Wealth by the Decade - Fortunate 40s + If You're Behind

Welcome to your fantastic 40s! A phase in life when you've likely got more solid ground under your feet, and the world looks a lot more colorful.

You've learned from the good, the bad, and the awfully odd previous decades, which has put you in a much better position to focus on creating wealth and financial stability.

In this episode, we will delve into the essential factors that shape and refine your financial objectives during your 40s. Join me as we explore the significance of determining the kind of lifestyle you desire, encompassing travel dreams, living arrangements, and financial commitments.

Along the way, I'll share tips on how to reduce expenses, such as downsizing or relocating, to free up money for investing and wealth creation.

As you can see, this episode is jam-packed with valuable insights and actionable steps to take control of your finances in your 40s. Let's take this decade head-on and look forward to a wealthy future!

IN TODAY’S EPISODE, I DISCUSS: 

• Importance of starting early in teaching children about money
• Building wealth in your 40s: priorities, tactics, and cautionary tips
• How to maximize tax benefits in your 40s

RECOMMENDED EPISODES FOR YOU
If you liked this episode, you'll love these ones:

• Wealth By The Decade - Roaring 20s
• Wealth By The Decade - Messy 30s
• Wealth By The Decade - Flying 50s + If You're Behind
• Wealth By The Decade - Sticky 60s + If You'r e Behind 

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 

OTHER RESOURCES:
7-Day  Money Plan Workshop: https://www.TheMoneyPlanWorkshop.com
Affluent Entrepreneurs Private Facebook Group https://www.melabraham.com/group

CONNECT WITH ME:
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Transcript

2:02

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 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 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 so the first 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. And 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. And 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 ever 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 thousand dollars, 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, the 10,0000, 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. 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. 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 Manny Pettis 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 independent 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. Let's keep on going. Welcome to the Fortunate 40s. This is a cool decade. This is kind of an interesting time in people's lives. And so let's hit on this one. If we are looking at this, the wealth by the decades, and now you're in your 40s, what are the things you need to focus on? What are the things that we need to consider? The priorities, the tactics, the cautions? What happens if we're behind? We're going to talk about all that in this session. So first things first. What is the theme when we're in our forty s? And so I want to jump here. You'll get a chance to see this. The theme here is to optimize. You've been working a while, your family's around, your kids are growing up, all kinds of things that are going on. But this is the time to optimize. Optimize your income, optimize your expenses, optimize your life, optimize your health, optimizes the theme in the 40s, we should be starting to settle into a groove to make that happen. So in order to do that, we're going to come back to our focus. We're going to start with the focuses. Again, some of these we've already talked about and they still exist here because they're important. For instance, the first focus is what's your why in this stage of life, in this decade of life, what's your why? Has it changed? Has it morphed a little bit? Which it might, because in our 40s, all of a sudden our kids are getting grown. Potentially they might be considering moving out of the house soon. You're going to start coming into that space. So what's your why? Revisit the purpose behind what's driving you to build wealth, to see what that is. Second, which is again the focus that we've had in the last two decades, and that is education. Continue your growth by podcasts shows like mine, books, courses, mentorship, guidance. Keep growing so you feel like you've got your hands on the wheel of your financial ship. The third focus here is this is a time where you need to find we talked about margin, but we talked about margin in the sense of money in the prior decades. Here's where I want you to find margin, but I want it to be time margin. I want you to find time for you to live more fully. The tendency is that we start to allow time to get away from us. And as someone who stared mortality in the face with cancer, time is the most precious thing you have. And so this is a time to revisit and say, am I spending my time the way I want? Do I need to find more margin in my time so I can live more, to live more fully with the people that I care about? The fourth focus during this time is navigating the family changes. Like I said, kids might be growing up, they're getting into their teenage years, they're getting into sports, or they might be leaving the house, going to college. And so there's going to be some family changes. There's going to be some family dynamics. And how do you navigate those? How do you navigate those financially? But how do you navigate those psychologically too? Mentally, sometimes that impacts people because they feel this loss that all of a sudden the kids are gone and grown and they're having a hard time letting the kids go and do their thing. So navigating the family changes becomes a focus here. And the last focus here is this harmonizing your present and future responsibilities. See, during this time is when we start to really start thinking about what is retirement going to look like? It may still be off in the future, but we start thinking about what that might look like. What are my medical needs? What are college needs and costs? What are those future responsibilities and my current responsibilities? And how do I mesh them, how do I harmonize them so they work together? And I know that I'm taking care of both of them. So those are the focuses. What are your priorities? Well, in this decade, in the fortunate 40s decade, this is a time where you start to completely define and be more definitive about what your finish line looks like. In other words, what's your number? We had a number potentially in our twenty s and thirty s. But now we need to refine it because it's a couple of decades off. So now is a time for us to really get clear on what do we want our lifestyle to look like? Too often I'll sit down at this stage with clients and working with people and now we start to detail out how much do you want to travel? Where do you want to live? Do you want multiple homes, just one home? Do you want to just travel the world in an RV? What does that look like? You want to pay for the kids, do you want to get behind a cause, generosity, contribution, charity, those kinds of things, and you start to do it without regards to, can I do it financially? Because that's the second question is, after that, we said, if this is what we want to make happen, how do we make it happen? And so we need to know our finish line. And part of knowing your finish line is to control this next priority, because the tendency is that we have something called goal drift. In other words, we're drifting on our goals. By detailing out what that finish line looks like, we can avoid and control goal drift where we're sitting back and saying, being a little flexible on our goals. I want you to be flexible, but I want it to be with intent, not because of circumstances. If our goal is to hit a million dollars, that's our goal, to hit a million dollars. And the reason we're hitting a million dollars, because it's the kind of lifestyle we need. We want it's. The generosity, it's all that stuff. But I don't want that goal to drift and go, I'm okay with 800. Unless you decide that's the case or you pass the million, you say, let's go to two, let's go to three, and you're just kind of chasing it for the sake of chasing it. What I'm concerned about here is the quality of your life as we start to move through this. And so gold drift can start to impact the quality of your life. If we're not careful and it's happening unconsciously and not intentionally so as long as it's intentional and you're aware of it, I'm cool with it. We can change our goals every day of the week, but I don't want it to just happen. Flippantly okay, that means that it comes to this next priority control. The controllables again. What can you control about your expenses, about your living, about the way you do things, your health? All those things start to come into play. And then the last priority at this stage, this is a beautiful time, and even earlier, depending on the age of your children, is to start teaching your children about money, about the financial journey. Look, I started teaching Jeremy about money when he was 1011 years old. We started talking about it. He started to make a commission, and he knew, he started to learn what he needed to do with the money, how to navigate it, and pay for expenses, like he paid for his school lunches and clothes and everything he would give to charity. He would put money in savings. So he understood that, and we would have conversations around it. And this is a beautiful time for us to start teaching our children, listen, this isn't about you building some big asset pool that they're going to inherit one day. I truly don't believe that you ever give assets to a child without giving them the skill sets to handle it. Now, I'm okay with letting them inherit it, but give them the skill sets first. I've watched. I had a family that two boys came to me after mom died. They came to me after mom died. They were worth $5 million. Said, what do we do? And in having a conversation with them, I found out that dad died five years earlier. Five years earlier, when dad died, they were worth $180,000,000. They wiped out$175,000,000 in five years. You actually have to try really hard to do that. But the fact of the matter is, the reason for that is dad didn't pass on the skill sets to mom and the kids. They made some bad decisions. They got into bad investments. They had some people steal from them, and they lost the majority of the wealth. Now, that's not just them. Money magazine published a study that following some statistics where over 80% of millionaires are first generation millionaires, meaning they created it on their own. You have the ability to create it on your own. It's not about inheriting or winning a lottery or anything like that. 80% of the people are first generation millionaires, but Money magazine showed that 70% lost it by the second generation. Why is that? It's because we don't concern ourselves with transferring the skill sets. This is a perfect decade to start working to transfer the skill sets late in the into the start working with the kids to transfer the skill sets so they have the ability to navigate if they get the assets. I'm not saying they get them, but if they get the assets. Here's the deal. By giving your kids the opportunity to take $100 and make it a million, it's a far greater thing than giving a million dollars with no skill sets, because they're going to make it 100. Hope that makes sense. So those are your priorities. What are the tactics at this stage? Okay, so there's a couple of things I want to do here. Tactics again. Emergency fund has to be in place. The Peace of Mind Fund, as we call it. I want you maxing the retirement. You should be saving 2025, even 30% into your investment accounts right now. If you are late to the game and you haven't been doing it through the 30s, you want to be pushing that 30%. Now, I want it on autopilot, and I want to be driven by your financial plan. In other words, I want you to know what your target, what your finish line looks like. So you know you're going towards a thing. You're not just putting 20 30% in with no target. Let's get a target in place. But in all likelihood, at this time, you still want to be putting between 20 and 30% in. I want it on autoplay and net worth tracking. Continue to track your net worth each and every year so you know where you are in. The process and you couple that with a detailed plan. A detailed plan of what you need financially as you get into the next couple of decades and your retirement, or as you start to go into those later years of your life. Do I need a million? Do I need 10 million? Do I need 100 million? I don't care what the number is, but know what the detailed plan is to get you there so you know what you need to do to get there. I can't plan a journey without knowing my starting point and my ending point. That detailed plan is going to give that to you in that process. When you have that detailed plan, you can now adjust your savings and investing to hit those targets, those milestones. During this time, during this stage, if you're in a lower tax bracket, I want you to max out the Roth or the tax free types of investments so you can pull that money out completely tax free when it's time. And that you should be maxing the match from your employer. Still, you can use low cost ETFs and index funds here and target date funds like we talked about in some of the prior decades. It's easy, it's straightforward, it's diversified. But here's where we start to think about. I should be accumulating enough wealth that maybe I get some specific advice with the detailed plan that might want you to be more specific with the ETS index funds that you use or the investments that you start to put into the portfolio to build your financial machine. Okay, now we start to look at how you're allocating all your assets much in much greater detail because your risk tolerance and your risk capacity is shifting here. Our runway is starting to shorten. We want to look at things differently. So this is a time for you to get advice, get a mentor, get a financial coach, get a financial planner, someone that can help you walk through this in making that happen. Real estate is an investment that you probably have in your forty s, and you might be getting more in your 40s. This is a time to be careful about over leveraging, over buying, putting you into debt. Because remember, if I'm purchasing a home at 45 and I'm putting a 30 year mortgage on it, that's putting you to 75. Do we really want the mortgage that long? Those kinds of things we need to think about here because of the plan. Still, it doesn't mean that you don't get it. We just got to be smart about doing it. And then the last tactics that I think come into play here is this is that you have the ability to invest in a tax free account, like a roth, an after tax account, like just a regular brokerage account. And a tax deferred account like an IRA or 401 where you invest starts to impact your ability to get access to that money tax free or with tax down the road. This is the time that you start to look at those locations for your investment. Saying? Am I maximizing? What I can do here again, typically requires a little bit more detailed analysis. This is when you start to get an advisor, someone that might can help you plan, a mentor that can walk you through some of what makes sense, what doesn't make sense, the nuances. I don't expect you to know it all, but know that there's some things that you can do. Last two things. This is a time you might need to adjust your insurances, either increase them or decrease them depending on what's going on in your life. So review your insurances, the life insurance, the disability insurance, your umbrella policy, and that type of thing. And then review your estate docs. There might be adjustments there. If kids are grown and come out of the house, maybe you don't need some of the provisions in the trust that you had before and you can change that to fit. There was life changes. Maybe you got married, maybe you got divorced and remarried. Maybe there's other kids. All those things will lead to an adjustment to those estate documents. All right, so I got two things that I want to finish this up with. One is what are the cautions? And two, what you can do if you feel like you're a little behind in building your wealth. Okay? So the first thing is the cautions. There's a couple of them to consider. One is this lifestyle creep, which we talked about. Allowing our lifestyle to just creep and grow without control, without intent, can get us in trouble. That's when we start to over buy. That's when we start to over leverage. That's when we start to finance lifestyle and those things catch up with us. So we want to be deliberate with how we live our life and watch lifestyle creep. Number two, we want to watch complexity creep. Too often we start to get into complex investment structures and complexity breeds problems. Doesn't mean that you're not going to be in complex structures and everything, but you don't need to. Most investing needs to be simple enough that you understand. If you don't understand the investment, you shouldn't be in it in the first place. Simple as that. We don't invest in things we don't understand. But complexity creep can be a downfall if we're not careful with this. So watch the complexity, keep it simple. Watch the impatience. This is a time where all of a sudden you go, oh, you're starting to see the finish line coming up in a decade, a couple of decades, or whatever. So you get impatience, impatient, and you make an investment like I did and it turns into a Ponzi scheme. Or you buy into something that's really speculative and you lose a lot of money. Impatience can cost you dearly, dearly I lost one third of my net worth in that Ponzi scheme. Now, granted, I was able to rebuild it. I don't want you to have to go through that. So watch the impatience. And then lastly, don't live leverage, okay? Those are the cautions in this fortune. Forty S. Now, I just want to touch on some things. If you feel like you're behind, if you feel like you're behind with respect to wealth creation in this decade, in the next couple of decades, here's some things I want you to consider. One, income has to become your priority. So 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 apart when 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 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 it in an investment account and start jumpstart 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 and 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 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 because the next stop oh, my gosh, it's the flying 50s. Here we go. All right, I'll see you in the next episode. Cheers. I just want to touch on some things. If you feel like you're behind with respect to wealth creation in this decade, in 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 apart when 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 income is 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 in 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 it 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 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. 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.