People Who Save Money Are Harder To Control

If you ever felt trapped or you couldn't say no, or your boss could make whatever asks and you couldn't decide not to do it and you just had to say yes, or you took on a bad client, this episode's for you. This is something that's different than one of the other episodes I've done because I'm just sitting here having a conversation. I'm not in my studio. The bottom line is this, is I've listened and talked with a number of people that feel like they have no options in life. It isn't that they have no options, they have no margin because with the margin you get the power back. And that's what I want to talk about is How do you get the margin back? How do you get agency back? How do you get choice back in your life? So if you have ever felt trapped, if you ever felt like you couldn't get out of something, this one's for you and this one's going to hit hard. All right? So this is Building Your Money Machine where we help you master your money, eliminate financial stress so you can live a life of choice. And I'm your host, Mel Abraham, and I want to open your eyes and give you a pathway to margin in your life so you can have choice and agency back. All right, let's do this. This one's going to be a little bit of a different episode. I wanted to have a frank talk with you because this has been on my heart. It's been on my mind a lot about how people are living today and what we're doing. Think about this. So Friday night, 10 o'clock at night, okay? 20-something floors up in downtown Los Angeles, and I'm staring out at the skyline and it's supposed to mean like, I made it. Big consulting firm, CPA on partner track. The exact path I went to school for. The one my parents were so proud of. The one that looked right on paper from every angle, actually, except one, mine. Seeing down the hall, I can literally see the partner that I worked for is still at his desk, overweight, gray, stressed in a way that had become literally his personality. Every signal on that man's face said that he had— it was a heart attack just waiting to happen. And the thing that hit me standing there wasn't fear for him. It was the recognition I was looking at my own future, 10, maybe 15 years out. See, if I stayed on this path that everyone else had already approved for me, man, that's not the way. But walking away wasn't the obvious move that it sounded like. See, I'd done the schooling, I chased the designation. If I quit, what was I supposed to tell everyone who put their expectations into that path? See, my degree said stay. My parents' pride said stay. My peers, the ones climbing the ladder with me, said stay. Every single vote on that list belonged to somebody else. Not one of them was mine though. So I quit that night. I had no plan. I had no next job lined up. I had no idea what would come after. I got on a plane and spent the next 5 months in Japan trying to figure out who I was when nobody else's expectations were writing the script. Here's what made that possible though. Not courage, not clarity. Money I had already set aside sitting there doing nothing but waiting for a moment exactly like this one. I'm a long way from that skyline now. Feet in the sand instead of 20 floors up, but That Friday night is still the clearest example I've got of what money's for. That's what I want to talk about today. Not budgeting, not getting rich. The much stranger, much more useful thing that happens when you build savings. The people, the systems that used to have to hook in, you stop being able to pull you. The belief that everyone starts with, ask most people, why they're saving and why they're saving money. And you'll get some version of, so I have more, a bigger cushion, a nicer retirement, a number that feels safer than the number they've got right now. But that's not wrong. It's just incomplete. And the missing piece is the one that changes your life day to day. Money in the bank buys something specific. It's the ability to say no and mean it. The difference between staying in a job because you chose it and staying because you're scared of what happens if you don't. See, start chasing savings for the wrong reason and you'll quit the first time the market dips or the account grows slower than you hoped. But start chasing it for this reason and it becomes the most durable motivation you'll ever have because the payoff shows up In your Monday morning, not just in your retirement statement. You can earn a great income. You can still be completely controllable even though you have a great income. In fact, high income with zero margin might be the most controllable position there is because the lifestyle it funds becomes your own leash. Bigger house, bigger payments, nicer car, bigger reason to keep saying yes to whatever keeps that paycheck coming. See, income alone was never the thing that set anyone free. What you keep and what that keeps buying you back is choices is a different game entirely. What margin buys you, that's the thing. So let's get specific because freedom is a word that sounds nice on a hat and means nothing until you can point to it. See, advertising starts to lose its grip on you. The entire marketing industry is built on urgency and scarcity. And because a person living paycheck to paycheck with no cushion, And no room to breathe is the easiest customer alive. See, fear and impulse do the closing for them, but you try running, last chance, buy now. And on someone with 6 months of expenses sitting in a high-yield savings account, it doesn't land the same. It, the margin doesn't make you immune to wanting things, but it certainly makes you slow enough to ask if you actually want them. And that half-second pause is the whole game. Your boss loses leverage, not because you're planning to quit, but because you could. There's a specific kind of employer who can smell desperation on a person, who knows exactly which people are in there that are on the team that have no options, which ones do, and who treats those 2 groups very differently. If you picture 2 people on the same team, Same title, same skill. And I had some colleagues back in the day that was that way. One's got 3 weeks of expenses sitting in a checking account. The other has got 6 months of a runway earning real interest. The same bad month can land on both of them. The same unreasonable ask, the same guilt, or the same guilt trip about being a team player. Only one of them though actually has to swallow it. And I've watched it happen. Someone feels trapped and a boss uses that as leverage, piling on the workload, the guilt, the extra ask nobody else gets handed because they know that the person isn't going anywhere. That's a garbage way to treat people, and it only works on someone who has no exit. The other thing that happens is bad clients and bad projects lose their pull. See, when you need the check to survive, You say yes to work that drains you, clients who disrespect your time, projects you knew were wrong the moment they landed in your inbox, your lap. See, margin lets you say yes to what you're built for and no to what merely pays. See, that single shift, saying no to the wrong income, is one of the most underrated wealth moves there is because chasing the wrong work is how good people burn out, chasing a paycheck that was never worth what it costs them. The other thing I think happens is your body stops paying the tax too, because money stress doesn't stay in your bank account. It shows up in your shoulders, in your sleep, in your relationships, in your blood pressure, in the way you snap at people that you love over nothing. See, that partner I watched at his desk that Friday night, he wasn't stressed about a spreadsheet. He was stressed about a life with no exits. Margin doesn't just change your bank account. It changes what your body is carrying around every single day. Your relationships get evaluated on their merits, not on your fear of starting over. See, I'm not just talking about the romantic relationships. I'm talking about business partnerships and friendships and family and family arrangements that quietly cost you more than they give. See, people stay in situations well past their expiration date because Well, frankly, the alternative, standing on your own without a financial floor, feels like a free fall. Build the floor and the decision stops being about survival. It becomes about whether this relationship is actually good for you, full stop. And then there's your time. Your time becomes yours again, not because you stopped working, but because you stopped negotiating from your knees. There's a different posture you carry into every single conversation, every deal, every ask when the The person across from you knows, huh, you don't have to say yes. Where the number comes from, I'm not going to hand you a magic figure. That's different because it's different for everyone. But generally, 6 months of expenses sitting in a high-yield savings account is a good start. It gives you a real runway, enough time to navigate a layoff, to deal with a health scare or a bad boss or a business that needs to pivot without the walls feeling like they're closing in. While you figure it out. See, that's the logistics answer. The psychological answer underneath it matters more. See, if you're consistently putting money away by default, that tells you something about how you're living. It means you're living below your means and you're investing the difference. The basic equation. It means you've got margin room in your life, and you know that a single bad month or a lost paycheck It ain't going to take you out. That's not a spreadsheet outcome. That's a nervous system outcome. It's the reason the wealth priority ladder was built the way it was. The foundation first, because you can't make good long-term decisions from a place of short-term panic. And I built that framework in phases for this exact reason. You don't start at investing. You don't start at the exciting stuff. You start with the foundation. The cushion, the piece of margin that keeps a single bad month from turning into a bad year. Everything else in someone else's financial life gets easier once that piece is in place, because every decision after it gets made from stability instead of fear, and every dollar you set aside on purpose instead of by accident is a rep. And you're not just building a balance, you're Literally building the muscle, the habits, the behaviors that says no when no is the right answer, which is the same muscle that says yes to the things that actually matter. See, most people think that discipline shows up as willpower in the big moments. It doesn't. It shows up as a transfer that happens automatically on the 15th of every month, whether you felt like it or not, until one day you look up and you build something. Hmm. You can actually stand on. The belief that keeps people stuck though, what gets to me is watching someone decide they're trapped. No options, no alternatives, and they settle in without ever testing whether that's true. Not the debt, not the fear underneath it all, but the quiet surrender to a story that was never checked. The shift may not be easy. I get it, but it's available to almost everyone. Reading their bank statement right now. I mean, it is. Most people haven't run out of options. They just stopped believing the options exist and stopped looking. And some employers know exactly how to use that belief against the person holding it. Now, if you feel trapped or someone who benefits from your labor has every incentive to keep you feeling that way, huh? That's not a conspiracy theory. That's just how leverage works when only one side of the relationship has it. Bosses aren't the only ones who do this. Family members will pull the same move when they know you won't push back because you need them, the peace more than you need to be right. Partners do it when they know you've built your whole identity around the relationship working. So you'll absorb things that you shouldn't. You're trapped, rarely looks like one big wall, usually 100 small ones, and every dollar of margin you build knocks a few of them down. So one important caveat I want to tell you, I want to be honest about something because I don't want you hearing this story and booking a one-way ticket out of your life this week, next week. I quit with no plan. I had the money to cover me, but I didn't have a strategy. And looking back, That's not something I'd recommend. I wouldn't do it that way going forward. There's a real difference between being committed and being reckless. And even though from the outside they can look identical, committed says, I've built the runway and I've thought about what the options are. I've thought about what I'm walking towards, even if I don't have every detail nailed down, and I'm making this move with my eyes wide open. Reckless Phil says, I'm miserable enough to jump and I'll figure it out on the way down. 5 months in Japan worked out fine for me, 24 years old, and that's okay. I still wouldn't hand that plan or lack of one to someone with a mortgage, 3 kids, and call it good advice. The savings gave me the option. The option is the point. What you do still requires judgment, and ideally, A plan, a little better one than I had. So where to start? Man, you don't need financial freedom to get a piece of this back. You don't need a number with a lot of zeros. You don't need enough margin to change how you show up in your job. You don't need that for your relationships, your decisions, or anything this week. Start smaller than you think, than you need to. A month of expenses is a real shift from zero. Automate the transfer so it happens without you negotiating with yourself every single payday. Put it somewhere where it earns real interest, a real yield, high-yield savings account, and watch what happens to the way you carry yourself. Once you know a bad month can't take you out, you'll feel it before you can measure it. The next time someone tries to rush you into a decision, you'll notice yourself slowing down instead of scrambling. The next time a boss or a client makes an unreasonable ask, you'll notice the words, let me think about it now, instead of an automatic yes. That's the margin talking. It shows up in your posture long before it ever shows up in your net worth. The amount matters absolutely less than the trajectory. That trajectory starts the day you decide your money works for your agency instead of your survival. This is the game that I want you to play. This is the game that I think changes everything. And if you want the framework, get the Wealth Priority Ladder, get the book to dial it in because it's built precisely for this. Start with step 1, give yourself a version of that by Friday. So you start to build choices into your life. I got mine looking out over a skyline. You might have yours show up in a quieter way at the kitchen table, a drive home, or staring at a balance when it finally registers to you that you want more space, you want more choice, you want more. How it shows up doesn't matter, but the fact that it shows up and you do something with it matters, that you take control of your life, that you turn around and say, I don't have to put up with this. I don't have to continue to do this. And having margin, having that in place gives you the options, the choice, the ability to do that. That's what I want for you because I've talked to a lot of people recently who said, I don't feel like I have a choice. That's because they don't have the margin. Let's build the margin. Let's do it together. Let's make it happen so you have access to it. And now you have choices. Slowly build the choices. That's the purpose. It wasn't about the money in the first place. It's about having a life by choice, to have the freedom to decide, to say no to the things that you want to say no to, to say yes to the things that actually matter, to make a difference the way you want to make a difference. That's a choice. Now, I didn't say that it's easy. It is simple once you make the choice. You know the process, but it may not be easy, and you don't have to do that alone. That's why we're here. So do me a favor, if you haven't done so already, subscribe below. Let's stay on this journey together. If you have questions, if you have comments, do me a favor, let me know. Let me help you. Let me light the path for you and give you some guidance along the way. And if you know someone else that's dealing with these kinds of things and these kinds of choices, do me a favor, share this with them. All right, let's make this journey happen. Until I get a chance to see you in the next one or 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.