#411 Freedom, Purpose, and Impact: Financial Wisdom with Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA

This week on The Less Stressed Life, Mel Abraham shares the mindset shifts and life lessons that helped him rebuild after cancer, single fatherhood, and losing a third of his wealth in a Ponzi scheme. We talk about redefining wealth, the purpose of money, and how to build true freedom—financially and emotionally.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re behind with money or unsure where to start, this episode will help you reframe your relationship with it and move forward with clarity and confidence.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Why most money beliefs are caught, not taught
• How to define your own “enough”
• The emotional traps that sabotage smart investing
• Lessons from losing it all and starting over
• Why financial freedom starts with intention, not income

ABOUT GUEST:
Mel Abraham is a USA Today bestselling author, CPA, and entrepreneur who helps people build lives of freedom, purpose, and impact. With over 30 years of experience mentoring entrepreneurs and individuals, Mel shares proven frameworks for creating financial independence and living in alignment with your values. A cancer survivor, single dad, and son of an immigrant, Mel blends real-life resilience with financial wisdom to inspire others to build wealth and lasting legacy—without sacrificing what matters most. 

WHERE TO FIND:
Website: https://melabraham.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/melabraham9/

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Podcast Instagram: @lessstressedlife
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lessstressedlife

SPONSOR:
Thanks to Jigsaw Health for sponsoring this episode! Looking for a clean, tasty way to stay hydrated this summer? Their Electrolyte Supreme is a go-to for energy, minerals, and daily hydration support. Use code LESSSTRESSED10 at JigsawHealth.com for 10% off—unlimited use!

NUTRITION PHILOSOPHY OF LESS STRESSED LIFE:
🍽️ Over restriction is dead
🥑 Whole food is soul food and fed is best
🔄 Sustainable, synergistic nutrition is in (the opposite of whack-a-mole supplementation & supplement graveyards)
🤝 You don’t have to figure it out alone
❤️ Do your best and leave the rest

Transcript

[00:00:00] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: We get indoctrinated into this earnings mentality of make money, get a good job, get a good degree, get a good career, a good profession.

And we presume that it's in the making of the money that the solutions are found. And it's not

 make health a priority and take care of yourself because you owe it not to yourself. Do you owe it to everyone that you're living life with?

[00:00:24] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm your host, Christa Biegler, and I'm going to guess we have at least one thing in common that we're both in pursuit of a less stressed life. On the show, I'll be interviewing experts and sharing clinical pearls from my years of practice to support high performing health savvy women in pursuit of abundance and a less stressed life.

One of my beliefs is that we always have options for getting the results we want. So let's see what's out there together.

Today on the Less Stressed Life, I have Mel Abraham, who is a USA today bestselling author, a CPA, and an entrepreneur on a mission to help people design lives of freedom, purpose, and impact. He spent over three decades mentoring entrepreneurs, executives, and individuals sharing proven tools to create financial freedom and reclaimed time for what truly matters.

The powerful frameworks he's developed have empowered others to build wealth, live aligned with their values, and leave a lasting legacy. He's the son of an immigrant father who came to this country at 17 with nothing but determination and grit. Mel's been a single full-time dad, juggling bedtime stories and boardrooms, survived cancer twice, and rebuilt his life after losing a third of everything in a Ponzi scheme.

So we'll cover all of those topics today. Each of those taught him resilience, purpose, and importance of living. Fully expressed and welcome to the show, Mel.

[00:01:57] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: Chris, it's so good to be here. Thanks for having me.

[00:02:00] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, you bet. I first heard you speak, I think on James Wedmore stage last December, and I just really liked you and I can't even remember exactly what you talked about, but I was just interested in the topic of finance and financial freedom and the way you talk about it because sometimes it's a whole bro conversation and I just like how you talk about it with purpose, right?

About, it's really about building a life you like, and so I got your book Building Your Money Machine and found it to be this really easy read and I thought that the general layout really inspired my upcoming retreat about finance because you covered all of these pieces about understanding yourself with money.

'cause you can't really do anything if you don't understand how you're acting around it. And then all things investing and then, or creating the money machine, which is a little bit more attractive to those of us that have maybe. Go to sleep when we talk about investing. So your money can work for you.

And then covering, protecting your legacy, which also it's like, what are the right words for me? It's, how do you know everything's covered if you get a cancer diagnosis, which we'll cover it later. So I think that your stories are really fun and incredible and I think that they take us through those sections.

So I'll allow those to shape our conversation today. So my jaw dropped open when I read about your dad's involvement in war times. Which I'd have pulled up and reread that section, but you talk about your dad's involvement in war times in the Middle East and staying to save his friends at the age of, I think 17.

That was such an incredible story. And so if you wanna share any of that, but really the question is, I just think it's so powerful how that happened and then he moved here and then, how did some of that upbringing shape the inherited money stories that you got from your own father?

How did it shape your early life and how you used money?

[00:03:48] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: Gosh. So I mean it, the first money memory I have is of my dad of my dad crying, him and my mom were having an argument. It had to do with money. I don't know what the topic was, but I just remember him crying, and I said, this is like my idol, this powerful man in my eyes as a five-year-old.

And he's crying. And, as I walked away from it without any guidance, I just made that mean that, hey, if you don't make enough money, you're gonna disappoint the people you love, because that's what he said to my mom. He says, I just feel like I'm trying so hard and I'm disappointing the people I love the most.

And it was hurting him. And I thought, wow, this is crazy because my dad was such a powerful. Just resource for me. Like you said, at 17 years old, he was basically fighting persecution, him and four other people, and they were smuggling people out to get them safe. They were smuggling guns in to keep them safe and he was being hunted to be hung at 17 years old.

And I think the most important thing that my dad didn't really talk a lot, he was very quiet, but it's the way he walked his walk. And I, in hindsight, in his passing, I realized how much of an impact it had on me in how I showed up in life. Because four days before he passed away, we were sitting in the rehab center and he was in a wheelchair.

And I asked him about the story about how he got here to the us. And he told it really, he had this energy about him, even though he was literally, we didn't know it, but he was days away from passing away. And I asked him, I says, 17 years old you're doing these things knowing that you're gonna get, if you get caught, they're gonna hang you in the square.

I know in 17 what I was doing and it had nothing to do with anything that was gonna get me hung, why would you do it? And he just looked at me and all of a sudden he grew out of the wheelchair and said, because it was the right thing to do. And that is what represented how he lived his life, whether it was finances, whether it was helping people, whether it was doing for people.

And I think that's where the spirit of service. And everything and being a role model came in to my life and and everything. The challenge is if we're not careful, and this happens with our financial lessons is most of our money lessons are caught not taught. And I wasn't taught about money, so I was taking in the things that he was doing, and dad was never really great with money.

He was an engineer. We had what we needed, but there was no lavish lifestyle that we lived in the same house all our lives. So I was watching my dad, my mom argue about money. My dad struggle at times, my dad losing his job, and I am. Catching all these lessons and bringing them into my life and giving them meaning in my life, which starts to impact the things that I do.

And we don't realize that. And there are so many things that happen in our lives around us, whether it's media, social media, parents, siblings, what have you, that start to shape how we see money, the relationship with money and wealth and our deservingness of it, that it works under the surface. And as a CPA, as an accountant, when I came to start doing this work, I literally thought, all I'm gonna do is give you the math to the wealth.

Here's the columns, here's the rows. Just do this. You're fine. And it didn't take me long to figure out that if I don't deal what's in their head and in their heart, I'll never be able to touch their pocketbook. And that's where this all came from.

[00:07:50] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. If it makes you feel any better, I work with health and I feel the exact same way about, there's all this emotional stuff behind how I had recorded this podcast a month or two ago about like how health and wealth are so similar and parallel, and sometimes we try to outsource we think someone else will just solve the problem.

And it's you have to still take ownership of it. So how did you end up deciding to go into a finance career and then once you were a CPA, what were some of these most common things that you saw with people, as you just said, what were some of the most common kind of roadblocks that you saw people run up against when you were trying to just help them do the spreadsheets, help them with their money and to help themselves?

[00:08:29] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: So the reality is that my CPA license and my career as a CPA, or at least the beginning of that CPA career did not teach me anything about money. Taught me about business, it taught me about some of that. But we didn't talk about finance, we didn't talk about money. And in fact, the thing that it did is it tied me to a time sheet, which is a prison in the sense of if I am always swapping hours for dollars, I'm never gonna find the freedom.

And what happened is that later in my life as a single dad I got a lesson and that lesson was from my, by at that time, my son was six years old. And I was trying to build a business, I was trying to build a practice, and my partners had pushed me out and I had no clients. And so I did what most people do.

I got on the treadmill. I started running, I started speaking, I started writing, I started and I started to get clients in. And all of a sudden things are going well, and I. I thought I was doing the right thing. And Jeremy comes running in at six years old and he says daddy, I drew a picture of your school today.

And I bent down thinking that I'm going to see this picture of us playing ball or having fun. And it wasn't anything like that. It was me standing in front of two computers and a phone in each ear and another one on the desk ringing. And at the hands of a 6-year-old, I was given probably the greatest life lesson, money lesson, business lesson, ever.

Because what happened is that everyone's telling me, and we all hear it, you need to work life balance. You need to work life balance. But here's the reality. When we talk about stress and everything, balance insinuates that I have one weight on one side. I have a counterweight on the other side. They're playing tug of war with each other, and on average we're balanced.

But that is friction. That is stress. And we weren't meant to live a balanced life. We were meant to live a harmonious life. And harmony, I realized, came from intent. And what I wasn't being is intentional with my money, intentional with my time, and intentional with my presence with Jeremy. And that's the birth of the journey where I said, I gotta figure out how do I separate my ability to earn from the efforts to earn it so I can have the time to put into the most important things in my life.

And at that time was this 6-year-old boy, and that was the birth of the idea of the money machine. That was the birth of this journey and this obsession to say, how do I buy my time back? And it wasn't gonna be done through a job.

[00:11:09] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. You talk about being the really, the first step was. One, realize realization, right?

Like bringing that to consciousness, thanks to your son's drawing. I'm just like, yeah, I've heard you tell that story before. And I'm just like, look at, he really thought the world. He was like, I'm gonna give him three phones, just thinking about, how cute child brains are. But I was thinking about intention and how it's very easy to skip over intention and to not revisit it frequently.

I was just doing an exercise with clients last week about just ideal day. I've done that exercise many times for myself, and it changes all the time. And it's really about blooming in the current place. It's not that, oh, we're all gonna live on an island and, wake up without any worries or cares.

It's like, how do you have an ideal day in the current scenario? And the reason I bring that up is because sometimes we might glaze over the concept of intention. Yeah. And there are simple ways to say, and sometimes certain, sometimes the result feels far away. And so it's like, how do we create intention on, in a very small level.

And so I would just start with that day, right? And if it's way Yeah. And something I, we can have gratitude. Like I'm sure you, I'm sure there was a pretty big gap between that picture and ultimately getting to where you needed to be. May mean some people make a drastic shift right at that moment.

But I know that I made decisions last September that are allowing me to have a much more free July and August because I realized I was on the downhill slope with my own children. And so I was just being very intentional. But it took, for me it was like, I'm gonna make a decision now that creates what I want later.

Right around that intention. So you just talk about, personally for you, there was a lot of freedom pieces. I wanna make sure we'll have to come back and talk about, as I was just talking to someone recently and she was I think that. Where I wouldn't want someone to get stuck in our listening to our conversation is that they hear that they I don't know, maybe you would want them to hear this, but that they hear that they must quit their job and do something else.

Only because I had, I was having an email conversation with someone recently where she was going over all those things and sometimes there's just too many decisions at first. And so there's a first thing overall. And so what is our overall interaction with money as well? So I would say it's common no matter if we're talking money, health, life in general, that intention, realization consciousness of like your current scenario and what do I actually want in my intention is always like a good first piece.

If you wanna share anything else that like showed up in people all the time, feel free to insert that too. But I brought in another concept that. You talk about in your book often, as humans, we chase money. We think when I have this, then this will happen. When I have this will happen. And this is a direct quote from you.

As you start to understand money, you realize money is not a purpose, which is why people chasing dollars always feel unfulfilled and unhappy in the end. And instead money has a purpose. And so I'd love for you to make that really tangible. You suggest people come up with this money purpose statement to help guide decisions and behaviors.

A lens, which I love, the concept of a question or a statement, helping you have a lens. It's like the concept of values, which I don't think should be undercut as again an intentional life. But can you describe that more about money not being a purpose and how you can create a purpose statement around money to help you guide decisions?

[00:14:40] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: Yeah. I think that the reality is, first off, just so we're clear, I'm not telling people to quit their job. I just want them to live their life intentionally. They might have a degree, they may have a parental desire or siblings that say, this is the path you take, just like I did as a cpa. But if it happens to not be the path you're called to, then you make that change at that point.

But that's being intentional. That's not just being, you don't wanna be reckless. Yeah. Yeah. And, but I think that here's where I think the challenge is. We get indoctrinated into this earnings mentality of make money, get a good job, get a good degree, get a good career, a good profession.

And we presume that it's in the making of the money that the solutions are found. And it's not I used to say that money is a tool, but it's not a tool. It's a paintbrush. It's the paintbrush that we get to use to paint the masterpiece called our life. That we don't need the money, but we need the money to allow us the choice to live life intentionally.

And most of everything I teach and I do is because I screwed it up. Okay. I was chasing a number, I was chasing that goalpost. I was chasing the next nice car and house and everything, and I was feeling empty, yeah. I had the scorecard, but I didn't have the rich life that I didn't have the feelings and the experiences, and it was something was missing.

And what was missing is that I disconnected the statistic wealth from the life richness. And when we turn around and reconnect them and have the conversation around money and what it does to allow us to create the life for ourselves and those we care about, the missions, the movements and everything, now all of a sudden money has a higher purpose.

And when money has a higher purpose, we will raise our life to a higher purpose. And that's how I started to look at it. So money's never been, Hey, I wanna accumulate 10 million, 15 million, 1 million, a hundred thousand for the sake of doing it. It was initially because I thought that was the answer.

But what the answer was getting a vivid picture of the life I wanted to live, figuring out what the price tag was and figuring out how I was gonna use the money to get me there so I could make sure that I lived fully. Fully invested in the life that I specifically designed and now that includes missions movements, caring for loved ones, taking care of, like my mom, we just lost her in September and she was older, she was 91 6 years on dialysis and everything.

And she would, would freak out. Talk about money stores. We can, I've got a story with her that she would freak out about, we had her in assisted living and she would say, yeah, I'm okay money. I, okay. She didn't know how well we were doing, for ourselves. But the gift was, I knew that she was fine.

There was nothing that was ever gonna change. And her cost of care, when I looked at that six years was over 850,000. It was crazy. But in our life. Even though she kept worrying about it because of her, where she came from and the upbringing in our life, I had the peace of knowing that my mom would always be okay, that my brother is gonna be okay, that my son and my grandchildren are okay.

And when you create that purpose for the money, it's a whole different game than just figuring out how to get a big bank account.

[00:18:27] Christa Biegler, RD: I think your story about your mom is the most lived, real, tangible example I can think of around money that is just scarcity thoughts about the idea of having enough.

And I don't know another way to solve for that besides educating yourself to find out what is enough. But first you have to decide what is enough, right? And then you have to understand that math, right? Because it just solves the, you have the emotional issue. And part of the solution is like just solving the problem, right?

Solving the math problem around it. Once you define. What the actual outcome should be. I think that's the tricky part is humans do have a tendency to move goalposts, right? Or to not stop and be intentional. Part of intention is stopping and realizing what would be enough, how would I even know if it's enough?

That would be the first step.

[00:19:15] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: You're just, you nailed it because that's the thing. I screwed up and it wasn't until I had a bike accident, so I ended up flipping a mountain bike. I was on the pavement coming down on my head. Great for concussion. Can't feel anything on the right side. I'm stuttering.

Two days after I'm out of the hospital, I'm in a neck brace and a dear friend comes up to me and says, I'm bringing, taking you to lunch. Now. He retired at 37. She's taking me to lunch and we go to get a sandwich and we're sitting at the sandwich shop. I'm still stuttering, and he looks at me, he says, how much is enough?

And I go, what do you mean? I said I had blunt force trauma and you want to ask me about philosophical questions of life. I said I got a headache. What do you mean? He goes no, I'm serious. He says, how much is enough for you? Because the problem is, the reason you got in a bike accident is that you were distracted, you were angry, you were doing things you shouldn't have enough doing, and you ended up in an accident because you don't know where your finish line is.

He said, you don't know if it's behind you. You don't know if you're standing on it. You don't know if it's in front of you. And the problem is that you'll heal from this. You'll get back on that bike because you still haven't defined it. And until you define it, you'll keep running a race and you don't know where the finish line is.

The problem is that at some point you won't be able to recover. And he says, that's what worries me. So are you just gonna keep moving it? Are you gonna finally decide to define it? And maybe you move it later? But that question of how much is enough? Needs to be driven from an internal view of us.

And if you're in a committed relationship like we create it together and we say, this is what we want, this is what we want. And that's what we go towards. And the challenge for most of us, and this is where intention comes in, is that we are bombarded with peer pressure media, social media comparison, and all of the things to say, to get us distracted, to get us to go maybe that's what I need.

Maybe that's what I need. But when we define enough and we create a plan and we have a vision, and we know our values and we know what the purpose is, it's easier to stay in alignment.

[00:21:27] Christa Biegler, RD: It is hot weather season and there is probably no better time than now to make electrolytes part of your daily routine. Electrolytes help you make energy and help get hydration into the cell so you aren't just peeing out what you put in. I've been drinking electrolytes for at least five years and I'm always looking for a great tasting, high quality powder just to change up the flavors.

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Little, did you know at the beginning of that conversation with your friend that the question had nothing to do with your actual bicycle?

[00:22:41] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: No.

[00:22:42] Christa Biegler, RD: It was a metaphor for your entire life. And I think that concept of what is enough is the same as a question I had in my own life of, I don't know when it was, couple years, three years of the last five years are a blur. Where I was like, oh, how long should do I need to work this hard where I'm working all the time?

And I would say to that end about money is not a purpose is something you sometimes, like you with all of your experience is you learn sometimes through the school of hard knocks. My last retreat, it was a lot of successful business owners that had hit this like peak of, is this it?

Because we had lost the rest of the purpose around it. And you see that show up in lots of different places. So you said it really well. my next question is really, we all have a lot of things vying for our attention and for our money. And I have heard people say really just recently as I'm talking to people about money, which is funny 'cause they usually talk about health, but it's okay.

I think that they're very intimately, they were related. People will say things like, I don't know if I have the money to invest or how do I know that? And it reminds me of the story. I like inspiration stories, I love stories of people who totally change everything, which is one of your stories really as well, right?

CPA to really find like personal finance education. But let's talk about this pretty crazy story of you losing how much money in a business venture and making it back and climbing back, like from zero, really. So tell us about that, because sometimes we're like, oh, it's easy for Mel to say, right?

He's hanging out with people who are retired at 37, right? He has money. But I think that's it's so great to know these real stories. It's like actually Mel came from. Ground zero as well. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about that story, about the losses, the lessons, and how you came back.

[00:24:33] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: Yeah. And the guy that is 37 was caught in the Ponzi scheme too, so

[00:24:38] Christa Biegler, RD: Oh, wow.

Oh yeah. Amazing. 

[00:24:40] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: Oh, and so what happened was in 2005 I got involved in an investment. Now, at that time, I was really just at the cusp of starting to do my investing and I was starting to see results. I was starting to see that things were going, which there is this human nature where we go, okay, I'm getting good results.

If this is good, maybe more is better. So I got introduced to this guy from a friend who had been investing with him and. Ultimately what ended up happening is this thing was not an investment. It turned out to be a Ponzi scheme, and I had ignored my rules, so I didn't follow the rules. I ignored the voice.

I allowed myself to get sucked into it, and then I brought that friend in. That was retired, so there was three of us in it that we knew there was more in it from that. But between me and my two friends, we lost over four and a half million, and I lost one third of everything I had. Because, and what got me into it was that these guys are really good.

The cons, they know how to push the emotional triggers, the psychological triggers to get you involved. He used scarcity, he used emotion, he used inspiration, he used aspiration. I was literally spreadsheeting all the returns. He was promising looking at my wealth grow and going, in two years I'm gonna be wealthier than GDP.

It was like, and it should have dawned on me, but what happened is I allowed the emotions to take over the rules and the logic, and in the end I lost one third of everything. And I was left with this. Choice of what to do. And at that time Jeremy would've been, was 15 years old, 14 and a half years old, and someone came to me and said, here's the deal.

You're gonna have a choice to make because Jeremy's watching you. He knows something's happened. If he doesn't understand it, just like we said, what's he gonna do? He's gonna give it his own, meaning he's gonna catch the lessons and he's gonna catch the lesson in adversity. And we watched one of the people that, the 37-year-old that was retired, he just changed his life and kept on going.

He was fine. And he was the smallest amount that was lost. The person that got me into it was the first one into it. He spiraled into resentment. He destroyed his marriage, he destroyed his business, and he ended up destroying his liver. He started drinking and he's literally about three years ago, just coming back from it.

It's taken that long. And then it was me and this person said, Jeremy's watching you and what he's gonna take away is gonna inform how he's going to deal with adversity the rest of his life. And it was at that point that I go if I curl up in the corner and do what I was gonna do and tell myself the story that I'm a loser, I shouldn't be doing this.

That's the lesson he's gonna take away. And so I had to look at this and say, we all make bad financial choices, just hopefully don't lead the kind of scar that this did. Okay. But we all make bad financial choices. I still do. I'm not perfect but the question really isn't about the choice. The question is what we do with it.

Because once I looked at it and said, I had a role in this, I don't have the blame, but I have a role in it. that empowered me. To figure some things out because I could have easily blamed him. Look, the guy's a parasite either way but I could have blamed him and say, this was done to me, and then I take away nothing but resentment and no lessons.

And then I had to come away and go, okay, I had a role in this, but how did that role come about? What did I ignore? What are the lessons I can take away? What are the things that come about? What did they take away? And the reality at the end of the day was, he took my money and I wasn't gonna allow him to take my esteem.

And I went and he didn't take my skills to build it before. And so I had to regroup and just say, okay, these are the things that, the only thing he took was money. So now how do I regain it? How do I rebuild it? What do I need to do? And the first thing I did was. Was create a whole new set of investing rules.

Everything I teach now is born out of that because I swear I don't want anyone else to fall prey to something like that. And I may leave a lot of money on the table because my rules get in the way, but I'm gonna be safe and the people I work with will be safe because I will not go into any investments that don't satisfy these rules anymore.

And what allowed me to do is grow, learn more. And then the most important thing is to look at it and say, how do I give this back to the world? 'cause it's fine that I grew and it's fine that Jeremy learned it, but how do I make sure? Because there was some elderly couples that cashed in their retirements that got their whole world shattered, and they didn't have the ability to recover.

And so that's where this whole kind of focus on how do I start to teach this? How do I start to get everyone to protect them from doing it?

[00:30:07] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. I wanna underline several things that you said there because I don't want us to miss them. So you said early on something like emotional stuff can block logic, and I see that a lot.

When we get emotional, we lose our logical brain. Another thing you talked about. Was, rules that you ignored because people are gonna really wanna know about these rules that you ignored and how could you have saved yourself? Actually, I'll go back one step and just that not making money, he took your money but you had the option to say, what did that mean?

Like, what meaning did you apply to him taking the money? You could have said I'm a victim. I'm not qualified. All these things. These are real, I started narratives that probably, yeah, it would be really normal. It's very human, to recruit that in negativity bias.

And I think one place you have been extremely fortunate that shows up in your story is surrounding yourself with incredible people that have showed up in the right places. Like these little earth angels almost showing up to help guide you really. And I just think about, yeah, not letting that money.

Mean things about you. And also the concept of, and this is where it relates to health, it relates to everything in life, is am I choosing victimhood, right? Am I choosing victimhood, which creates a disempowered place and creates desperation? Or can I take a different road? Can I create an empowered, can I rebuild in an empowered place?

Right? Which is just the thoughts of, hey, he took my money. He didn't take my esteem, he didn't take the skills I had to build that. And so you have to really recruit those positive thoughts to like, get yourself,

you do

over a hell of a hump, right? A hell of a hump. So all the things that we would say yeah.

Were actually like the things that really saved you from a negative spiral, I would say probably. And it's changed the trajectory of not only your life, your son's life, your family's life, but those that you interact with. Okay. So anyway, about the rules that you ignored just give us a snapshot of that .

Because you mentioned it multiple times, and I know as my listening ears were listening, it's oh yeah. Tell us what rules you violated, please.

[00:32:16] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: So the first and foremost rule is never, ever invest in anything you don't understand. And I didn't understand the transaction. I didn't understand the deal.

I had an inkling of it, but I didn't fully understand it. And because I didn't understand it and let's be clear, I wasn't meant to understand it. That was the intent. He wanted to give me enough to think that I understood it. And that's what a lot of these con artists will do. 

[00:32:43] Christa Biegler, RD: you 

don't have to tell us the context, I'm just curious to make it more tangible, like 

[00:32:47] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: what he was doing?

[00:32:48] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. What was the, just to help us understand it better

[00:32:51] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: in general, what he was saying is that he was taking our money and using it to buy. Distressed assets. Okay. So imagine the time, this is just before the 2007, 2008 crash. So businesses are starting to drop.

They have assets that they got a fire sale. And so he's telling us that's what he is doing. He is borrowing money doing a purchase of these assets, taking title to these assets. Then he is going to a bidding site and selling the assets at 2, 3, 4 times that, and he's doing it in six weeks cycles.

And that every six weeks we'll make 20% on our money. Okay? Ding ding. You can't make 20% on your money without taking on a whole lot of risk. And this was something that was not even real. He showed us spreadsheets, he showed us websites, he showed us trails of things that were fabricated. And created.

So it made it look like that. But we didn't ha have an enough of, but all I was doing was all I got caught up on was 20% every six weeks. Oh my God. Let's take that out for two years and see what happens. And you could start with a hundred thousand, 200,000, 500,000 20% on that. That gets big really fast.

That was what I was focused on and I ignored every other thing, the due diligence, of saying gimme more documentation. And what he did, there was a couple things that he did in there is that we're closing the deal this week, so are you in, are you out? So he put urgency on it. That caused me to then say, I'll get the details later, which I never got.

Then when it came, then I said, I'll just do it for the first six weeks and I'll cash out and I'll move on. And see what it's like. When I went to cash out, he then said, oh, if you cash out, we'll have to send you a 10 99. You'll have to pay tax on it. But if you stay in, we'll roll it since you didn't pick it up.

You won't have to pay tax and we'll just roll it to the next deal. So all of a sudden he got me in to start rolling it and I wasn't paying attention. And all I was doing was getting these statements that showed the number growing.

[00:35:08] Christa Biegler, RD: It was very elaborate.

[00:35:09] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: It was elaborate.

And then at some point he came in with another deal saying, I got this other deal, but I need more money for it. And what do I do? I stroke 'em another check. Okay. , So I don't invest in anything that I don't understand. And I tell my clients to do the same thing. And it's okay if you leave money on the table.

There's a lot of folks that are out there. I just had a conversation with someone literally weeks ago that went into a deal that turned out to be a scam. She lost a half a million bucks, and I had told her a month and a half beforehand, do not do this deal 'cause something doesn't smell right. And she ignored me.

Not only did she do the deal, she went in at five times what she told me she was gonna do, which she lost it all. Yeah. And so that's one, two I will look at deals that are let's say, more public facing. If it's, Hey, my buddy told me about this deal. I'm not getting the deal.

Okay.

Yeah.

So there are some parameters in there that I just won't, I will not cross anymore. I don't need to take the risk and we shouldn't be taking the risk. And is it possible that I might pass up on a good investment? Yes, absolutely. It's, but it's also highly likely that I pass up on something that goes south on me.

[00:36:26] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. And it's not even, I don't even know if the conversation is really the risk tolerance. It's just oh, my tolerance for this potentially not being, having a return is just, has gone to zero. Yeah. And so part of understanding, what I wanna say is and also for all that are listening for all types of investments you can learn.

Sometimes you don't want to, sometimes we don't want to go toward the thing that's like we have ignored for a long time, but you can learn Yeah. About investments that are tried and true. So I'll put that little caveat in there too for all of us that are understanding this early on.

And what I also heard from your story and I could be wrong. , It was 2005. That was 20 years ago. You just told me your age. And so are you trying to tell me that you really got into investing at age 45? And if so also, what did you think? And maybe this was all in the middle of that scheme.

What about the crash of 2008? Because we've been looming this economic crisis Yeah. For five years. And it's like history. There's always things repeating themselves. But fear is this constant in life. Yeah. And even your story could elicit fear accidentally. So anyway, just curious, what did you start investing at 45?

[00:37:37] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: I started investing a little earlier than that, probably in my late thirties. But it wasn't serious. It was, I got a 401k, I got an ira. I wasn't as involved and I just picked some things because it was often the distance and I wasn't really thinking about it. From a, I need to perfect this perspective, but by and large, my wealth creation literally happened.

So if I look at, if I look at it at the time that, that I lost that money I already had a seven figure net worth. So I had been investing for a little bit then it got cut by one third, and now I had to grow again, and it accelerated from there. Now, what caused the acceleration was one, my hyperfocus on the investing strategies, the rules, the process, a system that I followed consistently over time.

I didn't follow the crowd. I didn't follow memes, I didn't follow emotions. I didn't try to time the market. I was thinking long term. The other thing is. In 2008, like you said we had a bad time, 2007, 2008, but I had experienced a downturn in the market years before, like decades before. And I had sat in a lecture hall where this person was on the stage talking doom and gloom.

Everything's going to hell in a hand basket, and you better hang onto your seats. I didn't even wait for him to finish the lecture. I got up, I went to the lobby. I called my stockbroker at the time and said, I don't wanna play the game anymore. Put me in cash. I cashed everything out. It was before I was involved in it.

It was just, like I said, passively investing. I knew I needed to, and that's all I was doing. So I sat on the sidelines because of the fear, and I sat on the sidelines for well over a decade. Because I didn't know when to get in. I didn't understand it, and I was scared. The market dropped, but it, then it started to come back.

But I didn't participate. And literally if I went back and did the math. If I had kept investing from that day, even in the panic, $500, a thousand dollars a month as I was doing it, my net worth would've been a couple million dollars more. But the fear held me outta the game.

So when 2008 hit, I go, oh, I've been here before. I've seen this before. The people will say, is the market going down? And the answer is yes. Is the market going up? And the answer is yes. We just don't know when. We don't know how long, and we don't know how far. And so it's just part of the journey. And as long as I have time, It will recover. And so I need to be on the field playing the wealth game to make it happen. But the challenge is emotions again, fear and greed come in. And so we get scared because we're listening to media and doing all those things, and we get out and we're sitting on the sidelines like I did. There's a study that happened where they studied 20 years of the s and p 500 invest $10,000 in in 2003.

And then see what you would have at 20 23, that $10,000 in the s and p 500 would turn into $67,000 if you just did nothing. But if you missed 10 days in those 20 years, the 10 best days of the market. Okay, that's one day every other year, 10 days if you miss the 10 best days of the market in that 20 year period, your 67 was 29,000, less than 50%.

And here's the kicker, seven of those 10 best days were after the worst days. And so if we are in fear and we get out of the market because it's going down and seven of the best days are the day after we missed the best days, and we cut our returns in half. And so when emotions get involved in our financial or money decisions, typically they're not good decisions.

That's the thing that that I learned tremendously out of the Ponzi scheme, out of that other situation where I said, I understand the market. And the ups and downs. I understand that the longer I have, the more likely the higher the probability of success. I'm just gonna play the long game.

[00:42:19] Christa Biegler, RD: That's what most savvy financial education people will say is it's time. It is time. Yeah. But what I love to capture is you can still start later and be okay.

[00:42:32] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: Yes.

[00:42:33] Christa Biegler, RD: You can still start later and be okay. Okay. I wanna talk about this other piece which is protecting your legacy and we can frame it up by, in recent years, you've had not just one but two cancer diagnoses.

And none of us are immune to this. We're at a one in three rate. We're going to a one in two rate. I care about this topic a ton, and so part of my. Financial goals are understanding what to do when something hits, when the unexpected happens, because the unexpected will happen. So you talk about how you were able to have peace of mind financially while you took care of yourself during your cancer diagnoses, and that your money didn't get obliterated by health costs.

Yeah. Can you talk about how you were able to ensure that your needs were cared for during this time? And how would your approach change if you were at a different age, 35, 45 or 55?

[00:43:28] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: So this is a great question. First off, I don't think we ever planned. I don't think we can ever plan for it.

I wasn't a candidate for can, I'm not a smoker. Not a drinker. No one in my family ever had cancer. It was bladder cancer. They said it was average. Average age for bladder cancer is 73. I was 58 and I go unless mom lied on the birth certificate, none of this should have happened, but it did.

Life will happen now. When I created the idea of the money machine and then started to build the money machine, it wasn't because of the cancer. It wasn't even because of life. It was just to give me freedom of choice, right? But the cancer highlighted the power of it. The cancer said to me, that moment that I said, okay, I gotta fight a demon and I need to be 100% invested in fighting that demon spiritually, physically, energetically.

And I was fortunate that we built enough of a machine at that point, at that stage to sit back and say, I'm gonna shut everything down and let me just fight the demon and let the machine pay for everything. And I, and the size of the machine or the portfolio of assets, if you want to call it. Was large enough that we didn't even it kept, still kept growing.

It just was growing at a slower pace during the cancer battle. But our lifestyle didn't change other than the cancer changes your lifestyle. But we, financially, it didn't change. We kept on going and it was a blessing. And it showed the power of if when we do this right, we have the opportunity to take on life's choices, life's left turns with a little more grace because I can't imagine what it would've been like to work nine to five and then have to fight for my life.

Five to nine. Yeah. And that becomes the crux of it. And look, we never think that anything is gonna happen to us, but the odds are at some point it happens. To me, it's, we're better that off being financially prepared for the left turn and never making the left turn than having no options.

My mom had the best care because I could give it to her and she would've never lasted to 91 if we didn't have the capacity to do that. But did I think about that when I built it? No, it didn't. it was another reason that I thought it was a gift. Now, are there things we can do? Yeah I think there are things that we can do and when we go younger and everything, and this kind of goes right up your alley, the first thing is to take care of ourselves.

Without our health, it doesn't matter the wealth. Look at Steve Jobs. Okay? He had more wealth than he knew what to do with, but it still couldn't keep him alive. And so the first thing is make health a priority and take care of yourself because you owe it not to yourself. Do you owe it to everyone that you're living life with?

And everything. The second thing then is to sit back and say, how do I make sure that financially I'm not burdened? That means that you need to make some priorities. And some priorities might be certain types of insurance. If you're the breadwinner in the family and people are reliant on you, then things like long-term disability might be something you get that will pay for the bills during the time that you're trying to go through this situation.

And I have a long-term care long-term disability policy that paid me twice, once when I herniated dis some back. And when I did that bike accident, that allowed me to just focus on healing and the bills were paid. And if you're working for a company, you probably have short-term disability with a company, and they're certainly state disability, but I'm talking about a private long-term disability plan.

So if you're disabled more than 90 days or something, it will pay and then you don't have the pressure of it. So there, there are some ways to ensure it. But then the other side of it is to make investing a priority too many people right now, what they're doing, and it's, I get it. I don't wanna be insensitive to the cost of life today, whatever our financial situation is, people say, I got money issues.

I say, no, no one has money issues. No one. And they go, you haven't seen my bank account. But no, what you have is money symptoms. And they're symptoms of choices. They're symptoms of decisions. There's symptoms of behaviors and habits from the past. And as much as that's confronting, it should be empowering because that means that if we just make different choices, habits and behaviors, our future's different.

So if we want a different future, we have to make different choices. It's not about how much you make, it's how much you can get working for you. In fact, there was a study of 10,000 millionaires, 79% of them first generation. They didn't inherit it, it wasn't gifted. They didn't win it in a lottery. They created it in their lifetime, 79%, eight outta 10, 30% of them never made much more than a hundred thousand dollars.

So it's not the magnitude of what you make, it's what you do with it. And what you do with it is your choices, your decisions and behaviors. And so what we really need to start to do is prioritize. Investing and our future, which is really meaning prioritizing our peace of mind by giving to our future as a priority and not our current lifestyle.

Because in a week's time, the new outfit you bought, the new technology you bought, the benefits of it are gone. But the peace that you have, knowing that if something happens, you're okay, or your loved ones are okay, that's long lasting. And the only way that happens is that we flip it on its head and we say, I'm gonna make investing a priority.

I'm gonna allocate a percentage of my income as a priority to start building my money machine. So I have a life of choice.

[00:49:58] Christa Biegler, RD: Because Mel, you're a fan, you're a proponent of enjoying life and not like skipping your coffees. It's just a matter of have you prioritized if you say you want to be ready for the unexpected, have you prioritized that first before I think that's what you're saying, right?

It's have I considered that piece first or have I been setting it aside and been saying maybe later? And in reality, like I don't have a long-term disability policy and I'm putting it on my list to do, I wonder at what age you thought, man, I should do that when that was highlighted.

[00:50:31] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: So here's the interesting thing.

I never thought about doing it. But at one point when I had the firm, the CPA firm, and I was a partner, I had partners. And when you have partners, one of the challenges is what happens. this is a whole different discussion, but when you have partners, you have to deal with the DS of partnership.

What happens if they have a desire to retire? What happens if there's a divorce? What happens if there's a disability? What happens if there's a death? Okay? What happens if there's dissatisfaction? Those are the five Ds. As part of this partnership they said we can ensure the death and we can ensure the disability.

So I got this policy back in the day, and I'm talking about going back to 1996. That's how long I've had this policy, but it was put in place before I knew and understood the power of it. Back then, and then I've just carried it because I've seen the use of it and paying for it every month. So it wasn't like the light bulb went on me, it was more like we had a senior partner at one point and we were trying to preserve the business and as part of that, we put these insurance policies in place to cover it.

And when we went our separate ways, we took our policies with us. And that's how it, so I'd love to say I was a genius and I thought about it, but I really wasn't. But in hindsight, it's something that I recommend a lot. There's more likelihood of someone being disabled than there is dying.

all gonna die. So there, there's a hundred percent likelihood we're gonna die. But there's a high likelihood that there's a disability prior to that.

[00:52:19] Christa Biegler, RD: And death, insurance around death protects your loved ones, whereas disability insurance protects your own assets.

Yeah. And I think your examples brought it to life really quickly. It was like, actually I just had a mountain biking accident. That could have happened to me at any moment, right? Yeah. Or what was the other one? There was something else that was the,

[00:52:37] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: I herniated three discs in my back.

[00:52:39] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. That could happen at any time, at absolutely any time. So I wouldn't have even thought that's not the image that comes to mind when I hear long term disability policy. I just think oh, it's if I'm permanently incapacitated.

[00:52:51] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: you're right.

But let's just look at both of these. One took about seven months of recuperation. The other one took a bit longer, nine to 12 months. And so it wasn't permanent, it was longer. Long-term, meaning more than 90 days. Yeah. But even if it was four months, they would've paid me for 30 days of it.

[00:53:12] Christa Biegler, RD: And when you had cancer, that wouldn't have counted as a disability.

So how did that work? Was there any just health insurance? I didn't trigger it.

[00:53:19] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: Yeah. I didn't trigger it with the cancer because it was gonna be a little harder to do because their argument would've been yes, you're going through treatments, but in between the treatments you could still work.

And because the disability policy, so this is getting into the nitty gritty. There's two kinds of disability policy, there's a a more general one, and then there's one that's called an own occupation. And the own occupation is a very narrow definition. And so what that means is that if you can't do the work that you have in that own occupation.

Then they'll pay you out even if you can make a billion dollars doing something else, but in a more regular disability policy if you're making a million dollars or a hundred thousand dollars in this function. But you can't do that function anymore. But you can make a hundred thousand over here.

They're not paying you out because you've replaced the income. And so I had an own occupation, but I was still mobile. I was still able, and so it would've been challenging. And what happened was, it was a five year battle for the cancer, but I was still doing things and I needed a 90 day wait period, so it would've been hard to trigger and I just didn't trigger it.

And would I have pushed it if I didn't have the money machine in place? Yes, I probably would've pushed it when I, but I had the structure in place and the finances in place to be able to go. Okay. It's not what we wanted to do, but let's flip the switch on and have it pay for our lifestyle. So I didn't have the necessity to try and work the insurance company to get them to pay.

[00:55:01] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. No, that's great. How much do you spend on long-term disability insurance per year, do you think? Ill tell you probably had a good deal. I'll tell because you started a long time ago.

[00:55:10] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: Yeah. But it's still not, it's not cheap. I paid $400 a month.

[00:55:15] Christa Biegler, RD: Oof. That was pretty bad. That's a health insurance used to cost once upon a time.

[00:55:19] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: Yeah. Once upon a time. But I paid $400 a month. It has paid me over six figures twice. And if there's a disability that I trigger, it pays me multiple five figures a month until I die.

[00:55:33] Christa Biegler, RD: Interesting. Yeah.

[00:55:35] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: So you're playing a probability game.

[00:55:37] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, for sure. Always, yeah. She was trying to decide how much to invest in insurance.

Sometimes. 'cause it can be.

[00:55:43] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: You don't need it all the time. At some point, things will build to a point where you're self-insured. Like I have no life insurance. I had term life insurance for a while, but we don't need it. We don't need it for estate taxes.

We don't need it for anything because we have the machine. Now, if we didn't, I need the life insurance because I wanna make sure that my wife is taken care of, my son and everything. Now, the life insurance isn't, is not meant to make people rich. It's meant to replace the income that they are reliant on so they can live.

Yeah. And so at some point we decided we weren't gonna renew the life insurance. What happened was. It was expiring and I needed to renew it and I was in the middle of the cancer, so they were gonna go, yeah, we can't renew you. And then you have to wait five years beyond five years. And by that time I go, they're gonna tell me I'm too old.

At that point, yeah, the cancer's passed you, but you're too old. So we didn't need it. So we made a choice to self-insure.

[00:56:45] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Concepts I haven't even really thought about. And I was thinking about, yeah, if you had cancer at age 45, of course you're well, or even 55 really before the age of drawing from retirement.

Yeah. You have options to draw the principle that you put in. But otherwise you would've been relying on other types of investments or brokerage or savings, et cetera, that you had been drawing from.

[00:57:10] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: it gets into, deeper into the things of if you're building the machine, you wanna do it in buckets, because if we need access to money prior to retirement age, we need it in a bucket that isn't gonna penalize for it.

Yeah. For taking it. So that's where we get the tax free bucket. We get the tax deferred bucket and we get the taxable bucket and we just put money. So you got the Roth, you got your traditional retirement accounts, and then you have your traditional brokerage account, and we're allocating and moving things around.

So if I need to bridge the time between. Accessing retirement funds without penalty. And today I have a place to go without penalty and without incurring a huge tax.

[00:57:49] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, that's helpful. What are the tax free buckets if someone wanted to withdraw before 59 and a half. , And then I'll wrap up.

[00:57:57] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: So before 59 and a half, so there's two things. One, a tax free back bucket is pretty much only the Roth. Okay. So you got Roth ira and you have Roth 401k. So you put the money in, it'll grow tax free at 59 and a half. You can take the money out. You can start taking the money out.

You don't pay a diamond tax on it because you didn't get a deduction for it, and you don't pay a time in tax on the growth. It is a wonderful account. Okay, now there, it's so good that they limit how much you can put in and they limit your income. If you make too much, you don't qualify. But they now allow 4 0 1 Ks to have a Roth element to it.

So not only do you bypass the income there, so the income is I dunno, 160, don't quote me on that. A thousand for a single 240 for a married. So if your income's above that, you can't put it into Roth ira, but if they have a Roth 401k at the company, you can put it in there and it doesn't matter what the income is.

And instead of being limited to 7,000 or $8,000, you can go to 23 or 30,000. So that's the only thing that is a tax free bucket. Okay? But you cannot draw the money out before 59 and a half in total. The only thing you can draw out of that account prior to 59 and a half is the amount you put in.

All the growth has to wait. Otherwise you pay penalties on it. The other way to do it is in your traditional brokerage account, you have a Schwab account, a Vanguard or a, fidelity account and you're putting money into a traditional brokerage account and you have investments there. And if you need to access that money, you can access it any time.

And the only tax you'll pay is when you sell the investment, you'll pay the capital gains tax on it. And if it's held for more than a year, you'll pay a maximum. Forgetting state taxes for a moment, you'll pay a maximum of 20%. Versus, our individual rates can hit 35% or more. And so you still will pay some tax on it, but it's at a different tax rate.

It'll be at capital gains rate if you held it for more than a year.

[01:00:04] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. And then there's a whole lot of other details, right? Oh yeah. Ladders and all kinds of things. And that's where it's once you once are way zoomed out and we've addressed the zoomed out thing, then we can zoom in, right? Yeah. Okay. So much to talk about in that kind of conversation, but hopefully our listeners found it so helpful to hear those really fun stories because, even for me, I thought, oh, long-term disability I wouldn't have thought about it for a mal biking accident. So helpful. Mel, where can people find you online got?

[01:00:34] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: So the two primary places that I play first is my YouTube channel. We are, we've, we do a lot there. I do a, I do two recorded shows, a week there, and I do a live show, a live stream show every week. So there's plenty of content there. I answer questions so people submit questions and everything.

YouTube, Instagram under Mel Abraham nine, you can access all of that stuff through my website@melabraham.com. And then my book, which is Building Your Money Machine. If you go to your money machine book.com, you can order the book from Amazon. You can get a bunch of free training and other resources that go along with it there.

[01:01:11] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. And I have loved that book very much mel, thank you for making this topic so easy to digest. I personally think, I think that, I'm sure your life's work is like sitting around thinking of an analogy. The metaphors to make this easier for those of us whose brain doesn't always work around it.

But I appreciate that. I'm a lover of analogies and metaphors. That's probably why I love your work. You do a great job of empowering around money. And so if you wanted to leave people with one kind of empowering statement in a topic that is so often riddled with fear, what do you think you would wanna leave people with?

[01:01:45] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: I think that the biggest thing I wanna leave people with is the reality is that the gift in life is actually you. And we get so caught up in stuff and other things. But the real gift is finding a path to bringing the full you to the world, to nurture that gift that you are given here.

And to use the finances. To build the finances. So you have the choice to nurture the gift so we can get to those last days of our life, those last moments of our life, and know consciously and unconsciously that we lived it fully and we did it our way, that we did it in alignment with our values, our vision, and congruent with what we were put here to do.

And that we get a chance to take the gift that we were given at birth and nurture through our life, and that we get a chance to look back at the people we love and hand them the gift and say, it's yours to take it from here. And then we walk away knowing that we lived it fully. That's a rich life.

[01:02:47] Christa Biegler, RD: I love that.

Thank you. Because I missed the question about a rich life versus a wealthy life or whatnot. So I appreciate you so much for coming on today and all that you shared and all of the beautiful stories. So thank you so much.

[01:02:59] Mel Abraham, CPA, CVA, ASA: Oh my God. Thanks for having me.