AJC’s Secret Strategy?

Every financial ‘expert’ has a secret strategy …

… you know, the one that made them $1,000,000 simply by doing [insert: strategy of choice]; just try googling “how I made million” and you’ll come up with listings like:

How I Made $77 Million In Two Years & You Can Too by Vincent James

How This Kid Made $60 Million In 18 Months

How I made a million in 3 months.

How I made over $2 million with this blog

How I made my first million: Schoolboy entrepreneur

7million7years- How to make 7 million in 7 years …

How I made a million dollars investing in real-estate

One link is about making millions in real-estate; another through marketing your business; another through online businesses; another through promoting yourself via your blog, and so on …

In fact, you’ll find one guy talking about how to make $7 million in 7 years through commercial real-estate and business 😉

At least that is the vibe that I am picking up, if Ryan at Planting Dollars (who kindly mentioned my blog in this post about personal finance outliers) is representative of my readers:

There are two blogs in the personal finance arena that are obviously outliers.

Adrian at 7 Million 7 Years… How many people do you know that are worth 7 million? Adrian did it in 7 years and writes about his strategies that are, of course, not common sense and not mainstream. He advocates starting businesses and investing in commercial real estate.

Jacob at Early Retirement Extreme… He retired in 5 years via traditional work, lots of traditional work, and cutting his living expenses to the bare minimum.

I may have used real-estate (both commercial and residential) – fueled by very modest (at the time) business-generated cashflow – to make my first $7 million, and then actually selling the businesses to make my next … but, I also used stocks, negotiating, options, gold, and relationships to make a few more million, as well.

Starting a business and/or investing in commercial real-estate may be the exact wrong – or right – strategy for you to make your $7 million in 7 years, too.

It all depends …

First, though, if there’s any ‘secret’ to making millions, it’s to truly understand the game of financial roshambo:

Stocks have no intrinsic advantage over Real-Estate; Real-Estate has no intrinsic advantage over Business; Business has no instrinsic advantage over Stocks.

This applies equally to how you choose to earn your money, as well as how you choose to invest it.

In fact …

It’s the combination of what you earn (income) and what you do with it (invest) that provides the compounding that you need in order to reach your Number.

For example, if you put a little extra salt-and-pepper into your income-producing strategy, you may be able to back-off the gas a little with your investing strategy (as long as you have cultivated excellent MM101 habits, so that you don’t just piss it all away).

On the other hand, if you are subsisting on a meagre office-job salary, you may need to ramp up your income with a little side business and you may need to seriously ramp up your investment strategy with some RE and/or stocks.

Three examples:

– I pursued a high risk / high reward business strategy to generate the cash that I then invested in real-estate and stocks to allow me to reach my Number; to ensure my success, I chose to push the risk throttle by expanding my businesses internationally.

–  Josh has chosen an  even higher risk / higher reward income-producing strategy by trading ‘penny’ pharma stocks with ever larger portions of his Networth going into one or two ‘trading positions’; I advised him to put a portion of his ‘winnings’ into lower risk / lower reward investments such as buy/hold RE, Value stocks, Index Funds, or (dare I say it), Bonds or CD’s to ensure that he reaches his Number.

Mike has chosen  a high-income-employment path to producing the income required to fuel his investment strategy, but has chosen to ‘invest’ his Net Worth mainly in cash. I advised him to maintain his current earning capability, but ‘up’ his investment risk profile up the scale to, say, Index Funds so that he can then pretty much cruise to his Number.

It’s different for everybody …

In neither Josh’s nor Mike’s case does commercial real-estate or business need to figure greatly in their journey towards their Number.

And, it may not figure in yours 🙂

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One thought on “AJC’s Secret Strategy?

  1. “It’s the combination of what you earn (income) and what you do with it (invest) that provides the compounding that you need in order to reach your Number”

    This is so true, you need both not one or the other

    There are people that amassed money on a small income (cheap way)

    And there are the ones that make alot of money and don’t know what to do with it

    But you need a little of both to do it right

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