7 Reasons Why The Wealthy NEVER Trade Time For Money

Curious. You ever stare at your calendar and see every inch of it, every minute of it packed with meetings or errands or calls or just one more thing, and just think, like, wait a second, is this what I'm in for? Is this what success is like? Because it's not feeling like you're getting ahead. I get it. If you're trading your precious time, your precious minutes and hours for dollars for a few bucks, you're not alone. We all do that. I did that as a. As an accountant. But here's the thing. The wealthy kind of figured out a cheat code. They know that just putting and packing more into the day and hustling harder isn't the right thing to do, that there's a different way to hustle. And in today's show, I'm gonna show you how they do it. This is building your money machine, where we help you master your money, eliminate financial stress so you can live a life of choice. Think of it as financial wisdom with a shot of sarcasm and a heart full of purpose. Okay. I'm Mel Abraham. And when I started out, I thought success was this crisp three piece suit, a quiet office, a bunch of spreadsheets that made me feel important. I was swapping time for dollars, and it felt horrible. Okay. And so it turns out that money without meaning is. It's just a treadmill with a view. You're doing a whole lot of stuff, but you're not getting ahead. In this episode, we're going to break down seven reasons the wealthy never trade time for money and how to stop being the unpaid intern in your own life story. Let's do this. All right. Let's talk about the oldest hustle in the book. Trading hours for dollars. You work, you get paid, you stop working, so does your paycheck. It's like being on a hamster wheel with no end in sight. And most people were taught this. We're indoctrinated into it to. To work hard, save more, retire later. Okay? And if you play by the rules, you might get free by your 60s if your knees, you. Your sanity and your health hold up. But the wealthy, they know that time is the most precious currency on the planet. They know that that's the thing that actually is how they measure their wealth instead of through dollars. So instead of trading it, they protect it, they multiply it. They find a way to do that. They build something that pays them, even when they. They're sitting on the beach or they're asleep or they're arguing with their teenager. Why the wi Fi isn't a human right. Okay, that's the game. Here's the deal. And I've talked about it in my book, and I've talked about it on stages, that there is two journeys that we should be on, but we've only been indoctrinated and educated and pushed into the same in the one journey. Journey. One is the earnings journey. It's where we build income. And what they tell us to do is go get a good career, go get a good job, go get a good profession, go build a good business and just go earn, earn, earn, Go make money, go make money as if that will solve the problems, as if that is the key to having freedom, choice and an agency over our time, over our life. But it's not. See, that earnings machine is necessary and it's important. It is the vehicle that creates the fuel to give you the freedom. So we do need it, but we need a second journey too. We need the second machine, which they don't tell us about. And that, because that is where the magic happened. That's where your freedom lies. That's what we call the money machine. That's what my book is about. And so this is the system that takes the cash from the first machine, the first journey, and builds it in a way that you get to buy your time back, you get to buy your choices, and you get to have your sanity. So here's the truth. Freedom isn't justification or a six figure month of income. It's waking up each and every day, putting your feet on the floor and knowing you have a choice. A choice how you're going to spend that day. A choice. Are you going to spend that hour. A choice are you going to spend that month? And it starts when you stop selling your time to the highest bidder. So let's break this down and look at the seven reasons wealthy people just never trade time for money. And they, they may have started that way, but they quickly find a way out of it. Because here's the thing. When, when Jeremy drew that picture of me, of me in front of two computer screens and phones in my ears and one on the desk ringing, it set in that I wasn't present for him. I wasn't there for him. I wasn't doing the things that a dad that wanted to be a good dad would do. Even though in my mind I thought I was doing the right thing because I was earning, I was keeping the roof over our heads and we need to do that. But see, Jeremy, at six years old, he didn't Understand money. He didn't understand profits, he didn't understand cash flow. But what he did understand was presence. And I wasn't present for him. That pained me. And that's what started this whole obsession with how do I separate my earnings from the efforts to earn it. The birth of the money machine. This is what the wealthy figured out. And it took a drawing from a six year old for me to start to figure it out. So here's the first reason that I think comes into play. The first is that they realize that time is non renewable. It is the one resource that we can't put on a shelf and use it at a later date. Once the minute's gone, it's gone. You can't get it back. You lose time and that's it, you lose money. We can make it back. If you don't, you buy something and you don't like it, there's, there's refunds, but with time, there's no refunds, there's no store credit, there's nothing. The wealthy treat time like it's that last piece of dark chocolate in the drawer. They look at it as sacred, non negotiable, and protected from people that want to steal it. All right, here's, here's what. One of the things that I did, I realized that it wasn't just the amount of time that mattered, but it was the quality of the time that mattered. So with Jeremy, one of the things we did is put a calendar in place where he knew that there was color coded elements in the calendar that were 100% his, not movable, not changeable. So he knew well in advance and any other color on the calendar if he needed me, he just needed to change the color and I'd be there. And so the key here is that I started to realize that to really feel wealthy, measuring wealth in dollars isn't enough. We need to measure it in time. How much time do you control? How much time of your life do you have agency over? And so this is where that all comes in. Because once it's gone, it's gone. Number two leverage is the secret sauce. See, the wealthy don't try to do everything themselves, even me doing my show and everything my team knows. There's three things I want to focus on. Three things and that's it. Create, relate, deliver. That's it. I want to create content that makes a difference, that impacts you. I want to relate to the people. I get to serve you, to make a difference, to be in the audience, and I want to deliver that's it anything outside of that someone else is doing, okay, I'm creating it, I'm relating it, I'm delivering it. Beyond that, it's out of my hands. Because here's the thing. I don't need to be doing all of that because what I'm doing is that I'm doing tasks that are $1 tasks, $10 tasks, $100 tasks, $1,000 tasks, $10,000 tasks. I wanna focus on the thousand, $10,000 tasks in my life, okay? So they don't look at it and say, hey, I'm going to do everything. They leverage it because they realize they're not auditioning for a role for the burnt out superhero. There isn't an award for that. So they hire, they automate, they delegate. Some of them literally even outsource all their wardrobe, their cooking, everything. Now I get it, they have the money to do it. But, but initially, think about it. Even with me, as I was starting to do things, I had someone else to do the, the yard work one, because I, I'm not good at it and I don't like it, okay? But there's a better use of my time. I had someone come in and when I was single, I had someone come in and clean the house every other week, okay? So leverage. Look for places to leverage because you're going to then be able to use that time to create the richness in your life you want, okay? And so this is the key to multiplying your hours. Number three, passive income pays you all your snore. Now, I don't like the term passive. I like the term leveraged income. In other words, it leverages your time. Passive. I think that we have a relationship with our money, with our income, with our wealth. And when we take a passive approach to will wither in a die. Because no relationship lasts in a passive environment. It needs to be nurtured. So I look at it through the eyes of leverage, just like I look at look at time through the eyes of leverage. Leveraged income to me is that it isn't a one on one relationship between my effort and my income. I don't have to be there 100% of the time to generate it. As a CPA, as a, as an accountant, that was billing time on a timesheet. If I wasn't there for the hour, I couldn't bill it. So I had to be physically there doing it, doing it, doing it. But if I can create something or invest in something that doesn't require me to be there, I spend an Hour or two hours. Think about my book. I spent. I had untold hours writing the book, and I wrote the book, and now the book is out there in tens of thousands of people's hands making a difference, delivering. And at the same time, I get paid. So I made it once, and I get paid. So finding ways to leverage your income, ways to create leveraged income, the money. Because the fact of the matter is your money doesn't sleep. They're the best employees, your dollars. They work seven days a week, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. No holidays, no PTO. And they're not going to unionize. That's the key. All right? So whether it's a rental or dividend, paying stocks or residuals or royalties from something you did, look for ways to create income streams that don't require you to be physically present or participating every minute of the generation of the income stream. Okay? This is. This is how you win. The idea of the money machine itself is to have a money machine that allows you to live the life that you want, paid for by the income and the cash from the money machine. When. When I got diagnosed with. With cancer, I looked at my. My wife, my son, his wife, and I said, life's changed. Hey, y'. All, I just want to let you know that my book, Building your Money Machine is out. And it debuted at number four and number 24 on the USA Today bestseller list. Number four in business, number 24 of all books, all titles, all genres. It was big time. So if you have not got your copy of Building youg Money Machine, then the first question is why not? The second question is when? And the third thing is, go to YourMoneyMachinebook.com, grab your copy, then give me the information from your book so I can make sure that I give you some special gifts, bonuses and wealth resources to accelerate your path to financial freedom. Let's get to the show. Shut the business down. I'm not getting on a plane. I'm not doing these things. I'm focusing on beating the demon called my wealth team. And I said, turn the machine on. The money that we were reinvesting in the machine to grow it bigger and bigger. Give me a piece of that so we can just continue our life. Now, the machine during that time didn't shrink. It still grew. Just not as fast, as fast a pace. But in the meantime, it paid for our lifestyle. So we didn't have to sell things. We didn't have to downsize. We didn't have to do anything. And then when I came out of the cancer, we shut the machine down or we just had the money go back into the machine and grow faster and faster. And I started doing the things again. Choice. This is the thing that we need to do. Building that money machine is the key to your freedom, the key to choice in your life, to that freedom based life. All right, number four, they'd rather own the stage than dance on it. Think about this. Labor means that you're dancing for dollars. Ownership means that you're collecting royalties for someone else to do the dance, to do the cha cha. All right, so what we're thinking about is wealthy aren't thinking about how can I work harder. Their thinking is how can I own the thing that makes the money? Do I want to be the dancer or do I want to be the stage that all the dancers want? The difference is really the difference between working in a circus and owning the tent, renting, renting a room or owning the building. See, when we move from the earnings pillar in the money machine blueprint to the grow pillar, what we're doing is taking our income and converting it to assets and assets that cash flow. So it's not assets that, that are lifestyle assets like big screen TVs and technology and, and fancy cars, but things that actually build wealth, things that actually generate cash flow, things that actually support your lifestyle and things that will give you choice back in your life. The richness back in your life. Number five, they don't hustle, they architect. Okay? They're not on a rat race. Most people will try to build a job, but the wealthy will build a system and they'll even build an ecosystem where everything feeds everything else. Think about this as a cpa, I was trying to build my consulting practice. I literally there was me in the middle and I wanted to build it. I was consulting, I was valuing businesses, I was doing expert witness testimony. I wanted to get hired to do that. But in order to get my name out there, this was pre Internet. Then I had to do something. So I was out speaking, I was writing, I was doing articles, I was doing workshops. But I was just doing it to try and get the job, the gig. I wasn't getting paid doing all those things. And it wasn't until later on I said, wait a second. I got the $20,000 project, but it took me three speaking engagements and I had to write five articles to make it happen. What would happen if I got paid for speaking, I got paid for writing, and I got the gig at the same Time. So what happened is then I created this ecosystem of content that allowed me to get paid on the journey to get the gig. And now what ends up happening is that my speaking fees have gone up, my writing fees have gone up, my courses have gone up, and now I don't. I'm not as dependent on that center nucleus of the project. But the point is that can you create an ecosystem that architects multiple income streams that work together? So it's not like, it's not like I'm, I'm a CPA by night and I'm doing needlepoint at night. Okay, it, that's too far afield, but just one degree off, two degrees off to create this system, this ecosystem that everything feeds on itself. Okay? Think about that. It's like turning around and saying, I'm going to build a Starbucks or a juice bar in the middle of a yoga studio or inside a wework or something like that. In fact, my gym has a juice bar and a smoothie bar in there. It's not the gyms, but they get rents and they get royalties off of it. So where in your life can you do that? Because all this is going to do one, it's going to expand the breadth of income. You're getting the shovel of income that you have. So it'll accelerate your path to wealth and financial freedom, but it's also going to give you more security because now you're not reliant on one thing. Then number six. Number six, their timeline is not a deadline. It's a decade. When you look at it, you and I, we usually look at things and we want results by Friday. The wealthy look at it differently. They think in decades, they think in 10 years out, they plant the trees that they might never sit under, but their grandkids will have the hammocks. You become that inflection point in your family tree by making choices. Today, the challenge is when we make our choices for 24 hours away, or we take. Make what I call Friday choices instead of generational choices, we make very different choices. And so when we start to think longer term, we start to make a very different choice. How is this going to affect me in a decade? How's this going to affect me in two decades? And I know that's long term thinking how, however, it's also gonna set you up in the present moment because you'll make better decisions about what you do today because you know that it will not. It's not fleeting. It will last and it will last for a lifetime. And in fact, it Will last for generations if you do it right. So the long game is the game to play to give you freedom in the long term and peace in the short term. And number seven, they use the income to fund their freedom, not fancier problems. Okay? The wealthy don't raise their lifestyle every single time. They raise their income, they raise their assets. They increase the size of the machine, they increase their capacity for freedom, their choices. Look, buying a Tesla is fun. I've had plenty, okay? But buying back your time, that's priceless. Your ability, your ability to choose, your ability to do what you want with each and every moment. Now, it doesn't mean you don't increase your lifestyle. It just means that you do it deliberately, intentionally, with a plan for the future, long term thinking decades. Okay, so how do you do this? What are the things that you need to do to kind of bring that in? Because now you know why they're doing it. Talk about what to do. And so I'll break it down for you in basically a couple of steps that I think really will make a difference. No fluff and no 3am guru stuff. So the first thing is this. Know your freedom number. What does a life by choice actually cost each month? Okay. In other words, we need to, we want to support a lifestyle, not some fantasy version of you sailing around Amalfi coast sipping organic beet lattes. It's, I mean, but, but the real thing, when we do it in the, in my training and in money, Machine blueprint and in the book, we break down the domains of life because you do not, you do not ever disconnect money from life. So what do you want in your relationships, your career, your health, your family, your spirituality, or all of the things? And what does that look at, like decades out? And what's the price tag to make that a reality? Okay, because here's, here's what we know. If you don't know where you're going, you never know when you got there and you actually might pass it up. A life by choice is also by intention. And so we have to figure out, write it down, tattoo it on a whiteboard, do whatever it takes to figure it out. Now, in order to help you to calculate your freedom number, how much you think you need as a machine, you can get us a free tool that we have. It's my freedom number calculator. Go to melabraham.com number. You'll be able to download it and work through some numbers, get some things going to make it happen. Number two, step two. Build your Primary income engine, the earnings machine. That, that first journey, you need cash flow before you. You're going to get growth in your flow. That means business, consulting, job, content, whatever it is, it doesn't have to be sexy. It just has to be solid and has to generate cash. So here's where I would focus. What are the skill sets you need to make you more valuable to a marketplace? To make you more valuable to a job, a corporation, to make you invaluable to your clients? Because when we expand our ability to solve problems and solve bigger problems, more complex problems, we expand our ability to earn to a higher level. And so rather than stop and say, I got my degree, I got my job, and I'm just going to follow the path, look for ways to increase your value in the marketplace. A real, for instance, when, when my partners push me out, the partners, when our partnership broke up, you know, we had a traditional CPA firm. I was doing consulting work different than the traditional CPA work. They were getting paid $125 an hour. Mind you, this was in the 90s, okay, so they get paid more than that now. But I was getting paid $150 an hour. Actually, it's what we were billing our clients one year later. Because I grew my, my skill set, I grew my reputation, I grew the niche that I was in. I was getting paid $350 an hour. They were getting paid $150 an hour. It started to separate, and it has continued to separate since that time. Now people will pay me a lot of money, multiple five figures, just to spend a day working on things. Point being is, what can you do in your world to make that primary income engine hum? All right, step three, start building your money machine. This is where the income starts to work harder for you than you did for it. Now what I want you to do is I want you to follow the wealth priority ladder. It's in chapter 12 of my book. If you don't have it, get the book. Building your money machine. I break down what to do with every single dollar as it comes in to build it out, okay? Because it's going to give you a unshakable foundation of safety so you can build your machine on top of it. It's going to optimize your wealth flow to do that. But in this process, to start building the money machine, we need to build it with assets that don't require your direct effort. That means it's going to be buying stocks, ETFs, index funds, real estate, digital products, anything that can Pay you while you sleep, while you golf, while you're. You're doing whatever you want to do. It doesn't need to be flashy. It just needs to be consistent. And it needs to generate cash. That's it. Boring builds wealth, believe it or not. Exciting, exhilarating, you know, Dopamine, I mean, adrenaline dumps, those build all ulcers. I don't want that. My wealth and all this, my money machine, it's boring, but it's effective. Step four, Ask the magic question. And that magic question is, does this buy me freedom? So at every opportunity, at every gig, at every great idea, at every moment that you're considering something, ask yourself, is this getting me closer? Is it building my freedom or is this just making me busier? Is it just getting me nicer furniture? Okay, if it's not building the machine, it's probably going to break your back. It's probably going to stress you out. So as long as we are continually moving closer and closer to the machine, we continually moving closer and closer to freedom and further and further away from being tied to a timesheet or the hours in a day. So listen, if. If your income depends on your energy, your time, your calendar, or some color coded within an inch of its life kind of schedule, that's not freedom, that's not richness. You might be generating income, but you're not enjoying it. The financial fragility is sitting in a fancy suit if we're not careful. And so the wealthy figured out that secret. They stopped renting their life out by the hour. They started investing in a machine that runs without them. And now it's your turn. Now it's time for you to take the steps to take control of your financial future. Start building. Follow the steps. Start building your own money machine. Because it isn't about just having money. It's about what your money does for you and how hard it works for you. That matters. And trust me, when your money starts working for you instead of the other way around, life gets a whole lot lighter. All right? I hope you found this valuable. I hope that you'll start to really look at the most important currency. You have time. And look at it differently. Because when you control your time, when you have agency over your time, now you have a life of choice and you have a life of freedom and you have a life that you can live richly. And that's what I want for you. All right, if you, if you enjoy this, do me a favor, make sure that you subscribed. Send me a comment, Give me a like, give me a thumbs up, whatever it is, share it out. But stay on this journey with me because I'm on a crusade to light the path for a million families to financial freedom. And I want one of those to be you. All right, until I see you in the next one. As I always say, always, always strive to live a life that outlives you. See you in the next one. Thank you for listening to the Affluent Entrepreneurship 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 youg 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 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.