You work hard. You set great intentions. You stick to deadlines. You even appear successful to everyone. Yet, somehow wealth seems to elude you. You have always wished you had more money in your bank. 

If this feels like you, read this post and you may begin to attract those zeroes into your bank account. There just may be a few critical things you are not doing, or doing wrong.

He is filthy rich. They have obscene amounts of money. Do you use words like filthy, stinking, obscene to describe wealth? 

Now, do you really want something which is filthy, stinking and obscene in your life?

Definitely not. And so wealth eludes you. Your subconscious will repel wealth, or create situations such that even if you earn tons of money, not much will remain with you. You always wonder – where does my money go?!

Be careful of the words you use to describe wealth. Take a page from ancient India – they elevated wealth to the status of a Goddess. And India’s biggest festival Diwali, popularly called the festival of lights, is in the honour of the capricious Goddess Laxmi, the bestower of Wealth. The ancient Indians venerated wealth. Little wonder that India was the richest nation in the world for centuries. 

To attract money use words like prosperous, thriving, blessed and flourishing to describe wealth.

In your home, keep your money neatly, and in a clean place. There are too many people who will carelessly leave money all over the place. Currency notes in a dirty old wallet. Coins carelessly tossed onto an untidy table. This will keep true wealth away from you. Reserving a drawer or a safe exclusively for keeping your money is a great idea. Have a beautiful bowl in which you keep your change. Show that you care about money and money will care for you.

The memory of what a lot of money once meant to you is important. You could manage an entire month on a few hundred dollars. There are still people out there who do that. Feeling grateful for the abundance that you now have, brings even more abundance. Poverty is never about having too little, it’s always about wanting even more. Wealth is a mindset that needs to be developed.

Numerous books and courses claim that you can “think” and grow rich. That unfortunately never happens. You cannot “think” about having pizza, and have a pizza magically manifest on your plate. You have to make the pizza or order it. You have to act on your intentions. The reality is that you have to work to earn money. 

You may have sorted your earning game, even more importantly you need to figure out how to have your money work for you. Money that is simply sitting in your bank is making you poor. Learn to invest your money, then the money does a lot of the work. 

Time is your greatest friend in the game of investing – the magical effect of compounding means that the sooner you start investing, the sooner you will have more zeroes than you could ever think possible.

Ronald Read was a janitor in Vermont,  who lead a simple life. Nothing about his life was out of the ordinary. Except this. When he died at the age of 92 in 2015, he left 8 million dollars to charity!

Warren Buffett is reported to have once said, “You don’t need to have extraordinary effort to achieve extraordinary results. You just need to do the ordinary, everyday things exceptionally well.”

90% of Warren Buffet’s immense fortune was generated after his 60th birthday. Like I said earlier, time is your best friend when it comes to investing and growing your money. Start early and be consistent. Roland and Warren both started early. Both are spectacularly rich. You could be too.

And if you have not yet started – today is a great day to start. It’s never about how much you earn, It’s about what you manage to invest, and when you start.

Greed creates poverty. If something is too good to be true, it most probably is exactly that. A scam. Throughly study what you decide to invest in. Take the time to do that. If you don’t understand why you are doing what you are doing, you have set yourself up for failure. Getting help from a mentor is critical for this. You will be surprised how many people will help, if you only ask.

A calm, centred mind will ensure that you gain luck with money. You do have to make efforts to earn and invest your money – however, those efforts will yield much more than you expect when you practice meditation on a daily basis. Meditation allows you to let go of day to day stressors, and gain perspective to the circumstances of your life. A meditator gains the ability to make wiser, better decisions. This is critically important for material success. To be a millionaire work hard and invest wisely. To get to being a billionaire, learn and practice meditation.

Create secondary and tertiary sources of income for yourself. If you rely on just one stream of income, you are exactly one step away from poverty. Over time, you should aim that 70% of all you earn is from passive income streams. 

A job pays you to learn and plan about what you really want to do in life. It’s like being in university – only you are getting paid for it. But sooner, rather than later, it’s best to graduate. 

Prioritise liberty and freedom over money every time. You are truly rich when you can work where you want to, with whom you want to, and when you want to. Money is capricious, Knowledge is steady. You can lose money quite easily. Knowledge once thoroughly learned will always stay with you. Choose learning over money.

But don’t make the mistake of investing everything into learning. You need to use the knowledge you have gained to earn – so that you can finance further learning adventures.

Over time, you will realise that earning money is quite easy. Knowing why you want that money, and what you are going to do with it is much harder. Having clear life goals that are not about wealth will take you much further than simply thinking about financial freedom. 

Your wealth needs to be a means for you to achieve what you truly want. Listen to that again. Your wealth needs to be a means for you to achieve what you truly want. Earning money for the sake of money is just a waste of time.

Before we move on to figuring out the right way of spending money, I would appreciate a comment about what your secondary source of income is.

Spending money is an art. Pick up the cheque whenever you can, and tip generously. It makes you feel wonderful, and it means you don’t sweat small amounts of money. When you feel great, you do nice things. This makes life better – for you, and others around you. 

Give to charity. As you earn more, don’t raise your standard of living too much. Instead raise your standard of giving. Make a difference to people, and to the planet. To the one who gives, more will be given.

Spending money on experiences is always better than buying material stuff. Experiences are fantastic, and create glorious memories that become resources in tough times. But you don’t have to say yes to every experience that comes your way. Because experiences take away the most non-renewable resource of them all – time.

Track your spending. Robert Kiyosaki says rich people buy assets. Poor people buy liabilities. Liabilities actively take money away from you. Assets actively bring money to you. Buying assets creates even more income. Spending on liabilities suck wealth away from you.

Spending money to impress others is a surefire way to get into crippling debt. You attract fake people who are sources of misery. Respecting your wealth, and spending where required is intelligence.

The reward for success shouldn’t be that you are constantly stressed about that success. Consistently take time off to exercise and meditate. Ensure you sleep well every night. No amount of money is ever going to be a replacement for great health.

Accept that you will make mistakes and give yourself the permission to fail. I am not saying that you should fail. Only that you give yourself the permission to fail. 

Accept that there will be costs to mistakes. Accept that certain amounts of investments will fail. Learn from all this, and pay up gladly. Don’t keep making the same mistake again and again though. That would be truly costly. 

Accept that there are taxes. Pay up, and sleep peacefully.

Finally, if whatever you are doing is making you worse as a person, it’s not success. It’s never worth it. You need to grow as a person. We are not human beings. We are human becomings. Become better. Each Day. Then life is great.

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