Start Enjoying Your Money, It'll Make You Richer

A couple sitting at $1.7 million called me because they couldn't decide whether to spend $8,000, not on a car, but on a week in a rented house with their kids and their grandkids. See, they'd been talking about it for 3 summers and they were, they were losing sleep over it. Here's what makes that story worth the next 20 minutes. The same thing that had them frozen at $1.7 million has people frozen at $40,000 at $4 million. It's the operating system. It's one operating system that almost nobody knows it's running. So welcome to Building Your Money Machine, where we help you master your money, eliminate financial stress so you can live life by choice. And I'm your host, Mel Abraham, and I've spent 30 years inside real people's finances. And I'll tell you the pattern nobody warned me about: the ones with the most money are often the ones enjoying it the least. So today, I'm gonna show you the 3 reasons people say no and why only one of them is a problem and how to know which one you're in. And I'll tell you what happened to that couple because it changed how they handled money from that day forward. All right, let's do this. Now, their argument was never really about the $8,000. It just took them 3 summers to figure that out. See, $1.7 million Combined income, just over $200,000. See, they'd been in the same house for 15 years, so the mortgage was almost gone. Their adult kids wanted the whole family to just rent a house and stay there for a week together, everybody under one roof. And their share came out to be about $8,000. They had been talking about doing this for 3 summers. 3 summers! And, and yet they were agonizing over it. Not casually, genuinely losing sleep over it. So I ran the plan—not a vibe check, but the actual numbers—and what came back was that spending the eight thousand dollars had essentially no meaningful effect on their financial freedom or financial independence. None. Zero. It didn't move their date. It didn't move the needle. It didn't change their trajectory. It was a rounding error against one point seven million dollars. In a portfolio. So I said to them, you're asking me whether you can afford to spend $8,000. I'm wondering whether you can afford to not spend it, to keep saying no. Now, here's where I have to be careful because there's a whole genre of advice out there right now telling you to loosen up, go enjoy your money, you only live once. And a lot of it is gonna get some people in real trouble because there are 3 completely different reasons a person says no to something. From the outside, they look identical, but from the inside, they're not remotely the same, and only one of them is an actual problem. So refusal number 1 is real constraint. You want it, it generally would bring you joy, and you can't afford it. You see, the money's not there, or it's there but it's spoken for already, and buying it means that you're going to go into debt or raiding something else you need. So saying no to that, that's accurate. That's not a scarcity mindset. That's not a lack mindset. That is a real mindset. And it is correctly reading the situation that's in front of you. You know, there's nothing enlightening about financing your healing on a credit card at 24%. That's not abundance. That's an interest payment with a story attached to it. Anybody who's telling you to override that reading It's not helping you. They're helping you feel good for about 6 weeks. But the important thing is that if you can't truly afford it, you gotta say no. And, and I get that, that's hard, but it's necessary. Now, refusal number 2, that is discernment. See, you can afford it, but you already know the joy is going to evaporate. It's a momentary pleasure, and you've been around long enough to recognize that There's a difference between something that lights you up for a weekend and something that you'll be still talking about a decade from now. See, saying no to that isn't deprivation. That's you actually being awake. That's the second one. The third one, refusal number 3, is the one nobody diagnoses. You can afford it. You're not going into debt. It would genuinely matter to you. It's not fleeting. It's not impulsive. It's the real thing. And you say no, Anyways, that's the disease. That's the only one of these 3 that's costing you something. And, and the cruel part is that from the outside, refusal number 3 looks exactly like the other 2. It looks responsible, it looks disciplined, and your friends will compliment you on it. But nobody stages an intervention for a person who won't spend money on their own family. There's no support group for that. Let me take you to Ted and Elizabeth. They were in refusal number 3, and they thought they were in refusal number 1. They genuinely believed that they were being careful, that they had built this entire story about prudence on top of a fear that had nothing to do with their actual financial position. So the first job is diagnosis, is figuring out which refusal you're actually in. But that raises the harder question. And it's the one that Ted asked me next. Because if the money's there and the plan says yes, why does saying yes feel so wrong? See, you didn't build a machine to admire it. Elizabeth answered that one for him. She looked at me, she said, I guess I'm still afraid that someday I'm going to need it. And I told her, that's exactly why we built the money machine, not so you could die with the biggest machine. And I'm gonna be honest with you, just a personal perspective. I feel this myself. I get this pull myself. So, and, and I'm the, the dude that talks about this and speaks about that, built it, that wrote the book. But the machine was built not to observe. The machine was built to fund a life worth living. And I wanna say something here that might sound strange coming from that guy that wrote the book. If all I do is help you build that large bank account, I actually failed. And I mean that. So the money was never the object. The money was simply the mechanics, the, the vehicle. The, the life is the destination. And the only way you ever live rich is if the money's pointed at your values, at your vision, at the things that genuinely matter to you. And so often we're so focused on the bank account, we don't take time to look at the life account. So, so let me show you what that looks like. I, I wanna break it down mechanically and using my own money because I'm not gonna ask you to do something I don't do. Stephanie and I met in an airport, which is either very romantic or a warning about my travel schedule, depending on who you ask. But traveling together is one of the greatest joys of our relationship. It's not about getting away. It's about creating moments that we're still talking about years later, experiences that, that deepen what we have, time where, where it's just the two of us and nobody else needs anything. Now, our big trips, they run into the tens of thousands of dollars. And we've set aside a minimum of $100,000 a year in travel. Okay? Now, here's the thing. I get it. It's a big number. Now, before that number does anything weird to you, understand that the number is the least interesting part of this. For some of you, that's an enormous figure. For others, it's probably small. The magnitude isn't impressive. The mechanism is. Here's how it works. We book our major trips a year in advance. 2027 is already booked. My speaking calendar fills up fast. Hers does too. And so we sit down and decide roughly where we want to go and, and when, and we literally block it out. It goes in her calendar, it goes in my calendar, and It never gets moved. And then it goes into the financial plan, which means by the time we're standing there deciding whether to book something, the decision was already made 12 months earlier by 2 people who were calm, clear, not staring at a checkout screen. And that's why there's no guilt. Not because we're rich enough not to care, but because the money was allocated to that on purpose before it had a chance to get spent on something neither of us would actually remember. And right now that's funded out of my active income. She's working, I'm still working, I'm speaking, and I have my businesses. So as long as that income covers the bills and funds the machine at, at the level we want and covers the travel, there's no reason to touch the machine for it. But someday it will come from the machine, and that's the point of building it. That's where Ted and Elizabeth were. What most people do is the exact opposite. They pay the bills, they save whatever's left, and then joy has to justify itself out of the scraps at the end. Joy shows up as the defendant standing there explaining why it deserves $8,000, and it loses that argument every single time. I think you need to flip the order. The things that genuinely matter to you get funded first on purpose in advance, and everything else competes for what's left. So you follow the wealth priority ladder, you do the right things, and then what's left goes towards your joy. You can't build a plan around a life that you haven't defined. That's the actual reason people can't spend their money without guilt. There's no target. So every dollar out the door feels like a step backwards from the finish line they actually never drew. So here's the thing. If you never sat down to put a real number on the life you want, I'm gonna make it easy for you cuz I built a free freedom number calculator and it walks you through it. It's totally free. You'll put some numbers in it, it'll give you a trajectory, it'll give you a ballpark rough idea. Go to melabraham.com/number. to grab it and get into it, because now you'll at least have a target. All right, so you diagnose the refusal and you fund what matters on purpose, but there's still a force out there quietly overriding both of those, and most people never even notice it, and they don't notice that it's making the decisions for them. So here's the thing, so somebody else is actually spending your money. We don't buy new cars every 2 years. We don't replace the TV because there's a better one that came out. That stuff doesn't bring us sustainable joy, so we don't put our money there. And, and I want to be precise about this because that's what it is and, and what it isn't. Because if you saw our house, you might think, uh-huh, I'm being cheap in a few places. Declining something, turning down something that doesn't matter to you isn't scarcity. It's not cheap. That's— Humility. Alignment. See, we push aside the things that don't matter so we can go all in on the things that do. Now flip it around, because this is where I think the money really leaks. The trouble doesn't start when you spend too much. It starts when you spend on something that was never yours to want in the first place. You bought the car because of what some— somebody would think when you pulled up. You upgraded the kitchen because your sister-in-law upgraded hers. You took a trip because It photographed well, not because you wanted to be there. You joined the club, you got the watch, you did the thing. And when you spend from comparison, you're not making a bad decision. You've just been handed the decision to someone else and you agreed to pay for it. See, somebody I know who doesn't know your numbers, doesn't know your values, doesn't know your vision, will never see the bill. That's the part that makes me a little crazy because those people aren't going to be there in the moment it costs you. The neighbor who inspired the truck payment isn't making that truck payment. The algorithm that sold you the kitchen isn't paying the second mortgage. Instagram has never once cosigned a loan. And this is the trap Ted and Elizabeth were caught in from the other direction. See, they had absorbed a whole set of rules about what responsible people do with their money. Rules that came from somewhere outside of them. The rules that were louder than their own family sitting there asking for one week together. Both versions have the same root. Someone other than you is deciding where your money goes. And the fix? It's not more discipline. Discipline aimed at the wrong target just gets you to the wrong place faster. The fix is knowing what you value and being clear on it and clearly enough knowing it that comparison loses its grip. Because once you've got the real answer, everybody else's answer stops being interesting. Which brings me to the part of this that isn't about money at all, because there's a cost to waiting that no spreadsheet on earth will ever show you. The window is not as, as wide as you think. Ted and Elizabeth waiting 3 summers. In those 3 years, the kids got older, their schedules got harder, grandkids grew, their parents aged. None of that showed up anywhere in their financial plan because financial plans are very good at modeling money and completely blind to time and modeling life. And I've watched people do this for 30 years. They plan the trip that they want, the trip, and, and it keeps sliding next year after the next promotion, once things settle down, you know, and then someone gets sick or someone's gone or the window that was wide open just quietly closed. Well, Everybody was being responsible. See, the money was fine. The life wasn't. And I, being someone who's had cancer twice, I'll tell you what scared me. When I was sitting there thinking about the cancer, I was scared not to fight the cancer. I knew I was in for a battle because it wasn't what people assume. The treatments didn't matter. It wasn't that I had to go through that and the surgeries and everything. The fear was there for sure. The anxiety was there for sure, but I knew what the path was and I knew the path that I was going to walk. But here's what really scared me. So I still had a lot of life in me and I wasn't finished and I felt incomplete. And the thought of not getting to experience the rest of it with the people I love sat on my chest in a way that nothing else did. I literally looked in the mirror and said, not yet. I'm not done yet. That's what I kept saying. And that's what scared me. Now, I'm not telling you that to be dramatic about it. I'm telling you because that fear, the one that actually shows up when the window starts closing, has nothing to do with your account balance. Nobody in that moment wishes their portfolio were bigger. So Ted and Elizabeth, they took the trip. And when I talked to them afterwards, they didn't tell me about the house they rented. Not one word about the resort or the beach or, or any of it. They told me about breakfast. Breakfast. Everybody around the table, some of the stupid inside jokes that started that week and are apparently never gonna die. Now, here's the part that surprised me, and it's the reason this episode has the title it does. That week changed how they handled money afterwards, not by making them looser with it, but by making them sharper with it. Because once you've felt the right thing, you can't unfeel it. You know exactly what it's worth, and everything that was quietly draining money without ever delivering the feeling Starts looking obvious and a little ridiculous. Discipline stops requiring willpower because you're no longer white-knuckling against desire. You're just choosing the thing you actually want over the thing you don't. So what they asked me next was this. It's like they said, how do we do this again? And that question kind of reorganized their entire plan, not around a bigger number, around making that week repeatable. And that's when the machine gets built with real urgency because now they, they can actually feel what it's for. And that's when the comparison spending dies on its own without a budget or a rule or an app. Because when you know what your joy is worth, nobody else's version of it can compete. And that's how enjoying your money makes you richer. Not because your spending creates wealth, but because the joy is the only thing that ever tells you What you're building towards. And a target you can feel is worth 10 times a target that you can only calculate. So here's the thing. Ted and Elizabeth spent $8,000 they'd been protecting for 3 years. They earned it back. Of course they did. They're 2 people with good incomes and a portfolio that didn't blink. The $8,000 came back. They earned it again. The weak never would. So if you're sitting on money right now saying no to something that genuinely matters to you, something you can afford, something you'd remember for the rest of your life, I want you to be honest about it, which refusal you're in. Because if it's a real constraint, then no is the right answer and you should hold that line without a shred of guilt. But if the money's there and the plan says yes, and you're still saying no, You're not protecting your future. You're postponing your life. And there's no line item on any statement or any portfolio anywhere that will ever show you what that costs. You didn't build this so you could look at it. You built it so you could live it. Because earning more doesn't make you free. A money machine does. I truly hope that this lands for you. I truly hope that you'll start to realize that it's not the bank account that makes you rich. It's the life account that does. All right, do me a favor. If this hit, let me know. Give me a thumbs up, send me a comment, send me a DM. And while you're at it, share this with someone that needs to hear it. I want you all living rich lives. I want you all living wealthy lives. And if I can light the path to make that happen, that's what we're here for. That's what this channel is for. All right, until I get a chance to see you on your journey and on your path to financial freedom. Always, always strive to live a life that outlives you. Cheers. 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'd do me a favor, go to Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to this podcast and rate and review it. 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.