How To Make Your First Million

The question most people want to know about money and wealth is:

‘How do I create wealth? How can I become rich?’

The simplest answer to this question is twofold:

Spend less than you earn, or make more money than you spend. Simple, and the added good news is you can choose to either spend less than you earn, or make more money than you spend, or decide to do both. Whichever you choose will naturally create a surplus for you that will inevitably make you rich, even if you do nothing else.

Most people however find this a most boring way of creating wealth, and either never start or find it too boring to continue. This is often due to lack of information or education about what to do with the surplus money that is created.

In fact, the magic difference to where you are now and having enough money and wealth to meet your every need is in the word INVESTING! Investing your surplus money is the key to wealth. Working harder will not make you wealthy! Making more money will not make you wealthy!

You have to learn how to invest your money to become wealthy. First, create a surplus. Then invest the surplus.

One of the most important resources we have as human beings is our time. When we have both time and money, we can create the lifestyle of our dreams. Unfortunately, we have been conditioned into trading one for the other. When we continually work hard to earn more money, we trade our time for money thereby giving up, or deferring our lifestyle.

When we learn how to invest our surplus money, we start putting out our money to work for us, as opposed to us constantly working for our money. Over time, thanks to compound interest, the income from your investments will increase thereby giving you the freedom to work, or not to.

There are a number of different investment asset classes you can choose to invest in. You are better off choosing two, or three at the most. But start learning about one to start with until you have mastered it and have a good grounding in it. Then focus on another asset class. The reason for doing this is to ensure that you have a solid foundation for your wealth. By so doing, you also create multiple streams of income and your income is not dependent on just one source.

Learning about how best to invest your money can be a lot of fun, and definitely beats simply leaving your surplus cash in a savings account.

Following are a number of asset classes you can choose from.

• Stocks and Shares: income or capital, domestic or international
• Property / Real estate
• Bonds: corporate or government, high, medium or low yield
• Cash: money markets
• Natural resources: oil, timber, minerals
• Precious metals: Gold, silver, platinum
• Luxury collectibles: fine wine, art, classic automobiles
• Foreign currency
• Businesses

One of reasons why you need two or three different asset classes is that the best performing asset classes vary from year to year and is not easily predictable. Hence, having a mixture of different investments will help you meet your medium to long-term goals and reduce your overall risks in terms of the variability of returns for a given level of expected return.

I am a big fan of ‘The Three Pillars Of Wealth’, namely:

1. Stocks and Shares: income or capital, domestic or international
2. Property / Real estate
3. Businesses

You do not need a Harvard degree to master the basics of any of these. That’s why I focus my wealth mentoring on these three core areas.

Do not be deterred by small beginnings with your investments. I started investing with £100 per month and many people have started with less. Focus more on taking action, and starting early. Whichever asset class you choose to start investing your money in to create wealth, the one thing that is for sure is: The sooner you start the better off you will be in the long run.

The one thing most investors say to themselves, once they see their investment returns compound year after year is, ‘I wish I’d started sooner.’

Do not wait any longer. Start small, if you have to but start now!