Every time you look up, someone is trying to sell you on a different “get rich quick” scheme. You know the drill: You get invited to a friend’s house for dinner and it’s actually a sales pitch to convince you to join his ‘team’ at the bottom of the Whatever-Pyramid Group.

*Side eye*

I don’t know about you, but I would rather take the slow route to wealth.

Why would anyone want to build wealth slowly?

Let me explain:

We all know the story about the tortoise and the hare right? The obvious lesson you should have learned is that slow and steady wins the race.

I really believe that this is a true statement, especially when it comes to personal finance. You can simply look at some of the statistics of people who get rich quickly. Pro athletes, movie stars, lottery winners and people who inherited their wealth usually have 1 thing in common:

A LOT of them end up losing their money just as quickly as they got it.

On the other hand, out of the people who build wealth slowly over time, how many do you think end up returning to the broke-life?

I’m just going to go out on a limb and say that it’s probably a MUCH smaller statistic than the first one.

Why is this the case, though? Money is still money, so it shouldn’t really matter how quickly you get it..

Right?

Let’s explore that for a second:

Why does getting rich quick usually suck?

We like to believe that personal finance is 80% behavior and only 20% math. The problem with getting rich quickly is that your bad behavior is simply amplified when you receive that influx of cash.

Becoming a “rich” person with a “poor” mentality will just end up causing you unnecessary problems.

What is the first thing lottery winners or new athletes do with their money? They run out and buy everything that they can get their hands on. Normally, little time is spent on actually figuring out what they want their future to look like.

They normally don’t have a budget or any type of financial system in place either, so this reckless spending empties their bank accounts pretty QUICKLY. Have you ever wondered how people can spend millions of dollars and be left with nothing?

When you tally up the new houses, cars, expensive trips and wasteful spending you can see how fast you can get right back to $0.

Another thing that sets newly-wealthy people up for failure is OTHER BROKE PEOPLE.

When you suddenly come into new wealth, ‘family’ and ‘friends’ will start showing up out of nowhere expecting for you to include them in your fortune. It’s sad to see because this is where you can easily let yourself get taken advantage of or shunned for not sharing.

Why does building wealth slowly actually work?

You’re probably thinking to yourself:

“Okay, but even if I build wealth slowly, I could still end up with these same problems.”

You’d be right to think that but the likelihood of this actually happening is so low that it’s almost not even worth mentioning. When you’re slowly making changes to how you approach your finances, a lot of things start to happen.

Your mindset towards money will begin to change and you’ll look at things through new eyes. You’ll go from “Should I buy this” to “Is this in the budget?” You become more intentional with the money that you decide to spend because you actually know what each dollar is allocated for. You will also start to become super cheap frugal as well. It’s hard to part ways with money when you’ve worked so hard to have more of it leftover at the end of the month.

Attempting to build wealth slowly also has an effect on your family members and friends as well. This can be a positive or a negative because people will definitely notice a change in you and how you handle money. They’ll either try to figure out what you’re doing so that they can apply it to their own lives or they’ll make fun of you because they don’t understand your mindset.

Either of these things is fine because something else also happens: Family and friends won’t feel entitled to your success. They can actually see that the hard work you’ve put in is the reason that you’re becoming financially stable and they have no right to benefit from it. It’s a lot easier to say ‘no’ when no one is even asking in the first place!

#winning

The best part of all of this is that by the time you’ve built a substantial amount of wealth you will have also developed the habits that will let you KEEP that wealth.

In the grand scheme of things, money ALWAYS goes where you tell it to. If you’re not giving it any directions then it’s probably just going away from you. It’s not too late to figure out where you are and start building wealth for the future.

If I’m being honest though, we do play the lottery every now and then just for kicks. So, if we ever win…please forget everything I just said. 🙃

We’re more likely to get struck by lightning than for that to happen though. So you can be sure that we’re out here trying to build wealth slowly.

Just like our little turtle friend! 🐢

Now, repeat after me:

— Dj

The new get-rich-quick tactic is to build wealth slowly. Let me show you what I mean…