Why You Should Start Spending More (Even When You’re Scared)

The most expensive mistake in money has nothing to do with running out of it. See, you can hit the number, take the trip, write the check, and still come home with nothing. See, I watched somebody that I love do exactly that for most of her life, and I'll tell you who she is later in this episode. Because most people building wealth right now are building it for a life they've never actually once described out loud. This is Building Your Money Machine, where we help you Master your money, eliminate financial stress, and live a life by choice. And I'm your host, Mel Abraham. And today you're going to get 3 things: a short list your money should be funding, a 2-minute exercise that finds yours, and it only takes 3 people, and the one test that tells you whether you got it right or not. And by the time we're done, you'll understand why spending more on purpose is the most disciplined thing You'll do all year. All right, let's do this. So let's get into it because there's a version of doing everything right that still leaves you with nothing you can hold. And it starts with a number that almost nobody says out loud. This is it. The EBRI did a study. They asked 2,000 retirees why they weren't spending their own money. And one of the answers I think actually should stop you cold. 31% of those that said they weren't going to spend down their assets said they simply felt better having a higher account balance. It had nothing to do with safety or the kids or a plan. The balance itself was the payoff in their eyes. And you know the move because most of us do some version of it. You open the app, you look at the number, you feel something for about 4 seconds. Then you close the app and you go back to work. That's the entire relationship. Now, I'm not judging anybody for this because I understand it. I did the same thing when, when we were growing up, when I was growing up, when you were growing up, watching your parents maybe fight about money at the kitchen table the way maybe I did. A big balance feels like a bulletproof vest, and you don't take a bulletproof vest off just because the shooting stopped. But at some point, you have to ask what you're doing with it. And here's the deal, I'm a CPA, and I've read more balance sheets than bedtime stories, and I've never once seen anybody hug one. Your grandkids are not gathering around the laptop to admire your 401. That balance can't take you anywhere. It can't sit across from you at dinner and have a conversation, and it won't be remembered by a single person after you're gone. So what do you do? So let me give you the CPA version. An asset that never converts into anything is a stale asset. It's sitting on your balance sheet doing absolutely nothing for the only person it was ever supposed to serve. You built a museum instead of a machine. Beautiful lighting, but nobody comes. So the first shift is this: the number is the instrument and the life is the destination. When you get those backwards, you can do every single thing right on paper for 30 years, for 40 years, and still end up somewhere you never meant to go. Which raises the question almost nobody can answer on the spot. If the life is the destination, what does yours look like? Most people, they can tell me their number to the dollar. They can't tell me one thing they want that number to buy. They might say something like freedom and choice and everything, but those generic terms, they can't tell me the specifics. And the people I know who are living the life instead of Just funding it, all have the same thing in common, a short list. I call them joy points. So let me tell you what they are and then give you a way to find yours, because this is what creates richness in your life instead of wealth just in the bank account. Because where, where do they come from? Here's the thing. I want you to have 3 or 4 things in your life, in your plan, in your financial life. That's the whole assignment. It's not a bunch of stuff. It's 3 or 4 things your money exists to fund, sitting in the plan as line items with dollar amounts right next to them. Same as the debt payoff, same as the investing, same as the expenses. It becomes a line item. And the question I always get back is the honest one: how am I supposed to know what mine are? Well, they come from 2 places, I think. And if you skip these, You end up picking something off a list and wondering why it did nothing for you. And the first is your values. Now, I don't mean the ones that somebody painted on a wall in a conference room or some poster. I mean a real value that sits at your core. It's tied to what you believe you are put here to do. It shows up as a thread that runs through your entire life, different decades, different jobs, different circumstances, but it's the same thread. Most people have one or two, and most people have never stopped long enough to name them. So let's do this. I want you to think of 3 people who absolutely inspire you, and this is the exercise I want you to do. The first is someone from history or even from fiction who embodies the hero you wish you could be. The second is someone in your actual life. Whose daily energy you deeply respect. Not their resume, but the way they move through the day. And the third is an older version of you looking back at you right now. You get all 3 and you get them in your mind and you sit down. If you want, write them down. And now answer one question. What is the one quality all 3 of them are begging you to lean into today? It's not some personality quiz that's your thread. The people we admire are never random. We're recognizing something in them that's already sitting in us and waiting for permission that we keep not giving it. And the older you isn't going to lecture you about it at all. He's seen the whole tape. She's seen the whole tape. They just want you to get on with it. The second place you get your joy points is in your vision. And I don't mean the number, I mean the picture. Pick a Tuesday 5 years out, not a vacation, a regular Tuesday. Where do you wake up? Who's in the house? Who's next to you? And what do you do between 9 and 11 in the morning? What do you do after that? Most people have never once answered that. And then they wonder why 30 years of savings feels like they're walking towards the fog. Your joy points are the 3 or 4 things that take that, the quality of your life, and put it into the picture. Let me show you what that looks like coming out from the other side, just using mine for instance. Okay? When, when I ran this on myself, the quality that came back was presence, which is actually hilarious because I became an accountant specifically so I could sit behind a desk and not talk to anybody. Now I'm talking for a living. Life's got some jokes there, I guess. All right. And I knew presence was the right answer because I'd been handed it 30 years earlier by a 6-year-old. Back then, I had $300,000 in debt, no clients, and a little boy who had just come to live with me. And I became a full-time single father. And I put my head down like I thought I, I should do because I was trying to build something. I was starting fresh with nothing. And I started to run. I got on the treadmill of earnings and I worked and I worked and I worked and it worked. And the clients came and the money came. And I told myself this whole thing was for him and that it was gonna work. Then Jeremy came running in from school one day and he says, Daddy, Daddy, I drew a picture of you at school today. And I knelt down and I— to take a look at the picture. And there I was in blue felt tip pen, a stick figure in front of 2 computer screens with a phone in each ear and a 3rd one On the desk ringing. Jeremy wasn't even in the picture. It wasn't us at Disneyland. There was no ball. We weren't playing. Nothing we'd ever done together made it in the picture. It was just me working. See, the thing is that I started arguing with myself, oh, this is work-life balance. This is— and giving excuses around it saying, but we need the profits to be able to do the things we wanna do and to give you the things that you wanna have. But he didn't want my profits, he wanted my presence. See, I was making good money, but I wasn't doing money good. And it took a 6-year-old with a crayon, with a felt-tip pen to tell me that. So let me fast forward. How does that show up in my life? I met my wife in an airport. So this might be a telltale sign, but I met her in an airport. And one of the things that we realized we loved doing together was traveling. Traveling. To travel and spend time together, uninterrupted time without the distractions, without the things. Now, travel isn't a value. It's just a simple delivery mechanism. And what we understood is that we started to look at it and say, what does that do for our relationship? What does that do for the memories? What does that do for bringing us together, for us reconnecting after busy lives? It became a visceral joy point. And that's why travel is on the plan. It's funded on purpose. And our trips, gotta tell you, they run into the tens of thousands of dollars. They're not small trips when we take them. But you look at it in that perspective and we start to understand why that matters. And it doesn't matter how much the trip is. And I'm just using this as a representation of what your values might be. And that's the thing that we need to understand is what are the joy points that are in your life that That, that will make a difference that you will talk about for years, not the momentary pleasures that maybe come up. Maybe it's Saturday morning drives with no destination. Maybe it's walks on the beach. Maybe it's coaching 9-year-olds on a muddy field. It, it doesn't matter. The size has nothing to do with whether it counts. It's what matters to you that counts. Now, I do have one guardrail that I wanna talk about because I think it's important. None of this is permission to just get reckless. The math is still the math. It still has to work out. So we don't go into debt for joy. We don't go into debt for our travel. We don't do that. We don't blow up our investing to pay for a trip. The discipline stays exactly where it was, but now we insert it into the plan. And that's what changes is now the plan isn't just a financial plan. It's a worth plan. It's a joy plan. It's, it's a life plan. And that's the thing that I want you to start looking at is, am I spending or planning to spend in the areas that actually give me joy, give us joy. Your money starts pointing at the quality of the 3 people you were pointing at. That kind of spending is alignment, not indulgence. And that's what we need is an alignment with our values and our vision. And it's difficult. It's difficult in today's world with the comparison and, and the social media and everyone parading their facades of the perfect life. So get your 3 or 4 on paper, then get the questions answered and start to understand it. All right? Then I want you to test that truth. You know, is it the truth? Think about this. A man I worked with is standing on a dock behind his house on a lake, watching his grandkids play at the edge of the water. And it's a Sunday. The weekend's almost over. His son walks up next to him. Looks at the kids, looks back at his mom and dad and says, they get to do this because of you. He bought that house years earlier. The money was long gone. And on that Sunday, it was still paying him in a currency that doesn't show up on a statement that I would ever prepare as an accountant. That's the test. And you, you can run it on your own spending tonight in literally 4 minutes. Go back through the last 2 years and pick out the 5 biggest things you spent money on that weren't bills. And then ask one question about each of them. Are you still getting something from it? Not did you enjoy it at the time, because everything is enjoyable at the time. That's why you bought it. Even the momentary pleasures. The question is whether it's still paying you today. Stephanie and I, we still pull up the pictures from the trips that we took years ago. We still tell the same stories. We still laugh at the same things when we almost missed the cruise ship, the things that went wrong, the delayed flights, the running through the airport, and something always goes wrong. So it creates a story and we're already talking about the next one in the anticipation of that. It's its own kind of return before we've ever packed a bag. Meanwhile, I want you to think about this. I own things that I, I would need a flashlight And a search warrant to locate. Bought them, justified them, loved them for a weekend, couldn't describe them to you if you put me under oath. Same wallet, same guy, wildly different returns. A JoyPoint keeps paying you long after the money's gone. Ordinary spending stops paying you roughly the moment the box is open or thrown away, which is why the price tag tells you almost nothing about whether something was worth it. Or not. That muddy field on a Saturday has outperformed most of what, what I've ever bought. The expensive thing you got talked into 2 summers ago is worth nothing to you right now, and you know it. See? So if price isn't what separates the good spending from the bad, something else is. And it comes down to where the decision came from in the first place. All right, quick thing before we keep going. If you want to know what the life you just described actually costs, I built a free lifestyle cost calculator. Easy to get. Grab it. It's free. Go to melabraham.com/lifestyle and run through some numbers. Get it dialed in. All right, let's get back to it. Now, think about the thing you keep not doing. This is kind of the, the 4th point here, and that it's what I call inside out or outside in. The thing that you're not doing, the class you've looked at twice, The standing Saturday with maybe your dad or your mom that keeps getting rescheduled. The trip that's been on an open browser tab for maybe 2 years. You've told yourself you can't afford it. And sometimes, frankly, the math is, is true and I respect it completely. But there are seasons where the money genuinely isn't there and, and we gotta deal with it. And anybody who tells you to just do it anyways is selling something. But a lot of the time, You're choosing not to afford it. It's a priority in your heart and in your mind, and then your mind is overruling it. It's getting pushed out of the way by the momentary stuff, the comparison, the thing you saw on a phone at 11 o'clock at night. The money went somewhere. It just didn't go where you would have sent it if you'd been the one steering. And that's outside-in spending, and that's what it does to you. The neighbor's driveway, the vacation on somebody's feed, the watch on the guy across the conference room table. A stranger posts something on a Tuesday and by Thursday, you own it. You own it. I remember a friend of mine saw my very first Tesla. I had one of the first Teslas here in Orange County, Model S, and he saw it. Literally 2 weeks later, he ordered his own. But then he regretted it. He didn't like the car. So that's the thing that I want you to, to be aware of. Are you living in alignment with your values and vision? That's why we start with that. Are you spending in that? Because if you don't, that's not a decision. That's a hostage situation with free shipping, quite frankly. And there's hard evidence for how expensive that trade is. Researchers actually at Cambridge went through over almost 77,000 real bank transactions and matched every one of them against who that person actually was and whether the spending fit the person. It mattered more for their happiness than how much they, they earned and how much they spent. The aim mattered more than the amount. So this is where I part ways with most of the financial advice you'll hear. The standard prescription for overspending is to spend less. Cut the subscriptions, cancel the lattes, white-knuckle your way to a smaller number. And I think that's backwards. I think it's why it never works. When you name 3 or 4 things that came out of your own values and you fund them on purpose, the impulse spending starts dying off without you having to fight it. Not because you got more disciplined, but because the money already has somewhere to be. It's spoken for by something you actually care about more than looking good in a parking lot. You stop being tempted. Buy the thing you never wanted once you've claimed the thing that you did. That's the filter. Every dollar gets a question. Is this coming from inside me or from around me? And when you get that filter working, you'd think you'd be finished, but hate to say it, you'd be wrong. And this last one is the one I think about the most. And I call this, this money aims it, attention collects it. A woman I know, she, she took her mother and her grandmother back to Ireland. Nobody in that family had been back. The roots were there, the names were there, and not one person living had ever stood in the place where they came from. So she paid for it, and the 3 of them went, and they found the family that was still there. 4 generations, counting her own kids, standing in a country their family left behind, putting faces on the history that had been a story until that week. Now, notice something about that trip because it's the whole point. There was a clock on it that nobody could negotiate. Her grandmother, 5 years later, that trip does not exist at any price. Not at twice the amount, not at 10 times the amount. The window was open and then it was going to close. And the only variable she controlled was whether she walked through it while it was open. That's it. And most of what you're deferring has a clock on it and you're treating it like it doesn't. The grandkid who's 7 right now will not be 7 again. Your knees at 58 are not your knees at 78. So she wrote the check and she got everything that was available in that week. My mother didn't, and she knew it. My mom had experiences in her life. She traveled, she saw things, she was grateful for them, but she'd tell you so. But later in her life, she came to a realization that I've never been able to shake, and it's The reason this whole episode exists. She understood there was more she could have taken from all of it. She'd been there. She just hadn't fully been there. Part of her attention was always somewhere else on what was missing, on what hadn't worked out, on what should have been different. She spent the money, she showed up, and she still came home with less than what was available to her. Let that land before moving on. So here's the piece that makes this whole thing work. The money aims the joy point, but your attention is what collects the return. You can write the check, you can book the trip, you can sign up for the class, you can still get nothing back if your whole time that, that you're there, you're somewhere else. Half the people on the beach this week are looking at their phones and the other half are mentally rehearsing an argument with somebody who's not there. All of them paid full price for the sand. Presence is the second half of the equation, and nobody sells you that in a course because there's nothing to buy. It's just the decision to be where you are. Tom Gilovich at Cornell has spent years asking people what they regret when they look back on their lives, and 76% named the same thing as the biggest regret of their life. It had nothing to do with a mistake they made or a job they should have taken. What haunted them was the person they meant to become and didn't. 76%, 3 out of 4 people. And when I think about my mother, that's exactly the shape of it. What she was reaching back for was the fuller version of an experience she had already paid for and already lived through. That's the real cost. And it fits in one word, regret. The quiet kind, not the dramatic kind that shows up at 70 when the math finally works and you realize you spent 40 years Being extremely responsible on the way to a life that you never got around to living. You don't have a money problem, you have a money symptom, and underneath it is a life that never got chosen on purpose. So let's bring this home. The number is the instrument and the life is the destination, and getting those backwards costs you decades. Your joy points come from a thread that's run through your whole life, and the 3 people can show you what that thread is in about 2 minutes. Test them by whether you're still drawing on them years later. Aim every dollar from the inside out instead of from whatever is happening around you, and then show up all the way for the things you paid for. Because the money only gets you into the room. You have to be in the room. Now, before you go, I want to take you back to that drawing one more time because there's an end to it I never saw coming. Jeremy's now 35 and he has a wife and 2 little kids. They both work remotely and they've done something with that flexibility that literally floored me. They rent a place in another country and they stay for a month, not a week, a month, long enough that the kids know where the bakery is, where the playgrounds are, where the swings are, and they stop being tourists. They literally just got back from a month in the Dolomites in Italy. And they already planned next year. Sit with the shape of that for a second. The little boy who drew his father as a stick figure with a phone in each ear, who couldn't find a way to put himself in the picture, grew up and built his entire life around being in the room. He didn't read my book to get there. He never sat through a workshop to make it happen. He watched what we chose. And he decided to do his own version of it and on his own budget in the messiest season of his life with a machine that isn't close to finished yet. That's the part I need you to hear. Your kids are not going to inherit your number. They're going to inherit your behavior. And if you spent 30 years modeling deferral, deferral becomes the family recipe and it gets handed down whether you meant to pass it on or not. So go get in the picture. While they're still drawing it. Because earning more doesn't make you free, a money machine does. And this is the more important thing. Sometimes we do the math about our spending, but it isn't the spending that's the problem. It's what we're spending it on and whether we're fully engaged in it. All right? If this kind of conversation hits you and you want more of it, do me a favor, hit subscribe. You know, let me know. Whatever came up for you while you were kind of watching this or listening to this, I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to have the conversation. You know, the thing you keep not doing, I want to hear about it. Put it in the comments. Let's dial it in. Let's name the real thing. Because sometimes writing it down where other people can see it is the whole beginning. Until I get a chance to see you in the next one and on your path to financial freedom, as I always say, always, always strive to live a life that outlives you. I'll see you in the next one. Cheers for now.