The 3 Ways To Become A Millionaire

How many millionaires are there in the United States? What If I told you that just in 2018, 700K people became millionaires. And now try to guess the total number, it's in millions, to be exact, there are over 11 million millionaires just here in the US! And now try to imagine how many millionaires are there worldwide! the world is actually filled with millionaires! Every single day, thousands of people join the club. However, If you give it a closer look, all millionaires can be divided into 3 categories, because, there are essentially 3 ways to become a self-made millionaire unless your dad will give you a small loan of a million-dollar, and that will be the fourth way. By the way, contrary to the popular belief. Only 20 percent of millionaires have inherited their wealth, the other 80 percent made it with their blood and sweat. In fact, out of 2604 billionaires worldwide, 56% of them are self-made. So even if you are not born with a silver spoon in your mouth, your chances to become one are reasonable. There are basically 3 financially paths you can take! Sidewalk, Slow lane, and The Fast lane!

1. Slow lane is get rich slow formula, or get rich old where you will be on a wheelchair! The Slow lane is your typical parent's advice: Go to school, get good grades, graduate, get a good job, save 10%, invest in the stock market, max your 401k, clip coupons…then, someday, when you are, oh, 65, maybe 70 years old, you will be rich. Congratulations, you have made it! The problem with the Slow lane is that you will have to sacrifice your entire life so that you can live your dream life when you are in a wheelchair. Which I don't really like because once you are old, you can’t get back young again, and Time is out of your hands. So as your income, you can’t double it or triple it every year, try asking your boss for a 100 percent raise, you will most likely get fired! So, If you decide to take this path, remember, you are not going to drive that Ferrari while you are young, you are not goanna travel and have adventures because it's quite difficult to do that when you are 70. You will live like a slave waiting for Friday to celebrate your freedom and then get back to slavery on Monday. If Buffet started investing when he was just 11 years and only made his first million by the age of 31. How long do you think it will take you to make even a million dollars when you haven’t even invested a single dime in the stock market yet and you are 25! Nonetheless, it’s probably the best strategy for most people.
Although you will have a boring mediocre life, you will have a financial plan that works! Even if it's not exciting. You will be a millionaire in 30 or 40 years. In fact, a considerable number of millionaires in the US have taken this path. It's safe, secure and guaranteed and better than the second option - The Sidewalk.

2. Sidewalker: The Sildewalkers are usually one step away from bankruptcy, because they are more bothered about living their dream life today and aren’t much into the future. They can even make millions of dollars but still, end up poor like a professional athlete or an actor. Your album fails, you get injured, and you get homeless and file for bankruptcy. Even if you have a prosperous carrier, chances that you will remain a millionaire after you retire are really low. 78% of NFL players are either bankrupt or under financial stress within 2 years of retirement. 60 percent of NBA players go bankrupt after 5 years of ending their career. Imagine making millions of dollars but still go broke. It sounds unbelievable, but that’s what happens when you decide to become a pro athlete. There isn't time for financial education, you have to work hard day and night to be at the top, and there will be people who are more talented than you or simply have better genetics. The numbers of athletes who end up making it to the pro level are less than 1 percent. While you are having the greatest years of your career, you get used to a certain lifestyle that’s completely taken care by your multimillion dollar salary, and once you retire its difficult to get back to an average life. So you go broke in few years. The numbers of athletes who build a sustainable business while making it to the top like Michael Jordan are an extremely small minority. And even those who end up earning 400 million dollars like Tyson did can still go absolutely broke! The worst part about it is that. With the rise of social media, everyone is taking the sidewalk. You pull out your phone and see how these people are driving ferries and living their dream lives. and You don't want to be left behind, You might be working hard, but whatever money you make, you spend it on the next great gadget, on the next trip so that you have something to post on your Instagram. On a more expensive car. Sidewalkers are trapped in such a lifestyle where they are driven by their urgent instant need for pleasure. Every dime you make will directly go to your car payment, clothes, whatever. You are not worried about the future because you think that someday, sometime in the future you will hit big. but you most probably won't. So it's not the wisest option to take!

3. Fast lane And then there is the Fast lane. The whole idea behind it is that, instead of sacrificing today for tomorrow or tomorrow for today. Get out and provide value to as many people as possible. You see most of us are consumers because to provide value, you need to have something first. And most people do not take the time and effort to build themselves up to a point where they will have something to give. Mark Zuckerberg became a billionaire in just a few years because he provided a platform to millions of people to socialize. If you give it a closer a look, the purpose of any business is to give value in different ways, the store besides your house provides you with the groceries, the restaurant downside the road provides you with the food. Your favorite YouTuber provides you with content that you find interesting. Amazon saves you the time and makes shopping much easier! And what makes this path much more appealing than the other two, There is no limit to how much you can make! You want to triple your income in the next 3 month, It's under your control! You don't have to beg your boss for a 5 percent raise like the Slowlaners do. And you are not scarifying your future like the sidewalks do because Fastlaners take that money and buy real estate, patents, businesses that will keep raising their income.
The challenge with the Fastlane is that you will have to spend first an enormous amount of time to create something that will truly bring value to a substantial number of people. Of course, it's not easy, and most people would never be able to do that, because the other path looks more appealing since that’s what being rich means to most people. But  “When you finance an $80,000 Mercedes Benz over six years because that's all you could afford, that isn't wealth, but the impersonation of wealth. You are Fooling yourself. It still blows my mind how people travel while not having even a thousand dollars in their savings account. Wealth isn't embodied in a car or clothes but in the freedom to know that you can buy it. That's why it's easy to find self-made not only millionaire but billionaires who are cheap because they know that they have the freedom to afford pretty much anything anytime they want. On the other side, you have people who haven't paid their students loans yet but are completely comfortable to take another loan to show everyone how successful they are. People don’t choose to be poor.
They make poor decisions that slowly lead them into that direction. Conclusion  So here are the 3 financial roads that you can take to become a millionaire. Of course, the Fastlane is the most rewarding one where you can become a millionaire in just a few years and stay one for the rest of your life., but its also the most challenging one, which is why most people won't take it, but being a Sidewalker isn't sustainable, that's why the Slowlane is probably the best option for most people. This Article is based on a book, the Millionaire Fastlane by MJ Demarco, It's a brilliant read which I recommend to everyone. It's quite different from all other books on this subject.

Why The Rich End up Poor But The Wealthy Enjoy Life

Why The Rich End up Poor But The Wealthy Enjoy Life

In 1997 Robert Kiyosaki published a personal finance book called Rich Dad Poor Dad. The book instantly became a phenomenal success and in no time catapulted Kiyosaki to the world of fame. In one of his books he mentions that there is a disparity between being rich and being wealthy and he went on and said something surprising that the rich have lots of money but the wealthy don't worry about money. And I found this very interesting because I've always thought that the two go hand in glove that if you're rich then you're also wealthy and that if you're wealthy then you're probably living a very comfortable life. But this isn't always true, when I think about someone who's rich, I think about someone with a lot of money and I typically think about someone who's quite showy with their money.

They drive fancy cars and live in a fancy house they wear fancy clothes and eat at fancy restaurants. Growing up I wanted to be rich, I wanted to own a big house, live in a fancy neighbourhood, drive a luxury car and buy expensive clothes, I wanted to sit in the best seats at sporting events and travel the world any time I wished. Heck I wanted to go to Mars and I've got to be honest some of those things still sound good to me now.
Kiyosaki said the rich have lots of money but the wealthy don't worry about money. I thought about this for a while, the wealthy don't worry about money. Growing up I've lived in a relatively financially stable family, we're not rich but we're not poor either we're middle-class if you will. Both my parents work nine to five jobs and they work really hard to provide for me and my siblings somehow they've managed to pay for mine in my siblings tuition while at the same time making sure we have food to eat and a roof over our heads. I can't say things have always been rosy there have been months where money was a serious concern and we weren't sure whether they would manage to pay for all our tuition, bills, and expenses. I watched my parents struggle and I didn't ever want to live a life like that and when I read that statement the wealthy don't worry about money.

I thought to myself well that must be a really nice thing to have. Imagine never having to ever worry about money, who wouldn't want that? I want to be wealthy and rich so I decided to do a bit of digging to try and find out the difference you see having lots of money is nice and all but I believe not ever having to worry about money is even better. So after a bit of research this is what I found out and I think this might surprise you a lot. There actually is a difference between being rich and being wealthy. The simple difference between a rich person and a wealthy person is that a wealthy person has sustainable wealth, in other words a wealthy person will always be wealthy. Whereas someone who is merely rich will only be rich for a short period of time until the money runs out. I'm sure a lot of you have heard stories of rich actors, celebrities, professional athletes and so on who were once living fancy lifestyles with big houses, nice cars, expensive clothes and vacationing all over the world, but are now on the verge of financial bankruptcy because of poor financial skills and trying to sustain this kind of lifestyle for many years.

You've heard of the lottery winner who went to bed one night in debt and woke up the next day an instant millionaire, but due to poor financial management, ends back up where they started or in an even worse situation. So let's use Lucas as an example, Lucas is a surgeon with an annual income of $310,000 most of this income is earned from his work with only 5% coming from some investments a couple of his colleagues enticed him to invest in. By all accounts and standards, Lucas is a rich man, he has a big house, he's living in a good neighborhood, he has two luxury cars, one for himself and the other he bought for his wife. His children go to good private schools and he has membership in the local Country Club. So clearly Lucas has lots of money at his disposal, so he uses this money to make sure he fits in and looks the part of a respectable surgeon in society, obviously Lucas has expenses, as does every other person, he has a mortgage to pay, he has transportation costs, he has to feed his young family, he has to pay health insurance, he has to pay taxes, he has to put aside money for his kid's college fund and he has to buy another expensive anniversary gift this year. Did I mention the annual vacation he takes with his family? When you subtract these expenditures from his annual income, then remove the savings and the little investments he makes here and there, Lucas is not left with much. In total Lucas spends about $21,500 every month on expenditures and he has savings amounting to $43,500 in his bank account. And so since wealth is defined as the status of an individual's financial resources to sustain the individual's way of living, for a long period of time even if the individual stops working.

In essence, this is money coming in on a consistent basis that's able to sustain your current standard of living for many years. This means that should Lucas lose his job today together with all the benefits accruing from it, Lucas should be able to feed his family for only two months. After which he'll immediately need to find an alternative source of income. Lucas is rich, he's not wealthy. Now let's look at an example of a wealthy person. Kiyosaki said that while the rich have lots of money the wealthy don't really have to worry about money. Let's look at Bill Gates. Bill Gates is one of the richest men in the world he's a business magnate, an investor, a philanthropist, a humanitarian and an author. As of early 2018, Bill Gates was worth a mammoth $97.4 Billion Dollars. It's estimated that every second, Bill Gates earns about one hundred and thirty dollars, which translates to around $78,000 every minute. This is to say that in an hour bill makes more money than Lucas earns after a whole year of working, yet Lucas is considered rich. Being wealthy is essentially being financially free.

This means that you don't live paycheck to paycheck and you don't necessarily need to make any more money over a long period of time, because you have enough money saved or passive income flowing in from your assets and investments to maintain your current lifestyle for the rest of your life. Bill Gates doesn't actively work for the $135 that he made this second or the almost $78,000 he will learn by the end of this video. This is passive income that he gets in his sleep when he is playing golf and when he is giving away four billion dollars annually to cause us that he cares about. Wealth is sustainable richness, basically a rich person who never runs out of money. If Lucas quits his job today, he will most likely get bumped into the middle-class. If Bill Gates decided to retire today and become a sedentary person who eats sleeps and eats again, he could maintain his current lifestyle for the next 213 years. But you don't necessarily need to have gates kind of money, or own a large business like Microsoft. As long as you have income flowing in that you're not directly working for, such that if you were to stop working today but you can still maintain your current standard of living, then you are considered wealthy.

Usually when you think of a rich person, you think of someone who buys both their wants and their needs. You know the $5,000 suit, the $3,000 watch, a luxury imported car, usually German made. The big house on the beach and so on. Just because someone exhibits these "Rich behavior’s" it doesn't mean that they have their personal finances in order, sometimes these people you consider rich are actually living paycheck to paycheck or drowning in debt. Many people who say I want to be rich aren't actually looking for financial security, what they want is the social status and prestige they associate with a million dollars Club. So now I pose this question to you, do you want to be rich or do you want to be wealthy? and if so how?