Once You Reach this Point, You'll Stop Working For A Living

There is a question in the back of your head you probably don't say out loud. How much longer do I have to do this? Now, I want to give you a better one. Think about the last 3 things you said yes to at work. Did you choose them for what they paid you or for what they do for somebody? Because I had a stretch in my career where every project I took on was connected to the money, the money I was going to make, and not the impact I was going to have. Same work, I'd been doing for years, same skills, and it had quietly turned into something that I wasn't doing for a living. What changed? It wasn't more money. Today, I'm gonna show you exactly what it was and why 2 people with identical bills can be living completely different lives. And at the end, the piece almost nobody runs the number on, the one currency you can never get back no matter what you earn. This is Building Your Money Machine, where we help you master your money, eliminate financial stress, and live a life And I'm your host, Mel Abraham, and this is the conversation I wish somebody had with me, gosh, when I was 45. But let's do it now. So let's talk about the day work stops being something you do for a living. Not the day you stop working, because frankly, I haven't, and I'm, I'm 65. Here's the thing, 59 and a half. I want that age in your mind. That's the age the tax code lets you pull out your money from the retirement accounts without that 10% penalty. And the half, it's literal. 6 months from your 59th birthday to the day, you get access to that money. Like a half birthday, like a toddler. Now, I'm a CPA and 30 years in this tax code and working with it. So I kind of looked at this and said, why is that the number? Guess what? There isn't a reason. No published rationale, nothing you can point to, yet millions of us have organized our entire back half of our lives around 59½. What does it take? But see, that's not the part that bothers me. Here's the part that bothers me. You've got a date in your head. Maybe it's that one. Maybe it's a number instead. And you're waiting on it so you can finally do what you actually want to do. What? Which means you just told me you're not doing it now. So the question was never when you get to stop. The question is why you're working in the first place and whether that reason belongs to you or to your bills. And I'm gonna show you that something I've discovered, and I'm gonna show it to you today, that explains the whole thing. And I call it the meaning curve. Because here's what almost nobody realizes. You never wanted the money. You wanted what the money could get you. The object and the goal isn't the money. The object and the goal is the life the money can buy. And the higher you climb, the less money can get for you. But that's only half of it. Remember what I said about the currency you can never earn back? That's the second curve, and it's running underneath the whole thing. So stay with me because the first curve shows you why you work. The second one shows you how much runway you've gotta do and what you can do about it. So let me show you the first one, because once you see this curve, you can't unsee it. And so let's build this and build this picture. Remember, you've seen probably Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that pyramid in a classroom on a slide. Abraham Maslow in 1943, and he had this idea that was simple. What do human beings live for? And what they live for changes depending on where they are. Food and shelter at the bottom, then safety, then belonging, the need to, to be connected with people, then esteem, the need to actually matter. And then at, at the top, becoming who you're capable of being and eventually serving something beyond yourself. Now, when you're hungry, you're living for food and nothing above it exists. Get fed and the food stops driving you. Something else moves in. That's his, and it's about people. And I get it. It's an interesting way and smart way to look at things, but not money. Watch what happens when we lay money on the top of this, because it's the exact same thing. Survival. Money is doing almost everything at that bottom rung. Money's doing almost everything. Every dollar converts directly into the food, the rent, the medical, the clothes on your back, keeping the lights on. If you're down here, it's the same curve. If you're down here, money is close to 100% of the answer that you need to get the life that you want. And anybody who tells you otherwise has actually never been there. But then we move up a little bit, 'cause now all of a sudden our survival and everything is taken care of, and we get to that safety. Money here though still does most of the work, but here it starts to buy margin for you. It buys a bad month that doesn't become a catastrophe. It allows you to do things that maybe you didn't do before. It gives you some breathing room to do things. So money is important, but it's a little less important, but still important nonetheless. Because the first crack, the first crack in this whole process is the next one. And that's belonging. See, money here can buy that plane ticket home. It can make you and give you access to things that maybe you didn't have. But belonging, I think, is different. Belonging is about your presence, and the money can't make you present when you get there. Even if it can buy the plane ticket, it doesn't make you present when you get there. It buys the house everyone gathers in, but it does nothing about whether you're in the room. So as you start to see that now, all of a sudden belonging requires less money and more of you. And then we move up. One more rung to esteem. Money buys symbols. That's how I see it. The title, the car, the house, the vacations, things that people mention when they introduce you. And it works. It works briefly, which is what makes this the most dangerous place on the whole climb, I think, because progress keeps feeling like progress long after it stops being progress. See, we start to do things because it satisfies Frankly, our ego, our esteem. It makes us feel good from the outside though. And it buys that. But then all of a sudden you move to the next level and that's becoming and contributing. See, money can't fund that. Money can't create that. There's no price on this at all. So look at what just happened. Money went from doing everything to doing almost nothing. That curve is the same curve as Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And the only thing that changed was how high you climbed. That's the meaning curve. It's this relationship between meaning and money, money's usefulness against human need. And when you start to understand that, you start to see that money's usefulness starts to fall as the need gets higher. Now let's draw the other line. This is your wealth. Your wealth goes the other way. It rises and then it accelerates. 2 lines in the same picture, but they're moving in opposite directions. One is arcing down, one is arcing up, and your money is getting bigger and its power to buy you what you want actually is getting smaller. This is the thing I think people miss, is that the things at the top of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, that the things about belonging and contribution, Money can't necessarily buy the presence with the people you love. Money can't necessarily buy because that's an act that you have to act on. It's why Jeremy drew the picture of me. And somewhere in the middle, those 2 lines cross. And most people hear that and they get depressed, like the money stopped mattering. And that's not what this says. The falling line is proof that you were never after the money in the first place. You were after safety for your family, being there for the people you love, doing something that matters. Money was just the vehicle the whole time. And the reason it does less work as you climb is that the things you're now reaching for were never things you could actually buy. The curve isn't money failing you. The curve is you arriving. And hold on to that word, arriving. Arriving. Because there's a version of this where you arrive and the arrival is worth nothing. And I'm gonna show that at the end here in, in a moment, because I think that that's the thing that we need to realize and be careful of. I know that the bottom of that curve, and I know that bottom of the curve well, because the '90s, my partners pushed me out and I was a full-time single dad with my son at home. And I can tell you exactly what mattered. Rent, groceries, lights on, the mortgage, food, medical. Every single dollar went straight into survival, and survival was the whole point. Nothing else mattered. There's nothing small about that. That's a man or a woman meeting their obligations, and there's real dignity in it. But then it got quieter. The income started to grow. The numbers started handling themselves. The portfolio started to move. And I moved up the curve without noticing that I moved. And I just kept going as if I was still in survival mode, trying to make more and more and more. And then Jeremy comes running in from school one day and says, Daddy, Daddy, I drew a picture of you at school today. And I kneel down and I see this picture of me standing in front of 2 computer screens and a phone in each ear and one on the desk ringing. He wasn't even in it. I was crushing the bottom of the curve. But completely missed the next rung. And nothing on my balance sheet, you know, was ever gonna tell me that because by every financial measure, I owned it. I did it. I was winning. That's the trap. And that's the thing that I think most people mistake is we stay on the transactional treadmill of earning, earning, earning. The money side is loud. The statements, the dashboards, the numbers go up. Nobody sends you a notice when you've been parked in the same place for 11 years. You stay there. And you keep going until you get something like I got from a 6-year-old that opened me up and said, oh, wait a second, you're missing something. Because Jeremy didn't need my profits. He didn't need my money. He needed my presence. He needed me to be there for him. Picture this. 2 people, same income, same bills, same hours, put their balance sheets side by side and you can't tell them apart. One of them is working for a living, the other isn't. And there's nothing financial that separates them. See, I started speaking in 1996 and I'll be honest about why. I frigging needed clients. That was it. I just started speaking because it was the only way I knew to get in front of people to basically fill my valuation practice. So for years I spoke narrow audience, narrow message aimed at one thing, landing projects. And guess what? I was landing them. I built a national practice. It's the same skill I use today. Same stage, same microphone, same, same guy. And somewhere in there, I noticed something. Noticed something I didn't like. The projects that I got because I built that practice started to feel transactional. I'd take one on and my head was on what was gonna make in it, how much I was gonna get paid instead of what it was gonna do for anyone. See, the work became connected to the money. And not the impact that I was gonna have. And I think that's the critical thing. Many of us end up, and I get it, we gotta pay the bills, but many of us end up becoming transactional junkies where we are doing the work for the pay only. And that's the sole reason we're there. Now, if you wanna know whether you're working for a living, that's the test, not your net worth. Look at the last 3 decisions and ask, what you chose them by. Did you choose it because you needed it because the demands of the bill only? Did you choose it because of the impact you're gonna have? Did you choose it because of the meaning it has to you? Did you choose it because of the passion you have for it? Because I know for me, something shifted and I wanna kind of really look at this and be precise about how, because it's not what people expect. I didn't sit down and find my purpose or expand my purpose or change my focus. Nobody does that in a quiet room. I just happened to get exposed to something. I got on stages that weren't about valuations. I got into personal development. I watched people come alive in front of me because of something I said. I realized the same skills that I'd been using to close engagements could reach lives instead, could change families to change generations. And that yearning came after that exposure, not before it. Now here's what matters about that. I didn't change careers. I changed who the work was for. Same skills, same stage, same man. And it was harder writing, speaking to new rooms, starting over in arenas where nobody knew me. Objectively worse conditions than, than the practice I'd already built. I could have stayed easily in the practice. It was easier though, because the meaning was behind it and not just the transaction. And the bills, they didn't go anywhere. And I want you to hear that because it's the whole point. I wasn't rich and free and choosing a hobby. I still had the obligations. What changed though is that the work stopped costing me what it used to. So that's the one route. Find it while you're still carrying the weight. There's another route and it's the one I'd rather you avoid. See, another client of mine, James, He sold his HVAC company. I helped him sell it for $25 million. Decades of building it. His name carried the weight in that industry. And when the wire cleared, he never had to work again. $25 million. 18 months later, he was standing on a racquetball court on a Tuesday afternoon wondering what the rest of his life was going to feel like. See, I want to be careful about James because The easy version of the story is wrong. He wasn't a guy who chased money and forgot about meaning. He had meaning for decades. He built something. People depended on him. He had teams that depended on him. He solved problems that mattered to them. He was contributing at a high level every single day. He just never knew that's what he was living on because it arrived bundled in a business that also paid him. So he sold the business. The money was perfect. And the thing he'd actually been living on, walked out the door with it. And he had no idea what he'd lost. See, the first stretch of that after he sold it was great. It was, and it was supposed to be, but then the days started repeating, Groundhog Day, basically. Racquetball on Monday, golf on Wednesday, reading a book on Thursday. None of it is wrong and none of it was enough for him. And what he told me when we talked, he says, I can still hear the flatness in his voice when we talked. He says, the free time didn't feel like freedom. It felt like I was just in a hallway. 18 months and he found himself in a hole. It wasn't in his bank account. He couldn't go back to work. He had a non-compete, so he couldn't rebuild what he had done before. So about 2 years out, he looked for something that actually brought meaning to his life, purpose to it again, identity to him again. And he got involved with a venture that worked with foster kids. Coming up on their teen years, bringing them into real businesses to do real projects and learn how to build something. See, there wasn't a whole lot of money in it for him. He ran it for 3 years, over 3 years, but he loved it. And when I asked him why, he said he could see everything he learned in his life come alive again in someone else. And those kids got to see the pathway and they got to see that their circumstances weren't gonna be their final say, that they had a path out. He rebuilt the meaning with no money attached to it, which proves that money was never the thing that was doing the work anyways. That was the key. 2 men. I found it while the bills were still coming in. James found it only after they stopped. The difference between us wasn't money. It was 18 months of his life. And he's one of the lucky ones because some people never find it at all. And 18 months is the actual price tag on it. Not dollars. Which brings me to the thing I told you we'd get to. Here's what nobody prices in. You've spent this whole episode watching money's usefulness fall as you climb. Now put the second line on the picture and everything, and you start to understand how the wealth curve and the meaning curve and the hierarchy comes into play. Your ability to convert anything into actual life starts to fall too. It falls with your health. So you've got money, and I think this is the thing that we mistake. You've got money doing less for you the higher you go, and a body that can do less with whatever it does buy. See, 2 lines are falling at the same time and you're standing in between them. Money's not the thing that runs out first, and it never was. That's the real currency. That's the thing that we miss. Not the balance. The time and the health to spend it. Those are the prime currencies. Everything else on your statement is just a claim on them. And that claim expires whether you use it or not. And it's crazy. I was speaking at an event a while back and a gentleman came up to me, Robert, afterwards. He'd just come through a divorce. He'd built a real business, high 7 figures, just over 8 figures. And a big piece of it ended up going in the settlement and divorce. And he came out of it with less than half. Wow. But he had this urgency and I could feel it as we talked. He was convinced that he had to make it all back, that he, in his head, it meant hundreds of thousands of dollars every single year for the next 10, 15, 20 years. He was preparing to grind it out for decades, the next couple decades of his life. So I asked him what his life actually needed to cost. What does he really want? What's the vision? What's the driving force? What's the meaning? What's the purpose? And then we put a price tag on it and ran the numbers right there. Now, straight up, I told him, look, I'm doing hillbilly math, napkin math here. I am not running a detailed analysis. We can do that later, but I just want to give you a perspective. So, you know, I used an 8% rate of return and I built something out for him because here's the thing that I wanted him to understand. He thought he needed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars and decades of work to just catch up. I said, well, you're starting somewhere. You still have a little less than half. So that's your starting point. We know where you want to go because we kind of priced it out and there's a gap in between. That's what we need. And when I did the math, I said, you only need about $100,000 to put away every single year for the next 10 years. 10 years of work. That's it. But that wouldn't just catch you up. It would put you on the trajectory for the life you wanted. Now, he was off by a factor that no spreadsheet needed, needed 4 decimals to catch. That was the thing because Here's the mistake we make, and he was making it there. Time is linear, wealth is exponential. And the money he had left, the money that was sitting there, wasn't just sitting there wasting away and waiting to be rescued. It was working for him. So his assets were gonna build at an accelerating pace because of compounding. His assets, his current assets compressed his timeline while he was building A 10-year plan to do it by hand. And what he almost paid wasn't money. It was the decades of grinding he thought he had to go through. 10 years of choosing projects that he didn't need to choose just because he had to pay himself back. But that's the thing. Once he started to understand that, it lifted the weight off of him because money is worth exactly what you can convert it into. The trip. A Tuesday with the grandkids. A bike ride through Tuscany with the person you love. But if we grind too hard and our health isn't there, then it changes the exchange rate too. See, your health sets the exchange rate on every one of those. $10,000 to a healthy 55-year-old becomes a week in Italy on a bike. That same $10,000 to an 82-year-old whose knees are gone and whose friends have started to disappear can't become that. Same money, but the rate collapsed. I think that's the thing that we mistake is as we start to go up that curve, time and health don't allow us to convert the money into the exchange rate experiences and the richness of life that we once thought we would have. So I'm telling you that what we need to look through is the lens of the richness of life, not just the money in the account. Once we get past those couple of bottom tiers of safety and survival and everything, then all of a sudden we gotta be in a better place. And we look at a different metric and it's not about the money. If we look in this country, life expectancy sits right around 79. Healthy life expectancy sits right around 66. That, that means that roughly the last 13 years of an American's life gets spent in some state of diminished health. Steve Jobs had access to essentially every resource on the planet, yet he was gone at 56. All the money in the world, and it didn't buy him the one thing he needed. And we get so caught up in all of these things about accumulating, acquiring, and achieving, and we Fail to live it. And the point where we start to cross a line is where we start to not work for a living, is the point where we start to work to build a life that matters. But hear me, because the wrong lesson is easy to take from that. You don't need a diagnosis like Steve Jobs. You don't need to get this. Crisis doesn't create clarity. All crisis does is force the conversation that you've been avoiding on a schedule you didn't pick when your options are worse. Clarity comes from awareness. It came to me from exposure, not from a hospital room. One more thing, the clock changes, and that is legacy. That is what we do. Most people hand their wealth to their kids when they die. So it lands when the kids are in their 50s or their 60s and barely moving. And I got a different version. Jeremy's in his 30s. He's already built a 7-figure net worth with properties and everything. I didn't wire that to him. I taught it to him. And I was here to watch it work. The dead can't mentor. Wait long enough and you transfer that asset while forfeiting the lesson. And the lesson was always the more valuable half. So what do you do with this? You don't have to quit anything. Look at what you're already doing and ask who it's for. That's it. That's the whole test. And it costs you nothing but honesty. And if the answer bothers you, don't go sit in a room and try to think your way to a purpose. Go get exposed to something. Say yes to the thing that isn't about the money. That's how I found it. That's how James found it. Neither of us thought our way there. And don't file this under someday. Someday is where this all goes to die. Every year you spend choosing work by what it pays instead of what it does is a year off the only account that never refills. I'll leave you with something that happened while I was actually Writing this episode. I stopped in the middle of writing it because somebody had actually bought a program from me, but he couldn't get access. So I could have handed it to my team, and that's what the team's for, but I picked up the phone and I called him myself. 20 minutes on the phone with him. No money in it, nothing to sell. He had found our channel 2 weeks ago. He watched one video and it landed somewhere real for him. And he said that now he and his wife and his son have a text thread going where they are actually sending each other my videos back forth and having conversations about doing things differently. 20 minutes, $0, and I hung up more fulfilled than any invoice I've sent in 30 years. That's the top of the curve, and there's no amount of money that buys that, which is the entire reason I'm still working at 65 with no plans to stop. Yeah, I did retire from something. My valuation credentials are on retirement status. That chapter's closed, and I don't miss it. But I didn't retire from work. I retired to something, and that's the point. Not a date somebody picked for you. Not 59 and a half, 62, 67, 70. Not a number on a statement. It's the moment the work stops being what you do for a living and starts being what fuels your life. You'll know when you get there because the reason you got up this morning will have nothing to do with the bills. Because earning more doesn't make you free. A money machine does. I hope this one landed. And if it has, do me a favor. Subscribe. Stay with me. Send it to someone who's chasing a number who's never asked what it's for. Because I think that this matters. This is the game. It's never the money that's the goal. It's the life that is. And I want to help you build it. All right? I hope this has landed. If you have questions, if you have comments or anything, DM me, send me a comment. Let's have the dialogue. Let's get you on the right trajectory to do the right thing so you're building a life and not just working for a living. All right? Until I get a chance to see you, as I always say, always, always strive to live a life that outlives you. See you in the next one. Cheers for now.