The Affluent Entrepreneur Show

Wealth By The Decade - Sticky 60s + If You're Behind

August 02, 2023 Mel H Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA Season 2 Episode 161
The Affluent Entrepreneur Show
Wealth By The Decade - Sticky 60s + If You're Behind
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Ever wondered what you should be doing with your wealth as you enter your 60s? 

In today's episode, we're diving into some essential moves you should be making as you enter your fabulous 60s. We'll chat about selling stuff you don't need anymore, like those dusty gadgets, and turn them into cash for some smart investments.

Another thing we'll tackle is having enough cash on hand for those unexpected curveballs life throws at us - you know, medical stuff and such. So, increasing that peace of mind fund is a top priority!

Don't miss out on the tips and tricks that can help you make the most of this exciting decade!

IN TODAY’S EPISODE, I DISCUSS: 

  • Selling non-productive assets for investment
  • The caution of lacking liquidity and the importance of increasing our peace of mind fund
  • Balancing financial support for adult children and our own financial wellbeing

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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. Welcome to this special series, wealth by the Decade. This was a special one that I think is really important. But here's the thing. At the beginning of each of these episodes, the talk about what does it take for you to build build wealth no matter the age or stage. So it's the foundational elements. What that means for you is this. If you listen to one of the episodes from the prior decades, maybe you listen to the you want to listen to the 40s. That beginning is going to be the same. So just skip ahead and get to the core content for your decade. But if you haven't listened to the setup, make sure you listen to the setup at least once, because that's the foundation to make sure that you build wealth in the decade you're in. Enjoy the episode. Hey there. Welcome to this episode of the affluent entrepreneurship. This is the beginning of a special series. Often I get asked, what do you do in your 20s, your thirty s, forty s, fifty s, sixty s? What do we do? Depending on your stage or age in life. And the reality is that you can't figure out your wealth journey, the things you should be doing with your money if you don't look at it from the context and the construct of where you are in your life, how much time you have left, and those kinds of things. So I decided to create a special series called wealth by the Decade. And so I'm going to walk you through some of the key elements that you need to consider as you start to look at your wealth, depending on where you are in your life. Now, before you go jumping ahead and saying, well, I'm not in my 20s or I'm not in my 30s or I'm not in my forty s and skipping those parts of the series, there's some valuable elements that build on each other going through the whole series. So I'm going to invite you to go through the absolute whole series, no matter what your age is, no matter what decade you're in, it can also help that maybe you have children or grandchildren that need to hear some of this stuff. So I want you to go through all of it and take the notes. I'm going to walk you through a couple of things. Each decade. We're going to talk about the theme of that decade. We're going to talk about the focus for that decade. We're going to talk about the priority for that decade. We're going to talk tactically about what you need to do for that decade. And then we're going to talk about some cautions. What are the things you need to watch out for in each decade? This is going to be powerful. This is going to be incredible, I think, because it's one of the things that I get asked most often. But before we do that, I want to set up kind of the whole idea of wealth creation, at least the fundamentals. Because no matter what your age or stage or whatever decade you're in, this applies. And so I want to talk about the wealth triad, the wealth drivers triad, and what are the stages, what I call the journey, the financial liberation journey, so you understand where you might be and what to do. So in order to do that, I'm going to actually jump to my iPad and walk through some of the things that I think we need to bring into Bear. So here's the thing. When we start to look at this and we start to look at what drives wealth, because this is going to impact everything that you do, is that there are truly three wealth drivers that we can have that drive things. And this is the thing that most people think that they need. And that is this. It is all about money. And I get it. We need to have money. We need to have income. We need to have money coming in to make that happen. But if you've watched me for any length of time or if you've seen some of the work that I've done, it's not the money that's the sole contributor to building wealth. Look, we want wealth not because we want wealth. Now, some people maybe, but not me. I want wealth. So it allows me to get behind the causes, to move my missions forward, to create a movement, to have the moments in my life and to control those moments. Maybe you're the same way. The reality is that the reason we want money money is a result. It is not a purpose, is to fulfill a purpose. It could be to take care of our children, our grandchildren, to get behind a movement. It could simply be to sit back and say, I just want to control my life. Whatever it is, there's something beyond the money. And so although money is a necessary ingredient to building wealth, it's not the only ingredient because we can have lots of money coming in. And if we have lots of money going out, we're not building wealth. So that's the one ingredient. First ingredient. The second ingredient that we need to consider is time. That is this. And I hear this all the time. People that are younger, they're in their 20s or 30s or even their forty s and say, I got time, I got time. Or I hear people that are in their fifty s and sixty s and say, it's too late, I don't have time. Well, the fact of the matter is, time is what it is. It's a factor we can't control. We are at a certain age and stage in our life, period, end of story. And I want you to hear this really clearly. It is never too early to start, okay? It is never too early to start building wealth. Time is the greatest lever you have to creating wealth. So the earlier start, the easier it is, the less money we have to bring in. It goes back to my whole Emily factor when we talked about my granddaughter being born. And the fact is that if all I did was put away $100 a month,$20,000 over 20 years and just did that, she'll have a million six by the time she was ready to retire. And it's because time did the heavy lifting, 20,000 to a million six. If we started that at 30 or 40 or 50, it's a little bit of a heavier lift. Time is the greatest lever when it comes to your wealth building. Now, that also means this the best time to get into the investing game. The best time to get into the wealth creation game is now. If we didn't do it yesterday, then, now. Because here's the thing, if we don't get into it now, then it's just going to shorten the runway, and it's going to make it a bit more difficult as we get older. Now, it doesn't mean it's impossible, okay? It just means it's more difficult. So why do the heavy lifting? Let time do the heavy lifting for you. So money, time, and number three, that nasty word, discipline. Let me tell you, this is the place where I think a lot of people fall off, is the discipline. There's a study that was done, 10,000 millionaires was done, and literally the majority of those millionaires, they weren't like entrepreneurs. They weren't mega entrepreneurs that sold their companies for hundreds of millions of dollars. They were wage earners that consistently and persistently put money away over time in their 401K, in their investment accounts and everything, and they ended up becoming millionaires over time. Discipline is one of the greatest catalysts to building wealth. Here's the thing. Remember, I say wealth is not about the money. It is a behavioral issue. Well, discipline is about your behaviors. If we don't get in the game early, or if we don't get in the game now, whatever the age or stage you're at and stay disciplined in the game of wealth creation, then what happens is you make money, you lose money, you make money, you build wealth, you lose wealth, you build wealth. But what happens is it's an up and down and you don't necessarily get ahead. So when you have the three key ingredients of money, time and discipline, things shift for you. Now, let's look at what happens when you have these things in place. Because if we truly have money and time, what it gives us is leverage. It gives us leverage. The time does the heavy lifting. Now, I don't have to feel the burden of putting so much away. Time will do it. I'm going to give you some numbers as we go through each of the decades here, okay? Now, when we have money and discipline, in other words, the discipline of our spending, the discipline of our earnings, and the discipline of our investing, we have money coming in, we have money going out, and we have money staying home, hopefully. And it's the money that's staying home. What we do with that. That starts to create the wealth, building the money machine that's going to give you the freedom the wealth machine that gives you the freedom to choose, to have the option to work because you want to, not because you need to. To be able to decide whether you're going to take a project on or not. To decide that you're going to take a month off like my son and his wife are doing and going to Portugal. We're going to join them. So those kinds of things. And what that means is that when you manage your income, your inflows and your outflows effectively and what's staying at home, you're creating margin in your life, but you're doing it from a financial standpoint also. And so this starts to really drive things. Now, when you have discipline and time, what happens is you start to create habits, and those habits give you consistency. And this, my friends, this is the key. These are the three wealth drivers. When we start to understand how to manage all of these, and time is always going to be defined as now, it's never too early, it's never too late, it's now. Okay? So hopefully this makes sense to you. Now, there are stages to go through, and I've had so many people that say, you know what, you know, what's my financial freedom number? Okay, what's my Fi number, my fire number, all that stuff. And sometimes those numbers can get really large, which means that they feel so far away. And so you're in many cases, sitting back saying, I don't think I never get there, but I want to bring something to you. I want to give you kind of the four stages, the four steps you have to go through. Because, let's face it, whether you're in debt or whether you have hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars, if we need to get to $1,000, we pass through$100. If we need to get to 10,000, we pass through$100. Then that $1,000, then $5,000, and we get to 10,000. If we need to get to a million, we have to pass through the hundred, the thousand, the 10,000 10,0000, the 500,000 to get there, realize that it's a journey, it's not a destination. And there are milestones in this journey that I call the financial liberation journey. And I think that when you start to understand that all I'm trying to do is get to the next milestone, then I'll worry about the next milestone and then the next when we turn around and say, I got to get to 5 million, if that's the number, it feels lofty and unreachable and impossible. And so too often, we stop. We stop. But what we need to do is put little milestones that say, oh, I'm on track. I'm doing well. And then before you know it, your discipline, your money, and your time get you to the 5 million, and you go, gosh. How'd I get here? Well, you got there by moving through the four stages of the financial liberation journey. So let's look at them, because here's the thing. When we talk about the financial liberation journey, and this is financial liberation, this is the journey, the path, here's the thing. We have to move through each of the stages, and you might find yourself in one of these stages, and none of them are good, bad, or indifferent. It just allows you to understand where you are, what your focus is, and what to do next. And so hopefully that this will start to make sense to you and give you some ways to look at it. The very first stage that we have to pass through, that $100, if you will, is what we call what I call financial stability. And what is financial stability? Financial stability is when you have enough assets, generating enough income, that it actually covers your necessities. And I mean necessities, that means the roof over your head, the food that you're eating, your medical, your transportation, your shelter, your clothing, the necessities, the bottom rung of Mazzle's hierarchy of needs. Once we have that, that's the stability. Those are the things that we need to take care of. Now all of a sudden, you say, I'm stable. My necessities. My survival is covered. Okay? And if we have our survival covered, it gives a level of peace of mind. We know that we're okay. Now, it may not be the lifestyle we want. It may not be the lifestyle we have currently, but at least we're not on the street. At least we're not in debt. At least we're not struggling to just survive. So we need to get to that stability line first. And so if you're in debt or you're struggling, you're living, check. There's some things that we need to do to get some things dialed in. We'll talk about those decade by decade, because then once we get to the stability stage, we can move to the next stage. And that next stage is what I call financial security. And financial security, if financial stability is your necessities, financial security is your current expenses. Your current lifestyle expenses, if you will. And so if I look at it and let me just throw some numbers to it, if my survival, my rent or my mortgage, my medical, my food, my clothing, transportation, let's say that that was$2,000. So I would need to generate enough income, $2,000. If I did that, then I am at the financial stability line. But that's just the necessities. What about things like Netflix and manipetties and other luxuries and the gym membership and all those things? Those are lifestyle expenses. Those are lifestyle expenses. They're not necessary. Now I get it. You might say to me, Mel, it's necessary. I get it. All right? But the reality is they're not. But those are lifestyle expenses. This is where we have to get to for financial security, where we can support our current lifestyle. Hopefully this makes sense. So our current lifestyle is then supported. Now we have financial security because now we sit back and say, I can keep living this lifestyle without having to worry. And so if our necessities were$2,000, and let's say that in order to continue our lifestyle, including the necessities, it's $5,000. That means that I need$3,000 more. So your financial security is a total of $5,000, which is the 3000 for lifestyle and the 2000 for financial stability. Now we're doing well. Now we're at the security line. Now we know that our current lifestyle is safe. That leads us to stage number three. Stage number three is financial independence. So stage number three, financial independence, is where we have enough income being generated to replace 100% of the income that we currently have. So let's keep with the numbers.$2,000 for necessities, another 3000 for security. So that's a total of$5,000. But let's say you're earning $7,000 a month. Well, financial independence replaces the income that you have, which is $7,000, which allows you to pay for the expenses that are necessities and lifestyle and have money left over. And have money left over. So financial independence here is replacing the income. And let's say that that is $7,000. So that is the financial independence line, which then leads us to this last place, which is what I call financial freedom. The financial freedom is when we have the opportunity and the ability to fund what we call an affluence vision. When I work with people in the Affluence blueprint or with my one on one clients, we create the vision for their life, the ultimate vision. So this is the lofty goals that allow you to do the things you want to do, get behind the missions, the movements, and do things without concern. This is the big kuna, the big number that you're looking for. So it supports everything. So you're completely free. You can live life on your terms the way you want. Okay? That number could be anything, but we have to figure it out. Too often, we don't know what our target is. So we just keep running. I did that. And so the idea here is this is that to understand that this is a journey that requires you to go through stages, and it's not just you jump up to financial freedom. So when we do this and when we look at the stages and the decades of our life, we start to look at it through these eyes to understand that I'm going to be whether I'm at the stability stage or security stage or independence stage or freedom stage, we're at different stages. Totally fine. The fact that you know what stage you're at allows you to know what the next milestone is. Okay? So that's the financial liberation journey. And I think when you look at the three wealth drivers and the journey now, you understand some of the elements that come into play with building wealth. All right, so with that, let's jump to the decades. All right, here we go. This one's the 60s, what I call the sticky 60s. Here we go. This one's special to me because it's the decade. I'm in lookout world here's. The way I look at this, the theme for this, the 60s, is freedom. Freedom. This is the time for us to be looking at how are we going to live even more freely than we already have? What are the things we're going to do to make sure that we can live fully in this new season of our life, to make that happen? So in order to do that, there's going to be a couple of focuses and a couple of priorities and some tactics that I want you to put in place. Some of them are new. All right? But the focus is here we go again. What's your why? Always starts with why. Remember, one of the core principles we talk about is this idea of why before how and how much val in your 60s as families are growing, grandchildren, maybe great grandchildren, things are happening. All of a sudden there's this family below you, these generations. The why changes. What is the why for you? And even if you don't have children, even if you don't have grandchildren, the why still changes. Maybe it's the generosity. Maybe it's a cause you want to get behind. Maybe it's a charity. What's the why? Second focus is education. Always. Always education. Keep on learning. This is your financial future. This is your financial legacy. So what are the podcasts, the shows, the books, the courses, the mentors, the coaches that you need to surround yourself with to keep you moving forward? I'm constantly learning. I'm constantly digging, and I love to grow. I love to learn. I'm learning new investment strategies right now, going through some stuff and working with a coach. Yeah, I got a coach in my sixty s and I've done. Well, not that I need to do more, but I want to learn more one because it's going to help me bring some of that to you. Then the other two focuses, I think, are unique to this decade, and that is reflecting and realizing, reflecting on the journey that you've been on, because now you've had six decades of life to reflect on. It hasn't been all roses. It hasn't been all great. You've had ups and downs, you've had challenges, you've had losses, you've had gains, you've had births and deaths and friends and marriages and divorces around you. All kinds of things have happened. Reflect on it. What did you learn? Realize the gifts in it. Realize and appreciate it. I've lost friends. I've gained friends. People have passed. I had my bout with cancer. I've had bad relationships. I've had good relationships that went bad. I have a wonderful marriage now. I've got one grandkid, another grandkid on the way. Great relationship with my son. Lost one third of my net worth. Regained it, traveled, spoke, continue to speak. And I only say this because it's important for us to appreciate the whole journey. I wouldn't give up any of it. The pain, the angst, the anger, the frustration, the beauty, the love, the compassion, the empathy, the caring, the service, the generosity, all of it, because it gave me the life that I have. It made me who I am. And until we appreciate the journey that we've been on, the growth that we've had, the people we've cared about, maybe we don't realize the value of life the way we should. So I think this is a great time to start focusing on that and appreciating those things that maybe we took for granted over the years and maybe we should be doing this in the other decades too. And then the last focus here is to define the new seasons. This is a time where you start to look at what do I want to do? In my case, I say, what do I want to do when I grow up? Because I am never going to grow up. But what do you want to do in the new seasons? And for me, this new season of life, which was post cancer in this decade, it's all about service. It's why I do what I do. It's why I do the show. It's why I do these episodes. It's why I do the teaching. It's why I do the coaching. It's why I do this, because I want to see people live fully. I want to see people live full, expressed. I want to see people that get a chance to live into their financial freedom, that they don't have. The biggest stressor, one of the biggest stressors in life is money, that we take that away, give them the pathway to live fully, to know that people are taken care of, to have that richer lifestyle, that deeper impact on that complete freedom. As we talk about in the affluence blueprint, as we teach a process to make that happen, what is it for you? Is it traveling? Is it charity? Define the new seasons of your life. So they're lived intentionally. Okay, that leads me to then the priorities. Now, the priorities at this stage are avoid debt. Number one, this is not the time to burden yourself with debt, okay? You don't want that albatross around your neck. Two, review your medical care options. At this point, all of a sudden, medical starts to get expensive. Or you need to think about it because maybe you're not employed anymore or you're going to move away from your business. What are your options to make sure that you have good care? Because this is the time where it starts to hit. This is the time where you start to have issues. I am going to get on a soapbox here a little bit because I think that this is also a time that we need to be proactive. I neglected my health because I thought I was taking care of myself. In other words, we moved 100 miles away down to the beach. So I didn't have any doctors. And I'm going to the gym, I'm eating right, I'm doing the things. And so I said, I don't feel bad, so I'm not going to worry about it. So I didn't see a doctor for seven years. What got me to see the doctor was the cancer. Now, had I seen a doctor or just checked and was proactive about my health and care and self care and all that stuff, it may not have prevented the cancer, but it would have prevented the tumor from being a seven and a half centimeter tumor and putting me in such grave danger that I was. So in this stage, one of your priorities is a self care plan. Physiologically, physically, psychologically. Put yourself on a self care plan. It's going to matter so you can enjoy it. Okay? The fourth priority is income flow planning where's your income going to be coming from as you move through this. You have the business. Maybe you sell the business, maybe you have to shut it down. Maybe your job. Is there a pension. This is a time for you to start looking at where your income is going to come from as we start to move through this. This is why you do a detailed plan. It's one of the things that we talked about in the last decade about stress testing the plan. Now, this 1 may be hard for you. This next priority may be hard for some people to accept. But your children during this time are secondary from a financial standpoint to you. Your children are secondary from a financial standpoint to you. They still have a lot of years left to build and create, so you help facilitate that for them. But you don't jeopardize your financial future to a point to take care of them. I'm assuming no special needs and that stuff to take care of them. Where ultimately, you end up finding yourself having to live in their basement. That's the worst thing we can do to our children. Take care of yourself first. Your children will become second. If we did the right thing to teaching them starting in the fourth decade in your 40s or even earlier, and they're doing the right thing, they're not going to need your help. Things happen. I get it. But we don't sacrifice our financial future for them if there's any way around it. That also means things like college planning. If we're not going to fund college and jeopardize our retirement funding, there's other ways that college can be paid for. Okay, so those things that come into play, and then the last priority, which is huge here, is risk management. Again, risk tolerance, risk capacity, and your ability to carry risk. We need to start bringing back and pulling back the risk big time here because our runway is shorter. A 30% decline in your investment value or your portfolio requires a 50% increase to just get back to ground zero, and you may not have the time or the capacity to sustain yourself during that. So we need to protect ourselves from risk. All right, so what are the tactics here? This is a time where you actually might need to increase your liquidity or your peace of mind fund, where you have more cash available to sustain you, because maybe the income that's coming in is going to go down or stop from your active roles because you're retiring, you're stopping. So we may need a little have more cash on hand to make that happen. So we want to review whether you need to have more liquidity versus less. This is a time for you to start to look at long term care insurance as an additional insurance that you might want to put in play. If we look at long term care, if someone needs in home nursing or nursing facility or skilled nursing or something like that in their later years, this is the time to start looking at it. This is also a time to start looking at the role of Social Security, at least in the US. In your retirement. Now, some people say it's going to go bankrupt, and it may, but when there still may be some remnants of it, I don't know. But I'm not saying to plan for it. I am simply looking at saying, evaluate its role in your retirement. Now, in my retirement, we look at it and say, we're going to presume. We're going to do our plan as if it's not going to happen. So it becomes icing on the cake. Okay, again, this is not a time to stop this. This is a time to increase this. Net worth tracking and a detailed plan. Net worth tracking and a detailed plan. Again, so this is a time we're going to have a detailed plan. We're going to stress test the plan. Like we talked about in the last decade, but we have this detailed plan for what we're doing, where we're trying to go, how we're going to fund it, and we stress test the heck out of it. And we've adjusted our targets and our savings and investing to fit the stress test plan. You can still be investing at this time. I am still making investments currently. I'm still building the wealth, continuing to build the machine, continuing to do that via my retirement accounts, my tax recounts. I can't do Roths, I can do backdoors, backdoor Roths, that kind of thing. So I'm still maxing it out. I'm using ETFs, I'm using index funds, and I'm using other investments. At this stage, I'm not going into leverage. So you can buy real estate, but I don't want you to leverage real estate. Going into a 30 year mortgage at 60 years old doesn't make a lot of sense. And each and every time I meet with my team, we are looking at the allocation of my assets, the location of my investing, in other words, tax free, tax deferred, or after tax, where are they? And this is the time that I want to get myself completely debt free. I want to have an aggressive debt payoff plan if I have debt, so we can see ourselves clear of the debt, so you don't have that burden on you, that if anything happens, you have this big obligation that's got to get paid. And then lastly, again, look at your insurances. Remember, add to long term care potentially is something you want to consider unless you're going to self fund. Look at your estate documents that's it in your sixty s. Now if you're behind, there's some things to do, and we'll talk about that in a second. But before we get there, let's talk about the cautions. So a couple of cautions when we are in our sixty s, and that is one too little liquidity for unplanned events, health scares, health issues, other issues that might come up. And that's why I say increasing your peace of mind fund sometimes to have that liquidity. So one of the problems is that sometimes we don't have liquidity to take care of those events. We will typically want to increase liquidity in this decade. Allowing children the next caution is allowing the children to stress your financial plan. If your financial plan is for you and you haven't considered the children coming back into the picture and say, hey, can I move back into your basement and all of a sudden you're supporting them, that stresses your financial plan. I understand things happen. I understand there may be issues. I understand that the key is that if it's not part of your financial plan, then we need to adjust tweak or do some things. The one thing that I can't tell you how to parent, I'm not going to even pretend to do that. But if they're not capable, that's one thing. But if they're capable, they need to participate in their own rescue. So helping them temporarily, fine, let's have that contingency in there. But the hopes is that they're not moving in to your basement and you're not moving into their basement. Okay? And then caution number three is not planning for the psychological transition. It's a change. If you've been driven by your purpose of building your your career, your business and all of that stuff when you make this shift, what does that look like? What's your driving force? What's the thing that fulfills you from the inside out? Remember, an affluent life is a meaningful life. Well, that's the joy from the inside. So preparing yourself psychologically for that transition is important. We don't just walk into retirement and say, okay, I think it's something we need to think about. I think it's something we need to understand. I think it's something we need to reflect on and move through. So that's the third caution. The fourth caution is debt. We don't take on you debt here, if at all. We just don't because that will destroy you at this age. Okay? We want to be debt free in our 60s as we move into a fixed income situation or that type of thing. Now, I'm going to continue work. I'm not going anywhere. I love what I do because I want to serve and I want to do the things that I want to do. So even though I'm in this decade, at least for now, I ain't going anywhere. Others might want to, others might need to health wise or things like that. So we need to be aware of that. Now, I just want to touch on some things. If you feel like you're behind with respect to wealth creation in this decade and the next couple of decades, here's some things I want you to consider. One income has to become your priority. I need you to start to look for ways to increase your income, scale your income, and scale your cash flow. That might mean that you have to develop a side hustle. You might become a gig worker where you're taking on contracts that are separate or part of what you're doing to bring in extra cash. It may be temporary, but it's to get you over that hump. Or you might have to take on a second job. And I know none of this probably sounds great, except that if you're trying to do a side hustle that you're going to convert into a more permanent thing. But we're trying to solve a problem of saying, I'm underfunded right now. I want to try and catch up. So income becomes the priority at this stage. The second thing to consider is expense management is the next priority. That means I want you to review every single dollar that's going out the door to see if it's necessary. Not that it's desired, but it's necessary. Am I using it? Am I getting value out of do I need that subscription? Do I need that? Because if it's not necessary, we can get rid of it and we can use that money towards our investing, towards our wealth creation. And I want you to look at your living expenses and say, are there things that I can do to reduce my living expenses? In other words, am I living in an expensive place that maybe if I move a couple of blocks away, a couple of miles away, I can reduce my living expenses? Do I have a car? Like I've got someone that they just actually went down to one vehicle because they weren't driving, they didn't need two vehicles. Saves them$800 a month. That money is going directly into investments. If they need another car, they'll go buy another car. But point being is to start reducing your living expenses. So incomes priority one, expense management, priority two. If we're behind number three, this is really just about you trying to find some cushion and that is looking around for non productive assets that can bring in cash. That means selling stuff. Okay? If I went around and looked at some of the technology that I have sitting in my studio, my office that I'm not using and haven't used and probably won't use and just listed it, I could bring in probably thousands of dollars and then take those thousands of dollars and put in an investment account and start jump start or move forward or leapfrog. My investing. So look for nonproductive assets that we can liquidate and bring money in. And then the last piece of this during this time is that all savings and additional income, that's coming from priority one. Priority two, that means your income and your expenses and even the selling of nonproductive assets needs to go into a separate account for investing automatically. Out of sight, out of mind. This is the way you're going to jump start and then start move yourself forward. Now we can go into more details about how do you do the side hustle, what do you need to do? But we just need to get our mindset the way we're looking at things correct. So if you're behind income is priority number one, expense management. Priority number two, look for nonproductive assets so we can liquidate and bring cash in quickly. And number four is you making sure that all the savings from the expense cutting, the additional income coming in is automatically going into an investment account. This will go a long ways to helping you move forward and jump forward in your wealth creation and your money for retirement. So hopefully that helps. I hope that this is something that you're finding valuable. So that's the hope that you found this a value. I hope that this helps you. I hope that this gives you a map. I know during this series I threw a lot at you in each of the decades. Go back through it. Take the notes. If you have questions, hit me up. If you have challenges or things, hit me up. You're not on this journey alone. We're on this journey together. Financial freedom is your birthright. And remember, it's never too early, it's never too late. Now is the right time to start your wealth creation journey. All right? I hope that this helps. I look forward to seeing you on the road. I look forward to seeing you soar. And as always, always continue to live a life that outlives you. Cheers. Thank you for listening to the Affluent entrepreneurship 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.

Introduction
Wealth driver #1 - Money
Wealth driver #2 - Time
Wealth driver #3 - Discipline
Four stages to reach financial milestones
The financial liberation journey
Priorities in the 60s
Tactics for the 60s
Cautions in the 50s
Strategies for catching up on wealth creation