What is the wealth mindset? A wealth mindset means making more money, cutting expenses, and investing as much money as you can to build wealth. It’s a mindset that looks to secure your family’s financial future and set them up for life.
Many have the option to pursue the wealth mindset every single day yet choose not to because they can’t fight their demons inside of them. The biggest demon people have to fight is the inability to delay gratification. Our impatience works against us.
There’s no need to buy the latest and greatest when the used version of the product works just as good. The government “teaches” us that excessive consumerism is the way of the good life. That excessive consumerism will make us happy. That couldn’t be further from the truth.
It’s no wonder why it’s hard to save money in America. Governments and corporations lie to us that having stuff is the way to happiness. That’s not true. It’s no wonder why it’s so hard to cultivate a wealth mindset because everyone tells us saving is the wrong way to go.
With the internet, we thankfully dispel all of those myths about building wealth and can build wealth our own way. There are many more millionaires in their 20s than ever before. There’s no need to wait until retirement age to retire a millionaire.
We can get there a lot faster and follow our own path.
Wealth Mindset: 9 Ways to Develop One
Below are the 9 ways to develop a wealth mindset. Steps that I personally use myself to build my own wealth.
1) Surround Yourself with Others Who have a Wealth Mindset
If you hang out with 5 poor people, you’ll be the 6th one. If you hang out with 5 millionaires with a wealth mindset, you’ll be the 6th one. It’s the information you surround yourself with that shapes your mindset and therefore, your actions.
My friends are some of the most motivated people I’ve met. They want to achieve upward mobility and willing to make sacrifices to get there. There’s an infinite number of ways to pursue wealth today. Entrepreneurship, high paying job, and passive income.
When there’s people around you who give each other advice on how to better each of those areas, you get a group of focused people who each find out helpful information to better their financial lives. You’ll get there much faster than if you try to find out the information on your own.
You don’t have to go through it alone.
2) Read Financial Blogs
The ones who read personal finance blogs have a higher chance of becoming wealthy than the ones who don’t. Personal finance blogs are a great way to consume wealth information because there are actual millionaires who provide this information for free.
There are many who provide wealth advice when they’re not millionaires themselves. But not the majority of personal finance bloggers. These are some of the most wonderful people you’ll ever meet in developing a wealth mindset. Everything I learned about money was because of reading.
The government wants to keep you poor and working for longer, which is why they never teach anything about money. School teaches you how to find a job and stay employed for decades on end. But never about money. You can’t let a crucial subject like money fall by the wayside.
It’s time to learn the concepts yourself because your future depends on it.
3) Watch YouTube Videos
Millionaire YouTubers give this financial advice… for free. If you don’t want to read written text, then listening to financial advice is another great way to develop the wealth mindset. You get to live vicariously through them by learning how they think.
Your mindset dictates your actions. There are many YouTubers who got there through many means. Some got there through real estate, others got there through YouTube, and many more strategies, tips, and tricks you never even knew existed.
I personally have been consuming many Real Estate Youtube content and have plans on consuming more in the coming years. I want to get into the real estate game in the next year or two. Once I save up enough capital to put to work.
Any skill you want to learn, you can learn for free on the Internet. The knowledge economy is here to stay.
4) Make a Budget and Track Your Finances
You can’t develop a wealth mindset if you don’t track where your dollar goes in and out every single week, month, or year. Too many people just use the savings account as a rule of thumb where their financial lives are going.
Then they think they’re doing OK or not OK, without realizing they can optimize their finances. The way you optimize your finances is by making a budget. I personally have a $2,000/month budget. I track where my dollar goes religiously so that I don’t waste any money.
Although some months, I do waste money but over a given course of a year, I’m always in good shape. Money is an important subject that you can’t ignore. Budgets save lives because it shows us what our limits are. We can’t live above our limits because that would be committing a money sin.
We can all make a simple budget with our computers and spreadsheets. Budgets are the antidote to bad spending habits.
5) Look at the Long Term
The wealth mindset doesn’t care about the short term. All it cares about is the long term and what the long term consequences of their choices are. This is why we don’t mind sacrificing today for a better tomorrow. I bought a brand new MacBook Pro during Black Friday 2022 for $1,000.
It was the largest purchase I made in a while. However, the money was well worth it. If this MacBook allows me to make one more blog post per week for the rest of the year, it paid for itself 10 times over. The processing speed with the new MacBook is so fast that it’s well worth the cost.
Time is money. The long term consequences of my purchase is what matters. I don’t mind paying $1k today if it makes me $1k/year for every subsequent year afterwards. This is the wealth mindset. The frugality disease has you believe that the money isn’t worth it.
However, the wealth mindset means knowing how to spend and knowing how to save money.
6) Be Patient and Delay Gratification
Too many people don’t know how to delay gratification. They just want it all and they want it now. That’s not right. That’s our evolution working against us. It was an advantage in the past because if you were hungry, you had to satiate yourself now.
Not so much anymore. There’s restaurants that will always be there to take your money in exchange for a product. There’s grocery stores that open even during odd hours. We no longer need to have things now. We can wait for the really good things to come.
This is why I max out my 401k without fail every year. I currently have a quarter million dollars to boot in my 401k because I delay gratification. It’s a muscle. The more you practice the delayed gratification muscle the more you get used to it.
The more you get used to it, the easier it is to do it. Then one day, you wake up filthy rich and see what your efforts were all about.
7) Make it a Goal to Have a Wealth Mindset
If you’re not focusing, you’re not doing. When you make a pact with yourself and have it as a goal to develop a wealth mindset, your mindset changes. All of a sudden, the little choices and decisions are clearer to you. You don’t buy that impulse purchase at the grocery store.
You don’t buy that collectible action figurine even though it’s only $9.99. You’re never going to use it ever again, anyway. Those who don’t plan plan to fail. Every year, I make it a goal to increase my net worth. I don’t always accomplish that goal. However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t try.
I try every year to improve my finances and increase my net worth over and over again. Without fail. One day, I won’t ever have to worry about money ever again for the rest of my life. Until then, I am focused on wealth and I will always actively take steps to better my finances.
My future family’s life depends on it. Money goals are great to have.
8) Look at Investing as Expenses
Too many people see investing as a luxury activity. They think it’s only for the rich. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Developing a wealth mindset means looking at investing as a necessary expense. Something that gets taken out of your paycheck. Non negotiable.
I see the money that I have to play around with only on an after 401k contribution basis. I don’t ever see my 401k as money that I can use for a couple of decades. It’s already gone in my mind. The ones who are wealthy see investing as a necessary expense.
Right up there with food. When you make upward mobility a priority, you don’t forget to do it. Even just $100/month compounds to large amounts down the road. Even putting money into a savings account is investing because in 2022 – 2023, savings accounts were paying close to 4%.
A risk free 4% is a deal you should take all day long. It’s unheard of.
9) Always be Looking for Opportunities
The wealth mindset means always being on the lookout. You don’t close yourself to any introductions to anyone else who may give you opportunities to move upward. It means subscribing to job boards for emails. It means always scouring LinkedIn for job opportunities.
Talking to recruiters. Talking to other business owners who may teach you a thing or two about business. Whatever the case is, your eyes and ears should always be open to hearing opportunities that better your life. I know how hard it is to get a meeting out of someone.
Don’t think about “it’s not the best time today” or “I don’t like the restaurant you suggested” when meeting someone new. Just go out and say yes. I started doing so in 2022 and saw my life improve in many ways.
When someone wants to meet with me and wants to change the time the last minute 30 minutes later, I still just say yes. Even if it’s inconvenient for me. You never know where the conversation will lead to.
The Wealth Mindset is Achievable
Anyone can achieve the wealth mindset because the information is so much readily available online. However, very few put in the work to learn it because it takes too much time or it takes money to learn. A $10 investment into a book is well worth it if it pays dividends down the road.
No one is born out of the womb knowing how to build wealth. They learn from others and seeing what’s around the world. Learning from others who is already at where you want to be at is a great way to learn. Especially if they communicate in a no-BS approach.
It’s also one thing to know how to get a wealth mindset but another to execute on the ideas and not give up. There are many who started their wealth journey in 2006 who gave up because they couldn’t find a job. Or because the financial crisis decimated their net worth.
Or any number of a hundred million other reasons why they shouldn’t invest. That’s not the case. You have no idea how much I wanted to give up in my near 7 year journey of building wealth. There’s many times I questioned why i was doing all of this for.
The wealth mindset doesn’t work if you give up. Many people don’t realize how long of a journey it actually is to achieve upward mobility. The first 2 – 3 years, you feel excited because it’s something new. It’s the subsequent years that feel like a drag, especially if you ever move backwards one year.
The best we can do is ignore those feelings and keep going no matter what.
The Wealth Mindset: 9 Ways to Develop One
- Surround yourself with others who have a wealth mindset
- Read financial blogs
- Watch YouTube videos
- Make a budget and track your finances
- Look at the long term
- Be patient and delay gratification
- Make it a goal to have a wealth mindset
- Look at investing as expenses
- Always be looking for opportunities
