Hit These Money Milestones in Your 40s, You'll Become Financially Free

You can earn $150 grand, $250 grand, and still lie awake doing the math at 2 AM. I know, 'cause I did. And in your 40s, that comes with a second voice, the one that's whispering in your ear, I shouldn't still be here. And here's the stunt. That feeling has almost nothing to do with your income. It's just telling you which rung of the ladder you're standing on, the milestones. And the ladder is the whole game. Everybody out there is handing you one more tactic, one more budget app, one more Just save more statement. I'm gonna tell you the opposite. You don't need another tactic. You need to find out where you are actually at because you can't climb a ladder you can't see. This is Building Your Money Machine, where we help you master your money, eliminate financial stress, and live a life by choice. Because earning more doesn't make you free, a money machine does. And I'm your host, Mel Abraham. We're gonna talk about 6 rungs, where you're at and how to move. Let's find out yours. All right, let's do this. Most people think financial freedom is a number that they have to hit. It was really a series of 6 moments, 6 milestones where the sentence running through your head finally changes. See, I'm going to walk you up 6 rungs of a ladder basically. Survival, stability, momentum, compounding, optionality, and freedom. That's it. And it isn't a list to nod along to. It is your checklist. And at every single rung, I'm gonna give you 2 things: how to know if you're standing on it right now, and the one move that gets you off of it and up to the next one. So don't just watch this. Find your rung and let's move on. All right? So rung number 1, milestone number 1 is survival. This is where you start to say, I just need to get through this month. This milestone here is simple. One bad Tuesday stops turning into a bad year. So when you start to understand this, here's how you know you're on this rung. An unexpected bill still knocks the whole month sideways, meaning that something comes up, whether it's a plumbing issue, a car issue, a medical issue, you know, the tooth that busted, the busted water heater shows up. It doesn't just annoy you, it wrecks your plan. And the debt clock is still running in the background. The credit card at 24% is growing while you sleep. If that's your life, you're in survival. Now, the floor barely exists. And I want to talk to the person watching that, that's making good money and is squirming right now because you think this rung isn't about you. But I can tell you about people that earn $150,000 A year. There, you can earn $150,000, you can earn $250,000 a year, and you can still be sitting right here watching it all evaporate the second it hits the account. See, the number on your paycheck may have gone up, but the fragility never left. You know, bigger income just means you get to panic in a nicer car. Now, understand this. In your 40s especially, survival brings a passenger nobody talks about. It's called shame because now there's this voice that says, oh my God, I should, I should not, shouldn't still be here. You did things, you built a career, and some quiet part of you is embarrassed that money still has this much power over your week, your days, your month. The shame is lying to you. Survival isn't a verdict on your character. It's just a rung. It's just a step in the financial journey, and the rungs are there for you to climb up, to climb off of. This is the thing, your move. How do you get off of it? And it is the opposite of what almost everyone will tell you. Most people will say, pour every spare dollar at your debt, kill it completely, and only then start building savings. Now, I've watched that advice, and I've watched that advice put people right back where they started because the— you throw everything at the debt. You've got zero buffer, and then the water heater dies, and you have no choice but to reach for that credit card again, and you're back in the hole. Not only that, now you're demoralized on top of it. So I have my clients actually build both muscles because I think debt and expense structure is one muscle group, but wealth creation is another. And so I want you to develop both muscle groups at the same time. Most of your margin money, the cash that's left after the essentials, after you've paid your bills, goes at the destructive debt, but a portion goes to starting to build something. So let's just look at it. Let's say you have an extra $1,000 at the end of the month, $500 at the end of the month. It doesn't matter what the number is. You can take 80 to 90%, and this is what most of my clients will do, and put it towards the debt to get you outta debt. And then they take the remaining 10 or 20% and they put it first towards liquidity, giving you that breathing room. That's the emergency fund and then the peace of mind fund, and then towards investing once you have those in place. So you're not just killing debt at that point, you're learning to build wealth while you do it. And so the day the debt is gone, the muscle for wealth creation is already strong. That right there. That balance is the thing that eventually became the, the wealth priority ladder that I teach, that I wrote about in my book. And it started as a simple answer to a question. How do you dig out and build at the same time so you never have to start from zero twice? So get that working. If you're here, that's okay. Let's climb off the floor. The next rung is where you finally start to exhale, but the first rung. We just need to get you there, get liquidity in place, have a debt paydown in place, and get you dialed in. Now, milestone or rung number 2, stability. This is where you all of a sudden say, God, I can finally breathe. The wind here is quiet, but you'll feel it before you can actually measure it. So how do you know that you've arrived? Well, you've stopped checking your bank balance before you buy a coffee. That's kind of how it is. That mental math at the register, It's gone. And there's real money behind that feeling. 3 to 6 months of expenses are sitting in a high-yield savings account that you don't touch. A $2,000 surprise might show up. It may ruin your afternoon. It may piss you off, put you in a bad mood, but it's not going to destroy your quarter. It's not going to destroy your plan. That, that's stability. You're spending less than you earn and you're not white-knuckling every single purchase to pull it off. This is the first time that money actually feels boring. Here's the thing. Boring is the goal. Boring is a luxury you actually paid for. But stability plays a trick on you here, and I want you to be ready for it. You clawed your way out, you finally have breathing room, and almost immediately a new thought shows up. Okay, now what? Because breathing room feels a lot better than drowning. It just doesn't feel like getting rich. You're standing on solid ground wondering why solid ground doesn't feel like enough. That you're asking yourself, now what, has an answer. And it's the move that gets you off of this rung. And that is this: automate the gap. The money that's used to just sort of— well, it used to be there and just not get spent. The surplus that sat in the checking account until it quietly disappeared. It now leaves every single payday before you ever see it. You set it once and it runs without you. Because the difference between people who stall out at stability and people who climb past it isn't the income. It's whether their investing depends on willpower every single month or whether it happens automatically while you sleep. So automate it. And that's the key because when you automate, that means go to your brokerage, go to your payroll HR, tell them that you want that money automatically going into that account And automatically being invested. Set it up once and forget it. Automate it and you step onto the rung where most people in their 40s are standing right now. It's also the one that quietly breaks them. That's milestone 3, rung number 3, momentum. This is the key. This is where you start to say to yourself, I'm doing everything right, but why don't I feel rich? Picture the person who's been investing $3,000 a month for 6 years. But they still feel behind. That's what this runs about. That's the way it is. Now, here's how you know you're in momentum, because it's strange. The diagnostic is a feeling, not a number. You're doing everything right. The 401 is getting funded. It's automated. It's automatic. Money leaves every single month before you can spend it. You've got $300,000 in accounts, maybe $500,000. Things are moving. Maybe 3/4 of a million. It doesn't matter. On paper, you're winning. And yet you still feel behind anyways. See, if the account is climbing, but it feels like nothing's happening, you're not failing. You're in momentum. See, I thought I'd be further along by now. That's the words. How am I at 46 years old still worried about money? That's the words. Is this actually gonna be enough or am I just feeding a number that never gets big enough to matter? That's the words. That's also the trap. And it gets louder because, heck, you've got a phone. So you're watching the guy with the bigger house, the couple that just posted their vacation, their trip, the friend who supposedly made a killing on a stock or on crypto or on the thing you didn't happen to buy that you missed the boat on. That you think everybody looks like they cracked the code and somehow you missed the boat. Meanwhile, you're putting away $3,000 a month like the responsible adult you are. And you're feeling like you're the only person at the party who didn't get the memo. I get it. Here's what I noticed watching people live in this stage. Momentum is what we call the messy middle. Mathematically, you are making real progress. Emotionally, it feels like nothing's happening. Both of those are true at the same time. And living inside that gap is one of the most discouraging places in this whole climb. And this is the exact moment most people quit. They look at the flat, boring, unremarkable numbers and they decide, man, this isn't working. This stage is a stage where most are tempted to believe it's broken and where quitting actually costs you the most. Because here's what you can't see from the inside, from the messy middle. Momentum is building the asset base that makes everything after it possible. You're stacking the bricks, you're compressing the spring. You just can't see the wall yet. You can't see the trajectory yet because you're standing 3 inches from it. So here's the move, and it has 2 parts. First, you keep going and you raise your contribution every time your income goes up. That means that you increase that percentage. You keep pushing as much as you can instead of letting the nicer lifestyle swallow that raise. I get it. I want you to celebrate. So take a slice of that raise and celebrate. Take another slice of it to make sure that you can cover your bills, but then take the rest and start putting it away. The raise is the fuel, so don't burn it on a bigger car. Second, and this is the one that saves you, and this will change what you're measuring. Stop measuring the wall you can't see. Measure the bricks you're laying. Ask yourself, did you invest this month? Did the contribution go up with the raise? Those you can actually control. Those are things that make the next rung inevitable because the math always will math out. The behaviors will always behave out. Everything you're doing right now that feels pointless is the setup for the rung where it stops feeling pointless. And that rung is next. But before I show you what happens when you— when it finally clicks, I need 10 seconds from you. Because I think it's something to think about. If this rung just described your exact life, then make sure you subscribe. Because this stuff that I'm putting out every single week, I want to make sure that I get you on the right trajectory doing the right things. I don't want you climbing this alone. And while you're at it, do me a favor. Send it to someone else who's grinding and convinced that this isn't working also. Besides, it's more fun when you do it with someone you know. All right, they need this, and they need the next part, because the next rung is the one that changes everything. So rung number 4, milestone number 4, is compounding. Wait, my money made that? That's what goes on in your head when you finally look at it and you say, oh my God, how much did I make? I didn't even try. Yeah, think about this. What would happen if you put $30,000 into your accounts in a year and you watched them grow by $60,000? You didn't work more. The extra $30,000 wasn't yours. It was the machine's. Here's how you know you've reached compounding. And it's the cleanest diagnostic on this whole ladder because it's yes or no. It's binary. There's a year where your money actually will make more money than you did. There's a year where your money puts more money in your account than you did. Your contributions were the smaller number. The growth was the bigger number. That day, I promise you, will happen. And that day when it does, you've crossed over. For the first half of this journey, you built the machine. You're slogging it. You are pushing it. You are pushing the boulder uphill. But then the machine starts building your future for you. That's the game. Now let me show you why this is baked into the math, and if you don't quit, what you're up for. Because my friends Brian Preston and Bo Hanson over at The Money Guy Show, they built something that they call the wealth multiplier. And this is important. It gives one of the clearest pictures of compounding I've ever seen. Here's the idea: every dollar you invest today grows into some multiple of itself by the time you're age 65. And the earlier the dollar goes in, the more time it has to multiply. A dollar invested at 20 can grow roughly 88 times, $88 by age 65. Now you wait a decade, wait from age 20 to age 30, that same dollar that grew to $88 only becomes $23. Wait until age 40 and it's only around $7. So here's the thing, and you may sit back and say, well, I'm, I'm well past. My 20s or my 30s. That's not what I want you to focus on here, because don't let the age fool you into thinking that you missed it. They present it by age, but the age is really just a stand-in for the runway. A 20-year-old is getting 45 years of compounding. A 30-year-old is getting 35 years of compounding. Give the 30-year-old the same 45 years and the dollar does the exact same thing. It was never about your birthday or your age. It's about how long you let it run. It's about the runway. It's about getting in and allowing the machine to build and the math to math out, which is exactly why quitting in the messy middle is so expensive. Every year you stay invested is another year of the runway. The multiplier only pays the people who leave the machine running. Let me tell you about my son Jeremy. He started investing in his teens. Now, he He didn't fully get why. He just did what Dad said. And he kept doing it year after year after year. When it was boring and small and looked like it was doing nothing, he sat in his own messy middle for a long time. Same flatline, same nothing. And then it kicked. He came off the flatline and watched the exponential part take off. The part where the curve stops crawling and starts climbing. Now, mind you, he's 35 and he hit critical mass in his 30s, not in his 60s. It isn't because he out-earned anybody or picked some magic stock or daddy gave him a whole bunch of money, because I didn't do that. All right? He started early, he stayed consistent, and he let time do the thing that time does. But here's the part I love the most. When Jeremy saw it working, When he watched his money make money, it all of a sudden became clear. Not only did it become clear, it became addictive for him. He started putting in more, not because I nagged him, but because he finally believed it. He finally saw it. And he'd seen the machine turn over with his own eyes. And once he saw that, he couldn't unsee it. That, that's what compounding does to you. For years, financial freedom is an abstract thing that somebody promises you, 3 decades out. And then one day the math shows up in your account, and for the first time you can actually see the whole path. It's the difference between being told the pool is warm and finally getting in. We gotta get you in. So what's the move here? For once, it's mostly to not do something. Don't interrupt it. Don't yank the money out to chase some shiny thing. Don't panic sell when the market has a bad month, because the market will have a bad month. It might even have a bad year, but the market goes up 8 out out of 10 years. The single most powerful thing you can do at this rung to protect the machine and let it run, because the multiplier only rewards the runway you leave intact, is to just leave it alone. And once you can see it working, the whole question changes. It stops being, will I make it? And it turns into, what do I get to do now? Which is the very next milestone, the next rung. Rung number 5, optionality. You have the ability in your own mind to say, I don't have to. The milestone here has nothing to do with your net worth. Your boss does something ridiculous, and for the first time, the panic doesn't come. Here's how you know that you're on this rung. Something happens that used to trigger a real fear. The boss oversteps, a big client gets difficult, the industry wobbles, you can't collect from a client. Instead of the old panic, A different thought shows up. I don't have to put up with this. You feel the I could before you've even decided whether you will. That is optionality. Wealth stops being a number on a screen and starts showing up as choices in your actual day. That's the beauty of it. That's what this is all about, to be able to live a life of choice, to have options in life, to be able to say, I have agency over my time to do the things that I wanna do. And here's the part everyone gets wrong. It's not about quitting. You might not quit. You might stay in that exact same job. The difference is you're staying because you chose to, not because you're trapped. The leash comes off whether you walk out the door or not. That's what money actually buys you here— the freedom to stay by choice instead of by fear. You can take the trip. You can help your kid without wrecking your own month. You can walk from a toxic client. You can take 3 months off. You can spend real time with your parents while they're still here to spend it with. The move here is this: it isn't a task. It's a shift in what you allow money to decide. So make one real choice on your terms, not the paycheck. Say no to the one thing you've been tolerating only because you thought you had to or you had no option. The first time you use the choice that you didn't know you had, Optionality stops being a number and becomes something you actually viscerally feel inside. It's one of the most underrated forms of wealth there is because you feel it long before you're anywhere near rich. And once the money stops making your decisions, you reach the last rung, the last milestone, the one this whole thing was all about. Milestone 6, rung number 6, freedom. Now the question starts to become, What do I want? What do I want? Here's how you know you've reached freedom. You notice the questions in your head have changed. In survival, it was, what do I have to do? In momentum, it was, am I doing enough? And here it's, what do I want my life to look like? And you can point to a realistic mathematical path from where you are today to the day the machine covers your life. When the question flips and the path becomes visible, you're on the last rung. Now I get it. Freedom isn't a beach and a piña colada forever. If your dream is doing nothing on a beach for 30 years, I promise you, you'll be bored by Thursday. But freedom is waking up knowing that your time belongs to you, that you can still work like a maniac. I have my time belongs to me, but I still decide to do the things I wanna do because they, they warm me. They excite me to be able to serve, to do the things that I wanna do. To make a difference, to matter. You can build, you can create, you can contribute. You're just doing it because now you chose it, not because the bills demanded it. See, underneath the feeling, yeah, there's a number and you need it. You need to know what that number is because once you hit that number, it's called the freedom number. You now know where you have that freedom. It's the amount of invested assets that funds the life that you actually want. When you, it first sets it, When you first figure it out, it won't be precise because you may have decades before you get there. And it doesn't have to be precise. You just need to be looking at the right horizon in the right direction instead of swimming in circles. Then you measure against it in 2 ways, asking yourself, are you getting closer? And does the number still fit the life you truly want? Because that life Sharpens as you get clearer about it. So here's the move. It's the most important one on the ladder. Look, go ahead, run the numbers, have the money conversation out loud with the person that you share your life with. See, most people never do, and it costs them everything. Someone close to me literally spent years with no idea where they stood, not because the news was bad, but because They never looked. He and his partner never sat down to have a money conversation. So they had no clarity, which meant they couldn't even do the math, which meant they honestly didn't know if they were in trouble or almost home. That's trying to plan a road trip without knowing where you're starting or where you're going. You just drive around burning gas and calling it a progress. So we sat down, we got specific. We stress tested. I built it out. We— I asked some hard questions that they had to answer, and I stressed it out and said, what if this? What if that? What does the life they actually want cost? What do they need to create to make that a reality? We adjusted it as it got clearer, as they got closer, as they understood some things. And then all of a sudden, when the fog lifted, he wasn't nearly as far off as the fear had told him. The fear was worse than the math, and it almost always is. That conversation is the very reason I built the Money Machine Master Plan, because I watched what happened to a person in that moment when they can finally see possibility and the path in the same picture. We don't build the plan for the plan's sake. We build the plan so we can see the path, because none of this was ever a math equation in the first place. It's a life equation. The number was never the point. The life the number pays for, that was always the point. Here's the thing. So let's walk back up the ladder with me one time, not through the numbers, but through the sentence in your head at each rung, because I think we start to understand it in a different way when we understand the arc. Survival. This is where life controls me. Stability. I now feel like I can handle life. Momentum. I'm building something, but I can't see it. Compounding. Wait, it's working. Optionality. Are you kidding? I've got choices. And freedom. I'm choosing my life. That's the whole climb. 6 sentences, 6 rungs, 6 milestones, and you're standing on one of them right now, today. Whether you've ever named it or not, that's where you're at. Financial freedom was never the number at the top. It was the moment the question in your head finally changes from, what do I have to do, to, what do I want? That's the day money stops running your life and starts funding it. I think that you're closer to that day than the fear is telling you. So go find your rung. And when you're there, when you're ready to climb to the next one, I'll be here. That's what I'm here for, to make sure that you have guidance, to make sure that we light the path to your financial freedom, to the life that you desire, that you deserve, and that you envision. I hope that this gave you a map. I hope that this hit, and I hope that you get a chance to look at this with a critical eye to see where am I and what's next. And if this gave that to you and took the fog away for a moment, stay with me. So make sure you're subscribed on this channel, and let's do this together because you don't have to do it alone. All right, until I get a chance to see you on the next one, or on your path to financial freedom, or as you climb the rungs in the milestones to that freedom. 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 where 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. Thank you.