Bank on Your Neighbor: The Audiobook Podcast

Bank on Your Neighbor: The Audiobook - Chapter 3

• Melissa Dorman • Episode 6

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Too many of us have been taught that investing is dangerous… but the truth is, not investing is far scarier. In this chapter, Mel shares the deeply personal story of watching her father’s decline with Alzheimer’s and the financial devastation that came with it—a wake-up call that “being good” and “working hard” were never going to be enough. You’ll learn why financial celibacy doesn’t protect you, how passive income changes everything, and why delayed gratification might just be your most powerful wealth-building tool. From side hustles to her first Prius deal to understanding how the wealthy play by different rules, Mel unpacks the mindset shifts that turn fear into financial freedom.

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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 three, money Myth number two. Investing is too scary. Formal education will make you a living. Self-education will make you a fortune. Jim Rohn. People think investing is scary, but you know what's scarier, not investing and watching the people you love pay the price. I didn't start investing because I was fearless. I started because I saw what happens when you don't, and trust me, that is far more terrifying than market fluctuations or interest rates. The wake up call didn't come all at once. It crept in slowly until suddenly. I couldn't ignore it anymore. I should have known something was wrong the day my dad forgot the name of our favorite burger spot, you know he said, squinting into the sun, the one with the shakes. He was searching for the name in and out. Burger, a place we'd gone to a thousand times. That missing word wasn't just a moment of forgetfulness, it was a warning shot. Another puzzle piece clicking into place. A few weeks later, the doctor said it out loud. Alzheimer's. Looking back, I can still see us side by side under the hood of a cherry red 65 Mustang. Our daddy daughter project that bonded us through grease gears and grit. My dad could solve mechanical puzzles like magic, diagnosing problems by sound alone that day. Standing in the driveway with a wrench in my hand and fear tightening my chest, I realized that this was a puzzle I couldn't help him fix. As the youngest of three siblings by 10 to 25 years, I had never thought much about my parents' finances. They were the grownups, the safety net, the ones with a plan. But at 23, doing math on the back of an envelope, it hit me like a gut punch. I had more savings than they did, just a few thousand dollars, but it was more than them. A flood of emotions came with that realization. Shame, guilt, disbelief. When had the roles reversed? When had I become the one who needed to plan to worry, to protect? I didn't feel ready, but the baton was already being passed and deep down, I knew the days of leaning on them were over. It was time to stand up, even if my knees were shaking. After working full days, my mom would collapse at the kitchen table, pouring over invoices, trying to cover my dad's fading competency at work. It was a brutal double shift, full-time employee by day, uncredited crisis manager by night. Eventually, my father's boss, who had offered months of compassionate payroll, had to let him go. At first, dad stayed busy with side projects around the house until the day he took a chainsaw to a tree branch mist and sliced through the electrical cord. He narrowly avoided death. It became clear we couldn't leave him alone anymore. Our former roofing supervisor now needed supervision going forward. I leveraged every skill I had from social work. I called agency after agency, explained our case pleaded, but Medicare didn't cover the $7,000 a month cost to keep my dad safe. After 50 years of blistered hands and battered knees, his social security check came up to just $2,300 a month. That was my first brutal lesson in what this country does with its working class. When they age, time started moving backwards, dad became more childlike with each passing week, vulnerable dependent, and we were out of options. So we did the only thing we could think of. We asked my older sister to move in. It wasn't a solution. It was a survival tactic. Years earlier, she had lost her home in the Great Recession, along with 8 million other Americans. That loss spiraled into addiction and periods of homelessness, but compared to leaving Dad alone in a house full of hazards, this imperfect choice was the least worst option. I still carry the complexities of that decision, the guilt, the fear, the bone deep exhaustion that comes from realizing love alone isn't enough to solve life's problems. Up until then, I thought I was clean. I thought I could opt out of capitalism on moral grounds. I believed wealth was a dirty word, and that my refusal to sell out made me pure, let's call it financial celibacy, living paycheck to paycheck by choice, as if avoiding money could immunize me from its harm. Abstinence doesn't erase reality. It just leaves you unprepared when life's demands show up. Financial celibacy didn't shield my family from crisis. It didn't protect my father. It didn't offer us dignity. It just left me helpless when it mattered. Most watching my dad unravel after a lifetime of backbreaking work and so little to show for it shattered something in me. The illusion that being good would be enough. That hard work would work out. That being broke made me somehow better. Avoiding money doesn't make you pure. It just keeps you powerless. That was the moment I stopped waiting for someone to come save us. The moment I knew the only way forward was financial literacy and not the Wall Street kind. The kind that builds real options for real people. I'm telling you this, not to scare you, but to spare you. If you've ever looked at your parents, your partner, or your future, and felt even a flicker of fear, I want you to know there is another way. You don't have to wait until the system fails someone you love. You can begin building the safety net. Now, I didn't become a real estate investor because I was brave. I became one because I never wanted to feel that helpless again. I needed a way to build security, not just for me, but for the people I love. That's what this chapter and this book is here to help you do. Redefining Millionaire. I was fortunate to have a father as old as my friend's grandparents because I witnessed the end of life much sooner than most. Watching my parents brave the financial hurdles at the final stages accelerated my awareness of what it takes to retire in America. Today at my desk in LA County Jail between screening inmates for mental health issues, I Googled what it meant to have enough for retirement. My father needed around $80,000 a year on top of his Social Security income to be self-sufficient to weather the lows of economic storms. Financial advisors recommend withdrawing no more than 4% of your retirement nest egg each year to ensure it lasts 30 years, give or take. So I plugged in the numbers, clicked enter, and looked up at the scream. A whopping $2 million is what my dad would've needed to be financially autonomous as he aged. Curiosity led me to one more click of the mouse. Accounting for inflation. Someone like me 30 years younger, would need $4 million. My heart sank. Perhaps you've already done this math, or perhaps this is the first time you're hearing of it. Maybe it feels like a distant concern or perhaps you feel a slow sinking sensation. Personally, I was shocked. How could I attend nearly 20 years of school without ever learning this most important life lesson, the cost of financial security in retirement? Had I not watched my dad suffer? I may have never asked the question. I suspect many do not. This new information had me dizzy like a compass set next to a magnet. My internal dials were spinning, recalibrating. My worldview. Far from being a dirty word millionaire is now just the price tag of growing old in America, trading time for money. The second money myth that holds Americans back is the myth that investing is too scary. I can attest to the reality awaiting us at the end of our lives when we don't invest. It's far scarier. We sacrifice our autonomy and freedom when our fears of investing prevail. Not to mention the amount of time we spend working our lives away clocking in for decades unnecessarily. The fear of investing is often at the heart of financial disempowerment. It's how we are conditioned to see the world. Think about it. Our education system rears us to be diligent workers, not effective money managers. From our earliest days in kindergarten to our final years of schooling, we spend 12 to 28 years mastering the art of sitting at a desk for eight hours following instructions from authority on how to behave. As we conform, we earn good grades that eventually translate into adult salaries. We think of our jobs as our primary source of income, dependent on the whims of our employers. By the time we reach adulthood, we've internalized the mainstream idea that working is how we earn money. We trade our time for dollars. As a result, we have little imagination for anything else. I didn't learn financial independence from my teachers. I had to study it on my own through reading books, listening to podcasts, and attending seminars. In contrast, we learned skills in schools that we can offer to employers who provide for our incomes in exchange. That's why your boss will never pay you what your skills are worth because they need to make a margin of profit on your labor. Perhaps it benefits those at the top, those accumulating the majority of wealth. If the masses remain financially in the dark, the educational system is steadily supplying workers. But if knowledge is power, then much of our education lacks financial empowerment, and the result is our time and labor are traded for dollars as if that's the only way. Here comes the upside down. Logic. We only have so much time to trade for money while there's always more money to be had. Our time on earth is finite. I realized this by watching a hardworking loved one die suddenly, time over money became the most valuable resource in my life. We cannot make more years of our lives, and likewise, we cannot afford to waste them. The core motivation for my financial liberation was the freedom to do with my time as I please. Free of our jobs. We can rally for political causes, volunteer at nonprofits, build community gardens, plant trees, develop musical mastery, spend time with loved ones, express art in its various forms, and even write a bestselling book. Fingers crossed. But how do we free up our time? By changing the type of income we earn, we can finally stop living in a world where time and money are shackled together. Like grumpy coworkers who can't stand each other. Active income is like trying to fill a giant bucket with a single cup. Every day. You stand there, scooping and pouring, scooping and pouring. Some days you get a bigger cup. Hello, promotion. Some days you get really good at scooping. Hello overtime. But no matter how skilled or fast you get, you still standing there tied to that bucket and if you stop, so does the money. Passive income is different. Passive income is like installing faucets over the side of your bucket. You twist them on one by one rental property here, create a financial deal there, a small business humming along in the background, and before long you've got water pouring in steadily. The beauty, once the faucets are working, they don't care if you're scooping, napping, or hiking in the woods. They just keep flowing. At first, it takes effort. You have to find the right tools, do the plumbing, maybe get sprayed in the face a few times, figuring it out metaphorically, and sometimes, literally. But once those faucets are in place, your life changes. You're no longer stuck in the endless scoop and poor cycle. Instead of trading your hours for dollars, you're building systems that keep you afloat and eventually overflowing. Real financial freedom isn't about working harder or longer. It's about getting out of the damn bucket altogether and realizing you were meant for oceans, not plastic pales, or as my dad used to say, work smarter, not harder. Learning the difference between passive and active income unlocked a world of ideas of how I wanted to spend my limited time on earth going forward. At 28 years old, I had a new life goal, buy enough assets to replace the income from my job. I used to think compound interest was just a fancy way of saying boring math rich people care about. Turns out it's one of the sneakiest most powerful forces in wealth building like financial gravity working in your favor. The idea is simple. Start early, invest often, and let time do the heavy lifting to prove my point. Let me ask you this, would you rather have a million dollars today or a single penny that doubles in value every day for four weeks? Most people grab the million and go shopping. Seems like a no brainer, right? But those who have been burned by two good to be true offers might pause and crunch the numbers. Day one, you have a penny. Day two, 2 cents. Day three, 4 cents. So far, not exactly yacht money, but day 28, that penny has snowballed into 1,342,000. That's the magic of compounding. It starts off slow, then suddenly takes off like a rocket. Even if you're only able to stash away $5 a day in an account earning an 8% return, you'll still end up with over a million dollars in 50 years. That's the slow track. Sure. But last time I checked, a million bucks is still a million bucks. The trick isn't just making money. It's letting time work its magic. Before buying an investment property, it's a good idea to start with a side hustle, get paid while you learn business principles on a smaller scale with less risk like training wheels. With limited cash and unlimited daydreams, I started scheming how to build passive income. Walking to my car after work one night, it hit me like a lightning bolt. Relay rides. What we now know as Touro had just launched a pilot program in Los Angeles, basically Airbnb for cars. You could rent your car to strangers through an app, make money while you slept and still get it back in one piece, hopefully. Since I lived a short scooter ride from work, yes, this masked lesbian zipped around town on a pastel pink gas scooter. And yes, the vibe definitely worked. I realized I could turn my dusty Honda into a cash machine after a month of renting it out. I earned $800, boosting my monthly income at the time by nearly 25%. It worked, and for the first time, I realized assets could earn money for me passively. I didn't need to be clocked in or tethered to a desk to make a living. That tiny side hustle was my financial awakening. I had no idea then, but that beat up Honda was my first real investment, my real estate training wheels, and it paid off naturally. I wanted more, so I ran the numbers and decided to buy another car to double my cash flow. After some obsessive research, shout out to late night Craigslist dives. I determined the most reliable, eco-friendly option I could afford was a used Prius. One afternoon I found it, a 2016 Prius listed online for $4,000 less than anything else on market. I practically tackled my phone. Two hours later, I was standing in the desert at a Toyota dealership staring at the car like it was my ticket to freedom. But when I got close, the price tag was wrong, calmly on the outside. Anyway, I pulled up the online ad on my phone and showed the salesman. He blinked, went inside and came back looking like he'd seen a ghost. My boss says we have to honor the online price. He said, shaking his head, even though we're taking a loss. I just smiled and nodded, hiding the victory, dance exploding inside of me. Quite the opposite of any sales experience I had before. Each employee tried their hardest to talk me out of buying the car to avoid the loss. Investors say You make your money when you buy, right? Meaning a screaming deal, and that I certainly did. But that wind pales in comparison to the free car I earned. 18 months later when the cashflow for my Turo renters paid off the car loan. This was my first taste of owning an asset, and I was sold as philosopher. Khalil. LeBron says they de me mad because I will not sell my days for gold, and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price. Follow the money. Just as our stories are composed of words that shape our reality, the numbers in our financial lives come together to tell a tale of how money moves through our wallets and affects our lives. Deciphering this money flow narrative can unlock the potential for important changes. I'm going to spell all this out with some financial literacy terms they don't teach you in school. One of the concepts I discovered in Rich Dad, poor Dad is the chart below of the typical money flow patterns for the lower class, middle class, and wealthy. The top section labeled income statement tracks income and expenses. The bottom section is called a balance sheet and tracks ongoing bills, liabilities, and sources of income assets. Think of your income statement as your budget's diary. It captures your monthly drama, what's coming in, what's going out, and whether you're sticking to your financial resolutions. Your balance sheet, on the other hand, is the big picture scrapbook of your financial life. It calculates your net worth by adding up all the cash and assets you've got and subtracting any debt that is weighing you down. Here's the fun part. Most people, especially when they're just starting out, have a net worth that looks more like a punchline than a point of pride. Negative net worth. Join the club. It's not permanent and it's not a death sentence. Think of it as a starting point, like realizing you haven't flossed in months at your dentist checkup. Not ideal, but nothing a little regular maintenance won't fix. And just like those trips to the dentist, the ones you begrudgingly schedule to delay the need for dentures, you'll want to check in on your finances regularly. Once a month is ideal. Once a quarter is the bare minimum. Why? Because what you measure grows ignore your finances and they'll wither like a plant you forgot to water. Pay attention to them and they thrive. It's not magic, but it sure feels like it. Now let's talk about the elephant in the financial room, how money flows through different socioeconomic classes. Look at lower income folks. They often are walking a tightrope, spending every dollar just to keep the lights on and food on the table. I've been there when every paycheck feels like it's a on a mission to escape your wallet before you even see it. There's no room for saving or investing. One flat tire or unexpected expense can throw everything into chaos. It's a brutal cycle. The middle class, meanwhile has a bit more breathing room, but often falls for the siren. Songs of liabilities. They work hard, earn raises, and then immediately reward themselves with a shiny new car or bigger house, or an extravagant vacation. It's like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom. It all flows right back out. Consumerism doesn't just steal their money, it robs them of time and freedom. The wealthy, however, play the game differently. First, they buy assets, rental properties, stocks, businesses that generate income, that new car or sleek boat. It's paid by the dividends from their investments, not the sweat of their brows. But here's the question. How do you get from paycheck to paycheck survival or middle class liability splurges to the asset buying habits of the wealthy? Unless you've stumbled into a trust fund or a surprise inheritance. And if that's you mast, but let's be real. You're probably not reading this book. You're going to have to build wealth from scratch, and that means cosing up to everyone's least favorite virtue, delayed gratification. I should have known I was destined for investing when in kindergarten. I rationed my Halloween candy until February while other kids blew through their loot in a sugar fueled frenzy. I sat on mine like a tiny capitalist dragon, carefully trading fun size, Snickers at lunch like I was running a black market candy exchange. It wasn't flashy, it wasn't cool, but it was a hint at something powerful. The ability to say later instead of now. Turns out science backs this up. In the 1970s, researchers at Stanford gave preschoolers a choice, one marshmallow now or two. If they could wait 15 minutes alone. The kids who held out weren't just doubling their candy, they were doubling down on life decades later. The waiters had higher graduation rates, better health and higher incomes. The simple ability to delay gratification, paid dividends for decades. The best part, delayed gratification isn't a magical gift for a lucky few. It's a muscle you can build. Picture this, instead of buying that shiny car upgrade or limited edition, a sneaker drop, you invest the money from the outside. It looks like you're living the world's most boring life, but underneath the surface, you're rewiring the entire flow of money in your life. You're planting financial seeds that will bloom into something way better than a marshmallow, freedom, security, and options. After my car experiment, I realized the real magic didn't start with buying assets. It started with what I did before I bought anything. Learning to save. That's the first step, and it's as simple and as complicated as spending less or earning more easier said than done. Right? That's why the median American has about $8,000 in the bank. If you're just getting started, you're not alone. Fortunately, you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Ramit Ethie, I will teach you to be rich as a goldmine of advice on budgeting, negotiating raises, and building a strong financial foundation. If you're new to this game, start there because learning to manage your personal budget is like learning to ride a bike. It's wobbly and awkward at first, but once you get the hang of it, you're cruising towards your financial goals. Moving from the path of poverty to prosperity isn't about luck or even intelligence, it's about grit, courage, and sticking with the plan when it's easier to blow your budget on something fun. Stacking assets instead of credit card bills isn't easy, but let me tell you, it's so worth it. Or as Cardi B puts it, I don't dance now I make money move, and she's right. Making money. Move is what wealth is all about. Before you can make your money work for you, you'll have to face the thing most people run from debt. In the next chapter, we will impact the myths around debt, show you the difference between good and bad debt, and learn how to turn one of your biggest fears into one of your most powerful tools.