9 Buy It For Life Items That Are 100% Worth The Money

There are things in your life that are worth spending serious money on. Not because you want to impress someone and not because the brand name actually matters. But because the cost of the cheap version, when you factor in what it takes out of your back or your time or your energy or your relationships, it ends up being a whole lot higher than the number that you were actually trying to avoid paying. So today, I'm going to actually give you 9 of them. Here's where I want to want you to think about going in. We're gonna start with some tangible stuff, the things that you can actually buy, you could touch every day and put them in the cart and stop replacing them every 6 months, every 3 months. But then we're gonna go somewhere where you probably didn't expect for the, a list like this to go because some of the best investments that I've ever made, the ones that actually changed my life, that can't be ordered online. Those are the ones I want to touch on also. 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. And stick with me through all 9. The ones at the end are the ones that matter most. Let's do this. Many people come to an episode like this and they think that I'm going to give them a shopping list, but that's not really the case. But I want to start here because I think it's really important for this to land the way I want it. Many of us have taught to approach money the same way, you know, make money, spend less, put some money away. I talk about it and we lead with a question that is, can I get this cheaper? But here's what I think. I actually think that that's the wrong question. Not because quality doesn't matter and not because I think you should just throw money at everything. Now, I don't wear jewelry other than my watch and my wedding ring. I don't need flashy things. But after 30 years in the trenches, I've seen a lot. The problem is never what people spend. The problem is what they spend it on. And most financial advice misses this. Money doesn't drive your life. Your life drives your money. And when you make that, that flip, things completely change. Now that shifts the question. You stop asking the question, can I get this cheaper?, and it becomes, what is this worth in my life? Those questions will take you to two different places. And that's where I want us to, to look at these through, through the eyes of where will this take you in your life? So let's jump into it. Number 1, the first thing, your sleep. And we're starting here because listen, it sounds boring, but bear with me. Sleep is not a lifestyle upgrade. It's the foundation that everything sits on. Your energy, your decision-making, your mood, your relationships, your ability to execute in business or at your job. All of it runs on the quality of your sleep. And most people are running that engine on bad fuel because they're sleeping on a mattress that they bought on clearance 8 years ago. Now, now here's the thing. Quality mattress, and these things get expensive, all right, but quality pillows, whatever it takes for you to get a legitimate restorative sleep. I actually track my sleep to see where I am. This is a buy it for life investment, not because the mattress will literally last forever, but because every single day you wake up well-rested is a day you get to show up fully expressed, fully present. And differently for your work, for your relationships, for your health, and for your mental clarity. The research consistently links chronic poor sleep to reduced cognitive function, elevated stress hormones, weakened immune response, increased cardiovascular risk. Very, very, um, real threat. And I think that we need to really understand that. So, and I, I already know the objection though. Mel Abraham, a quality mattress costs $2,000, $3,000, $5,000. Yeah. And what you're paying on that car note every month, it's gonna be like a mattress. But what, what did you spend last year on subscriptions that you forgot you even had? See, the math on the mattress makes sense the moment you decide that your rest is actually worth investing in. It's, it's crazy what happens when you get a good night's rest. A bad mattress is just a $400 chiropractor visit that hasn't happened yet. And I'm trying to save you money here. All right, so let's do that. That's the foundation. Let's go next to number 2. Now, my wife's gonna like this one. Your shoes. Almost every single physical moment of your life starts from the ground up. And a lot of people are standing on $50 shoes, $20 shoes from wherever they were the cheapest, wondering why their knees hurt at 45. A great pair of shoes, quality boots if that's your world, walking shoes that actually support your foot structure. This is not vanity. All right. Now, I get those red bottom shoes. Actually, they don't, they don't feel good according to my wife. But shoes is about biomechanics. And when your foundation is off, everything else above it compensates. Your back, everything, your neck. And over time, that compensation turns into pain in your feet, in your knees, in your lower back, in your hips. And now you're not as productive. Now you're not as focused. Now You had doctors and physical therapists and that kind of thing. So, I used— and a lot of these things I used to not spend the money on until I realized the impact on the effects of my life, my ability to show up fully expressed, and the things that I do. So, you gotta get good shoes. Be willing to spend money on some good shoes. And here's the math that nobody actually runs. A quality pair of walking shoes, let's call it $250, which is expensive. You wear them every day for 3 years, they hold up, your back is fine, no orthotics. Or you buy a $50 pair of shoes every 5, 6 months and have to replace them 4 or 5 times a year in that same window. Somewhere in there Add a doctor visit or two because all of a sudden you're having problems. Well, now which one's cheaper? See, the cheap shoes are the ones that— one of the most expensive things that you can actually buy. Because I think it has such a ripple effect in your life. And I know, so don't let my wife hear this. She'll probably use this to buy more shoes. And I get it. Now, number 3, travel gear. This one's an interesting one for me. It's something that I didn't do, and this story made me realize how dumb I was being. I am by nature someone who will find the cheapest version of anything and call it a win. That's the way I used to live. For instance, my backpacks. I carry— I travel a lot and I carry my backpack with me all the time. And I would buy my backpacks on Amazon for $35, for $40, use them, watch them fall apart, buy another one. Used it, watched it fall apart. Repeat over and over and over again. Every single time, I'm proud of the fact that I got my $40 backpack thinking that I just saved. But here's the thing that I didn't realize. I ran into a friend of mine. We were traveling and he told me he had a nice backpack. I go, "That's a nice backpack." He says, "Hold on, let me tell you about it." And I go, "What do you mean?" And he just laughed out loud because he says, "This backpack's like $600." I go, "You're out of your mind." He says, "No, no, no, no, no. Believe it or not." I didn't believe someone when they told me, but it had structure to it and it had enough structure to it that he says, "My back doesn't hurt. It's easy to carry through the airports and it's helped me." And I go, "Are you serious?" And so what happens is that a proper backpack or travel gear, like in this case, the backpack, the weight was evenly distributed. And it made it easier on my back. It was less tiring. There was structure to it. Like I said, it wasn't like some sack hanging off my shoulder or my neck. And so I ended up— I love the backpack. I, yes, I spent $600 on a backpack and, and yet this one will last for a long time and it's helping my back, my neck, and my quality of life. And so I, I, when you start to look at the things that you use every single day, you gotta start asking yourself, hey, does it make sense for me to spend spend a bit more money or a lot more money for something that is going to increase the quality of my life in a measurable way and allow me to be more functional and last longer in the process. Now, we don't— we do it responsibly. We don't go into debt and try to finance it. But the bottom line is that quality luggage, travel gear is one of the things that I will spend money on because of the fact that we travel so much and it has such an impact on our life. So that's the game I want you to play. That leads me to the next one. And this is something, well, I don't have a lot of experience in, but it is quality cookware. So let me full disclosure up front, I don't cook. If I cook, it's in the microwave or it's in the air fryer. That's it. All right, cooking is Stephanie's domain and she owns it. She's an incredible cook. She's actually been on a cable cooking show a few times. So on this one, I'm giving you the perspective of someone who has watched this payoff from the best possible vantage point, the dinner table. All right, Stephanie has quality cookware. She buys the expensive stuff. That is properly seasoned and she uses it regularly. She has knives that hold an edge and it makes her ability to cook easier. The food tastes better. She enjoys it more. And I'm on the receiving end of this the whole time. So it's not the $20 pans that you get on a clearance aisle anymore. And the food actually is different. The experience is different and the durability is different. And when you get the cheaper version, you're gonna replace it and it's gonna flake and you're gonna have some problems with it. And so I think that this is one place that it makes sense if you're someone that cooks at home, get good cookware. You won't have to replace it for a long time. Buy the quality stuff in the kitchen because it's gonna end up in your system, okay? And so for someone like Stephanie, her tools are an extension of what she creates in the kitchen. And we joke 'cause she'll make some things, I tell her this, you know, she makes some things just on a whim and she has no recipes. She just creates. I joke saying that our meals are like one-night stands 'cause she'll never cook it again 'cause we don't have what she put into it and everything. But it is amazing. So some things in your life are heirlooms, waiting to happen, but your cookware can be one of them that sticks around. So that's the game. All right, now number 5. Now this is where we start to transition into other things, and that is your health. Now I'm gonna say something that might sting a little, but some of you will spend $700 a month on a car payment without blinking and then sit and debate whether a gym membership is worth $50. That's not a budget problem. That is a priority problem. Your health is the machine that runs the machine. And I mean all of it. The gym, the food you actually put into your body, the doctor visits that you keep rescheduling, the therapy, the physical therapy, the massages, the things that support your energy. We started with the mattress, then the shoes. Now your health supports your energy and your level —level of life and energy that you bring to that life. I've had my own health battles. I know what it's like when your body stops cooperating. And what I can tell you from the other side of that is this: your energy, your clarity, your capacity to show up is driven by your health. To show up for your family, for your work, for your job. All of it flows from here. And when health goes, everything gets harder. Every single thing. This is not a luxury category. This is the foundation of your ability to experience anything else on this list. It's your ability to live your life fully expressed. You can't enjoy the Italy trip on a broken body. You can't show up for people you love when you're running on fumes and you can't sustain the growth when the engine is failing. Your health is a buy-it-for-life investment that makes every other investment possible. So I would look at it through those eyes. Also, you gotta think about it. The version of you who skips the gym for 2 years and then tries to fix everything in January doesn't need a resolution. They need a conversation in their life, in their— with their future self about the compound effect of not taking care of yourselves, because that's exactly what's happening. All right. Now let's get to things that are going to matter the most when you start to look back. Item number 6, experiences. See, I differentiate between a wealthy life and a rich life. A wealthy life is a statistic in a bank account. You've got money, you've got commas, whatever. All right. There's plenty of people that have wealth.. But do they have richness? The experiences, how they experience life, how they feel for life. Now you can see how some of the other things before this lead into this. To fully experience life with the people you care about, the, the experiences that matter. This one I want you to sit with for a while, because if I'm completely honest, this is the one thing that took me the longest to understand. I was good at earning. I was good at building. I was good at the financial architecture, but somewhere in there I made the mistake that a lot of high achievers make. I confused accumulating with living. Having more didn't mean I was experiencing more. 2 years ago, 2 years ago, Stephanie and I came home from a trip. We were at Budapest and Vienna, and we were home and someone called us up, a dear friend called us up with an opportunity that was literally 45 days after we just got home to join a small curated group in Italy. And when I say curated, I mean the kind of trip that most people will never get access to ever. And we almost said no because we literally just came back from, from being in that area. And so the timing wasn't perfect, and I did the math in my head, and I thought, oh, let's be responsible, no, you know. And then I heard what we were actually going to do. We're going to be going to the, the top of the Duomo in Florence with the caretaker of the cathedral before it opened up. We were going to help him turn on the lights and be at the top when the sun rose. Standing there looking over Florence, Italy. Flying by helicopter to a winery that's been in the same family for 4 generations, a family that survived World War II because American soldiers saved them from being executed. And they're still there, still making wine. And we sat at their table, heard their stories. Or biking through Tuscany, the Tuscany countryside, 5 of our closest friends and having lunch on the green overlooking the entire valley. Bottom line is we went. And one of the things that I've come to understand about my relationship with Stephanie is that travel is how we connect. It's how we build the story of our life. The trip wasn't a vacation. The trip was an investment in our relationship, in our shared history, in the intentional life that we were building together. And it was an experience. To match no other. There was no balance sheet that holds the morning atop the Duomo or no net worth statement that captures the lunch on the hillside. No amount of stuff gives any of that back to you. So, the memories compound. The possessions, they depreciate. And the life you actually want to look back on is built from the moments not the transactions. So it brings me to, to this next one that I think is really important. But so experiences, and then item 7 is relationships. I want to tell you a story, and, and the reason I'm telling you this is because it has nothing to do with me, which makes it more powerful than anything I could say about myself. But someone close to me, someone that doesn't typically spend money on big experiences, had an opportunity to go on a safari. He won a safari in a silent auction, but everything else, the flights, the accommodations, all the logistics, all that was real money. Money that he wasn't sure he wanted to part with, but he decided to go. And he had the space for one person to go with him, and he decided to take his son. Now, his son was in his late 20s. He wasn't necessarily young, but he was young. And Here's the thing about fathers and adult sons. Sometimes the relationship needs an anchor, something new, something neither of you have ever experienced before, something that exists outside everything familiar. And being a single full-time dad raising my son on my own, I know what that's like. And they went to Africa together. They camped. They saw how people lived there in, in, in the way that changes your perspective on your own life. They experienced things that they couldn't manufacture, that you couldn't recreate, and you absolutely can't order online. And they came back from that trip different. Their relationship was different, not because of the safari, but because what the safari gave them. It changed the dynamic between them. It created a memory that wouldn't have existed any other way. It deepened something in their relationship that no amount of ordinary time together would have ever produced. Now, let me be clear. I'm not telling you to go book an expensive trip on a credit card because you want a meaningful experience. The machine has to fund that life. But you do this when the foundation's there. You do it responsibly like he did. And then here's the truth. No spreadsheet's ever going to capture that. The return on investment for that shared memory with someone you love can't be calculated. And the cost of never making it, that cost is also real. And you only feel it on the back end when it's too late. See, the relationships that matter most in your life are worth real investments, real time, real presence, real money when you've built the machine to fund it. All right, let's talk about something else though. Let's talk about the next investment, and that's investing in the person making all of this possible. Item number 8, your own growth. See, if you ever hesitated to hire a coach, invest in a course, to pay to be in a room with people who are further along than you, or invest in your own professional, personal development because the price tag felt like too much, this one's, this one's for you. See, I've never once looked back at a real investment in my own growth and said, I wish I hadn't done that. Not once. The coaches I've hired, the rooms I've paid to be in, the mentors who showed me things that I couldn't have seen from where I was standing, the programs that literally pushed me past where I was comfortable. Every single one of them had a return that dwarfed its cost. Because here's what you're actually buying when you invest in your own growth. It's not information. You can get information for free now. You're buying compression. You're buying years off the learning curve. You're buying the version of yourself that might have taken a decade or more to arrive, to get it to show up in a fraction of the time. See, the right investment in your growth, it doesn't cost you money. It costs you the discomfort of the price tag, but it returns a version of you that earns differently, that leads differently, that lives Differently. See, the people who say to me, ah, personal development's overpriced, and in my experience, usually the ones who— they're the ones who have never had a real coach. They've had a lot of opinions, but that's not the same thing. Opinions are one thing, but true coaching, true mentoring, true growth, man, man, that's huge. That leads me to the last one, number 9. That's your peace. The older I get, the more I understand that peace is not something you stumble into. It's something you build, something you protect. And yes, sometimes it's something you actually pay for. Your environment matters. Where you live, what surrounds you, what your home feels like when you walk through the door at the end of a long day. These are— they're not indulgences. They're the container for everything else you're building. They're where you exist. It's why my wife and I live where we do. Maybe that means paying a little more for a neighborhood where you can actually think. Maybe it means a home office that's set up to support the way you work. Maybe it means eliminating the noise, the chaos, the friction that quietly drains you every single day. Even when addressing it has a cost, the benefits to it may be great. See, we chase more, more income, more possessions, more recognition, more achievements. And somewhere in the chase, we forget that peace is what we actually wanted all along. The ability to sit on your back porch and hear the birds, to come home fully restored, to wake up in a space that supports who you're trying to become. That's worth some. It's worth real money. And, and the quality of life like that has no net worth number on a spreadsheet. There's no way to capture it that way. So here's the thing. I know some of you came here thinking that there's a list of products and I gave you some of that. I think so. But here's what I actually wanted you to leave with. The question is never, can I get this cheaper? The question is, what kind of life are you building? And what does that life require? The sleep matters because your energy is the engine. The shoes matter because your body is carrying you every day of that life. The backpack? That matters because a sore back is a tax on your presence. I'm telling you. And the cookware matters because the things you use every day shape how every day feels. But then the experiences. The Italy trip that almost didn't happen. The standing on the top of the Duomo and the sun came up. The biking in Tuscany with the people you love. You know, that's what matters. That's what I was building towards. This is it. But the reality is it's the relationships. A father and son on the other side of the world together that came home closer than they left. The return on investment of that matters. The money is the vehicle. It was never the destination. The whole point of building the money machine, the whole reason we do this work, is so that one day you have the freedom to spend on what actually matters without guilt, without the math eating you alive, and without feeling like joy is something that you have to earn. So go out, build the machine, fund the life, buy the things for life, because earning more won't make you free. The money machine will, but that freedom will only feel free when it's in alignment with what matters. And some of what we talked about is what matters. All right. I hope that this was helpful. I hope that you can take away some things. I'd love to hear from you, which one hits you, what your thoughts are. And while you're there, do me a favor. Give me a subscribe and a thumbs up. The algorithm likes it. It also warms my heart. Right? Until I get a chance to see you in the next one, always, always strive to live a life that outlives you. See you in the next one. Cheers for now.