Tag Archives: How Much

Making Money 301 – Staying Rich

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Very few people will ‘become rich’ …

… a lot of those that do make it to this stage do so by virtue of ‘accident’ (inheritence, lottery, sudden fame, etc.) … without graduating through Money 101 and 201, many lose their money here … all of it and quickly.

During this stage, there is still an up to 80% failure rate!

Even for those who have lived through Money 201 and 301, the rules change (again). There are only a couple of books (Get Rich, Stay Rich, Pass It On, The Millionaire Next Door, and Donald Trump’s books) and I didn’t find any of them to be terribly helpful.

This stage is all about moving more risky ACTIVE assets (businesses, trading portfolios, etc.) into PASSIVE portfolios (income producing real estate, selected value stocks, inflation-protected bonds, etc.) that generate enough passive income to support your dream retirement lifestyle.

The tools here are wealth preservation tools: value stocks, buy-and-hold commercial real estate, inflation-protected bonds (as well as maintaining the remaining Money 101 and 201 systems).

Now that you are Rich (really), your main task is to have fun (you’ve earned it!) but to also be at least 98% certain that your money will not run out before you do …

Simple, isn’t it?

How much does it take to be rich?

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My 10 y.o. daughter asked me exactly that question the other night … actually, she simply asked “are we rich”? I’ll tell you how I answered in a minute, because it is important that you understand how YOU would answer this question.

In the meantime, and by coincidence, I came across this blog just yesterday: http://www.millionairecorner.com/content/blogsection/4/110/

It’s written by Spectrum who did some research on what it takes to be rich …

How Rich is Rich?

 http://getrichstayrich.net/introduction/index.html

The problem is that they asked people who were already Rich!

 So, most said $5 million (what? net worth? in the bank? under the mattress?), but some said as much as $25 million. I would guess that this was related to how much money they made … the more they have, the more they spend, so the more they believe it takes to be ‘rich’.

Only 1 in 5 said $1 million, which is what many people just starting on the road to wealth would believe means ‘rich’ … when you get to $1M tell me if you’re ready to retire (I’ll bet the answer is NO!). 

I think the number is somewhere between $100 million and $1 billion …

… as one Billionaire said recently, after his company stocks grew five-fold in less than 12 months moving him from $1 Billion to $5 Billion net worth: “once you get past the first Billion the rest doesn’t matter.

So, how did I answer my daughter?

I said: “we are not ‘rich’ we are wealthy, because we can afford to live the same way that we are living now for the rest of our lives”. 

Now, we aren’t slouches (nice house in a great suburb, the ‘right’ cars, schools, vacations, etc.) but we have no helicopters or Lear Jets …

So, to determine when you are ‘rich’ you first need to determine your Number … that is the amount of money that you need to have ‘in the bank’ (actually in Passive Investments : bank accounts, investment properties, stock market … anything that makes YOU money even while you are asleep) to produce enough income for you to live your current (or desired) lifestyle for the rest of your life (which means, the amount has to be indexed for inflation).

I’ll show you how I worked through this in a future post!

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