From the pen of Karin Iten…

Dear Investment Academy Reader,

Anybody can get rich. It doesn’t take a genius. Nor are special talents required. You don’t need to be lucky. Becoming rich is a matter of making certain decisions and practicing certain skills, none of which is difficult or complicated. Viewed from this perspective, becoming rich is simple. You can acquire a multimillion-rand net worth by doing just five things.

Putting each one into practice will help you become as rich as the richest Internet promoter, just as quickly as the latest lottery winner and with a lot less legal and moral danger than the best known stock market shyster.

Today, I’ve asked personal wealth guru, Michael Masterson to share his top five secrets to wealth building with you.

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Introducing the five secrets to building real wealth
By Michael Masteron

Secret #1: Get to work an hour early
To get rich, you have to give yourself an edge over everybody else. And the best way I know to do that is to get to work early. By getting to work early, you can do all the little things that put you ahead of the pack. You can make extra contacts, learn useful skills, take time to write an impressive memo, polish off a report, etc.

There is no better time to collect your thoughts and plan your day than early in the morning when the office is quiet. Not only are you undisturbed by phone calls and interruptions, but ahead of you is the potential of an unopened day. Use your extra time to get at least one positive thing done before you start doing all the regular things. The regular things will give you a regular life. The extra things will give you all the extras – including the extra millions.

Secret #2: Develop and then perfect a financially valued skill
To make more money than the guy sitting next to you, you’ve got to be able to do something that is worth more money to someone else – your boss, your business, your customers. Selling is a financially valued skill. So is producing profits. So is creating growth. Other skills – making things run smoothly, eliminating mistakes, balancing books, etc. – are valuable to a business, but not as highly valued when it comes to dividing up the money pie.

What successful businesses mostly need, and value, are employees who stimulate sales, increase customer retention, boost customer spending and bring in a bigger profit. So study the sales and marketing programmes that are currently working. Learn from existing masters. Keep at it until you’re confident you know how to create more wealth for your business. Then communicate your ideas to the powers that be. Do everything you can to help your boss produce a better bottom line. If you work at this long enough and with intelligence, people will take notice.

Secret #3: Make an above-average income
You don’t have to earn a ton of money to become a millionaire, but you do need a higher-than-average income. To get wealthy while you’re young enough to enjoy it, you need to make about R250,000 or more.*

* If you’re making less than that, it’s almost certainly because you have not perfected a financially valued skill. Go back to Secret #2.

When you have learned to produce profits and have put yourself into the business of helping your business grow its profits, then the first and most important thing you need to do is ask for a raise. You can simply ask for more money – as I did when I first made the transition – or you can ask for some kind of incentive-based remuneration tied into the financial rewards you are producing for your business.

Secret #4: Spend less than you earn
It isn’t easy to make a lot of moolah, but it’s very, very easy to spend it. To make sure you spend less than you earn, use this powerful money-management trick. It’s allowed me to get richer in good times and bad, when my ideas were working and when they were not, when the economy boomed and when it stalled.

One day, I took out a sheet of paper and tallied up my net worth. Despite earning R50,000 more than I had the previous year, my net worth was less than R10,000.

I made myself a simple promise. I said that from then on I’d recalculate my net worth once a month and that I’d do everything I possibly could to make sure that each month’s total would be larger than the month before. It was as easy as that. I decided simply to get richer one month at a time. By calculating my net worth, I saw that many of my habits (including some of my spending habits) were financially unhealthy. It also gave me, at times, the panicked energy I needed to do something drastic – to start something new or end something that had gone wrong.

Don’t dismiss this little technique because it’s simple. All the best and most powerful things in life are simple. This WILL make a difference.

Secret #5: Invest Wisely

Investing wisely means doing two things:

1.    Create a second, active income and keep it growing.
2.    Invest your passive income in a sensible, conservative fashion.

Part one: Creating a second income
I believe in “chicken entrepreneurship” – starting out slowly and learning about a side business while you have the safe and steady income of your main job. By a “side business,” I mean something you can run on weekends or weekday evenings. It is something that won’t take your attention away from your full-time job. It should be something you enjoy and are willing to stick with. Just stick with your strengths – your strongest skills, your smartest contacts, your most devoted supporter – and you’ll succeed.

Part two: Investing your second income
Finally, take the extra money you make from your main business and the extra money from your side business and put it into an investing programme that is reliable, safe and productive.

These are five steps that have worked for me and dozens of others I’ve personally coached. They’ll work for you too.

Here’s to your financial freedom,

Michael Masterson
For the Investment Academy