How To Save More in 6 Months Than Most People Do in 6 Years

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. Why is it that some people struggle to save even a few thousand dollars over years while others can build serious financial security just in months? Well, if you ever felt like saving money is just too slow or it's too hard or it's just not happening fast enough, you're not alone. People want to save more, but they seem stuck in this cycle of expenses and bad habits and financial plateaus, and they just can't get past it. But here's the truth. They don't have a money problem. They have a system problem. They have a process problem. They have a behavior problem. And in this episode, I'm going to give you the exact steps to save more in six months than some people will save in six years and without sacrificing everything you love.

So what does it take to actually accelerate your savings? Well, in some cases, it's going to take some hard decisions, some hard choices, some big discipline. But just because something might be difficult doesn't make it impossible. And in fact, when we talk about money, when we talk about your financial future and financial freedom, it's less about the money you make and more about the behaviors, more about the habits, more about the choices and the priorities you have. And so in this episode, I want to walk through some of the things that you can do to accelerate your savings and at the same time, not give up all the things you love. I don't think that deprivation is the path to a rich life, but discipline might be. So there's a couple things that I think we need to think about if we're really going to save more in six months than some people do in six years. And the first thing is a mindset shift. We need to stop thinking small. Here's the thing. I think that a lot of people underestimate how quickly they can literally shift their financial situation. And it is primarily because we're operating in this slow, incremental change type of environment. But if we want massive shifts in a short period of time, we actually have to think differently. We have to look at things from a different perspective, and we need to start compression. Thinking is what I call it. So instead of spreading savings out for years, set a short, intense window where you go all in. Okay? It's not forever. It's for six months. And so now you've got this compressed period of hyper focus, if you will. Okay? And you know that it is for a short period of time, a short duration. So decide. At this point, you decide, what do you want in savings at the end of six months? Pick that number and whatever you feel is comfortable. But actually I want you to feel a little uncomfortable, but possible. Okay? Because when you do that, now you have that goal. And now the next piece really is shifting from a goal to what I call a declaration. See, I think it's easy for us to set goals. I want to have this. I want to do this. I want to lose weight. I want to. I want to add a hundred dollars. I want to stop eating candy, whatever that is. It's easy to set those goals. But those goals are easy to kick down the road, too. I mean, think about your New Year's resolutions. How many of them, as you sit here today, are you still on, on track for versus? Oh, guess I missed that one. Okay. And look, I'm not. I'm not different. This isn't judgment. This is just reality. And so here's what I believe. Once we set a goal, we need to convert that goal into a declaration. When you create a declaration, you say, I will. Then you must, because the alignment of the congruence of your choices, the congruence of that open declaration changes things. And you'll see that when you start to take goals and put them into declarations, you might change your goals a little bit or you might shrink not the goal down, but the. The number of goals you have, because now you feel the commitment to do that. So, so in this first step, we need to then make the commitment real. And one of the ways we make the commitment real is to make a declaration that it is going to happen. Okay? Let go of the idea that you need to enjoy life through spending right now. Make sure that you have some joy points in this, but at the same time know that maybe there's a little bit of discomfort for the short term to create a lot of breathing room and a lot of comfort in the long term. Okay? Think about this. You. You go to the gym and you lift weights. I've been lifting since high school. And it doesn't matter what day it is. You know, whether it's leg day or it's chest day or anything, sometimes, just. Sometimes that weight just. It doesn't feel good. Okay? But it is in that short burst of lifting the weight and then the recovery that allows us to grow. Okay? So the thing that will keep you on track in this space is to make sure that you know why you're doing this. It's not an arbitrary goal to say, hey, I want $1,000 in my high yield savings account at six months, but we want $1,000 in a high yield savings account because it's going to do what for your life? Okay. And then treat this six month period like your financial bootcamp. And I'm not your drill sergeant, but I'm going to be your cheerleader the whole way. All right? So that's number one. Number two, I want you to slash unseen leaks. I mean, like going through with a critical, critical scalpel on all the money that is going out the door and say, do I really need this? Because remember I said you don't have a money problem. You have a system problem or process problem and a behavior problem. That also means that there's an allocation problem. In other words, where are you allocating your priorities and your money with those priorities? And the first step is to literally stop the leaks. If I, if I kind of zoomed in to your checking account, to your credit card statement, and we start to look at things from the perspective of, of do you really need this? We'll find some leaks, okay? And so tracking everything becomes really important during that first period of the six month journey. So you write every single dollar down. I remember when I was writing my diet down, because I had to write it down, I thought, maybe I won't eat it. You know, it changed the behaviors in a different way. But I want you to do what I would call an expense triage. What are your necessities? And I will do this with a color coding system also. So if I know what my necessities are, they must be there. So I will color code them in green. Okay? Write them down. Write it all down. This is rent, utilities. This is the stuff that if you don't have it, you die. Okay? It's not Manny's. It's not Petties, it's not Netflix. It's not the latest technology. It is survival. It is roof. It is food. It is health care. It is. It is clothing. It's transportation in a shelter. That's it. Okay? You're going to keep those. You're going to Mark those green, you know what that is. Then you find your discretionary or your wants. These are dining out. This is shopping, this is subscriptions. These are those types of things. Well, those I want you to color them in one of two colors. Yellow if it's, this is a want and I kind of want to keep it. Or red in the sense of I want to cut this or I want to pause. It doesn't mean that you have to stop it altogether. Just ask for a three month pause, a six month pause. Okay. If you haven't been using the gym membership. Okay. Get a six month pause on it. Okay. And then the third category in this triage is hidden costs. Those are the things that happen in the background that you are either not aware of or vaguely aware of it because they just happen.

Through the process. And this is fees. It could be auto renewals, it could be other unused memberships, dues, things like that. And those we want to eliminate completely. So we're going to cut those. Okay. Then the other thing that I would do at this, at this point in time is I would also look at some of my providers, whether it's my, my mobile phone, my Internet, my insurance, my, you know, different, my cable. All those, all those. I would call them and I would negotiate with them. Everything's negotiable. Okay. And then the last piece in here is, is for you to put a 72 hour rule in. And that is if you have the urge to buy something in this next six months that you have a 70, 72 hour cooling off period. Okay? Not saying not to buy it. Give it 72 hours, three days. And if you still have that urge, okay, then. Okay. All right. This is gonna, this is gonna allow you to cut the emotional spending. And I did another episode on, on the spending and structure of that and how we overspend. Then there's emotional spending, there's comparison spending, and we have these spending triggers. So it's going to allow you to start cutting this, the emotional spending. It's going to reduce your social spending and it's going to eliminate hopefully your comparison spend, this process. So that leads me to number three. Number three is let's get a bigger shovel, increase your income. The fastest way to save more money is to have a bigger shovel of money to throw at it. And so we can cut our expenses, but we can only cut so far. Okay. But if we can increase our income, there may be no ceiling on that. And by increasing our income, we, we definitively shorten the time to financial freedom because we have more income to throw at it. Literally, if all I did was increase my income $200 a month over 30 years, it's $350,000, okay? It doesn't take a lot to make a lot. And it can have an exponential impact on what you're doing. And the power of this six month journey that I'm trying to put you on is not how much you're going to save in the six months, it's who you're going to become over the six months to be able to save that. The habits you create, the decisions you make, the behaviors that you build in that, you become that person that allows you to get to that point of financial freedom. So this is this, this time right here to increase your income is a six month hustle sprint. Okay? That means side hustles, that means gigging, gig stuff, that means additional shifts, things like that. If I can, for six months hyper focus on finding a way to increase my income for a period of time and use that income to build the savings and kickstart myself into what I call the wealth priority ladder in chapter 12 of my book and get you rolling into it, man, that's going to accelerate it really quickly. So things like, are there services you can sell online? Freelancing, you know, maybe you do web design, maybe you do graphic design, maybe you do writing, copywriting, maybe you do proofreading, you know, freelancing, coaching, writing, graphics design, things like that. Or maybe there's a part time gig you can do, whether it's uber food delivery, weekend shifts, things like that. Maybe you can flip some things. I know here if I just went behind me, because that is a tech closet behind me, I got all kinds of tech in there that I'm not really using and I probably won't use. And if I really got, you know, diligent, I could take all that stuff, put it on Facebook, Marketplace or, or somewhere else and sell it. Just flip the items there that we don't need it. Okay. And then another couple of other things you can do here. If you're an employee, you can ask for a raise or a bonus. That doesn't usually go well. Okay. And here's why.

You go in and say, I wanted to, I would like to get a raise. But why? Here's how I approach negotiation, especially when it comes to increased compensation. Your compensation is going to be based upon the value you create.

No two ways about it. And whether you've been there a year, 10 years, actually doesn't matter. And that may be a hard truth. For someone to take on. But the fact that you worked the Same job for 10 years doesn't entitle you to more money. The fact that you created more value in that job because you've worked at 10 years does. That's the difference. Okay? So before you go in asking for a raise or a bonus or something like that, get really clear on the value you are providing and how much incremental or additional value you are providing. And if you're not clear on it, then maybe we need to get clear on how you can provide more value. What projects can you do? What skills can you skill up? What things can you do? Okay. Because when you skill up, when you have that and your values up, then getting a raise, getting a bonus becomes a lot easier. And you might have a different conversation with your boss to say, listen, I would like to get paid more, but I would like to take on more responsibility and I want to be able to provide more value. Where can I take on projects, where can I do those things and co create a journey path for you to make that happen? Okay. And then the, the last thing on, in, in this segment I want to just touch on is to, to use any unexpected cash wisely. If you get a windfall like a tax refund, a bonus side income, pop it straight into savings for the six months. Straight into savings. Be disciplined about it. Put it, put it in there and make it happen. Okay. During this six months though, you got to be really careful about lifestyle creep because all of a sudden if you're making more income. Hello. And all of a sudden the lifestyle starts to expand for that additional income and then we never get any savings out of it. All right, that leads me to number four, make your money work for you. The subtitle of my book is getting your money to work harder for you than you did for it. That is what's going to give you the freedom. It isn't actually how much you make, it's not even how much you keep that makes the difference. It is how much is working for you that makes a difference. Your money should be earning for you. And so one of the things that you gotta look at is the money you have. What's it doing, how is it invested? Are you following the wealth priority letter? Are you following the principles and the things that I put in the book? When you first start out, most of it's going into a high yield Savings account. That's fine. 4, 4.5%. It's better than.01% in a savings account or nothing is In a checking account. Okay. You could use CDs or money market accounts, although those have limitations and they may tie you down. It's not fully liquid like a High Yield savings account, but, but we want to start getting our money to make money for us, and then ultimately we want it invested. We don't want a bunch of money sitting in a High Yield savings account beyond our peace of mind fund. We want the money working for us. That means we're going to put it into, into our Roth IRAs or our IRAs or our 401ks. Getting the match, doing the things that I talk about, and make sure it's invested in ETFs, index funds, low cost, low fee. So it is building and growing over time. And this is the time where you sit back and say, let's take the friction out of what I'm doing. Let's automate the whole thing. So set up automatic transfers so you don't have to rely on willpower. Okay? So for this piece of it, what I want to do is I want to take a certain amount of money. I want it automatically transferred to a High Yield savings account. I also want, if I have additional funds transferred to a, to a brokerage account and that automatically invested, you can set it up and forget it and allow it to, to run in the background without your efforts, without you having to pull the levers, twist the dials, do the things. And once that money's going that way, we never dip into it. We don't make it easy to access. We stick to the automation, we stick to the plan. Because this is going to allow you to have the future you want. Okay, that leads me to number five. This can be a tough one for people, but I want you to do a no spend challenge. Okay? This is sometimes radical for people, but I want you to temporarily, just intentionally deprive yourself of certain things. Now, I'm not telling you what those things are. I'm gonna ask you to pick some. But here's what I mean. Maybe you completely cut out for six months buying new clothes. Maybe you completely cut out for six months eating out or entertainment spending. And, but find one, two, three categories that for six months you will intentionally say it's off limits. It's off limits. Okay, maybe you're. You drink wine and you get, you get a bottle of wine, I don't know, whatever it is. But you, you're going to have to have commitment to it. But here's the key. It's not to get you to stop spending for the sake of spending. It's what you stop spending on that needs to then be used to save. Okay? So we're doing this temporarily so we can get through it. Okay. It's like, I remember when I first got diagnosed with the cancer, I did a water fast. Now, I knew there was an end to it, but let me tell you, in the middle of it, it was killer. But because I know that it was, I knew it was temporary. I got through it. This is temporary. This is temporary discomfort. But it is going to allow you to accelerate and jumpstart that savings in that six months. So find it. Find which categories you want to cut out. Make it a game. Set weekly savings milestones. Compete with maybe a friend or partner and create a visual tracker. I remember in school, remember we had the thermometer when we were selling magazines or something like that. Um, but it's gonna take some hard choices. Cause you might have to say no to some fun things that maybe you decided, I'm gonna cut that out. But on the other side of that, you'll be much better off. Okay, so. So number five is really about you doing a no spend challenge for six months. Finding those one, two, or three categories that you can say, I'm gonna cut that out for six months. All right, that leads me to number six. Number six is multiplying the momentum. And this is something we think about after the six months. What do you do after the six months? Okay, listen, if you followed the plan and you've been able to save, you could have put a thousand, two thousand, $5,000 away, maybe even $10,000 away in six months. If you're disciplined, if you're diligent, if you're committed to this, if you've done this. So the next step is to sit back and say, okay, which one of the things that I'm doing can I keep doing? Okay? Because it doesn't do us any good to say, all right, I did it for six months. And then you go right back to your old habits. Because now after six months, you're looking at it. You can see the proof. You see what's possible.

Now, maybe it won't be as an accelerated rate because you're not doing the. The no spend challenge, or you're. You're not maybe not taking on as many side hustles to increase the income, but the habits you created that created this savings, that created the momentum. We do not want to stop. We want to keep it going, keep the habit going. So once you see what's possible, it can become addictive okay? So we don't go back to those old spending habits. We don't reintroduce spending in intentionally. Now we look at it and say, how can I expand on this? Taking more of the, more of the savings that we're putting away and getting it, investing for us to grow and make this a permanent mindset, a permanent pattern, a permanent habit. Because here's what I know. When you create behaviors in our life that do the math of wealth, the math will work out. Okay? Bottom line is it's like exercise. You want to lose weight, it comes down to move more, eat less. If you want to build wealth, it comes down to make more, spend less. It's not crazy rocket science. Now. Yeah, the details. What do I invest in? What? Great. That's why I got my book. That's why I do the trainings. But don't let that stand in the way. And now you've created some habits. At the end of six months, let's keep the majority, if not all of those going because we've just started you on a money momentum path to financial freedom. And now instead of going back to your old ways, let's keep moving forward in the new way. All right? This is the game that, that I want you to play. Just do it for six months. I'd love to hear how it goes for you. I'd love to, to hear what your savings goals are, what the, what, what the no spends are. Tell me what's going on. Tell me what, what, what you're doing. Let me cheerlead you. Let me support you in this journey and help you through it. I'm not saying that it's gonna be easy, because changing a habit and doing some of the things, especially if they're emotional spending triggers and psychological spending triggers, those kinds of things, there's secondary gain to doing it. We gotta, we gotta navigate that. So I'm here to help. I'm here to support, to cheer you on and to keep you on that path. Because here's what I know. When you build the right habits, the right behaviors to build wealth, to give you financial freedom, it is not something that just gives you a life today, but it gives you a life tomorrow and for the rest of your life. And it doesn't just give it to you, it gives it to you, it gives it to your family, it gives it to the people you love. It gives it to the causes that matter to you. And that's what I want. A freedom based life. A life based on choice. A life that you get to choose what you do with your time, your efforts, your money, your person and your contributions. That's it. All right. I hope that this is a wake up call and gives you something to move forward on because in six months, things could be completely different. All right, let me know how it goes. And if you haven't done so already, make sure you subscribe to the show. And do me a favor, share this out. Let other people know that we're doing this stuff and that there is a path to financial freedom and I'm trying to light it. Remember, I have nothing to sell you as far as investments or insurance or anything like that. I simply want to light the path to financial freedom and your dreams. All right. Till I get a chance to see you on your road to your financial freedom, always, always strive to live a life that outlives you.

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.

And I'll see you there.

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 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.