Millionaires in America
I got a question for you. Are you on the path to be becoming wealthy?
Asked another way, do you have a dedicated plan that you are executing, that you are confident is going to lead you to wealth?
It’s a simple question. Are you on the path to become wealthy? You either are or you’re not. Yes or no.
Now, your answer might be complex in nature but it’s a relatively simple question. If you are not, I would follow up this question to you, which is why not?
According to recent studies that I’ve looked at, there’s somewhere between 22 and 30 million millionaires in America. There’s also about 330 million people in America.
According to the last census, there are around 330 million people in America. If you think about them in four stages of life, 0 to 20, 20 to 40, to 60 to 80, a quarter of those Americans are minors, so obviously they would probably not be millionaires.
If you take them out, that means you have about 250 million adults in North America, in in America and you have about 25 million millionaires. That means about 10% of the population is millionaires.
So, my question is, are you on that path to become one of those 10%? And if not, why not?
Two Reasons
I would surmise that there are two reasons as to why.
The first is the lack of financial literacy. In North America, the sad reality of the situation is, people growing up don’t learning about personal finance.
It’s not really taught anywhere. If your parents don’t teach you or you don’t have a strong mentor in your life who is kind and takes you under their wings to teach you the rights and wrongs of finance, you really don’t know. Then you are forced to learn through experience and that can and often does hurt!
So that’s, that’s one thing – the lack of financial literacy in North America. And the other one is, I think is lack of action or bad choices.
The reality is, whether you like or not, you are where you today (financially) because of the decisions that you have made in the past. The choices, the thoughts, the actions, the behaviors, the patterns that you have previously engaged it. Those have led you in your life have led you to where you are now.
And if you’re at a great spot, then good, then keep doing those things. But if you’re at a spot you don’t like, then you need to change because your future self is dedicated upon the decisions, choices, mindset, beliefs, actions that you’re taking now. If you want a better future, you must do things differently in the present.
A World of Books
In 1996 Tom Stanley wrote a really good book called The Millionaire Next Door, and it talks about the habits and the characteristics of millionaires. It talked about their buying habits, their purchases, the kind of cars that they drove, the houses they lived in, what they did for their occupations, their marriage status how much support they received from their parents, how much they gave to their children. It was a really good book.
He went on to write another book called The Millionaire Mind, which focused on Deca-millionaires. He wrote some others, Stop Acting Rich, The Millionaire Woman. Him and his daughter were working on the book, The Next Millionaire Next Door when he tragically died in a car accident. But The Millionaire Next Door was the first book that I read about millionaires, and it was really, really good. It was really interesting. It’s kind of meaty. It’s kind of statistical in nature.
One of its limitations though, was that it was formulated off a sample size of about 750 millionaires that he surveyed. It gave a good picture, but it wasn’t representative maybe of the larger, millions out there that, that are millionaires.
Ramsey solutions, specifically Chris Hogan and his team at the time, in 2018 did another study of millionaires of over 10,000 millionaires in North America and wrote about it in EveryDay Millionaires. And it went a lot deeper.
It quantified their jobs, their ages, where they lived, and a whole bunch of things, which is really fascinating. When Hogan left Ramsey Solutions, Dave kind of repackaged that book into Baby Steps Millionaires, which basically outlines, that research and the steps to get there. It too was really interesting.
The takeaway from that is – – – the information is out there if you want it.
There’s two ways to get information. One is to basically learn it from experience like we talked about a little bit earlier, or learn it from the benefit of others. it’s a big world and you’re doing a great job of today trying to gain information from others by reading this post. There is a ton of resources out there like this that will help you.
There are also people that provide services, like banks, advisors, experts, and planners that can be of help to you as well.
Learning from Others
With that in mind, I want to kind of go through the services that I provide to my clients and it’ll also provide a foreshadowing of where we are going to go through with this site, all with the idea of helping provide you the information and inspiration to navigate financial decisions, intentionally build wealth, and retire with confidence.
One of the services that I offer to clients individually is true wealth coaching. Financial coaching focuses on the fundamentals of getting control of your income -understanding where it’s coming from, where it’s going, kind of doing the B word (Doing that budget). Said another way, having a cashflow plan. It focuses on getting that initial savings taken care of, maybe reducing or even better eliminating debt. That’s what coaching is about. And if you need help with those things, reaching out to a financial counselor or financial coach might be beneficial for you.
The next service that I offer to clients individually is that of true wealth investing. This is the idea that if you need help with investing, you’re trying to start your Roth, IRA, or you are trying to get going on your 401k, you’re trying to do some wealth building, maybe outside of some of those retirement vehicles. This is a service that’s provides professional help regarding your investing. Investing is the engine. It’s the thing that helps your wealth grow over time. So again, there’s a lot of people out there that you could reach out to, to get the help that you need when it comes to your investing. There’s a lot of statistical evidence, empirical evidence out there of historical habits and patterns, as well as investment strategies that if you follow… chances are it will help you.
The next service that I offer clients individually is that of true wealth planning. What planning does, is it starts to combine multiple different domains or facets of the financial world into one. And the idea is you start at one location and you plan out where you want to go. Think about it, if you were taking a vacation, you wouldn’t just randomly get in the car and drive somewhere and just kind of figure it out. Yet that’s what most people do when it comes to their lives and their money. They just make independent decisions throughout the day, throughout the months, throughout the years, and just kind hope it will magically happen. And the reality is, it often doesn’t.
Financial planning is the idea of starting to understand first holistically where you are. One of the best ways to do that is a comprehensive cashflow plan and a net worth Balance sheet. Then we try to dream and envision/plan out your desired end-state. Where is it you’re trying to go five, ten, maybe more years out than that. But generally, 10 years is kind of about the upper limit someone can kind of visualize. And then we try to determine, okay, here’s where you are. Here’s where you’re trying to get. Just like if you’re going on a vacation, you know where you’re starting, you know where you’re going, then you start to walk the path.
But there’s a lot of different facets to it. There’s estate planning, there’s insurance, there’s investing, there’s taxes, there’s debt, there’s all these different domains of money that’s going to help get you to where you’re going. And that’s what planning is about. Planning is about the intertwining of all those different domains to help you realize your end state, whatever that state is for you. And it’s different for everybody. Because no two people have the exact goals, desires, ambitions, and outcomes that they want for their life.
The next service that I offer people is that of true wealth retiring. Retiring is the idea that you have retired, or are near retiring, or you’re beginning to transition into this phase of retirement. One of the things I say about retirement is “everything changes at retirement”. Your time changes, your relationships change, your health generally changes. And the way you need to handle money also needs to change. You had an income for all these years, 20, 30, 40 years you had an income. Now that income goes away and you’re living off the money that you saved, as well as other capital social or financial pensions that you’ve set up. A lot of things change retirement.
Things like health insurance through Medicare, things like Social Security, things like Legacy planning, things like retirement income planning. Retirement Income Planning has to deal with you getting the income that you need/want, but yet balancing the risk of not running out later in life. A complex, yet super important things.
And here’ the trick – retirement income’s very dynamic. It’s not just a hit the button and it’s done forever. It changes over time. COLAs go up. Costs go up. Expenses may go down. One might have different streams of income, turn on and turn off at different times. It can be very complex.
Legacy planning deals with somebody dying, and the other spouse has to take care of things. That spouse dies, the children inherit things. Thus, they too need to understand there’s a lot of things that take place in that stage of life.
Again, out there, there are retirement planners that work just those things. They just specialize in retirement planning, if that’s what you’re looking for.
My point is that there are people out there that have the information that you need, and will walk aside you, and educate you and help you get your desired outcome, which hopefully entails that, of being wealthy.
Let’s Walk and Learn Together
And that is what we’re to do on this site. I’m going to start walking you through just like I would as a client on those very beginning stages of, what does coaching look like, and mindset and cashflow management and savings and debt and things like that. And really walk you all the way through to retirement with going in between investing and financial planning.
Post by post, episode by episode, helping give you the information and hopefully inspiring you along the way to become intentionally build wealth, retire with confidence, and navigate the decisions that you’re going make in your life.
As I said, I think there’s two reasons why people are not on a plan to build wealth.
If you listened to my last episode or read the post on, our back story, I went and read a whole bunch of books. But one of the things that really brought me back to the Dave Ramsey book, TheTotal Money Makeover book that I highlighted in that episode, was that it gave me at a base level, a step-by-step-by-step plan of what to do, what Dave calls the baby steps, what I refer to as the path to financial success.
It lays out the big rocks of what you need to do. There’s, there’s a ton of micro decisions, and things inside of those steps, and even some that aren’t in there. But I like the systematic approach to build wealth. My thought was that if other people did it following these things, if I followed these things, I would get the same results. And honestly, I have, and I’ve helped a lot of other clients and other people get there too.
And so that’s my goal here, is to help you with those things. So, one is financial literacy, the other is taking action.
A Step in the Right Direction
I’m going to try every post, if I remember, to give you a small micro action that will help enhance your wealth building and your knowledge regarding navigating decisions, intentionally building wealth and retiring with confidence.
Here is this week’s action: I want you to explore this week, to find a financial book that you could purchase and read it. You can go to the bookstore, go to the money section there will be a bunch of them there. You can go to a thrift store and maybe buy the same book for, you know, a quarter of the price. You could even, go to the library. Libraries are great things, and you can get a library card if you don’t have one, and you can borrow that book for free <laugh>.
In the back of Babysteps Millionaires they have an appendix. And one of the things that about millionaires is that 85% of millionaires read over six books a year. So that’s one every two months or so. Information is power. We live in an information generated economy, and we don’t produce goods as much. We live in an information and knowledge-based economy.
Get a personal finance book and begin to increase your knowledge and begin to do the things what others have done. And by doing so, going back to our original question, are you on a path to becoming wealthy? You will then be able to hopefully, confidently say yes.
Hope this is helpful for you. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to reach out to me. Otherwise, until next time, I hope you have a great day.
