By Ben Gobel — Mar 5, 2024

How to Become a Millionaire (What No One Tells You)

So, you want to be a millionaire? That’s fantastic, you’re in the right place!

The number of millionaires hit an all-time high this year, but the vast majority of the population still lives paycheck to paycheck, has limited assets, and has little to no savings.

I’m happy to report that if you’re reading this, it means you have access to the only thing you need to make your millionaire status a reality – the internet. Everything you need to learn about becoming a millionaire is available online for free.

Unfortunately, what we learn in school is aimed at teaching us to be great employees. Our education system seriously neglects personal finance, financial literacy, and entrepreneurship. You have to take it upon yourself to learn what it takes to become a millionaire.

If it feels overwhelming, it’s okay! Your journey to millionaire status won’t be easy and it won’t be quick – but it is very possible. You just have to make sure you’re on the right path.

Surprisingly, eighty-eight percent (88%) of millionaires are self-made, according to a 2017 Fidelity Investments survey. They didn’t inherit their money. Even among the ultra-wealthy, a 2019 study conducted by Wealth-X revealed that sixty-eight percent (68%) of people with a net worth of over thirty (30) million made it themselves.

So, if the vast majority of millionaires build their own fortunes, how exactly does it happen? How do people become millionaires?

The key is not cutting back and spending less. It’s about earning more and building assets. I believe that real estate is the best way to build wealth for most people, but the same concepts apply regardless of the industry.

Yes, the process of becoming a millionaire obviously requires some sacrifices. You need to be willing to be patient and to defer gratification. With that being said, there are a few steps you can take that will significantly increase your chances of hitting a million-dollar net worth, regardless of your current income. Applying these strategies will also cut decades off the time it takes to get to seven figures.

With these things in mind, let’s get to it!

Common Misconceptions about Earning & Saving Money

If you ask the average person how to become a millionaire, they will probably say something about getting a high-paying job, living frugally, and saving money.

While this can work, working a job and saving money is not the best way to become a millionaire – not even close. If you’re trading your time for money, you will always be limited in how much you can make.

Just think about it: If you make $25 per hour and work forty (40) hours per week, you are capped at $1,000 per week. Let’s say you managed to save twenty-five percent (25%) of your income, which would be impressive. Even with this high savings rate – which would be over three (3) times the national average of seven percent (7%) – it would take you almost seventy-seven (77) years to “save” a million dollars. This doesn’t even account for things like taxes, insurance, emergencies, or health issues. That sounds horrible.

Obviously, you can reduce this timeline by investing your savings along the way, but even assuming a six percent (6%) net rate of return, it will still take you almost thirty (30) years to cross a million dollars. This still sounds painfully slow to me.

Keep in mind, being an employee means you are just a cog in a wheel that makes more money for someone else. If you’re being paid $25 per hour, your time must be worth more than that, otherwise, it wouldn’t make sense for your employer to keep you around.

Some people are fine with being employees and making someone else more money than they make for themselves. But, if you’re reading this, I suspect you don’t fall into that category.

If you’re working a job where you’re doing this now, it’s okay, but you have to begin to shift your focus. That is the primary point of this article, if you want to reach millionaire status in a relatively short period of time, you have to think about time and money differently than most people.

In summary, if you want to become a millionaire, you have to stop just trading your time for money – there’s a better way.

Start a Business (or Scalable Side-hustle)

The key to breaking out of the cycle of trading your time for money in order to become a millionaire is to create a system that makes money for you while you sleep.

I can hear you now: “Okay, Ben, sure, that sounds great, but how do I do that?” Well, you need to start a business around a product or service that is in demand, that is also scalable. Unlike your W2 job, when you start a business there is no limit to how much you can make.

Back to the earlier example, if you’re paid by the hour, you are capped at $25 per hour, multiplied by forty (40) hours per week. No matter how hard you work or how many times you calculate it, if this is how you’re paid, this is always going to limit you to $1,000 a week. And yes, fixed annual salaries and jobs with overtime still have the same problem.

When you start a business, it can be open and generating income for you twenty-four (24) hours a day, seven (7) days a week. Better yet, if you set it up correctly, a business can generate money for you without you needing to spend time working.

So, what kind of business should you start?

It can be almost anything, but again, it needs to be in demand and scalable. Focus on solving a problem or serving a need.

You don’t need to start the next Facebook or Apple, there are countless needs out there that you can fill. Start with something you have an interest in and probably already know a lot about. It can be anything from real estate or photography, to landscaping or writing.

Starting a rental real estate business that uses the BRRRR strategy (Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance, Repeat) is a perfect example. The business serves a need by providing housing for people. It’s also scalable because as your real estate business grows, you can start to outsource functions of it, e.g., property maintenance, management, and leasing. There isn’t anything new about the idea of buying rental properties, and you don’t need to be the next Elon Musk or Steve Jobs to make it happen. Millions of people have started rental real estate businesses already, just copy what they did!

If you’re focused on something more like photography or landscaping, that’s great, but you need to think like a photography or landscaping business owner. Don’t limit yourself to taking pictures and planting trees. This is the thinking of a W2 worker being paid by the hour. That’s not you.

The key is systematizing and documenting your processes. For a photographer, that may mean documenting exactly how you take great pictures, creating lists of the best gear, making visual outlines that show each of the angles you need to capture to properly photograph a wedding. Or maybe it’s writing out a step-by-step process for taking perfect professional headshots.

For a landscaper, it might be creating lists of the best types of privacy bushes and trees to plant depending on your location and desired growth rate, or maybe how to properly plant and space perennials.

From there, one of the easiest paths forward is to develop a digital product like an ebook, online course, YouTube channel, or website (like this one) that teaches people how to be great at whatever it is you’re teaching.

Now market the product and sell it. At the same time, because you’ve systematized and documented your processes, you can also begin to hire people and scale the services side of your business. The same materials that you developed to sell can be used to train your new employees.

By now, this hypothetical photographer is making money taking photographs, selling their digital products, and employing other photographers to take photos just like they do. This is amazing!

Applying this process is even more straightforward when it comes to scaling a real estate business. You just have to progressively get better at finding great properties, financing them, and managing them.

If you’re not sure where to start in business, social media content creation and posting for lawyers, accountants, and other small businesses in your area is still an extremely viable business. My law firm pays thousands of dollars per month for these services. I know many other businesses that do the same thing. This is a very scalable business, but again, make sure you are systematizing and documenting your processes!

If you’re thinking that this all sounds oversimplified, you’re not wrong.

There will be hundreds of problems to solve and challenges to overcome along the way. That’s okay! Don’t let tomorrow’s problems stop you from taking action today. The key takeaway is just to start to shift your thinking away from trading your time for money.

In the immutable words of Warren Buffet, “if you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.”

Reinvest in Your Business and Yourself

Once you start generating some revenue, you need to take that money and reinvest it in your business. This is where the

Let’s take the rental real estate business as an example again: You managed to get the business off the ground and bought your first property. You fixed it up, you rented it out, and now it’s generating $500 per month in positive cash flow. Congratulations, that’s fantastic!

But you’re not done. Rather than going out and leasing a fancy new car with that new $500 per month, you need to take that money and reinvest it back into your business. You could spend the money on a direct mail marketing campaign to find your next investment property, or you could put it toward your next down payment, or you could spend it on property management to make scaling even easier.

For the photographer, maybe it’s investing in some new gear or lighting, or paying for a higher-end website to showcase your portfolio.

Regardless of the type of business, if you want to become a millionaire, you need to do this.

As you generate more revenue and continue to reinvest it back into your business, you’ll progressively become more efficient. This efficiency is what will allow you to improve your product or service, to bring on more people to grow and scale, and ultimately, to become more profitable.

Best of all, if you reinvest in building the right business systems and hiring the right people, your business may eventually be able to function without you even working. Getting to this point will require a great deal of trial and error, but my best advice for making progress toward this goal boils down to this concept:

Focus on working ON your business, not IN your business. You’re creating a business for yourself, not another job.

Finally, don’t be discouraged if someone else is already doing what you want to do. When you’re starting out, if there is already a competing business out there, don’t think of them as the enemy. The existence of a competing business is just proof that what you’re trying to do is possible. It means there is demand for your product or service and someone is making money selling it – just find a way to do it better!

Buy Assets First (and Avoid Liabilities)

The next step in the process of becoming a millionaire is to buy assets.

Now that your business is starting to grow, any money that is leftover needs to be put toward buying assets, not liabilities. It may sound simple, but a lot of people confuse the difference between an asset and a liability. A lot of people also don’t understand the importance of buying one before the other.

An asset is something that will provide you with future economic benefits – think investment real estate and stocks. Assets generate money for you in the form of cash flow, dividends, distributions, and appreciation.

A liability is something that will present you with a future financial obligation. For the average American, cars are one of their biggest liabilities. Student loans, credit cards, and most forms of debt are other common examples. These are pretty obvious.

An example of a liability that is less obvious? Your house!

Most people think of their homes as an asset. While there are exceptions, particularly if you house hack, your home costs you money every month and creates financial obligations. For the vast majority of people, their house is a liability.

Now you might be thinking, “Ben, what the heck, the whole point of becoming a millionaire is so that my family and I can have nice things, if everything I want is a liability, which I can’t buy, what am I supposed to do!?”

I’m happy you asked!

Don’t worry, if you apply the strategies we are talking about here, you will have your dream house, fancy cars, and nice clothes, if those things are important to you. You’ll be able to take expensive vacations if you want.

But, before you spend money on these liabilities, you need to buy assets. The order in which you do these things is extremely important.

Purchasing assets needs to be your sole focus until your assets generate enough money on a monthly basis to cover your fixed living expenses. To fast-track your millionaire status, this needs to be your first goal.

If you buy liabilities first, your road to seven figures gets much longer. For each liability you buy (house, car, etc.), you’ll be increasing your monthly financial obligations. In turn, these obligations eat into your free cash and make it harder to reinvest in yourself and your business.

I’m not sure who said it first, but it comes down to this concept: “Today, you have to do what others won’t, so tomorrow, you can live like others can’t.”

Take Action

The next step is to both the simplest and the most difficult: You need to take action!

Analysis paralysis is real. You are the biggest obstacle standing in your way. Most people won’t take action.

Researchers have found that when it comes to online resources like this website, ninety percent (90%) of visitors will just read the content, that’s it. Nine percent (9%) will interact with the content, they’ll like, comment, or share it, but they’ll stop there. Only one percent (1%) of visitors will actually read this and take action.

You will never be fully prepared, and that’s okay. You need to trust in your ability to figure it out and just start. In fact, someone has probably already filmed a YouTube video or written a blog post that outlines the solution for every problem you’re going to encounter.

You got this, now get started!

Final Thoughts & Additional Reading

While you're working to increase your net worth, always keep in mind that becoming a millionaire isn’t even about the money, it’s about the freedom it provides.

For some additional reading on the subject of becoming a millionaire, check out the following books:

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