How To Become A Millionaire – 5 Secrets Revealed
Want To Know What It Takes To Become A Successful Millionaire?
Key Ideas
- Discover the shocking truth behind what it takes to become a self-made millionaire.
- The simple, yet powerful shift that occurs when you open your world to new opportunities.
- How fear can hold you back from realizing your wealth potential.
Editor's Note: Jaime Tardy has interviewed more than 120 millionaires to learn the “secrets” for how to become a millionaire. She just published her new book, The Eventual Millionaire, which explains the most important insights from those interviews. In today's article, she reveals her 5 favorite tips to help you become a millionaire. Take it away Jaime…
It's amazing!
After interviewing more than 120 millionaires, I've found more similarities than differences in their stories.
The basic building blocks to wealth are always the same. All of these millionaires seem privy to the same wealth building “secrets”.
Below, I share 5 of my favorites tips so you can become a millionaire, too.
1. Make Your Life Happy Before Making a Million
One of the key things I learned during these many interviews is that you need to make your life happy FIRST.
That doesn't mean being rich or working towards a million. That means working on the other aspects of your life.
Everyone thinks the million will give us the lives we want. I can tell you after interviewing 120 millionaires, it doesn’t.
If you want an enjoyable life, it's easier to obtain that enjoyable life first – before making your first million.
It can still be about the money, but only after you choose your life.
“After you become a millionaire, you can give all of your money away because what's important is not the million dollars; what's important is the person you have become in the process of becoming a millionaire.”– Jim Rohn
Action Item: Evaluate your life and change one thing you're not happy with.
Take a good, hard look at your life. Certainly there are things you would want to change.
Choose one thing you’re not happy with – maybe it’s the lack of time you spend with friends and family, maybe it’s a lack of self-care.
Whatever it is, name it and find a way to change it so you can be happy. Changing just one thing will have a profound effect on your life as a whole.
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2. Control Your Money (Don’t Let It Control You)
Millionaires set a goal and then work toward it. There's never a nebulous plan for a million.
One of the first steps in that plan is often to get rid of your debts and take control. Debts have a nasty habit of controlling you and you have to take control of them before you can ever achieve bigger financial goals!
Next, work on your lifestyle. Figure out what work makes you happy by trying different things.
A helpful homework assignment is to write down what your perfect day would look like. This will give you an idea of what will truly make you happy.
As Harvard’s resident happiness professor, Tal Ben-Shahar told Yes Magazine.org:
“Happiness lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning. Whether at work or at home, the goal is to engage in activities that are both personally significant and enjoyable.”
Once you’ve made your work and life happy, NOW you can work on the big money.
Figure out what your real goal is, whether it’s to create a million dollar business or just have enough money to retire comfortably. Then start to work toward that goal.
Remember, your goal should be your own and not just a vague goal of having a certain amount of money.
It’s not all about the money and your goal should reflect that. While your final goal will definitely include money, it should also include other things important to YOU – to be the goal to achieve.
Action Item: Create a debt repayment plan and follow through with it.
List all of your debts and their minimum monthly payments. Figure out how much extra you can pay on the debt.
Put that extra amount toward the smallest debt or the debt with the highest interest rate and set them all on automatic monthly payments.
Once that first debt is repaid, take the entire amount you were paying on that first debt and add it to the minimum payment of the next debt to accelerate that payoff.
This is known as the debt snowball method and you can use this free calculator to make the math easy. Follow this plan until the debt is gone.
3. Take Opportunities
Millionaires constantly rise to meet any challenge presented to them.
When an opportunity falls into their lap, they take it, barreling through any obstacles that might be in the way.
Millionaires don’t sit around for weeks analyzing an opportunity or making excuses for why they can’t follow through with it.
They do whatever it takes to meet the challenge and do it well. This is an important trait of all millionaires and a mindset you should adopt if you want to become one.
The point is opportunities, especially the great ones, don't come very often.
Therefore, when an opportunity arises, you have to take it no matter what, providing you have the confidence to turn this opportunity into a win for yourself.
Action Item: Say yes to at least one new opportunity.
When a new opportunity arises, say yes, even if it’s scary or something you’ve never done.
This might be an invitation to speak at a conference, a guest blogging opportunity, or something else. No matter what it is, make it a point to say yes.
4. Overcome Your Excuses
Speaking of excuses, millionaires don’t let excuses hold them back from anything.
They realize every excuse has a solution and they work hard to find the solution to every excuse that may arise.
They take action, any action – no matter how small.
If you want something bad enough then you’ll undoubtedly find a way around any excuse you can come up with.
As they say, where there’s a will, there’s a way. Millionaires live by this code.
If you're someone who wishes to become a millionaire, then you have to live by this code, too.
You can start with small things and see whether you can get around excuses. The more you do it, the easier it will become.
This is a very important step because getting past excuses results in you becoming less and less indolent with time. This creates a strong work ethic and produces greater results.
Action Item: Identify one excuse you’ve been using as a crutch and take action to squash it.
Think about all the excuses you make in a day.
Do you ever say, “I don’t have time for…” or “I would do that, but…”?
These are excuses that don’t help you move forward. Identify one of your more frequent excuses and find a way to overcome it and make that thing happen.
If you feel you don’t have time for something, take action by prioritizing your time and making room for that one thing.
5. Millionaires Play a Bigger Game
Finally, I’ve noticed how things that seem huge or scary to me are old hat to millionaires.
This is because they take those scary steps in order to keep moving forward. The more we do things, the more normal they get.
For example, when I first started my site, I was a nervous wreck about interviewing millionaires.
But now that I’ve been doing it for so long, I’m totally used to it. It’s old hat for me. The same can be true for you with that thing you’re scared of doing.
When you think about the most famous millionaires, there are a few words that probably come to mind, and one of these words is usually fearless.
That's because when they have a fear of doing something, they're brave enough to overcome it, plow through it, and see their plan come to fruition.
Action Item: Do one thing you’ve been too scared to try and just do it.
What have you been putting off because you’re afraid of failing (or maybe afraid of succeeding)? Name it and put it on the calendar.
This gives you a goal and a deadline. Once you do it, you’ll wonder why you were ever afraid to do it in the first place.
How To Become A Millionaire – Summary
These are just 5 of the many ‘secrets’ revealed from more than 120 millionaire interviews I've conducted.
Sure, each millionaire story had its own unique twists and turns, but it was striking how the core of each story was more similar than different.
They shared characteristics and habits, and it's these commonalities I've distilled into my new book The Eventual Millionaire on Amazon.
The key is to implement these lessons in your life and see the positive changes they’ll make. That's why I provided you with specific action steps.
My goal is for you to learn how to become a millionaire, too.
Just take the first step, even if it’s scary. It’s totally worth it! Never lose sight of what’s important to you, and don’t forget it’s not all about the million bucks!
If you don’t believe me, then here's a quote from my interview with Todd Tresidder (you might be familiar with him):
“Once I became a millionaire it was this big ‘so what’. I mean, it led to one of the most unhappy periods in my life and I couldn’t really understand why. I just had so many false assumptions in my brain about what it was to be financially independent and what was the basis of happiness and what really leads to happiness and so it really sent me back kind of to ground zero and I started reworking this stuff.”
The goal is your happiness and life fulfillment. Learning how to become a millionaire is an excellent next step in that journey.
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My brother and I both have gone to church all our lives. Abraham from the bible was rich because God had blessed him. I was joking with my brother and ask him, why was Abraham so rich? He shook his head and I responded, because he didn’t eat all his sheep. Financial Independence is not about having a “million dollars”. But having enough to meet your standard of living. To be rich, you have to lower your standard of living so you can save up some ‘sheep’ to live off of. Many friends, though well paid, could have walked away from their jobs when an early out was offered except they were in bondage to their higher standard of living as could be seen by the nice vehicles, extravagant homes and their vacationing habits. I vacationed two and three weeks a year. They were all camping/fishing trips on the beach. It matches my personality well because I can’t imagine enjoying a vacation where I spend the night in a hotel room. My job had me traveling a lot. In the best of hotels that I got to stay in, the only real thing I appreciated was the free ‘cooked to order’ breakfast. I found for me that once a hotel was good enough, it didn’t matter how much better it got, I did not really appreciate it.
Todd, I have a question for you. When you calculated your net worth, did you use the present value of Social Security and pensions? If so, what terms did you use? i.e interest rate, end age and on what basis did you calculate them. I’m not sure when a man says he is a millionaire he should be including these income streams. But when you consider their present value it might give you a “wow’ moment to how much you are really worth and how much God has blessed you.
telsaar I don’t include Social Security. I consider it a nice bonus if I get it, but I don’t rely on it. As far as I’m concerned it is just another tax because there are no actual assets behind it. Just the taxing authority of the government. I prefer to treat my numbers conservatively that way I’m always pleasantly surprised when reality beats expectations.
Financialmentor telsaar
hi please help me with the millionaire calculator in rands..
That’s easy. Just multiply by the exchange rate of Rands for Dollars.
AzaniaLebotsa Financialmentor telsaar That’s easy. Just adjust your numbers for prevailing currency exchange rates. Hope that helps.
Nice topic and nice suggestion for how to become a millionaire. Who want to be millionaire not only know the trick of saving but also know how to spend where to invest and maximum how much return will get from his/her invested money. Saving may give you a sound financial status but investing money with proper strategy is the secret of developing your personal financial status.
Controlling your money, living below your mean and trying to avoid debt as much as you can. For me, these are just a simple tip that surely would give you a good result to be financially independent.
Marie @ My Personal Finance Journey Yes, Marie, those concepts are important for most wealth building paths, but most importantly for the paper asset or saving your way to wealth path. Jaime is talking more about the entrepreneurial or business path to wealth. Each asset category emphasizes different principles. Hope that helps clarify.
I really appreciate the ideas given, and I will now start to plan on how to control my finances from now on and I will start to evaluate my present situation to improve it. Thank you for the key points, it’s a big help.
Each asset category emphasizes different principles. Hope that helps clarify.