How to Build Wealth

We live on an economic planet. Every day you will have to deal with money. Finances, money and economics are the main topics of everyone's adult life—whether we accept it or not. Every time you go to the store, the gas station, have to pay the rent, go online, when your kids need clothes or shoes or when you open the refrigerator and discover you are out of bread, milk and fruit.

Money is an everyday topic of people lives. The amount of conscious time people devote to money is dangerously low. Most people only think about income, spending, saving, and debt, and never learn to understand investing, wealth, cash flow, and leverage. Most of us were brought up poor and middle class trapped by the ideas of our environment believing we are merely prisoners to our situation or some conspiracy. 98% of the people spend no time working on these massive issues in life.

The reasons why 98% of the people do not ever accumulate wealth are: 1) Most of the people do not understand that income (inflow) should be more than expenses (outflow)—Seventy-six percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck; 2) They are conditioned to believe a job is the only way to earn money; 3) Probably senior to all is most don’t ever pursue financial freedom and only settle for money to buy things.

We go to school and college to get a good job but invest almost nothing in financial literacy. I earned an accounting degree from a good college and didn’t learn anything about cash flow, using debt leverage, or how to exploit wealth trends and opportunities. I have never lived beyond my means, driven fancy cars, or played baller. I didn’t borrow money to start my first business rather I went to the market and sold my product door to door to raise cash and fund my expansion.

People borrow money for college, to start a business, to go on vacation—amassing massive debts on multiple credit cards. College debt exceeds all credit card debt with millions borrowing trillions of dollars to avoid going to work. People borrow money to get educated on jobs that may not even exist by the time they graduate and then borrow more money to buy things they can’t afford. No wonder so many people have become complacent and then give up on the idea of creating financial independence.

The wealthy on the other hand, and I am not talking about the few who inherited money, but people like me. At 25, I was broke. At 30, I had a million dollars saved and no debt, plus my first business. By the time I was 35 I had three businesses running and had started my real estate career.

To create financial freedom you must do the following:

1) Understand that you can.
2) Get rid of the middle class and poverty thinking you were brought up with.
3) Become financially literate. You have to know the difference between income, expenses, and cash flow.
4) Have the courage to take risk and make investments.
5) Create multiple flows of income and pay attention.

Study the self-made wealthy. I have been doing this since the age of 26 when I made a decision to create wealth for myself so I could one day have a life most only dream of. By doing so I was able to undo the middle-class poverty thinking that served my father to get him into the middle-class but would not serve me in creating true wealth. I learned from Warren Buffett that if you KNOW what you are doing you reduce the downside of an investment. From Mark Cuban, I unlearned the popular idea of diversification and realized when to go all in. I listened to Jack Welch, the CEO of GE, who talked to me about domination rather than competition and it changed how we scaled CardoneU.com to be the leading online sales training university on the planet. By studying the Real Estate magnate Sam Zell I learned how to use debt to leverage my real estate portfolio and turn a dream to own 20 units into 4,500 units and almost $400 million dollars.

To build wealth and make money you need to: a) make a decision, b) study the self-made, c) disregard the advice of poor people that have given up on money, and d) keep paying attention.

"Money is a funny thing—when you don’t pay attention to it… it will go
spend time with those that do.”

Be great,

GC

Grant Cardone is an American entrepreneur, New York Times best-selling author, speaker, motivator and online sales training expert. Cardone is a respected, highly regarded master salesperson whose passion is to teach people how to sell themselves, their products and services regardless of economic climate. His books, audio packages and seminars provide people of all professional backgrounds with the practical tools necessary to build their own economies towards the path to true freedom.

“Success is your duty, obligation, responsibility."