The full title of this essay is: How to Get Rich: The Sorely Needed Logical and Structured Essay That Won’t Be Found Anywhere Else Today.

I wrote this because I figured it was something that was needed, something that would be fresh, new, and take an innovative approach to the subject aside from the usual spiel of “don’t drink that Starbucks latte and take that money and invest it at an assumed compound rate of 12% and you’ll be a millionaire in 40 years”, etc.

The full length of this is 48 pages so needless to say, I don’t think it would be practical to upload all of it here. I figured I would upload the beginning of it to give those who haven’t had a chance to read it to get an idea of what it’s all about. So without further ado, here is the beginning of: How to Get Rich: The Sorely Needed Logical and Structured Essay That Won’t Be Found Anywhere Else Today.

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It’s a question that will undoubtedly arise in the minds of many people at one point in time or another in their lives.

And we all know what that question is.

“How do I get rich?”

And so the search begins.

Books, articles, tapes, videos, seminars are all devoured but the person devouring them begins to see a slightly frustrating pattern showing up:

All the information out there seems to be repeating the same things over and over again.

The same information is being churned over and over again and packaged in different products with the people buying them hoping they will say something different but invariably are left feeling disappointed when they find there’s nothing really new to learn.

Add to that, it’s just full of platitudes, information that they hear all the time, but isn’t very useful - superficial information that doesn’t go any deeper.

You know exactly what that kind of information is.

It’s the kind of advice that has no “meat” to it.

To illustrate the superficiality of the get rich advice given today, here’s a brief snapshot of each side.

One side gives the general information we all hear about all the time.

- Go to college and get a good job and work hard to climb up the corporate ladder.

- Live below your means.

- Save your money and invest it in your 401k because otherwise you’re losing free money.

The other side gives even more seemingly vague advice.

- Start your own business.

- Invest in stocks.

- Invest in real estate.

Or the kind of advice Robert Kiyosaki says – “Buy assets”, because assets put money into your pocket and liabilities take money out of your pocket.

But what assets to buy?

Again, the same old answers. Stocks, real estate, bonds, etc.

Then you have the middle ground which attempts to give real information that’s applicable in real life, and it does look like that on the surface, but it’s much too idealistic to work in the real world and assumes too much.

You’ve heard about it.

It’s the “don’t buy a latte at Starbucks everyday and take that money and invest it and assuming it gets a 12% annual return, you’ll be a millionaire by the time you retire”.

But what if you don’t want to wait that long to retire to do the things you want?

What if you don’t want to sacrifice life’s little everyday luxuries?

What assets specifically give a 12% annual return every year? (they never mention that do they, and do they really get those kinds of return every year?)

What if those assets don’t return 12% on average, but 6% or even worse, a negative return due to circumstances out of your control? (look at what the whole subprime debacle has done to Wall Street and the stock market)

What about capital gains tax and transaction costs?

The personal financial experts always love to breeze through the “assuming you get a x% return” but it’s not a universal guarantee.

Can this strategy work?

Yes, but again, it assumes a lot.

What happens if you lose your job and can’t put in the money to invest?

Maybe you get sick and have a large medical expense to take care of?

A car accident that takes you out of work for a year?

A financial emergency that forces you to take money out of your investment account?

Then they get trapped in the cycle where they don’t have any money to save, less invest and because there’s no savings to bail them out, they whip out the plastic to hold them over, but they soon start getting into high interest credit card debt that quickly snowballs.

Meanwhile life happens in the form of weddings, babies, braces for the kids, weddings of family and friends, furniture for the new apartment/house and the viscous cycle continues.

This is what financial experts tend not to see in the real world.

It’s not always cut and dry. It’s easy when you make given assumptions but real life doesn’t work that way.

Then you have the pop psychology type of get rich advice.

People use words like “mindset”, think in abundance, and all this pseudo psychology.

“You deserve to be rich.”
“The universe will make you rich”.
“Feel the abundance around you.”

That sounds great and all, but again, when it comes down to the REAL world of actually DOING something, it doesn’t help.

Then you get phrases about getting rich like:

“It’s not how much you make; it’s how much you save.”

That’s great and all, but there’s ultimately, there’s only a certain limit as to how much you can save.

At some point, you can only save so much, even if you make a little, you can still save but at what expense at the quality of your life- what will you miss out on?

What people seem to forget is that there’s no limit as to how much you can make.

That being said, why not focus on the other side of the equation?

It seems so simple and logical, yet most finance experts only tend to focus on the other side of the equation of saving, investing, budgeting, etc.

That’s like playing defense all the time.

Sure you can play great defense but sooner or later you have to start playing offense to put some points on the board.

Otherwise you’ll never win a game.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s nothing bad about playing defense and all but nobody wants to go into detail on the other side of the equation, namely playing offense because they don’t know what to say and even if they do, it’s just a bunch of platitudes like:

- Get a higher paying job.
- Invest in real estate.
- Start your own business.

It’s all fluff, yet people praise it like it’s the best thing since sliced bread. It really puzzles me why people settle for the crumbs when they should be looking for the main course.

What we need are REAL solutions that will work in REAL LIFE that the AVERAGE EVERYDAY PERSON can apply to get rich - NOT recycled platitudes of common sense and flowery philosophical type information that basically tells us what we already know:

It’s easy for people who have parents who can give them money to start a business, who give them whole businesses, who pay for their college tuition and their house to give them a head start in life, who connect them with high paying jobs, etc.

But what about those who don’t have rich parents?
Who work in 9-5 jobs?
Who pay for everything on their own?

What about the average Joe?

That being said, I wanted to write a logical essay that provides the very “meat” of getting rich that’s not very prevalent at all in today’s literature that the everyday person can apply because all of the recycled information out there tends to make people run around in circles, never getting to the center, to the MEAT.

What people want to know is HOW TO START.

That’s the big GAP that’s prevalent in today’s world that nobody is addressing because the advice of today is too general and doesn’t go into any depth.

It’s general advice like:

- Invest in real estate.
- Go to a good college and get a good job and max out your 401k.
- Save and invest your money in stocks and bonds and your Roth IRA.
- Live below your means.
- Start your own business.

But reality soon starts to set in.

- Not everybody can get rich in real estate. It’s a cyclical market. Timing is crucial. When the real estate market is down, it’s very difficult to make money. Startup capital is needed. The risks are great. And it’s not as easy as late night infomercials make it seem. Can it be done? Sure it can. But when the field gets oversaturated, not everybody will be able to make a decent amount of money from it.

- The days of getting a great job out of college and job security are over. With the explosion of people graduating college and getting a bachelor’s degree, the scarcity that its value was based upon has dropped. It’s become the new high school diploma. Too many people are competing for too few jobs and pensions and job security are a thing of the past. On top of all that, students are leaving college with huge debt in student loans with the average being around $20,000 as well as considerable credit card debt. Add to that inflation, a lack in the rise of real wages, skyrocketing cost of living costs, etc., and the college graduate feels doomed to live paycheck to paycheck, spinning his/her wheels in the all too familiar rat race.

- With over 70% of people living paycheck to paycheck, the old “save and invest” route seems to fall under the realm of impossibility. It’s easier said than done. Along with all the economic factors, there’s the psychological factors of consumerism and materialism and readily available credit fueling the debt that adults incur.

But can this method of living below your means and saving and investing to get rich work? Can it be done? Of course it can. But the argument against that is that some people just don’t want to scrimp and save their whole lives. They want to experience life before they die. They want to experience life while they’re still able to when they’re young and to do that, it requires money.

- Then there’s the highly favorable entrepreneur route of owning your own business. When the words are uttered: “I want to start my own business”, all the critics come out of the wood works and say:

- “Starting your own business is a lot of work. Get ready to work 100 hour weeks.”

- “Where are you going to get the money to start your own business? You need money to make money.”

- “It’s too risky. How are you going to pay your bills? It’s not secure.”

And everybody’s favorite:

“Did you know that 9 out of 10 businesses fail in the first five years?”

So what’s a person to do given all these seemingly checks and balances and stone walls that appear on all the paths to getting rich?

Alas, they throw their hands in the air and declare that only those who have rich parents or got lucky are the ones who can get rich. The rest are doomed to forever be stuck spinning their wheels in the rat race.

What’s the average person to do – who didn’t have any inheritance from their parents, who had to work during school to support themselves and their families, who knows what it feels like to live paycheck to paycheck?

Section 2: What This Essay Is About and Why I Wrote It

Seeing as how there’s all this information out there being churned over and over again, with nothing new, with no definitive answer that the AVERAGE person can use, this is precisely why I chose to write this essay – to fill in the gaps of the advice that’s out there for the everyday person to go DIRECTLY to the heart of the matter and better structure and aptly explain the mechanics of getting rich.

But getting rich is NOT all about making as much money as you as you’ll soon see and I’m sure that’s something you already know.

But first off, before we do anything else, the FIRST and FOREMOST LOGICAL THING TO DO is we have to DEFINE what we mean when we talk about getting rich.

Section 3: How Do We Define “Rich”?

We can’t define rich as a certain amount of income/year.

$30,000/year might not sound like a lot in America but take that to a third world country and you can live like a king.

Rich for someone might be a million dollars but take someone who already has a million dollars and rich will be 10 million for him/her.

So there is no “absolute” number we can use to define rich.

It’s all relative.

So how do we do we define what rich is?

Well, if you breakdown what people want when it comes to getting rich, it can be categorized like this.

We have needs.

Then we have comfort.

And then we have freedom.

Needs is self explanatory. We all need a roof over our heads, food and water to eat and drink, clothes to wear, etc., - in other words, the basics to survive.

Then we have comfort. The TV, vacations, the nice car, the things you want, but don’t really need, etc.

Then, we have the holy grail of getting rich.

FREEDOM.

We want to have the time AND money to do WHAT WE REALLY WANT TO DO IN OUR LIVES, WHEN WE WANT.

What good is freedom alone if you can’t do anything with it because you don’t have the money to finance what you want to do?

What good is all the money in the world if you don’t have the time and freedom to enjoy it because you’re working all the time to make it?

I think we can all agree that covering your needs is the absolute basic minimum foundation of getting rich. You have to make enough money to cover the basic necessities of life. That is a must.

But from then on, most people get confused.

They THINK that getting rich involves COMFORT – that COMFORT is the PINNACLE of getting rich – jetting off to enjoy vacations on remote desert islands, eating the best foods and drinks, buying the best cars and clothes and houses and gadgets, etc.

The media has us believing that this is what getting rich is all about.

And don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with doing all that.

The thing is, when people view that as their “end game” and they actually get to that stage and do everything, the question they invariably and inevitably ask themselves is:

Now what?

What scares people is what do you do AFTER?

After you buy the nice, big house, the fancy car, the yacht, what do you do after ALL THAT?

They’re just “things”. You will get bored of them quickly.

Very quickly.

Once your needs are met, any additional income has a diminishing effect on your utility.

For example, let’s say you’re really hungry so you eat that first burger and it tastes really good, but the next burger and the next don’t taste as good. Why? Because you’re not as hungry anymore. Your needs were fulfilled. What now? Now that you’re satisfied with hunger, do you buy more and more food or do you do something else?

I want to wean people away from the improper thinking of buying expensive things, cars, houses is what being rich is all about. There’s nothing wrong with doing that BUT realize that if that’s your end game, you’re in for a world of hurt.

People ADAPT to their circumstances in time.

So even if you buy the nice house, car, etc., you’ll get sick of it and the novelty WILL wear off over time.

Think of it like this.

You’ve experienced it before when you were a kid, when you really wanted that toy and finally got it.

You got sick of it a month later.

The same thing applies here, only that the toys are a lot more expensive.

You see, everybody who wants to get rich is looking for that point in time when they can just relax – sip a margarita by the beach.

But what do you do AFTER that?

After that “point” in time when you don’t have to worry about your finances anymore?

Nobody ever thinks about that and when that time comes, they get hit like a bus with a big gaping void in their soul.

So some people turn to drugs. Some to alcohol. Some commit suicide.

And I think we can all agree that none of those things can be construed as a person who is “rich”.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying all the comforts in life but it’s more like the seasoning of life. It makes everything taste better.

But if all you eat is seasoning, you’re going to be severely malnourished.

That being said, what people are REALLY talking about when they say they want to get rich is FREEDOM.

To have the time and money do what they want, when they want.

And here’s the secret most people don’t realize.

WHEN YOU VALUE FREEDOM over COMFORT ,you invariably get both.

When you value COMFORT over FREEDOM, you will NEVER be free.

You will always be trapped in the cycle of debt.

So with all that being said, I think the following definition of what getting rich is all about will be something most people will agree on:

Having enough income to meet your basic and comfort needs and to give you the freedom to do the things you truly want to do in your life.

The typical person reading this is probably a 9-5er who has his/her needs met, has some sort of comfort, pays the bills and saves a little, in other words the typical middle class, but they don’t have as much comfort, but more importantly as much FREEDOM as they like and that’s ultimately the bridge they want to gap to get “rich”.

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This is just the first couple of pages of the 48 page essay. To read it in its entirety, you can sign up for the VIP Self Improvement newsletter and wait for its release. I usually release it once a month as a bonus to one of my products/services.

It’s an essay you definitely won’t regret reading.

  
     

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