Bank on Your Neighbor: The Audiobook Podcast
Building wealth doesn’t have to mean Wall Street. In this exclusive audio series, Mel Dorman brings you Bank on Your Neighbor — a practical, people-first guide to seller financing. Learn how to create ethical, win-win deals rooted in relationships and strategy, and start building financial freedom right in your own community.
https://meldorman.com
Bank on Your Neighbor: The Audiobook Podcast
Bank on Your Neighbor: The Audiobook - Chapter 1
What if everything you were taught about money was wrong? In this opening chapter, Mel Dorman invites you to step outside the financial “scripts” we’ve inherited—stories about wealth, ownership, and success that were never designed to serve us. Through Rachel’s powerful journey from survival to rootedness, and Mel’s own reflections on money myths, you’ll see how deeply social conditioning shapes our beliefs about worth, belonging, and possibility.
This episode exposes the invisible rules that keep us small, from toxic beauty standards to the lie that only banks can decide who gets to build wealth. Mel shows how seller financing flips that script—turning neighbors into partners and transactions into relationships.
Listen in to unlearn the stories that keep you stuck, reclaim the power you already hold, and discover how to build freedom one community-driven deal at a time.
🔗 Get the book bonuses at https://www.meldorman.com/resources
📖 Purchase the book at https://a.co/d/4HAQZiN
Hi, friend. I'm Mel Doman, real estate investor, former social worker, TEDx speaker and financial activist. And this, this is Bank On Your Neighbor, the podcast. You're probably here because you felt it too, that the system wasn't built for us. That building wealth shouldn't mean selling your soul to Wall Street or crossing your fingers every time a bank says no. That there has to be another way. Well, there is, and this podcast is my free gift to you. That's right. Free, no paywall, no audible subscription, no gatekeepers standing between you and the knowledge that can change your life. Because here's the truth, just because something's free doesn't mean it isn't valuable. Sometimes the most valuable things, clarity, empowerment, freedom, don't come with a price tag. They come with purpose. I created this podcast because I'm on a mission to decentralize wealth, to take power out of the hands of billionaires and put it back into our communities. Each episode is a chapter from my book Bank on Your Neighbor. Read by me. It's my way of making sure this knowledge reaches the people who need it most without a single algorithm getting in the way. We'll walk through the real strategies I use to go from dumpster diving in my twenties to building a multimillion dollar portfolio in my thirties without banks, without credit, and without compromising my values. We'll talk seller financing, community centered investing. And creative ways to build wealth that actually serve people, not exploit them. But this isn't just a podcast, it's a movement, a radical reclaiming of power, a blueprint for creating more community-minded millionaires and fewer billionaires extracting from our neighborhoods. Every chapter builds on the last, so I recommend listening in order. I'll drop links, visuals, and extra resources in the show notes to help you take action. Not just absorb information and if something in an episode strikes a chord, send it to someone you care about. That's how we spread financial literacy. That's how we grow a movement. That's how we rise together. Welcome to Bank on Your Neighbor. Welcome to the movement. Let's build something together. Chapter one, the water we swim in. Why Everything you were taught about money is wrong and what to do about it. Things do not change. We do. Henry David Thoreau. I first met Rachel when I was working as a social worker in Hollywood. She had just aged outta the foster care system with nowhere to go. No family, no safety net, just shelters, addiction and whatever scraps of stability she could find. She could have walked right past her, just another girl blending into the static of Los Angeles. But if you listened closely, you'd hear it. That hum of pain, barely audible beneath the rhythm of survival. That's how Rachel moved through the world, not loud, not visible. A whisper in a city, too loud to care. Years of trauma, had toughened her skin, but left her spirit paper thin. When I asked her what she hoped for, she shrugged like hope was something she'd misplaced a long time ago. She didn't see herself as broken. She saw herself as worthless because that's what the world had taught her to believe. But years later, we reconnected. She'd gotten clean, enrolled in outpatient treatment and moved into Section eight housing. She told me she'd lived in the same apartment since 2019, raising her son Pharaoh, with a sense of rootedness she never had herself. I finally know what home feels like. She said, I sit in gratitude every single day. What changed? Rachel did. She didn't just change her circumstances, she rewrote her identity. She stopped seeing herself as disposable and started seeing herself as sacred, A mother, a mirror of strength, a living revolution against everything she was told she'd never be being his mommy. She told me, helps me mother, my inner child. She didn't just survive. She alchemized her life. And not because her world changed, but because she changed how she saw herself inside out. That shift in perception, seeing herself not as broken, but as a builder of force reminded me of something deeper. The stories we accept shape the lives we live, especially the ones about money. Rachel taught me something. No textbook ever could. If you change the way you see things, the things you see change. This first section of the book is about changing how we see the financial myths we've inherited. And how seller financing can help us write a new script rooted in freedom. Without a new script, we can't build a new reality. Financial freedom isn't just about making more money. It's about daring to believe you deserve a different story. And it's not just the people I worked with who were living out old stories. All of us are because here's the wild thing, nobody tells you almost everything we believe about money, success, and even ownership is completely made up. It is as you perceive it. Ever notice how humans are really just a bunch of people walking around agreeing on imaginary things. We agree that a piece of paper with a dead president's face on it can buy a burrito and guac. That investing your future involves funding the s and p 500 with your retirement, and that words like escrow or amortization should be left to the professionals. These shared beliefs are how we create order out of chaos because without them, we'd be debating whether we can pay rent in goat cheese and good vibes this month. But here's the thing, no one told you in school these agreements aren't real. They're constructs stories, ideas we inherited passed down, like hand me down sweaters from people who didn't even know how indoor plumbing worked. Just like those sweaters. Not every idea fits anymore. Some are helpful, some are hideous. Some are actively strangling us, and our ability to build real freedom. Take money. Money isn't real. I mean it functions, don't get me wrong. Rent is still due whether you believe in dollars or not. But think about it. We'll pay $150 for someone to snip our split ends, not because the haircut costs that much in raw materials, but because of what it represents. Beauty, identity, belonging. We're not paying for hair, we're paying for meaning. Money is just the middleman in that emotional exchange. The bills themselves fancy paper dressed up in dead presidents and anti-counterfeit ink. Without our belief in the system behind them, they'd be no more valuable than monopoly money. And yet millions of people stay stuck in jobs they hate, defer their dreams and say no to opportunity. Not just because of the money itself, but because of what they believe about money. Stories like I'm bad with money. People like me don't build wealth. Debt is dangerous. If I invest in fail, I'll lose everything. These are the stories that quietly run the show. They shape how we think, they shape what we risk, they shape what we think we deserve. Yes. Money feels concrete. It pays for groceries and rent, but the system built around it, the rules about who gets to have it, use it and grow it, those were all made up, which means they can be reimagined. And if that's true, we're not as stuck as we think we are. But money isn't the only story shaping our lives. Take land ownership. Once upon a time a bunch of colonizers stuck flags in dirt and declared this is mine, and shot anyone who dared to disagree because enough people nodded along. Whether outta fear, greed, or survival ownership became law. Nevermind that indigenous peoples had lived, loved and stewarded that land for thousands of years without needing a deed. Today you can technically own a slice of the planet, complete with borders, taxes, and contracts, even though the earth will still be here long after your dust. Ownership is a human invention, not a universal truth. Money, land, banks wealth, all built on made up agreements we inherited and keep passing down. And get this. They only feel real because we've lived inside them so long. We forgot. They're just our shared delusion, which brings us to you and why you're here. No one tapped you on the shoulder in kindergarten and said, Hey sweetie, almost everything you're learning about success adulthood and ownership is completely made up. And guess what? You are allowed to opt out. Instead, you are handed the default script. Work hard. Trust banks buy a house. The bank really owns. Spend 30 years paying it off. Hope you don't get sick before you can enjoy it. But here's the secret glitch in the system. Once you realize that most of what we call truth is just collective storytelling, money, credit scores, who gets to own what? You start to see the script for what it is. And just like the matrix, when Morpheus offers Neo, the red pill or the blue one, you get a choice. Keep playing by the old rules or wake up and write your own. You can stop treating banks like Gods. You can start treating neighbors like partners. You can stop waiting for permission to build wealth and start building it yourself. One human to human deal at a time. That's what seller financing is. It's not just a creative financial tool. It's a quiet revolution. Seller financing, one of the most overlooked and underutilized tools for building wealth, doesn't rely on banks or perfect credit. It relies on people. Instead of a buyer and seller standing on opposite sides of a negotiating table like suspicious cats, imagine sitting side by side solving a problem together. It's about collaboration, not competition, connection, not exploitation. It's not about hunting for deals, it's about planting seeds, watering hope, and harvesting wealth sustainably. No banks, no billionaires, just people creating freedom together. Seller financing is how we resist the default future we've been handed and start creating one that actually works for real people. But first, we have to recognize the old stories running the show, and that's exactly what we're about to do next. Uncover the invisible rules you've been living by and learn how to rewrite them so that you can reclaim your financial future. What water? There's a Chinese proverb that says, if you want to know what the water is like, don't ask the fish. Not because fish are keeping secrets, but because they don't even realize they're swimming in it. Same goes for us. We're all immersed in social conditioning, invisible currents, shaping how we think, spend, invest, and dream. It's so ingrained we mistake it for truth. This section is about spotting the water. We've been soaking in those inherited money stories and life scripts. We've never consciously chose and learning to separate what's real from what's just noise. From the moment we're born, we begin absorbing the rules of belonging. Parents, teachers, peers, media. We look around to figure out how to fit in. It's our first crash course in becoming socially acceptable, some of these norms are helpful. Wash your hands before you eat solid advice. But others, like debt is bad. You need a nine to five to survive. Or only rich people own property get passed down, like family recipes for struggle. On learning them starts by asking what beliefs were handed to me and which ones do I actually want to keep The easy ones to spot are explicit laws, religious texts, mainstream messaging. Historically, these have blocked entire groups of people, especially women in marginalized communities from owning land or accessing fair loans. These weren't accidents. They were imagined, codified, and enforced by design. But implicit norms are sneakier. They're not written down. You just pick them up sideways. Like how you know to face forward in an elevator even though no one ever told you. Some are harmless. Others quietly shape what we believe about money, power, and possibility. Take movies, for example. Ever notice how wealthy women are often portrayed as cold villains looking at you? Cruella Deville and the Devil Wears Prada while wealthy men are heroic billionaires. Tony Stark, Bruce Wayne. Nobody says it outright, but we absorb the message. If you are a woman and you get rich, you'll be alone, hated or evil. These subtle scripts add up, and so without realizing it, good hearted people, especially women and people from marginalized backgrounds, start believing that building wealth will cost them their soul. It won't. When you zoom out, all these explicit and implicit norms blend into what sociologists call your social location. Your unique identity shaped by race, class, gender, ability, and more. These are the subconscious scripts we often live into. It's not just about who you are. These are the invisible forces shaping how much freedom you are, quote, allowed to pursue. And if we don't see this conditioning for what it is, it's easy to keep playing by those old rules. Rules meant to exclude, not to empower. So why are we talking about all of this in a book about seller financing? Because seller financing is a giant permission slip to opt outta the old rules. It's a way to say, I don't need a bank to bless my dreams. I don't need perfect credit to build wealth. I don't need to be a trust fund baby to own property. When you start questioning the water you're swimming in, you realize you don't need to work 40 years just to retire broke. You don't need a perfect credit score or a six figure salary. You can collaborate directly with a seller. You can fund your neighbor's dreams while securing your own. You can live free sooner, not someday. Here's what it looks like in real life. A coaching client of mine once believed she needed to save for years before buying a fourplex, but once she learned how seller financing worked, she tried something different. She found a tired landlord ready to retire and asked if he'd consider seller financing the deal to her. She offered a fair price, a solid interest rate, and promised to take care of the tenants like family. He said yes, no bank, no 20% down, no underwriters. She moved in, rented out the other units, and started cash flowing from day one. This book will teach you exactly what steps she took that one shift from I have to qualify to I can create a win-win. Completely changed her financial trajectory because seller financing isn't just a tool. It's a way of reclaiming power from systems that profit off our perceived limits and rerouting that power back into your life and your community. And that kind of liberation always starts with awareness. If you can see the water, you can change how you swim. Once you recognize how social conditioning shapes your money choices, you'll start spotting the invisible scripts like you're not ready or. You don't deserve that yet, or you have to wait your turn. But when you change the way you see things, the things you see change capitalizing on our insecurities. While it might feel uncomfortable to confront how deeply social conditioning impacts our financial lives, ignoring it is far more expensive. Literally take beauty standards, for example. Women are taught explicitly and implicitly that beauty is currency. If you're thin enough, young enough, stylish enough, maybe you'll be worthy of love, success, or belonging. And because belonging is a primal need, think survival in early human tribes. We chase these standards like our lives depend on it. Expensive makeup, lip injections, spin class stilettos, the list goes on for what women are told we must do to measure up. Meanwhile, social norms have long encouraged men to chase wealth and power because somewhere in the tribal blueprint standing out meant you had status and status meant you had safety, you belonged. Fast forward to now when Susie sends a passive aggressive text about your waistline, oh, you're so brave for wearing that. Your brain doesn't just shrug. It panics like your survival's at risk. So when beauty standards whisper that, you need to be thinner, younger, richer, looking to belong. We buy in. Literally, we pour our money into trying to fix ourselves instead of building freedom. And I know this firsthand. At 16, I hated my voice. It was deep, rich, and nothing like the soft, high pitch tones. I thought femininity required. I had started researching voice surgery to literally change the way I sounded just to fit in. At the time I was working at Cinnabon in the mall, hair and visor, apron, dusted with sugar, trying to figure out who I was in the world. Every morning a regular customer named Keith came in. He was a quadriplegic, had cerebral palsy and a speech impediment. He didn't fit society's mold of beauty or power, but Keith showed up every day with kindness, consistency, and a kind of quiet confidence that made the world slow down. When he spoke one morning I handed him his order. Keith looked at me and said, I love your voice. That was it. That was the moment. There was no performance, no pretense, no agenda, just truth. And if Keith, someone who lived entirely outside the world of curated perfection, could hear beauty in me, I had to ask why couldn't I? That moment cracked something open. I stopped trying to sound like someone else. I stopped apologizing for the voice I was born with, and now that same voice gets on stages and podcasts and changes lives. The moment I stopped contorting myself to fit the mold was the moment I started actually shaping my life. That's the power of rejecting someone else's definition of worth. And here's the part most of us miss. The systems that teach us to feel unworthy are the same systems profiting off of our self-doubt. We're taught to spend to belong, but belonging is expensive when it's defined by someone else's standards. The more we try to look the part, the less we're able to build the kind of security that can't be bought. The threat isn't real. Susie's opinion doesn't control your fate, but it feels that way because it pokes the same old survival wiring. And billion dollar industries know exactly how to exploit it because while you're busy chasing $300 leggings and $12 green juices, guess what? You're not buying assets, investments, security. When we're stuck, hustling to look like we belong, we're not investing to belong to ourselves. We trade money for self abandonment, and that's not accidental. It's a feature of the system. Consumer culture thrives on our insecurity because insecure people don't build wealth. They consume it. Meanwhile, the corporation selling you that anti-aging cream, their CEOs are buying rental properties and startup equity, the real stuff that builds generational wealth and power. Seller financing offers an alternative, not just a different financial tool, a different lens entirely. It's not about performing success, it's about creating it. It's about stepping off the hamster wheel of consumption and into the role of creator building wealth directly. One relationship driven deal at a time. Seller financing isn't about needing to look qualified. It's about solving real problems. You don't need perfect credit, a banker's blessing or Pinterest ready portfolio. You need creativity, clarity, and the courage to start conversations that banks don't know how to have. When you stop letting billion dollar industries define your worth, you free up your mind and your money to invest what actually builds power. You stop asking, how can I look successful? And start asking, how can I build success that serves me and my community? That's what seller financing in this book is about, teaching you how to invest in assets, not insecurities. The first step is seeing the game for what it is. The second step is choosing to play a different one. Change your mind. Change your life. So pause and ask yourself, whose rules am I living by? Who profits from me staying distracted and small? What would change if I stopped spending to belong and started investing to be free? The moment you stop following their rules is the moment you take back your power in that version of you. She's stacking assets, not shame. She's creating freedom, not chasing approval. She's walking into rooms knowing she belongs without needing anyone else to say. So the roles we play, just like Rachel, we all move through the world playing roles we didn't choose, but rarely think to question. We inherit them like hand-me-downs. Buyer, seller, renter, borrower, bankable, not bankable. Each one comes with a script. Each script comes with expectations. And when we forget, they're just roles. We start mistaking them for truth. This isn't just philosophy, it's psychology too. Back in 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo ran a study that became infamous, the Stanford Prison Experiment. He took a group of ordinary college students and split them randomly into two roles, prisoners and guards. No training, no prep, just a basement, some uniforms, and a permission to act the part. What happened next was chilling. Within days, the guards began degrading the prisoners, stripping them of identity, enforcing sleep deprivation, using isolation and humiliation to establish control. The prisoners in turn became passive, despondent, and broken. It didn't matter that these were all classmates, folks who probably passed each other in the hallways just weeks before the roles took over. So much so that Zimbardo had to shut down the experiment after just six days. The most disturbing part, there were no bad guys, only people who forgot they were playing. Pretend Zimbardo's experiment wasn't just about prisoners, it was about perception. It revealed how easily we conform to systems and hierarchies, even when they harm us, especially when they harm us. What roles do we play without realizing it? What labels do we accept about money, power, and ownership that shape our choices every day? Because here's the thing, we don't just inherit roles. We co-create them. Every title we accept shapes our behavior. Every story we internalize becomes a map. We unconsciously follow. What if we rewrote the map? What if the buyer wasn't someone begging a bank for approval, but a community investor funding a neighbor's livelihood, one payment at a time? What if the seller wasn't just offloading a property like a consumer, but instead stepped into the role of lender? What if they became an investor monetizing their equity with wisdom and intention? What if instead of funding corporate profits, our deals helped fund retirements? What if every loan wasn't a power play? A partnership. The words we use matter. Seller becomes lender, buyer becomes partner, transaction becomes relationship, and suddenly the whole system softens because when we can change the way we see ourselves, we change the way we behave. We move from extraction to stewardship, from competition, to cooperation from survive to thrive. Here's the catch. Even when this way of working feels aligned, even when it lights up our values and makes logical sense, your brain might still sound the alarm because this kind of change, it feels unsafe. Not because it is, but because it's unfamiliar. The primal part of your brain, the one wired for survival over success, wants to conserve energy, avoid risk, and take the path of least resistance. It's trying to keep you alive with the same outdated script. It's been running since Saber Tooth Tigers existed, and in modern times that sounds like just stick to what's known. Stay in your lane, follow the system even if it's broken. But here's the truth, the system isn't safe. Depending on institutions that don't know you, love you or prioritize your community has never been safe. What's actually safer learning to build your own systems? Creating value in partnership, investing in relationships over corporations, rooting your wealth in your own discernment, not Wall Street's performance. We don't have to play the role of ruthless profit at all. Cost investor. We can rewrite that story. Starting with this. I'm here to build community, not just capital. And in that role, every deal becomes an act of regeneration, not consumption. So ask yourself, how do you see the world? Is it a battlefield where only the fittest survive? Or is it a garden where we plant, nurture and harvest together? Is wealth something to conquer or is it something we co-create one human to human agreement at a time? What if we reimagined what it means to be an investor, not a loan hunter chasing deals, but a community builder on a shared journey? Not someone who executes transactions, but someone who cultivates financial ecosystems.'cause when we do, we restore what was taken from us. Generational wealth, trust, and stability without needing to take it from anyone else. Investing becomes an act of restoration, a return to enoughness, a rejection of scarcity and favor of shared possibility. But to live this way, we first have to notice what we've inherited. We have to be willing to see the water we've been swimming in. The beliefs. We didn't realize we were breathing the scripts that taught us who gets to build wealth, what success is supposed to look like and why so many of us were raised to fear our own expansion. These narratives have kept us quiet, kept us grateful for crumbs, kept us convinced that our power was for someone else. But the truth that power is already inside of you, you just have to be willing to choose it. That's why seller financing matters because it's not just about acquiring property, it's about reclaiming authorship. It's about rewriting the story of what's possible and doing it together. So if we're going to write a new future, we need to start by questioning the old one, which is why we begin with unlearning money myths, because before we can build something better, we have to clear the rubble. Every chapter you are about to read, tackles one of the myths you've inherited, the ones that keep you small, scared and stuck. We'll do it together gently, but honestly, thoughtfully, but without apology. Because these myths aren't just abstract ideas. They shape your choices, your risks, your relationship to possibility, and most of the time you didn't even choose them. Together, we're going to spot the myth. Understand who it serves, name the cost of believing it, and replace it with a new liberating truth. By the end, you won't just understand seller financing. You'll know how to wield it. Not like a loophole, but like a lever for freedom. Because this isn't just about real estate, it's about rewriting the story of who gets to own, who gets to thrive, and who gets to lead. And the first myth, we're going to smash the one that says, if you build wealth, you're a sellout. Nope. Money doesn't make you selfish, it makes you powerful. And when good people have power, they build good things. Take a breath, shake off whatever guilt or fear you've been carrying. Let's unlearn what's never served us. Let's rebuild something that does, because just like Rachel, you have the power to change your story, not by waiting for the world to change, but by seeing yourself differently inside of it. She didn't just rewrite the ending. She reclaimed the whole plot. And so can you, not by waiting, but by reimagining.