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Hey there, real quick before we jump into the episode, listen, if your earnings treadmill hasn't set you free yet, running faster won't either. Listen, hustle without principles just going to burn you out. So here's what I want for you. I want you to join me for my money machine experience. Live it is three free trainings. Deep dive into how to escape the treadmill and build a money machine that actually works for you. All right, grab your spot here by going to moneymachinelive.com and I'll see you in the free training. Have you ever felt like no matter how hard you work, you're not getting ahead financially? Here's the truth. Your financial future isn't determined by one big moment. It's shaped by the small daily habits that you follow right now. The problem is most people focus on the wrong things. They're chasing the shortcuts. They're chasing the big wins. They're chasing the home run. They're waiting for that perfect opportunity and thinking that they need more money before they can ever start building wealth. But the wealthiest people, they do something different. They follow what I call harbinger habits. These are tiny but powerful actions that will help predict the financial success in the long term, long before the money ever shows up. In this episode of building your money machine, I'm going to break it down for you. I'm going to break down the 11 habits that I think silently shape your financial future. Whether you realize it or or not, these are the habits that will separate those that struggle from those that achieve true financial freedom. And the best part is, you don't need to be rich to start them. So we're gonna get you started today. I'm your host, Mel Abraham. And after 30 years of helping people master their money and build real wealth, I've seen exactly what habits predict financial success and what habits lead to struggle. By the end of this episode, you'll know exactly what to change, what to do, what to focus on, and how to take control of your financial future. Let's do this.

Curious. You ever wanted to know where your financial future is headed? Listen. Here's the answer. Look at your habits today. There is a concept we're going to talk about in this episode that I call harbinger habits. These are the tiny, small daily actions that you take that literally can predict your long term financial success. In fact, they can predict your long term successes in anything. Whether it's relationships, whether it's weight loss, whether it's health, vibrancy, all that. All that kind of thing is that the little things you do matter. So often what I see is that people think that to build wealth you gotta have that one big break. You know, the company that you sold, the big bonus, the big payout, the home run. But the truth is this, it's your daily habits that will actually tell me whether you'll be financially free or financially stuck in the next decade. There is some surprisingly easy habits. I'm going to talk about 11 of them here and stay tuned for number 10 because it might surprise you that I think are going to surprise you about what they are, what they mean and what they can do because it can have massive long term consequences when you get them right. So let's jump in. The first habit is what I call the commitment habit. Do what you say, not necessarily just for other people. That's a great thing because that is integrity with other people. But for yourself, your ability to build wealth is dependent upon your ability to stay consistent and follow through the little things that actually matter. Remember I said that building wealth is more about your habits, your decisions and your behaviors than it is about the money. And so if you say I want to build wealth, then the question is, do you have the habits? Are you saying that you're going to put money away? Whether it's $5, $10, $100 a week, whatever it is, are you actually doing it? Are you following through with it? The question is, can you trust yourself to follow through on the small things that when stacked up, become magnificent? And if you can't, this is one habit we have to get in place. Otherwise it's a real high predictor of, of what's going to happen in the next decade. So here's what I want you to do. There's an action step here, and that's simply I want you to start keeping one small promise to yourself each and every day. If it is, I want to, I want to skill up my financial literacy. Then just commit to doing something small. Ten minutes of reading each and every day on financial matters. Whether it's my book, building your money machine or another book, or maybe it's 10 or 20 minutes listening to a podcast or a show like mine. Or it's taking the time to say, I'm going to track all my expenses each day so I can stick to my plan. Whatever that step is, let's get it in place, let's commit to it. Because what we're doing is we're building the commitment habit. We're building the commitment muscle. When we do that, that consistency will pay off in time. Okay, so that's the first habit. The second habit is what I call the ignored pennies habit. Here's, here's what I want you to think about so many times I'm talking with people, I say, well, when I make more, then I can start building wealth. And maybe that's you. I know that was me early on, as I was, well, I make more than I, I'll have more to, to build wealth. The fact of the matter is, if you're not doing the right things with the small stuff, you're not going to do the right things with the big stuff. And so ignoring the pennies habit is about treating the small money like the big money because it develops the skills, it develops the thinking, it develops the habits to do that. The way you handle small amounts of money is the way that you'll handle large amounts of money. And people will ignore loose change. They will ignore the small fees, they'll ignore the minor expenses because it's small. But that isn't the problem. The small expenses, the fees and the change, it's the pattern that it creates, the potential pattern it creates, that is a pattern of neglect that scales with your income. So now when you're making maybe $20,000 a year and you ignore some of these fees, then you will do the same when you're making $200,000 a year, that's a problem. And so what happens is that, that the ignoring of those small things will expand as your income expands over time, which erodes your ability to build wealth. And so one of the things that I tell people to do is I want you to start to track every single dollar spent over, over a 30 day period. Okay? Now most people are shocked at what, what they do. They, they're shocked at where their money's going, where they're spending money. It's $3 here, it's $5 there, it's $10 there. And at the end of the day, it's $100 or $200 that maybe got spent on stuff that they really didn't need, they didn't, didn't matter to them. But I can tell you this, $200 a month put away over 30 years is $350,000 by the time you're ready to retire. And, and I'm not telling you to get rid of your lattes, I'm not telling you to do any of that. What I am telling you is that when you are intentional, when you are aware, when you are conscious about how you spend what you Spend on. Then you will be conscious and aware and intentional on your financial journey. So I'm not going to tell you not to do it. I'm just simply telling you that when you do it, be awake, be aware of it to make that happen. So track your spending. This is developing this habit. I want you to track your spending for 30 days. Now, I track spending differently when I work with my clients. When we're working with clients, I ask them to track what they spent. I asked them to track also why they spent it. You know, is it to pay utility, what it was for? Okay, so here's the important thing. I ask them also to attract the emotions that they have at the time they're spending. Here's why. Because there could be emotional triggers, spending triggers, as I call them. And when you start to track the emotions of spending, you start to see a pattern of emotional spending. And when you see the pattern, it's something that you can break. Okay, so that's habit number two. Habit number three. Habit number three is the invisible preparation habit. It's about acting rich before you actually are. This is where wealthy people start to structure their finances before they become rich. Here's what I mean by this. And this is about setting up multiple accounts for different purposes. Automating investing, prioritizing financial education. All those things, things that you're doing is saying, asking yourself the question, what do rich people do? And starting to do that before you ever get there. Are they having a separate account for taxes? Are they putting things in different buckets? Are they automating, automating their investing? Are they working to make sure that they have a peace of mind or emergency fund? Are they keeping their credit cards paid off so they're not carrying high interest debt or consumer debt? All those things are acting as if the rich act, which will ultimately result in you becoming rich yourself. And so here's the action step here. I want you to set up your finances today just like a rich person will. A wealthy person will. So things like automated savings, tracking spending, optimizing cash flow, those types of priorities. Whatever it is for you, I want you to sit down and just pick one. One, because remember, harbinger habits are all about tiny little things done daily that stack up to create and predict what our financial future is. And if I know you and you're sitting back saying, I'm not carrying credit card balances, I'm tracking my spending, I know what I'm doing, I've automated savings and investing, you'll be okay, we'll get you There. It may take time, but we will get you there. All right, that leads me to habit number four. Habit number four is the long term scarcity habit. This is prepping for the bad years in the good years. There's no other time where I think that we need to be looking at this, because here's what we've seen. The market has been on a terror lately. It has gone up. Yes, we've had down days, 400 points down, 1100 points down. But by and large, the market has been on an upswing for decades, for over a decade. And so these are the times to not get sloppy, to not get fat and happy. These are the times to make sure that you're doing the things to prepare for the bad years. One thing's a certainty. The market goes up and the market goes down. Now, long term, the market goes up eight out of 10 years. But there are two years that the market can, can go down. There are times where the market's going sideways. In other words, it's not growing at all. It's just kind of treading water. How do you navigate that? What happens if there's a job loss? What happens if inflation comes back? Are you taking care of yourself and putting yourself in a position to make sure that when economic downturns happen, you're prepared for it? Now, remember I said when, because markets go up and down, we will have economic downturns. It doesn't mean that you have to participate in them. It doesn't mean it has to destroy you. The, you know, Warren Buffett's got his philosophy of be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are feeble, fearful. So having cash on hand, liquidity on hand at times.

Is really helpful when times get tough because one, it'll keep you safe, it'll keep you through those tough times. But two, it allows you to take advantage of opportunities when things drop. And so I think that the action step here is that you always look for things and say, how do I make sure that I'm preparing for the down times or the bad years during the time where I'm making money, during the time that things are good, that means that you have an emergency fund or a peace of mind fund. Now we talk about in my book 9 to 18 months. I explain why it's 9 to 18 months. In fact, I did a whole episode on this that we'll make sure that we link up in the show notes for you so you have access to it, why it should be nine to 18 months and where you should be in that range and how to make it happen and how to build that emergency fund so you can capitalize on the downturns and make sure that you're not crushed by them. All right, so that leads me to habit number five. Habit number five is the energy audit habit. This is a big one. This is about managing your inputs. Just like a CEO. Wealth isn't just about money. It's about how you manage your time, how you manage your focus, how you manage your energy. High performers, they structure their time. I have a structured day. I know what I'm doing. It is intentional. It isn't. I don't get up and check my inbox and say, that's what's going to tell me what my priorities are. No, what tells me my priorities is the vision I have for my life, the plan I created for that vision, and the strategies that I have in place to make that happen. So I control the distractions, I delegate the tasks that do not move me closer to that, and I focus on the high impact activities. This is the thing that I think most people don't do is we get caught up in the minutia, the small stuff that doesn't move the needle. Primarily because it keeps us busy, it keeps us occupied. And with social media and all that stuff, it's really easy to do that. What I want you to do is say, what are the highest value tasks that I could be spending my energy, my focus and my time on, and spend the time there and try to delegate, eliminate or postpone the low value tasks that actually don't move the needle? Okay, we can probably cut 10% of the things, at least 10% of the things that we can, that we're doing right now to give us time back, to give us focus back, to give us energy back. So here's what I want you to do in this step is, is I want you to do an energy audit this week. I want you to start to ask yourself, what are the things? List out the things you're doing and ask yourself, is this energizing me or is this draining me? Is it fueling me or is it draining me? Because when you do that, you have the opportunity now to then eliminate the things that are draining you to the best of your ability so you can do the things that energize you when your energy is up, when you are putting your time and efforts into things that provide energy that energize you, that excite you out. Like me, I love going and speaking. I love being able to do this. It Energizes me. I get excited. I am jacked when I come off stage because I know that I serve because it's serving my soul to serve. And it's those things that I told my team, literally told my team, I said, here's where I want to spend my time in creation, in relation and in delivery. So all I want to do is create, relate and deliver and everything else I let the team do, I let other people do because I want to focus on the things that energize me because I can do more. And I know that I have a bigger impact. So that's, that's step number or habit number five, habit number six. This one's an interesting one, the no decision habit. This is, this is really important. This is about automating what you shouldn't would, what you want to eliminate willpower. So I want to automate what shouldn't require willpower. The wealthiest people don't rely on motivation. They don't rely on willpower, they don't rely on those kinds of things. They remove the unnecessary decisions. There is something called decision fatigue. And when you have to make too many decisions, too frequent decisions, over and over again, it's tiring, your mind gets tired. And so one of the things that I know from.

Money and the things that we do is that when there's friction in your savings, when there's friction in your investing, when there's friction in your wealth creation, the tendency is to not do it or not do it consistently. And now you lose the power of these harbinger habits because you're not doing it daily and consistently over time. So what we want to do is eliminate the decisions. This is why I say that we need to automate. Literally make it. So when money comes into the bank account, it automatically goes to the tax account, it automatically goes to a savings account, it automatically gets invested, it automatically goes into the 401k or, or the Roth or the IRA. It automatically gets put into the index funds or the ETFs or the investment portfolio. It's the way we set it up with ourselves. And so when you preset your investing or anything like that, it will happen in the background and there isn't a decision. Here's a different, a different example. My dear, dear friend Brendan, Richard and I, we do a lot of four day events together. We have done over a hundred events together and we're talking about 600 to 2,500 people at them. And I am, him and I are basically running the event. I am backstage with Them. I am the voice. We do all the things. Here's what we do. We tell the team, here's our lunch for all the days of the event. It's going to be, it's going to be chicken, it's going to be broccoli or asparagus, it's going to be spinach, it's going to be blueberries, it's going to be lots of water and avocado. And here's our meal for dinner. It's going to be salmon, it's going to be spinach, it's going to be broccoli or, or asparagus, it's going to be avocado, it's going to be blue blueberries, and it's going to be lots of water. That's it. Every single day we have the same meal at an event. Why? Because we don't want to think about it. Because our job is to stay focused on the audience, stay focused on the audience experience, on the content and to deliver. And the more we do that in our investing in our life, in structured morning routines, the automated savings, the easier it will be because it's just happening for us in the background. So here's your action step for this habit. Ask yourself, what are three recurring decisions that I make daily or weekly? And then figure out how to automate them. Now I would love for one or two of those, or even all three of them to be financial related because we're talking about wealth here, we're talking about building wealth. And the more that we can automate your wealth creation, if you're not sure how to do it, if you're not sure what to do, get my book, Building your money machine. It will give you the priorities and the ways to do it. But get a number of those recurring decisions off your plate. Give yourself some space, think about what's happening here. Habit number five was an energy audit. Habit number six is the no decision habit. Imagine you get more energy back because you're spending your, your time in the high energy stuff. Then, then you get the more time back because you're not spending your time making decisions that you don't need to make on recurring decisions. And you allowed to, to go see how these things stack up. They're very, very powerful. That leads me to habit number seven. This is the generosity habit. Giving before you have enough. And I, and I think that generosity, it truly isn't about money. It's about believing in abundance before you actually have it. It's about giving of you.

One thing that came from my Cancer was this. My cancer journey was crazy. It was long, it was difficult, and it's not really over because this is a high recurring cancer. I go in regularly for scopes and scans to make sure that I'm clear and clean. And in fact, I got another one coming up soon. But here's the thing.

I realize that you have to sit back and say, how do I take care.

Of things in the proper way?

Generosity isn't about money alone. When someone asked me, did the cancer change you? I said, yes, it did. And they said, how? I mean, it's kind of a crazy question. Of course it did. I said, I can say, no easier. What do you mean, no easier? See, here's what I realize. You've been given.

A certain number of slices of life. I've been given a certain number of slices of life. May they be plenty. But I know that when I give a slice of life away, like right now, you are listening to this or you're watching this episode, you're giving me a slice of your life. And I hope that you feel that, that that's a valuable slice to give away. Here's what I know. If I can't give 100% of my soul to that moment, to give this to you, to deliver it to you, to. To give it in that moment, whether I'm on stage, whether I'm here in front of the camera, whether I'm having a conversation with you, then the answer to doing it should be no. Because it's not fair to you, it's not fair to me. And the only thing I ask in return is that you give the same. And so my point is this generosity is of your soul. It's of your giving, and not of your pocketbook. So one of the things that I've seen with many people that are on that wealth journey is they give before they have excess. And it trains their mind. It trains them to be in an abundant mindset rather than a scarcity mindset. And they give of themselves.

Before they probably give of their pocketbook. And so what I'd love for you to do is, as an action step for this, is to set aside a small bit of time to give to something that's meaningful to your soul, but at the same time, to set aside a small percentage of your income, even if it's just $10 a month, to give to a cause that's meaningful for you, okay? Not because of the amount of money, but because of what it does to you internally. The training of the mind, the training of the heart. The training of the soul. That's the generosity habit. That leads me to habit number eight. That's to challenge your own story habit. Oh, this is a big one. It's about recognizing when your beliefs, the stories in your head, are holding you back. Now, when it comes to money, I literally thought that as an accountant, I was going to teach you the columns and the rows and the math behind wealth building. And I quickly found out, including with myself, that until I dealt what was in between our ears, the stories in our head, the problems in our heart, we couldn't deal with the issues in the pocketbook. And so there are stories and beliefs around money, around wealth, around your ability, your worth, all those things that have to be navigated because those are the things that are actually holding you back from the wealth you deserve, the richness you deserve. And so if we're sitting back going, I'll never be wealthy, look at them there. And you're looking at other people that are driving nice cars, living in nice places, and you're doing it with envy. That's a problem. Now, mind you, there's a whole nother aspect of it. You might be seeing them driving nice cars, living in nice places, but they might be buried in debt. So we don't know the whole story. That's another discussion for another time. But the reality is this many people aren't broke because of circumstances. They're broke because their beliefs about money, around success, around opportunity, around themselves. And so if you've ever thought, I'll never be wealthy, or rich people are just lucky, or I wasn't born on the right side of the tracks, or money's the root of all evil, all those stories that we. We've heard, okay, money's taboo. All that stuff, it's shaping the actions you take. And when it shapes the actions you take, it shapes the results you get.

And I walk through the story dynamic in my book, building your money machine. And here's the thing. What's really holding us back is not the story itself, but the interpretation we give the story. The story is the facts of what happened. The interpretation is the meaning and how we make it mean to us. And if it means that I'm not capable, if we give it a meaning that I'm not capable, I don't have the capacity. I'm not. I don't have the right genetics, I don't have the right. Right whatever, okay, education, that holds us back. But is that the fact? No, that's the meaning. So here's what I want you to do the action step here is I want you to write down those beliefs, I want you to write down those stories. I want you to look at it and say, what were the facts? And if you don't know what the facts are, here's how you do it. Presume you're going to see the situation through a lens of a camera with no sound. You can't hear anything. All you can see is the actions. Those are facts. What the camera records, everything else, the voices and all that stuff, that's the meaning. Separate the facts from the meaning and then ask yourself what's a more positive meaning? What is a more serving narrative, if you will, that, that I can, I can use in this case. Okay, this is really important because this is the one thing that starts to hold a lot of people back. And many of the stuff that we've learned about money and wealth were never through education, but through observation because we were watching other people with money argue about money, problems with money in the media and the social media, all those things. We need to break that pattern. And so this habit, that challenge your own story habit becomes really important. Here leads me to number nine. Number nine habit. Number nine is the 1% progress habit. This is the tiny wins that compound over time. Success isn't massive leaps. Maybe it happens here and there, but it's about small daily improvements that compound just like compounded interest. It's the same thing with our habits. If we get to the gym for 15 minutes and then the next time we get there for 18 minutes and then 20 minutes we start to stack that. If all I DO is improve 1% per day each day over the year, you're going to actually be 37 times better by the end of the year. Not 365% because it's not additive, it is compounded. So even though that you go 1% a day, it's not 365 times, it's 37. Having 365%, it's 37 times. Because the 1% you improve today, you'll get the 1% for tomorrow plus 1% of the 1% and it grows. But imagine if it wasn't 1%. Imagine if it was 2% or 5%. So I'd ask you this. The action step here is to pick one area of your financial life. Investing earnings, budgeting or planning savings, spending, all those things. Pick one and commit.

To improving it by just 1% a month. I'm giving you a month to do it, but I want you to bring it down to a day because that's when we see the big changes. All right, That's. That's habit number nine. Habit number ten, Financial literacy habit. I know I said it at the beginning, but this is the. One of the most important ones, learning about money weekly. You cannot master what you do not study. You cannot master what you do not do. You can read a book about riding a bike, but until you get on the bike, you'll never learn to ride. It's just that way, okay? Warren Buffett spends hours reading financial reports and books, not because he has to, but because the wealth is built on the knowledge he's gained.

Now, here's the important thing. Gaining the knowledge is one side of that. Applying the knowledge is the other side of that. It's important that you learn something and then go apply it. Learn something and go apply it. When we talk about this financial literacy habit, ask yourself, you know, what is one thing that I can learn? And then I can go apply it. Not just to just stack up learnings, because knowledge is. Knowledge is information. It occupies our mind, it occupies our soul. It occupies our focus. But truly, truly start applying it. It's in the application that we find the growth. Okay, so action step for this one. Block out one hour a week to learn something new about money. Books, podcasts, courses, whatever it is, the more you learn, the more you learn. That's what Warren Buffett said, and I truly believe that. So block out an hour a week. Now, maybe it's not an hour at one time. Maybe it's. It's 15 minutes over four days, 10 minutes over six days, whatever it is, but block it out to learn something about money and then.

Apply it. And don't apply it once, but apply it consistently. You see how this will all stack up. And then last habit. Habit number 11, the no is your superpower. Habit boundaries over busyness. This kind of goes back to my story with the cancer. But saying yes to everything is going to keep you busy for sure. But is it going to give you progress? No. Saying no to the wrong things.

And when I say wrong things, the things that don't move you closer to the vision you have for your life, then moves you closer to that wealthy freedom that you want, that rich life that you deserve, that you desire. And so we need to look at things, and this is why it's so important for us to actually start with the vision for our life, to create a dynamic plan to make it happen and then set things in motion from there so it's informed by the vision and the plan and not haphazard things. So most successful people ruthlessly protect their time and they eliminate the distractions that take them off track, the things that are unnecessary commitments, the things that. That will drain them. The people that will drain them. They learn to say no and know that that is their superpower. Okay, so this action step here is to set a filter for requests. Ask yourself.

Does this align with my long term vision? Does this align with my plan? Does this move me closer to what I want for my life? And if the answer for that is no, then you need to say no without guilt. That's the way, way it goes. All right? We need to. We only have certain number of hours in the day. We only have a certain amount of energy in our life. And so that's the 11 harbinger habits that if I looked at those habits and said, what are you doing with them? They will let me know whether you are going to find your path to financial freedom or you will be in financial struggle. Because they're predictors of what's to come in the future. And when you stack these up, it makes a huge difference because the, your. Your future is not built in a day. It's built on your daily habits. And the harbinger habits you build today will literally determine your financial success tomorrow. Right? I hope you found this helpful. I hope you found this valuable. I hope that you're going to take these 11 habits, write them down, get them put into your life. It will change your life, your future forever. And I'd love to hear from you. Which habit hit home, which habit you set back and said, I really need this. I'd love to hear you. Send me a comment, send me a note and do that. And if you haven't done so already, make sure that you're subscribed to this channel, the show. I want to make sure that we're having these conversations on a regular basis. Many of you know that I am on a crusade to light the path to financial freedom for a million families. And I want one of those families to be you. All right? Financial freedom is your birthright. Let's go claim it and let's do it the right way. All right? I look forward to seeing in the next episode or the next show or on your road to financial freedom. And until I do, always, always strive that I will list 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 youg Money Machine, where we help you learn how to master your money, eliminate financial stress, and live a life of choice. If you found this valuable or helpful to you, here's what I'd love for you to do. If you do me a favor, go to Apple, Apple Podcast, or wherever you're listening to this podcast and rate and review the show. It helps us tremendously to keep us at the top of the list so we can continue to get this information and this message out to people. Because I truly believe that financial freedom is your birthright, and I want to help each and every one of you claim it. Thanks so much.