Plan To Be Rich

You Need A Get Rich Plan:

Only 5% of the people in industrialized countries will get rich and fewer then that in non-industrialized countries. (Currently 1.3% of the US population is considered rich.) That begs the question, why is it that more people are not getting rich?

The Answer is simple and complicated. The simple answer is that most people who want to be rich (that is almost everyone) do not have a plan and would not implement the plan if they did have one. Most of us are unsure of ourselves and our abilities and we do not give ourselves credit for being smart enough. We thus have fears of uncertainty and fear of ridicule and failure. Because of this fear, people never take the needed actions to make them selves rich.

Educating yourself will help overcome the lack of knowledge of what to do, but the fear factor never entirely goes away no matter how many times you do something, so you must find the strength to over come the fear to take action. When I purchased my first rental property I could hardly sleep at night, then years later and when I purchased a half a million dollar office building and I started to worry, I dug out my notes, reviewed my math for reassurance that I had made the right decision and when back to sleep. The difference was that I had learned how to evaluate a deal and thus learned to trust my abilities. With knowledge and experience we can overcome fear.

The Plan:

You need a get rich plan, I like written plans as they force you to conceptualize and clarify your thoughts. A Rich plan is made up of parts, a statement of the goal, a list of prerequisites you need to take care of, and a list of what you need to do and by what dates. I will get to an example in a bit.

If you are married and your spouses is not supportive it will be more difficult to implement your plan but not impossible.

Money:

Let us get money out of the way right now. I will repeat here a statement from Pre-requisites to getting rich.

“Having money is not a pre-requisite to getting Rich; having money to work with is nice, money makes it easier, but not a pre-requisite. A desire to be rich, and a willingness to learn, combined with a calculated action plan of how you intend to get there and a commitment to implement that plan, are far more important.”

I know many rich folks who started with no money (including me) and no family connections. No more excuses, if you do not get rich in the next ten years it is your fault.

Doubts:

As you have been reading through this your mind is flinging in doubts, I don’t have any money, I don’t know where to start, I have bad credit, my spouse won’t help, I can’t tell so and so they will think I am nuts, I don't have the time and so on. Yep! You are normal all right.

Sadly we are surrounding by negativity, that’s not all bad as caution keeps you safe.
But if being rich is paramount then you will need to overcome negative thinking, and avoid negative people. You need to make thinking positively a habit. It is not easy to retrain your brain to think positive you will need to work at it. You might read an old 1960’s book, “Think and grow rich” and I will write an essay of the subject of thinking positively and include it on this (Towards Wealth) web site. In the meantime try this.

Make three post-it-note signs that say “I will think positive today”, put the signs next to the other one you have that says “Think rich” one on your bathroom mirror, one in your car (my car note is over my tachometer, no one uses it anyway) and one on your computer screen at work, or home, or both. Then every time you say a negative thing, or catch your self thinking a negative thought, put a dollar bill in your get rich savings account.

I started years ago by putting a quarter in my left pocket every time I thought negatively and at the end of the day I put the money in a jar at home. The first month I had to skip lunch a few times I had transferred all my money before noon to the left pocket. This exercise teaches discipline, keeps you thinking about getting rich and slowly changes your way of thinking. Now stop reading a few minutes and make the notes out, no better time then now (you remember "take action" that is the second part).

Time:

The next obstacle to you making yourself rich is managing your time. Sorry! but getting rich takes time.

Time to plan, time to educate yourself, time to implement your plan and time to make the plan work. Time will pass everyday weather you take action or not. Do you manage your time or does the day slip away? How much time is wasted on the phone with nonsensical calls when you could have been implementing your plan, or learning, researching, or thinking of getting rich? Take control of your time, it is a valuable asset, invest it wisely.

The difference between the self-made millionaires and you is how they invest their time and use their mind. Every thing else you can think of to list as a difference between you and the rich person is simply an obstacle to overcome, or an excuse for not implementing your own get rich plan. If you have a thinking and reasoning mind and you take control of your time, then the only thing standing between you and riches is you.

Example One:

Single mother, early forties, mother of four, all ages, Some experience managing a small business, understands accounting and time management. Burning desire to get ahead and willing to work at it, Time and money scarce.

Her Plan

Path to Riches; first start an E-business then invest in real estate. On line retail fits in with my low budget start up needs and the up side potential means I can make a good income after a few years.

I plan to research starting a on-line retail sales company over the next sixty days.
I will decide what to sell by the end of the research period.
I will order a name (Ural) for the business with in sixty days.

My goal is to start the business with in two months and and launch the web site in six months from today. I will re-wright this plan as the research is being done so I can create a step by step plan with a time line.

My goal is to be selling $50,000 per month with-in 18 months at which time I will go full time in my new business.

Implementation:

In our example (it is a real life example) She has made a decision as to what she will do and a commitment as to when. Her biggest obstacle will be time, as any one with four kids knows, spare time is a rare commodity. She will be up many a long night after the kids are put to bed working on her new store.

Example Two:

Middle class couple mid fifties, The wife is being down sized out of her job this fall and will have a severance package, they do not save much as the income runs out before the month is over. She is not worried about finding a job and could take early retirement. The husband has no pension and will only have social security at retirement.

The goal to get out of the debt, and then make investments that will bring in extra monthly income so that in ten or fifteen years they can retire without worries.

We plan to have in-place in the next thirty days a plan to get out of debt, and to create an investment plan that will eventually bring in $2,000 to $3,000 per month in extra spendable income. We know we need a budget, we know we need to learn about investing for ourself and not rely on others. We know we need a get rich plan and a implementation or action plan.

We will put together a household budget in the next week.
We will make personal a financial statement this week.
We will put together a plan this month to deal with all the debt after annualizing all our options.
We will put together a savings plan that starts after the debt is paid.
We will set aside the expected severance pay for starting our monthly income investment plan.
We will study up on rental real estate investing as a way to leverage the limited money available and study other investment method. We have four months to get ready to start our investment plan.

In conclusion:

As you can see a "Get Rich Plan" is not hard to write. It is really a get started plan. You are setting out where you are today, where you want to be in the near future and a place to get started with a time control line. The goal is to get started and form the habit of working at getting rich on a regular basis. The get rich plans are vague on purpose, as you do your research and preparations you will take notes and a more detailed plan will emerge.

As you accomplish the things in your plan your confidence grows, the next plan you write is more detailed and the numbers grow. The next year your personal financial statement looks better. You begin to have money left at the end of the month. The extra money coming into your home starts getting saved. The next thing you know you are comparing making a major household purchase to investing the money instead. When that day comes you will have crossed the line, because you will have developed the habit of thinking rich, go and celebrate.

The other day I was looking at getting a new truck because the one I have is older and the gas is expensive. With $8,000 down I could afford the payments with ease, then I thought of what else I could do with the $8,000. I could drive the old truck another three years and use the $8K for a down payment on a rent house, guess what I did.

The old truck cost $0.40 per mile in fuel cost, the IRS lets me take a $0.54 per mile tax deduction for managing rental properties, I like my old (paid for) truck.