My Honest Advice To Anyone Who Wants To Get Rich

You ever wonder why so many people are working harder than ever and they still feel broke? Yeah, me too. Here's the twist, though. They're not failing because they're lazy. They're failing because they're financially directionless. And the fact is, yet you can't hit a target you never aimed for. So today, I'm going to give you the raw, the unfiltered truth about what it really takes to get rich. You know, and spoiler alert is this. It's not about working more or hoarding cash or landing the next big promotion. This is building your money machine, where we teach you how to master your money, eliminate financial stress so you can live a life of choice. Because here's what we know. Earnings and earning more doesn't make you free, but a money machine does. And that freedom, it doesn't start with your next raise. It starts the moment you get your money to work harder for you than you do. Think of this as your financial education with a bit of sarcasm, but a whole lot of heart. And I'm your host, Mel Abraham. And after 30 plus years of a financial advisor, CPA, and working with folks on building their journey to financial freedom, I've seen some things. And in this episode, I'm sharing with you the nine non negotiables for building true wealth. Plus maybe a few uncomfortable truths that might rattle your comfort zone a bit. So no fluff, no flexing. Just real talk, real tools. All right, let's do this. So you want to get rich. Let me save you a few decades because you certainly don't get rich by accident, and you sure don't get rich by working harder. See, I'm not here to sell you on hustle, culture and all of that stuff. I'm here to show you how do you build freedom. Okay, so let's jump in. The first thing that I think we need to do, and one of the things that a lot of people don't do is you got to know your destination. That's the first thing. It's like, if you don't have a picture of your ideal life, how the heck are you going to build it? How are you supposed to know that? My book, building your money Machine, we talk about this. I build in and help people build what I call their money machine vision. Now, this isn't about what's the bank account. It's actually what's the life account. It's to look at the domains of your life. Your health, your relationships, your family, your friendships, your career, your profession, your spirituality, all of that and then start to put a price tag on it. What does that actually look like when you're free? Because now you start to look at and say, I'm not looking to design an account. I'm looking to design a life that makes sense to me. You know, I remember back in my CPA days when I was doing the work, that I thought that success was just a bigger paycheck. And I realized really quickly that it was just a bigger paycheck and life didn't get any better, and life wasn't more fulfilling until I started to look at it and say, how do I use the bigger paycheck or the paycheck? I had to start to move towards the dream, the life that I wanted, because otherwise I was using someone else's blueprint. So here's what I want you to do in this is I want you to write down what your dream day looks like. I mean, specifically, what. Where are you? What do you. What do you smell? What do you feel? What do you see? Who are you with? What does it cost? All the things. Now, you might have to make some assumptions here, but we start to get a picture that gets more and more vivid as time goes on, as you start to. To build it. Because if your dream life, when you start to draw it out, if your dream life looks like $8,000 a month or $10,000 a month, and you're out chasing some $10 million number buddy, that's like buying a yacht to sail in a bathtub. It doesn't work. So what we want to do is go towards the destination that we are looking for, not something that was given to us. And in fact, I have a tool that makes it easier to understand the calculations. It's called the Lifestyle Cost Calculator. I'll put the link down below, but it'll allow you to start putting numbers in to calculate what that lifestyle looks like. And you can grab it@melabraham.com lifestyle if you want, but I'll put the link down below. All right, that leads me to number two. If we know the destination, we also need to know something else. And that is what is our why wealth without a purpose is just a shinier treadmill. That's it. And I know a lot of people that are on that shiny treadmill, and they keep running faster, longer, harder. I was one of them until Jeremy drew that picture of me standing in front of two computers with a phone in each ear. It hit me in the gut to realize that I was doing the wrong thing. I wasn't focusing on the things that actually mattered. And so the question is, why do you want the wealth? It's one of the first questions I ask when someone says, I want a million dollars, I want 10 million, I want, I want 100 million. I don't care what the number is. My first question is, why? Why? Because money is a result. It's not a purpose. And it's the purpose that drives the result. And you start to understand what are the things that actually matter for you? So in this one, I want you to ask yourself, who are you doing this for? Why are you doing this? What becomes possible if you hit these numbers? What movements, what missions can you get behind? How will it change your family's life? What is driving the fulfillment, the joy in your life? It's not the number, it's something else. It's something bigger. Because when you have that bigger purpose, it'll also help you when you start to have struggles or obstacles or resistance or frustrations. And it'll happen because that's what happens with life. So the first two is really understanding where you're going. And the second part of that is to know why you're going there. That leads me to number three. Number three is this. You got to have debt discipline. Debt isn't evil, okay? But undisciplined debt, that's financial quicksand, all right? And in the book, when I start to talk about the journey to financial freedom, we go through stability, security, independence, and freedom. Those are the four gateways that we go through. But in the stability thing gateway, we're really looking at how do you cut the debt? How do you create a unshakable financial foundation? And the reality is that credit card debt, especially today at 20 plus percent interest carrying balances will destroy your wealth. I mean, this. So what we need to do is if you are sitting in debt, we need to make sure that you're on a debt payment plan. We need to make sure that you're either using the snowball or avalanche method to make sure that you're methodically, in an accelerated pace, paying that debt off. And when I say debt discipline, it's really about, are you using debt for the right things? Okay, and here's what I mean by this. There is productive debt and there's destructive debt. Productive debt is the debt you use to create wealth and to create cash flow that allows you to leverage your wealth. So it could be a mortgage on a rental property. Destructive debt, on the other hand, is consumables. It's to Finance your lifestyle. It's the expensive vacations that you can't cash flow. It's the car that you're financing over seven or eight years. It's the big screen TVs, it's all the, the buy now, pay later stuff that's going on, okay, that's lifestyle, that's consumerism at its worst. That debt, that debt will destroy you. And that's the thing that we need to avoid. So when you look at debt discipline, we have to look at what do we have in balances, how do we make sure that we get those paid off? One, two, we got to look at that we aren't continually using debt as the vehicle to support a lifestyle we can't support. And, and three, that we turn around and start to tackle the high interest debt first. No shame, but just start to build it. Because if we don't, carrying balances with high interest rate, it's like trying to run a marathon with bowling balls in a backpack. Okay? It's going to get tiring. We can't get ahead in doing that. So that's number three. Number four is something that I wrote about and I talk about called the wealth priority pathway. Here's what I've seen many people, including myself, most everything that I teach is because I learned the hard way. I made it, I made mistakes, I screwed it up and I figured it out. So I don't want you to make the same mistakes. So one of the things that we have been indoctrinated into in our society is this consumerism culture where we look at lifestyles. So what people will do is they make money, they spend money on their lifestyle and then they see what's left. And based on what's left, that's what they invest. In other words, your ability to build your future is based on what is left over after you've taken care of your lifestyle today. And that's a mistake. That's taking care of your future on the scraps, whatever's left over. And when you look at wealthy people, when you look at those that have truly built wealth, they reversed it. They made money, they invested first. They took care of their future first. They made investing the priority. And whatever was left over is what they used to create their lifestyle. Now I can hear you right now. I can hear the trolls, I can hear the critics. I can hear you say, but Mel, if I did that, I couldn't live my current lifestyle. I get it. Here's why we have to look at our lifestyle. I'm not telling you to Cut things. But I am telling you to be discerning about where your money's going. And it could be, are you making enough money? But in all likelihood, are you spending it in the right places? And I understand, like, life nowadays is way more expensive than it used to be and affording things becomes problematic. That means that we need to be much more discerning about our spending and we need to also be much more focused on increasing our income in doing that, because then we can turn around and make investing the priority and lifestyle after that. When you do that, that's what starts to put you on that wealth creation curve to do it. So this is, this is the best way to do it. And again, like I said, you can grab that lifestyle cost calculator, help you with these numbers so you can understand what it takes to make this happen. And you can click the link below to make that happen. All right, leads me to number five. Number five is to conquer your money stories. Now, this is actually one that surprised me because when I came into this journey of speaking and teaching and working with people to help them build the path to financial freedom. I'm a cpa, I'm an accountant, so I'm used to spreadsheets and columns and rows and the math. And I literally thought, all I'm going to do is teach you all the math behind wealth and what it takes to do that, and the pluses and the minuses and the multiplication and all that stuff. Here's what I found out really quickly. Until I dealt with the stuff in people's heads and in their hearts, I couldn't ever get close to their pocketbook because the stories, the beliefs we have about money start to drive the choices, the decisions, and the things we do with money. Think about it. Most of us were never taught about money. Now you happen to be here, so now you're getting, you're getting lessons and you're learning and kudos to you. This is the right way to do it. But as in a general sense, from a society, a schooling perspective, you know, our money lessons, they're caught, not taught. Okay? They're not something that we go through some formal education. In fact, we live in a society that says money's taboo, don't talk about it. I still remember at 5 years old, which is almost 60 years ago, 58 years ago, watching my dad cry for the first time. And he was, what was happening is that he was having a conversation with my mom about something that my mom wanted to do and having to tell her, we can't do it. And he was in tears because he felt. And he said this. He says, I feel like I'm letting the ones that I love the most down and I'm disappointing the people I love. Now, I heard that. I saw that. But in my world, I made that mean that if you don't make a lot of money, you're going to disappoint the people you love. And so I was driven to earn, earn, earn. I got on a treadmill and I was running really hard. But was that the reality? See, I made an interpretation. The stories in our head are typically not the facts of what we saw, but an interpretation of what we saw. I interpreted it differently. There's something that I talk about called the money story dynamic, where you observe something, and from that observation, you make an interpretation. You give it meaning. It could be that money is evil, money's for the greedy, money is dirty, money is hard to come by. I heard things like, money doesn't grow on trees. What does that do to your psyche when you start to look at, am I deserving of wealth? Am I deserving of the things? But all of that is interpretation. And when we understand what that does to us, then you can understand how to break it down. Because we get the observation, we get the interpretation, and what that does is it changes our identity. And that identity defines the behaviors. And those behaviors will set a money set point. And you can't get above that money set point. This is a time for you to examine the stories that maybe are going on in your head, the fears in your heart, the things that maybe start to drive the beliefs that you have around money, and ask, are you giving it interpretations that are real? And to separate the facts from the interpretations. What really happened when I lost one third of everything I owned in that Ponzi scheme? What really happened is I gave him money and I didn't get money back. It's just as simple as that. Everything else was an interpretation. Me calling myself a loser. Then there's me calling, saying, I shouldn't be doing this. I'm no good at investing all those things. Those are interpretations. And once I was able to separate those two things, I could learn, I could grow, I could heal. And so right now, for this one, I want you to write down three beliefs you have about money. What are the beliefs? Where did they come from? What did you observe? What are the facts and what's the interpretations? And then ask this. Would a financially free person believe this? Hey, y', all, I just want to let you know that My book, Building youg Money Machine is out and it debuted at number four and number 24 on the USA Today bestseller list, number four in business, number 24 of all books, all titles, all genres. It was big time. So if you have not got your copy of Building youg Money Machine, then the first question is, why not? The second question is, when? And the third thing is, go to YourMoneyMachinebook.com, grab your copy, then give me the information from your, your book so I can make sure that I give you some special gifts, bonuses and wealth resources to accelerate your path to financial freedom. Let's get to the or. Can this belief move me to the path to financial freedom and then make the shifts? All right, that leads me to the next one. Number six, you can't save your way to wealth. Oh, man, this is a big one. And my dad, my dad did a lot. He would save CDs, things like that, because he wasn't good at investing. Now, back in the day, in those times we didn't have the technology, the access to investments that we have today, there was no such thing as index funds and ETFs. There was not even mutual funds. It was individual stocks. And so he would have to stock pick. And stock picking is a, is, is a tough game, especially if you're not good at it, if you're not trained in it and everything. And so instead of that, the safe route was to put it into a savings account. But here, let's just do some math for you. If you assume we're going to go from age 25 to 65, so 40 years, someone puts $5,000 away a year, $5,000 away a year over 40 years, $200,000 total put away at 8%, which is, call it the S&P 500. We can do 8 to 11%, but let's use 8%. Conservatively, at 8%, that $200,000 by age 65 will turn into a million and a half dollars. If I put it in a savings account at 2%, okay? Not, not the current 4 or 5% that you might get in a high yield savings account, because that's going to come back down. And not the 0.1% that you would get in a bank savings account, but let's give it 2%. We'll give it the benefit of the doubt at 2%, the same $200,000 would only accumulate to $300,000, little over 315,000. Okay? So the point is that we cannot save our way to wealth. You have to be in the investing game, that means low cost, low fee index funds, ETFs, diversified portfolio, other assets that are building over time. You have to be on the field. You can't be on the sidelines or in the stands. And so the action step here is first I'd love for you to follow the wealth priority ladder, which is in, in chapter 12 of the book where you get a chance to see exactly what to do with every dollar. And. But I want you to start putting money away and opening an index fund or an etf. Low cost, low fee start dollar cost averaging. Start with whatever you have. $5, $10, $20. Wealth isn't about timing the market, it's about time in the market. Get in the game and play the game consistently, okay? Because saving alone, let's not even talk about the impact of inflation on it. Because saving alone is like trying to protect ice cream in a sauna. It's going to melt while you're playing it safe. It's not going to work. All right, all right, that leads me to number seven. Number seven. The ultimate currency isn't dollars, pounds, liras, euros. The ultimate currency is time. See, money is infinite. Time isn't. I learned this the hard way, okay? When mortality smacked me in the face, when they diagnosed me with cancer, when they found the tumor, the 7 and a half centimeter tumor, all of a sudden the reality of mortality hit me. I realized that it didn't matter how much money I had if I didn't have the time to use it, if I hadn't had the time to enjoy it, if I didn't use the time effectively. See, if your money the thing to realize that you actually are sitting back saying, how do I have agency over my time? The whole purpose, the whole premise of my book and the work that I do is to get you to a point where you are living a life of choice, where you have the ability to separate your earnings from the efforts to earn it. Where you get up every single morning and put your feet on the floor and say, I get to make a choice today. But if you're driven by time and time for dollars and things like that, then you need to start to relook at things. Now the accountants business model is horrible because we were billing in six, six minute increments, okay? So here I was selling time. Time is finite. And if I wasn't selling the time, I wasn't making the money. If your money stops when you stop working, then you're not free, you're rented. I mean, that's that's the reality. And. And the key to everything we're trying to do here is to build a money machine so the money will continue to work when you aren't and to give you your time back. I choose to do the things I do, not because I have to. I get to do the things I do, not because I have to, but because I want to. And so this is a place for you to start to examine and say, what am I doing to leverage my income to get agency back in my time? It doesn't mean you're going to stop working. I haven't stopped working, but now I do it by choice. So do you have the ability to build the machine? Follow the process in building your money machine to bring it together. Follow the things that I'm teaching here on the show. Build leverage into your life in the sense of how much effort it takes to earn to drive that, whether it's through courses, royalties, investments, real estate. It allows you to get paid even when you're off the clock. That's the key. All right, that leads me to number eight. Now, this might sound odd, but it is huge. You need to choose the right partner. Okay. I can't tell you the amount of richness that has come into my life since meeting my wife. Now, we have been together, we met each other a little over 15 years ago, and we've been married for over 14 years. But having a loving, great relationship with a great partner to share life with is huge. Money will magnify that relationship. It will magnify the cracks in it, if there are any, and it will cement the connection. And so having the proper wealth conversations with your partner is important. Now, my wife didn't want to have money conversations because it didn't. In her eyes, it didn't really matter until she understood why it was important to me. It wasn't about the money. It was about realizing that I wanted to create moments, I wanted to create memories, and I wanted to create movements with her, with my family, with my. With my children, my grandchildren. And money was that paintbrush to allow us to do it. And yet money is seen. In fact, I heard a statistic. I don't know if it's 100% true, but if it is, God forbid, okay, that is the money is the second leading cause of divorce behind infidelity. Now, whether it's the second leading cause, fifth leading cause. Money, in and of itself, should never be the cause of divorce. It should be something that brings us together, but yet it creates a big stress in relationships. And we have to have a conversation in a way where we say, am I picking the right partner? Not from a money standpoint, from a values standpoint, because that right partner will walk in life with you and not cause the friction that can break it down. Now we can talk about the idea of divorce. Although my wife said divorce is an option, murder is. So. So she warned me. But the whole point is that. That I think that you need to really start to look at how this plays out. A partner in your life plays out. I'm blessed with my partner, and I couldn't do the things I do at the level that I do it with the grace that I might have to do it if it weren't for her. So be really careful about who you're choosing to partner with. In fact, Charles Munger and Warren Buffett said that one of the most important decisions about your wealth that you'll make in life is the partner you're going to have in life. All right, that leads me to number nine. And I think that this is a great way to sum this up, is that richness is the goal, not just wealth. And I've talked about this a lot. Wealth is the means. Wealth is a statistic in a bank account. Wealth is just a number. Richness, that's the meaning. Richness is the experience. Richness is what you feel, what you experience. It's the moments, it's the missions, it's the. It's the movements, it's the. It's the. The time together, the memories that you create. It's the friendships, it's the relationships. And. And so I look at it and say, richness is. Is time. It's presence, it's contribution. I've sat in boardrooms with multimillionaires that have extremely, extremely large bank accounts and horribly bankrupt life accounts. They just chase a number, and unless they're on the chase, there is no joy or fulfillment at all. So they're constantly looking for another hit, another dopamine drop. Don't chase the number, chase the life. That's why we started with the vision, what's the destination? If you had all the money in the world, this is the action for you. If you had all the money in the world, what would you still do? Ask that question. I still do what I want to do because I have a choice. See, I want to experience life. My wife and I, we travel a lot. We do a lot of things. We have some dear, dear close friends that we share life with. That's the richness that comes out of It. It's not about the bank account. The bank account may facilitate us doing different things, but the bank account alone doesn't give us a rich life. All right. I hope that this starts to make sense. I hope you start to look at it. Because rich doesn't mean flashy. It means free. Free to be with your kids, free to be with your causes. Free to choose each and every day what you want to do. Free to live fully into what you were put here to do, to live your gifts and all that. So here's what I'm going to ask you to do. Pick one of the nine of these. Commit to them this week. Which one are you going to do? And if you're trying to figure out what the number is, remember, I've got the lifestyle cost calculator with the link below. Go ahead and grab it. Start doing some calculations. Get in the game. I. We are just starting. There's plenty more to come. All right? And do me a favor, drop a comment below. Let me know. Let me know what step you're owning, what you're going to do. And remember, build your money machine so you can live life by choice. Not one by chance, not one that's driven by the demands of the day, the demands of a boss, the demands of a degree, the demands of your expenses, but one that is driven by choice of the vision you have for your life. All right, I hope that this helps and I look forward to seeing you on your road to financial freedom. Until I do, always, always strive to live the life that offers you. 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.