The Benefits of Getting Rich Without Anyone Noticing

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. What if I told you that true wealth isn't about flashy cars, designer clothes, or a mansion in the hills, but it was really about freedom, security, and peace of mind? And what if the secret to achieving that kind of wealth is staying under the radar while you build it? If you ever felt the pressure of keeping up appearances and lord knows, in the social media connected world that we live in, it's there. Or if you're worried about how do you grow your wealth without attracting unwanted attention, well, this episode's for you because I'm going to show you exactly how to build lasting wealth. Quietly avoid the traps that come with flaunting success, and you get a chance to live your rich life your way, on your terms.

Imagine this. You're walking into a grocery store. You do your shopping. You get in line to pay with your debit card. You see someone behind you. They're modestly dressed and they're going to pay with their debit card or their credit card or cash themselves. And you would never guess that they own a bunch of rental properties or that they have a net worth in the millions or beyond. But then you see someone driving some flashy car into the parking lot that you look at and go, wow. But, you know, the difference is the one behind you may be truly wealthy because they understand the power of quiet wealth. The one that drove into the parking lot may be drowning in debt to create a facade and a picture for people to see. Now, why do some of the wealthiest people prefer to stay unnoticed? What are the benefits? Why does it matter? Well, I want to break it down for you because I think there's some really interesting dynamics that go into play and that you may want to bring it into your world. I live in a town that is like this, okay? I live in Laguna Beach, California, and we call it a town where you have billionaires in board shorts. Like they walking down the street in their flip flops and their board shorts and they're literally billionaires 100 millionaires and you would never know it. They're down to earth.

They're modest and they're good natured. Then you'll see people that are driving up PCH in their flashy Lambos and everything. They're loud cars to attract attention. Now, I don't know those because I don't associate with them. But the fact is, is that there's a huge difference between the two. And, and so I think that building wealth quietly isn't just about humility, but it's about security, it's about sustainability, it's about freedom. And I want to share with you some steps and some things that, that come into play. All right, so the first thing I want to really touch on though is this. Why stay unnoticed? What's the big deal? Well, I think that we can see what happens by comparison if we just look at how social media has impacted people's buying decisions, people's living decisions. We see things and we think that's the normal. I remember listening to Patrick Bendavid who made the comment that growing up, now him and I grew up in the same town, not far from each other at the same time. He said our comparison set was the kid that got the new Stingray bicycle. Okay, I remember Stingray. I don't know if they still have them, but we. And that was my comparison set too. You got the new Stingray bicycle with the sissy bar in the back and all that stuff. Okay. But now the comparison set is the Kardashians jet because of social media. And so what ends up happening is that, that the advantage of staying unnoticed is it actually frees you from the external judgments, the external pressures. There's a difference in someone that is just parading it and one that is quietly enjoying it because it's not. Ben Franklin had a quote, and I thought it was a great quote, that wealth is not those who have it, but it is those who enjoy it. Okay? Credit Karma found that 40% of Americans feel pressured to spend more to maintain a social image. That's not a recipe for financial freedom. That is not a recipe for proper financial responsibility and stewardship. Okay? We don't spend because we're pressured to spend to keep up an image. We, we spend to create the life that we want. Now the other reason I think we want to do this is enhanced financial security. I mean, just safety flaunting. It makes you a target to, for scams, for, for theft, for unwanted attention. And you'll see it, you'll see it over and over. It's I got effectively targeted in the Ponzi scheme and I fell susceptible, I fell prey to it. Okay? It wasn't because I was flaunting, it was because someone knew me and introduced me into it. But the FBI has reported that there's a 70%. 70% increase in financial scams that are targeting affluent people, wealthy people in the last five years. Okay, 70%. And with AI and the things that they can do, I think that's going to go up because their access to it is, is really much easier. The other thing is that being quiet is you have this sustained long term growth. You keep wealth on a low profile, allows you to focus on growth, allows you to focus on your family, allows you to focus on the very lifestyle and vision for your life that you want without the distractions and without lifestyle inflation. So what do we need to do? I think that there's a couple things to to do that come into play. The first is this. I want you to look at things through a different set of eyes. First step is to adopt a stealth wealth mindset. This is shifting your perspective. So let go. And I know this can be hard, but let go of the need to impress others. Okay? I live my life my way. Most of my days are spent in sweats and T shirts, okay? That's just what it is. When I get on stage or when I'm meeting with clients, yes, I'll dress up, but I'm just, I'm just a dude that likes to walk the dogs on the beach and just live my life. I don't feel the need to impress someone. And if I feel like I want to buy something because it'll look good for others, it's a mistake. Okay? So I'll buy things that I like. Now they, I happen to like nice stuff, but it's not for others, it's for me. Okay? So shifting that perspective becomes important because it allows you to avoid lifestyle inflation. You don't sit back and allow your life to expand because you think it needs to expand. Instead, every financial decision that you make is driven by a detailed, dynamic financial plan that drives the decision and moves you closer to your ultimate desired vision for your life. That's it. Okay? So one of the things to do is as your income goes up, to have a process in place to automatically funnel a percentage of every single raise or every increase into your investments into your financial future. Okay?

That leads me to point number two. And point number two is I want you to automate your wealth building. I just want you to set it all up on automatic. I want it on autopilot. I don't want you to think about it. I want it to be easy. I want you to be walking down the street, walking down the beach, walking, hiking in the hills, knowing that your wealth is being built without your effort. Set it up on auto transfers, okay? Meaning that, that you have a system where when money comes in automatically, the percentage that needs to be set aside for taxes is set aside into a separate account or into a separate bucket in the account. The percentage that is meant to go and invest for your financial future is automatically set aside and invested. At the same time. The, the percentage that is necessary to pay down your debt is automatically used to pay down the debt. Your bills are automatically paid. That, that everything is without question, without effort and without thinking. The less friction we have in the process, the more the process will you and not against you. Okay? You build wealth in the background that way. Okay, Next one is to prioritize assets over liabilities. Okay. There are things where you sit back and say, do I really need that $150,000 car when I'm renting a one bedroom studio or a one bedroom or a studio apartment? Maybe what I need to do is acquire assets. Now here's my definition of an asset. Is a car an asset? Yes, technical, technically it is, but it's a depreciating asset. I want you to buy assets that have the potential to grow, to appreciate, to go up in value and to generate cash flow for you. Okay? When we start talking about building your money machine like I do in, in my book is what we're looking for is not just any asset. Listen, my wife's got a whole bunch of shoes. She thinks they're assets. I think they're weapons, if you've seen the heels on these things. But the reality is they don't generate cash flow. They generate enjoyment for her. And that's a whole different currency. And I'm fine with that. But it's not an asset that increases your, your wealth or your ability to live by generating cash flow. So assets are going to be investments, rental properties and things of that nature that allow you to get more cash flow because that's what gives you the freedom. So assets over liabilities. Now any liability liabilities can be debts, okay? It could be stuff on credit cards, it could be your mortgage. But the mortgage used to buy properties that are cash flowing is an investment. We still need to be careful about it. But a liability is also something that's draining your cash. It could be frivolous Spending, it could be emotional spending, it could be momentary pleasure spending. Because you're swiping on Instagram and you buy something that's a liability, it is draining your wealth. And, and so when you look at the, the people that are under the radar, the majority of the time they're focusing on acquiring assets over liabilities. Okay, the next one is this is to embrace the power of time. Can't tell you how many times I've had people come to me and say, well, I got time. No you don't. I don't care if you're 16, I don't care if you're 20, I don't care if you'm 40 or 50, 60. You don't have time. The greatest wealth building lever is time itself, okay? It's not the income that you make. People say, well, it's not how much you make, it's, it's how much you keep. Yeah, it is, but it's not even how much you keep, it's how much you get to work for you. That's the definition of true wealth and financial freedom. And the earlier we can get in the game investing, the more powerful our dollars are, our money is, the bigger it's going to grow. If you think about this, If I put a dollar in at 16 years old and I had this happen with, with a client who's a 60, was a 16 year old kid who joined one of my programs, Henry, and I've talked about him before. He's now 18. And over that, the last couple of years he's put over $13,000 in a Roth IRA that's invested in an S&P 500 index fund. Low cost, low fee. The average return over the S&P 500 is, is somewhere between 9 and 11%. Let's just use 8% for the moment. That $13,000 that he put in will go up 107 times by the time he's age 65. 107 times, that makes him a millionaire. If he did nothing else, put nothing more in, but allowed it to grow, time is huge. Now if he waited, if I just wait a couple years and we get to age 20, that amount goes up 88 times. Still a huge multiple, but it goes up only 88 times. It goes from 107 to 88. If I wait 5 years to go to age 25, it drops by half. It goes up only 44 times. My point is, is that, that embrace the power of time. No matter what your age, stage or circumstances, now is the time to get in to Open up the IRA to open up the Roth IRA to get even small contributions and stuff. Working for you to put those soldiers to work. If you're not sure how to do it, if you're not sure how to do it, get my book. In chapter 12, I walk you through something called the Wealth Priority Ladder. I literally tell you where to put each dollar, the priority and the recipe to optim your dollars to work for you. Okay, number the, the next one is, is this protecting your wealth by staying anonymous. So that means that staying private about your financial wins, you don't need to broadcast everything. Okay? It's, it's. I read a, an article about someone who had won $22 million in a lottery. He told his wife, so his wife knew. They didn't tell their kids. They stayed anonymous in this article. They were asking for advice. They didn't tell their family members. They didn't tell their friends. They kept working their jobs. They just didn't want to change things for a lot of reasons. One, they didn't want people coming out of the woodworks to ask for money, to try and get investments to be targets of scams. Two, they wanted their kids to define their life based on what they experience, not to give them a silver spoon and change their view of life. And so I think that staying private about the majority of our financial wins is important. It protects our family, it protects our values, it protects our peace of mind. It shields us from external pressures. Okay? Now, at the same time, you might come into a windfall like this lottery, and I want you to think about it and say, how do you use it strategically? In my business, when I first really started out, I would, I was valuing businesses, I was buying and selling. I was doing these big consulting gigs and things. So I would get a project that would go anywhere from 10,000 to 110,000 and more. But I didn't need all the money at that moment. And so I call it leapfrog funding. And so sometimes you'll get a project or you'll do a launch or you'll do something where you get a big bonus and a lump sum in. Instead of going and spending it all, here's what I tell people to do. I want you to carve a small sliver off to celebrate because I really want you to still enjoy the journey to financial freedom. So I want you to carve a piece off to celebrate. I want you to also carve off a piece to pay for the taxes if it isn't taken care of already. So make sure you take care of that. Then I want you to carve a piece off to pay your bills for a period of time that you need to cover your bills until you get the next revenue generating activity. Okay? Now if you get a regular paycheck and you're covering your bills, that might be zero, okay? And then the rest I want you to put strategically towards your financial future. That means putting it into your, into your roths, into your IRAs, into your plans and your brokerage accounts to invest it for your financial future, to redirect that those windfalls into a place that's going to build the future faster. Because we just saw the power of time. And if we get this leapfrog in funding, we get the benefit of, you know, front loading our investing. And the time leverage of doing it all right, leads me to the next one. And that is saying, I want you to have a sound foundation that first is going to come from a place of having multiple streams of income. Having multiple streams of income is no longer a luxury, it's a necessity. It's, it's not to have you working 15 hour, 18 hour days all the time, but it is a way to create a.

Foundation of security. Because if I am reliant on one income stream, a salary, a business, a job, or one client, and that client goes away, or that job goes away or something happens, you're in jeopardy. I lived this, okay? I lived this on the other side of it because I did it right. In the book, I talk about the five incomes. I need you to build the five incomes over time. You're not going to do it overnight, it's going to take a while. But when you do it right, like when I got diagnosed with a cancer in 2019, I shut my businesses down. Anything that required a lot of my effort, I stopped because I needed all that energy, all that effort to conquer the cancer battle. But we didn't have to reduce our lifestyle, we didn't have to sell things, we didn't have to do any of that. I had a machine because I had multiple streams of income that could support us. On the other side of that, having an additional streams of income creates stability and it accelerates your wealth building to a point where you have financial freedom in a faster way. That leads me to a couple of the last things here, and this one, as much as it isn't about the money, it is all about the money. Invest in your education, invest in the relationships. Surround your people with people that value financial growth. Surround yourself with, with knowledge where you can gain the knowledge and the skills to be the captain of your financial ship. Whether it's watching my show, subscribing this channel, and if you haven't subscribed to this channel, you should be subscribing now. Follow me. I'm, I am not, I'm not selling you investments, I'm not selling you insurance. I just want you to take control of your financial future and live a financially free life. It may not happen today, it may not happen tomorrow, may not be a year or, or two years from now, but, but it will happen. Your dreams come and I truly believe that. Okay. Attend workshops, take courses, read books. Okay. Join a mastermind. Do the things that are going to up level your, your knowledge, your experience, your expertise, and surround you with other people on a similar journey with similar values. Okay? And then the last piece is this. I think it's about playing the long game. Patience and consistency is truly the real wealth building secret. Those that make it overnight usually lose it the next night. Those that go up fast come down fast. You don't. It's not the beans. I call it the beanstalk syndrome. You can't just plant seeds and throw the seeds out the window and say, okay, and tomorrow morning the beanstalk's completely grown. It's not the way it works. You plant seeds over time and there's a point in time where you cross a tipping point where, where what looks like slow growth Tips to accelerated growth. Do you realize that at, at, at putting $10,000 away in an 8% fund to get to your first hundred thousand dollars, it will take you seven and a half years, 7.6 years to get to half a million. It'll take you 20 and a half years to get that other half a million. It only takes seven and a half years. It takes you less time to make the second half a million than it took you to take the first to make the first hundred thousand. That's the power of patience, consistency, and long term.

Habits and behaviors. So it builds sustainable wealth when you do this. So commit to, to weekly, weekly contributions, to weekly investing, to monthly reviews and keep yourself on track. All right? And in the end, what you're really doing is prioritizing the richness in your life over the wealth in the bank account. It's about the experiences, the feelings, the missions, the movements, the fulfillment that you can create in your life by doing it in a quiet way, but in a way that fulfills you from the inside out and everything. And I think that in that process, you'll learn to measure your wealth in freedom and time and not the dollars in the bank account. All right? Because all along, what you're really doing is living your legacy each and every day. You're not leaving a legacy, but you're living it in the way you show up, the way you. You're generous, the way you're thoughtful, the way you contribute to causes, the way you mentor others, or the way you become role model. A millionaire who's donated anonymously to local schools.

Leaves a lasting impact.

Without all the pomp and circumstance of recognition. Now, I'm not saying you don't need that, but if that's the reason you do it, I think we need to examine it. That's just my thought. All right. And in the end, when you do this and you build quiet wealth, you have more security, you have more peace of mind, you have more safety. You're less susceptible to scams, thefts, or other things. And in the end, you have greater rewards by building unnoticed wealth in a way that aligns with what you want in your life, to live each and every day the way you want it. So imagine waking up every day now knowing that your finances are secure, that your choices are unlimited, and that no one else is going to dictate the path, the pressures, the comparison, all that stuff that you are taking, the steps one by one on your path to the vision for your life to do it your way. I hope that helps. I hope you go out there and build your wealth in a way that builds it and builds the life that you dream of, that you designed, that isn't designed by someone else. All right. Until I get a chance to see you on the road to your financial freedom, As I always say, all, as always, strive for the life that outlives you. Thank you for listening to the affluent entrepreneurship with me, your host, Mel Abraham. If you want to achieve financial liberation to create an affluent lifestyle, join me in the affluent entrepreneur Facebook group now by going to melabraham.com group and I'll see you there.

And that's it for this episode of Building your money Machine, where we help you learn how to master your money, eliminate financial stress, and live a life of choice. If you found this valuable or helpful to you, here's what I'd love for you to do. If you do me a favor, go to Apple, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this podcast and rate and review the show. It helps us tremendously to keep us at the top of the list so we can continue to get this information and this message out to people because I truly believe that financial freedom is your birthright. And I want to help each and every one of you claim it. Thanks so much.