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 financial freedom, a lot of people talk about it. A lot of people say they want it. A lot of people trying to figure it out. But the question is, what do you need
to do to get there? Now, a lot of all. All my work is about that because I truly believe financial freedom is true birthright. For some reason, our society is in a situation where we've been raised to not talk about money. That money is a taboo topic. Oh, my gosh. We should never have a conversation around money. Yet three quarters of the people say they're stressed about money, and one quarter of them say that it's
extreme stress about money. And then when you look at the debt statistics, people that have credit card debt and. And student loan debt and all those things, and the state of their own personal finances, it's a travesty. Why? Because we choose not to talk about it. Because we choose not to walk it. Most of our money lessons are caught, not taught. In other words, we see people, we learn from them. At least we think we do, and we go do it, but we think that's the right thing to
do. And we think that burying ourselves in debt is okay, or we think that just overspending is okay. We think that using payments is okay. Now, it can be if you're smart, strategic, and you have a plan and all that stuff. But it may be the thing that's hindering us from financial freedom. And the problem is, is that we're not having these conversations. And if we're not having the conversations, we don't know what to do. Now, I get often asked,
what's your advice for someone that wants financial freedom? Now, there is a whole lot of things to talk through, and I build it all out and give you the recipe and the prescription in my book, building your money machine. Okay. But I want to give you, like, some elements to think about in this episode, that this is what I would say would be my brutal advice to someone that says, hey, I want financial freedom. What would you tell me to do? And and here's what I
would tell you to do. And I'm going to give you some things. I'm walk you through some things, and hopefully it puts you on the field. Because the other thing that we need to understand is that if you're not on the field playing the game, you can't win the game. No one wins the game sitting in the stands or on the sidelines. Get on the field. So here's what I would do, and I'm going to jump to my iPad on this. But. But what I would do
is. Is number one. Number one, always start with your lifestyle desire first. Okay? And here's what I mean by this, is that we often, especially in today's world, you get on instagram or anything, and you get on your phone, or you get on the media, social media, TikTok, and what do we have? We have so many people parading their facade of the perfect life in front of us. The Lambos, the planes, the boats, the fashion, all that stuff, as if that is the happiness now. It's material stuff. Now,
don't get me wrong. I love nice stuff. My wife and I have nice stuff. But that isn't what gives us the immense amount of joy in life. And so, at the very beginning, even in my book, when I work with my clients, one of the biggest things is to define the lifestyle that you want, no one else. Not what your parents want, not what your siblings want, not what society says, not what your degree says, not what your career path says. What is the life that you want?
I remember having a conversation with someone actually on my publishing team, and it was all about buying a home. And he says, I don't know that I'd ever be able to afford to buy a home. And I said to him, I said, why do you want to buy the home? He looks at me, he says, it's the american dream. I said, I know. That's what they tell us. The question I have, though, is it your dream? See, we're not here to live someone else's dream. We're here to live our dream.
So the very first thing is to say, what do I want my life to be like? Is it the boats and the planes and the fancy houses? Is it a tent in Montana? Is it somewhere in between? What's my relationships like? What's my health like? What's my family like? What's my spirituality like? All of it. What do you want your life to be like? So the very first thing is to get clear on the vision for your life, to get clear on where you want to go. Is it going to change? Certainly it's going to
change. Okay. Mine changed many times when I had a son, when I got cancer, when I got married, when we had grandkids, all those things. It changes. But at least you know you're looking at the right horizon and you're going the right direction. The idea behind this in building financial freedom is one, lifestyle, two, I want you to have a life by choice. And what I mean by that is, too often we are living a life by demands. I have to pay bills. And I
get it. We are all there. I got to pay bills, too. But does that mean that the only way to pay bills is to be chained to a job? And the answer is no. Now, the real answer is you need to build a money machine. The real answer is that you have to build something that is outside your efforts, and that's what the money machine does. Okay. But the idea here is to know that the most, the ultimate
purchase that you can make in your lifetime is your freedom. Because when you do that, you're no longer changed to a job. You have work option. I get to do what I do. I don't have to do what I do. I get to do what I do because it's joyful, because it's in service, because it gives back, because it makes a difference, and because I know I can change some lives, but I do it at my option. That's what I want now. So now you kind of look at that. So then the next piece is you have to put a
price tag on it. Okay. What do you think that this dream life is going to cost now? This is an estimate, especially if you're young. We don't know what things are going to cost, but we can get an estimate so we at least have a trajectory and a target to go towards because there's the number that we need to get to. And why is this important? The biggest reason is because if you don't put some number down, you'll never know what your finish line looks like.
You don't know if you're running a sprint, a marathon, an ultra marathon, a mega marathon, I don't know. But the bottom line is that until you define what the target is, what that price tag is, you don't even know when you'll get there. I made that mistake. I was running and running and running, and I ended up in a bike accident because I was distracted, because I was so focused on making. I was angry. I got on a bike and. And ended up in an accident with a
grade four concussion. I had a dear, dear friend who had retired at 37, and he asked me this question, how much is enough? How much is enough? And I couldn't answer it. I couldn't answer it because I didn't know. I was just running. And I just thought that maybe. Maybe one day, when I got there to that enough point, I would look back and say, this is enough. But I kept moving the mile marker. I didn't know what enough was. I didn't know what the price tag was. I didn't
even know what the life was I was going after. I just was going after something. And so this is why I want to start with lifestyle. I want you to start with lifestyle. I want you to put a price tag on it for now. We'll change it. As life changes, as life ebbs and flows, we may change it, but that allows us to understand a little more about the race that were becoming. And then this one, which is something that might surprise people, is okay now. You know that.
Who do you need to be? And what I mean by this is that dream is going to ask something of you. You have to have a certain level of skill. You have to have a certain level of knowledge. You have to have a certain level of drive. You have to have a certain level of demeanor. What is it? Who do you need to be to create that and make that a reality and ask and do that? This isn't something that you can just sit and say, I'm going to contemplate it. I'm going to
energetically just attract it to me. It doesn't work that way. It's going to take action. It's going to take movement. It's going to take work. Now, it's not complex. It's simple, but it doesn't mean it's easy. Whatever your facts, whatever your circumstances, whatever your age or stage is, you might be in debt. You might not be in debt. You might be just coming out of something. You might be coming from a divorce. Whatever it is, I get it. The circumstances may make it difficult, but difficult
doesn't mean impossible. But we got to ask ourselves, who do I need to be to be that? Who do I need to be to be the father, the mother, the spouse that I want to be that I defined in that first step? Who do I need to be? Okay. And then number five is to create a plan. Create a plan. Now, here's the thing, and this might hit hard for people. You already have a plan. And you might go, no, I don't oh, no, you do. You do. It might be a haphazard
plan. If you don't have a deliberate, intentional plan in place that is by your own design, then you're living someone else's plan. And it may be the whims of what's going on in the day. It may be the whims of the media or social media that you saw. It may be the whims of other people in your life. But it's a plan. It just may not be the right plan, and it ain't going to get it, get you there. So we need to create a deliberate plan and ask the question. The
plan you created, will it get you where you want to go? Will it get you where you want to go? Okay. And if it won't, we need a different plan. All right. That leads me to number six. Number six seems obvious. Spend less than you make and less than you make. Now it seems obvious. Look, building wealth, like I said, is simple. Make money, spend less, save the rest. That's it. Invest the rest. Basically. Okay? That's it. How you invest it. Some of the other nuances, okay?
But at the core element of it, if I am not making money and I'm, and I'm not spending less than I make and I'm not using what the, what's left over to build that life, to build that money machine, then we're never going to get there. At the core, that's all we're doing. Spend less than you make. Be really clear about it. Here's the
thing. Your ability to create wealth, your ability to build wealth, to build this money machine, to have financial freedom, has far less to do with your ability, with your income, the money, and has far more to do with your behaviors, your choices, your habits, your decisions. And so when I say spend less than you make, what we're really talking about is your choices, your decisions, and your behaviors around money. And so we have to be really deliberate with that if we choose to get financial
freedom. If you don't want to, I get it. But when you look at the pattern of people that have achieved it, what do they do? They were very deliberate in their behaviors. They were very specific in their habits. They knew exactly why they were making decisions, and they made that, made this number seven, investing a priority. They weren't worried about trying to live a life today on credit, that they couldn't afford to live, that they weren't worried about
sitting back and saying, I want to look wealthy. They wanted to be wealthy. They wanted to live the rich life. And so what they did is they actually sat back and said, I'm going to make investing a priority. Every dollar that comes in, there's a portion that's going to go towards my financial future before I worry about today's lifestyle. And I'm going to focus on making money, investing money, and creating a life. And then number seven, number eight is really about. And this is the
first milestone. I got to get you to get to your first hundred k as quickly as possible. It is the hardest part of the journey. The first hundred thousand dollars is the hardest part of the journey. Here's the thing. If you look at it, let's say you're putting $10,000 a year away at 8%. And this was an example that some dear friends of mine, Brian Preston and Bo Hansen, and the money guy show did. So they did the calculations. I'm going to use it because I think it's
such a powerful example of why it's so important. Your first hundred thousand is. Is the most difficult. And I had a whole nother video and episode. We'll hook it up in here for you to know why it's that way and it needs to be that way. But once you get past the 100,000, why is that such a pivotal point? Watch what happens. $10,000 a year. $10,000 a year at 8% is going to take you 7.6 years. 7.6 years to hit your first
hundred thousand dollars. So you're sitting back saying, oh, my God, now that's 7.6 years. What I call that is the wealth flat line, okay? Because it's not gonna feel like you're making progress. It's not gonna feel like you're getting anywhere. And you're gonna say, this is stupid. It's not getting me anywhere. But what you're doing is you're compressing a spring. You're compressing a spring that when it releases, it releases and
expands and grows. It is what happens after that that matters, because that's where your money is working harder for you than you did for it. Hence the money machine, the subtitle of my book. Because after your 1st $100,000 to get the second $100,000, if you keep that clip of $10,000 a year at 8% instead of 7.6 years, the next 100,000 only takes you 4.7 years. Okay. 30% less. The next 100,000 is 3.4 years, then it's 2.7 years, then it's 2.2 years. So literally, the way this
works is over 20 and a half years. 20.6 years, you will make your first half a million dollars. Now, you may sit back. That's a long time. It is. I get it. But watch the power of this. Why is this so important? Because in 20 years, at 10,000 a year now, I'm hoping that we'll push it higher than that and we'll get you there faster and we can talk about it and I talk about in my book, but after 20.6 years, you have a half a million dollars. What do you think it takes to double that half
a million dollars? Another 20 years? No, you actually double it in less time than it took you to make your 1st $100,000.07 and a half years. Your first hundred thousand dollars took you 7.6 years. But your last 500,000 to a million will only take you seven and a half years. That's the power of it. But we have to cross the 100k threshold. That means you have to be disciplined, you got to go at it, and you can get it done
in less than 7.6 years. That first hundred thousand, you just gotta be more deliberate and focused on what you're doing. But that's the threshold that starts to get you into momentum, to get you into critical mass where things start to work for you instead of you having to work for it. Okay, number nine of my brutal advice. Number nine, this is a lifelong journey. This is not a destination. This is not something that you just do and say, I'm done. It is a journey. It is long term. It is long
term thinking. And I believe that, like my financial freedom journey, it's not over. I mean, we're fine. We're free, we're doing whatever we want to do. But now my responsibility is to, one, make sure that my, my son, his wife, my grandkids and all the missions and movements get the benefit of that journey and can carry it on when I am through, when my wife and I are through, that they get to carry it on. So it is not just your lifelong journey, it becomes
a lifelong journey beyond you. This is why I say to live a life that outlives you. And so we need to look at financial freedom through the eyes of a long term journey. And that it's constant. Not that it's constant stress, but it is something that never really ends. We're always on it. It's part of life. It's who we become. And then the last piece is this is to focus on richness, not wealth. Here's what I mean by this. Wealth is a statistic. In the bank account,
wealth is just a number. I know a lot of wealthy. I know people that have hundreds of millions and even billions in the bank account, yet they live bankrupt lives. Unfortunately, there is no richness in their life in the sense that they're not experiencing life, they're not loving life, they're not sharing life, they're not feeling life. Richness comes from the feeling, from the experiencing, from the sharing, from the loving, from all of that.
If all we're doing is chasing financial freedom for the wealth, for the bank account, you're going to find that it's an empty existence. You're going to find that it is appealing. On one side, I can pay for whatever I want, but it's horrible on the rest of it because inevitably you feel lonely, you feel empty, you feel a lack of content unfulfilled. It is a challenge. So focus on how you build richness in the moments of your life. Because richness doesn't necessarily require
money or wealth. It's how you experience it. It's the joy in the moments. It's making the moments matter. And if we stack those moments effectively, we live a rich life. Wealth will be on the journey. Follow the plan. Follow this advice. But here's the thing. It isn't quick, it isn't overnight, and it isn't something that you start and stop. You get in the game, stay in the game.
Lifelong journey, long term. But live it each and every day with discipline, with the right habits, with the right choices, you'll get yourself there. Not only will you get yourself there, bring a whole lot of people along for the ride. Because you become the example, you become the role model. You become the possibility around your community, around your family, and you become the inflection point for your family tree. I hope that this helps. I know that I was direct on some of it,
but I wanted this to be my brutal advice. For someone that wants financial freedom, I'm going to shoot you straight. That's what I do. I got nothing to sell you as far as investments or insurance or anything like that. But I do want to sell you on one thing. It's your dream possibility of, like I said, financial freedom. It's your birthright. We just got to go claim it. You need the recipe, you want the prescription, then let's give it to you.
Because it doesn't have to be complicated. It's actually, in fact, very simple. But it may not be easy, but you don't have to do it. Alone because I'm with you every step of the way. So until I get a chance to see you in another episode or on the road as I'm speaking, are on one of my other live calls, always, always strive to live a life that outlives you. Stay on the journey. Financial freedom. 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 dot group and I'll see you there.