“Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive.”
– John Kenneth Galbraith
If you aren’t yet a millionaire, this message is for you.
My fourth book with John Wiley & Sons is currently on the bookshelves. The title:Seven Years to Seven Figures: The Fast Track Plan to Becoming a Millionaire.
The title makes an audacious promise. I’m sure more than one critic will write it off as irresponsible. “The ordinary person can’t become a millionaire in seven years,” they’ll say. “It’s wrong to give people false hope.”
When the title was first suggested, I had the same thought. “Yes, this idea could get people motivated. But is it realistic?”
I thought about that question for some time, and concluded that I wouldn’t make any promises in the book that I couldn’t keep. My big promise – a seven-figure net worth in seven years or less – seemed a likely candidate for the chopping block. But when I mentioned my concern to my writing assistant, she asked, “How long did it take for you to make your first million?”
I thought about it and realized that it took me about two years to become a millionaire after I’d made up my mind to do it. What’s more, I realized that most of the people I’d mentored had also done it in less than seven years. For example:
Justin Ford, ETR’s real estate expert, went from bankruptcy to multimillionaire in six years.
Brad Solomon turned his dead-end accounting job into a $4 million fortune in six years.
Alan Silver built a profitable direct-response company and a multimillion-dollar net worth in five years.
Just about every wealthy person I know, in fact, accumulated their wealth in a relatively short period of time.
So I stuck with the title and embraced the challenge. Seven Years to Seven Figures would be a get-rich-quick book, to be sure, but it wouldn’t be based on some idea or investment program that I wanted to sell. It would be based, instead, on actual experience – mine and that of people I know who became wealthy in seven years or less.
I profile eight of those people in the book. If you read it – and I certainly hope you do – you’ll come to your own conclusions about how they did what they did. You can follow their stories and see exactly which strategies and techniques made them wealthier … and which made them poorer.
I also give you my interpretation of what did and didn’t work, so you can compare your conclusions with mine. And at the end of the book, I summarize what I think are the key principles of wealth building – the essential truths that underlie most of their stories.
Here’s a sneak preview.
Super-size Your Income
The stock market won’t get you wealthy in seven years, because stock investing gives you neither of the two things you need to accumulate money fast:
- A dramatically higher income than you are getting now.
- A dramatically higher rate of return than you are getting now.
Let’s talk about that first objective: supercharging your income:
You can’t become a millionaire in seven years with an average ($60,000) family income. Truthfully, if you want to develop a seven-figure net worth in seven years or less, you have to earn a lot more than $60,000 a year. At the very least, you need to double that. And you need to get to that $120,000+ level fast.
You can see how the people I profiled in Seven Years to Seven Figures did just that. When you get through reading their stories, it will be obvious that there are basically three ways to do it:
- Do what you’re currently doing for a living … but do it better.
- Develop a financially valued skill.
- Augment your income with a second job or home-based business.
Put Your ROIs on Steroids
Getting your income up to the six-figure level will give you a richer lifestyle, but it won’t make you wealthy in seven years unless you also invest a big portion of that extra income at an above-average rate of return.
Most financial planners argue that you should be satisfied with a four to six percent return on investment (ROI). I think that’s ludicrous. During the wealth-building portion of your life (during the next seven years), you should shoot much higher. If becoming a multimillionaire is your objective, you will have to achieve a net ROI of 20 to 25 percent per year.
As I’ve said, you can’t get that kind of return by picking the “right” stock and sitting back. To get huge returns on the money you’ll be socking away during the next seven years, you have to do two things:
- Invest in businesses that you understand.
- Invest in businesses that you control.
Knowledge and control – those are the key elements. Most investors are too lazy to learn about what they put their money in, and they’re also too timid to assert control. Having control means keeping tabs on market fluctuations. It also means being willing to make tough decisions based on those fluctuations. Most of all, it means being involved with sales and marketing – the pillars of every business, large or small.
In Seven Years to Seven Figures, you’ll read about people who enjoyed super-high ROIs by (a) becoming knowledgeable about particular businesses and then (b) investing in them as insiders.
You’ll find out how they did it … and how you can too.
I can’t promise you that reading Seven Years to Seven Figures will turn you into a millionaire by 2013, because I can’t foresee what you’re going to do after you read the book. Most readers will either (a) immediately disregard what they learn or (b) make themselves promises they won’t keep.
But a few will use the book to change their lives.
I hope you’re one of those few.
I hope this book will inspire you to change your financial habits, because it will force you to realize that what you have been doing until now hasn’t produced the results you have been looking for.
I hope you’ll find useful, wealth-building ideas that you can put to work right away. And that after you’ve implemented a dozen wealth-creating changes, you’ll read the book again and find more ideas that will take you to the next level of wealth. And then, when you have attained that level, you’ll do it again.
Most of all, I hope that when you read this book you’ll realize the doubters and naysayers are wrong. Getting reasonably wealthy, reasonably quickly, is not a pipe dream but an achievable, short-term goal that you can work on the day you lay eyes on the first page.
Contributed by Michael Masterson
Guest Contributor
Michael Masterson publishes the Internet’s most popular health, wealth and success e-zine, www.EarlytoRise.com that mentors more than 160,000 success-oriented individuals to help them achieve their financial goals.
Masterson has been making money for himself and others for almost four decades. At one time or another, he has owned and managed multi-million dollar companies that were either public/private, onshore/overseas, local/international, service-/product-oriented, retail/wholesale/direct mail, and even profit/not-for-profit.
Masterson is the author of the Wall Street Journal best sellers Seven Years to Seven Figures: The Fast Track Plan to Becoming a Millionaire; Automatic Wealth: The Six Steps to Financial Independence; Automatic Wealth for Grads … and Anyone Else Just Starting Out; Power and Persuasion: How to Command Success in Business and Your Personal Life (all published by John Wiley & Sons); and Confessions of a Self-Made Millionaire.
To find out more about Michael visit www.earlytorise.com
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