Have you ever wanted to be rich? From how long I can remember, making money has always been part of my life goals. Don’t get me wrong, money is not that important in my life. I would actually trade all the money in the world to stay happy and healthy with my wife and three kids. But since everybody in my family is doing great (knock on woods!), I can concentrate on other things… like becoming millionaire. And you read it right; I have more than one plan to become millionaire by the age of 65. In fact, reaching this milestone at 65 is probably the worst case scenario.
Where this idea of becoming millionaire comes from?
At the age of 13, I was living a more than comfortable life. My parents weren’t that rich, but I had more than any kids would want. My parents would pay for everything I wanted (expensive clothes, games, toys, movies, etc), I was going to private school and we would eat filet mignon and shrimp as a Tuesday night supper. However, a year later, my parents went bankrupt. They lost everything because of two reasons: #1 they were spending lots of money without saving a penny and #2 they thought this situation would last forever. One day, my dad lost his contract (mainly due to his own faults) and it took 2 months to receive a call from the bank. I remember moving out of our nice house and ending-up in a crappy place. On that day, I swore to myself that I would never oh never lack money. Then, becoming millionaire is just a number, the arriving lane of a journey. Since then, I started making plans to reach the 7 figures net worth. I just threw away my first plan to have more fun in life and achieve my goal faster. Here are my new plans from the “slowest one” to the “fast one”.
Plan#1: Sit There and Do Nothing
Believe it or not, at the age of 36, I have already not much to do to become millionaire by 65. The truth is that I worked hard enough over the past decade to let the power of compounding interest do the rest for me. Here’s a short portrait of my financial status:
Assets:
House: $365,000 (professional appraisal as at June 2016)
Investments: $190,235 (including RRSP and pension account)
Liabilities:
Mortgage: $306,471
Net worth: $248,764
I do have a RV with a loan, but let’s just ignore both of them as both value even it out. In 29 years from now, I’ll be 65. At that time, I think it’s safe to say that I will be debt free as I have only my mortgage to pay down. If I expect my property to grow in value by 2% each year, my house, net of debt, will worth $648,183. In this case, I could call myself “house rich”. But this is not really being wealthy, isn’t it?
I intend to manage my portfolio throughout this period. As I am 100% invested in equity, I expect to bring a 6% annualized return. This is not too optimistic, but it is still a challenge. If I achieve my investment return projection, my nest egg will worth $1,030,767. In other words, my worst plan leads me to a net worth of $1,678,950 at the age of 65. This plan highlights the importance of starting to save money as soon as possible.
Plan #2: Make it quicker by saving more
I must admit, this plan isn’t in place yet. Since I quit my job last summer to pursue my dream of building a company, I am a bit short on cash flow these days. However, I am confident I will be able to start saving money aside in 2018. I’m already doing it for my children’s tuition, but I can consider adding to my retirement account shortly.
With a portfolio worth of $190,235 today, I only need $300 per month to save 4 years on my objective. But if I want to make the million dollars by 55, I would have to increase it to $500 per month. At this rate, I would become millionaire at 53 showing a portfolio value of $641,490, a house value of $511,088 and an outstanding mortgage value of $118,070 for a net worth of $1,034,508 at 53. This plan highlights the important of saving money on a consistent basis.
Waiting 17 years instead of 29 to show 7 figures net worth is not bad. In fact it’s pretty good. But I think I can do better without killing myself. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, money isn’t that important in my life.
Plan #3: Finding Net Worth Accelerators
While I’m fairly confident about executing plan #1 and plan #2, this final section is about finding ways to make it happen quicker, but harder to quantify. It’s easy to make a projection of a steady investment, it’s another when you think of working on various projects. I will make a list of some accelerators that may trigger the 1M$ net worth faster than I can imagine.
- A) Receive larger dividend cheques from my company. As I told my partner when I quit my job to work full-time on our business; my goal here is not to make 100K per year and be content. I want to make several hundreds of thousands per year. The business I’m building is perfect for this type of scale. Here is some simple maths. Imagine I make $10 net per month per members at Dividend Stocks Rock. If I can add 3 net members per day for 3 years, I will be having 3,285 members and be making over $32,000 per month. Those numbers seem crazy when you think of it now, but they are not once you have a solid marketing plan. If I can grow my business by 1,000 new members each year, I will be able to save a lot more than $500 per month. In three years only, I could easily be saving $4,000 per month (assuming I leave most of my income within the company to help it grow). At this pace, I only need 10 years to make my $190K into $1M.
- B) Add some side gigs to my current income. I recently started doing webinars for free. If you haven’t attended to one of them yet, make sure you subscribe to my newsletter. Making those webinars and seeing the interest from you, my readers, I’m thinking there is need here. After all, there are bunch of webinars about how to become rich and build a website, but little is still made in the investment world. Webinars, courses and live conferences are among the other projects I’m contemplating right now. Each of them could turn out into more money in my pocket, meaning more money invested! If you want to hear about my next free investment webinar, subscribe right here:
- C) Invest in Real Estate. As a dividend investor, I’ve understood the power of passive income. If I can leverage money and buy a plex, my “dividend” payment will increase rapidly. I have no plan on buying a rental property in the next 2 years, but this is definitely something I want to take a look at in the future.
- D) Sell my house and transform the proceeds into an investment. When kids will leave the house, I will definitely sell it and travel the world. At that time, I could use the proceeds to buy a condo downtown Montreal and rent about half of the year when I travel abroad. I could then transform a non-productive asset (my house) into additional passive income.
- E) Build a business and sell it. I have no intention in selling DSR. This is my baby and this is the reason why I wanted to quit my job in the first place. However, as things are doing well, my partner and I are already looking at other business opportunities. I would like to create something from scratch and have the possibility to sell it for a few millions down the road. I know, I’m now in the world of dream, but keep in mind that I’ve already escaped reality when I left for Central America last year. Today, everything is possible, even selling a business to a bank for a few millions (yeah… that has to be a fintech!).
There are dozens of possibilities, it’s only a matter of working on your strengths
You may have read this post telling yourself that I’m lucky to have found my way or that your situation is more complicated. You could tell yourself that you can’t make it happen, but don’t tell me. All you have to do is put yourself in danger, pick an action and set a date. I know, this is too simple and it’s not going to work… let me finish with a little story that happened to me 2 weeks ago. On a Friday afternoon, I decide that I must do another webinar. The first one I did back in September was great and I need to do more if I want to become very good at it. I then put the last 30 minutes of my day to build a lending page and send a quick note to my readers.
“The market is full of surprises. Even when you think that it’s overvalued, you can find companies that are producing strong earnings. For investors, the end of October is quite a busy time of the year. With several earnings reports coming out every day, your head could be spinning if you tried to follow all of them. For this reason, I decided to help you out and host a free webinar on next Monday, October 30th at 2pm EST.
This is 100% free, no strings attached. The only catch is there are only 200 live spots available.
The webinar will be 45 minutes long. I’ve selected 3 buys and 3 sells that I will share with you in this webinar. Prepare your questions; I’ll also answer them at the end of the presentation!
Once again, it is 100% free, you will not be required to buy or register to anything to access the webinar. If you can’t make it, register anyway and you will be able to watch the webinar in replay.
Click here to reserve your seat”
Then, on Monday morning, I spent about an hour to work on my presentation. As I had reviewed dozens of companies the week before, it was easy to pick 3 buys, 3 sells and make a general market commentary. Then, I did a test run for 30 minutes to make sure I was comfortable with what I have to say. The webinar lasted 51 minutes. I had about 15 minutes of presentation and I answered questions from highly motivated investors for the rest of the time. At the end of the webinar, I simply mentioned that I was giving them the exclusive opportunity to register to my site at a special discount price. I spent another 30 minutes after the webinar with my Core Business Guardian for feedback.
For a total of 3-4 hours of work, I made $400 on that day. I didn’t prepare for weeks or spent a dime on marketing. I simply used content I’ve been working on throughout the week and found a way to make a few bucks out of it. On top of that, I was feeling darn great about myself! Now, imagine I can pull-off one webinar per week; I could probably increase my monthly income by $1,500 to $2,000 in no time.
So if you think being a father of three in the mid 30’s is too complicated to become millionaire, I have some news for you… There are tons of wways to make it happen! What’s your excuse?
