Bank on Your Neighbor: The Audiobook - Chapter 2

Is wealth really corrupt—or have we just been taught to believe that? In this chapter of Bank On Your Neighbor, Mel Dorman dismantles one of the most damaging money myths: that being rich automatically makes you greedy, selfish, or disconnected.

From a misadventure with broken Bengali in the streets of Calcutta to the sobering history of financial discrimination in the U.S., Mel explores how cultural narratives, systemic barriers, and personal shame have kept too many of us small. With humor, heart, and unapologetic truth-telling, she reframes money as a tool for liberation—not exploitation.

You’ll learn why building wealth isn’t about yachts and hedge funds, but about reclaiming power, creating time freedom, and fueling movements that serve people and communities. This chapter is an invitation to shift from unconscious wealth to conscious wealth rooted in love, justice, and possibility.

✨ Wealth in the right hands changes everything.

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Transcript

0:00

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. Part one, the Money Myths. Chapter two, money. Myth number one. Rich people are bad. I like when money makes a difference, but don't make you different. Drake, before we can build wealth, we have to ask, what do we actually believe about money and who gets to have it? Because if deep down you think being rich makes you selfish, corrupt, or untrustworthy, how likely are you to ever let yourself become someone who builds wealth? This belief is more common than we admit, and it quietly holds many of us back from using one of the most powerful tools for change. Money, especially when we're talking about tools like seller financing, which can help regular people build wealth without banks and with integrity. I had to confront this head on in the sticky heat of Calcutta India while sweating through my t-shirt and accidentally asking taxi drivers and broken Bengali about the size of their genitals instead of the taxi Fair. Yep. That happened. I was living in a red light district volunteering with a social enterprise that helped women exit sex slavery. My bank account was modest. I was living out of a backpack. My room was the size of a walk-in closet shared with three locals. I didn't think of myself as wealthy, not even close, but one afternoon I proudly tried to show off to some of my American friends by teaching them how to ask a taxi driver for the fair. Overhearing me Samita. A sharp, bubbly, local woman, burst out laughing so hard. She had to sit down through tears, she gasped. You've been asking every driver, how big is your penis this whole time? After that, Samita agreed to be my language teacher. One day during a vocabulary lesson, she taught me three words. Lower class ti, middle class ani wealthy. I repeated them carefully, feeling proud, use them in a sentence I asked. She pointed to the families living in plywood shacks along the riverbank and said, they are lower class than gestured toward her one room flat with no kitchen, no plumbing, and a toddler on her hip. She said, I and middle class, and then she looked at me, you are wealthy. I almost laughed, but she wasn't joking. That moment became an epiphany. Wealth isn't absolute. It's relative. And if I was considered wealthy in her eyes, I had to ask what story had I been telling myself about the rich? I graduated college during the 2009 financial crisis. Wall Street was the villain. Occupy was the anthem. Rich people meant greed, corruption, disconnection. I didn't wanna become that. So unconsciously I made myself small. But here's the problem with demonizing wealth. When we think money is bad, we sabotage our ability to use it for good. Money is just a tool. It can be used to oppress or to liberate, to extract or to reinvest. The question isn't whether we hold it. The question is how in this chapter we're going to dismantle the first big money myth that being rich is bad. We'll look at where this belief came from, how it keeps us stuck, and what it would mean to redefine wealth as someone rooted in contribution, not corruption. We'll also talk about seller financing, not just as a clever way to buy property without banks, but as a method for redistributing power locally and ethically. Because the truth is we can't build a new system while clinging to old shame. And it all starts with the stories we tell ourselves. Money wasn't meant for us. Let's get one thing straight. Most of what we've been taught about money and power is a lie. It's like getting handed grandma's secret stuffing recipe, except instead of making your house smell amazing, it keeps you stuck and small. Take property ownership. Men, they've been fencing off land and calling it theirs since the beginning of time. Women, not so much. For centuries, we weren't allowed to vote. Work outside the home or own property. Our job was to keep a tidy house, pop out a few babies, and trade our labor and loyalty for access to a husband's wallet, swoon. Right? And this wasn't just bad vibes, it was law until 1974. Yes, that's disco era, not medieval times. A woman couldn't even open a credit card without a man co-signing married. Congratulations. Your income was magically worth half as much to the banks. It's like they thought our paychecks were monopoly money. Cute. Meanwhile, racial barriers were even worse in Oregon. Black people weren't even allowed to own property until 1926, even after it became technically legal for black and brown families to buy property in any neighborhood. Redlining practices made sure the message stayed the same. You can live over there, but don't expect to build wealth. Banks refused to lend appraisers, devalued homes and city planners withheld investment, ensuring that entire communities were locked out of the upward mobility. Home ownership was supposed to provide. The fallout is brutal. As of 2019, the media net worth for a single white man was$78,200 for a single black woman.$1,700 for a single Latina woman.$1,000. Pause. Breathe picture, trying to build your future. Raise a family. Start a business with $1,000. That's a few car payments in a Starbucks latte before you're broke. Again, that's not a cushion. That's a cruel joke. This isn't ancient history. It's baked into the world we're living in right now. Fast forward to today, you'd think we'd be strutting around in power suits, running hedge funds by now, but nope. Women make roughly 82 cents for every dollar a man makes. At home, we still do the lion's share of domestic labor and child rearing. Even women who are primary breadwinners put in on average three and a half more hours of housework than their male partners. Sociologists call this the second shift. We clock out of one job just to start the next. Women are still fed a steady diet of find a husband disguised as happily ever after. Financial articles aimed at us Focus on budgeting and saving. While those for men scream. Grow your empire as if we need to be told one more time to skip the lattes and feel guilty about wanting a beach house. And yet studies show women are actually better investors than men. More strategic, less reckless. We just hesitate, we absorb the message that money is not our thing and end up sitting quietly on the sidelines while Wall Street Bros. High five over brunch. It's not just about gender either. Communities of color still fight uphill battles to access funding, housing, business loans, basic tools. Most white men are handed with a smile and a signature. The world doesn't shout. This isn't for you anymore. It just whispers it over and over until it sounds like your own voice. And here's the sneakiest. After a while, you start believing it. You hesitate to ask for a raise. You joke that you're bad with money. You let someone else handle the finances because they probably know more. You downplay your ambition so you don't seem too much. Systemic discrimination gets planted inside of us, blooming into a thorny little garden of self-doubt, and if you don't rip it out by the roots, it will quietly run your life. Want to dismantle the patriarchy? Be a woman with wealth. Want to disrupt systemic racism? Be a black entrepreneur who owns the block, want to smash queer stereotypes? Be the queer millionaire who buys the damn bank. Because here's the truth, nobody tells you. Wealth in the hands of the right people changes everything. Kids growing up, seeing queer wealth, black wealth, Latina wealth, it stops being rare and starts being normal. And when it's normal, the system has to change. Look, I get it. In my twenties, I treated capitalism like the death star. I lived in a community house, dumpster dive for groceries, wrote angsty papers about Marxism, and proudly owned exactly three shirts. I thought rejecting money made me pure, but life taught me otherwise. Money isn't good or bad, it's just a tool, like a kitchen knife or a power drill, or dry shampoo. All things I've misused before. It doesn't change who you are unless you let it. If you're generous and brave now, you'll just be more generous and brave with money. If you're an activist now, more resources will amplify your voice. When marginalized people opt out of building wealth, we're not flipping off the system. We're feeding it. We're handing our power back and saying, no thanks. You keep it. Financial freedom isn't about yachts and private jets. It's about building a life where you get to call the shots. It's about raising money for your community. Funding your wildest dreams, creating ripples of change. You might not even live long enough to see, as Anne Lamont says, lighthouses don't go running all over an island looking for boats to save. They just stand there shining. When you choose to step into your financial power, you're not just changing your life, you're making it possible for everyone around you to imagine something better too. So stand up, shine, and show the world what wealth really looks like in our hands. Overcoming learned helplessness. One reason financial freedom feels like a total fever dream for so many of us is that we've carried a heavy backpack stuffed with financial trauma. We've been bruised by money in ways that make even imagining a way out feel like wishful thinking and science says, yep, you're not making this up. Back in 1967, a group of psychologists ran experiments on dogs that would definitely get them canceled today. They put the dogs in cages and shocked them randomly, but the dogs could stop the shocks by pressing a pedal only if they figured it out. The ones who found the pedal did great. They learned they had some say in their circumstances, but the ones who never found the pedal, they spiraled anxiety, depression, total shut down then. Then came round two. This time, the scientists added a divider to the cage, an escape hatch. Dogs who had learned they had power before they jumped to safety. But the ones who hadn't, they didn't even try. They just sat there absorbing the pain. Even though freedom was one tiny hop away, just like the dogs who never learned they had a choice. We humans who aren't taught how to earn, save, invest, or build wealth internalize helplessness too. We sit in financial cages thinking. This is just life. We live paycheck to paycheck. We drown in debt. We burn out at jobs that make us want to fake an illness just to stay home on a Tuesday. And we tell ourselves it is what it is. When you've been shocked enough times, dreaming feels dangerous. Building wealth feels delusional. Financial freedom sounds like something rich. Instagram influencers yell from yachts, not something real people do between soccer practice and late rent notices. But here's the catch. Cage, it's not locked, never was. There's a whole other side labeled financial literacy. And on the other side of that divider, time, freedom, autonomy, breathing room. Jumping over though terrifying because first you have to admit the scariest thing of all. You might have more control than you think. As Irvin d Yalom said, such, freedom generates so much anxiety that many of us embrace gods or dictators to remove the burden. Responsibility is heavy. It's easier to blame the system, the economy, fate, mercury in retrograde, literally anything, and to risk hoping again. But listen, if life is just stuff that happens to you. Fine. Rage against the machine, shake your fist burn out. But if reality is something we co-create even a little, then you have power. Real messy, inconvenient power. So here's what we're gonna do. Take all that anger, that disappointment, that heartbreak about money, and use it not to sit in a cage longer. Not to scroll and seethe, but to smash the whole damn thing. Open and walk out. To build something better. Listen to your laziness. I don't know about you, but I hated clocking in as an employee. Every shift felt like a battle against myself. When my boss encouraged me to maximize productivity or pick up extra hours, I felt deep in movable resistance. Like my soul was saying, Nope, this isn't it. For years, I thought that resistance meant I was lazy, broken. That if I just pushed harder, I'd finally feel like enough. But looking back, that resistance wasn't laziness. It was the first spark of something bigger. It was the first sign I wanted freedom. Freedom from selling my time, from burnout, from the grind. It's not laziness. That's the seed of financial independence, but I didn't know that at the time. All I knew is I felt wrong for wanting more, and culture sure didn't help. In his book, laziness does Not Exist. Dr. Devin Price explains how American culture worships productivity like a golden calf, twisting it into a moral obligation. Rest is treated like a sin. Busyness is a badge of honor. No wonder work became my favorite form of dissociation. I could brewery my discomfort in the endless to-do lists and call it noble. But where did this obsession with productivity even start? Blame the Puritans. Americans original overachievers, who decided that hard work was next to godliness. Then came the industrial revolution, which doubled down on the myth. Workers were taught that idleness led to crime and chaos. Not because it was true, but because free time might inspire them to organize for better rights. Keeping workers exhausted was always about control. That belief system didn't disappear. It just got shinier. Today, the laziness lie whispers that if you're not producing every second, you're failing at life. And if you can't keep up, whether you're poor, burned out, sick, or just done well, that's on you. But the truth is the system is designed to keep you busy broke and too exhausted to dream of anything different. And if you start thinking about financial freedom, you're seen as greedy or lazy or naive. On this side of financial freedom, I see it differently. Rest is resistance. That feeling I once judged as laziness wasn't a defect. It was my spirit refusing to be a cog. It was my body screaming for sovereignty over my time, energy and life. If you love what you do, beautiful, but building wealth, whether you love your career or not, gives you options. It gives you the power to choose how you spend your days instead of selling them off one shift at a time. Believing wealth is bad, keeps us trapped in the grind, worshiping productivity as virtue and judging rest as failure. But when we start to see money as a tool for freedom, not just survival, everything changes. Organizing your financial life to create time. Freedom isn't just smart. It's an act of rebellion. It's saying, I refuse to live my one precious life on a hamster wheel of exhaustion. So if you feel that tug of laziness inside of you, maybe it's not telling you to do less. Maybe it's telling you to dream bigger, loving your neighbor, taking back my time and power wasn't just about escaping the grind. It was about reclaiming the energy to live the way I was always meant to live with more courage, more intention, and more love. Because here's the truth, love isn't something you earn after financial freedom. It's something you practice in every season of life. When you're no longer drowning in survival mode, you finally have the bandwidth to love bigger, deeper, and wider. Not just yourself, but your neighbor too. In a book called Bank on Your Neighbor wouldn't be complete without talking about well, actually neighborly love. It's one of the few treasures I carried with me from my Christian upbringing alongside a freakish ability to stack folding chairs faster than anyone else. Neighborly. Love is simple. Love your neighbor as yourself. Simple doesn't mean easy, especially not now, we live in an increasingly polarized world. Politically, culturally, economically. We define ourselves by what we're not. We build walls out of identity and difference and then wonder why we feel so alone. We're navigating otherness on a scale we've never faced before and it's making us uncomfortable. Here's the real question. Do you believe difference is a problem or a gift? Perhaps more importantly, how do your politics play out in real life? Because how you answer that determines everything about how you move through this world. Love of sameness, same political leaning, same values, same race, same sexuality. That's just disguised narcissism. It's loving your own reflection and calling it virtue, but loving across difference. That's the real thing. That's neighborly love. Loving because someone exists, not because they agree with you. Look like you or think like you, and loving like that. It's revolutionary. It's also the foundation of this entire book. Creative Financing. Building wealth through relationships instead of institutions only works when you bet on trust instead of fear. Neighborly love isn't soft. It's radical. It's how we take capitalism by the collar and shake it awake and say, you work for us now. So what does that look like in practice? Let me tell you about my contractor, Joe, a blue collar guy with a heart of gold. He's dependable, hardworking, and also a proud Trump voter Q, the dramatic music. When he called me after the 2020 election, knowing the results probably weren't my wish. A part of me wanted to cancel him, ghost him, wipe him out of my contacts, but I didn't. Instead I leaned in. I shared the principles you're reading in this book. I helped him get his contractor license, sent him. Clients kept hiring him, not because we agreed, not because he earned it, but because love doesn't require agreement. Neighborly love says we either rise in relationship or we don't rise at all. Now our businesses support each other, and yes, we end phone calls with I love you. It still catches me off guard sometimes. But that's what unconditional love does. It creates space big enough for real life, for difference, for change. I saw it again in the slums of Indio, where the word namaste wasn't just a yoga cliche. It was a way of being. The divine in me honors the divine. In you, no exception, no conditions. When you start seeing the divine, or at the very least the humanity in every seller, every neighbor, every contractor who votes differently. You start building real wealth, the kind that spills over into community belonging and joy. Because financial freedom isn't just about dollars. It's about building a world where trust grows faster than fear, and where love shapes reality more than scarcity ever could. So go on. Love your neighbor, not because they've earned it, but because you deserve to live in a world built by love, unconscious, and conscious wealth. Before I ever made an offer or structured a deal, I had to ask myself a deeper question. What kind of wealth am I building and who does it serve? Because real estate isn't just numbers, it's power. And power When disconnected from values turns into something hollow, something extractive. Growing up in LA I got a front row seat to what I call unconscious wealth, the kind that hollers look at me every time. It drives by in a least Maserati. It's the kind of wealth splashed across Instagram stories and Glossy Magazine covers promising happiness if you can just snag the next designer bag, ocean, view, condo, or very important injectable. But when love, love for yourself and love from others is missing. Money doesn't fill the void, it deepens it. Sure there's a dopamine hit with every swipe of the credit card or luxury purchase, but it fades faster than a New Year's resolution. And so the treadmill begins. More stuff, more scrolling, more loneliness. Unconscious wealth isn't about building a beautiful life. It's about masking a painful one. And when we're disconnected from ourselves and others, people stop being people. They become walking opportunities, obstacles, or stepping stones. Life turns into a zero sum game of winners and losers. No wonder shows like selling sunset. Pull us in. We cringe and binge at the same time. They put opulence, drama and disconnection on full high def display, narcissism masquerades a success, and somewhere deep down we internalize that lie that wealth must cost us our humanity. But there's another way. Conscious wealth grows from an inner abundance. It's fueled by love. Love for yourself, love for others, and love for something bigger than either. When you stop tying your worth to what you produce or own, everything shifts. People stop being transactions. They become the whole point. This isn't a detour from the strategy we're about to explore. This is the strategy. The tools in these pages ahead, seller financing, deal structure, wealth creation, are powerful. They can be wielded for greed or for love. They can extract or they can empower. They can replicate the status quo. Or completely reimagine it. So how do we know which path we're on? Well, love is known by its fruits, the fruit of unconscious wealth, greed, fear, exploitation, but conscious wealth that yields generosity, connection, and purpose. One hoards the other heals. For me, the shift began when I stopped hiding who I was. Queer, trans and gloriously human and stopped measuring my worth by how much I could hustle. I started valuing my one wild, precious life. Not out of greed, but out of self-respect. In my early days doing humanitarian work overseas, I thought charity was the goal. Give a fish. Teach Amanda fish. Feel good about myself. But I've since learned real empowerment goes deeper. It's not just about fish or fishing poles, it's about making sure the pond is accessible to everyone. No gatekeepers, no secret handshake, no special invitation to the table, and that's what this book is about. Reclaiming wealth as a tool for justice, redirecting power into the hands of people who lead with love building real estate portfolios that heal not harm. Imagine it. Wealth in the hands of environmental activists, trauma counselors, teachers, LGBTQ plus organizers. We could fund community healing, turn jails into rehab centers, revolutionize education. We could house our neighbors. We could rewrite the rules of who gets to thrive, but what does this actually look like? For me, one of the most surprising answers came in a role I never imagined I'd take on becoming a landlord. Answer dramatic music here. I know landlords have a reputation and not always a good one, but that's exactly why we need people with heart in these roles. If we want to shift power back into our communities, we need to reclaim these positions, not reject them. Here's the reality. 98.6% of all assets under management are controlled by white men, and almost half of them share the same 25 first names. A whole nation's worth of wealth sitting in one giant group chat titled Kens and Johns. How can we expect equity if the faces at the financial table never change? Today, I wanna be the kind of landlord I always wished existed. I provide stable housing, secure housing that my tenants can count on. I buy them Christmas gifts, I send check-in texts. Our relationship is rooted in mutual care and respect, and it's not charity, it's community. It's business done with heart. This is the kind of wealth that heals instead of harms. And if you're not a landlord yet, don't worry, this book will help you become one, not the exploitive, eviction, happy caricature that drives people out. But the kind of landlord who creates belonging, who offers safety, who helps build lives, the kind that turns a real estate deal into a relationship. Because yes, becoming a landlord can be an act of love when it's done with intention. So now let's get practical. In the next chapter, we will impact the myth that investing is too risky because the truth is staying stuck is riskier. And the tools you're about to learn, they're not just financial strategies, they're invitations to build something radically different together. I.