7 Money Excuses That'll Keep You Broke!

It's time to take a closer look at the excuses we often make when it comes to money! These excuses may seem harmless at first, but they can have a significant impact on our financial well-being.

Today, we’ll uncover the top seven excuses that are keeping you broke and preventing you from achieving the financial freedom you deserve. 

We’ll talk about the importance of building a money machine alongside your business machine to achieve financial control. I’ll also share insights on how to avoid burnout and the treadmill entrepreneur cycle that keeps you trapped in the never-ending pursuit of more money.

Let's break free from the chains that have been holding you back and start creating a life of financial abundance and control. Tune in now and start taking control of your financial future.

IN TODAY’S EPISODE, I DISCUSS: 

• How excuses are preventing you from achieving wealth
• The importance of building a money machine alongside your business
• The shocking statistics about financial struggles even among high-income earners

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

• Money, Debt, Dopamine & Freedom With Frank Benedetto
• Create a Money Machine for Financial Freedom
• Generate & Scale Your Income to Build Wealth Faster
• My Favorite Investing Accounts (And How to Maximize Your Returns)

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

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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 seven excuses that are keeping you broke and from the wealth you deserve. Yeah, I get it. But here's the deal. You can only have reasons or results. You can't have both. The fact is that 18% of people making over $100,000 a year are still living check to check, and more than one third, 35%, could not pay for a $400 expense. That was unexpected. The fact of the matter is that when you start to look at statistics, even 26% of adults have nothing saved for retirement. And so why is that? We're going to examine the mistakes and the excuses that are keeping it that way so we can solve them and move you towards financial freedom. After all, it is your birthright. Let's make it happen. Welcome to this episode of the affluent entrepreneur show. Let's get it going. All right. Welcome to this episode of the affluent entrepreneur show. This one is a good one. It's a doozy. Because here's the deal. As much as I have conversations with people that are trying to build their wealth, that want financial freedom, that are struggling to make it happen, and that might be you, I don't know. But the fact of the matter is that they think that the solution to the problem is money. But there's something before that. There's these insidious things that we call excuses, there's these insidious things that I call mistakes that are actually keeping you broke, and they're holding you back from the wealth you deserve. And it's not about the money you make. So I'm going to walk through the seven excuses that are the top excuses I see, and we're going to give you the facts around them, the reality with them, and why it's important for you to start to move through it. Because, look, let's just look at statistics. 18% of people making over $100,000 a year, so they're making six figures a year. They're still living check to check, and that was in a recent study. And 35% couldn't actually afford to pay for an unexpected $400 bill. And 26% have absolutely nothing safer retirement. Now, you might say, well, that's a money issue. And I said, no. Remember? Always, I don't believe that we have money issues. I believe that we have money symptoms. They're symptoms of the choices, the decisions, and the behaviors that we had in the past. The fact of the matter is that your ability, my ability to generate wealth is based upon my choices and behaviors. Now I get it. You might sit back. Go himl. It's easy for you to say, I'm not making a lot of money, so I don't have the ability to build wealth. Look, I started out, as many of you know, where I got pushed out by my partners. I had my CPA license, I had some skills, I had some knowledge, but I had no clients. I had no client backlog. I had no cash flow. And it was$300,000 in debt, okay? Because I just bought a house. So I'm sitting there with nothing saying, how do I start? How do I start making money? What can I do to make that money? So I was starting ground zero. It was the same year that I became a single full time dad. It was the same year that my son came to live with me at five and a half years old. And so I was given not only this responsibility, but this gift of being a dad. And I needed to serve both. So starting with nothing. So I get it. We just need to figure out the process to make that happen. We'll talk about that a little deeper in other episodes, about the skill development and skilling up to create additional value so you can elevate your income streams. Because when you elevate your income streams, you elevate your ability and you accelerate your ability to create wealth. So here's the thing though. I think that when we start to deal with these seven excuses and we move through them, you'll start to see how you can take fast and better control over your own financial world. And so we need to really dial that in. So I'm going to jump to my iPad. Let's just look at the very first excuse that I see. And that first excuse is this I have time or I'm too late. Now I get it. So these are two ends of the spectrum. This is for the 20 and 30 year old who thinks that they got plenty of time. And it's also for the 50 year old or 60 year old or the 45 year old that is sitting back and saying, I'm too late. And so what's happening is that both people I see are sitting in action for their reason. And their reason is, I have time or too late. Here's the thing that we need to understand. Time is your greatest lever when it comes to creating wealth. It truly is. And so the sooner we can start building wealth, the easier it will be to create the level of wealth that you need to have financial freedom at the level that you want. And so it's never too early to start. In fact, my little granddaughter, Emily, she just turned one, and we already started saving for her literally $25 a week,$100 a month for her 1st 20 years.$100 a month, 1st 20 years. I'm going to put $20,000 away for that. 1st. 20 years will turn into over a million and a half dollars when she's 65. See time will do all the heavy lifting. I'm going to give you an example. I'm going to walk you through this because I think this is really important. But that also means if you happen to be in that stage where you're in your forty s, fifty s or 60s there's no better time than now. You don't throw your hands up and say I'm too late so I'm not going to try because one of the worst things you can do is say well I don't have much for retirement and so why should I try? It puts you in a situation where you either have to live off of government funding, work till you're 80 years old or move in with your kids. None of those sound appealing and I hope that they don't sound appealing to you. I'm not ridiculing, I'm not criticizing. I'm simply telling you that and giving you hopefully the hope that you sit back and say I'll get in the game no matter how big, no matter how small I'm going to get in the game. And even if I only get 20% of the way to where I want to go I'm 20% closer than I would have been if I didn't. But you'll start to see when I draw this out your wealth creation, your wealth creation works on a curve like this. There's a time in wealth creation where it's flat and it just doesn't grow. And you'll be looking at in fact I just got a DM from someone who was saying that they watched me do a keynote and they said you gave me hope because I was looking at my account and it really wasn't growing any and I was getting disappointed and I was losing hope. And I thought well this isn't really working. But here's what's going to happen is that account stays flat and then all of a sudden you start to get the effects of compounding over time and then you get this acceleration. And so what happens is that if we're not careful we don't see a lot of growth in this section, the flat section. This is where she was. Okay? And we give up. Here where the reality is that the acceleration is coming down the road. Now I will tell you that this depending on your investments this is a number of years. It's not days, it's not months. Okay? Your ability to grow your wealth sustainably. Okay? Let me be really clear. What we're talking about is wealth that's going to last. Your ability to create lasting wealth is going to be based upon your behaviors, decisions and the consistency with those and your patience. Wealth creation it can be boring but when it's sustainable it gives you the freedom. So let's do some math. Let me show you an example I'm going to walk you through an example here so you see it. So I'm going to give you a couple of people. Let's just go with Tom, who tom is going to invest $5,000 a year, and he's only going to invest it for ten years starting at age 25. So 25 to 35, he's going to invest for ten years. Justin, $5,000. He's going to do the same thing that Tom did, but he's going to start ten years later. He's going to start ten years later. Okay? Then we have Sally. Sally is going to start at the same time as Justin. She's going to invest $5,000 a year, but she's going to invest it from 35 all the way to 65. And then we have Angela. Angela is $5,000 a year, but she's going to start at age 25 and do it all the way up to 65. Now, so here's what these people are investing. Tom's going to invest a total of 55,000. Justin's going to invest the same thing that Tom is $55,000. Sally is going to invest 150, and Angela is going to invest$50,000 more. $200,000. Well, let's look at what happens. By the age age 65, tom, who invested for ten years from 25 to 35, he's going to have some total of $904,000, almost a million dollars. Okay? I'm using an 8% rate of return, which is conservative, given the market, long term returns in the market, okay, he's going to get $900,000. Then there's Justin. Now, remember, Justin invested the same amount of money for the same amount of time, ten years as Tom, but he started ten years later. Okay? Tom did it at 25. Justin did it at 35. Justin ends up at$418,000. He has less than 50% of Tom because he waited ten years. That flat portion of the curve, the acceleration, becomes a problem. And so let's look at Sally, who started at the same time as Justin, but she kept it going. Sally, now, she has $660,000. She's doing all right, but still, she invested$150,000. That's almost three times what Tom did, and she still ends up one third less. Hopefully, this is hitting home for you. Now, let's look at Angela. Angela started at the same time as Tom and stayed till 65, continuing to invest. She now has $1.5 million. See, the important thing is that we get in the game. And the sooner we get in the game, the better. So sitting back and saying, I have time makes no sense, because the sooner we get in the game, the sooner the game is done, the sooner we get things funded. Saying it's too late doesn't make sense either, because all of a sudden, you do nothing, and you end up with nothing. I'd rather start. Wouldn't you rather start and get 20% closer, 30% closer. 70% closer. 80% closer? Because you never know. And now you are in control of your financial destiny. You're in control of what happens, and it doesn't take a lot to make a lot. Let's do some tweaks on this for a moment so you understand it. What I'm going to do is let's just assume instead of 8%, okay, I used 8%, but let's assume that you only made 7%, okay? If you only made 7%, what does that do? 7%? It drops the numbers dramatically by one third or 25%. Look, instead of 900, he's got 600. Instead of a million, half. She's got 1.1. Still good. But your return matters. Well, what happens if I turn around and say, okay, what if I just put an extra $50 a month? What if I just put a little more away? It makes a huge difference. What happens if I take it away? So if I reduce this by $50 a month, it's only $600 less a year. Remember, we went from $5,000 to 4400. It reduces the numbers dramatically. I hope you see this excuse. This reason doesn't serve us as we start to move through it, because the fact of the matter is that if we start, we should start early. And if we didn't start early, we should start now. And it's not the amount that matters as much as the time. It's not the amount that matters as much as the behavior. Remember, when we start early, we're exercising and creating behavior. When I started with Jeremy, he started at 1011 years old. He's now 32. They have three homes and a multimillion dollar net worth, but they started small and let time do the work. I've got other clients that started late. They started at 50 years old. They're now 60. They've had ten years in, but they changed the way that they invest in saves, and they, in ten years, have accumulated a million dollar net worth. But what if they just said, I'm too late? What if they just said, I got time? Where would they be? I want to take that away. All right? So hopefully that gets you just to understand and see that excuse doesn't hold water. Excuse number two. What's excuse number two? Excuse number two is this I need to make a lot of money, or when I make more money, then I'll invest. Okay? Both of these don't serve you, and I hear this all the time. I need to make a lot of money to get wealthy. Yeah, we'll look at some numbers again, but it doesn't take a lot to get wealthy. The Emily factor $25 a week,$100 a month, 20 years turns into a million six time consistency work. Okay? And to sit back and say, I want to make more money, then I'll invest. Remember, your wealth creation. Your wealth creation is a behavior. It's a habit. It's a decision. When we make wealth creation and investing a priority, we will change the way we do things. It will become part of our being, but it won't become part of our being if we don't start and develop the behavior. And so one of the things we need to do what's happening is too often people see that I either need to make a lot of money to have a lot of money, which isn't true, we'll walk through that, or when I make more money then I'll develop the habits. Well that's like saying I want to go work out and you've never worked out in your life. And so you go into the gym. You walk into the gym, you get on a bench. You take that big barbell and you slap on a couple of 45 plant plates on both sides. You lay down and you drop that thing on your chest. What do you think is going to happen? It's going to hurt like hell. You're going to get injured. When we first start to exercise a muscle, we start slow. We start light, but we stay consistent. Okay? We start slow, we start light, but we stay consistent. And then through that consistency it'll grow. And through that consistency we can lift heavier weights, we can put more resistance, we can do bigger things. But the sooner we start to develop that muscle, the more we get muscle memory. Investing wealth creation is a muscle. It's a behavior. So no matter what your income is, no matter what it is, it's important to do it. Let's look at some numbers and why that matters. If we just look at some numbers here, people are they get we get caught up in this whole idea of I need a lot of money to make a lot of money. Well yes, but there's a whole lot of people that make a lot of money and have no money. Let's just look at the people that have gone bankrupt. Actors, athletes, they're all around us. Made hundreds of millions of dollars. Michael Jackson. Francis Fort coppola. Okay. Nicholas Cage. I can keep naming them. They all made hundreds of millions of dollars and ended up broke. Some of them still are. So it has nothing to do with the income that you make and everything to do with the consistency of the behaviors and habits you create. And so if I look at this$200 a week over 30 years, $200 a week over 30 years at 8%, gives you$300,000, $200 a week.$50. If you're doing any kind of sales, if you're doing any kind of thing, the first $50 a week, put it away, start investing it. And what happens if we start to increase this $800 a month? Okay,$200 a week, $800 a month, 1.2 million. You say, well I don't have 30 years. I get it. Here's half a million and 20. My point is that this is not a ton of money. We can do a side gig to make, bring this in and put it away. If we truly want that financial freedom, we need to make some choices and some decisions to know that that doesn't matter. Jeremy when I started him out at 1011 years old, I was paying him $125 a month. That was it. And from that he was paying for his school lunches, he was paying for some of his clothes, he was paying for some of his toys, he was donating to charity, and he was saving and investing. It's not a lot, but starting early. But the key is really not just the time. The key is the behavior. Because we think that we got to wait till we can put thousands away. No, if I got $1,500 put away, that's $2.2 million, it's 900,000 in 20 years. Even$1,000 a month gets me at a million and a half dollars. Even if you're sitting back and saying, I don't have that, I might have 15 years left. 15 years can get you between 300 and and 5500 thousand dollars. That'll make a difference. So my point is that your ability to generate wealth is less about the amount and more about the behavior. So waiting till you make a lot of money or waiting till you make more money, that excuse isn't going to help you. It's going to put you further behind. It's going to keep you behind the growth curve. Remember, again, the best time to invest is early. The next best time to invest is now to get in the wealth creation game. All right, excuse number three. What is excuse number three? Well, let's see. Excuse number three. Oh, man, I love this one. Well, I don't, but yeah, I have my business, so I'm good. I hear this from entrepreneurs all the time. They say, My wealth is my business. Big mistake. Big mistake. Okay? Because what happens if your business fails? What happens if you have problems in the business? Let's face it, 80% of businesses fail within the first five years. Statistics aren't on our side, and you're putting all your eggs in one basket. I did a whole episode on this and the impact of it, because I hear so often entrepreneurs telling me that I make more money by investing back in my business than I would investing in the stock market or other investments or even real estate and everything like that. I said, I get it. However, all the eggs are in one basket. The fact of the matter is, the business was never there to be your wealth. The business was there to help you create your wealth. Let me say that again. The business was never there to be your wealth. The business was there to create your wealth. Different game. Let me show you an illustration of how this plays out, okay? Because so often we come to this in this way. We come in and we look at this and we say, the business machine is born out of an idea. I got an idea. I want to serve. I have a dream of control and freedom. So I build this business. And when I build the business, here's what happens. I don't have control and freedom, it doesn't come across the way I thought it would. And what ends up happening is the truth is that the business was never meant to give you freedom. So what ends up is you end up in burnout, breakdown and ruin, which almost happened with me because you're on this treadmill, okay? That's why I call it a treadmill entrepreneur, is that you're on this treadmill. And the only way that you can make more money, the only way that you can do it, is to sit back and say, I got to run faster, I got to run harder, I got to run longer, and just keep it going. But that only leads to burnout. It brings breakdown. You might be looking at your life right now and going, that's what I'm doing. I get up every day and I'm running on that treadmill hoping that that pot of gold is at the back end of that. But when we realize that the business is not our wealth but is meant to help us create wealth, we look at the business differently. So how do we look at it differently? Here's what it looks like. Because we create the same business machine, but the business was meant to create a solution, have an impact and generate profits, not freedom. Profits, not freedom. And it is through the use of those profits that we start to create wealth. So what ends up happening is this, is that you use the profits to build this second machine called a money machine. When entrepreneurs do this right now, all of a sudden you're no longer on the treadmill. Your money machine gives you the freedom. You're living your best life on your terms. Okay, let's look at it a different way. You're going to create the business machine like you have here. You have inputs in. This is your effort, this is your money. This is resources. It's going to run. You're the business owner. Everything's running great. Here's how this plays out. Again, what this is all about is how do I optimize systems and how do I optimize profits? When we use the business machine from that perspective to optimize systems and optimize profits, now all of a sudden you have cash flow that's coming out of the machine. It's that profit that's coming out the optimized cash flow from there. We use it because the impact and profits and solutions are here in the business. But now we take the profits and look at it as an affluent entrepreneur. When we look at it as an affluent entrepreneur, we change our mindset because we have an affluence mindset as we move forward. We now create the second machine. This is the wealth machine or the money machine. Now all the profits are going in here and they're coming out here. Three x ten x they're multiplying because that's what a money machine does. It gets your money to work harder for you than you did for it. And when your money is working harder for you than you did for it, that's when you're going to find financial freedom. All right? And so here's what ends up happening in the end, is that the money machine, instead of optimizing profits, is about optimizing assets and optimizing time. But here's the mistake most people make, is they don't realize that freedom and legacy and affluence are sitting in a money machine and not the business machine, and that you need both. That without both, you'll never find the kind of freedom and the kind of control that you want. It's the very reason I could shut down my businesses and still sustain our lifestyle without draining cash, without selling assets, without doing anything so I could heal and fight the cancer. I want you to have that kind of freedom, that kind of flexibility, financially just in case life happens. Now I get it. You might be there right now sitting back saying, mel, I am so far from this. So was I. Remember? I had to come back from losing one third of everything I own in a Ponzi scheme. But we got to start. We got to get in the game. We got to do this because if we don't start, we'll never get there. If we start, even if we got there, a percentage of the way 70%, 50%, 80%, 90% are better than if we didn't start at all. But as an entrepreneur, we need to look beyond the business and realize the business was never meant to be our wealth, but the business was meant to help us create our wealth. All right, that leads me to excuse number what is it? Number three? Number four? Number four? Let's look at number four. Number four. It's complicated, and I'm not good with numbers. It's complicated, and I'm not good with numbers. Let's let's walk through this because it doesn't need to be complicated. I just let me let me get I might get on my soapbox here. The financial services industry benefits by making you believe that it's complicated. The fact is that it's not that complicated. Make money, spend less than you make. Make regular investments on a consistent basis. You can invest it in a three or four fund portfolio. It's not complicated. Portfolio of index funds, ETFs, something like that, or in a target date fund. You don't even need an advisor to do that. When you understand principles, it doesn't need to be complicated. And then automate it. That's it. Make money, spend less than you make make regular investments. Keep a simple investment portfolio, three or four funds or a target date fund, and then automate it. You're done. You're done. It doesn't get any easier than that. Let me walk you through a framework also, because now you'll start to understand what drives your wealth. And this is what I call the wealth driver matrix. And you may have seen me teach this before, but let's just walk through it quickly because there's only four things that are going to drive your wealth, and some of them you can't control. Okay, so the first is this is this idea of income that's the first input into your wealth creation is how much income you generate. We need to look at it and say, can I scale my income? Can I optimize the cash flows? Can I optimize my income? Do I need to do a side gig? Do I need to do something differently? And part of that is believing in the value that you create, believing in your self worth and asking for your value when you do that. Now you look at the income. The next piece of this is your savings rate. This is actually the percentage that you're saving. So how much of your income are you saving now? We try to get people to be 20% to 30% of their income. I want saved because this actually is the biggest impact on your wealth creation. Number three is the investment returns. These are the investments you get into. Now, you can get high returns on investments, but typically you're going to take on more risk. So this is going to be all about your risk that you take on. It's going to be all about the risk that you take on and is highly dependent on the asset allocation. The asset allocation. This is where you can do, like I said, a three to four fund portfolio or a target fund. Low cost, low fee. I've got other episodes that walk through in more detail on how to do this. Okay? And then the last piece, which you have zero control over, is time. So really it's about getting in early or getting in now. It's not any more complicated than this. It doesn't matter that maybe you think you're not good with math. If all you do is say, I'm going to make money, I'm going to spend less, I'm going to invest it, I'm going to make it simple. Three or four funds in a portfolio index funds, ETFs, or a target date fund, I'm going to automate it, and I'm going to get in now so I can use time to my advantage. Then you're good. That leads me to the next excuse. I hear this one a lot, and I don't agree with a lot of the people out there that are talking about this. The financial gurus out there, I think they're wrong. Let's talk about it. Here we go. So people will say, I need to get out of debt first. I actually don't think that that's true. I think that that's a problem. Here's the reason. Your ability to create wealth. Remember, we already said that wealth is more about behaviors, decisions, choices and habits. It's a behavior. It's a muscle. It's a muscle that needs to be exercised. And. If we're not exercising the muscle, then we're not learning to grow. We're not doing the things that we need to do to make that happen. But the muscle for wealth creation is different than the muscle for debt management. They're not the same. And yes, if you worry about getting out of debt first and then start investing and start doing things for your financial future, I get it. You'll get out of debt faster, but you're not exercising the wealth muscle. So that's getting atrophied. I think you need to do both because if you just work one muscle group, it's like the guy that got the dude that goes into the gym, does nothing but upper body. He's got big arms, big chest, big shoulders, really good toothpick, legs, looks really funny in shorts. I want you to have a balanced approach. Here's how I play this out, okay? I want you to split the income in a way that works for you. And we can go deeper on this, and I go deeper on this in my course, the Affluence Blueprint and with my students. But here's the thing. You're going to have some income, and that income is going to come in. And I want you to understand the priority of that income is first, I want you to have a comfort fund. And what we call a comfort fund is a minimum of$1,500 or one month's expenses. This is just to make sure that you don't have to automatically go to credit cards. This isn't your emergency fund. This isn't what we call a peace of mind fund. We're going to build that in the next step. So now what I want you to do is that with your cash, I want you to do what I call split funding, okay? That means that if you say you have income coming in, say you have an extra $500 that you want to use for debt and investing, I want you to split it. I want you to split it. I want you to have some go here and I want some of it to go here. How you split it will be up to you. It's a matter of which one you want to give priority to first. But it can be 50 50, 60 40 70. And it's more dependent upon your circumstances too. And we individualize it when we work with people. But the idea is this. Now this is the emergency fund that a lot of people talk about. I'm more conservative on this than others. Consumer debt is lifestyle debt. It is for consumables. It is not something that is wealth debt or debt that's going to help you grow cash flow or grow your wealth. So I typically want nine to 18 months in liquidity for my clients. Nine to 18 months. Call it twelve months. Okay. For now we go twelve months for now. Okay. Twelve. I want you to start building that. And then here I want you to be able to put yourself on a payment plan so you have an affluence debt plan that sits back and you're paying the debt down. You're getting your peace of mind fund in place. And now from there, once we have twelve months in here, we can move this into a Freedom account. This is where we invest. This is in a high yield cash account, not invested in the market because we don't ever want to put it at risk. So this is for your emergencies. This is for your family. This is to make sure you take care of things. But this is the way I would play this out. You don't pay debt first. You move through this in a way that expands your wealth and shrinks your debt. At the same time, it's in a way that builds the debt management muscle. At the same time that you're building the wealth creation muscle, you're building the behaviors that will serve you for the rest of your life. So hopefully that makes sense. I've got two more excuses we want to walk through. The next one interestingly enough is this oh, that stock market. It's rigged. I can't tell you how many times I hear this and it feels like it's rigged every time you buy a stock and all of a sudden it drops like it knew that I got in and now it dropped. Why? Well, let's just talk about the market real quickly. It is rigged. It is rigged. But let's talk about how this plays out. One, the reason people say that it's rigged is because some people, they think other people have better info access, which may be the case, it may be the timing of the information, but insider trading is illegal. Martha Stewart learned that the hard way. Okay. Doesn't mean that it doesn't go on. Your access to information is far greater than it has ever been with the current technology and the things that we do. They think that, oh, well, people are trading on insider information. Well, this is I'm not saying they don't do it, but by and large, it's not done because they'll serve jail time. Ask Martha Stewart. Oh, the market is full of collusion. They're colluding against us again. Really? I don't think that that's the case. You've got all these buyers and program buyers. Yes. Are there things that drive the market? Certainly. Are they manipulating it? Sometimes. Like the meme stocks and trend stocks, like the GameStop and all that? That was manipulation. That was collusion. That was a problem. There's a lot of people that lost a lot because they got caught in the hype and everything. But when you follow principles, when you follow prior, is when you understand the processes that we teach that are sound and have tried for years and years and stayed true. You won't get caught in those emotions. You won't get caught in those things. The market is forward looking meaning that when you see a stock price, it's the evaluation of what they expect to happen in the future, not what happened in the past. So if I see a stock price of, I don't know, Apple at $250 a share, the accumulation of buyers and sellers of that stock are looking at that company and saying it's worth $250 a share based on its profitability, its growth prospects, the industry, its management, the inventory, access, all those things. So it is all about expectations, not past performance. Necessarily past performance we evaluate, but it doesn't mean that's the way it's going to run in the future. And some people will say, Well, I need to have an active manager. We'll talk about that. Statistics actually show that active management accounts, most of the time, long term, do not and cannot beat the market long term. This is why the majority of the time we say invest in ETFs and index funds that take the broader market. Get that. You might, with an active managed fund, get a year or two, maybe three years of really premium performance. But if you look at it over the long term, unless you're able to get in and out of those active funds at the right time, it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. So is the market rigged? Yeah, I think it is rigged. I think it is rigged. And I think it's rigged to do this, to go up and down like it does. That's it. And in the long term, the market goes up. The market is up eight out of ten years. If you happen to be in a down year in a down year? In a down year or two, yeah. But if we get out and sit on the sidelines, it's a problem. It's going to cost us. But if we stay in long term, it goes up. Yeah, it's rigged. It's rigged to go up. Because what's the market all about, stock market is about the belief in the innovations, the belief in the American ingenuity, the belief in the ability for businesses to solve problems, to create an improvement in the human condition, to do it in a way that serves people. And I believe in that, and I hope you do too, because that's what causes growth in the future. All right, last thing, last excuse. I hear this a lot, all right? I have an advisor, so I'm cool. I don't need to do this. My advisor takes care of it for me. Let me tell you something. No one, advised or otherwise, no one will care and love your financial future more than you. No one. Your job is to be the captain of the ship. Now, I am not saying that your job is to make all the detailed analysis and choices and be an analyst, but I am saying that your hands are on the wheel of the ship. You get to make the choices. Your advisor's job. The right advisor's job is first off, to buy into your financial vision. We call it an affluence vision that we work with people on to build that affluence vision. And they need to buy into that vision because we're going to build a plan to make that a vision, a reality. So their first job is to buy in the vision. Their second job is to educate you, to inform you, to help you understand the decisions that you need to make to understand the investments that you may be going into. We don't invest in something we don't understand. If they aren't willing to explain it to you, they're the wrong advisor. If they are not willing to spend whatever time it takes, they're the wrong advisor. If the investments they're putting in front of you are too complicated for where you're at, they're the wrong advisor. Don't get me going on this because I see it all the time and I'll call them out on it. Okay? The third is that they are there to be a servant to your vision. A servant to your vision. So what is an advisor meant to do? They're to help you navigate. They're to inform you. And they're there to give you access to investments that are the best fit for you. Not suitable. They use two different criteria. Is this a suitable investment? There's plenty of suitable investments that I can get into, but are they the best for me and my circumstances? And the answer is, even if they're suitable, they may not be the best. I want the best. You deserve the best. And these advisors that sometimes are captive advisors working for a single company can only sell certain investments that their company tells them to do. And they may be suitable, but they may not be the best. The other thing to think about is I want to know where their bias is coming from. Now, I am all for. I got a whole advisory team and they get paid, paid well, and I'm cool with it as long as they're fully disclosed 100% and transparent of how they get paid and where they get paid. Too often they get paid commissions buried in an investment that you don't even know about. Too often they have a bias because of the way that they're going to get paid on it. I've watched someone turn around and try to sell whole life insurance to teenage kids, four teenage kids to their parents, and they got away with it. The parents didn't talk to me. You don't put life insurance on a teenage there's no reason, especially whole life. Why did they do it? Because they got a big commission. So yeah, I get it. You have an advisor. But the advisor isn't the decision maker. The advisor is the information provider. The advisor is the educator. The advisor is the one that gets you access to it. And the advisor must be doing things that are in your best interest, not theirs. Don't get me going. So I get it. We have advisors, I have advisors. But the advisors aren't there to advocate your financial future, too. Once again, they will never love your financial future like you do. Listen, those are the seven excuses. Those seven excuses, when you move through those, I promise you, you will change the trajectory of your wealth. You will change the trajectory of your financial destiny. It will change for you forever. And you can choose to continue to live in those excuses if you have any of it. Because I related to some of these myself through the years, so I'm not exempt. And if you related to any of these, I'm going to invite you, I'm going to implore you, I'm going to try to drag you along to say, no more, no more, no more reasons, no more excuses. We just want results. I want results for you. Your financial freedom is your birthright. These excuses, one or all of them, they will hold you back. Let's move through it. Let me help you move through it. Stay with me on this. So I hope that you found this of value. I hope that this started to resonate with you and start to look at things in a different way and to say, I'm not going to allow those excuses to hold me back from where I belong. And I want to make sure that I'm there for the ride with you. If you have any questions, anything that comes up, do me a favor, let me know. Let me help you navigate this. Remember, I'm not selling any investments. I just want to sell you on your dreams. All right? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being here. And as I always say, always, always strive to live a life that outweighs you. Thank you for listening to the Affluent Entrepreneur Show with me your host, Mel Abraham. If you want to achieve financial liberation to create an affluent lifestyle, join me in the Affluent Entrepreneur Facebook group now by going to Mel Abraham.com/group and I'll see you there.