If You Can Spare 15 Mins, You'll Get 20 Years of Your Life Back

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. What if you could gain 20 years back in your life, not just in time, but in the quality of your life? If you ever felt that life is passing you by or wondering if you're truly living the life you were meant to, this episode's for you. I'm going to share some financial and life strategies that can transform your days from just getting by to living with a purpose, having joy and freedom.

What if you had a way of bringing 20 more years into your life now, maybe not in time, but in the quality of life? Okay, I want to have a conversation. I want to share some insights about life, about money, about wealth that I think changed the trajectory of my life, changed the quality of my life and has done it for my clients. And I think you can do it for you. So I'll grab my coffee and we're going to have a conversation. Alright? And I think the first thing is to realize this. One of the things that I have seen because I spend so much time working with people around their money, around their finances and everything is this concept of retirement. And so the first thing is this is I want you to look at retirement through a different set of eyes. I want you to replace it with purpose instead of retirement. Because early on with me, I was working for one of the large consulting firms in downtown Los Angeles. And it was another late Friday night and I was staring out at the skyline of Downtown Los Angeles, 10:00 night. And there was this angst, there was this feeling of dread that why am I doing this? This is my life. And then I turn around and I look inside and I see the partner I'm working for to. And there's this guy who's I respect, who's by all stretches very successful, but he's stressed out, he's not happy, he's overweight, he's probably an inch away from a heart attack. And I look at him, I go, that's my future. Is that really what I was meant to do? Is that really what I'm here to do? Is it a matter of just serving time, you know, 30 years, 40 years, until you get to that magical line called retirement and say, okay, now I'm here. Now I can enjoy it? And we've all heard the stories of those people that hit retirement, and then months after they hit retirement, they have an illness and they can't enjoy retirement. And that's when it shifted. And I said, this isn't about living a life till we get to retirement, to get to a point where we have to use retirement as the escape from the life we created. And I had to make a shift to say, what's my purpose? Why am I here? What's the thing that lights me up? That's what I call anti retirement. Because then I get to live each and every day. I get to speak to you, I get to speak to thousands of people in my keynotes and online and serve. It doesn't feel like work. Not trying to escape it. I'm trying to do it. I'm trying to live it. And so imagine what it would be like for you to sit back and say, what's my true purpose? What are the things that I should be doing that are in alignment with my values, my vision, and my life? And how would that feel? So I would. The first thing is to sit back and say, how do I swap out purpose for retirement? The second is this is to realize that the investment I make in relationships is more important than the investment I make in my bank accounts. And in order to do that, I also have to make an investment in my health. Now, my health has always been a priority. I worked out for five, six days a week since high school, okay? But the relationships, be honest, weren't always a priority. I didn't always put them as a priority. And so until I spent the time to sit back and say, what are the relationships that matter to me? Not transactionally, relationally, and make them a priority and invest into deepening those relationships. Not only did I have deeper, better relationships with those people.

I had deeper and better meaning to my life. That investment pays off tremendously. And so. So I would look at it and say, how do I invest deeper into the relationships that matter and my health to build that? The third thing, I think that when you look at it is really about finding a simpler path. It's easy to complicate things when you listen to the press, when you listen to the media, when you see social media, you watch other people and what they're doing and how they're living. It's easy to bring some of that stuff into your life and complicate your life. We don't need complications. Complications and complexity bring stress. Stress brings disease. Stress doesn't make you feel good, it brings conflict. Find simplicity. What are the handful of things that actually really bring you joy? And make sure that you put your time into those instead of the complexity of what other people are doing and living their life in that way. So once I started to look at those three things from a life standpoint, okay, what's my purpose? What are the relationships and making sure that I'm focusing on my health and how do I simplify life felt a whole lot better. But now how does that translate? And how do you bring that full circle to the finances, to the financial aspects of your life? And I think the first thing really is once I started to realize that this is a journey of steps, not jumps. In other words, start small, start somewhere, start where you're at, start early, okay? It's not about.

Gosh, I wish I would have started when I was 16. I wish I would have started when I was 20. I can't tell you how often I hear that. But it's about, I know I can start where I'm at. And even if I can start investing, building money, putting money in a high yield savings account, building an emergency fund, a peace of mind fund as we call it in my book, even if I know that I can only start with $5, least I started.

So start where you're at, whatever your situation is, and start building the habits, start building the behaviors that will move you slowly and step by step towards financial freedom, towards that wealth. And it's not about the freedom that we want, okay? It's about what that freedom gives us. And that freedom gives us choice, okay? And so you need to look at it from that perspective. So if you start small and you do this next piece, it'll make it easier for you, and that is this. Align your spending with your values, okay? We get bombarded each and every day with marketing messages. Just log into social media, get on media, watch, watch any kind of streaming, and we're getting marketing messages of what our life should be like, what should we drive, what should we wear, what should we think, all those things.

And we're allowing that sometimes if we're not careful to define us, we're allowing it to determine what we do and how we do things. Instead of looking at and saying, what are my values? What are the things that matter to me? And live true to that to make the choices based on that. My spending, the money that we spend is based on our values. It's to further our values, to allow us to actualize them. It's not driven by marketing. Now I'm not exempt. There's a reason I have a $900 coffee maker in there, because the marketing messages got me. But at the same time, when the majority of your spending is value based spending, you will sit back and realize that your life is richer because of it. Not just because you're not spending as much, but because of the feelings you get with it. And that's really the truth behind that. And then the last thing is this is to invest in your freedom. That's got to be the ultimate purchase, is your freedom and not stuff. And when you, when you look at it from that perspective, you start to ask yourself, how does this investment or how does the spending move me closer to freedom?

And now we start to look at things through a different set of eyes because through that it'll allow you.

To build a life that is a life of choice, which is ultimately what financial freedom is about. It's about choice. It's about the opportunity to say, I have agency over my time.

It's not about, I have a big bank account. Yes, the bank account matters because it's the thing that allows you to have the choices to decide. So that's the purpose of it. It's not to have the account itself, but it's to have choice. And I think that we should be measuring our wealth in time, not money. I've said it over and over again because you can have a huge bank account, but if you don't control your time.

Then are you really rich? You're imprisoned by the time. You're imprisoned by the earning machine. You are still tied to it.

The reason I feel.

Wealthy today is because I have agency over my time. I can decide each and every day what I'm going to do, how I'm going to do it, who I'm going to do it with and the way I'm going to do it. That's choice. That's true freedom. That's what I want for you and I get it.

I don't want you to think that I'm Pollyanna, think that life doesn't happen. Life does happen. It happens to me. I'm a two time cancer survivor. I lost one third of everything I own in a Ponzi scheme. I've made some bad decisions, I've had some, some obstacles that I've had to overcome. I didn't come from money. I had to build it from nothing. So I get that it can be challenging. It doesn't mean that you don't get on the horse and do it. And that leads me to these last couple things. And these are more life things. And this is about living intentionally each and every day. And that I'd ask you this, and this next piece is, I call it Step out and Step Up. Ask yourself, what are you here to do? What are you truly here to do? Now, maybe it's going to change. It's changed for me multiple times during my life. But I think that you were put here with a gift. You were put here with a purpose.

And sometimes we shrink because we're afraid to fail. We shrink because we're afraid of what they're going to say. We shrink because I'm uncertain. I don't know that I might be able to make it. But you know what? By shrinking, we rob the world of the gift that you were meant to give to the world. And so I would look at it and say, let's challenge the comfort zones. Once I started to challenge the comfort zones and ask, what if it were possible? I grew personally, I grew professionally, I grew financially. Now, I wasn't reckless and throwing caution in the wind, but I was willing to get uncomfortable. And so when you start to get outside your comfort zone, you get a chance to experience the things at a level that maybe you would have never other imagined. Okay? So I would look at it from that perspective, say how to step out and step out. And then the second last thing that I want to throw out is this idea of each and every day to find gratitude and generosity. This was something, I'm gonna be honest with you, I was not good at. I was all about me.

But I try to be much more grateful and much more generous each and every day. When I do my morning walks with the dogs, we do a four mile walk every day. It's a generosity, it's a gratitude walk. It's us, me thinking about the things that I'm grateful for. If you're in my close circle, you'll typically get videos and audios from me, notes from me during that time, because I'm thinking of you and I'm saying thank you. Being generous with your time, being generous with your efforts, being generous in a society that is needing gives more back to the person that's giving than the person that's receiving. Finding that in you.

Enriches your life. It. It puts more life in the life that you're living. And then the last thing is this, is that your legacy is in your living, not in your leaving. Okay?

We're not building up stuff to give away. That doesn't matter. Yeah, okay, so you have given endowment, you give money, you give assets, you give. That doesn't matter. That's not lasting. What's lasting is how you lived, is how you interacted. What's lasting is what you've done with people, what you've done for people because you shifted their lives, you put a smile on their face, you gave them a direction, you gave them something that actually matters. Legacy is in the living, not in the leaving. So look at it and say, how can I take each and every moment of my day, live it intentionally in aligned with my values in a way that each moment matters and stack those moments up each and every day? That's legacy. I think that's. That's the way to do it. When you do that, you will find that although you may not get additional time back, the time you have is going to be far richer. And that's what I mean by putting 20 more years into your life. That's what it did for me. I know for me that once I started doing these things, the moments of life had more life in them. And that's the way to live a richer life. I hope that this helps. I know that this was a little different episode, not as tactical on the financial stuff, but you know what? You never separate money from life because when you do, you separate the meaning and it feels empty. So I think sometimes we have to have these conversations to know that the reason that we're building wealth, the reason that we have the money machine, the reason I do the things we do, is not to get the money in the bank account alone. It's to get the money in the bank account so we can put choice in your life so you can do the things that you are meant to do in the way you want to do them. And I hope that this helps. All right, I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to hear your thoughts. I'd love to hear some of the insights that you have had. See if anything I've said sparks something in you that you might do differently. Alright? So do me a favor, leave a comment, let me know, send me a note. And I hope to see you on your road to financial freedom. And until I do, always, always strive to live a life that outlives you. Cheers. See you in the next one. Thank you for listening to the Affluent Entrepreneur show with me, your host, Mel Abrahamic. 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 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 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.