How to Get Rich Slowly

So you have been searching all your life for the magic bullet that is going to make you rich. Well ladies and gentlemen, there is no magic bullet, if you have read any of my other articles, you know how I feel about lotteries. There are allot of true isms that you hear throughout your life that are good advice and I will start with those. One, do what you love and the money will come. Two, Improve yourself constantly. Three, read, read and read some more. Four, do not get divorced. Five, do not buy a new car every five years, in fact, never buy new. Six, save at least ten percent of everything you earn and invest it. Seven, do not follow trends with your savings. Now to elaborate on those seven facts.

One, do what you love and the money will come. This has its limits, if you love to watch T.V. you are not going to make a living unless you have a degree in journalism and get really lucky as a critic. Thing about that is everyone is a critic and nobody likes one. The truth in this is that more people hate their jobs than those who love them. If you are happy at work, it shows and you will be rewarded. If you hate your job, that to will be noticed and you will be rewarded, usually with a pink slip. Have you ever been in a restaurant and it was obvious that the waitress hated her job? What kind of tip did you leave her? Not a very good one, I am sure. This is the most important thing that you can do, find something you love and stick with it. Another note on this same theme is do not job hop, if you are applying for a job and it is apparent that you change jobs every year or two, they will not want to invest in you. Employers will not want to invest the time and money to train you for a position if they think you will leave soon, it doesn't matter if you are the best at what you do.

On another point of tip number one, you will never get rich working for someone else. There are very few employers that are willing to pay any more than they have to. One of the things about America is that the system is designed to keep you in debt and in need of the benefits supplied by employers. If you work hard, figure out the industry that your in and you can save or find the money to invest, start your own business. Point of fact: almost eighty percent of all small business fail in the first year. Usually that failure is due to one of two things, one your business plan isn't flexible enough to adapt to the market or you run our of capitol. Lack of capitol is the most common reason for failure because the person didn't believe enough in themselves and didn't borrow enough for fear of failure or they did not do their homework and had no idea what it would cost to reach profitability. Another common cause of failure is not knowing the market well enough, this could be due to bad location or failure advertise. The best thing I can tell you about this is to never take on a partner unless you are ready to hate this person for the rest of your life. For every one partnership that works, there are forty horror stories. Use your best judgment, however, if you are taking on a partner for funds you are sure to regret it.

Two, Improve yourself constantly. This is the same as three. Read a self-help or some type of self-improvement book every time you finish one. Read everything you can get your hands on that is relevant to your industry. If you have a degree, keep up to date on current changes that could make you obsolete. If you don't have a degree and are self educated, work on getting one. You will never get anywhere without education. This isn't always true, take a look at Bill Gates. He got lucky and I bet if you asked him, he would say that you should get an education. If you don't want to spend all of your extra time on education, take night classes that are not credited. Whatever you do, never quit learning. I was once told by a very wise man that, "you can learn something from everyone, whether you like them or not." The real wisdom in this is that you can learn from a bum as well as a professor. Take time to learn from everything and everyone. If you have made it through a day without learning something, you have wasted that day. Remember, you only get so many of them.

Four, do not get divorced. If you decide that you must get married, that is good. If you have kids as well, then that is even better. The point of this one is that divorce will hamper your ability to make and save money more than any other life experience. If I could go back in time, I would have done everything possible to make my first marriage work. Between my first divorce and having a child out of wed-lock has cost me more than a quarter of a million dollars over the last twenty years. Sounds kinda high don't it? Really that figure is a low one due to low earnings. If you make any money at all, this is expensive. I once knew a man who divorced his wife and she kept the five kids. His child support was five hundred a week and his alimony was an additional three hundred a week. Once you have more than three kids they take fifty-one percent of your income. Even if you make two grand a week, this is gonna hurt.

Not to mention the fact that if you have your wife and kids with you, you will be a much happier person. Any man who looses his family may try to hide his misery by dating younger women and drinking and acting like a twenty-five year old. This is just covering up the pain and wearing away at your wealth. Since my son turned eight, I have told him that he shouldn't get married and have kids until he was educated and able to take care of yourself financially. This is the number one mistake made by young people today. They are in such a hurry to grow up that they get married and have kids before they can even support themselves. The cycle of teenage pregnancy is hard to break in a family once it gets started. My mother had my sister when she was nineteen. My sister and myself both had kids before we were twenty-one. Now to beat it all, I have a daughter who is seventeen and I found out this week that she is pregnant and planning a wedding next month. The boy she is planning on marrying is a good kid, but that is just it, he is still a kid. I think I have said enough.

Five, never buy a new car and don't replace your car every four or five years. If you buy a vehicle, buy one that has a few miles on it. Do not take the depreciation on a new car ever. When you buy a new car, the value drops ten to twenty percent the moment you drive it off the lot. Then when you do buy a vehicle, keep it at least ten years. They (no I don't know who they are) say that if you keep a car for ten years you will save an average of thirty thousand dollars. Now myself I am a very conservative person (cheap bastard according to wife) and I bought a ninety-six model truck in ninety-seven, I have had the truck ever since. It currently has 325,000 miles on it and still runs strong. Another trick to saving money on a vehicle is to buy one that will maintain its resale value. This means that if you buy a Kia, don't expect to sell it for top dollar ten years later. However, some vehicles keep their value over the long term better than others. This can be evaluated with either Kelly's Blue Book or through Consumer Reports.

Six, save at least ten percent of everything you make. Wish I had followed this advice when I was young, if I had, I could retire now. This is one of the hardest things to do on this list. If you want to do this and make it a regular habit, then you must treat it like a house payment with the idea that they are going to come and get you if you don't pay it. Make this the bill that you pay first, before you pay anything else. The reason that this is so hard to do is because there is always a use for the money. You might need to make your car payment or your washer might be broken. Thing is, you need an emergency fund that consists of at least three months of income in case something happens to you and you cannot work. This is another piece of advice that I wish I had taken. There is always something that needs fixed or replaced. This will always be the case and will never change. All that you can do about it is to live well below your means until you are caught up with your emergency and saving funds.

Seven, don't follow trends with your savings. The best example of this is the technology bubble that busted in ninety-nine. This happens over and over again to the gullible. The rich people don't gamble with their money on stuff like this unless they can afford to loose their investment. If your like the rest of us, you cannot afford to loose one dime. Your best bet for long term savings is mutual funds. The mutual fund market can be more than confusing. However, if you do your homework, you can put part in slow growth, part of it in aggressive growth and part in medium to slow growth. Depending on how long until you retire, you can decide on which of these funds is best for you. The one thing that you must look at is how often you are going to move your money. If you plan on putting it somewhere for a short period, the fees you accrue might eat up all of your gains. Read everything you can about this before investing as this is just a short article and I could write a book on this one subject alone.

If you decide to hire a broker, be careful that he is not going to be shifting your money in order to generate fees. A good test is to ask your broker about the Dow Jones and its growth, if he tells you that Diamonds (the name of an exchange traded fund, much like a mutual fund that invests in the Dow) gains twelve percent on average, he is telling you the truth, kinda. The truth about the Dow Jones industrial average is that it does gain about twelve percent over every ten year period. The thing is that once you adjust for inflation, you will only gain about seven percent. Not the best average, but it is a good slow growth fund. Then there is everything else (that is a huge generalization) that you can invest in. DO NOT put all of your money into mutual funds or exchange traded funds. Put part of it in bonds, (do your homework, there are more type of bonds than you can imagine) try to stay away from any investment that you don't understand. Keep some in Cd's, keep some in cash or in gold and silver. The best advice that I can give you about savings is do not invest in anything that you don't understand. If your broker tries to get you to invest in some new venture that your not sure about, then learn about it before you say yes or no. Do not trust anyone with your money. The horror stories out number the fairy tales.

This is about all I can tell you about getting rich. The one thing that I can add is, "take my advice, I am not using it." Funny how we can know what we should do that we don't. Myself, I have always had to learn everything the hard way. This advice is best for those first starting out in life. If you are like me and owe thousands upon thousands, have multiple judgments against you, have burned more bridges than you have built, or own thousands in child support, then you know that what I say is true. One note on judgments, protect yourself if you start a business, don't rely on partners or associates to do what they are supposed to do. Sweat the details and the big stuff will work itself out. Micro-manage anything that may destroy your future. If I had hired a lawyer instead of relying on an associate to have his lawyer take care of it, I wouldn't have a judgment against me. The associate had his lawyer take care of himself without regard to me. Not a surprise, is it? But that isn't what this article is about. The point is that you have to look out for yourself, period.

The final piece of advice that I can give you is this. You reap what you sow. If you give, it will return to you ten times over. Whether you tithe to your church, give to a homeless shelter. Whether it is money or time, give, give and give some more. This will not only help to make you feel better about yourself, but it will help someone who truly needs it. You can help the children who are starving overseas. You can join the piece corps. Whatever you do, do not be selfish. It will only keep you bound to your possessions. Then there is this, your family is your greatest wealth. Know one ever dies wishing they had more money or property. When people die, they always wish that they had spent more time with their family. So, try to make giving, earning and living a family affair. You will be much happier in the long run. Oh, there is one more thing, there are people out there who charge good money to learn these exact principles. If you have one ounce of will power, you can do it without them.