E6 - Busy Money vs. Working Money - How To Tell If Your Cash Is Actually Building Wealth

The treadmill gets more done than your bank account — and here’s why.

In this episode of Before the Returns, Jaden Zubal explores the difference between money that moves and money that works. Because just like running on a treadmill, constant motion doesn’t always mean progress.

You’ll learn how to identify when your money is simply cycling in and out — giving the illusion of activity — versus when it’s truly building momentum toward freedom.

💡 In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The “Treadmill Effect” — why activity isn’t the same as progress
• The difference between motion and momentum
• How to give every dollar a job — turning income into working capital
• Why investing in yourself often outperforms outside investments
• How the Four Pillars of Wealth (structure, control, cash flow, and movement) help you measure true progress

🔑 Key takeaway:

“Working money serves you. Busy money owns you.”
 “Busy money keeps you tired. Working money keeps you free.”

Learn more at www.jadenzubal.com | Follow @jadenzubal | Join the *Before the Returns Weekly* newsletter

📩 Questions or ideas? Email: jadenzubal.wealth@gmail.com

⚖️ Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational purposes only. It is not financial, tax, or legal advice. Always consult with a qualified professional before making financial decisions.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction: Money Movement vs. Progress
• 0:39 The Treadmill Effect: Movement Without Progress
• 1:22 Breaking the Rat Race Cycle
• 2:22 Motion vs. Momentum: Understanding the Difference
• 3:29 Working Money: Giving Every Dollar a Job
• 4:56 Focus Your Energy: Investing in What You Know
• 7:14 Investing in Yourself vs. Outside Investments
• 8:49 The Four Pillars: Questions to Ask Yourself
• 11:39 Working Money vs. Busy Money
• 12:35 Coordinated vs. Chaotic: Building Your System
• 15:09 Closing Thoughts: Purpose Over Activity

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

The treadmill gets more done than your bank account. Do you want to know how I know? When you step on a treadmill, even though you're not walking forward, you are still doing something. You're building endurance, right? You're working your body, you're exercising, you're helping create more longevity to your life. Now, when you open your bank account, what most of us see is we see money coming in, and we see money going out every month, right? We go to work, we create an income, and that income goes into our bank account. As we build the bank account up, very quickly expenses come in and pull the money back out. So we see a lot of money movement, but the bank account's not really changing. And the difference between our bodies walking on a treadmill and our bank accounts is our body actually gets some benefit from you walking on that treadmill, right? It benefits your body to do that non-movement, if you will, right? You're moving your body, but you're not moving the physical position that you're in. If we just move our bank accounts around all day, but we don't take some sort of physical movement with our money outside of our bank accounts, maybe, not a lot's happening, right? Your bank account is just gonna create this cycle of money in and out for the rest of your life. You know, have you ever heard of the rat race? Well, that's probably what's happening when you deal with your bank account. Hello and welcome to another episode of Before the Returns. I'm your host, Jaden Zuball, and today we are gonna talk about money movement and not just moving your money for the sake of moving it, but moving it with strategy and purpose. Okay, so I'm really gonna start this episode out by going over, you know, just a quick reminder of last week we talked about how wealthy families keep their money in motion, right? Money that never rests. But movement alone doesn't make you wealthy. So money can move constantly and still go nowhere. So let's spend a little bit of time and talk about how to tell if your money is actually working or if it's just looking busy. So most people's money is always moving. Income comes in, bills go out, right? We have our credit card payments, we have our house, our rent, our utilities, groceries, all these things. The list just seems to get bigger every day. And then in past episodes, we have talked about this thing called lifestyle creep. So even when you make more money, it doesn't always feel like you're making more money when you look at your bank account. In fact, I just had a conversation with somebody today about that. Um, they were talking about how they got a pretty significant pay raise through their job, but they don't recognize any additional income on their bank account. Uh so there's there's strategy and things to look at there and different ways to save, but we'll we'll get into more of that on future episodes as well. So the key point here is that activity isn't necessarily progress, right? Uh, just like I mentioned at the beginning of the episode, it's like running on a treadmill. You have lots of movement, but no distance. Okay, so money can move without meaning, and that's where most people get stuck. So let's talk about this thing I call working money. You know, working money is money with a purpose. It creates value, it generates cash flow, or it increases control. It doesn't just exist, but it actually performs. Okay. Um, when every dollar has a job, you move from motion to momentum. So let me repeat that. When every dollar has a job, you move from motion to momentum, right? Those two M's are really important. Motion isn't always helpful, but momentum is, right? Law of physics. So every dollar should have a role, not just a resting place. Okay, so I've worked with a lot of people over the years, and in that time period, I've I've seen people who have had incredible success, and I've watched others who have really struggled to build their success. And a common trend that I've seen in my most successful clients, the people that have just absolutely skyrocketed, is not so there's a balance here, and I gotta be careful about how I say this because it is important to diversify, don't get me wrong. And my most successful people do diversify. But what I've seen is that they focus their time and their energy and their efforts on the thing that they're really good at. And so typically this is some sort of business, or it could be, you know, a high-paying W-2 job, and they put their energy and their time into that and get really, really good at what they do. And again, I just had a conversation with a client a couple weeks ago about this where this is a younger gentleman who is trying to figure out how to invest, what to invest in, things to do right now. And I related to him a story of a really, really fantastic couple that I've worked with now for a few years. Uh, and this couple, you know, I recently, I say recent, but this was like eight, nine months ago, um, I went and visited them down in Houston, Texas. And I was a guest on their podcast. Okay, so I went to lunch with the guy. His name is Drew. And while we were at lunch, we were just talking about some of the things he's doing currently and what they're trying to accomplish. They have a very successful business, they've done very well with it. Um, and while we were talking about all of that, he asked about some of the real estate that I do. He knows I've invested in real estate for a long time, and he was curious if he should be putting more money in real estate. He had done a little bit, uh, I think he had just recently done a flip, actually. And he asked, you know, I've we've got some money on the sidelines. Should we take that money and put it into real estate? And my response was in their situation, I personally think a better fit actually is to take that same amount of money and put it back into their business. The reason I told him that is because across the board, everybody that I've ever worked with, if you take, let's just say you use$10,000 as an example here, if you take$10,000 and you put it into some sort of outside investment. So when I say outside investment, I mean something outside of yourself. So this could be the stock market, it could be crypto, it could be real estate, it could be any of that stuff. If you take that money and you put it into those things versus taking that same amount of money and putting it into your business and yourself, you know, nine times out of ten, you're gonna get a far better return on putting that money into yourself. Okay. Usually the return is so significant, it becomes incalculable because it just becomes this indefinite thing, right? It keeps going. And so since that point, they have continued to expand their business. They've done quite a bit actually, and their business every single year gets bigger and bigger. And I see that often with business owners. I work with another gentleman who has been doing assisted living facilities, and I've watched his business go from, you know, probably a few million dollars in, let's see, this would have been maybe 2021 to today, just a few years later, and they're pushing$30 million on that business, right? And it's because they chose to invest in the right things. They invested in the things that they understand, they invested in the things that they're good at. But then this ties back into that money movement, right? Moving money for the sake of moving money is not the right answer. Moving money for the sake of putting it in the right places and doing the right things with it is really what matters here. Okay, so you've heard me talk about on a couple of previous episodes now, these four different pillars of wealth, right? So we have structure, control, cash flow, and movement. Okay. I'm gonna revisit these just for a minute because if you really want to know whether your money's really working, just ask yourself these four questions. And they all tie back to these four pillars, okay? So on structure, do I know where my money is and how it moves? Okay, you've got to have structure behind how you're moving your money. You just don't you don't want to just be throwing it around and guessing on your investments and guessing on where you should put your money that month. Control. Can I access it when I need to without permission or penalty? Do you have the ability to access your money to solve problems? You know, I recently recorded a bonus episode of this podcast. Very short episode. We'll, I think we'll have that released here pretty quick. But if you want to understand control better, go back and listen to that episode. It will help give a clear understanding of why you need control. Because in that, I talk about a mistake that I caused that caused me to have to fork up some money. But if I don't have control, I'm not gonna have the ability to solve those kind of problems. Okay, so next is cash flow. So is it producing consistent income or value right now, or at a minimum when I actually need it? So that kind of ties back into the control thing. It's not that we have to have the cash flow immediately, but we've got to have the ability to either access the money or turn it into cash flow at a time when we need it. And then movement. Does it get reused or does it leave and never return? Right? So in a previous episode, we talked about this a little bit as well. It's that idea of climbing the staircase and then we get to the top, which is we saved up fifty thousand dollars or whatever it is we need for our next big investment or the next thing that we're doing. And if we just spend that money, we're basically just jumping off the staircase and we've got to start over, right? We've got to climb back up. It's like using a stair stepper at the gym. You can keep walking, you can walk as long as you want, and you're not going to actually go anywhere, right? So are we doing that? Or are we climbing the staircase and then we get to move to the second floor and the third floor, right? That those four questions. So again, do I know where my money is and how it moves? Can I access it when I need to without permission or penalty? Is it producing consistent income or value right now and at a minimum when I actually need it? And does it get reused or does it leave and never return? Right. Ask yourself those questions if you want to have a better understanding of where you're at today. Working money lives at the intersection of structure, control, cash flow, and movement. Okay, so your savings account might feel safe, but if it's not compounding or funding opportunity, it's resting. Right? Your investments might move a lot, but if they don't create control or cash flow, it's just motion. Remember that motion versus momentum? We want to create the second one, not just motion. So working money serves you, but busy money owns you. All right. So if you've been following this series, you've probably noticed the pattern. We've talked about structure, control, cash flow, and movement. And I'm gonna hit on that quite often. Those four pieces together are what separate families who hope for wealth from those who build it. When you have all four, your money stops being chaotic and starts being coordinated. It becomes a living system, one that feeds itself. So when you think of chaotic versus coordinated, right, this is um this is a common thing that I've come across. I've worked with a a lot of people who have said that you know, market ups and downs stress them out a lot. Or everything that's happening outside of their control is really causing a lot of financial stress. And it's understandable why that would be the case, right? If all of our money is put into our 401ks and our IRAs and it's sort of just on autopilot in the background, of course it's gonna stress us out if the markets are going up or down or what's happening. And it's going to become even more stressful the closer you get to that ultimate retirement date. If you know, hey, I want to retire when I'm 65, but you're 64 and the market crashes, that might change your plans for a little while. You're gonna rerun some numbers and say, okay, well, now I've got to work for an extra three or four or five years to let things get back on track. Because the market will correct. I'm certainly not trying to say that it's going to just kill you and you're done. It will correct, but the question is, can you wait that out? Do you have the ability to wait for that? So it's better if we can get away from that mentality of putting everything in the background and just letting it do what it does, right? The more control we have, the less chaos we're going to have. So money that works has direction and intention. It's again, it's not about activity, but it's about alignment. Ask yourself, is my money creating freedom or just keeping me busy? So again, go back to the stair stepper and the treadmill idea. You know, we can we can run on the treadmill, we can spend an hour on the stair stepper, and you're gonna get tired, right? But you're not necessarily, you're not going anywhere. You're still hanging out in the same gym that you were in an hour ago. Busy money is is going to be similar in that aspect because busy money will make you tired, but it's not gonna make you free. It's not helping you make progress towards that ultimate goal of financial freedom or that ultimate goal of traveling the world or whatever the thing is for you that's really, really exciting, um, you know, taking care of your kids in a way that you've always hoped to do, or whatever it might be. To do that, we can't just have busy money. We have to have money that actually is working. Okay, so next time we'll talk a little bit more about what it means to actually own your financial system, not rent it from a bank or an investment firm. Money is a tool, and purpose is the goal. If this helped you see your money differently, please share it with someone who's always moving but never feels ahead. Thanks for joining, and we'll see you next time on Before the Returns.