I read a great piece in Money Magazine a while back.
It’s more about mindset than the market, but I found it to be highly relevant to what we’re doing in REI, so I wanted to pass along their analysis.
The author stated that he gleaned his information from his 5-year study on the habits of 233 self-made millionaires.
His two biggest takeaways were:
- Nearly every one of the millionaires attributed their success in life to habits they learned primarily from their parents or some mentor in life, and
- The secret to success is daily habits.
He says that he’s identified more than 300 of what he calls “Rich Habits,” and he wrote about 5 of them in the piece. At first I was surprised how much they aligned with real estate investing. But then as I thought more about it, I realized that it’s about focus and habits, and that those are transferrable to anything we do.
So here’s his top five “Rich Habits.” Some of them are no brainers, and #3 is huge, but the point is to make this worthwhile to your business, why not take a critical look at what you’re doing to see if it aligns with what the 233 self-made millionaires are doing? I’ll bet you’ll find, like I did, that there’s a lot of room for improvement.
1. They Create Multiple Streams of Income
Self-made millionaires do not rely on only a single source of income. They develop multiple streams. Three seemed to be the magic number in my study. Sixty-five percent had three or more streams of income that they created over time.
Diversifying your sources of income allows you to weather the economic downturns that always occur in life. These downturns are not as severe to the rich as they are to the poor. The poor put “one pole in one pond” and when their single income stream is negatively impacted in some way, they suffer financially.
Conversely, the rich have “several poles in several ponds” and are able to draw income from other sources when one source is temporarily impaired.
2. They Dream-Set Before They Goal-Set
Dream-Setting is the act of clearly defining a dream. Sixty-four percent of the millionaires in my study were pursuing one single dream. Here’s the 2-step process to Dream-Setting: