7 BIG Investing Regrets (as a Certified Public Accountant)

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. All right, so what are my biggest investing regrets as a certified public accountant? I get it. This is a question that I got asked about, do I regret anything? And the answer is, oh, a whole lot. But there's lessons in it, and I want to talk about that in this episode of the Absolute Entrepreneur show. See you in the episode. Let's talk about these regrets.

Question was, do I have any investing regrets, man? How long do we have? I got a ton of them, but I'm going to give you seven of them here because I think that they're really important ones that, God, I wish I would have done some things. And so, look, no matter how we cut it, I live a blessed life now. I mean, I feel good about where we're at, but I made a lot of mistakes along the way. Um, I've lost a lot of money. I've made some bad investments, I made some bad decisions. I made some bad choices. They all cost me, okay? But I grew from all of them. Now, the hopes is that by exposing some of it, by burying it.

That you don't make the same mistakes that you don't. It doesn't cost you the same. Listen, one of them is cost me well into a million bucks. It cost me one third of everything I own. Look, if I want to spend that kind of money getting a lesson, you all should learn from it without getting that lesson and having that same price tag. So here's. Here's the thing. The very first thing to understand is that we all are going to have regrets. We all are going to make mistakes. Even someone like myself who's educated in it, who's. Who studies it and does it every day, day in, day out, I still will make a mistake. I'm human. I'm human. The thing is that the mistakes I make today do not leave the kind of marks that they did in the past. So I've learned a lot from it. So the point is, is this the tendency is when we have these regrets, or when we make these mistakes is to beat ourselves up about it. And trust me, I did. But beating ourselves up or blaming ourselves or trashing ourselves in any way doesn't help us. There's no way we can grow from it. We shrink from it. We stand still, we go backwards. The only way to grow from mistakes is to be willing to accept.

Your role in it. Okay, here's what I said. To accept your role in it, not the blame for it. Okay? I've had my role in all of these things, but when I accept the role, then I can sit back and say, well, what did it teach me? What did. What did I learn from it? What can I do to prevent it in the future? And as we do that, we grow and we tend to not make the same mistakes. So I want to make sure that we're doing it from that context of growth and not, oh, my God, I did that. And you start beating yourself up about it because it's not going to move you forward. Whatever you did in the past is in the past. And for some reason, even though we may not understand it, for some reason you had to go through it to get here so you could hear the message, do the things, make the difference, and be in a different place in the future. But until. Until you got here, you. You weren't prepared for it. So I look at it as the exercises, the resistance training, the. The things that you needed to do to make. Make sure that that happened. Okay? So I look at it as a positive. Doesn't mean that it feels like a positive when you're going through it. It's just the way that we look at it. So what was the first regret? I think the first regret really was not getting curious about wealth, about money, about living life fully earlier, to be deliberate around it. You know, what I did is that I, you know, I went to school to become an accountant. I thought I. But this is a college, kids. I thought I knew it all. I didn't. I still don't. I mean, I'm learning every day. I learned from you, the questions you ask and. And all that stuff. Okay? But I wasn't curious about it. Just to have this healthy curiosity of why and how things work and tinkering with it and making sure I understand it. But the other piece of that is not getting curious about wealth, because with that, curiosity will bring study, will bring learning, will bring the effort to grow. But there's another piece attached to it. It wasn't to be curious about wealth for the fact that I just wanted A big bank account, but curious about wealth and living life fully earlier. This really comes down to.

Having some level of contentment for where I'm at, some appreciation and gratitude for where I'm at. The good, the bad, all of it. To sit back and say this actually is serving me in some way.

And I may not know the way.

But the question is, and I remember my, my sensei in Japan, you know, I trained in the martial arts for well, four, four plus decades, lived in Japan and trained under a 17th generation samurai bloodline master. And he used to say when we were doing some risky, let's just say risky self defense, you know, like bladed, you know, not real knives, that kind of thing. If we're living with regret, we are still living in the past. If we're living with anxiety, we are living in the future. Which means that neither one of them puts us in the present. And if we're not in the present, we are not living the moment fully. And in a self defense situation, the context that he was talking about, if we are not in the present, if we're thinking about the past defense that didn't go well, or what could happen if we doesn't go well in the future, I'm not in the present to do it and it won't go well. Okay? And so I think that once I started to understand that each moment is precious and is meant to be fully expressed and fully lived is when I started to live a richer life even though my bank account didn't change. And so getting curious about wealth and getting curious about making sure that each moment matters becomes really, really important in doing that. So that's the first regret. The second regret is thinking that retirement was a long ways away. Retirement was because, look, I came out of school in my early 20s and you know, we're talking about retirement and this, look, I just got out of college, why am I worried about retirement? I got plenty of time for retirement. What I didn't understand is what I teach now is the wealth, the wealth creation curve, the wealth flatline and the need to get in the game. That retirement actually isn't far off, that retirement actually is accelerating. And I remember I was speaking in Montana once and they sent a driver to the airport to, to pick me up. And this was a young kid, it was in his early 20s. And as he's driving me, he says, what do you do? What are you doing? And I told him I'm here to speak. And what do you speak on? I said, helping people build a life. That's Financially free and to build businesses and to build wealth and, and to live a life that they get to live instead of have to live. And he says, oh, as a recent or soon to be recent college grad, what would you tell me about retirement? I said, the biggest thing I would tell you is to not call it retirement for two reasons. When you call it retirement, it's easy to delay it and put it off because it seems so far away, which is what I did. Second.

Seems like it is a phase that you go to, and now life changes. I think both of them are fallacies. Retirement, there's no such thing as retirement in my book. There's living. The question is how you're going to live. And so I would rather us look at it through the eyes of, and the optics of what I call peace of mind.

What's the peace of mind? It gives you. And the peace of mind is something we want today. Retirement is something we can put off till tomorrow. And so by doing that, it gets you in the investing game and the building game sooner. And when you get in the building game sooner, your, your wealth is easier. The more time you have, the less money you need. The less time you have, the more money you need to build wealth. Got a kid who decided to join one of my programs at 16 and a half. I had a conversation with his mother and, and she, and I said, let's bring him in. Let's see what we can do. So at 17, 17 and a half, he's on one of the live calls and he says to me, I got a job. What should I do? And I said, let's open up a Roth ira. So he gets up the call, he goes and opens a Roth ira. Three weeks ago, he was on another call and he says, I funded my Roth ira. How do I invest it? And I said, great, Henry, how much did you put in there? I said, how old are you? I said, still 17? He says, no, I just turned 18. Great, so you're 18 years old and you put money into a Roth IRA. How much did you fund it with? And I'm thinking, he's 18 years old. How much could he put in? $500, maybe a thousand bucks? He says, well, I fully funded 2023, and I already funded 2024. I go, wait a second. Are you telling me you put $6,500 away in for 2023? And he said, yes. And I said, in 7,000 for 2024. He says, yep. He says, it, it's, it's easier because it, you know, it helps because I'm living at home. I go, I get it, but that's 13,500 for an 18 year old. That's a, that's a good chunk of change. That's good. I said, let's do some math. Here's the deal. Every dollar he puts away, if we just put it in S P500 and it hits the averages over the long term, by the time he's retirement age into his 60s, that will go, that will multiply by 107 times. His $13,000 will turn into 1.2, $1.3 million if he did nothing, nothing more, didn't put another diamond, didn't do anything. I looked at him, I said, yo, he, you, we're going to keep you doing this, but the one thing that we have to avoid is stupid. That's it, you're good, you're done. Thing is that, that we don't think that way. And now he started early. My son at 34 years old and his wife at 30, you know, have a multi million dollar net worth because they started early. It isn't about retirement being a long, long ways away. It's about getting in the game and giving you the peace of mind when you have the most leverage. Now I get it. A lot of my viewers and listeners are sitting back saying, I'm not 18, I'm not 34. That's fine. Whatever the age or stage you're at, we have to get you on the field. Because the one thing that I do know is that you cannot win the wealth game on the sidelines or the stands. You have to be playing the game on the field. Let's get you on the on the field. Let's win the game. Okay? It's the only way to do it. So that's the second regret. Regret number three, getting too complicated too soon. All right, here's the thing. Investing, we think has to be complicated because the financial services industry makes it that way. Why? Because then we have to depend on them. Which I did. Which I did. And I ended up with this convoluted financial structure that was tremendously more complicated than it needed to be. Now I was able to manage it because of my background and because of all the things. But creating wealth and creating financial freedom doesn't need to be complicated. In fact, it can be really, really simple. And it should be simple. That's one of the reasons that I wrote the book the way I did. Building my book, building your money machines is to simplify it. It may not be easy because of your circumstances, and you might have to dig out of a hole and you might have to work hard and you might have to do. But the fact of the matter is it's simple. So keep it simple. I got too complicated. Complication leads to friction. Friction and resistance lead to risk. Risk leads to losses. Okay, we don't invest in anything that we don't understand, so keep it simple so we understand it. That's the third regret. The fourth regret, which is coupled with the third regret, is blindly following advisors. I get you hire an advisor and you expect them to do the right thing for you, but sometimes they just don't. Here's what I regret is I blindly followed advisors that I hired on and I didn't understand their bias. I didn't understand how they got paid. I didn't understand what they were putting in front of me, but they told a really good story. And so I ended up in some investments that I should have never been in. Now, mind you, there are primarily two standards that advisors will operate from. One is a suitability standard. Is the investment suitable for you and your circumstances? Everything they put me in was suitable. But there's a second standard, the fiduciary standard. Is it the best for me? They weren't the best for me. There was better things, but they followed the suitability standard because they weren't a fiduciary. And I didn't know that at the time. And had I known that one, that investment would have never been in front of me. And it's more than one investment and they would have done what was right by me and not what was suitable for me. And so blindly following advisors is a mistake. We need to look at our advisors as our navigators. I want you to have your hands on the wheel to captain your financial ship. They can be to the right of you, they can be to the left of you. They can show you the hazards, they can show you the possibilities, but you make the decisions, they inform you, they educate you. My team, my wealth team, now that's what they do. We do this together. But I do not relinquish. And I certainly do not outsource my wealth creation. But I did. And that I regret.

Number five, Allowing my emotions to get involved. All right, here's the deal. The general rule is this. When your emotions go up, when your money decisions, your intellect goes down. This cost me big time. It cost me one third of everything I owned. Between me and two buddies, we lost over four and a half million dollars. We got into an investment that we Thought was an investment, did not understand it. Rule number two, broken. Okay? Didn't follow my rules. Rule number three, broken. And it turned out to be a Ponzi scheme. Wiped out one third of my net worth. Just completely wiped it out. How did this happen? It happened because this con man understood how to create and bring emotions into the decision, aspiration and dreams and all of those things. And once my emotions went up, y', all, my emotions went up, and I saw the vision that he created for me. I went straight to stupid and made a bad decision, Lost it all. When our emotions get involved, we tend to make bad financial decisions. Marketers know this. It's why they put urgency and scarcity and. And, you know, I'm only letting you in and those kinds of things in front of us. Yeah, The. The idea here is that our investing decisions, yes, it's driven by a vision for our life, but the decision to invest, yes or no, has to be bolstered by logic, mathematics, due diligence, investigation, and sanity. Okay? When your emotions get involved, whether it's buying something or not, we tend to make bad decisions because emotions will lead to temptations, temptations will lead to emotions. And we start to do that comparison, and we live in an Internet world. You're. You're constantly seeing people, people with their fabricated facades of the perfect life in front of you. You're saying, well, I should do that. No, you shouldn't. What you should do is live true to the life that you want, no matter what's happening around you, to get really, really clear on your values, what you want out of life, how you want to live it. Your definition of success, your definition, definition of living a rich life, and live true to that and forget the rest. But regretting allowing my emotions to get involved is huge, huge. Number six, sitting out of the market because of fear. Again, emotions evolved, okay? But this was fear. I remember sitting in a seminar with a financial guy like me talking on stage. It was before I was doing what I was doing. And I'm listening to him, and he is literally talking about, Armageddon's coming, the end of the world's coming, everything's going to crash, we're going to be in despair, we're going to lose it all. I mean, I was freaked out. I didn't even let him finish, okay? He had me so scared. I didn't let him finish. I got up, went out into the foyer where the venue was, called my broker and said, put me in cash. I don't want to play the game anymore. Sold everything. First off, by selling everything, I ended up triggering a huge tax, had to pay taxes. So that went out the door. But then I was so fearful that I sat on the sidelines. I sat in the stands. I didn't get in the game again. And I sat and sat and sat in that fear because I didn't understand and I didn't get in. Now, now, since obviously I've been in the game and I've done done that, but I went back. So I was investing every month, regularly, like clockwork. And then I stopped and I wasn't investing. I recently went back because of my teaching and my writing and research for the book. I said, what would have happened, I wonder what would have happened to my net worth if I didn't let fear control me and I didn't sit on the sidelines? How much more would I have been worth had I just kept that investing of 5, 700amonth? Just doing it over time, over time, over time, over time. Okay? And it was a while ago when this happened, so it was a lot of time.

And I thought it might have cost me, you know, 300, $400,000, y', all, $3.9 million. My net worth would be $4 million more had I just stayed in the game and didn't sit out of them.

That was staggering for me. Bottom line is this. I realized that you cannot win the wealth game sitting on the stand, on the sidelines or in the stands. You have to be on the field. I got off the field. I sat in the stands for a decade.

Big mistake, big regret. All right, then, number seven. And the final. The final regret is actually not speaking about this or teaching this sooner. Here's what I've seen is that no one's really having real conversations around this stuff. We're taught not to talk about money. It's taboo. We're taught to. To. To say it's it. It. We're talking about it in the sense that it's demonized, it's evil, it's dirty, you're greedy. If you want money, I think it's a mistake. We should be talking about it regularly. We should be talking about it to our youth. We shouldn't be looking at. At it as anything more than a tool to have an impact, a tool to create a life, a tool to create richness.

And if I can be that mouthpiece, then I will. And I wish I would have started this sooner. I wish I would have started having this conversation sooner, being more open about my journey. And some of those Things. Well, I am now. We've got the book building your money machine, all the training, the YouTube, all of that stuff. But that is one regret. And the other part of that regret is had I started speaking and teaching about it sooner, I would have learned and sharpened my skills sooner. Okay, so those are my seven regrets. And I think that if you look at them as a. As. As how they might reflect in your life and your financial journey, you might see that there's some things that you could tweak, some things you might adjust, some things you might have a new perspective on that could change the trajectory of your financial destiny in the future. So I hope that you found this of value. I hope that you find this helpful. Look, like I said, I'm just a regular dude doing things that I've been fortunate enough to do enough things right to be successful, but I've done enough things wrong to be educational. And that's the good news for you. So in the process, I hope I get a chance to see you. I hope I get a chance to meet you. But know this, that I'm on a crusade to light the path to financial freedom for a million families. And I want you to be one of them. And if I can help you, let me know. And in the meantime, until I see you on another episode, another show, or on the road speaking, they always say, always, always strive, live a life. Cheers. Cheers. Thank you for listening to the affluent entrepreneur show 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.

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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 tremendous, 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.