This article is all about six millionaire habits that you can easily start today, whether it’s the new year, or really just anytime you’re feeling motivated.
6 Millionaire Habits
Starting off with
6. Aiming High
No, I’m not talking about getting high, just aiming high in general. Millionaires like to shoot high when it comes to setting goals and achievements. Why is that? Its because it shifts your mindset to thinking about methods and projects, that have higher outcomes and expectations.
I’m not sure how many of you have heard of Parkinson’s law, but there’s an adage that says that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. For example, when it comes to writing a paper, if you give yourself eight hours in a day to do it, you’ll usually take about eight hours to write that paper.
I think a similar psychological effect happens when you set high expectations for your goals, the higher expectations of your goals that you set the more likely you are to achieve a better absolute result.
Let me explain further, so let’s say you’re writing your goals down and your goal might be to make an extra 10k a year off of your side hustle, and perhaps you’ll work pretty hard throughout the year to try to hit that goal. You might flip small items on eBay, or you make stuff and start an Etsy shop, or maybe you’re just listing old items that you have around the house on an app like Poshmark or eBay that might get you to 10k by the end of the year.
No problem, but what happens if you set your sights at say 25k or 50k of extra side income throughout the year? Now all of a sudden you’re forced to shift your mentality to think about bigger ideas, that could get you there. Bigger ideas don’t necessarily take more effort than smaller ideas, its just that the outcomes are greater.
If you shoot high and you aim high on purpose, even if you fall short of your goal you’ll still come out ahead of your initial smaller goal. Let’s say you were aiming for 50k in side hustle income in the next year, and you fall short at 20k at the end of the year, that’s only 40% of the way to your goal. However, you still doubled or you still outperformed your old goal of 10k a year.
In my opinion, it doesn’t hurt to shoot high. When you are shooting super high, you want to set intermediate goals and process goals as well. That’s because if your goals are too broad, you may become detached from that goal and it might not be achievable. Instead set process goals, for example, let’s say you want to lose some weight say 25 pounds next year, instead of focusing on those 25 pounds a year, you should actually focus on the activities or short-term goals that will allow you to get there.
Perhaps it’s going to the gym, or working out four times a week. This is a much more achievable goal that fits into the broader higher goal of losing 25 pounds.
Millionaires tend to have higher expectations for themselves, and you can actually do this starting today very easily, by shifting your mindset and aiming a little bit higher.
5. Not Trading Time For Money
Most self-made millionaires typically do not rely on just one income source, and they definitely don’t rely on trading time for money. You can become a millionaire just through a day job, especially if it’s a high-paying day job like a doctor or a lawyer. But for those of us who aren’t doctors or lawyers, you can’t just rely on your day job.
Time is a finite resource and money is not, we can always make more money but we can’t make more time. We want to find a way where we can leverage our time and make more money, without having to always be active. That could be a small side business that you start, that runs on its own. It could be dividend income from investments, it could be an ebook, or maybe a course that you sell online.
For example, you could film yourself teaching a guitar lesson, and you charge a little bit of money on your site for people to come take your lesson. Even crypto lending and staking could be a method in which you generate more income, that doesn’t require as much of your time.
A good counterargument someone might bring up is “well Prince, even those things that you mentioned they take time to set up”. Yes, that is true.
A lot of passive income sources take time upfront to set up, and depending on your situation you may have that time or you might not. Some people may not be able to leave their jobs or dedicate their off time because of obligations like bills or family. If you’re in that situation, then a more suitable habit might be to invest a portion of your paycheck into dividend income or find ways to live below your means so that you can have extra income to invest.
However, if you do have the time to set up a continual source of passive income, I can tell you that there’s no better method of leveraging your time than having something that’s working for you in the background 24/7, while you sleep.
Not having to rely on just your day job to make money, is gonna help you compound your wealth even faster.
4. Living Below Your Means
The fourth habit of millionaires that you can start today is living below your means. There was a survey done on 100 multi-millionaires a few years back and the first thing that I noticed about them from this survey was that these multi-millionaires are often living within their means and saving a lot of their income.
You’ll see that in the survey, the average household income was 250k a year on average, and their annual spending was around 90k a year. Also, just a side note, almost half of them had a side income of some sort, with real estate being a top choice.
That definitely reinforces our earlier point of having more sources of income, that aren’t active sources of income anyway. Back to the saving, this income difference of 250k earned versus 90k spent means that the average millionaire from this survey was only spending 30% of their income a year, or had a savings rate of 64%. Which I thought was a little bit high.
I found another study on Business Insider that said, “In their per-millionaire years, they had the same goal: saving 10 to 20% of their income”. Now, I probably think this is a more realistic number. Either way, this shows you that even though millionaires make a higher than average income, their costs are staying relatively low. And it doesn’t seem like they’re a victim of lifestyle inflation. This should make sense.
Lifestyle inflation occurs because as we make more money, we think that buying more goods and services is going to bring us more joy and happiness. we’re always wanting to level up our lives. Unfortunately, what actually happens is that, sure we might get some dopamine from buying something new and shiny, but eventually that effect wears off,
Buying new things doesn’t necessarily increase satisfaction and happiness in life in the long term.
As your income increases, obviously, we want to spend money on some nice things here and there. But to prevent lifestyle inflation, we need to make consistent choices that aren’t going to hurt us long term. It actually benefits us instead.
By saving a large percentage of your income, you have more options with those savings including investing it or just having the luxury of having cash sitting on the sidelines for big opportunities that could produce a much larger return in the long run.
That brings me to my next habit that you can start today which is
3. Investing
Investing is one of the quickest ways to build your wealth, because of the principle of compound interest. What’s super interesting is that millionaires aren’t that different from normal everyday people. Literally, you can become a millionaire just by being disciplined, saving a percentage of your paycheck, and investing.
You don’t even have to know that much about investing to do it properly, the important part here is that you get your money working for you instead of having a huge cash pile sit in your savings account earning basically no interest. So during my research, I discovered that there’s a huge likelihood that self-made millionaires will invest in stocks. And on average millionaires held around five financial products, which came from a list including stocks, ETFs, CDs, Mutual funds, Bonds, Real estate, etc.
A very easy beginner method you can do today to become wealthy over time is by, consistently investing in low-cost index funds or ETFs. If you’re familiar with the blog at all, you know that we often cover investment topics.
Index funds are simply just all-in-one products, that allow you to invest in many different companies for just one purchase at a relatively low cost.
By making that one purchase consistently over time, you’ll at least match those market returns which should compound your wealth without having to think too much about it.
The second habit you can do as soon as possible is to
2. Surround Yourself With Positive People
This one might be a tough one to swallow, especially if you have friends that are on the more negative side. But I’ve noticed that when you hang out with positive people, a few things happen.
First your attitude changes, you get energized and excited about things, and that positivity will definitely rub off on you. Secondly, you’ll be able to accomplish much more. By having more positive reinforcement throughout your life, you’ll be encouraged, which can have a positive impact on your achievements.
Imagine you want to start an online shop selling custom-made artwork, and you have three negative friends all telling you that it’s a waste of time, or you’re probably better off sticking to what you know. You probably won’t pursue that as a venture, and that’s pretty natural because as humans we listen to a lot of feedback, and generally want to do what fits into societal norms.
Just imagine for a second that you have those same three friends, but they’re instead ultra-positive. Almost ridiculously positive, instead of saying you can’t do that, they encourage you to do it. In fact, one of your friends says something along the lines of “hey you have to do it, you would be perfect at that and even if you fail, at least you’ll learn something”.
That might just be the encouragement that you need to pursue something and take that risk. The more risk that you take, the more learning is done and eventually, that should all pay off.
If you don’t have someone that’s encouraging you and positive in your life, you can always come to my blog, I’m always going to be positive and try to encourage you to take on more risks. Also, according to a study in the wall street journal, positive people make on average about 40% more money than negative people. It definitely pays to be positive.
Another thing, have you ever seen interviews with wealthy people, they are usually pretty optimistic and pretty overly positive almost to a fault. A lot of them have the confidence that even though they might run into a problem along their journey, they’ll be able to fix it and solve that problem.
That’s probably because they’ve been through so many failures, and lived to see the other side. So make sure to surround yourself with positive human beings if you can.
1. Have A High Bias On Action
Our number one habit for this article is to have a high bias on the action. A lot of millionaires and successful people have a high bias toward acting first and diving straight into whatever they want to try even if it means taking on some risk.
To do this, you need to have an open mind and you need to be willing to accept failure and learn lessons from those failures. Within Reddits’ entrepreneur community, the term for a person who has an idea for something but never executes on it is actually called a Wantrepreneur. They want to pursue a venture, but most of these folks are convincing themselves that their business idea won’t work, or they aren’t the ones for the task.
They might have thoughts that sound like the following, and let me know if these are familiar to you. So they’ll say things like the “market is too saturated already”, or “I won’t be able to compete with Amazon or the large companies already selling these similar products or I don’t know how to run a business”, or “maybe ill wait until I have a really good idea and then ill begin”.
I know these thoughts all too well because I personally went through the same thing before starting my blog. Unfortunately, I don’t have a silver bullet on how to change this, but I can tell you that if you have the above thoughts, you’re definitely not alone.
The only way to get over it is to get started, even if it’s in the smallest possible way. Instead of starting a business is your goal, perhaps your goal today could be something a lot smaller. For example, figuring out how to register an LLC, could be step one.
The more times you start things, the better you get at the act of starting and acting. You’ll begin to become less attached to outcomes.
A lot of people will say that most entrepreneurs fail or most businesses fail, but then, again, so do most relationships. Most relationships will fail until you meet your spouse, yet we don’t really have hesitation in getting into some relationships now. Do we?
Ok Guyz
If you’ve read till this point, and you want to get started with at the very least investing, you should definitely check my other article on making $100 per day in passive income, and let me know in the comments if you pursue any of the other habits that we talked about in this article. Peace and Happy Hustling!
