How to Get Rich: The Truth
If you are here to learn how to get rich quick, let me just tell you that it does not exist. I value your time enough to tell you at the beginning and not waste it by making you read the whole post. However if you would like to learn valuable information then you should keep on reading.
If you are one of my first Instagram followers, you probably remember my very first post. “Getting rich quick will make you poor, reverse engineer the process before.” Let us examine a couple of scenarios.
What about winning the lottery?
You have to be extremely lucky to get rich quickly. The easiest way for that is to win the lottery. But what are the chances of that? I am sure most of you are familiar with Mega Millions, well the chances of hitting the jackpot with that is 1 in 302,575,350 which comes out to 0.000000003%. Basically your chances are very slim, right? Of course you can buy a lottery ticket, once a week for a dollar, but is it really worth pouring your money into lottery tickets? Even if buying more tickets increases your chances, your chances are still very slim.
What about Bitcoin?
Let us look at another example. I am sure most of you are familiar with Bitcoin, some of you might be tired of hearing about it, and others might be investigating it right now. Well, if you have invested in Bitcoin at the very beginning and by very beginning I am talking about before it was even worth a dollar or two. If you have put a few hundred, maybe a few thousand dollar into it early on, maybe you got lucky and got rich. But did that really happen quickly? It took 9 years until it reached almost $20,000, from 2008 to 2017.
We now have more than 1500 coins, and a lot more to come. But what you should always remember is this: only one Google, only one Amazon, and only one Apple made it. Yes there might be a few other crypto currencies like Bitcoin, but your chances are very slim at making it big, just like how it was almost impossible to pick out Google, Amazon or Apple at the beginning. However, if you have researched a few of the 1500 plus coins for quite a while now, and you really think they have a future it might be worth investing. If you decide to invest, make sure you do a ton of research first, make sure the coins solve real world problems, and it has a use case scenario. Also, remember the dot com boom, after the crash it was really hard to pick out the internet stocks of the future.
OK, but “this one website” promises me to get rich quickly?
Now let’s examine those websites that are promising you millions of dollars very quickly. There are a lot of examples for these types of websites. Some of these are just total scams, and as soon as they have your money you will never hear from them again. But let us not examine scams here.
Let us look at something legit and something that actually makes sense. I am sure you are familiar with sites selling you information for $497, or $997. At least these seem to be the most familiar prices I have seen. These could be sites promising you multi-million dollar drop shipping stores, multi-million dollar importing business, growing Instagram and making $100,000 a month. I was almost sold on one of these $997 courses. I have listened to a couple of YouTube videos, which hype you up really well, and the next thing you notice is that you are pulling out your credit card to pay for their course. However, I was smart enough to think. I am a very frugal person, so it will take time until I pay for something. If you want to learn how to be frugal, and how the actual millionaires live, I highly suggest reading the book The Millionaire Next Door. This book took me by surprise, and it was the total opposite of what I thought it is going to be.
So going back to the YouTube videos I kept thinking about what I have heard in the videos. “We will help you build multi-million dollar businesses. We are making 6 figures a month. You can easily do this yourself. We will walk you through it step by step.” I was thinking to myself, if it is going so well for them, why are they wasting time teaching other people about it? Why not just create a second business, and make even more money? Also multi-million dollar businesses require a lot of time and effort. Why waste that time and effort on YouTube and Facebook, trying to convince people to buy their course.
Well let’s just say they sell the $997 course to 200 people out of the thousands of viewers or even millions of viewers. That comes out to almost $200,000. That is a nice 6 figure income if you ask me. If they do this on every other YouTube video that they upload, sooner than later they will have that multi-million dollar business. Selling the course becomes their multi-million dollar business. So, going back to my quote of “Getting rich quick will make you poor, reverse engineer the process before.” If I would have tried to get rich quickly and jumped into a couple of these seminars, more than likely it would have made me poor. But I have reverse engineered the process before, and you can easily do this as well.
Now that we have that out of the way let’s examine some steps we can take to get rich.
Educating yourself
In my honest opinion this is the most important step that you can take. Handling your finances is not thought in school. You have to learn it on your own. Better yet, if you have somebody teaching you that early on in your life, be thankful for them! The system teaches you to go to school and get educated. There is nothing wrong with that, however they should teach you financial education as well. Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki is an excellent book talking about this. If you have not read it yet, I highly recommend it as well.
Let’s look at how fast you can put yourself into a lifetime of debt. You move as far away as possible from your parents for your college years. That is the norm and that is suggested by your fellow classmates. It doesn’t matter if you live on Ramen Noodles, you will end up spending a lot of money throughout the years. Now let’s just say you are a guy and during college, or right out of college you meet the love of your life. You might want to buy a nice engagement ring, but you are fresh out of college and have no money, but it is so easy getting a loan, why not just get one? You start to realize that it will take some time for you to pay back these loans, and maybe it would be a good idea to start saving some money. So, instead of renting you buy a house together. But with both of your college loans, loan on the engagement ring, house mortgage, and maybe auto loans you are set up for the rest of your life to run the rat race.
Getting out of bad debt as soon as you can
Notice how I said bad debt? Yes, you read that right. There could be good debt and bad debt. What could be a good debt you might ask? Good debt could be debt that you take out to buy a rental property. After you successfully rent the property, the property is paying for itself, and it might also bring you a positive cash flow. In which case you are building up your wealth and you might be getting income to pay off your own mortgage sooner. As soon as you can get out of bad debt, college loans, house mortgage, auto loans etc. the better. Better yet try to minimize some of these debts. Try to get the most out of you college, but try to find the cheapest way possible, and do not set yourself up for the rat race. Instead of buying your dream home right away, maybe start with a starter home first.
Save and most important save to invest
Let’s say you were smart and you went to college the cheapest way possible. You don’t have a lot of loans, and even the ones that you have you pay it back fairly quick. House mortgages are a different story, since those could either be 15 or 30 year mortgages. But let’s say the house mortgage is the only one you have. Soon you realize you have more money to spend, and now you want to buy all the nice things you have been dreaming about. But first you should save at least 6 months’ worth of your income for emergency purposes. In case you get laid off of your job, and you can’t find a job quickly, at least you won’t lose your house. After that it is time to save to invest. The reason I say this, what is the point of saving and having that money sit in the bank? That money should be working for you and making you more money. Invest it wisely and let it grow.
Create multiple streams of income
The fastest way to grow your money is to reinvest your profit and create multiple sources of income. This could be done in a lot of different ways. You can get creative with these. If you have money that is not invested yet, you can do a down payment on a second house, as I mentioned before, better yet a down payment on a duplex, triplex, or fourplex. If you are good at playing musical instruments, or if you are good at something else, pick up a few hours of tutoring here and there. If you could find a good financial advisor at a reasonable price, maybe you can start investing in the stock market as well. Otherwise you can start learning about it on your own, and experiment with small investments. The idea is to create multiple sources of income.
After all, you get the idea of how getting rich quick does not exist. Be smart when the ideas of getting rich quick present themselves to you. I really hope you have learned something with this post, and it will help you make smarter decisions in your life. You don’t fully have to agree with everything that I have said. We are all different, we all think different, and that is the beauty of life. With that said, always thrive to be better. Never stop improving yourself. The more you learn the more you will earn. If you learn to make smart decisions early on in life it will pay off much quicker. I wish I have learned this at an earlier age, but it is never too late. As the saying goes, we learn until we die. The more you learn about getting rich, the sooner you will achieve it. Forget about getting rich quickly, and start working on getting rich the smart way. I have worked for every single thing that I have in my life, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. Also I wouldn’t want that first million dollar any other way! Until the next post….