Building Your Money Machine

Is it too Late for You to Get Rich?

• Mel H Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA • Episode 240

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Ever wondered if it's too late for you to achieve financial freedom and get rich? I've got you covered in today’s episode!

Join me as I dispel the myth that it’s too late to build wealth. I share insights on how to get started no matter your age or stage in life. From the importance of running your own race to practical steps in investing and wealth creation, I walk you through the essential pillars that can help you build a fulfilling and financially free life.

If you’re ready to take control of your financial future and get in the game, this episode is a must-listen!


IN TODAY’S EPISODE, I DISCUSS: 

- Dealing with the feeling of being too late to build wealth

- The significance of avoiding comparison and setting your own dreams

- The importance of patience and understanding the wealth creation curve


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ORDER MY NEW BOOK:

Building Your Money Machine: How to Get Your Money to Work Harder For You Than You Did For It! 

The key to building the life you desire and deserve is to build your Money Machine—a powerful system designed to generate income that’s no longer tied to your work or efforts. This step-by-step guide goes beyond the general idea of personal finance and wealth creation and reveals the holistic approach to transforming your relationship with money to allow you to enjoy financial freedom and peace of mind.

Part money philosophy, part money mindset, part strategy, and part tactical action, these powerful frameworks will show you how to build your money machine.


TAKE THE FINANCIAL FREEDOM QUIZ:

Take this free quiz to see where you are on the path to financial freedom and what your next steps are to move you to a new financial destiny at http://www.YourFinancialFreedomQuiz.com

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. I have no idea where you are on your journey to financial freedom, but I get it. Because all of us at some level start to think, oh, my gosh, I wish I would have started earlier. And, yeah, you're right. The more time we have, the less money we need to build wealth. The less time we have, the more money we need to build wealth. It's a math equation that we got to work out. But the feeling around, oh, I'm too late to get rich or anything like that, is something I want to deal with. Because what that tendency is is that when we feel that, we choose not to do anything about it. And it's a feeling primarily because I think that we're running someone else's race. And so I think that what we need to do is look at six things. I'm gonna break some things down for you to start to make sure that you're on your own race, doing your own thing to build wealth, your own way to make it happen. Now, here's the thing. Even if, whether you're in your forties, your fifties, even your sixties, you could be sitting there going, I wish I had started early. I wish I started and all of a sudden say, I wish I started at twelve years old. Okay, I've got a kid, Henry, who is. He's not my kid, but he happened to join one of my programs at 16 and a half years old. We had a conversation and he decided to join and he's going through it. And then literally about nine months ago, we're on one of our calls and he said he got a job. What do I do? And I said, great, you got a job. How old are you? And he said, now he says, I'm 17. Perfect. We're going to open up a Roth Ira. So he opens up a Roth Ira. Literally a month ago, we're on another call and he says to me, hey, I got a question. I funded the Roth Ira, but I don't know how to invest it now. I said, okay, you're still 17. He says, no, I'm 18 now. I said, cool. I said, so you're 18 years old. You funded the Rothdeh Ira. How much did you fund it with? And I'm thinking. I'm thinking he's 18 years old, so he might have funded it with $500 or maybe$1,000. He says, no, no, no, I fully funded 2023. What? He says, oh, and I already funded 2024. I go, hold on a second. You're telling me that you put$6,500 away for 2023, and you put $7,000 away for 2024 at 18? And he says, yeah, I live at home. I don't have very many expenses. Yeah, no, no kidding. Oh, my God. So here's this 18 year old that put$13,500 away. I said, let me do some math for you. If we just invested in an S and p 500 fund, that 13,000 will go up over 100 times. 105, 106 times. Okay, you're already a millionaire. That 13 five is going to turn into a million one, a million two, a million three if you did nothing more. Nothing more. But we're not going to stop here. We're going to continue going. And the only thing we got to avoid is stupid. And I'll help you avoid stupid, and I'll help you continue going. So bottom line is this. Do I wish I was Henry? Yes. Do I wish I started at ten? Yes. Do I wish I started at two? If I could, yes. But we can't take time back. We are where we are, so we start where we at. If you're 20 or 30, you're 40 or 50 or 60, we get in the game because the one thing we do know is you cannot win the wealth game. If you're not on the field, you can't be on the sidelines, you can't be in the stands. You gotta be playing the game. And even if you sat back and said, I'm a little late, I wish I started earlier. What's the alternative? To just not do anything? To give up? To throw your hands up and say, I'm done, and I'm going to, then what? Submit to government assistance? Submit to having to live on your children's couch? No, no, no. We don't do that. We sit back and we say, let's understand the formula for building wealth and financial freedom. Let's work the formula to our benefit, no matter our age, our stage, or our circumstances. If I know that that is a mathematical formula, then I got to figure out the inputs, and it is a mathematical formula. Now, that doesn't mean that it will be easy, but it is simple. But just because there's some difficulty doesn't make it impossible. Is it? You might have a steep hill to climb. Certainly. You might have a big boulder to push. Absolutely. But we can still push it, and we can still climb it. And if we only get halfway up that hill, we're still halfway better than we would have if we didn't try. So I don't think that the alternative is to just throw your arms up. I think the only alternative is to get on the field, get in the game, and build it from wherever we're at. All right, so here's the thing. I'm going to walk through some six things here to help you kind of navigate this and hopefully bring this home for you. But first things first is, like I said, I think that this feeling comes from running someone else's race. And the first thing is this idea of comparison. Okay, now, comparison is fine. The question is, who and what are we comparing to? The problem is, in today's socially connected world, I can pick up my phone and I can look at someone's facade of their perfect life. You know, their coiffed hair, their, you know, their. Their perfect existence on here through filters that says, I live a perfect life. And now we feel bad about ourselves. See, what we're doing is we're comparing our current existence to someone else's dream, someone else's facade, someone else's journey, instead of running our own race. What our comparison, where the meaningful comparison is, is not to others. This is the keeping up with the Joneses type of mentality. Look, the Joneses. The Joneses are broke, okay? So just because your neighbor got a brand new Denali or Porsche doesn't mean you have to go get it. There isn't this race, because that race takes you to the poorhouse. That race takes you to a life of not being fulfilled because you're doing things that aren't in your lane. So the only comparison we should be comparing to at this stage is to compare ourselves to our prior self, to look at how far we've come, to look at where we started our journey. Where were we yesterday, a month ago? A year ago? And look at it from that perspective. When we compare to our prior self, we are building now, that also means that what we need to know is, where do we want to go? Okay? Where do we want to go? And this kind of adds to it. This number two is that set your dreams. I made this mistake in the sense that I did not completely define, specifically, vividly define what I had as a vision for my life. In my book, building your money machine, one of the first things that we do is we help you define what you want for your life, not just money, because the money isn't what we want for our life. The money is the vehicle that funds what we want for our life. But let me say that again. The money is the vehicle that funds what we want for our life. So we define our life, our health, our relationships, our family, spirituality, our business, all that. The lifestyle, all those things. You define that, then you put the price tag on it. Now the money comes in to fit that price tag. That's the game that you're playing. The challenge is that we don't take time to define what that finish line looks like. We don't take time to define what that life looks like. And when we don't take time to do that, we tend to fall prey to living someone else's life, to live the expectations of society, to live expectations of media, to sit back and say, oh, I got this degree, so I must go that way, or there's a professional path that I should follow, or my parents or my siblings, all these other external forces that start to direct the path that we're gonna go, and it isn't ours. And then we get to those waning years of our life. And Bronnie Ware wrote a book, the seven regrets of dying. She was a hospice nurse. And one of the biggest regrets that people had was that they got to those last days of their life and they realized they lived someone else's life. What a travesty. I don't want that for you. So, one of the first things when we start to talk money is to talk about why and what you want from your life. And so now, beyond comparing to your prior self, we focus on the dream that you want. We get clear on the dream that you want. We get clear on the values that you have. We get clear on the things that bring you sustainable joy, the things that I call joy points in your life. When you're clear on that vision, when you're clear on the values and you're clear on the joy points, you make those the priorities notwithstanding, what anyone else is doing now, whatever you hear on the media, social media, TikTok, Instagram, anything else, you are focused on that. And as long as it's moral, legal, and you're not hurting people, go for it. I don't care if it's a tent in Montana. I don't care if it's a yacht in Monaco. I'll take the yacht in Monaco, though. It is. That's the path you're on. And that's what you're evaluating, is you're living your lane. When we get out of our lane, we start to feel behind. When we get out of our lane, we start to not feel good. When we get out of our lane, we stop running our race. We start running someone else's race. Okay, that leads me to number three, because this is something that can weigh heavy on us. Leave the past. Leave the past in the past, y'all. Whatever decision you made to this point, you made it for a reason. You made the best decision you could based on the information you had, and for whatever reason, you were meant to make those decisions to prepare you for this moment, to make better decisions. Leave it in the past. If we stand here and beat ourselves up because of decisions that we should have, could have, and would have liked to make in the past, we won't move forward in the future. We're stuck in the past. When I lost one third of everything I owned in that Ponzi scheme, had I sat back and just beat myself up now, trust me, I did for a little bit. But if I stayed there, one, I wouldn't be doing this show. Two, I wouldn't have had the book out. Three, we wouldn't be having these conversations. Four, I would not be anywhere close to the financial position I'm in today. The past happened for a reason. We may not understand it at the time, and we can only understand it possibly looking backwards after decades, after years like I have, the Ponzi scheme, the loss of one third of everything I owned, the need to try and rebuild was a horrible, horrible thing. But it is the gift that allowed me to build the rules, the criteria, and the things so it doesn't happen to you to build wealth, to rebuild wealth. I rebuilt, tripled what I lost within 18 months. That's the thing that I think that we need to understand. The challenge is that we want to bring the past with us. That's a heavy, heavy set of baggage to carry. So whatever happened in the past, we don't blame ourselves. We accept it. We have accept our role in it. We find the lessons in it, and we move forward from it until we do. It's going to. It's going to burden us. So we leave the past in the less in the past, but we bring the lessons along for the ride. All right, that leads me to number four. And number four is a lot of times we feel it's because we don't have. We have lack of results, y'all. Wealth creation. Wealth creation is a long term game. If you make wealth quickly, you lose it quicker. There's a reason that people that win the lottery end up broke a couple years later. And I don't know all the stats on it, but by and large, the reason for it is they did not create the skills to steward that kind of wealth. One of the challenges is that $100,000, your first hundred thousand dollars of wealth, is the hardest threshold to get past. Why is that? Why does it seem like that? Well, because here's the thing. You cannot, in order to build that $100,000 of wealth, you have to develop new habits. You have to develop new decisions. You have to develop a new understanding. You have to develop new skills. All those things that you didn't develop, you are building muscle. You are developing all these muscles to do that thing that you've never done before. Now, once you've done it, you're just expanding on it. You're not starting from scratch. And so there's a couple things that happen here. Is that lack of fast results, or let's put it another way, lack of patience. We think that it should happen overnight. It doesn't happen overnight. There's something called the wealth creation curve. It is a curve. So one of the mistakes that people will make is they think wealth is linear. It's not a straight line. Wealth doesn't go in a straight line. It doesn't go like this. That's not what happens with wealth. Wealth is a curve. And it does that, and it starts off slow. This is something called the flat line that I talk about. And so there is this element at the beginning stages that walks, goes through slow, where you're putting money in. You're literally putting money in every week, every month, every day, whatever it is. And you're not really seeing the fruits of your label. You're sitting back and saying, this really isn't working. And you're not getting fast results. You're looking at it from that perspective. You look back after five years, and you say, oh, my God, I made $67. Mel doesn't know what he's talking about. Why am I following this guy? Trust me, I know what I'm talking about. Here's the problem. At the beginning, you will not see fast results, because what you're doing is you're compressing a spring. You're compressing a spring. You're compressing a spring. It's getting tight. It's getting tight. It's getting tight. And once you release the spring right about here, you now hit the acceleration zone, but you'll never get there. This is the place where your money is working harder for you than you did for it. That's the subtitle of my book, building your money machine, how to get your money to work harder for you than you did for it. The bottom line is this, is that I got to get in the game. I have to eat up this piece, the flat line. And the only thing that's going to eat this up is a four letter word called time. That's what it requires. And when we do that, now, all of a sudden, we start to move on the curve and we get to the acceleration zone. When we get to that acceleration zone, that's when things move faster. Watch what happens. This is an analysis that my friends at the money guy show did, and I just love the numbers. I'm going to throw the numbers out at you so you understand it and everything, but to give credit where credit's due, I said that to make the first hundred thousand is the most difficult. Well, assume that you're putting$10,000 a year away at 8%, which is the S P 500. It's going to take you 7.6 years to get to that first hundred thousand dollars. But you want to hit a million. You say, I want the million. So what's it going to take? Well, by the time you hit 20.6 years, you're at half a million. So you're halfway there. But it took you 20 years to get there. 20 years to get there. You still need another half a million. What's it going to take to get that last half a million? 7.5 years will give you another half a million dollars. Wait a second. It took you less time to make a half a million dollars than it took you to make the first hundred thousand. Yes, it did, because now you're in the acceleration zone and your money is working harder for you than you did for it. That's the thing that we need to do. And so the lack of fast results gets you the feeling like you're behind. But remember, you're compressing the spring, you're building momentum, and you're going to get that acceleration as, as you, as you start to move forward. Now, that leads me to number five. One of your biggest investments and first investments needs to be in yourself, in your growth and your development and your knowledge around, around money, around investing around wealth, getting into programs, not programs that are trying to sell you into. Into a bunch of investments, knowledge based, experience based, getting books. I don't sell investments. I'm not here trying to build a book of business. I don't want to get a bunch of clients. That's not what I do for a living. I speak, I teach, I serve, I help, I coach, I mentor. I don't sell insurance. I don't sell investments. I have no bias based on commissions or transactions. Okay? That's what you want. The book that I wrote to was a book that meant to serve, okay? The courses, this channel, all that stuff. Okay? And so I want you to look at it from that perspective and find the right mentors, the right coaches. Hopefully, part of that is me and my book and some of the stuff that I'm doing. Get yourself and invest in your own growth, your own knowledge, your own wisdom, so you can be informed you're not going to be at the level that that. Maybe I am, but you don't need to be, not when you follow a system and a process that works that is simple. Okay? But we have to invest our own growth. We do not relinquish responsibility for our financial future to advisors or to anyone else. We take control of the wheel. They can stand to the right and left, help us on the journey, but they are not steering the steering the ship. You are. All right? And number six, you can't have it all now, but you can have it all in time. Here's what I mean. It's important for you to set the priorities. There's a reason. There's a reason that I say, hey, start with the vision. The vision is going to be built on your values, what you want, your dreams, your desires, and all the things that are really viscerally important to you. You start with a vision, the domains of life, as I call it in my book. And then from that vision, you create the plan, the plan to make the vision a reality. And then from that plan, we set the strategy to bring the plan to life. And from the strategy, we put the tactics in to move this forward. And from the tactics, we set some action steps to get it really going. And so we may not be able to have everything today, but over time, we should be building towards the plan and the vision so we have everything that means something to us tomorrow. All right? That's the thing. Get in the game. That's the first step. Because if you're not in the game, no matter age, stage or circumstance, you will not win the game. It's just impossible. You got to be playing the game to win the game. And so whether you think you started late, whether it feels like you're starting late, there's some things in here that I want you to go back through that make it feel like you're late. But get in the game. Even if I can get you 50, 60, 70% of the way to where you want to be, it is 50, 60, 70% closer than you were, than you started when you started. So it is important to get in the game, stay in the game long term, follow a process, follow a recipe that's proven, and build it over time. I hope that this helps, and I hope that you got the understanding that it's never too late to start, it's never too late to get in the game, and that you have to be in the game to win it. And so you're going to get on the field, you're going to follow the process. And if I can help you on that journey, you reach out to me, you let me know. Walk the process from my book, from my trainings, from my channel, and let's make it happen. All right? It can happen no matter age, stage or circumstances. And I'm here to guide you. Remember, I'm on a crusade. I want to light the path to financial freedom for a million families. I want one of those families to be you. All right? Till I get a chance to see you on the road, get a chance to speak to you, or maybe out when I'm speaking. Always, always strive live a life that outlives you. See you soon. Cheers. 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.

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