Thursday, January 17, 2008

How to be a Millionaire?

Does it take money to make money? People always say that the rich will get richer and the poor gets poorer and the gap gets wider. Every country the Government are trying their best to bring the gap closer by giving subsidies to the poor, providing opportunities and assistance so that they can live better. But we still see poor people everywhere; from dirt poor (homeless) to the just-barely-make-it poor.

Have you ever pondered how the rich gets richer? Or how the poor gets poorer?

My personal opinion is that both questions have the same answer. Let’s not waste time in “poor getting poorer” but if you do have the time to survey the poor, you might get to learn from their mistakes and how not to make them. I feel it is better to learn first hand from the rich and find out how the rich gets richer.

As you can see from today’s stock market volatile situation and it is admittable that it is now not so easy to make money just from investing in stocks or the mutual fund as it is very closely related to the market trend.

Let’s learn from the already self-made millionaires of the world. What are they characteristics and their attitudes towards life:-

80% of the world’s millionaires are

Physically:

  • ordinary people (like you and me) who make it on their own and in his/her generation.
  • Their wealth is accumulated slowly and steadily.
  • Only 20% inherited their wealth and the rest never inherited a single cent.
  • Most wear inexpensive cloths, drive home-country made cars
  • About 50% of them still live in their first purchased house
  • 20% of them are retired, 55% self-employed, remainders are working professionals
  • All of these millionaires invested approximately 20% of their household income yearly.

Emotionally:

  • They have winning attitude
  • They always think positively
  • They are always questioning to better themselves
  • They are always on the look out for better and sure investment opportunities
  • They do not take risk; only calculated risk
  • They are the doer
  • They have the “never-say-die” way of life

After studying the physical and emotional aspect of self-made millionaires, the question we should pose to ourselves is “How can we be like them?” Majority of us spend more than we earn. We are always lamenting about not having enough and we are probably spending our next pay check before it even arrive, thus creating a debt situation.

We live beyond our means, we spend more than we earn while self-made millionaires do the opposite, they spend less than they earn.

They live beneath their means.

Very simply put: They simply spend less!!

And continuously looking for ways to make money out of the money they did not spend.

If you need to learn more, you may want to read some of the related posts in this blog under the category of “Wealth Creation”. Be warned – it is not easy to do what the millionaires do but it is simple. Have fun changing the way of life.

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