"They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself." — Andy Warhol
Most people over-complicate money: Becoming rich is just a matter of time. It doesn't matter if you're unlucky, dumb, or disabled. The amount of time you have left determines whether or not you will die rich or poor.
To start this guide, let's begin with a question that determines your financial future: Would you rather have $1 million today or one penny doubled every day for 30 days?
Hopefully, you choose one penny today. In just 30 days, that doubling penny will turn into $5,368,709.12. If you choose just the $1 million today, you just lost over 4 million dollars.
The action of your doubling penny is called compound interest and it is the secret sauce that the rich—and you—will use to make more money than you know what to do with.
Whether by investing, hiring or any other way of compounding your money, effectively making your money work for you (even while you sleep) is the secret to becoming rich.
This guide does not care how much money you can invest. Whether you can invest $1 or $100,000 right now, it doesn't matter—you can become a millionaire automatically either way. The only thing you should worry about is how early you start investing!
Compound interest only proves its worth over the long run. Check out the graph of the two "would you rather" choices below to see why:
If you chose to take the doubling penny, you would not have become a millionaire until the 28th day. If you have just started just 3 days late, it would have made more sense to choose one million dollars today. Do not waste your compounding days, and start investing as soon and as fast as possible.
By the way, if you do come across a doubling penny, you will end up with over 5 million dollars 30 days later. Pretty sweet, right?
Let's take the doubling penny example and apply it to the real world. Investing just $5 daily into a bank account with a 10% annual return will become about $30,000 in 10 years, $330,000 in 30 years, and $2.3 million in 50 years.
To prove it to yourself, try out the interactive calculator below. Pay close attention to how increasing your "Interest" and "Duration" numbers affect your "Final Value.”
There's nothing wrong with the graph above, only with your mindset. For just $5 a day, you can guarantee that you will become a millionaire by the age of retirement if you start early enough. And, of course, if you can get your money to grow 10% every year — less difficult than people make it out to be.
The idea you should plant into your head is that the rich got rich by making their money worth for them, not the other way around. In other words, the rich ensured their money was compounding early and often.
In the next few pages, you'll learn how to automatically compound your investment money for free so you become a millionaire whether you think about it or not. Corporations try to make it complicated to start investing so that they can take a "management" fee out of your earnings. Do not let this happen. So that you don't pay the rich any more money than they already have. Every financial product that this guide recommends is free to use, easy to set up, and well worth your time.
If you'd like a brief look into what this guide covers in the next few pages, check out the infographic below:
Prerequisites and exceptions:
Before you go through the entire guide and discover that you can't get started, here are the prerequisites. By the way, you can get around these! The text underneath each subtitle outlines how to get around each "prerequisite.”
You can bypass this prerequisite through your guardians, but check with them first or go through this guide together. The earlier you start investing, the better.
Most of the information in this guide will help you become a millionaire even if you aren't a US resident or citizen. But you might not be able to use the recommended apps.
If you meet both of these prerequisites, this guide covers the fundamental steps the wealthy took to gain cash. The "wealthy" will one day include you. Let's get started.
2. Debunking Finance Myths