How To Build Wealth In Ten Years Or Less | The Hype Economy

The world once used to be in a different age where people could simply work a nine-to-five until the end of their days and live and retire happily with what they had earned and saved. That age unfortunately is long gone, and modern demands on our finances often require that we grow our wealth at a pace that would have once made millionaires just to keep our heads above water. But how do you put enough money by for the rainiest of days and retirement? Short of getting rich quick, how do you get rich, as quickly as possible?

Ironically enough, the quickest way to get rich quickly is by planning in the long term. Saving, investing, and reinvesting over time is the only real way to ensure that you compound wealth without resorting to mere speculation, which can take away all your money in an instant.  So how do you go about it?

Ironically, the first step to compounding your wealth is by spending it first. It’s important to first pay off whatever debts are in your name. Things like credit card bills especially rack up high interest in addition to their usual penalties. It can be useful to use something like the debt snowball method, where the smallest of all your debts are paid off as quickly as possible. In the snowball method, the resources that are freed up by paying off smaller loans are then utilised to pay off progressively bigger ones. As the amount of debt you have reduces gradually, more and more funds would be freed up for saving and investing. 

An important avenue often ignored in beefing up one’s financial security is simply asking for a better salary. With every passing year, your value rises as you gain more experience in what you do, and the economy as a whole will be subject to inflationary pressure, both of which are fair and valid reasons to ask for a better rewards scheme. A salary increase is the single easiest way to increase the foundation you have for wealth building, allowing you to save and consequently invest at a faster pace. Your negotiation needn’t be purely monetary either, as perks such as extra vacation days, flexible work hours, and opportunities to develop professionally can all have financial benefits for you, either through reduced expenses or by boosting your income potential. 

Of course, no amount of wealth is going to help if you aren’t well-versed in managing your expenses carefully, and within a budget. As mentioned before, the only way to shorten the time between deciding to build your wealth and doing it is by saving aggressively. Reducing expenses can have other benefits as well: since you are not necessarily living paycheck to paycheck, you’ll enjoy not having to suffer under the mental strain of always having to think about whether you make the next month’s rent or credit card instalment. Of course, managing your expenses is not just about creating a budget and sticking to it: it’s important to revisit the budget frequently to make sure that it reflects the situation you live in, the quality of life you wish to achieve, and most of all, to ensure that it doesn’t legitimise any unnecessary spending that may be taking place under your very nose. For example, it may be necessary to revisit your actual expenses often to make sure that you aren’t paying for things on subscription models that you no longer need or benefit from, like streaming services and other entertainment mediums. 

Another avenue of picking up extra cash that many often employ is side hustles or part-time businesses that pick up a little profit on the side. Depending on your business, this might even prove to be an excellent passive source of income. Having a rental property is one such example, although arguably not everyone has the wherewithal to pick up a rental property on the side. Another important factor to consider is whether your ‘second income’ is actually adding to your quality of life or taking away from it: tying up all your free hours might leave you with no time to give to your relationships or yourself in the end. It’s best to use the increased accessibility that technology provides to commercialise something you can do easily and well. If you have trouble deciding on something, the easiest thing to do is consider what most people come to you for help: this is most likely a talent that you can capitalise on relatively easily. 

In the end, you must invest all the cash you save to generate wealth at a faster rate than at which its value depreciates. Most people make the mistake of spending time and money in finding the ‘perfect’ investment that generates the best rewards while incurring the lowest risk: the truth is, no such investment exists. Simply investing in a company with guaranteed growth in your country is enough to ensure that your little fund grows over time. As you become more literate in the way the stock market behaves, you can experiment with realising your capital gains, reinvesting them, and diversifying your portfolio. Of course, investing in stocks that regularly pay out dividends is a surefire way of tapping into a secondary, passive source of income. Large multinationals such as Macdonalds for example have increased their dividend payouts over the past two decades, which naturally represent an increasing effective yield to those who invested in them. Investing in such a company may require more resources than you think, however, as their stocks enjoy consistently high demand on the market. 

Building a significant amount of wealth might seem a daunting, even hopeless task for young people earning and living in today’s economy. Naturally, wealth-building takes more than a little time to materialise as actual benefits in your life, which is why many often resort to get-rich-quick schemes, with varying results. However, a little preparation, a prudent strategy, and good discipline will see you well down the path of wealth-building before you even realise it.