him up. He would not let go of me for the rest of the day. We didn't share a single word of language, but didn't need one. From a life perspective, that connection said everything. I knew that moment mattered to him as much as it mattered to me. Years later, when I wrote my first book, I had one photograph in the entire thing. One. Out of everything I could have chosen from a whole career, the only picture that made it into that book is me Holding that little boy. Think about what that says. A bestselling book about building wealth, and the single image its author chose to put in there cost nothing. No transaction, no logo, no receipt. See, you don't have to fly to South Africa to find this. Meaning is available in the season you're standing in right now with the people already in your life. Coaching the team, sitting with a parent, being the grandparent who shows up, The luxury industry can't sell it to you at any price, and it's sitting there free, waiting for you to pick it up. Chase the meaning in this season, and the purpose question will answer itself. And that brings me to the last one, the luxury I practice every single morning before the world even wakes up, with 2 dogs and a phone. Luxury 6, the gratitude walk. Every morning before anything hits, I walk my dogs. 4 miles, quiet streets, quiet beaches, early light. And I call it my gratitude walk because while we're out there, I'm deliberately walking through the things I'm grateful for. But here's my twist, and it's, it's the part that separates this from every gratitude journal tip you've scrolled past. If the thing I'm grateful for is a person, I don't just think it. I pull out my phone, I, I record a voice or a video message, and I send it to them. Right there, from the sidewalk, from the beach. The dogs think I'm nuts. I get them in it and do it that way. See, the people on the other end, they never do think I'm nuts. Try it for one week. On your walk, on your commute, wherever it is, pick one thing that you're grateful for each day. And if it's a person, send them a message, 30 seconds of an audio. You will not believe what comes back, and you will not believe what it does to you. Gratitude. You act on lands twice, once on them and once in you. See, why does this matter so much? Because comparison has become the default setting. And most people let that comparison set get chosen for them by social media, by neighbors, by the highlight reels of strangers. And you'll never feel rich comparing your real life to someone else's marketing. Never. The math just doesn't work. But the gratitude walk resets the compass. to internal. It forces you to focus on the positive energy already inside your world— the people, the health, the moments— instead of the manufactured gaps. Feeling rich was never about having more. It was about being unable to ignore how much you already have. See, I want to leave you with the thread running underneath all of this. Every one of these luxuries is free, and every one of them is perishable. The daycare didn't wait. My father's heart didn't wait. That little boy in South Africa is grown now. The people I watched put off the trip, put off the call, put off the life, they weren't lazy. They weren't wrong about wanting it. They just believed the most expensive lie there is, that someday is a date on the calendar. Well, you have the calendar. You have the 2 lists. You have the phone in your pocket and somebody who'd love to hear your voice today. None of it costs a dollar, and all of it appreciates the moment you act on it. Because feeling rich was never a purchase, it's a practice. And the wealthiest people I've ever known, and I mean the ones with real peace, not just real money, they have real richness, practice it daily. Listen, if this hit home, do me a favor. Like this video, subscribe, share it with a person who keeps saying someday. Let's get them off that plan because earning more doesn't make you free. The money machine does. And so does a life worth running it for. All right. I hope this, this hits, and I can't wait to hear from you. If you got a comment or anything, do me a favor, leave it below. I'd love to have the conversations with you. Which one of these hit home for you? All right. Till I get a chance to see you in the next one, as I always say, always, always strive to live a life without all the See you in the next one. Cheers for now. 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'd do me a favor, go to 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's your birthright, and I want to help each and every one of you claim it. Thanks so much.