The Tipping Points to My Wealth Journey with Corene Phelps

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.

This is the Affluent Entrepreneur show for entrepreneurs that want to operate at a high level and achieve financial liberation. I'm your host, Mel Abraham, and I'll be sharing with you what it takes to create success beyond wealth so you can have a richer, more fulfilling lifestyle. In this show, you'll learn how business and money intersect so you can scale your business, scale your money, and scale your life while creating a deeper impact and living with complete freedom. Because that's what it really means to be an affluent entrepreneur.

Oh, my God. I just had the blessing of being interviewed by Kareem Phelps. She's the host of the Super Expander podcast. But she had, she actually had asking me a lot of different questions about my journey to financial freedom, what it took to build the wealth, what it took to kind of build the money machine the way I needed to build it. What were the tipping points, what were the things that she could do, her audience could do. And I thought it was such a valuable conversation that I wanted to share it with you here on my show. So in this episode of the Affluent Entrepreneur show, we're going to go deep, but she's going to go asking me a whole lot of questions so you can listen in on our conversation. Enjoy this episode of the Affluent Entrepreneurs Entrepreneur show. I'll see you in the episode. Cheers. Hello.

Hello, super expanders. Welcome back to the show. I am literally sitting on the edge of my seat so excited because I'm sitting here with Mel Abraham and I have to tell you that this is kind of like one of those pinch me kind of moments because I've been on this entrepreneurial journey for many, many years and in lots of different containers. And it's really kind of becomes a full circle moment when you get to have somebody who was as a super expander for me, who I met as a speaker in a container, and now he's sitting here on my podcast. How exciting is that? Welcome to the show, Mel.

Corey. It's so good to be Here. My gosh, It's a small world. It's funny how things kind of just connect together and come full circle. So it's so cool to see you again.

Yeah, it's so amazing. I think that actually the harders are starting to be a little bit like Kevin Bacon. That's how I.

Yes. Because that is our mutual thread is the harder that was in Fast Foundations Mastermind. You came in on one of the amazing days that they have where it's like live speakers and so much education and inspiration. And I've been following along on this journey. And I know actually we have another common thread, which is somebody like our back end support team who actually has become a dear friend of mine over the years. And I think that's one of my most favorite things about being an entrepreneur is that it stops being this, like, corporate contacts, where these. Where there's these, like, barriers in relationships that you can't. You can't have or you don't get to deepen them. It's like every time you have an interaction with someone, you get to focus on relationship.

I totally agree. I mean, for me, there is no such thing as hierarchy. There's just threads of connection and. And there's no such thing as rules. Those are just suggestions.

Yeah, we. Okay, we are. We are going to go on deep enough because I am, like, I would call myself a rule bender. And I get from that very correct, polished statement that you gave that maybe we share a few things in common.

Okay. So let's just kind of dive straight in because I'm dying to hear this answer. Who's now on a soul level.

Gosh. Part of me, like the. The gut instinct to that is in some senses a scared child.

That.

Sometimes will get caught up in trying to prove to myself that I can do things. I remember. I remember I was sitting in an audience. A friend of mine was speaking. Was a small group, maybe 50 people there. And he says, I. I can get Mel to do anything I want. And I looked at him and I said, what are you talking about? He says, all I got to do is tell you you can't do it.

But I think that the reality is that it's easy to dress things up on the outside and have people look and say, you got it all put together.

But on the inside, at a soul level.

I'm just a guy who cares a lot, who wants to matter, who wants to make a difference, and has a little bit of fear that I won't. And so it drives me to make choices. It drives Me to do things that drives me. People asked. I had a conversation with David Bach. He's in the same money space as me and he's a 10 time New York Times bestseller. And he says to me, why are you doing this? You don't have to work, you don't have to, you know, do this. And I said, it gives meaning to my life to be able to serve, to be able to maybe know that.

I made a difference. Because I think that this idea of legacy, we talk about legacy as something we leave behind and I think that's a mistake. We don't, we don't want to die to have legacy, but what we want to do is live to have legacy. To turn around and realize that legacy is as little as a smile or a pat on the back or I'm proud of you. It's every moment of the day where you have the opportunity to shift someone's direction, shift someone's life, to boost them up. And if we realize that legacy was built that way, we would realize that the moments of life matter. And when we stack the moments together, we create legacy by living it day to day versus sitting back and saying, what am I going to leave behind? What am I going to leave behind? Because legacy isn't what we leave for someone. Legacy is what we leave in someone. And that's the thing that I think starts to drive me deep down in the soul.

Yeah, I think the, it probably goes back to, it's probably further back than this. But I think the big catalyst for me was becoming a single full time dad. I became a single full time dad of my son. He came to live with me when he was five and a half years old. And I was building my businesses, I was doing the work, but I was, I had at that time, I'm a CPA by education. And my partners pushed me out the door. They, they basically said, we don't want to be partners with you anymore. And I had no clients, I had no cash flow, I had no backlog. So I was sitting there with $300,000 in new home debt and.

This gift of being a dad, this, this wonderful gift of being a dad, sitting back saying, how do I make this work? And so I jumped on the treadmill, which most entrepreneurs will do. You put your head down, you start running, and you start running, you start running, you start running and, and all of a sudden you start to see things are working. I'm getting clients, I'm getting cash, I'm. Everything's going well. And all of a sudden you Know, I'm looking at my son Jeremy going, dude, we're going to be okay. Ruth's going to be over our heads. We can do the things, everything's going to be fine. And he comes running in from school one day, he says, daddy, Daddy, Daddy, I drew a picture of you at school today. And so I knelt down, he was so excited, it was like it was his birthday morning. So I grabbed a hold of this picture and it was me, a stick figure in blue felt tip pen. And I was standing in front of two computer screens with a phone in each ear and one on the desk ringing. Oh yeah. I mean, at the hands of a six year old boy, I was given probably one of the greatest money lessons and life lessons and business lessons I could ever imagine. And the challenge for me is that I could have looked at it and said, hey, but I need to do this, Jeremy. We need this so we can do the things we want to do. We need this so I can keep the roofs, we can go to Disneyland, we can do all of that. We need the profits to make it happen. But it wasn't until I realized that, that it isn't the profits he wanted, it's the presence he wanted. He needed me there. And that's when I started to shift this idea of realizing that our ability to measure wealth should be less in dollars and more in time. And so now I had to look at it through the eyes of how do I control my time? Because those moments matter. How do I control my time so I could give to him and give to the world the way I wanted to give and to be able to live life at the, at the fullest, to be fully engaged and fully expressed through life. And, and, and so it took a lot of re engineering of how to, how do we look at the, the old paradigms of money, the old paradigms of wealth, the old paradigms of business, and recreate it. I came from, like I said, the accounting. So we were swapping hours for dollars. So if I wasn't, if I wasn't selling hours, I wasn't making money. Which meant that the only way I could make more money was to sell more hours or try to boost the rate, which meant running harder, faster, longer on the treadmill, which only leads to breakdown or burnout. And so that was probably the, the one pivot point that started me down this path. So at, at, at the hands of a six year old boy, I got a lesson. The problem is I didn't know how important the lesson was until 2019 because in 2019, things were going well. My son and I are as close as close Cabis. He's now 33, with two kids and, and a wife and everything. And.

And I stepped off a plane. You know, I'm, I'm traveling the world speaking on the biggest stages and, and two weeks after I stepped off a private jet. Wasn't mine, but listen, you got to do it at least once and hope someone else pays for it.

And two weeks after I stepped off that jet, I would found myself in a hospital bed with a surgeon looking at me saying, we see a 5 centimeter tumor in your bladder. You have cancer. And so my life got flipped upside down and at the hands of a six year old, I changed the way I looked at money. I changed the way I did things in business, I changed the way I did things in life. But at the hands of cancer, I realized the importance of it.

Wow.

Isn't it crazy how those are the kind of lessons it's like they have? These things have to come in like a two by four to, to get us and, and when they do, you have to be able to see them as the gift that they actually are. I mean, like we're faced with two choices when something like that happens. You can see the lesson and see how it's happening for you, or you can, you know, shrink back and let it ruin you.

Yeah, I love that you're, you're saying this. I, I did often think back on, was there a message I missed that they didn't have to go so far as cancer? You know, I mean, is there, was there something in the back? You know, but, but the other thing, and I love that you're saying the lessons because the struggle I had with the cancer was I went into a dark place of resentment and trying to find something I did or someone to blame. I was, I was trying to give it a reason and say, what did I do? What did I do? Did I, did I eat something wrong? Did I do something wrong? You know, I wasn't a smoker, I wasn't a drinker, I wasn't a candidate for cancer. No one in my family's ever had cancer. So I was struggling with that because I was looking backwards.

And then all of a sudden it dawned on me. I said, well, what happens if the why for the cancer isn't behind me, but it's in front of me? And that the reason I ended up with the cancer was to get the message to me that I was meant to do something else. I was meant to do Something more. And all of a sudden, the cancer took on a whole different element. It took on a positive and valuable thing in my life. And now to those that I get to serve and. And I found myself that as long as I stay looking forward and say, wait, my why doesn't have to be behind me. My why can be what's pulling me forward.

Well, isn't that the most powerful why ever? The one that's actually magnetizing you, you forward? I think that's a much easier why to stay committed to than the one that is in our past.

Wow. So all of that happened, and then we shifted the lens. Then. Then what?

So for me, after Jeremy did the drawing, I started to just do business differently. I started to look at things and I said, here's. Here's the challenge. And this happens with most entrepreneurs, especially service entrepreneurs or personal brands. If we're not careful with our personal brands, they become our personal burdens because we don't realize that if we're not turning the wheels and running the treadmill, we can't get any income. And there isn't anything that's sellable from a personal brand in most cases, not all cases. So I started to understand this dynamic that we got trained industrial age thinking, and we got trained and schooled in this idea of earning. You got to earn a living, earn a living, earn a living, earn an income, go get a good job, all that stuff. So they were really good at giving us an idea that we needed an earnings journey. The problem, and this is the problem that I had when I left the firm and I started to start my own thing, is to think that when I started my own business, when I started my own firm, this was going to be my path to control. This was going to be my path to freedom. That if I did my own thing, I called my own shots, I could do whatever I want. And the fact is, is that's. That's wrong. The reason you go in business is not for freedom, and it's not for control. And if you've been in business for any length of time, you know what I'm saying? And so. But when we understand that the purpose of business is to optimize your value and optimize cash flow is to provide a solution and an impact in return for cash, that's it. That's the only reason we do it. That's the earnings journey that people are on. And the mistake is that we stop there. What we need is now a money journey. We have to be on parallel journeys at the same Time, you're creating an earnings machine through your business, through your wages, through whatever you're doing. But we now need to create a money machine. Because in the money machine this is where we take the cash and we do something with it. Now all of a sudden in the money machine, this is where you find your freedom. Because it is the money machine is about optimizing your time and optimizing your assets. And when we stand that now all of a sudden if you build them parallel, what will happen? And the whole objective of this is to get my money machine, the dollars I have at work, to work harder I ever did for them. And when I do that, I find myself at financial freedom.

So can anyone build a money machine?

Absolutely. I, I have a belief, core belief. Financial freedom is your birthright. We just got to go claim it. And the problem is a society doesn't want us to talk about money. We've all been told it's impolite or we demonize that.

But when you think about money is the second leading cause for divorce behind infidelity.

Money is the biggest stressor in 78% of people's lives. Money will cause unproductive, unfocused work at work. If money has that kind of impact on us, why are we not talking about it? Because we never will ever solve a problem without first having a conversation around the problem. And so I, I'm out here saying no, we're talking about it, we ought to be talking about it. I started talking about it to my son when he was 10, teaching him some of the things. He's 33, his wife's 30, they got three homes in a multi million dollar net worth already.

And it's not about greed because in the process we taught him, I taught him generosity, I chat him impact, I taught him service, I taught him the money machine and the earnings machine. And to live life, he takes the, him and his wife take, they got two, two little kids, one's two years old and little princesses, a two year old and a six month old. And they take a month, a year. They'll live in another country, work from there and experience it. We don't do that. We need to experience life. The journey is what we want to enjoy. We're not going to wait for the destination.

So as you're talking about this, it may start making me think about a few things because you know, a lot of things that I do are rooted in nervous system regulation and building wealth from that place. And I talk a lot about burnout and how burnout is a public health crisis, essentially. So is stress. Right. And it's like, it's a number one killer. And I'm just thinking about how this conversation is a pivotal piece of solving that actual problem. And then also, another thing that I started thinking about, something that I say all of the time, is that you don't know who you really are until you get to a place where money isn't deciding. Like, your bank account isn't choosing for you.

Yes.

Yeah. Because you get to that place, all of a sudden, you live a life of choice versus need.

Yeah, absolutely. It's a. It's funny. So my daughter lives in New York City, and we. I worry. You know, she's 24 years old, lives in New York City, and I worry. And she can be a little outspoken at times. And she has this thing. It's like pet peeve. People riding down the street. The guys that. Doing the delivery service, right, they're the Uber driver, whatever, Postmates or whatever, they're delivering food. And she yells at them every time, and she gets really indignant. She's like, you can't be doing that. And I was like, you've got to stop yelling at these people. She's like, no, I don't have to step. I was like, yes, you do. Because these people who are doing this typically are behind an eight ball. And when you're behind the eight ball, financially, you almost can't be held responsible for how you respond and react because you're stuck in this place of just literally trying to survive.

Yeah, absolutely. It's. The problem is.

If we just understood some simple principles, none of us would have the issues that we think we have with money. In fact, I actually, truly believe that no one has money issues. I know some people are going, you ain't see my checking account. And I go, here's what I believe, all right? Because it has less to do with the money you make and more to do with what you do is that you don't have money issues. You have money symptoms. You have symptoms from the. Of the decisions, the habits, and the behaviors from the past. And. And I know that's confronting for folks because they'll. They'll sit back and wait a second. Now you're blaming me? I said, no, no, no. I'm making sure that you're responsible. You have the ability to respond, because if you know that it is a result of behaviors, choices and. And decisions in the past, we just need to make different behaviors and choices. We just need to understand that, and we'll Get a different result. Doesn't mean that it's easy, but it is simple.

Absolutely. So here's a good one for you, because you work with people who are wanting to build wealth. And oftentimes it's not just the strategies to get us there. A lot of we were just talking about before we hit record about the mindset pieces, and something that I feel like I've discovered that I think is kind of an interesting dynamic or shift when you start thinking about these mindset pieces is that a lot of times we get so entrenched in this negative money story. You can't really envision who you'd be without that money story. So there's actually this secret part of you that likes that.

Yeah.

It'S. I mean, they call it psychology. They call it secondary gain.

We. It's. It's interesting. So when I got diagnosed with the cancer, I shut everything down because I had a money machine. Now, mind you, just so people have context. I didn't come from money. I'm a son of a. Of an immigrant family. My dad was an engineer. We didn't have money. So I. That's why it goes back to. I truly believe anyone can do it. I did it just getting a basic Cal State, you know, degree.

But I shut everything down because I wanted to heal. And so I went through three surgeries, four tumors, 57 treatments. In fact. I go in a week from this recording for another scope. But I'm now three and a half years clear.

But what happened was, once I started to feel comfortable that I've got it behind me, I looked at this empty desk that I created because I cleared everything off, and there was this sense of loss, because for two and a half years, my sole focus, my sole purpose was beating cancer. Everything in me was beating cancer. And all of a sudden that was gone. And I go, who am I? Who am I without this?

And I think it's the same thing with some of the money stories and some of those elements that come into play is that we start to ask ourselves when we start to take it away, say, well, wait a second. If I take that away, who am I without it?

Until you realize you're probably far greater than you ever were without it.

Absolutely. But it's a really funny question to explore when you first ask it to somebody who's maybe never, like, thought about it in that context. It's like, wait, hold on. Who am I? I've never actually thought about who I might be. There's this part of me like, of course I Want more money? Of course I, I want to have it and I talk about it and I think about it all the time, but I've never really thought about who I'd be. So it's like this block, this, this bottleneck between your subconscious and, and your conscious mind and your subconscious mind. What the subconscious mind wants, it gets. And so until you clear that piece up, you're in this big bottleneck and, and battle between the two.

Yeah, yeah.

I think the thing is when you start to think about it, and this is where we start to look at most of our money lessons are caught, not taught.

Because since we don't educate in schools, since we don't have it, where do we get it? We get it through conversations or observation.

And who are we observing? Probably people that didn't get the money stuff straight. Like my parents. One of my earliest memories, in fact one of the first stories in my book is the first time I saw my dad cry because he felt he was letting the family down. Now I didn't understand money back then, I was five years old. But I understood it had to do with money. And all of a sudden I realized the power of money would make it so you didn't disappoint people. Now all of a sudden it starts to inform things. But was that the reality? It was just my interpretation. It was an observation. But it starts to build your money, what I call your money set point in how we do things. And that will then be carried forward as if it were a truth. Now mind you, it's your truth until we dismantle it. Until we start to look at it through a different lens.

Yeah. So inside it you have an amazing program. Is that what part of what you do is you start to dismantle it inside of that program? Yeah, yeah. That's amazing. So obviously people need to get inside the program to get all the things. But if someone's listening and they're like, oh, that just piques my curiosity, like what's one little micro step? Because I'm all about the micro steps. I think that's how we make big progress. It's like one little micro step that they could take in the immediate to start to dismantle that.

So, so the first thing is that we have facts and we have interpretations or meaning and what drives your emotions is the interpretation.

And until we separate the interpretation from the facts, and I'll give you an example, we will tend to keep ourselves either placed down or shrinking or in a non productive place. And so I'll give you for instance, is that in 2005, I got involved in an investment that unfortunately turned into being a Ponzi scheme. It wiped out one third of my net worth. Between me and two other friends, we lost over four and a half million dollars.

Now.

I had one friend who was retired at the time, so all he did was adjust his lifestyle and then keep on going. I had the other friend, who's the one that got both of us in it, who spiraled into resentment. He destroyed his business, he destroyed his marriage, and then he started drinking, destroying his liver. This was.05. And it wasn't until just recently that he's come back out of it. I mean, it literally destroyed him. Now, with me, I started to go down that road too, going, oh, my God. Oh, my God, here I am. And my son at the time was. He was 15, 14 years old. But I was looking at myself saying, you're an idiot. You're a cpa. You should know better. You know, you shouldn't be doing this. You shouldn't be talking to people about money anymore. You shouldn't be. And so all of a sudden, I started to spiral into these emotions because I was telling myself a story and I was creating an interpretation until I sat back and said, wait a second. What's the facts? If you want to know what the facts are, you gotta look at it as if you're looking through a camera lens with the sound off. And what would the camera see? What would the camera see? The camera would see me giving someone money. The camera would see me giving him more money. The camera would see me not getting money back. The camera would see all of that. It wouldn't see me saying that I'm a loser. It wouldn't define me as a loser. It wouldn't define me as an idiot. It wouldn't define me with the interpretations. And when we start to understand that there are facts and there are interpretations, now we look at the facts and we can ask ourselves, instead of an interpretation, we can ask ourselves, one, what lessons can I take from this to make it valuable? And two, what else can this mean? My investing rules and the criteria and the things that I teach and that I've done for myself.

Came from.

Dismantling the stories around the Ponzi scheme. Because now I have criteria, now I have rules that I don't, don't. I don't go through, I don't. I don't violate. It's just the way it is now. So whatever the story might be, we have to go back and say, well, what would the camera lens see? First, those are the facts. How am I giving it meaning? Second, that's just interpretation. That's perspective. And just the same as. As if I hold the book up like this. You see the back side, I see the front side. It's the same book, but they're different perspectives. So your interpretation isn't fact, it's just your perspective. And. And we need to let go of that.

I like that. That's good. You got to let go of it and adapt a new perspective. Change the perspective.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And. And just within 18 months.

I. We. I recovered what we lost, and I tripled it.

Wow.

Because I learned some things. Look, if you're going to lose over a million bucks you paid for, like, three Harvard PhDs, you better use it for good. So the thing is that when we take the lessons from it, at least it was valuable. It still doesn't take the pain away. It still doesn't take the effort away, but at least it was valuable. You go, I will be better on the other side of this.

Yeah, absolutely. I think they always say that when you know how to make money in that way, it doesn't really matter. You could lose it all, but you'd be able to make it again. When you have those sorts of things, skills, though, building a money machine kind of sounds like a game. And the idea, which I think so many things. Business. It's a game, and I. It actually starts to make it exciting and fun. When I think about approaching making money as a game. Is that kind of a how. I mean, I don't know how your program runs, but that's the vibe I get a little bit.

Well, so I don't know that I look at it as a game, but I certainly say if it ain't fun, we shouldn't be doing it. So it has to be fun. But I do say we play the money game because.

We'Re not gonna.

We.

The mistake is when we give money too much power. It's just a tool. It's a tool, and. And we're gonna lose it. We're gonna get it. Some get more, some get less, but we always have the opportunity to. To generate more income. It isn't. I don't believe in the. You know, there's this pie, and if I get a bigger slice, someone has to lose. No, I think that we have the opportunity to expand the pie. We all get a chance to win.

And. And I think that when you come from that perspective, it gives you a lot more place to go. So with me, you know, and. And building a money machine, I want it to be a game, but I want it attached to your life. So one of the mistakes that I think I see made is that we focus on the income. I need to make this kind of income. And what we really should be doing is saying, I want to have this kind of life. And when we come and say, this is the life I want, that can inform the choices and the plan to make that a reality. And now you can create the fun in the journey to make it happen versus the drudgery of sitting back saying, oh, I got to. I got to make. I got to make this. I got to make that. I didn't hit my numbers this week. That. That angst, that pressure is. Is not productive for anyone, let alone a relationship or a marriage.

Yeah, absolutely. Oh, my gosh. It's kind of like a full game. Right? It's a reverse engineer process, which I think is always the best plan of attack, if you will. All right, so I have a. A question. In your own personal money money journey, what was the biggest and maybe even like, the darkest money belief secret that you had to reframe or re wire? Like, for example, mine is that money is control. And I. That's, like, really had a grip on me for a long time until I flipped it into money is choice, which is the same, but in a much more abundant way of thinking.

Yeah. I think that for me is. I thought that it would make me be liked. Ah.

And the reality is, is that.

Most people have no idea what I have.

And they. Well, I'm. I'm gonna. I'm making an assumption here, and they like me just the same.

Yes, I love it. Yeah, absolutely. Right. That's why I always say I want to be, like, a billionaire that drives the Honda Civic or I'm still driving my black.

Whatever Toyota Highlander that I've been driving forever. Like, I specifically actually get the same car over and over again, so nobody knows when I get a new car. I just, like, kind of flying under the radar like that.

Yeah, yeah. And I just. So that's. I think that's probably the biggest thing that I. I did because I thought. I think that insecurity that we talked about at the very beginning.

Yeah, that's exactly what I thought.

You know, if I can do this, they'll. They'll see me. But then the funny thing is that once you're successful, I go like, you know, other than when I'm trying to serve people, I don't want to be Seen. I'm really kind of a private dude. You know, my wife and I, we lived on a beach. We just. Just kind of are our own thing. I don't want to be seen.

Yeah, I'm with you. I am with you. That is so good. So on this journey, there had to have been. We kind of already touched a little bit on the one, you know, your son being a big expander, but there had to have been someone who really was a big, super expander for you, that showed you that building wealth was possible for you and for really for anyone. And that brought you into the place where you are now serving and teaching and guiding people to create this abundance and freedom in their lives.

So I'm gonna. The. I'm gonna go back a ways to my dad.

Now. My dad never. We were never wealthy. You know, we had what we needed. Okay. But so I. Like I said, I was. I'm a son of an. From an immigrant family. My dad was 17 years old when he came here. My dad was born and raised in a. In a country where he was being persecuted because of his background, because of his religion. He was actually being hunted. And he was part of a group of five guys that were smuggling people out to keep them safe and smuggling guns in to protect them. And they captured two of them, and they were torching the two to get the names of the other three so they could hang all five in the square. So we're talking about 1946 now. And. And so my dad took his granddad's name, Abraham, so our real family name is not Abraham. And they got fake papers for all five. They helped the other two escape. And my dad came here at 17 years old with nothing.

Got himself in school, got educated, and started to build. And four days before my dad passed away.

I asked him. He told me the story, and I really thought that I was going to have a chance to record it because we didn't expect him to pass away. But four days later, he passed away. And he was sitting in the wheelchair as I asked him the questions. And I said, you were 17. I know what I was thinking at 17. The last thing I was thinking was smuggling guns in and bringing people out and doing all that. I was thinking about, did she like me or would she go out with me or something like that. Said, why would you do something like that at 17 years old when you knew if they cut you, they're going to hang you in the square? As an example. He sat up in his wheelchair and he looked at me and he said, because it was the right thing.

And I look back on my life and it's the way dad always showed up. He didn't talk a lot, he was quiet. But everything he did was through the eyes of is it the right thing to do?

And I look at some of the things that I'm trying to do and it's driving the same thing. And I know that he can come here with nothing. And he brought it so far. I want to take it the next step for our family and our family tree. And I know that the more financially successful I am, the more right things I can do for other people. And it allows me to expand the reach and go further. And so I think that on that side of the driver for it would have to be him.

The other side would be my. I worked for my cousin who is a CPA while I was in college and he was an entrepreneurial CPA who always kept saying to me.

Got to do it on your own. Go get educated, get the training, get the experience and then go do it on your own. Go do it in a bigger way. Go do it. He's the one that literally said go. I was still in college. And he says, go try the CPA exam. Now back then it was a four day exam, no calculators, done by hand. Okay. With those little blue books that, you know, if I see one, it just, it gets me sweaty already, you know, and. And he says, just go, just take it so. So you'll have a chance to know what it's really like when you get out of school. And about a month and a half before the exam, he came to me, says, I want to cut your hours. I'm going to pay you for those hours still, but I want you to go and study for the exam. I don't want you just. I just want you to go experience it. Well, I ended up passing the whole exam before I got graduated college. And so having someone that sees something more in you and is willing to push you and willing to prod you and do that I think is really helpful. It's not critical, but it's certainly helpful. And I think so. If I look at the two of them were huge influences in my life. And this journey that I've been on since then with all the people around me, you know, the Chris and Lori Harders and you know, and Ed Myletts and Amy Porterfields, all these people that are around me that forced me to up my game. And notwithstanding my son and my beautiful wife, I mean they're always, I'm better because of both of them.

Such great stories there and. Absolutely right. So good. Okay, so I know everyone that's listening is like just really dying to know more about this program and how they can get in and start to build their money machine.

So cool. Thank you. We're doing a special.

Three part training that I do once a year, totally free. I'm gonna, I'm gonna walk them, walk you through the three different elements. Not three different elements, but the first day, the first training, I go deep into the things that will get in the way of building wealth. How do we, how do we break down the stories, how do we get, break down the barriers? How do we understand the concepts that will start to drive it? What does it mean to live an affluent life? Okay. Not an opulent one, but an affluent life? And then the second training is when I start to give the principles, six, six fundamental principles that doesn't matter what's going on in the economy, it doesn't matter what's going on in your life. These principles are what drive every choice and every decision that, that I make. We calculate some numbers in your life. We figure out what your targets are. And then last training, I give you the nine accelerators, the nine critical things. That is basically your checklist to build the machine to get it right. And, and we go deep dive. It comes, you know, I have an action guide with frameworks and worksheets. And so it is, it is a workshop where I'm, I'm on for, for at least 90 minutes and wow, as much as I possibly can because by the end of those three days, I want, I want everyone to have a direction. I want everyone to have an idea and I want everyone to, to be able to say, all right, I can go and work on this on my own and, and, and really start to build.

That's so good. So you get access. They're there, they're listening to you. So you guys are listening. You got to scroll down to notes. There's going to be a link where you can find this. So go ahead and sign up and then go get your notebook because you're going to want to take copious notes while Mel is out there teaching you how to build your money machine. Oh my gosh. I am so beyond grateful for you. I just can't even believe that I got to have this conversation with you. My heart is so full. So thank you so much for your time, for your wisdom, for sharing so authentically and vulnerably.

Oh my God. Thank you for asking me and being willing to jump on and do this. This was to me, like I said, this is what gives us the meaning to the cancer. So you've given me a gift. Be able to serve.

Oh, my goodness. Well, you're welcome.

We will catch you on the next episode.

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 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 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.