Becoming rich is one of the most common goals among the working class. But unfortunately, a lot of people have gotten the idea that you can’t become rich by working for someone else. This couldn’t be farther from the truth!
It is VERY possible to get rich by working for someone else as long as you use a little bit of discipline to consistently save and invest in safe investments throughout your career. By investing $100 a week for 35 years you will have $1,000,000 by the time you retire. Combine that with any home equity and becoming a millionaire working a 9 to 5 for someone else doesn’t have to be difficult.
Get Control Of Your Spending
Everywhere we go someone is showing us the next great thing, the one thing that “will change your life forever.” You are constantly being subjected to ads and different ways to spend your money. Then, even more, people trying to make it easier to spend money in the first place.
Getting your spending under control will take some time and it will be an adjustment but it’s entirely doable. The best spot to start is to look at what you have been spending and find out where you need to start adjusting.
Print Out Your Bank Statements
Print your bank statements and take a look. Add up all of your different expenses and categorize them. Add up everything for rent or your home, cars, food, etc. You will start to see some patterns. Little spending here and there but over a month they all add up to not having any money.
This is where you need to start, the small stuff. If you are going to Starbucks every day and spending $5 it might not seem like a lot but that’s $35 a week, $140 a month, and $1680 a year! That’s $1680 that you can use towards getting rich!
Going down the path to becoming rich requires sacrifice. You need to start with yourself because no one else will do it for you.
Reduce Or Eliminate Unnecessary Expenses
There are so many things that we spend money on all the time that are just hindering our success! Eating out all the time is expensive but it happens all the time. Buying Starbucks and other daily treats aren’t necessary. You can make a coffee or tea at home and bring it to work.
Think about the simple things you spend money on, like buying a new phone case every 2 weeks. Is that necessary? Or, would there be a better use for your money?
Add up and start saving your expenses you need to put that money to work for you.
Determine A Weekly Amount For You
Just because you need to save some money and not spend so much on unnecessary expenses doesn’t mean you can’t do things. You need to be fair to yourself with his part. I can’t tell you how much you should allow yourself but you can.
How much money do you think you can save and what would a comfortable “middle ground” look like in terms of the little things and saving money? Be fair and remember the more you save the faster you can grow your wealth!
If you think you can save $200 a month. Don’t make your play money $175 a month, that’s not good enough. There will be sacrifices and this is one of them. Saving money isn’t always easy but it is always necessary. If you find it hard just know it does get easier over time.
There may be an adjustment period but after a little while, it will feel natural for you to save more. I always try and do a 10%-20% rule. If you save 200 a month and can make your play money 10%-20% that’s a good plan. You will have some play money and still have sufficient funds left to start making it work for you.
Destroy Debt
Debt is holding millions of people back from becoming rich! It’s something most of us know and not too many of us have been able to conquer. That’s not you though! You can destroy your debt! It’s easier than you think.
By now you have printed your bank statements and added up your expenses. You know how much it costs to live every month and if you’re anything like me you were surprised how much extra you were spending on useless crap!
No really, there was a time when I was spending a lot more than I should have been but at some point getting your finances and expenses under control has to happen.
Consolidate As Much As Possible
Paying credit cards down is one of the hardest things people can try and do. If you have credit card debt that needs to be o your hit list right there at the top. Consolidating your debt in one payment (or as much as you can) is the best strategy assuming a few things happen in the process.
- You create ONE payment
- You only consolidate if it lowers the interest rate
- You don’t put it onto a mortgage
- You demand upon yourself to pay it off as fast as possible
Good options are lines of credit which you can usually get for prime plus 0.5%-2%. If the Prime rate is 3.5% then your interest rate would be between 4% and 5.5%. The average credit card is 19% so you will be saving a TON of money on interest, paying down your debt.
If you had $10,000 in debt on a credit card and through this process, you saved an extra $200/m minus your 10% fun money you would be paying $180 every month at 19%. It would take you 136 months or, 11 years 4 months to pay that off!
It would also cost you $13,897.57 in INTEREST over that time! Now if you had it consolidated into a line of credit with an interest rate of 5% it would take you 64 months or 5 years and 4 months. This will also lower the interest you pay to $1379.34.
| Amount of debt | Interest Rate | Payment | Time To Pay | Total Interest |
| $10,000 | 19% | $180 | 11Y 4M | $13,897.57 |
| $10,000 | 5% | $180 | 5Y 4M | $1379.34 |
Pay The Highest Interest First And Snowball The Payments
So what happens if you have debt that has a lower interest rate than your consolidation? Don’t mess with it!
Yes having one payment rather than several is better but the interest rate means more in this case. There is no need to spend more in interest just to have one payment. But, which should you pay off first?
The highest interest rate! Even if you have 4 payments you should pay the minimum on the lowest interest rate and dumb as much money as you can onto the highest interest debt.
So if you have 4 payments with corresponding interest rates of 3%, 6%, 8%, and 10% always start with the 10% interest or the highest.
Pay the minimum on the lower 3 interest rates and dump the rest onto the 10% interest debt. Then when the 10% has been paid off you move onto the next highest. Don’t change your payments just keep adding the payment from the last highest payment onto the next highest.
Ex.
| Interest Rate | Min Payment | Actual Payment ($180) | 10% gone | 8% gone |
| 10% | $10 | $140 | $0 | $0 |
| 8% | $15 | $15 | $155 ($140 + $15) | $0 |
| 6% | $15 | $15 | $15 | $170 ($155 + $15) |
| 3% | $10 | $10 | $10 | $10 |
See how the payments start to snowball the more you pay off? This will greatly increase your saving potential.
Create An Emergency Fund!
So you’re working on your debt and now you have that under control, it’s time to start an emergency fund! This is your safety net, the security you build just in case you actually have an emergency.
Only 40 percent of Americans would pay an unexpected $1,000 expense, such as a car repair or emergency room visit, from savings.
Via. Bankrate
That’s a staggering statistic! And believe me, you don’t want to be part of that 60%, perhaps you are right now and you need this plan to get out. That’s why it’s here, to help you most past the regular to the extraordinary. To, get your situation under control and start moving in the right direction.
Start saving your pennies and putting them away in an excellent savings account like a CIT Savings Account or a Money Market Account. You won’t make much in interest but your emergency fund is for emergencies not making money.
Start putting away money just like paying off your debt. Work to save up 3-6 months’ worth of expenses. Since you already figured out how much you need to cover your expenses every month. It may seem like a lot of money to save and just have it sit in your savings account but it’s a necessary safety net.
Imagine if something horrible happened right now. You get injured or laid off from work. How long could you afford your house? food? Vehicle?
If 60% of Americans would be in a bind with a $1000 emergency think about how many would be in really rough shape if they got laid off for a few months unexpectedly.
If you think about what that would be like, having 3-6 months of expenses saved in a CIT Savings Account is just smart finances.
How To Start Investing
Investing! The fun begins, and now you get to make your money work for you. Throughout all of this having a professional on your side is always a good idea. You can do a lot yourself but when it comes to investing Risk becomes a factor.
It is entirely possible to lose money investing. If you are investing smartly you can lower your risk by diversifying your investments and equal weighting. Equal weighting is investing the same amount into all areas of your portfolio so that one security or stock doesn’t have too much win/loss power in your portfolio.
If you have 5% of your money invested into 20 securities and one starts to go down in value you will only affect up to 5% of your money. But, if you have one security holding 30% of your portfolio and it goes down you can be losing considerable more money.
Of course, this works in reverse too, if that one security goes up you can make a lot more money too. But, you will be increasing your risk of losing money at the same time.
Become a true investor by starting at the beginning!
Make It Automatic
You have a few options to make things easier and automating all of the processes is one of the easiest and most effective.
You can start to automate even when paying down your debt too. Just go to your online banking and set up automatic payments for as much as possible. Since you already know how much you have available it makes it easy!
When it comes to your emergency fund and investing you do the same thing. Set up automatic transfers to your different accounts and you will be rich before you know it!
Investment Accounts
You have several options available to you for investing. The BEST thing for most people will be to either go and see an investment broker to help you get started or to set up a Robo Advisor that can help you invest and mitigate risk.
There are two main account types that you will want to be looking to using. A Roth IRA or a 401K for us here in Canada it’s a TFSA or an RRSP. The IRA and TFSA both provide tax-free money and a 401K and RRSP allow you to “write-off investments until you withdraw.
If you plan to use the TFSA or IRA you will be able to add money up to a certain amount and any withdraws are tax-free! So if you are adding every month and over years you end up with 1,000,000 in that account you won’t have to pay any taxes when you start to use that money for retirement!
With a 401k and RRSP, you WILL have to pay taxes when you withdraw but, you can write off any money you put into the account every year!
With the right strategy, you can be getting money back from the IRS or CRA every year AND have money that is growing to make you rich!
For a Great Robo Advisor with low fees have a look at Betterment. As one of the Top Robo Advisors available you can get started and know your money is secure!
The Timeline!
Everything about investing is a long game. The get rich quick schemes are just that, schemes. There is no such thing as a “Get Rich Quick” scheme.
If you want to be rich working for someone else or even working for yourself you need to be disciplined with your spending and investing for your future over the long run.
With the average return on the stock market being about 8% we can explore how long it will take to make $1,000,000 investing. Now, you need to understand that you may have a $1,000,000 net worth before this because if you are paying a mortgage or have vehicles those Assets count towards your Net Worth as well.
But for monetary investments, we can look at a couple of scenarios and you will see the long long-term commitment you need to start.
How To Speed Things Up!
Investing too slow? There’s a lot of things you can do to speed up the process but nothing will make the compounding any faster other than increasing your ROI (Return On Investment).
But you can increase your income to be able to invest more. Besides just saving money on your latte you can do more and start a side hustle!
You don’t need to start something crazy and spend 75 hours a week working on it you can take it slow and build up additional income over time. Remember, you have years to build your wealth, not days. I’ve included a few of the best side income you can start creating for additional income.
None of these are the “do surveys to be rich” time wasters. You can ACTUALLY make thousands of dollars doing any of these on the side with only a few hours of work at a time.
Write Books Or Courses
You may be surprised how much money you can make from books or courses. There is something you are good at or something you know about that others don’t. You already have enough knowledge in some area of your life to be able to grow this into another income source.
You pick the subject and write the course. Set it all up and you can sell it thousands of times! Not only that, you can then create MORE courses and sell those too.
There are millions of people in the world, that’s millions of opportunities to share your knowledge. For a walk-through of EXACTLY what to do and how to promote yourself, Twitter Cash Flow is your GO TO to make it happen!
From start to finish from picking a niche to marketing and selling you will have everything you need to make money!
Websites
Websites are one of the most lucrative tools in your arsenal! You can start a website RIGHT NOW with Bluehost for less than $4 a month and start building traffic. Place a few ads and BAM you are getting paid even while you’re at work!
Combined your website with a blog and you can get FREE traffic from multiple sources like Google, Pinterest, and other social media. If you have a book or course you can then sell it on your site and increase your sales EVEN MORE!
Setting up a site can be done in a few hours and is the basis of many hustles!
Pod (Print On Demand)
Print on Demand is an amazing opportunity for you to make money! Start with The Ultimate Zazzle Print-On-Demand Course and you can have a store set up and running within a couple of hours!
You make the designs for thousands of different products and when someone buys it Zazzle takes care of the rest. Zazzle prints it, ships it, and makes sure you get paid!
Simple, Clean, and of course easy!
Flipping
Flipping is an opportunity in every single city out there. You buy valuable items at a discount and then sell them on platforms like Facebook marketplace, eBay, Kijiji, Craigslist ETC.
You can even buy items from stores like Wal-Mart and then sell them for a profit on a lot of platforms. This is commonly called Retail Arbitrage. Getting the right items can make you thousands of dollars a month and most of the sales can be done on your couch while you watch TV!
Labour
Flipping isn’t the only thing out there. you can place free ads on sites like craigslist or Kijiji to do jobs for people. You can pick up scrap, clean areas out, cut down brush, mow lawns, anything they need.
Negotiate a price and go do some work for people to make a little extra cash!
Start Today!
Getting started is the hardest part! But once you start it will get easier and easier to save and start down the path towards becoming Rich!
Once you decide to start creating a second source of income will greatly speed up the process. Get the Zazzle Course and start designing your freedom right now!
It’s easier than you think!