First, let me just say to you that I am not a millionaire, so if you would like you can stop reading right now. I guarantee you, though, you’ll miss out. You might be asking yourself then, what makes me an authority on becoming a millionaire; how about the fact that I live my life like one. This year alone I traveled to London, Amsterdam, Costa Rica, Vegas multiple times, New Orleans and that is just within the last 5 months. In a sense my life right now is what most people dream about.

I have seen the best Broadway shows, sat ringside for high profile boxing matches, and been to the final four, Word Series and the NCAA football championship. I do everything first class, so as to not taint the experience. Name a place in the Caribbean and I have an opinion on it. If you want to know what the best restaurant in the world is, I can weigh in on that too!

I mean why would you go to Los Angeles and stay in the Super 8 Motel when you could hang with celebrities at the Beverly Hills Hotel and rent a Porsche to spend the day in Malibu? Oh yeah, I hooked that up for my wife’s birthday in April.

You could say I am bragging, but I’d prefer you think of it as illustrating a point. Why live life thinking about wealth accumulation? What you should do is experience life with the wealth you have. It’s sickening traveling to places and seeing nothing but old people because everyone has been taught to be scared shitless that they will be penniless later in life. I have a friend that would love to play the WSOP but won’t because it’s too expensive. This guy makes a great living and could easily satellite in. What is his main issue? He could be stuck there too long and it could interfere with his job. What??? If you get stuck there too long you are most likely winning a ton of loot. I am just saying you don’t want to be 60 years old trying to catch up to your dreams because you were afraid to take risks in your youth. If you are fortuitous enough to come into some money consider doing something you might have dreamed of when you were 6 years old. I have the same fears everyone else has and I will talk a bit about some of the things that I do to ensure I can maintain this lifestyle.

Here are some ways to accumulate wealth and a time value equation to further illustrate things. All of these scenarios are generic templates. What you do with those templates will determine your end result. So I have tried to give a few scenarios:

1. Coming straight out of high school and entering the marketplace. Most people will tell you that you can’t succeed doing this, but a little hard work goes a long way and most importantly you start from $0. You also don’t owe yourself anything so driving a 1989 Honda Accord is no big deal, neither is having 14 roommates. The problem is you will reach a point where doors are closed to you and it is virtually impossible to penetrate upper management with a high school diploma. But who cares, this isn’t about working more or getting promotions, this about accumulating wealth and you should be able to sock away $500-$1000 a month with most of it tax free. You can reach the 50k (through a regular job) level easy but that is likely the end of the road for you, only the truly special people can get to 70k-80k. Almost no one without a degree will go higher than that. If you saved $1,000 for 29 years and 9 months you will be a millionaire. Here is a calculator if you would like to get there quicker. Adjusted for inflation it will take you over 40 years, but even at that point you are only 58.

2. School gives you options but a Bachelor’s degree is little more than a high school diploma these days. If you are going to consider college you need to understand that without a Master’s or PhD your value is only marginally better than someone with a High School Diploma. What you will likely find is that you will get in the corporate world and have to continue your education to go further. If you are going to do it, do it now. This is no guarantee of success, mind you, but it does open some doors that would be closed otherwise. For my purposes I am going to say a Master’s degree will take you 8 years, so you are 26. Beef up that resume as much as you can and try to work as little as possible. At about $30k a year you are down $240k, not to mention student loans of $30k-$50k. Remember working out of a hole is harder than working from even and you will be paying interest on all of the new things you will want as a reward for all of your hard work. If you can get a 50k a year job, you will spend half of that on a house and a car but with a little hard work you should be able to maintain this lifestyle. While you are only 8 years behind the high school student is close to one double based on the rule of 72, assuming they can get 7% on investments. Also, when you are 26 you begin to feel the pressure of finding a life-long mate. All of this takes precious resources that hurt wealth accumulation and none of this assures you anything, once those doors are open you will have to do something with your opportunity.

3. So you want to start your own business? Well good luck to you. Do you realize that the guys from Google had to go out on their own because search engines like Alta Vista and Yahoo laughed them out of the door? There are many more stories (like Bill Gates’) of people who had to leave school to pursue their dreams because no one believed in their ideas; and why should they? I would imagine that Yahoo laments that deal, but not the 100s of others that they passed on that were duds. Being an entrepreneur can be financially rewarding, but if your goals are just financial rewards you will likely fail. There are days, weeks, months and even years that the people involved in a start up will question the direction they have chosen and many of them will be right. Its not the easy path but it helps when you choose an idea that you believe in and couple it with some life lessons. Personally I had a few mini failures and at least one blow out. All before I turned 30. To say I was broke at 30 would have been a lie. I would have enjoyed being broke if it meant I would have been at $0. As an entrepreneur you either need to get lucky on the first shot (that does happen but helps to be really smart like the Google guys, who had their PhDs) or get comfortable failing. If those failures bring you life lessons, they will most likely have been worth it, though at the time (by time I mean crying in the closet turning the lights on and off for a week) it is hard to realize that. A million dollars is achievable easily but you have to have a strong stomach and passion for what you are doing.

Simple things you can do that help

Pay cash for everything except your house (yes including your car, though use low financing to contribute more to savings). Also, try no cost mortgages, especially if rates are high. You want the flexibility to move into something cheaper long term, even though it will be about .5 of a percent higher, one good day in the market could make that up for you. If you have credit cards use them for miles so you can travel more and pay them off immediately. As you can see from the above examples, this is difficult with the second option because you feel entitled because you worked so hard to basically achieve nothing in the private sector. You have been sacrificing, and the idea of more sacrifice is difficult to stomach. I experienced this coming out of my blow out and ultimately it made things more difficult and the process longer by living life when I wasn’t really entitled (that deserves its own paragraph).

Do not live life up when you are in the hole! In scenario 2 I don’t think being a millionaire is really the goal, the goal is to build a foundation that can sustain you in the workplace for the rest of your life. Sure you can build wealth but at what cost, certainly the hard working people sacrifice something on the way to the top. Scenario 1 can live life but the cost is that ceiling that they can never get over. I think the more you acquire things you look around and think “what the hell did I need that for”. It’s a simple question, who has a better life, the CEO or a corporation or the average guy?

Becoming a millionaire is not particularly a difficult thing. Becoming a millionaire without selling out the rest of your life is quite difficult. Balance is important.