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 absolute entrepreneur. All right, so maybe you're looking at your finances and you say, God, I might. I'm not in the right place. This isn't where I want to be. I have more in debt than I wanted
to have. I'm not making the kind of income I need to have. I'm not in the wealth category that I want to be in. How do I fix it? Well, we're going to try and answer a lot of that in this episode of the affluent entrepreneur show. So I'm going to break down eight things that I think you can do in three months or less, 90 days that can start to transform your whole trajectory financially, to get control of your money and to do the things that will move you closer and
closer and put you on the path to financial freedom. All right? Now, doesn't mean that it's going to be easy. All right? It is simple, but what you're going to have to add to it is your effort, your discipline and your consistency. You do that, I'll help you the rest of the way. All right, so here's the thing. Just because it is difficult, remember, this doesn't mean it's impossible. Your boulder
that you might be pushing, maybe larger than someone else's. The hill that you're pushing up might be steeper than someone else's, but we can still make it happen. All right? So the first thing I'm going to, I'm going to break this down for you and just walk through. Here's how I'd love for you to think about this. I want you to take each one of these items, each one of the eight, and do one a week. I want it manageable. I don't want you to try and do it all at the same
time. Now, you can, um, you know, crunch it into a couple of weeks. But if you did one a week, I have eight of them. That's eight weeks. And then you have a couple of weeks of, of adjusting and tweaking and all of that stuff, or maybe a week break in there. It gives you some breathing room. So I dont want to pressure you. I want to make this in digestible chunks to do it. So I would use this as your checklist and the process that you want to do. And I would literally get a calendar
out and say, all right, week one, Im going to do this. Week two, Im going to do this and just do all eight of these things and then continue from then forward, once you have them all in place. All right, you deal? Deal. All right, stay with me on this. So I'm going to jump to the iPad. We'll start with number one. At the very beginning, at the very beginning, it is important for you to get clear on what matters to you and what you want. And what I mean by this is this is that number one is
what matters and what you want. Because if we don't do that, then whose life are we living? Which way are we going? Why are we going that way? And so, too often, we'll get a number. We'll say, I want to have a million bucks. Why? Million dollars is arbitrary. It's not a lot of money. It's not little money. It's just a number. And so the very first thing that I do with clients is for us to get a vision for their life, to understand the trajectory, the destination,
the general direction, the horizon we're going towards. If we don't, then what are we going after? What are we chasing? How do we even know that we're being successful? How do we even know we're getting there? If. If we're trying to travel a road to a specific destination, if we haven't set the destination, then we don't know if we're getting closer or further away.
And so, in this step, the very first thing that I want you to do week one is to take the time to start answering the questions about what really matters to you. The key word in there is you. And I mean not surface level, not like, I want a big car, I want a big house. That's material stuff. But what gives your life joy, what gives your life richness? What makes you feel viscerally good inside? What do you want? And detail it out. Journal it out. Really detail it out.
Be as specific as possible. And not, like I said, not surface level. Go deep. What do you want to feel each day? Who do you want to feel it with? What do you want to share? What movements matter, what missions matter? What do you want to get by? What do you want to be known for? What drives you at an emotional level? That's all I want you to do. And that takes some introspection. That takes some journey. Now, maybe you've done this work already,
so you understand it. But if you haven't, this can be challenging, because maybe you haven't thought about it or thought about it in this kind of depth. I want you to go through every part of the domains of life, health, relationships, family, okay? Spirituality, career and profession, all of the domains of life, and get vividly clear of what you want and what matters most. Now, that leads us to the second week and number two. And the second week is to get clear on
your current reality. All right, I get it. This is one of those things that people don't necessarily want to get into, because now they got to face the reality of where they're at. But here's the thing. If we never face the current reality, we don't know what we're working with. This isn't about facing the current reality to judge you, to say, oh, I can't believe that I did this. I can't believe I'm in this situation. How
does that serve you? This is to understand the current reality from an awareness standpoint, from you sitting back and saying, I am clear on where I am because this is my starting point. And now, in week one, we had an idea of what the destination is. We now know the starting point. We can then work in between. Okay. Now, how do we do this? I want you to literally, physically get out your checking account statements, your credit card statements, and I
want you to get six months minimum. And I want you to walk through them. Now, this is going to be, well, interesting. Let's just say I want you to mark everything on there. Now, I'm not telling you, stop, anything. Just so. So we're clear. I just want you remember I'm saying, raise awareness. I want you to mark everything on there. That is a want, a need, and a not anymore. Okay? A need is for your survival. That is the food
in your gut. That is the clothes on your back, the shelter that you live in. That is the medical and transportation. That's it. It isn't Manny Pettis. It isn't Netflix. It isn't technology. It isn't luxury vehicles and luxury trips. Those are wants. They're not needs. You might think you need them, but they're wants. So all I want you to do is mark it. Want and need. Okay? And then there's going to be a whole host of things that you go, I want, but am I using it or, I think I need it, but maybe
I don't need it. And if that's the case, then that's where you put not anymore. That's the stuff you're going to cancel. But it's up to you. I will never tell you. It's not my place to tell you to do something, not do something. My job is to inform you, to educate you, empower you, to give you some tools, some tactics, some strategies and some frameworks to work from. And you get to choose to live the life the way you want to live it. That's the purpose
is to. To live your life by choice, you know? So once you have, you're clear on the reality. Now you know what your wants are, you know what your needs are and you know the things that you say not anymore to. And that's week two, week three. Week three, I want you now, this may be something that some of you don't even have to do, but we'll see. Set yourself on a debt payment plan. Okay? And this means this is, I don't want you to be saddled and sitting with debt. That is what I call destructive
debt. So if you happen to have credit card debt for lifestyle spending, for consumables and things like that, first things first, I need to stop it. This week is you're going to stop doing the purchasing. That is temptation purchasing, impulse buying, a retail therapy, buying any of that stuff. You're going to stop it for a moment. You can start it up again. Remember, you can do what you want. But what I want you to do is because
that stuff's destroying your finances. It's destroying your financial future, especially at the interest rates that these credit cards are at. In current times at 20, the low is 22% and it's as high as 30%. You cannot get ahead financially carrying those kinds of balances. So we got to stop it. So I want you to get yourself on a debt payment plan. How do you do that? I want you to go to melabraham.com node, get my debt breakthrough calculator. It is totally free.
I want you to put all your debt in there, your credit card debt, not your mortgage debt, your credit card debt, your student loan debt, all that stuff, the payments, the interest rate, all of it. You're going to put it all in there. It's going to schedule out the payments. There's a short little training that shows you how to use it. And you can decide whether you want to use what's called the snowball method or the avalanche method of pay down. And it's going to schedule the payments for you
so you know exactly which one to pay when. And you follow that to the t, because the sooner I can get you out of destructive debt, the sooner you have breathing room to do other things to build your wealth. All right, so week three is getting a debt payment plan in place that leads us to week number four. And week number four is I want automatic transfers to an high yield savings account. Or if you have a, you work for a company, then I want you to get involved with
the 401K. If they have, if they, if they have one at work. I want you to get involved with the work at least up to the match. It's free money, y'all. Okay, here's, here's what we're doing in week four. We are starting to exercise your wealth creation muscle. We are starting to exercise instead of the spending muscle and the debt muscle, the building muscle. Okay. And so what I'm trying to do is I want you to automatically go to a high yield savings account. If you're not sure
where to go, go to bankrate.com. look for high yield savings accounts. You want one that has no fees, fully liquid, meaning you can get at the money within a day's notice, and, and that it's fully insured. There's plenty of them out there. Beware of those that are teaser rates. They might say, we'll give you 6%, but it's only for, you know, 30 days or 60 days. You want something that's consistent. The rate will go up and down depending on interest rates, but
I don't think it's going to go down anytime soon. So [email protected]. to find a good one and get yourself set up so you can transfer now. I can hear it now, Melissa. I'm in debt. I can't afford much. So does this make sense? Yes. You're exercising a muscle. Remember, wealth creation is more about behaviors than it is about money. I want to start building the behaviors. So if all you can put away is $5 a week, $5 every two weeks, that's where you start. And in that case,
you start putting it away. Now, that's for the high yield savings account. If you have the ability to participate in a company 401K where they match, I want you to make that a priority because here's what the company's doing. If I came into your house and I started dropping hundred dollar bills on the floor, I bet all of you would pick it up. Okay. I don't think there's anyone out there that wouldn't pick it up. And the question is, would you give it back to
me or would you just take it? But that's not the question, really. Here's what your company is doing. When they're matching. They're saying to you, if you put $100 bill on the ground, we will put one on top of it, and then you can pick up both. You have to pay to play. In other words, you have to contribute. They will match it. It's free money, yo. If I told you I was going to drop 100, but you got to put 100 on it to take it, then you would do that all day long. I would assume
I would start participating in your 401. So week four, you're starting the wealth building journey. You're going to start either moving money to a high yield savings account or you're going to start participating in the get the match from the company. Okay. Start somewhere. Start with something. It may not be the max, I get it, but we're exercising the muscle, and we'll keep ratcheting it up as we get there. I want you at that point, at some point, I want you to 20% to 25% of
your income. But we can't start there. So we start at 1%. I don't care. 1%. Next quarter we add another percent. Now we're at two. By the end of the year, we're at 4%. Great. We got to start somewhere. Okay, week five, fifth week, you're going to create what's called a cash resource plan. Y'all, this is huge and hugely important. I can hear you now. Oh, God. Mel's going to talk about budgets. No, I'm going to talk about permission. I'm going to talk about
planning. I'm going to talk about you eliminating guilt and shame about your spending and also removing temptation from your journey. Here's the thing. I want you to be deliberate. I want you to be intentional. I want you to know where every dollar is going before the dollar comes into your world. This is huge. See, the tendency is that we wait till we get paid, whether it's from a client or from a
job, and that money is in our account. And now we have to wrestle with temptation, because now we have all the marketing and we have the instagrams and all the stuff and people saying, let's do that, and let's do this. And now all of a sudden, there's all these people tugging at the money that's in the account that you just got. But the question is, if you spend it, is it going to move you closer? To where you want to be that we defined in week
one what matters and what you want. And if the answer is no, then why are we doing it? So in week five, I want you to start to create a cash resource plan. In other words, I want you to look at things and say, this is the job description. For every single dollar that comes into my world before it comes in, there's certain number of dollars that's going to be assigned to pay rent or pay a mortgage. There's going to be certain for food, certain for utilities, certain for clothing,
certain for transportation. Set it up because that is permission. And make sure that you're taking care of some things that you are. Your high level joy points. I talked about it in another video. But the things that give you sustainable joy, not momentary pleasures, but the real joyful things that you enjoy. Maybe it's like, hey, I like having a massage once a month, great. Maybe I want to go out once a month with my friends to a nice dinner and it's going to cost us $150, something like
that. But you put it into the plan because now that's permission to do it. You build the plan out and if you sit back and say, gosh, I don't have enough space in the plan, but there's too many things, then we have to relook at the things you're spending on. We have to go back to week two on the wants, needs and not anymore, and look at it. Or we have to look at the income that's coming and say, how do I
leverage the income up more? How do I get paid more? How do I get more income to allow me to have all of this in place? But you've got to operate from a plan. You've got to begin by giving each dollar a job description before it's earned. That's what we do in week five, week six, this is where I want you to track. You're going to be checking the pulse on the patient. Track inflows and outflows. Okay? Now, you can do this on a spreadsheet. You can do it in apps.
There's different apps. None of them, you know, ynab is you need a budget. Every dollar. Good budget. Quicken. I use quicken for all of my stuff, okay? I'm old fashioned. I use quicken. I get it. But somehow I want you to be able to look at things in the construct of where you are at any given moment in time and know where you are on the cash resource plan, on your wealth and all of that. So we need to have some method of tracking it.
And so you want to track it and you want to do it weekly. We'll talk about rhythm and accountability in week eight. Okay? And then week seven, I want you to create a bigger. You want to find a recipe or prescription to follow. Here's the thing. Wealth creation. Wealth creation isn't complicated. You know, the financial services industry would love for you to think so because it serves them. For you to think it's complicated, but it's not. Okay? There's some simple things that you need to
do. You need a prescription or a recipe to follow. What do you do first? What do you do second? How much do you put in all that stuff? And it works. It's math. Okay. If you're not unsure about what prescription to follow, then I'm going to invite you to follow mine. It's in building your money machine, my book. I break it all down for you and I give you the step by step follow it so you don't have to. It's proven, it's worked. It's
worked for me, it's worked for family, it's worked for clients. It's worked. And so it's the road traveled and it's built on actuality and not theory. It's built on the lessons that came out of my mistakes. But you have to follow something. Otherwise you're trying to recreate some. Look, it's. People have done this. There's no reason for you to recreate the wheel. So in week seven, I want you to find the prescription, find the recipe
and make sure that you're following it. If you're not sure where to go, follow mine. You can go to yourmoneymachinebook.com, comma, get my book, get some of the tools, get it implemented, and start doing the book. Because you do, the book will change your life. All right, that leads me to week number eight. In week number eight, I want you to set
a review. Rhythm and accountability. And. And here's what I mean by this, is that your relationship with wealth, your relationship with money, your relationship is just that, a relationship. You cannot set it and forget it. You cannot take a passive approach to it. It has to be something that's active. It has to be something with you involved. Now, are you going to be, you know, involved in it each and every day? No, you don't need to. Not if you follow the process and the prescription that I
work through. But you do need a rhythm where you're checking the pulse on the patient, where you're checking certain numbers. That rhythm is going to require you to do some things. Maybe once a week for the bills and the tracking, and maybe once a month for your accounts and your cash balances and your investing and your debt, and maybe once a quarter for taxes and other things, and once a year for your plan and that type of thing. And it's always helpful to
have accountability. So I'm going to invite you to take this and say, hey, let's get an accountability partner, and let's do these eight weeks together. Let's do this together. And now, once you're done with the eight weeks, you're going to continue on the process. You're going to continue with a review rhythm with your accountability partner. You're going to keep going. So those are the eight. Those
are the eight weeks. Those are the eight steps. If I promise you, if you do this, in less than three months, you won't have solved all of your financial situation, but you certainly will put you in the right path and you will be back in control. Because now you're not at the whims of temptation. You're not at the whims of debt. You're not at the whims of what is going on around you. You've taken control. You put your hand back on that, on that wheel to captain your financial shift to the
place that you want to go to, not somewhere else. All right? That's what this episode was about. It was to give you some fundamental things to do specifically, one week at a time, and literally in less than three months, you'll get a chance to change your finances. I hope that you found this valuable. I hope that you go and do this. I implore you to do this. If you're not where you want to be financially, we got to get
you doing different things. And one way to do it is to follow this, follow the work that I've done in my book, building your money machine. Get in the game. Know that you're not alone. I'm on this journey with you. I'm not going anywhere. I'm on a crusade to light the path to financial freedom for a million families, and I want one of them to be you. Until I get a chance to see you in another episode or on the road or out there, as I'm speaking. Always, always strive to live a life that outlives
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.