More Income Won't Buy Your Freedom (Here's What Will)

Give me 20 minutes and I'll fix your relationship with money. Not with another budget, not with another side hustle, but with the 5 shifts that changed everything for me, including the one that got me through the cancer without losing a single dollar. So you want to know why you're still stressed? I get it. It's not because you're not making enough. It's because you were sold a lie. The lie that more income equals more freedom. That if you just worked harder, hustled longer, earned more, eventually it would all click. It doesn't click. It never clicks because income isn't wealth. High income is just a shinier leash. And sooner you see that, the better off you are. Okay? The sooner we can change things. This is Building Your Money Machine, where we help you master your money, eliminate financial stress so you can live a life of choice. Because earning more doesn't make you free. A money machine does. And I'm your host, Mel Abraham. And after 30+ years as a CPA, an entrepreneur, a money mentor, and someone that has walked the financial freedom journey from nothing to something, broke it and had to rebuild it again, I've seen what works. And it's not about bigger numbers, it's about bigger choices. So if you're ready, let's dive in. So give me 20 minutes and I'll fix your relationship with money. I know. It's a bold claim, right? But here's the thing, I'm not gonna give you some budgeting hack or tell you to stop buying the lattes, okay? 'Cause can we please retire that conversation? 'Cause if cutting out a $7 coffee was the path to wealth, every barista in America would be a millionaire by now. So what I am gonna do though is I'm gonna share these 5 things that fundamentally had changed how I see money. And once you see them, you can't unsee them. And it's not about the thing, theories that maybe I read in a book. This is actually lived, what I did that got me through, you know, getting out of $300,000 of debt, recovering from the Ponzi scheme that wiped out 1/3 of my net worth, walking through the cancer diagnosis, and making sure that I didn't miss my son's childhood. Okay? Because I was chasing numbers at that time, and I was doing all the right things, but it was just never going to be enough. So, if you ever felt like you're doing everything right, with money and everything and still not, it's still not working. Well, I got you. All right. So let's start with shift number 1. And the first thing to realize is this, your money isn't broken. Your money story is. See, let's start here because I have to get personal when we start to think about this, because I, when I wrote my book, Building Your Money Machine, I started to look at what was my earliest money memory. And it was when I was 5 years old and I walked into the kitchen and there were my parents in a full-blown kind of argument, heated discussion, let's say it. And my dad, who's an immigrant, came to this country with literally nothing, worked harder than anyone I know. And my mom, you know, and him were going at it. And the fight was about money. I didn't know the exact topic, but I was 5 years old, so I didn't understand finances. I didn't know what a bill was, but yet I did understand something. I looked at my dad's face. It's the first time that this tower of power in my life, I saw the tension, I saw the fear, and I saw the disappointment, and I saw the tears in his eyes. And in that moment, that little 5-year-old Mel, Made a decision. See, I decided that without even knowing what I was deciding, that if I didn't make enough money, I would disappoint the people I love. Was it true? Of course not. But try telling that to a 5-year-old. Try telling that to your 5-year-old. The problem is this, is I carried that story like it was carved in stone for decades. It drove everything I did. The overwork, the focus, the obsessiveness, the hustle that never had an off switch, the constant burn, the constant hum in the background of going, it's not enough, it's not enough, it's not enough. You're not enough. Keep going, keep going. But here's what I learned. See, I've seen this with thousands of people that I've coached and myself is that you don't have money problems. You have money symptoms. The real problem, it's, it's the story that's running underneath that you don't even know is there. We don't even realize it because most of our money lessons are caught, not taught. We're never really taught money unless you're here going through some of this. But so most of it is through observation like I did. See, think about it this way. Here's how it works. You observe something. A fight, something in social media, a media, you know, some rich dude or gal stole money or was greedy, all those things. And you hear discussions like, we can't afford it, which has happened a lot in our house. We can't afford it. We can't afford it. And that kind of thing. And watching someone you lose, maybe they lose everything. They foreclosed on a house or they lost their job. See, the challenge is it's not the event that messes you up. It's the meaning that you give the event that messes you up and how you interpret it when you see it. That's what's happening in the background. And that's where our money stories come from. They come from the interpretations of the interactions that we have. And you build this whole identity around it, around an interpretation and not the facts. And that identity will quietly drive your financial decisions and your behaviors for the next 20, 30, 40 years or all your life if you're not careful. See, it creates something that I call the money set point, and you'll never rise above that until you see the story for what it is. And here's the kicker. Nobody taught us any of this. In fact, there's only like 14 states, I think, that require high school kids to even take a course on money. Why? Okay. See, when we understand this, we can take control of our financial destiny. We can look at stories through the right eyes. We can understand how to separate the interpretation from the facts. See, the question is, how did I finally see my story? Well, from my son when he was 5 years old. Same thing. Okay, I was doing something going on and he comes running in and says, "Daddy, Daddy, I drew a picture of you at school today." And I kneel down and here's this picture of me standing in front of two computer screens with a phone in each ear. Jeremy wasn't even in the picture. See, and it stopped me cold. That was this at the hands of a 6-year-old boy. I was looking at this drawing that said, wait a second, I thought from my dad's story, that fight, that if I didn't make enough money, I would disappoint the ones I loved. But in the end, I was making good money, but I wasn't doing money good. And even with the good money, I was still disappointing the ones I love, my son. I remember asking him, buddy, where are you? And he just looked at me, says, where do you think I am, Dad? Now, he didn't understand it, but boom, that drawing was a mirror. And I think that's the thing that we need to start to look at is that what are the stories that are running in your head? Where did they come from? What's the difference between the facts and the interpretation? And when it comes down to it, when you start to separate them and how do you separate them, here's what you need to do is to go back and revisit the situation. Revisit where it came from and list the facts out versus your interpretation. And the facts are what a camera without sound would see. That's it. What would the camera capture? That's the facts. Everything else, the voices and everything in your head, those are interpretations. And you have to look at it and say, what really happened? Mom and Dad were having a discussion about something that Mom wanted to do and Dad said we couldn't afford it. Dad was disappointed because he didn't want to hurt the people he loved. But the facts were that it was just a discussion about buying something. My interpretation is what gave me the story that carried me until my 5-year-old boy drew a picture and got me to realize that maybe I was looking at it wrong. So that's shift number 1 is to start asking yourself, what are the stories that are driving some of those decisions? Let's break it down. From there. Shift number 2, and this is, you know, income is the trap that nobody talks about. Once I had that wake-up call with Jeremy and the drawing he made, I started questioning everything. I started looking at things and say, how do I change the view of money and what is really driving my life? And this idea of gotta make more money, gotta make more money, gotta make more money, and that more money would be the answer to all money problems. And yet it wasn't. See, I'm not against making more money. I, in fact, I'm for it. But what I'm against is that if it's not moving you in the direction of the life that you want. So go make as much as you can. I'm rooting for you. That's what I want. But here's what nobody tells you around that, that might ruffle some feathers. Earning more does not make you free. It just makes a shinier leash Okay, so let me ask you something. Do you know people that are making $150,000, $200,000, $300,000 a year who still are stressed about money? They're still one bad month from a crisis. They're still saying, where did it all go? Yeah, you do. So do I. And you might even be one of those people. Okay? And there's no shame in that, but let's be real about what's happening. Income and wealth are two completely different things. And most of us are taught to chase income. Go get a good job, go get a good profession, go get a good career. Okay, go build a good business. Income is what you earn when you show up. Wealth is what works when you don't. That's where the whole concept of the Money Machine came into play because of the drawing that Jeremy made. See, that stat, that wakes me up when I sit back and say 58% of American workers say their retirement savings are behind. And so now you sit back and go, well, what are they doing? Roughly half the households have nothing dedicated to retirement at all. These aren't lazy people. These are people who did what they were told, the good job, the working hard, the making money, trying to max out the 401(k). And the math still isn't mathing. See, because hustle doesn't build a machine, strategy does. So what people have isn't a plan, it's a prayer with a spreadsheet. And so we need to start to think about things differently. And this is where it starts to get fun is where you start to look at it and say, wait a second, right now I'm working a job, I'm working a business, I'm an employee or a contractor and I'm making income. But unless I'm on that treadmill of earnings, I'm not making income. And until you could separate— that's what I call active income in the 5 incomes in my book, Building Your Money Machine. But until you have the ability to separate yourself from the efforts to earn the income and the income itself, you will always be imprisoned by it, trading time directly for dollars. That's the thing that needs to happen. Now, as we start to elevate and we start to make more income, we might buy some of our time back. We might leverage it by hiring people to help us out, whether it's at the house or in a business. And so now you have some systems that are starting to work, but still it requires you to work. That's the second level of income. But the next 3 levels of income is where you start to build your, your money machine and where you start to find your freedom. Asset-based income is where you start to use the income you're creating and generating to buy assets that will generate more income, real estate, equipment, things like that. Then you go to residual income. You create something, you get paid for it on a regular basis. My book, for instance, I get paid every time it sells. Courses, licensing, and I'm not going deep on these, but I want you to start thinking in terms of how do I use the income I'm generating by being on the treadmill of earnings to build these other income streams that will give me freedom down the road. And at the top rung of the 5 incomes is portfolio income. Stocks, ETFs, index funds, money that's making money for your money. That's where the money machine's built on the top 3 levels. Your goal is this, is not to just generate as much income as you can, is to generate as much income and put it to work for you at those 3 levels to start to give you the freedom. Now, it'll take some time, but once you get it and you get the machine running, it will run on its own. That's what we're talking about. Now, you may not be on the retire on the beach type of freedom yet, but you're going to get to a point where you get to live a life by choice, not by demands, not by chance. I work for my income, but I love what I do. I'm doing it all by choice. So that's the thing that we need to start to look at in a much deeper way in shift number 2 is once I started to understand the difference between income and wealth, and I started to use the income to build the wealth that didn't require my efforts, that's when I started to move myself towards freedom. That's when I was able to start being at Jeremy's football practices, track practice, taking half day off just so I can be the dad that I wanted to be. That's the difference between income and wealth. Okay. All right, so let's jump to shift number 3. Shift number 3 is that your wealth is built by your behaviors, not your brains. Okay, this is one that kind of humbled me the most because I'm a CPA, and so that's saying something. And we, we don't, we don't humble easy. Okay, and here's what happened. I spent years, I mean years, thinking that if I just got the strategy right everything would fall into place. Better returns, smarter allocation, different portfolio, tighter spreadsheets, all of it. I'm a numbers guy, and I just figured that I would get it all dialed in and started my career as an accountant, and everything adds up in neat columns and, and rows, and it's beautiful. Okay, so naturally I thought that was the answer to wealth, just better math. But that's a lie. See, at least only half the truth, if you will. Okay? Because I had a great strategy. I had the knowledge. I had a series of credentials. I was still running myself into the ground though. Working 80-hour weeks, missing dinners, missing ballgames, two phones in both ears, just like Jeremy Drew. Okay? Knowing what to do and actually doing it are two completely different universes. See, your wealth isn't built by what you know. It's built by what you do. 80% of wealth creation is behavioral. Okay? Consistently doing the right behaviors over time, especially when nobody's watching. Okay? And that Netflix is just calling your name. Okay? Here's the thing. What got me was that when I realized that more than 40% of our daily actions are driven by habits. 40% in habits that we likely didn't choose, habits that we inherited, habits that, that caught us from watching other people who were making it up as they went along too. Habits that maybe we got from social media, swiping on Instagram or TikTok. Okay, let me give you an example. I worked with a couple, young, good income, great people, and Amazon boxes were showing up at their house so fast they literally couldn't get their front door open at times. Okay, now I'm not exaggerating, okay? It was that bad. It looked like an Amazon distribution center. Every single day was like Christmas morning, except the credit card bill was more like a horror movie. See, here's what I had them do, because the bottom line is this: that was just a purchasing habit. When they were stressed, they would buy things. When they were arguing, they would buy things. When they were bored, they would buy things. That was an unconscious habit. They literally said, we're removing all the credit cards from every website. So they could not just buy, buy, buy. Remove it out of their phones so they couldn't tap, tap, tap. So it required effort and put resistance in to do it. They had to get up and go to their wallet to find the card, type in the 16 digits, the expiration code, the code on the back, and suddenly the impulse purchase didn't feel so urgent. And so this is the thing that I think we, we need to start to look at is what are the behaviors behind the purchasing, the spending, and the money. It's one of the reasons that when I have people journal their spending, I have them journal the emotions and the feelings at the same time they're journaling what they spent and what it was for. Okay. And, and so that's how I would start to look at this. Here's the principle underneath this, and this is important. Put friction in your spending and remove friction from your investing. Marketers know this. Credit card companies figured it out. That's why they gave us credit cards, not to give us credit, but to remove the friction from the buying decision. Well, let's put the friction back in. Let's make it easy for the right behaviors to take control of your life, because when we get those habits instilled, it will work for you. You just flip it. All right. Make your investing automatic. Put everything on automatic and put the friction in the buying decisions. All right. That leads me to shift number 4. When emotions go up, your financial intellect goes down. Y'all, this one hit me big. Okay. This one, I need to tattoo this on people's foreheads sometimes because I've seen it over and over again. When the emotions go up, your financial thinking goes down. When you're making financial decisions from an emotional standpoint, they're never really good. The world tells you trust your gut, follow your heart. And yeah, in relationships and creativity and choosing your pizza, maybe. But with money, the gut is a terrible financial advisor. Okay, think about it. The market drops 10% in a week, okay, and, and What does everyone do? They panic. They sell at the bottom. They lock in the losses. And then 3 months later, the market's recovered and off to the moon again, okay? Yet they're stuck standing on the sidelines. Now I'm saying they, but I did that once. It cost me millions 'cause I sat on the sidelines for decades scared to get in, okay? It's how I got caught into the Ponzi scheme is they stroke the emotions and my emotions got involved. The aspiration, the desire got involved and I made some bad decisions, lost 1/3 of everything I own. So when you look at money coming in, if there's an emotion attached to it or the spending, we have to separate it. Because if not, the lifestyle creep comes in. You get the new car, you get the new apartment, you upgrade your wardrobe. 6 months later, you're in the exact same position even though you got a raise because you spent it all on fancier stuff. Okay, that's not progress. That's just broke in a nicer outfit. Okay. See, emotions, the stock market, investing is driven by emotions, fear and greed. Fear makes you sell low. Okay. Excitement makes you spend high. Shame makes you avoid looking at what you did. Okay. And comparison, forget comparison. Comparison is the worst of all because it makes you buy things you don't need with money you don't have to impress people you wouldn't even want to have dinner with. What are we doing? And I'm not standing on a soapbox here. I lived this, I did this, and I had to finally get real with what I valued, what mattered in my life, what was important, and align my spending and my investing and everything from that perspective and give the space just as much as in the last shift to put friction in, but to give space to not allow the emotions to make the decisions. Okay? To build the systems to protect us from our worst emotional impulses. And so I set up guardrails to make that happen and make it work so I wasn't buying stuff at 2:00 AM when I couldn't sleep. So one of the things to do is to set up financial systems, automation, specific dollar assignments, making sure that every dollar has its job description and having structure in place to know exactly what the money is meant to do before it's in your hands. Because once it's in your hands, that's when we get in trouble. All right. That leads me to shift number 5. This was something that really hit home for me. It was never about the money in the first place. Okay. This, if you forget everything else that I said today, remember this one, because after all of it, the money stories, the machine, the behaviors, the emotions, I need you to hear something. And I need you to hear that it's just not up here, but you need to feel it. It's not about money. It never was. It's about the life the money makes possible. And I know that sounds like you'd put it on a coffee mug or something like that, but let me tell you why I mean it with everything in me. If all I do with this video or with my coaching, with everything that I teach, is to help you get a bigger bank account, to have a bigger brokerage account, then I flat out failed. Okay? Because the bigger bank account is with an empty bankrupt life. That's not wealth. That's not richness. Okay? That's just a high score on a game that nobody actually wins. And I know this because I lived it. I was chasing things. I was chasing a bigger number. I was looking at the accounts for validation of what it was. The account looked great, but my kid drew a picture of me without him in it. That was our family picture. See, that was the moment I realized that money was never the point. It's just a vehicle. It's not the destination. The vehicle to a life that you truly want to live so you can be present each and every day. And when you get this piece right, it helps you do the other shifts because now you're making life decisions that impact the money and not money decisions that impact your life. Here's what I want you to think about, because this is bigger than you. You have an opportunity to be the inflection point in your family tree right here, right now, today. The decisions you make, not someday but today, have the power to transform, transform not just your tomorrow, but your kids' tomorrow, your grandkids' tomorrow, the generations that you'll never meet. See, my dad came to this country with nothing, nothing. Son of an immigrant. That's me. The first business I started was at 11 years old doing magic shows for kids. Okay? But everything was done from scratch. And now, I have granddaughters running around the house making it louder, more beautiful than I ever imagined. That didn't happen by accident. It happened because somewhere along the line, someone decided to change the trajectory. Someone decided to be the inflection point, and that someone is now you. See, but here's the thing, and lean in for this. The inflection doesn't come from a bigger paycheck. It comes from alignment. When your money is aligned with your values, when your wealth is in service of your vision, when your system is built in a way that it reflects what you actually are, who you actually are, and what you actually care about, that's when everything shifts. That's not just financial, that's everything. Your energy changes, your clarity changes, your presence changes, your relationships change. You stop running and you start living. And when that happens, you're not just building a money machine, you're building that life that outlives you. You're living your legacy today and beyond, and you're leaving a legacy behind because you've built it and you've allowed them to experience it within you. Something that you get to live every single day. So, here's what I want to leave you with. When you fight for financial freedom, and it is a fight, don't fight for the number. Fight for the Tuesday morning where you wake up with nowhere to be except exactly where you want to be. Fight for the school play. You'll never miss. Fight for the ability to say yes to what matters or no to what doesn't. Fight for the moment your kid draws a family picture and this time everyone's in it. Your time is your greatest currency, not your dollars. Time. And every dollar you get working for you instead of the other way around, it buys back more of that one thing that you can never make more of. And that's time. So yes, build the machine, fix the story, change the habits, set up the guardrails, but never ever forget the why. Because retirement isn't a number, it's choice. And financial freedom isn't a dream, it's a system. A system that exists for one reason: to hand you back your time so you can spend it on the people and the things that actually matter. See, it's not about the money. It's about the life the money makes possible. And you, you watching right now, you deserve that life. So, go build it. All right? 5 Shifts: The Money Story to Running the Show. You see it? Okay? Income isn't wealth. Build the machine instead. Behaviors beat strategy every single time. Emotions will hijack your money. If you let them. Build guardrails. And above everything else, remember this: that it's never about the money, it's about the life. If one of these landed for you, just one, drop it in the comments. I'd love to hear from you. Tell me which shift meant something to you. Tell me which one resonated with you. All right, I can't wait to hear what you say. I'd love to have the conversation for you. Until I get a chance to see you in the next one, on your journey, on your path to financial freedom. As I always say, always, always strive to live a life that outlives you. See you in the next one. Cheers for now.