Why Financial Freedom Needs to be a MUST For You

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. So often we think that we want to build wealth because of the money, because of the finance, to be able to have the bank account because we think it's going to allow us to do whatever we want to do. You know, it's far bigger than that. In this episode of the Affluent Entrepreneur Show, I actually am going to broadcast a live stream that I did that talked about why it's a must for you to find financial freedom and to build wealth, not because of the money, but because of something far greater than that. And I think this is an important lesson for us to understand that we're not in this just for the money. We're in this for life. And so I hope that this serves you. Enjoy it. It is a live stream and I'll see you in the episode.

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 athlete, entrepreneur.

This week, I think we had 4% decline in the market. So we continue to have volatility. FedEx came out saying that it was not a great time for them. Their earnings aren't going to be great when they announce them. And they in fact said, we're going to pull back all our projections and basically said were not given any guidance and they really kind of punted it out to 2023, end of 23, 24. But what, why that's important? I think we need to understand that this is an indication of what might be coming. You know, here's FedEx just before their busiest shipping time, the holiday season, saying, we can't give you any projections. We can't do anything. So that, that tells me is that we have a much broader uncertainty in the market than originally anticipated. We don't have a handle on inflation. The Feds next week are meeting, they're going to make a decision next week on how much they're going to increase interest rates. In all likelihood, they're going to increase. They may go aggressive, they may go back to the Volcker days and, and say we're going to shock the system. But the only, and I'm not doing this to set fear, I'm just trying to set expectations. What that tells me is that we have some ups and downs. And what you're going to hear in the media, in the news, the social media is all the doom and gloom and the Armageddon that's coming. And.

As much as there will be uncertainty, as much as there will be challenges, it doesn't mean that your financial destiny needs to be destroyed. See, there are principles, there are priorities, there are processes we should be following to keep us safe. Yeah, there is going to be bumps on the road for sure, Drew. They keep us safe. That you can do that actually work no matter what is going on in the marketplace. And yet too often we pull up stakes, run for the hills, pack up, get in the fetal position, hold and wait and not do anything. So let's make sure that we have this conversation. The reason I have the group, the reason I'm doing social, the reason I'm doing my YouTube and my show, the Affluent Entrepreneur show, is simply to have a safe place for you to go. I'm not here to sell you investments. I'm not here to sell you on real estate. I'm not here to sell you on insurance. I'm not here.

To sell you on anything other than your dreams and the possibility of your dreams coming true. The ability to take control of your financial future, the tools and the tactics and the strategies that you need to make that happen. Not from theory, but from. Look, I'm 61 years old. I just turned 61. All right? So I've got a few decades under my belt of screw ups as well as successes. And so I want to make sure that you don't get caught in the current of fear.

You know, when we think about it.

Your whole future.

Really depends on that, on how you show up, whether it's for your children, whether it's for your, your grandchildren. I've got, I've got one grandchild, another one on the way. What is just for yourself, your ability to be able to take care of a Parent that maybe is aging. Your ability to take care of a cause that is near and dear to your heart. All that stuff is important. And important enough for us to take control of a financial future, to not sit back and relinquish it to either an advisor or, or worse yet, the government or some media hype that we're seeing on social media. Media that has got a bias. And so there are tools, every skill. Money is a skill and it's learnable. And so this is the thing that we need to look at. So couple things I want you to understand. One, I'm in the middle of a specific deep dive training. We did the very first training yesterday. If you missed it, the replays are up. Affluencelive.com, deep dive. We went for a long time. We went for a good 90 minutes of training, and then I did another hour or so of Q and A. And I'm walking through the process of building an affluent life. The process. And this isn't about money. This is about richness in your life. We often start getting caught about just the money. But the reality is that I want you to live a rich life. I want you to experience life fully, not just have a big bank account, because there's plenty of people that have a wonderful bank account and they have a horrible life.

I want you to have a wonderful life for you, for your legacy, for the people you serve, the people you love.

And so I want to be able to have that conversation. And so I'm walking through the process. We did the first training, like I said yesterday. We got the next training next week on Tuesday. But I've got a special training tomorrow about your money mindset blocks. I'll probably do another training on Monday. Short ones, lives like these that are going to give you tools. The idea is this, is that over these next couple weeks, if I can equip you, educate you, and empower you to not get scared. I see what you said, sin. Okay, single 60 and grabbed by fear. And.

It shouldn't be that way. There are things that you can do. There are things that you should be doing. There are things that work, no matter what's going on.

And so I want to be able to give you those tools, those frameworks and those. Those things so you feel comfortable. Now, look, do I have the tinglings of fear? I'm human. Yeah. I mean, when I see my portfolio decline. Yeah. And you know what? I'm in my 60s, too, so I'm looking at it going, wait a Second, I'm not 30 years old. I don't have a 30 year Runway, so. Yeah, but I've lived my life a certain way, so we'll be okay, you know, we'll be fine. And if you understand that the market goes up 8 out of 10 years, we just might be in a 2 year decline or a 2 year uncertainty. Most recessions only last 11 months.

So it takes 6 months to diagnose it. If it lasts 11, there's 5 months left. My point is that we need to be.

Aware of the realities, the truths, and not just beholden to the myths or the media spin that causes the fear. I'm looking at a comment on Facebook from Denise. She goes, I want this Funny, you just got my copy back from a VA creating a digital program. I'm 53, single mom, realized that I have to get myself out there and out of this scary feeling. I'm going to listen to the replay. Oh man. So, yeah, I've not touched my money in the market, decided just to leave it for the long, long term. So here's the thing. First off, I love the vulnerability. You know, you said 53, single mom. You're, you're most, you're doing the most important job in the world. Raising, raising children. I mean, it's such a gift and it's such a responsibility. I was a single full time dad. You know, I raised my son from age five and a half. Now he's 32 and he's doing well. He takes care of himself, he does well. He's got a child and a wife that's a beautiful wife, a great family. He's financially successful. So in spite of the genetics and the upbringing, he's doing okay. But I do think that sometimes we don't realize that, that our most important job sometimes is, is impacting our youth to give them the gift of the skills to operate. You may sit back. Here's the thing, when we talk about the money, you may be in a situation where you go, I don't achieve the millions that maybe we wanted to achieve, but if in the process, and I'm talking to Denise, but I'm talking to all of you, that if in the process.

You maybe achieve 50% of where you wanted to get to, but if in the process you give the skills.

To your children, to your grandchildren, to the people you love, so they can now take the baton from you and carry it further, to carry it into the next generation, to carry it into the next piece, and then you become the pivot point for your family tree where they Sit back maybe decades from now, generations from now, and say, when did this change for us as a family? And they look back and they said, it's because Denise did something, it's because Cynthia did something, it's because Kenneth did something.

So the impact of the choices that you make today.

The path you choose to follow, the financial structure you start to build, will have ripple effects beyond your time here on earth when done right. And I think that's the thing that fuels me is to sit back and say, I have the ability now to, you know, I've raised Jeremy, but now we've got Emily, who's one year old, and they're going to have another child in January and, and, and to be able to, to try and serve that and to be able to serve you so you can do the same. I think that's, that's the huge value. Because when we develop, when I got wiped out by the Ponzi scheme, they certainly cut my net worth by, by over one third, okay? But they never took my skill sets. Now, I questioned them, I questioned them because I started to tell myself stories.

But they never took them. And when you give those skill sets.

Back to the world.

And they choose to use them, you've given a gift that will pay dividends forever. And I think that's what excites me. Like some of you know that in 2019, I got diagnosed with the cancer and I shut things down. And now I've come back, I'm doing things. I'm free of the cancer now. Two and a half years, I had three surgeries, four tumors, and 47 treatments. But when I chose to come back, because I didn't have to come back, but I chose to come back, and David Bach, who's another financial guy and a dear, dear friend, a 10 time New York Times bestselling author, we were having conversations is, why are you even doing this, Mel? You can just go about your way, keep traveling, doing your thing. I said, it's the one way that I know to make sense of the cancer. For me to be able to look at the cancer and say, why was this given to me? Because I tell you, I look, I looked backwards.

And I couldn't find anything to blame. I couldn't find anything that I did. And I was searching, but it put me in a dark place. And then I said to myself, well, what happens if the reason for it is in the future that I get to define it? Maybe the reason for where we are today.

As an economy, as a society, as a world, is for us to relook at how we're living and to maybe look towards the future and say, what can we do differently? And for me, it's. It's to serve is to sit back and say, how do I help people out? I am on a crusade.

To help a million people find the path to financial freedom. That's what I want to do. Because I watch people struggle. Not some because of whatever their medical needs might have been, but more because of the pandemic, because of the uncertainty, because of society, because of all these things without the need for that struggle. And the only reason that that struggle is there is because no one's talking about the path to financial freedom.

We're not taking responsibility for our own financial destiny.

And it's time we do. I know that may be confronting for some.

And this isn't.

Judgment at all. I don't care what the decisions were in the past.

Because I've made plenty of bad decisions, all right? Financially, life wise, relationally, I've done it all. The question is, do we live in those bad decisions or do we learn from them? And what I'm hoping to do is that we all learn from them and we go on. We don't beat ourselves up. We take the lessons and we move on. The Ponzi scheme taught me something and I teach it to you now. The rules of investing, the rules of safety, the way that I keep things safe and the things that I do, the wealth priority ladder that I teach comes from that.

And so no matter where you're at, without judgment, without beating yourself up and blame, we just take it and say, great, that's a dot on a map and we're going to find the next dot and the next dot. We're actually going to do it on Tuesday. We're going to define where you want to go on that map, the next dot, the destination. And when we know those two points, then it's just a matter of us saying, what's the plan to move us from one place to the next. It's a journey.

And it's a journey that's possible, it's a journey that's probable. It's a journey that we just need to start and stay in the game.

So I'm looking at some comments. Anything coming in for you? I just kind of went off on a tangent. I am sorry, but I. I just. I. This was on my heart, it was on my soul. I sat here all day in the excitement, still from yesterday's training, talking with some of you, hearing from some of you And. And having these conversations, it's just. But I. I just wanted to go live because I had some time before I start filming. I'm doing an interview with a good friend and everything shortly and just to see what's going on, see if I can help. And I love Denise, what you're saying. Yes.

Yeah. Jeremy and I were on the podcast. We had an episode together to talk through it, and it was the first time we ever had that conversation of what was it like to grow up under my roof. Because there was times like my mom was like, you're. You're tough on him. And. And we. We used to have to have conversations because she would. I kept saying, look, you raised us. We did okay. Let me. Let me raise him, you know, And. And I think I did okay. If he's my best success so far, then I did okay while I'm here and. And everything. So I was a dental hygienist, left it to spend time with my kids. Real estate now health coaching, work FL to be there. Oh, my goodness, just got the chills. I want my kids to see that they can create wealth doing their passion and what they love. I love this. So Denise, a dear friend of mine, Allison J. Prince.

She actually brought. And if you think about Jeremy's story, it's similar. So Jeremy was playing on the computer all the time. He was locked in his room just playing computer games. And I thought, how do I get him to get off the computer or. And everything? And I didn't get him off the computer, but I made it more productive. I went out and I got him the software Dreamweaver.

And I got him his domain name. Now, mind you, at that time, I didn't even have a website. He was 13, 14 years old at the time. And I gave it to him as a gift. And, like, within a week or two weeks, he had his own website up.

And from that, I said, wait, wait, wait, wait. Could you do one for me? And that's what he did for me. Then he realized he could start making money at it. So he's getting paid at 14, 15 years old. So I think one of the things we need to do is we need to engage our children. We need to bring them into it. We need to show them the possibilities. Think about it. Children are born, and you ask them what they want to do. They go, I'm going to be a fireman. I'm going to be a policeman. I'm going to be the doctor. I'm going to be that. Well, they don't say I'm going to be a lawyer. Probably not, but. And they're probably not going to say they're going to be an accountant either. They're going to be an actor, an actress, whatever. But they come to you with a list, not just one thing. And then over time, society says, oh, get your head out of the clouds. Put your feet on the ground. Stop dreaming. I think it's wrong. Keep dreaming. We need to dream again. We need to embrace it again. We need to embrace the possibility that exists in life again.

Having financial freedom gives you the gift of being able to chase those dreams. The reason we want the money is not for the money. The reason we want the money is because it allows me to buy the moments of my life back, the time in my life. I get to get it back.

So I can do whatever I want, whenever I want. And so this is why I said it's important for us.

To measure our wealth in time versus currency, dollars or euros or anything. And you're right, John. Society crushes the curiosity.

My gosh. You know, I remember when Jeremy, he was in school, he was a junior in high school, and he was getting all A's and one B, and the B was in algebra. And I got a tutor to come in and the tutor said, he's getting a B. I said, I know what he wants, an A. And so he starts talking to Jeremy and says, what do you want to do? And at the time, Jeremy really wasn't going to start his own business and everything. He wanted to go to film school, which would have cost me a quarter million dollars. So, good thing he changed his major. But so he's talking about film school. And the tutor looks at me and says, so, what do you think about that, Dad? I go, what do you mean? He says, well, are you okay with that? I go, this is his life.

This is his life. I don't have a right to squash his dreams.

As long as those dreams are legal, moral, ethical, and not hurting someone, let him go for it.

And like, the tutor was like, well, you know, there's not a whole lot of parents that I talk to that feel that way. They want to direct their children. Yeah, I said, I do. I want to guide him, but I'm not going to define his life. I got the right to define my life.

And I think you're right, John. We don't want to crush that. We need that curiosity back. We need that curiosity back.

We need to bring those sprouts of dreams back again, not just for our children.

But for ourselves.

Because we lived into.

That paradigm.

I firmly believe that whatever is in your heart, in your soul, in your vision, in your mind, it's possible. It may not be easy. There may be work involved. But if it is so near and dear, that yearning is. And aching is so important to you.

You'Ll run the miles, you'll do the work. I assure you.

That when you find that you're doing the things that you want to do the way you want to do them with the people you want to do them with, all the work on the journey is well worth it. There's a guy that I just. I didn't meet him, but I met a friend of his, and he was telling me about him. This guy lost. I don't know his whole story, but I'm going to. I'll tell you.

Yeah, you're right, Denise. Too many times parents try to live their dreams through their children. We can't do that.

So this guy, at 17 years old.

Lost his best friend.

To an accident. And it completely shifted because.

He looked at his life and said, wait a second. I got to live something differently. He wanted to experience it. He wanted to live it fully. And so he spent the next eight years saving money, saving money, saving money, and he wanted to go see the world.

So he took off.

After those eight years and walked the world.

I think they said it was 290,000 miles himself. So he ended up. The first month in, he was doing it all alone, and it felt lonely. So the first month in, he was in Austin, Texas. He went to a pet adoption, got himself a puppy dog. And this dog. And him for seven years.

Walked the world in all countries, experiencing things, going through danger, being held at gunpoint, doing that. But he just got back a month ago and is now writing about it and everything. But he memorialized it. He took pictures of it and this dog by his side and everything. But think about it. To be able to sit back and say, I went and lived it my way. I love the song. The song, you know, I Did It My Way. It's an old. Old what? Frank Sinatra song, but that ages me. But point. Point being is that there's a yearning in your heart. Let's create the financial foundation for you to go after it, for you to be able to live it, for you to be able to be that example to your children, your grandchildren, the people around you. Because in the fact that they see that possibility in you, they will see the possibility in themselves. When I had the martial arts studio. I've been in the martial arts. I started 40 plus years ago, lived in Japan, trained under a 17th generation samurai bloodline. These are hand painted black belt certificates from my sensei in Japan. And.

I think that when you look at the children, when you look at the children and how they, they live, to be able to bring that promise to them. I used to tell the kids we would do the black belt test. The black belt test in my school was a four and a half hour test.

And when they were done, I looked at all of the new black belts and I said, you're more important to this school than I am.

And they looked at me and go, your Sensei, how can that be? I said, because in you.

They see possibility. In me.

They see 40 plus years as sensei.

You'Re closer to them, you give them the possibility. And I think that as parents, as people, as friends, as colleagues, when we show up fully and we give fully, we actually allow people to live into the possibility by seeing what's possible for us.

That's the thing that I think we need to do. That's what drives me to do the things that I'm trying to do. That's what fulfills me, that's what keeps me going and that's why we're teaching what we're teaching. So I hope that this helps you. I hope that this is something that maybe as you close out the week, this Friday, no matter what's going on in your world, no matter what's going on financially, that you take a moment.

To look at what's good, what's possible, what's probable and your ability to take those actions, know that I'm here, I'm here to help, I'm here to support you, I'm here to have these conversations. And like I said, we started the training yesterday, we're going to continue next week. I've got something tomorrow that I'm doing with for you. So stay in the groove with me. If you want to get on the training, go to affluencelive.com.

Stay in touch with me.

If you do. And when you do, you're giving me a gift.

I'm immensely grateful for the conversations.

That I get to have.

And I just want to give those gifts back. So with that I'm going to sign off. I got to get ready. We're going to start filming here in about four minutes. But I want to say thank you for being here. Thank you for being who you are in the world. Let's get more of you in the world. Let's help you do that financially. Let's help you take control of a new financial destiny. Let's give you the tools to make it happen, no matter what's going on in the world, because it is possible. All right, Bless you all and have an incredible weekend. I hope to see you tomorrow.

As I go live at 11:45. I'll be going live. We'll be talking about the money mindset blocks, and.

There'Ll be more to come. So stay in touch with me. I'll keep posting and we'll keep doing this. And if you have questions or anything, reach out to me. All right? And let's make it happen. All right. Cheers. See 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 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.