Five Behaviors To Build Wealth

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five ingredients to build wealth
Anyone can get rich. You don’t have to be a genius, and you don’t have to be lucky. People who build wealth make certain decisions and practice certain skills – none of which are difficult or complicated. You can do it, too.

By practicing these five simple ingredients you can build real wealth. Let’s take a look at each one.

Get to Work an Hour Early

You have to give yourself an edge over everyone else. The best way I know to do that is to get to work early. By getting to work early, you can do all the little things that put you ahead of the pack. You can make extra contacts, learn useful skills, take time to write an impressive memo, polish off a report, etc. There’s no better time to collect your thoughts and plan your day than early in the morning when the office is quiet. And if you do it right, it will be the most productive part of your day. Start it with your weekly to-do list. On a sheet of paper, jot down anything you need to get done. Make sure you give primary attention to your top goal that day, and get it done. Use your extra time to get at least one positive thing done before you start doing all the “regular” things. The “regular” things will give you a “regular” life. The extra things will give you all the extras – including the extra millions.

Develop and Perfect a Financially Valued Skill

To make more money than the person next to you, you have to be able to do something that is worth more money to someone else – your boss, your business, or your customers. Selling is a financially valued skill. So is producing profits. So is creating growth. Other skills – making things run smoothly, eliminating mistakes, balancing books, etc. – are certainly valuable to a business, but not as highly valued when it comes to dividing up the money pie.

What successful businesses mostly need – and value the most – are employees who stimulate sales, increase customer retention, boost customer spending, and bring in a bigger profit. The marketing jobs, sales jobs, and the merchandising jobs are the ones that most visibly contribute to the bottom line. You can add to the bottom line and become a financially valued employee or business owner by gradually developing sales, marketing, and profit-building skills. Study sales and marketing programs that are currently working. Learn from existing masters. Keep at it until you are confident you know how to create more wealth for your business.

Make an Above-Average Income

You don’t have to earn a ton of money to become a millionaire, but you do need a higher-than-average income. To get wealthy while you’re young enough to enjoy it, you need to make about $75,000 or more. If you are making less than $75,000 a year now, it’s almost certainly because you have not perfected a financially valued skill. Plying a financially valued skill toward a business you work for or a business you own (or both) will definitely produce wealth. Part of that wealth should go to you. If you’re an employee, ask for your share – ask for a raise, backed up by the results you’re producing.

Spend Less Than You Earn

It isn’t easy to make a lot of money, but it’s very, very easy to spend it. The book The Millionaire Next Door made and proved the point clearly: most millionaires become wealthy not by making a ton of money, but by saving and investing modest amounts over time. That’s precisely why I believe you can become wealthy when you earn as little as $75,000 a year. To make sure you spend less than you earn, use this powerful money-management trick. It’s something I began doing many years ago. It has allowed me to get richer in good times and bad, when my ideas were working and when they were not, when the economy boomed and when it stalled.

One day, I took out a sheet of paper and tallied up my net worth. Despite earning $50,000 more than I had the previous year, my net worth was less than $10,000. I made myself a simple promise. I said that from then on I’d recalculate my net worth once a month and that I’d do everything I possibly could to make sure that each month’s total would be larger than the month before. It was as easy as that. I decided simply to get richer one month at a time.

By calculating my net worth, I saw that many of my habits (including some of my spending habits) were financially unwise. It also gave me, at times, the energy I needed to do something drastic – to start something new or end something that had gone wrong. Plus, it gave me an underlying determination to get a little bit richer every day. Don’t dismiss this little technique because it’s simple. All the best and most powerful things in life are simple. This will make a difference. Do it.

Invest Wisely – Creating a Second Income

Investing wisely means doing two things:

1) Create a second, active income, and keep it growing.
2) Invest your passive income in a sensible, conservative fashion.

Start out slowly and learning about a side business while you have the safe and steady income of your main job. By a “side business”, I mean something you can run on weekends or weekday evenings that won’t take your attention away from your full-time job. It should be something you enjoy and are willing to stick with. Start with your financially valued skill. You are using that to create your first income, and now use it to create the second. Just stick with your strengths and you’ll succeed.

Investing Your Second Income

Finally, take the extra money you make from your main business and the extra money from your side business (by extra, I mean the money you can’t reinvest in that business because you simply don’t need it) and put it into an investing program that is reliable, safe and productive.

So here’s what you’ll do:

1) Set your alarm an hour earlier.
2) Identify the financially valued skill you are going to develop.
3) Commit to spending less than you earn.
4) Think about a second stream of income.
5) Start now – don’t wait a year or two and wish you’d started today.

Article by Mark Sumpter

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