Ya know, years ago I had the chance to hear Dr. Jerry Buss, the guy who owns the LA Lakers now and is a real estate gazillionaire, answer this question.
He started out like this: he asked the people who had come to the talk he was giving "How many people want to be rich?"
Every hand in the place shot up.
Then he asked, "How many people want to work 60 hours a week during the weekdays, plus 8 hours a day on Saturdays and Sundays, and not take any vacations or days off?"
Hands went down.
Dr. Buss explained: he started out as an aerospace engineer working for a salary. He made a good salary but not enough to get rich on.
He and his wife lived frugally-- they didn't buy new cars, they drove what they had until it fell apart and then bought used, not new, cars; they didn't take any vacations, didn't shop for fancy clothes, they lived in a normal house and their kids went to public schools.
With what he scrimped and saved, Buss went into a partnership with a couple of other aerospace engineers and bought an apartment building. Together, they worked on fixing it up and maintaining it, making sure the tenants they had were good tenants, and doing what was necessary to keep it up. And in a while, they bought another apartment building and did the same thing.
He said that they worked like dogs-- any time they had after work, they were doing things landlords had to do and researching other real estate purchases, or working with the banks and agents on loans and financials and so forth.
He said they did this for a good 15 years, putting every spare cent they had into the real estate investments and doing all the work on maintenance and upkeep themselves. He said it was hard work and not a lot of fun.
But at the end of 15 years, the partnership had properties that were worth millions of dollars. And they'd moved into industrial real estate and were branching out into other investments.
If you don't want to spend the rest of your life working at low paying job with a crap salary, the first thing you need to do is invest in yourself: get the best education you can. People with college degrees make more money than people who don't have degrees, and have more and better job options.
Then, start living below your means: save every penny you can by not buying things you don't need, shopping wisely to get what you do need as inexpensively as possible. Start researching investments and learning all you can about whatever you want to invest in-- real estate, stocks and bonds, commodities, whatever. And start investing.
Expect that at first you'll have to work long hours and do without things like vacations and luxuries, and put every penny you have back into your investments. Keep at it and keep at it.
In the end, you can be independently wealthy, but expect to work hard at it. Rich people, unless they inherited their wealth, had to work to earn it. The difference between rich people and not-rich people is sometimes just the willingness of the rich people to work harder and save more money than the people who would rather live easier and spend money on fun stuff.
Good luck.
Hands down the most common way to become independently wealthy is to start your own business. Ideally, it should be the type of business you could sell eventually (i.e. not a service business but a product or software, etc.).
Do this when you are young, work REALLY hard throughout your 20s and sell it.
It's not easy but it's more common than you think.
Oh my God Karin C, what a great answer! But definitely, that is the way to do it. Work hard, live frugally, and invest your money wisely. Plain and simple. I am lucky because where I live (outside the US) I can invest in a government-insured fund that gives me a 15% annual return. But even if you could only get a 10% return your money will double about every 7 years. Compound interest is a wonderful thing. If you work your butt off for 10 years, save 200k and then invest it at 10% annual return, in 21 years you would have $1.6 million. In 28 years, $3.2 million. In 35 years, $6.4 million and so on. Oh, and that's assuming you don't add a single penny from your pocket besides the initial 200k. If you were to invest a nice chunk of your income every year then it would grow that much more! Good luck!
PS. I realize the irony of this, though. Most people want to be rich because they want to have a luxurious lifestyle and/or not have to work. The catch is, in order to become rich you have to do exactly the opposite (work hard/live frugally). That's just how it goes! The only other legal ways I can think of are: inheritance, winning the lottery or a huge lawsuit.
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Good luck!
get an interesting high paying job with a good salary and save up enough money.
Thinking of wealth in terms of money saddens me. I have seen some horrible scenes and I try not to think about it. But it know many people are studying on the feeling.
Start off by posting on yahoo, where all independently wealthy people got their start.
Hard work. Luck.
how can I become wealthy so I don't have to do a boring tedious low paying job with crap salary?
