Give me 17 Minutes and I'll Remove All Your Retirement Worries

Am I gonna run out of money? That one question steals more retirements than any market crash ever has. Because the worry doesn't just sit there. It stops you from spending, which stops you from enjoying, which stops you from being present for the exact years you worked 4 decades to buy. And here's what nobody's telling you. That worry has almost nothing to do with how much you've saved. Because it was never a math problem in the first place. I've watched people with millions live scared and people with far less Live free. And in the next 17 to 20 minutes, I'll show you what's really driving it and giving you the 5 shifts that take the worry apart, and including the one I couldn't teach my own mother in time. This is Building Your Money Machine, where we help you master your money, eliminate financial stress, and live a life by choice. And I'm your host, Mel Abraham. Let's do this. Everything you're about to hear comes down to one idea. Your worry needs proof, not more information. And to show you why, I gotta take you back to 1948. And I call this the 1948 problem. The fear was installed. It wasn't invented. My mother spent her final years in assisted living questioning whether she could afford $20 to get her nails done. Now understand something. She could. I know she could because I'm her son and I sat next to her with the numbers more times than I can count again. And I showed her the math. But spreadsheets, projections, plain English, pictures, it didn't matter. The next week, the same question. Am I gonna run out of money? Am I gonna run out of money? The math never won, not once, because her fear wasn't a math problem. Here's where it came from. It was 1948 and her family had to escape A country because of persecution. They were wealthy, butlers in the house wealthy. And to get out safely, they had to use everything they had or leave it behind because you can't smuggle a house across the border. And my mom, at 13 years old, was smuggled out alone, each family member separate. She left with nothing right out of school, not knowing if she would ever see her family again. So her brain learned something at 13 that it never unlearned. Everything can vanish overnight. The money, the house, the safety, the certainty, even the people. Gone in one night. 70 years later, a spreadsheet showing up saying you're fine. Who do you think your brain believed? See, here's why I'm telling you this. Your retirement fear didn't start at retirement. It got installed decades ago. It doesn't leave just because the balance got big. And I call this your money story, and it runs underneath every financial decision you make quietly, like an operating system you never chose. And maybe yours isn't 1948. Maybe it's watching your parents fight about bills through a bedroom wall. Maybe it's a bankruptcy, a divorce, a layoff at at the worst possible time. Whatever it is, it wrote a rule in your head, and that rule doesn't. Read spreadsheets. And this is why the standard advice typically fails. See, the industry hands worried people more information— another projection, another calculator, another article— but the information only fixes the fear that comes from fog, from not knowing. It can't touch the fear that comes from the wiring. And when emotions go up, financial intellect goes down. You can't read your way out of a fear you lived your way into. You have to build proof your nervous system believes. And that's what the next 4 shifts do. So that's the first shift. Know which fear you're carrying, wiring or fog. Because the second shift exposes the lie the retirement industry has been selling you about for both. Trade certainty for adaptability. The certainty trap, as I call it. See, retirement is a 25 to 40-year window. Think about what that means. Inflation, taxes, markets, health, healthcare costs, how long you live, what do your family needs. Nobody on this planet can tell you what those look like over 4 decades, nobody. And yet the entire retirement industry is built on selling you certainty. What's your number? Follow the 4% rule. This income strategy guarantees you'll never run out of money. Now, and look, I'll cop to it. I teach a Freedom Number too. So I'm pointing this finger at myself a little bit, and the other 3 fingers are pointing back at me too, which is how fingers work. The difference is what the number is for. A number as a target for your machine to hit is useful. A number sold as a guarantee that has nothing over the next 40 years that will surprise you, that's a prayer with the spreadsheet. See, the models pretend they can predict the 40-year future, but they can't. And deep down, you know they can't, which is exactly why the confidence never arrives no matter how many calculators you run. See, you keep chasing a certainty that doesn't exist in this universe. So stop chasing it. Confidence actually comes from adaptability, not certainty. See, the retirees who sleep at night aren't the ones with a perfect forecast. They're the ones with a plan that bends without breaking. A plan that works. A plan built to absorb the surprise instead of pretending there won't be one, because there will be one. And that starts with getting one thing straight: retirement is a cash flow problem, not an asset problem. A pile of assets is abstract, and abstract breeds fear. But knowing exactly where the next month's income comes from, regardless of what the market did yesterday, that's concrete. And concrete Kills fear. So if certainty is off the table, how do you build a plan you can trust? Well, you punch it and you punch it hard on purpose. That's shift 3. All right, now before we get to the next shift, real quick, everything I just said starts with knowing the target your machine needs to hit. And I built a free tool for you and it is my Freedom Number calculator that I'm gonna give it to you for free. Just go to melabraham.com/number. Number. And grab it. Now, this isn't to give you certainty, it's just to give you a trajectory. Okay? Shift 3, punch the plan first. Literally break it on paper as much as you can. When I stress test a plan, 2 variables do more damage than everything else combined, investment returns and inflation. Move either one of those a couple percentage points and the entire plan reshapes right in front of you. Because those 2 numbers touch everything. The growth, the spread, the spending power, all of it. So here's what I do and what you need to do before you ever hand in your resignation, before you say, this is my retirement plan. It says, take your plan and beat it up on paper. Run it with returns a couple points lower than you're hoping for. Run it with inflation a couple points hotter than the headlines. Run them together. The ugly combination, the sequence where the market drops right after you retire. Do that. And I'll tell you what happens in that room when I do this with the clients. They brace for it. They've been avoiding these, these questions for years because they're afraid of the answer. But then they watch the plan take the punch. They watch the plan adjust and still stand. And you can see it in their shoulders. You can just see it. Something unclenches. But every scenario your plan survives is a piece of Proof. And proof is the only thing that fear can't argue with. Now, I'm gonna be honest. One, I got a caveat here because I promise you the truth, not comfort. The plan can survive bad markets and hot inflation. What it can't survive though is you. If you overspend, you overspend, and no stress test saves that because the owner keeps stabbing it. That's a problem. So I'm assuming that You have that plan in place and you're not gonna destroy the plan by your own actions. You still have to work the plan. Now, most people never do this because they think looking at the worst case will make the fear worse. It's backwards. The fear lives in the dark, in the unexamined what if. The moment you drag the what if into the light and watch your plan handle it, retirement stops feeling like a gamble. It starts feeling Like a decision you've already tested. I remember as a child, my brother and I lived across the hall from us, down the hall from each other, and in between the hall was a bathroom. And in that bathroom was this frosted glass window. And at night, the moon would shine in and it would reflect this figure almost on the floor. And at night when that moon was shining in, my brother and I would call it a ghost. And we were scared of the ghost as children. And we would run up and down the hall so the ghost would not catch us. And my dad was going, what are you doing? And we said, we don't want the ghost to catch us. And he says, what ghost? And we pointed to it. And he walks in the bathroom and he flips the light on and the ghost was gone. See, that's what happens when you don't test your plan is you see a ghost, but when someone sheds the light on it, when you punch it, when you test it, when you scenario test it, all of a sudden, The ghost disappears. That's where even a good plan can, can really dial it in. The next shift is this: the peace of mind front. The market goes up roughly 8 out of 10 years, which means it goes down 2 out of 10 years. And so it's not going to check your retirement date before it decides whether it's going up or down. The single biggest way retirees turn a temporary downturn into permanent damage is being forced to sell investments at a discount or at a loss. so they can pay their bills. The market drops 20%, man, you need the cash available, the liquidity and the cash flow to pay for your expenses. And you don't wanna do it by selling your investments and locking in a loss that the market would have handed back to you over time if you just waited. This is why I teach the idea of a peace of mind fund in the Wealth Priority Ladder. While you're working, it may be anywhere from 3 to 18 months. Mostly we push to 9 to 18 months of Expenses sitting in a high-yield savings account. But when you move into retirement, I typically push it to 2 years. Because if we have a long-term or sustained downturn like we've had historically at times, then you're just pulling from cash and you allow your portfolio to do what it's gonna do, then it recovers and then keeps on going. Now, every finance bro on the internet just fainted because they're gonna go, that money's not optimized, Mel, it's not earning the maximum return. You're right, it's not. But it's not supposed to. Your fire extinguisher isn't earning a return either, and you keep it right next to you anyways. The fund has one job. When the market has a bad year or two, you live off the liquidity instead of selling your investments at a loss, and the machine stays intact. The market recovers like it has after every other downturn in history, and you never took a permanent hit. But here's what this fund does that no spreadsheet can capture. It changes how the crash feels. See, there's a difference between watching a market drop on the news and living inside one. And that difference is measured in months of runway. With 2 years of liquidity, a crash is just a headline. Without it, a crash is your kitchen table at 2 AM. Remember, shift 1, your nervous system doesn't believe projections. It believes proof it can touch. 2 years of expenses You can see sitting in an account with your name on it is proof that your 13-year-old brain can literally touch. So, the plan is tested, the buffer is built, one shift left, and it's the one that decides whether you end up like my mother or like a client of mine named Megan. The next shift is retire to something. Give the money a job to finish. I remember Megan, she sat across from me trying to do retirement math. And the math kept telling her it was impossible, or at least a decade-plus of grinding away. And I watched her carry that number in her body like a backpack of bricks. Her mistake was one most people make. She was calculating as if every dollar of her future wealth had to come from her own sweat and effort. If she wanted a million, she figured that that was $100,000 a year of heavy lifting until she got there. She forgot the whole point of a money machine. The money works so you don't have to do all of it. And when we run the real math and we take into consideration the growth and the compounding and doing her job, her 10-year plan literally became a 7-year plan. 3 years of her life handed back to her. And she got there bigger than she projected, not just sooner, because the machine works harder than she ever could. And here's my favorite part. You know what she did with that freedom? She and her husband literally took 4 weeks off the last summer and traveled with their daughter to show her where their family actually came from. Sit with that one for a second because I have to. See, my mother carried out of a country at 13 years old by fear, and it never let her go. Megan broke her fear and used the freedom to carry her daughter back. One story is what fear costs. The other is what breaking it buys. That's the last shift. You have to retire to something, not just from something. Your mind has to make a transition nobody prepares you for, from an accumulation mindset to a stewardship mindset, to what I call stewardship in the sense of where the money's job is to fund a life and a legacy on purpose. So get specific. Give every dollar a destination. The 4 weeks in the old country, the check for your daughter you write without flinching, the class, the project, the grandkids' flights. When a dollar has a destination, watching the balance go down triggers a purpose. When it doesn't, it triggers panic. Same withdrawal, completely different feeling. Because your saver brain treats every dollar spent as a dollar lost right up until the moment you show it what the dollar bought. The savings were never the goal. The savings were the ticket, and the ticket you never use is just expensive paper. See, I couldn't save my mother from her fear. I want you to hear that from a guy who does this for a living. I had the spreadsheets, the credentials, the 30 years of experience, the USA Today bestselling book, And I couldn't talk my own mother out of the story that was installed when she was 13 years old. She had enough money, more than enough. She never had enough peace. And that's what I want you to take from these 17 minutes together. The worry you're carrying about your retirement was never really about the money. It's about the proof. Proof your plan can take a punch. Proof you can survive the down years without selling your future at a discount. Proof that the life on the other side is specific and real and worth walking into. You can build every piece of that proof starting this week. And when you do, something happens that no calculator will ever, ever give you. The question changes. It stops being, am I going to run out? And it becomes, where are we going first? Because earning more doesn't make you free. A money machine does. All right? If this one hit home, do me a favor. Subscribe. Like the video, share it, drop a comment. Tell me which of the shifts you're making first. I read every single one of them, and I love having conversations with all of you. All right, until I get a chance to 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. 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 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 is your birthright and I want to help each and every one of you claim it. Thanks so much.