Is it too Late for You to Get Rich?

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. Do you ever feel like, gosh, I wish I would have started sooner, or is it too late to become rich? Well, the short answer is no. And the second short answer is, what's your alternative? Well, in this episode of the Affluent Entrepreneurship, we'll break it down for you. No matter what your age or stage or circumstance in life, what I want you to focus on to move you forward and why. Maybe you feel like you're late, but I don't think you are. I'll see you in the episode.

All right. I have no idea where you are on your journey to financial freedom, but I get it. Because all of us at some level, start to think, oh, my gosh, I wish I would have started earlier. And yeah, you're right, the more time we have, the less money we need to build wealth. The less time we have, the more money we need to build wealth. It's a math equation that we got to work out. But the feeling around, oh, I'm too late to get rich or anything like that is something I want to deal with. Because what that tendency is that when we feel that we choose not to do anything about it. And it's a feeling primarily because I think that we're running someone else's race. And so I think that what we need to do is look at six things. I'm going to break some things down for you to start to make sure that you're on your own race to doing your own thing, to build wealth, your own way to make it happen. Now, here's the thing.

Even if, whether you're in your 40s, your 50s, even your 60s, you could be sitting there, I wish I'd have started early. I wish I started. And all of a sudden say, I wish I started at 12 years old. Okay, I've got a. I've got a kid, Henry, who is. He's not my kid, but he's. He happened to join one of my programs at 16 and a half years old when we had A conversation, and he decided to join. And he's going through it. And then literally about nine months ago, we're on one of our calls and he said he got a job. What do I do? And I said, great, you got a job. How old are you? And he said, now he says, I'm 17. Perfect. We're going to open up a Roth IRA. So he opens up a Roth IRA. Literally a month ago, we're on another call and he says to me, hey, I got a question. I funded the Roth ira, but I don't know how to invest it now. I said, okay, you're still 17. He says, no, I'm 18 now. I said, cool. I said, you're 18 years old. You funded the Roth IRA. How much did you fund it with? And I'm thinking, I'm thinking he's 18 years old.

So he might have funded it with $500, maybe $1,000. He says, no, no, no, no. I fully funded 2023. What? He says, oh, and I already funded 2024. I go, hold on a second. You're telling me that you put $6,500 away for 2023 and you put $7,000 away for 2024 at 18? And he says, yeah, I live at home. I don't have very many expenses. Yeah, no kidding. Oh, my God. So here's this 18 year old that put $13,500 away.

I said, let me do some math for you. If we just invested in an S&P 500 fund, that 13,000 will go up over a hundred times. 105, 106 times. Okay, you're already a millionaire. That 135 is going to turn into a million one, a million two, a million three if you did nothing more. Nothing more. But we're not going to stop here. We're going to continue going. And the only thing we got to avoid is stupid. And I'll help you avoid stupid, and I'll help you continue going. So bottom line is this. Do I wish I was Henry? Yes. Do I wish I started at 10? Yes. Do I wish I started at 2 if I could? Yes. But we can't take time back. We are where we are. So we start where we at. If you're 20, you're 30, you're 40, you're 50 or 60. We get in the game because the one thing we do know is you cannot win the wealth game if you're not on the field. You can't be on the sidelines, you can't be in the stands. You got to be Playing the game. And even if you sat back and said, I'm a little late, I wish I started earlier.

What'S the alternative to just not do anything? To give up? To throw your hands up and say, I'm done and I'm going to. Then what? Submit to government assistance? Submit to. To having to live on your children's couch? No, no, no, no. We don't do that. We sit back and we say, let's understand the formula for building wealth and financial freedom. Let's work the formula to our benefit, no matter our age, our stage, or our circumstances. If I know that that is a mathematical formula, then I got to figure out the inputs and it is a mathematical formula. Now, that doesn't mean that it will be easy, but it is simple. But just because there's some difficulty doesn't make it impossible, is it? You might have a steep hill to climb. Certainly you might have a big boulder to push. Absolutely. But we can still push it and we can still climb it. And if we only get halfway up that hill, we're still halfway better than we would have if we didn't try. So I don't think that the alternative is to just throw your arms up. I think the only alternative is to get on the field, get in the game, and build it from wherever we're at. All right, so here's the thing. I'm going to walk through some six things here to help you kind of navigate this and hopefully bring this home for you. But first things first, is, like I said, I think that this feeling comes from running someone else's race. And the first thing is this idea of comparison. Okay? Now, comparison is fine. The question is, who and what are we comparing to? The problem is, in today's socially connected world, I can pick up my phone and I can look at someone's facade of their perfect life. You know, their coiffed hair, their. You know, their. Their perfect existence on here through filters that says, I live a perfect life, and now we feel bad about ourselves. See, what we're doing is we're comparing our current existence to someone else's dream, someone else's facade, someone else's journey instead of running our own race. What our comparison, where the meaningful comparison is, is not to others. This is the keeping up with the Joneses type of mentality. Look, the Joneses. The Joneses are broke, okay? So just because your neighbor got a brand new Denali or Porsche doesn't mean you have to go get it. There isn't this race because that race takes you to the poor house that race takes you to. A life of not being fulfilled because you're doing things that aren't in your lane. So the only comparison we should be comparing to at this stage is to compare ourselves to our prior self, to look at how far we've come, to look at where we started our journey. Where were we yesterday, a month ago, a year ago?

And look at it from that perspective. When we compare to our prior self we are building now, that also means that what we need to know is, where do we want to go? Okay, where do we want to go? And this is. This kind of adds to it. This number two is that set your dreams. I made this mistake in the sense that I did not completely define, specifically, vividly define what I had as a vision for my life. In my book, Building youg Money Machine, one of the first things that we do is we help you define what you want for your life, not just money. Because the money isn't what we want for our life. The money is the vehicle that funds what we want for our life. So let me say that again. The money is the vehicle that funds what we want for our life. So we define our life, our health, our relationships, our family, spirituality, our business, all that, the lifestyle, all those things. You define that, then you put the price tag on it. Now the money comes in to fit that price tag. That's the game that you're playing. The challenge is that we don't take time to define what that finish line looks like. We don't take time to define what that life looks like. And when we don't take time to do that, we tend to fall prey to living someone else's life. To live the expectations of society, to live expectations of media, to sit back and say, oh, I got this degree, so I must go that way, or there's a professional path that I should follow. Or my parents or my siblings, all these other external forces that start to direct the path that we're going to go, and it isn't ours. And then we get to those waning years of our life. And Bronnie Ware wrote a book, the Seven Regrets of Dying. She was a hospice nurse. And one of the biggest regrets that people had was that they got to those last days of their life and they realized they lived someone else's life. What a travesty. I don't want that for you. So one of the first things when we start to talk money is to talk about why and what you want from your life. And so now, beyond comparing to your Prior self. We focus on the dream that you want. We get clear on the dream that you want. We get clear on the values that you have. We get clear on the things that bring you sustainable joy, the things that I call joy points in your life. When you're clear on that vision, when you're clear on. On the values and you're clear on the joy points you make, those the priorities, notwithstanding what anyone else is doing now, whatever you hear on the media, social media, TikTok, Instagram, anything else, you are focused on that. And as long as it's moral, legal, and you're not hurting people, go for it. I don't care if it's a tent in Montana. I don't care if it's a yacht in Monaco. I'll take the yacht in Monaco though it is. That's the path you're on, and that's what you're evaluating, is you're living your lane. When we get out of our lane, we start to feel behind. When we get out of our lane, we start to not feel good. When we get out of our lane, we stop running our race. We start running someone else's race. Okay, that leads me to number three, because this is something that can weigh heavy on us. Leave the past. Leave the past in the past, y'. All. Whatever decision you made to this point, you made it for a reason. You made the best decision you could based on the information you had. And for whatever reason you were meant to make those decisions, to prepare you for this moment, to make better decisions. Leave it in the past. If we stand here and beat ourselves up because of decisions that we should have, could have, and would have liked to make in the past, we. We won't move forward in the future. We're stuck in the past. When I lost one third of everything I owned in that Ponzi scheme, had I sat back and just beat myself up now, trust me, I did for a little bit. But if I stayed there, one, I wouldn't be doing the show. Two, I wouldn't have had the book out. Three, we wouldn't be having these conversations. Four, I would not be anywhere close to the financial position I'm in today. The past happened for a reason. We may not understand it at the time, and we can only understand it possibly looking backwards after decades, after years like I have. The Ponzi scheme, the loss of one third of everything I owned, the need to try and rebuild was a horrible, horrible thing. But it is the gift that allowed me to build the rules, the criteria, and the Things So it doesn't happen to you to build wealth, to rebuild wealth. I rebuilt it, tripled what I lost within 18 months. That's the thing that I think that we need to understand. The challenge is that, that we want to bring the past with us. That's a heavy, heavy set of baggage to carry. So whatever happened in the past, we don't blame ourselves. We accept, we accept it, we have accept our role in it. We find the lessons in it and we move forward from it. And until we do, it's going to, it's going to burden us. So we leave the past in the less in the past, but we bring the lessons along for the ride. All right, that leads me to number four.

And number four is a lot of times we feel it's because we don't have la, we have lack of results, y'. All. Wealth creation. Wealth creation is a long term game. If you make wealth quickly, you lose it quicker. There's a reason that people that win the lottery end up broke a couple years later. And I don't know all the stats on it, but. But by and large, the reason for it is they did not create the skills to, to steward that kind of wealth. One of the challenges is that $100,000, your first $00,000 of wealth, is the hardest threshold to get past. Why is that? Why does it seem like that? Well, because here's the thing. You cannot. In order to build that hundred thousand dollars of wealth, you have to develop new habits, you have to develop new decisions, you have to develop a new understanding, you have to develop new skills. All those things that you didn't develop, you are building muscle. You are developing all these muscles to do that thing that you've never done before. Now once you've done it, you just expanding on it. You're not starting from scratch. And so there's a couple things that happen here. Is that lack of fast results, or let's put it another way, lack of patience. We think that it should happen overnight. It doesn't happen overnight. There's something called the wealth creation curve. It is a curve. So one of the mistakes that people will make is they think wealth is linear. It's not a straight line. Wealth doesn't go in a straight line. It doesn't go like this. That's not what happens with wealth. Wealth is a curve and it does that and it starts off slow. This is something called the flatline that I talk about. And so there is this element at the beginning stages that goes through slow, where you're putting Money in. You're literally putting money in.

Every week, every month, every day, whatever it is. And you're not really seeing the fruits of your labor. You're sitting back and saying this really isn't working and you're not getting fast results. You're looking at it from that perspective. You look back after five years and you say, oh my God, I made 67 bucks. Mel doesn't know what he's talking about. Why am I following this guy? Trust me, I know what I'm talking about. Here's the problem. At the beginning, you will not see fast results because what you're doing is you're compressing a spring. You're compressing the spring, you're compressing a spring. It's getting tight, it's getting tight, it's getting tight. And once you release the spring right about here year, you now hit the acceleration zone. But you'll never get there. This is the place where your money is working harder for you than you did for it. That's the subtitle of my book, building your money machine. How to get your money to work harder for you than you did for it. The bottom line is this, is that I gotta get in the game. I have to eat up this piece, the flat line. And the only thing that's going to eat this up is a four letter word called time. That's what it requires. And when we do that, now all of a sudden we, we start to move on the curve and we get to the acceleration zone. When we get to that acceleration zone, that's when things move faster. Watch what happens. This is an analysis that my friends at the money guy show did. And I just love the numbers. I'm going to, I'm going to throw the numbers out at you so you understand it and everything. But to give credit where credit's due. I said that to make the first hundred thousand is, is the most difficult. Well, assume that you're putting $10,000 a year away at 8%, which is the S&P 500. It's going to take you 7.6 years to get to that first hundred thousand dollars. But you want to hit a million, you say, I want the millionaire. So what's it going to take? Well, by the time you hit 20.6 years, you're at half a million. So you're halfway there. But it took you 20 years to get there. 20 years to get there. You still need another half a million. What's it going to take to get that last half a million? 7.5 years. Will give you another half a million dollars. Wait a second.

It took you less time to make a half a million dollars than it took you to make the first hundred thousand. Yes, it did. Because now you're in the acceleration zone and your money's working harder for you than you did for it. That's the thing that we need to do. And so the lack of fast results gets you the feeling like you're behind. But remember, you're compressing the spring, you're building momentum and, and you're going to get that acceleration.

As you start to move forward. Now that leads me to number five. One of your biggest investments and first investments needs to be in yourself, in your growth and your development and your knowledge around money, around investing, around wealth. Getting into programs, not programs that are trying to sell you into a bunch of investments. Knowledge based, experience based, getting books. I don't sell investments. I'm not here trying to build a book of business. I don't want to get a bunch of clients. That's not what I do for a living. I speak, I teach, I serve, I help, I coach, I mentor. I don't sell insurance, I don't sell investments. I have no bias based on commissions or transactions. Okay? That's what you want. The book that I wrote was a book that meant to serve. Okay? The courses, this channel, all that stuff. Okay? And so, so I want you to look at it from that perspective and find the right mentors, the right coaches. Hopefully part of that is me and my book and some of the stuff that I'm doing. Get yourself and invest in your own growth, your own knowledge, your own wisdom so you can be informed. You're not going to be at the level that, that maybe I am. But you don't need to be. Not when you follow a system and a process that works, that is simple. Okay? But we have to invest our own growth. We do not relinquish responsibility for our financial future to advisors or to anyone else. We take control of the wheel. They can stand to the right and left, help us on the journey, but they are not steering, steering the ship. You are all right. And number six, you can't have it all now, but you can have it all in time. Here's what I mean. It's important for you to set the priorities. There's a reason. There's a reason that I say, hey, start with the vision. The vision is going to be built on your values, what you want, your dreams, your desires, and all the things that are really viscerally important to you. You start with a vision, the domains of life, as I call it in my book. And then from that vision, you create the plan, the plan to make the vision a reality. And then from that plan, we set the strategy to bring the plan to life. And from the strategy, we put the tactics in to move this forward. And from the tactics, we set some action steps to get it really going. And so we may not be able to have everything today, but over time, we should be building towards the plan and the vision so we have everything that means something to us tomorrow. All right, that's the thing. Get in the game. That's the first step. Because if you're not in the game, no matter age, stage or circumstance, you will not win the game. It's just impossible. You got to be playing the game to win the game. And so whether you think you started late, whether it feels like you're starting late, there's some things in here that I want you to go back through that make, make it feel like you're late. But get in the game. Even if I can get you 50, 60, 70% of the way to where you want to be, it is 50, 60, 70% closer than you were, than you started when you started. So it is, is important to get in the game, stay in the game long term, follow a process, follow a recipe that's proven okay, and, and build it over time. All right? I hope that this helps and I hope that you got got the understanding that it's never too late to start, it's never too late to get in the game, and that you have to be in the game to win it. And so you're going to get on the field, you're going to follow the process. And if I can help you on that journey, you reach out to me, you let me know, walk the process from my book, from my trainings, from my, my channel. And let's, let's, let's make it happen, all right? It can happen no matter age, stage or circumstances. And I'm here to guide you. Remember, I'm on a crusade. I want to light the path to financial freedom for a million families. I want one of those families to be you. All right? Till I get a chance to see you on the road, get a chance to speak to you, or maybe out when I'm speaking. Always, always strive to live a life that outlives you. See you soon. Cheers. 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 youg 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.