The Art of Winning the Game of Money
If you look at my bio, you will see that I am currently a college student. So you might ask how could a broke (slowly changing) college student can talk about wealth generation. However, these lessons that I started implementing this past August have led me to get my first $10,000 without getting a formal job. After reading countless articles and watching videos, I finally feel like I have gotten a fundamental grasp of generating wealth. With some basic concepts and understanding, multiplying your own wealth can become very simple.
Your mentality defines how much you make
Shifting one’s mentality towards money and understanding the rules of wealth generation are the first steps to mastering money. Money can be considered as one of the most important objects in an person’s life. It can determine everything from lifestyle to the types of relationships you make throughout your lifetime. However, a lot of people have different conceptions of money and carry different emotional connections to it. Some people view money as a “poison”. Others view it as a means to corrupt society. Many individuals, me included for the majority of my short life, viewed it as necessary to have a lot of. It has defined many of my decisions such as career choice. In reality, money is nothing more than a TOOL. It is a means of acquiring something else. Whether it be experiences, cars, houses, money is a way to get other desired things. And the process of getting money is just a game.
There are three main actions that people should do with money. Most people do one of these well, but to achieve true mastery, one should be well versed in all three actions.
Saving money makes the foundation
This is probably the only thing that most people do, if they do anything. Most middle class parents teach their kids to save money for “those rainy days”, but a lot people take this into their future as hoarding it under their beds and not doing it. For these people, having money under their beds gives them a false sense of security. The result is that most people do this in excess because they lack confidence that they can make it back. This is why the third action, to create wealth, is super important because it can turn this the idea of money into a game.
There are a lot of apps that help you deal with personal finances such as Mint. Mint will help you track your spending and even show reflections on your credit score. If you need help sparing extra cash every month, this app is probably the only one to use because it provides the same things that every other personal finance app does.
After you are able to save, it is time to invest that saved money to yourself. Approximately 10% of your monthly income should be spent on things that adds to your intellectual capital. This could mean buying courses on udemy or masterclass or even buying paperback books. Books are only the beginning. If you really want to get into weightlifting, spend that money on supplements. This investment in yourself brings the greatest potential for future returns, especially if you learn marketable skills.
Grow your capital by investing
Being able to put your money into different asset classes that increase in value over time is a skill that can take years to develop. Having a little bit of knowledge of the markets and how they operate is something that everyone should know. Aside from that, people should at minimum put their money into mutual funds or index funds so that it can at least grow with the market.
It is always better to invest your own money because a lot of these funds take out percentages of the total money you invested in. These cuts can be eliminated just by learning how to manage your own money. The ceiling for this is literally endless because once you get equipped with the basics of longs and shorts, you can get returns by leveraging global macroeconomic arbitrage scenarios or investing in options.
There are also a lot of apps like Acorns that help you invest your leftover change into the stock market. Robinhood is another app that doesn’t have trader fees to make investing accessible to everyone. These apps are allowing people to invest in alternative currencies as well, which makes diversifying your portfolios easier than ever.
Create your wealth with more than one stream of income
I am definitely saving the best for last for the readers that made it this far. Most people usually think that there is only one way to make money or think that other methods of generating wealth are too risky and thus compromise their need to be “secure”. They see their 9–5 jobs as the only stable source of income. They overlook other streams of income based on previous bias towards some of these methods.
The truth of the matter is that if there are things that you can profit out of online, then you are doing yourself a disservice by not doing them. The business I started about a month ago only started because it was a way for me to make passive income. Now, apart from my classes, it is the thing I spend most of my time on and has a lot more returns.
You are in charge of your destiny with how much money you make. It all starts with your mindset and then it is shown by your actions.
