If You're Ambitious But Lazy, Watch This Video

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 do so many people that are ambitious with all the dreams, all the ideas and drive in the world still feel stuck financially frustrated by their financial life? Listen, if you've ever felt like your ambition doesn't match your bank account or that no matter how hard you try, you're just spinning your wheels, this episode's for you. Because I'm about to show you how to escape the financial hamster wheel and break free from the wrong playbook that they gave you and finally start building momentum toward the life that you've always dreamed of.

Are you ambitious, but you feel stuck? You've got big dreams, but you can't seem to get traction. Or let me tell you something that you might not expect. You're not lazy. You're playing from the wrong playbook, a system that was designed to keep you spinning your wheels. And here's what I know. There is a better way. And in this video, I want to break it down for you. I want to get you off of the financial hamster wheel and get you building your money machine, a system that works harder for you than you did for it. That's. That's the key. And the problem is this, is that we have all this ambition. We do the things that people tell us to do, but we just don't feel like the results are showing up. And then we start to criticize ourselves, thinking, well, maybe I'm just not doing enough. Maybe I'm lazy. Maybe there's something else that I'm missing. But if it was all just running on the treadmill, the hamster wheel, wouldn't we have gotten the results if that was really the key? And you got to ask yourself, has it worked for you? See, the problem isn't ambition. The problem is the playbook they gave you, the system that you're playing by that keeps you dependent on trading time for money and chasing stability rather than freedom. I think that freedom is your ultimate purchase. That's what we need to do. The highlight, you know of all these kinds of things is that if we start to just look at the number of people that are living paycheck to paycheck, living in debt, rising expenses, all those things that society has normalized.

Is crazy, but that's the pool we're playing in.

What if the life you dream about isn't about working harder? And I know it's cliche, but it's about working smarter. It's about building a system that works for you, that actually gives you freedom. Okay, because I think that's what it is, is that, that when we start to look at it, say, wait a second, there are aspects of the current system that, that work. There are aspects of the current system that are good, but then there's aspects of the current system that maybe hold us down, hold us back, and keep us dependent on, on that, that paycheck to paycheck kind of debt rising expenses mentality. So what I want to do is I want to break that down for you. I want you to break free from that and I want to give you a new playbook. And that is where my Freedom framework comes in. I'm going to break it down. It's not about listen, it's not about quick fixes, it's not about hacks. It's about following a proven process that will walk you down a path that will lead to financial independence and ultimately financial freedom step by step. Okay, so let's do this. I'm gonna break it down for you. Freedom is an acronym. It stands for something. I'm gonna break down each of the elements of the Freedom Framework for you. And the first F for freedom is foundation. We have to stabilize our finances to begin with. We have to have a strong financial base. If you watch me for any length of time, you will hear me say these words that my job is to create safety first, an unshakable foundation first, and growth second. That's what this is about. It's about sitting back and saying, how do I stabilize what is going on in my financial life? How do I know where my money's coming from, where my money's going? Well, you track it. Okay, so the actions here in the foundation element is this, is that I need you to start tracking your numbers, tracking every dollar that comes in, tracking every dollar that goes out to sit back and say, every time I spend something.

Is it a. Is it a want? Is it a need, Is it a luxury? And I want you to track it in a different way. And, and so I would take and get three to six Months worth of your bank statements, your credit card statements. And I would get different colored highlighters, and I would mark, I would. I would. I would color code everything. So if it. If it. Say if it is a need, you're going to color code it green. And a need is something that is necessary for your survival. It's your medical, it's your food, it's your. Your clothing. Not luxury clothing, it's your clothing. It's transportation. Not luxury transportation. It's transportation. It's the roof over your head, your shelter. Okay? It's the stuff you need for survival. Because here's what we know. When we know that our survival is taken care of, we will find.

Stability. And so. So I want to know what it takes each and every month for your survival. So I'm going to color code everything for needs, maybe in green. I'm going to color code everything that I actually don't need that is optional and I not using it. Maybe it's a gym membership, a subscription, things that. I'm going to color code that in red because I'm going to cancel that. I'm going to use it for other things. Hey. And then I'm going to color code the. The wants, the desires, the luxuries in yellow. Okay? So I want to track everything because now we have the ability to make decisions around it and stabilize the finances. We now know where our money is going. We know where our money's coming in from. We want to optimize and maximize our income. We want to optimize and minimize our expenses. Now, let me be really clear here. I do not believe that you live a fulfilled rich life through deprivation. But I do believe that you will live a rich life with freedom when you bring discipline into it. So what I'm talking about is creating a plan that gives you the discipline, the permission to do the things that actually, actually move the needle in your life, not just emotional spending and things like that. So that's what we're doing here is in this foundation element, is that I just want to stabilize the foundation. I want to know where my money's coming in from, where it's going. I want to cut the things out that don't. I don't need. I want to take that piece of it and now use it to start building other things. So if I find that I have extra money and I need to find extra money, I mean, that's the bottom line. And the way you're going to find extra money are one of two ways. By cutting expenses or increasing income It There isn't a. This is a little bit of tough love. There isn't a magic formula. The math will always math. If $2 coming in and $3 are going out, we're in debt by a dollar, okay? I wish our government understood this, okay? If $2 are coming in and $1 is going out, we have a dollar to do something with, okay? An extra dollar to invest, to do other things with. It's the only way the math works out. And so I know people say I don't want a budget because I don't like it. Well, I don't like budgets or diets either. But I do like plans because a plan is a permission to move you towards the target that you want. And so we need to start doing that because that's where we start to see the leaks. We patch the holes, we stop the leaks, and we start the growing. Okay? That's F R stands for routine. Remember, your ability to build wealth is far more driven by behaviors, habits and decisions than it ever is by your money, okay? That means that the routines that you have, I want to make your financial.

The positive financial routines as easy as possible. I want to make the negative.

Financial routines as hard as possible. You'll hear me use the term frame friction, okay? I want as little friction in my investing and growth and wealth building as possible. I want as much friction in my spending debt and everything as possible. So I want to create systems that allow my fan, my finances and everything to work effortlessly. This is where we bring automation in and optimize it. So once we know where every dollar is going and everything, now I want you to automate it. I want you to sit back and make your bill paying automatic, your savings automatic, and your investing automatic. If you're not sure about where every dollar goes, I want you to get my book Building your money machine. In chapter 12, I break it down in something called the wealth priority ladder. I literally tell you how to allocate each dollar as it comes into your world, okay? To maximize and optimize your wealth building journey. So I want to automate my savings, I want to automate my bill payments. I want to take all that friction out so there is no decision fatigue, there are no emotions involved. It is happening automatically. That also means that the money that goes into my investing accounts is also automatically invested in index funds and things like that. So out of sight of my mind. When money comes into our world, into my world, into my wife's world, automatically it goes to the proper accounts without us trying to deal with it, it automatically gets transferred, then it automatically gets invested. It automatically pays the bills so I don't have to think about it. I'm not going to miss a bill. I'm not going to be late on a bill. I'm not going to incur fees. I'm not going to do any of that. I'm also not going to miss funding my retirement or funding my investments. It's all going to happen automatically. So automation is the path that takes and turns good intentions into consistent actions. And it removes the stress of daily decision making. Now all of a sudden, those patterns, those habits, those behaviors will just become ingrained. And before you know it, you'll look back 3, 4, 5, 10 years and go, oh, my God, look what we've accumulated. So the R is about routine. The first E is about expand, okay? In order to build wealth, we need as large a shovel as possible. It's easier to build wealth when you have a big shovel of income. So I want to multiply your income streams. I want you to start to look at, how am I getting paid? How do I get paid more? How do I get additional income in. Because it is the fuel to build the money machine. If I talked about this in the book that we are, we have been raised in an earnings mentality. Go get a good job. Go get a, a good degree. Go get a good profession. Go get a. Go build a good business. Make money, make money. Make money, make money. How many of you have heard that? You've all heard it. I heard it. Get a good job, make some money, make some money. As if making money is the solution. It's not. It's not. How many people do we know that make a lot of money and they're on the verge of bankruptcy? Because it's not the making the money that matters. Now, I know people will say, yeah, but it's not how much you make, it's how much you keep. You know what? It's not even how much you keep that matters. It's how much of your money that is working for you that matters. And so having, having a bigger shovel of income, the money coming in, we have the ability to take and put more of it to work for us faster. And it gets us up the, the wealth creation curve a lot faster. So it's the finance, it's the fuel for your financial engine. So that might mean that you look at it and say, hey, I got some extra time. Maybe I'll start a side hustle. Maybe I'll do a freelance gig. I've got Some skills, I got some talents, I have some passions, I have some hobbies that I might be able to monetize for the time being. And then as you start to build your assets and your portfolio, you can generate additional income that I call leveraged income. I don't like the term passive income, because I don't ever want you to be passive about your wealth and your income. I want you to leverage it. In other words, I don't want you to always have to be efforting to drive the income we make. You know, we make well into the multiple six figures and seven figures, depending on which income streams you look at. Really? Without my effort? Without my effort, it could be. It could be that as you start to multiply your income streams, you could be putting digital courses together, you could be doing tutoring, you could have portfolio income, dividend income, you could be creating rental income. There's a lot of different ways to do this, but the more we have income coming from sources that don't require our efforts, the more freedom we have in our lives. That's the beauty of the money machine. But at the beginning, the only thing we have is the value we create through the efforts we have because we haven't built the assets. So we want to take those efforts, the knowledge, the skills, the strengths and everything we know, and put it out in the world in a way that we get paid our worth. Okay? And that also means that in this stage is where you start to evaluate your skills. Are there new skills that you can bring to the table that raise your value in the marketplace, raise your value in the job? You don't, as hard as it is, I don't think you're entitled to a raise at a job just because you serve time.

You're entitled to a raise because you brought more value to the table. That's the way economics work. It is a value exchange. You know, once you're at the market rate of compensation, anything additional is because you brought additional value to the table. And when you bring additional value to the table, you become invaluable to the company. So. So you're not as susceptible to layoffs, job losses and things like that, demotions and all that stuff. So this is the time where you start to invest in yourself. Skill up. What are new skills that you can bring to this table? You know, whether it's AI and other things, what can you learn that allow you to set yourself apart in a distinct way and bring more value to the solutions you create? Because here's what I know. Relying on a Single income stream becomes extremely risky. The pandemic played that one out. But diversification in assets is great to reduce risk. But diversification in income not only reduces risk, it can accelerate your wealth and give you security. All right, that leads me to the second E in freedom, and that is to elevate leverage your investments for growth. Okay, this is about.

Now. I am starting to put money away. I'm following the wealth priority ladder in, in building your money machine. And now I need to put and get the money and the assets working harder for me than I did for it. In other words, it's got to outpace inflation. It's got to build growth. You cannot save your way to wealth. Okay, let me run some numbers for you. Someone that puts away $5,000 a year does it for 40 years. Say they start at 25 and end at 65. At retirement age, they put 200, $200,000 away at $5,000 a year. If they did it in an s and P500 fund and they got an average return of 8%. Okay. And the long term average is 9 to 11%. Let's just use 8%. Okay. After 40 years and putting 200,000 away, they will end up with a sum total of around a million and a half. Do. Not bad on a $200,000 investment. But if you save that money, if you just put it into a money market fund or a CD and you're getting 2% instead of 8%, you don't end up with a million and a half, you end up with 300,000. So in one case, you make, you know, six times over, six times the amount you put in. In the other case, you only make 50, 50% more, half more. You can't save your way to wealth. We have to put our assets, our dollars and the income to work for us. So it starts to drive additional income. When we start to see that the level of income from our assets, our, our invested portfolio, our money machine, is driven greater than the income from our efforts. That's true freedom. That's what we want. That also means that it's important for you to understand at this stage the difference between assets and liabilities. Okay? Assets are the things that grow wealth. Assets are the things that create cash flow. Liabilities are the things that drain wealth. They take cash flow. Liabilities are like debt, credit cards, mortgages, things like that. But an asset, remember what I said, it increases your wealth, it increases your cash flow. So I, as much as we live in a beautiful home, it's a very valuable home. I do not look at it as part of my money machine because it's not producing any income for me. It's costing me every month to have the home. So when I look at my money machine, I want to look at it through the eyes of investable assets that generate income, that allow me to generate income without my efforts. Okay? Now, don't get me wrong. Having a home is an asset in your net worth. It's just not an asset in your money machine. Investing literally turns your money into a team of employees that work for you even while you sleep. They work seven days a week, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. They do not take vacations, they do not take sick time, and they will not unionize. They are the best employees in the world. Put them to work for you. All right, that leads me to the D. D is about discipline. Remember, I said it's behaviors, it's. It's habits, it's decisions, discipline. Staying focused and consistent here is important. Now, one of the easiest ways to make this happen is to have yourself a dynamic and detailed financial plan. I'm not talking about some spreadsheet. Now, if you. If that's all you got, it's better than nothing. But you need a plan. Now, some people will say, well, oh, you mean a budget. No, I mean a plan. A plan that says, here's. Here's where I am. Here's my current reality. Here's the vision I have and where I want to go. And there's this gap in between. The plan, the budget, all that stuff is totally meaningless until it gives us the path to go from where we are to where we want to go. It's the path that matters. And the path is born out of having the right detailed, dynamic plan. And what it allows you to do is then to look to the plan to help you with your choices. It allows you to forget and avoid distractions. So when there's an emotional response to buy something, you look at the plan and go, does it get me closer to the goal? And if the answer is no, then I don't spend it. But in the plan, it's important for you to put in what I call joy points. In other words, sustainable things that bring you joy. There's a reason that in diets, they give you cheat days. It's not to cheat, is to keep you on the plan. It's the same thing with a financial plan. I want to make sure that we build in the things that you love into the plan so you have something to look forward to. You have something that you're enjoying on the journey. If you're not enjoying the journey to financial freedom, you will never enjoy the destination of it. We need to be on that. That's why one of the big things, one of the big line items in our plan is travel, because my wife and I love travel. We just booked an amazing trip, another amazing trip to Italy. We're going to north North Italy. And. But that's part of our joy points. So you build it in and make sure that you're doing that. Okay? It allows you to make that happen. And having the right plan keeps you focused, keeps you moving forward, gives you something to evaluate against and to make decisions against. And it allows you then to not fall back to your old habits, because the discipline of following the plan and tracking to a plan will move you each and every day closer to the freedom and the financial freedom you're looking for. All right, that leads me to O. O is about ownership. Build and protect your wealth. Take control of your financial future and safeguard your progress. That's the key. Now, you can use advisors. I have a team of advisors. Now, do they take. Do they run everything for me? No, I am. They are. They're my second chair. I have my hands on the wheel. You need to have your hands on the wheel of your financial ship. You are the captain of it. Anyone that you have in your life, whether it's me, whether it's an advisor, whether it's an accountant, they are your second chair. They're helping you navigate. They're helping you avoid pitfalls. They're helping you optimize, but they are not making the choices. They don't love your financial future more than you. You do.

So we take ownership of it. We protect it. We diversify the investments. We set up asset allocation to protect us and reduce risk. We insure things to make sure that we don't lose our assets to losses, natural disasters, and things like that. We make sure that we're structured properly to avoid the loss from lawsuits. We make sure that we use the tax laws to our advantage to make sure that we don't overpay our taxes. We make sure that all of our financial decisions are coming from a place of ownership and protecting and building that wealth. That's what ownership is about. And then the M is mastery. It's about achieving that element of financial freedom. It's that transition from building to living a life of purpose and living legacy. Now, I believe that your life of purpose and your legacy is lived along the way. It's not something that you arrive at and go, I'm here. It's lived each and every moment of your life in the way you show up, in the way you interact, in the way you're generous, in the way you live. And it's not about leaving a legacy, it's about living a legacy. But you get a chance to, if you follow this and things that I teach you will get a chance to find your path to financial freedom, where you live a life that is truly of choice to do the things you want to do, when you want to do them, how you want to do them, with who you want to do them. It's about being in control of your time, having agency of it. We don't want the big bank accounts. We want the ability to make choice and the richness that comes along with it to be able to create experiences. And it's in this stage that you have the income that is generating way more income without your efforts than you would on the outside. In other words, the money machine will continue to grow. My, our money machine continues to grow without our efforts. And it grows at a faster pace than the money that I am making through my efforts. True freedom isn't about the money, it's about the choice. It's about the fulfillment. It's about the impact. Okay, now that's, that's the freedom framework. There are some other little things. Why do people get stuck? Why do people stay stuck? I think there's some common mistakes that come into play. I want to hit on those before I close this out because I don't want to be pollyanned about it. Is that one of the common mistakes we talked about is they rely solely on one income stream. It's a salary. They work for 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, and they think that's enough. And it could be depending on your income. But it's more important is what are you doing with that income? Them. There's a study of 10,000 millionaires. 79 of them are first generation millionaires, meaning that they earned it, they created it. In their lifetime, one third of those never made much more than a hundred thousand dollars a year. It wasn't the income they made, it was how they used it to build the money machine to put it to work for them. And the majority of those are what they call 401k millionaires. It wasn't like they hit it out of the park and they had a, had a, an Internet business that they sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. No, they're, you And I moving each day closer to financial freedom, doing the right things, following the disciplines, following the principles, following the processes, and knowing over time we get there okay. The other mistake that I see people making that keep them stuck is that they're saving but not investing. And when you do that, even with the high Yield savings Accounts, inflation's eroding your wealth. Like I showed you, you can't save your way to wealth. You have to invest it. And if you're unsure about how to invest, don't get caught up in complexity. Make it simple. You need a couple of ETFs or index funds in there and structure if you're unsure about it. I actually have a course called Investing Simplified that we'll put in the show notes if you want to take a look at it and join in that course. I walk you through how to look at the funds, what to, how to set up the accounts, everything. And it's what I do. It's basically what I do. Okay. And the third, I think common mistake is they don't have a clear plan. I think that we all need a dynamic, detailed plan with which allows us to measure how we're doing, to know that we're on path to or know that we're going to a specific target. Okay? That's the game, that's the process. It's not the ambition, it's the playbook. Okay? It's not that you're lazy, it's the playbook, it's the system. So you don't have to stay stuck. You don't have to feel like, do I have to work harder or more. Just follow the freedom framework. You can break free. You can start building your life and the life that you deserve. Here's what I want you to do. Just start. Start today. Pick one of the steps, whether it's tracking your spending, whether it's automating your savings, whether it's understanding and figuring out a side hustle. Figure out what your first step is. Tell me what that step is. Just, and do that. Put it in the calendar, schedule it. Don't just think about it, schedule it.

The life you dream of is possible. You're not lazy. You just need the right plan. You need the right system. Let's build the money machine together. All right? I hope that this helps. I hope that this gets you moving forward and, and doesn't get you critical of where you are, because it doesn't matter where you are. That's where you're starting from. It's where we're going. That's where the beauty is. All right, if I can help you in any way, make sure that you, you reach out, post your comments, post your questions, keep on this journey with me. You don't have to do this alone. It's not a solo pursuit. That's why I have this channel. If you're not subscribed, subscribe to it. Also invite people, share this out, and let's do this as a community. I truly believe that financial freedom is your birthright. We just have to go claim it. And we happen to live in a society that doesn't want to talk about wealth, doesn't want to talk about money. That stops here. That's what this is about. That's what this season of service for me is about to have these conversations open, honest, unbiased. I don't sell insurance. I don't sell investments. I hope to sell you on your dreams. All right. Till I see you in another episode or on your road to financial freedom, always, always strive to live a life outlet.

Thank you for listening to the affluent entrepreneur show 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 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 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.