How To Get Your First Million Dollar
Boost Your Profit Margin
A profit margin isn’t strictly reserved for businesses; it also applies to you. “By increasing the gap between what you earn and what you spend, you end up with a profit in exactly the same way a business earns a profit,” said J.D. Roth, founder of Get Rich Slowly. “This profit can then be used to pursue your long-term financial goals.”
To specifically reach a million bucks, you’ll need to boost your savings rate substantially more than the normal 5% to 15%, said Roth. He suggested saving half of your income, and noted that you’ll have to make hard choices of deferring present spending in exchange for future financial success. For two-income families, he suggested choosing to live on one income, and saving and investing the other salary.
Start With $10 Million
“Start with $10 million” is actually a joke, and it reflects how our brains tend to trick us into doing the wrong thing when investing. The best way to circumvent our “inferior mental angels” is to learn about investing, create a plan and stick with it.
Our psychology often works against us, said Kirk Chisholm, principal at Innovative Advisory Group. It’s not difficult to make a million with investing — if you start young enough and avoid psychological pitfalls, such as following the crowd.
Avoid trading in and out of your investments. Create a sound investing plan, invest through thick and thin, and over time you can become a millionaire. Those who buy and sell more frequently tend to underperform compared to those who buy and hold, according to Vanguard Research.
Turn Your Passion Into a Business
Passion alone won’t make your first million. There’s no substitute for luck and flexibility. “Find something you are truly passionate about, become the authority and make a business out of it,” said Joseph Carbone, wealth advisor at Focus Planning Group. “Not only will you be happy, but you probably will be very successful.”
The Chipotle story illustrates this. After finishing culinary school in 1993, Chipotle founder Steve Ells was excited about starting a fine-dining restaurant. Lacking funds for the upscale place, he took a small loan from his father and opened his first Chipotle, to raise money for his exclusive restaurant. After selling 1,000 burritos in the first month, his passion for cooking veered from a high-end restaurant into a successful path to wealth, with the popular Chipotle Mexican Grill restaurant chain.
Furthermore, expect to fail along the way. Don’t be surprised if there are some bumps along the way before hitting that million-dollar idea
Invest Early
Getting rich can be a matter of mathematics. It’s well documented that investing in the stock market over many years, reinvesting your dividends and letting that money grow and compound can make you a millionaire. But it’s also a matter of knowing how much to invest, in what types of mutual funds and for how long.
You can find out how much you need to invest, for how long and at what return with a simple calculator. Todd Tresidder, former hedge fund manager and owner of wealth-building website Financial Mentor, developed a calculator to help with this. For example, you can calculate that if you invest $500 per month in a diversified stock market index fund — such as the Fidelity Total Market Index Fund — and earn an average 7 percent return — assuming a 2 percent inflation rate — you will be a millionaire in 36 years.
If Henry starts at age 25, by age 61, he’ll be a millionaire. If he starts later, he’ll need to save and invest more. If Henry chooses lower-return investments, such as money market funds or certificates of deposit (CD), he’ll have to save thousands of dollars more to compensate for those investments’ lower annual rates of return.
Be Patient
Regardless of the path you choose to get rich, it will take time. Investing in the stock market takes years for your money to grow and compound. Starting a business and nursing it to success doesn’t happen overnight. When it comes to the math of compounding returns, the greatest financial growth occurs in the later years.
“Making your first million will often take longer than making your second,” said Daniel Zajac, certified financial planner and partner at the Zajac Group. “Whether it’s through building a business, or years and years of saving, the first million is often the hardest. Stay committed, stay patient and keep your eyes focused on the goal.”
Don’t let the initial slow growth through compounding or the pitfalls of starting your own business thwart your long-term wealth aspirations. Fear and impatience can be your worst enemies when trying to make $1 million.
Invest In Real Estate
Investing in real estate has long been a path to wealth. However, it’s much easier to initially invest in real estate in lower-cost-of-living areas. If you live in San Francisco or New York City, you might want to invest in an up-and-coming area.
Paula Pant, owner of personal finance blog Afford Anything is building wealth with a real estate portfolio. Save enough to make a down payment on a rental property with a strong positive cash flow, she said. This means that after you pay the bills, there’s money left over to go into your bank account.
Over time, as you pay off the mortgage, you’ll ultimately own the property outright. Pant suggested starting with one property and repeating until you reach $1 million.
Adjust Your Lifestyle
Discard the myth that millionaires all spend with abandon and live high on the hog. In the book, “Millionaire Next Door,” award-winning authors Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko studied how individuals became rich, and their findings were surprising.
“Many people who live in expensive homes and drive luxury cars do not actually have much wealth,” they wrote. “Then, we discovered something even odder: Many people who have a great deal of wealth do not even live in upscale neighborhoods.”
The authors found that high salaries don’t necessarily translate into high net worth. In fact, Stanley and Danko found that those who accumulated the most wealth would be considered frugal themselves, and married to conservative spenders as well. The gap between income and spending is an asset for those learning how to get rich. Think about it realistically: You can’t build wealth if you spend all that you earn — or worse yet, spend more than you earn.
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