How Long Does it Take to Get RICH? | 10 Millionaire Strategies

In this post, learn about the millionaire strategies that I used to achieve my money goals and how to be smart and consistent at them.

I put together a poster a few years ago on the ages the richest in the world made their fortunes. It was a fun little motivational project but it got me thinking, how long does it take to get rich? Are you also curious about millionaire strategies?

If you’re like me, your jump-shot sucks and you’ve got no secret chicken recipe of 11 herbs and spices…so you’ve got to get rich the hard way, through investing or by starting a business.

In this video, I’ll countdown 10 millionaire strategies, ten ways to become a millionaire. I’ll reveal the annual return on each, how to get started and how long it takes to get rich. We’re talking ways to get rich, today on Let’s Talk Money!

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Hey Bowtie Nation, it’s right about this time in the video that I usually send a shout-out to all you out there in the Nation but today, I want to show you how much I appreciate your time. If you’d like a free download copy of that motivational poster, a timeline of how and when the world’s richest made their money, I’ll leave a link in the video description below. Click through and get started on your financial future! If you’re not part of the community yet, just click that little red subscribe button. It’s free and you’ll never miss an episode.

I’ll be counting down our list from the easiest millionaire ideas to the ones that pay off the fastest including investments and business ideas. We’ll look at how to get started and use returns on each to estimate how long it takes to get rich.

Our first millionaire strategy, lottery tickets!

OK hold up…no I’m not saying lottery tickets are a legit path to millions, in fact just the opposite. But I feel like so many people believe you can get rich playing the lottery, about half the population buys a ticket regularly and spends on average $1000 a year.

In fact, your chances of getting mauled by a bear are higher than winning the lottery, so I wanted to start by revealing how much a ticket is actually worth, why it’s not a get rich strategy before we cover those legit millionaire ideas.

And for all the math nerds like myself, you can actually calculate the value of a lottery ticket depending on the jackpot. Analysis by Charles Rotblut found that investment value of a $2 ticket doe come out positive but not until jackpot reaches $530 million for Mega Millions and $490 million for Powerball. Until then…you’re losing money because the odds are so far against you. Adding up value of each prize and probability of hitting that many numbers, can find out how much a ticket is worth given the jackpot amount. The jackpot amount is the biggest factor with all the other Mega Millions prizes combined only adding $0.25 to the value of the ticket.

Nation, my mom was the queen of bingo and given the choice between Vegas and the Garden of Eden, I bet you know where I’d go…but it has to be for fun because you will never get rich gambling or playing the lottery.

We’re getting to our list of legit ways to get rich but I want to get your feedback on this as well. The first six ideas are going to be investments; easy and completely passive strategies but a little longer to get rich. The last three will be those business ideas, more work but higher returns and a faster way to your seven-figure payday. I’ll start you out in this video but let me know in the comments below, which would you rather hear more about in future videos, those passive investment ideas or the business ideas to get rich faster?

Our first legit way to make money is through high-yield interest on stablecoins and while this is the lowest return of the group it’s also the lowest risk so I wanted to highlight it as a low-risk, high return option.

There is a huge demand for lending cryptocurrency and stablecoins right now so platforms like BlockFi are paying interest rates up to 8.5% on accounts. It’s a lot like what a traditional bank does with your savings, paying you interest and then loans it out on mortgages…except the rate BlockFi is paying out right now is more than 100-times the average .06% rate you get from the bank.

And you don’t have to be a believer in cryptocurrencies to use this strategy. These are the rates BlockFi pays on different tokens and you’ll see, the stablecoins like USDC, are paid the highest rates. Stablecoins are backed by assets like commercial paper and money market funds to hold their value to the U.S. dollar and you can see in this price chart, it stays almost exactly at that $1 each.

I earn just over $25 a day or about $750 a month from this source alone, and that’s interest on my stablecoins as well as my investments in bitcoin and Ethereum. At that 8.5% interest and investing $1000 a month, it would take 26 years to reach millionaire status so I think you try some of the other methods we’ll talk about but this is a great way to earn as much on your savings as possible.

I’ve recently started working with BlockFi on a series of videos after transferring my money from Coinbase. I use the platform for crypto and stablecoins and recently started using their bitcoin-rewards card as well. I’ll leave a link to BlockFi in the description, check that out and get up to $250 in free bitcoin when you open an account.

This next millionaire investment, real estate, holds a special place for me because it’s where I got my start as a commercial property analyst, and while I transitioned to venture capital and stock analysis, the fact has always been, no other asset has created as much family wealth as real estate.

I’ll show you a couple of ways to get started next but going off the 9.1% long-term annual return on the Vanguard Real Estate ETF, ticker VNQ, and investing $1000 a month, it would take 25 years to reach a million-dollar portfolio…so shaving a year off our timeline and stick around because the last investment idea is going to do it in less than 10 years.

Investing in that REIT fund is the easiest way to get started but you can make upwards of twelve- to 20% on other forms of property investing like crowdfunding and rentals. I own rental properties and invest in the income fund on Fundrise which is a great way to get a little higher return but still that easy, hands-off strategy of a fund.

The tax benefits of real estate investing are also some of the best you’ll find which is why, even if it’s not your main wealth-building strategy, everyone should have some direct property exposure. To get started, focus on a portfolio of two or three real estate stocks like the Vanguard fund and maybe STAG Industrial, ticker STAG, and Medical Properties Trust, ticker MPW, two of my favorite REITs.

Once you feel like you want to expand your real estate empire from there, I would start with buying a small house or duplex as a rental. You can get a HUD loan with less than 5% down but putting 20% down will save you from paying PMI insurance every month. Most important here is just to start slow with just one property. Don’t feel like you have to create your seven-figure cash flow overnight. Give your rental a year to better understand how much time it takes to manage before you even start thinking about buying another property.

Three millionaire strategies down, seven left and now easily the most popular topic on the channel, dividend investing.

Dividends have accounted for almost half the total stock market return over the past century and is always a positive cash return even when stocks sink. If you’re not investing in dividend stocks, you could be setting yourself up when the market wobbles.

Even though growth stocks, which we’ll look at later, have outperformed over the past few years. Dividend stocks tend to be less volatile, especially during a recession. On the 15% annualized return to dividend stocks in the Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF, ticker VIG, and investing $1000 a month, you drop the time it takes to become a millionaire down to just 18 years!

We’ve got some great dividend videos on the channel but the most important factors to watch are the payout ratio, that’s the percentage of a company’s earnings used to pay the dividend and a great measure of safety in that payment. You can also check Yahoo Finance, under the historical data tab to make sure the company has a history of increasing its dividend. Finally, don’t invest on the basis of a high dividend yield alone. Check the total return on the stock, that price and dividend return, so you don’t fall into the trap of a high yield but falling share price.

If you want your dividend stocks to pay your rent, I recently highlighted my favorite five monthly dividend stocks, so I’ll leave a link to that in the description below.

Fifth on our list of millionaire strategies, penny stocks, and here we’re getting into the growth investments.

I’m using the iShares Micro-cap ETF, ticker IWC, a fund holding the 1000 smallest companies in the Russell 3000 index as a proxy here with the 16% annualized return and a $1000 monthly investment making you a millionaire in 17 years. But the real power in penny stocks comes from finding those individual companies under $500 million market cap that are ready to run!

We’ve got a 64% average return on penny stocks recommended on the channel with nine that have more than doubled over the last year and one up more than 500%!

But looking at that penny stock list and the fact that four-in-ten are lower brings up an important idea in your investing strategy. Nation, too many investors want to trade penny stocks…selling after a quick profit of forty- or fifty-percent.

The problem is, investors tend to sell those winners too fast to book that quick return but then hold onto the losers. It saps their total return and the portfolio goes nowhere.

Instead, I want you to take a venture capital approach to your penny stocks. In the VC world, where I worked for five years, you’re finding those startups with triple-digit growth and holding on until they get acquired or issue shares in the market. You might be locked into a stock for three- or five-years or more but the reward can be ten-times your investment and higher.

In penny stocks, this means building a portfolio of at least five to ten stocks, small start-up companies that could be big someday. Then you’re going to give these stocks at least three- to five-years, holding them no matter what. And yes, you could see as many as half of those stocks go nowhere or even lower over the period but by holding onto the winners and giving them the time to grow into those 10X returns, your overall portfolio return can be into the 20- and 30% range on an annual basis.

I use the paper portfolio on Webull to track my penny stocks before I invest real money. Check it out, use the link in the description and you’ll get two free shares worth up to $1000 each when you start investing.

This next millionaire investment, growth stocks, has produced the highest stock return over the last five years.

I’ll use the Invesco QQQ Trust, a fund that invests in the 100 largest non-financial companies on the Nasdaq exchange as a proxy and you can see the fund’s 21% annualized return would cut the time it takes to reach millionaire down to just 15 years.

Of course, like we saw with penny stocks, the real return is in picking individual companies for gains like the 67% return on shares of Intellia Therapeutics in the six months since recommending it, or Tellurian, originally a penny stock pick last year, now up 344%.

Finding growth stocks, you can’t use traditional stock measures like the price-to-earnings ratio because growth is expensive. Instead, use the price-to-earnings to growth ratio which adjusts the PE by the company’s earnings growth. That gives you a better measure for stocks that may be expensive but are growing into the valuation.

You’re also looking for companies with a huge addressable market of at least ten billion or more and an advantage that can take market share from competitors. You can usually find an estimate of the addressable market size through a company’s investor presentations but that idea of competitive advantage comes down to really comparing companies in the industry.

Our last millionaire investment before those business ideas and you just cannot avoid cryptocurrency if you want to create that million-dollar portfolio.

Bitcoin is up 118% annualized over the last five years and up 340% in the last year alone. Now I don’t want to imply you can make 100% on your money every year in the next five or ten years, but this IS the NEW asset class. It’s not going away and there is no doubt in my mind, it will beat stocks for returns.

Even on a very modest 38% annual return, that would get it to my $240,000 price target over the next five years, it turns a $1000 monthly investment into a million-dollar portfolio in just ten years!

We’ve got a lot of crypto videos on the channel including their true value and how to invest but I want to get you started here. It takes less than five minutes to open an account on BlockFi with just a phone number and email address. You’ll want to set up two-factor authentication to keep your account secure. You can buy crypto in any amount and I’d recommend buying some bitcoin, Ethereum and a few of the smaller altcoins to diversify your portfolio.

I recently shared the five cryptocurrencies I’m buying and my own $400,000 portfolio in a video and how much you need to buy to become a millionaire so look for that link in the description.

Be sure to let me know in the comments which you prefer but I love these next three business ideas because they’re a great complement to the investing strategies. These three income strategies will cash flow fast for more money to invest and that faster path to your millionaire status.

And honestly Nation, I love talking investing but if you want to get rich, it has to start with creating assets that cash flow. Check out this survey of 2,500 millionaires by Scorpio Partnership and BNP Wealth Management. This shows the percentage of total wealth millionaires hold in each asset from stocks to bonds, alternative investments and their own businesses.

This shows, on average, millionaires have more than a quarter of their wealth in their own business, over 25% versus just 17% held in stocks. The rich aren’t waiting for other companies to make them rich. They are creating income through a business to drive that wealth.

This first business idea is where it all started for me, with blogging and affiliate websites.

I started my first websites in 2013, even as everyone was saying that blogging was dead, by the end of the first year, I was averaging almost $800 a month, an income that would grow to almost $3,000 a month over the next year and over $5,000 a month within the first three years, making over $108,000 over that period.

And this is all before I started on YouTube. In fact, I didn’t start making money on YouTube until late 2018. By that time, blog income had grown to over $7,000 a month on average with one month over ten grand!

Even if you were to only do this 10 hours a week, basically a hobby-blog, you can grow to several thousand dollars a month within a few years. That’s better than a million-dollar portfolio because it’s cash flow you can count on every month!

Now I can’t tell you how to start a blog in less than a few minutes but I can get you started. First is just to pick a topic you like to talk about, a hobby or interest…and really anything will work. For ideas, you can search Google for the interest to see what other people are blogging about.

Plan on posting twice a week, just write out an article on the subject and start connecting with others interested in the topic. Next, and this is how you start making money, you build in things like selling printable checklists, self-publishing or talking about products. This idea of using multiple income streams is hugely important, especially for new bloggers. One idea or stream might not make much to start but put two or three together and you’ve got a solid income. I’ve got a free checklist to get you started that I’ll link to below.

You’d think I was holding out on you if I didn’t talk about YouTube as a millionaire strategy. On just the ads alone, not including sponsorships, I’ve made over $216,000 in the last year…with one day making over $1,500…in a single day!

And while this is a business that grows faster the more you work, videos can make money years after you publish. This video published nearly a year ago is still making $26 a day in ads alone.

I’ll share a link in the description to a free webinar with my top three tips for getting started but the biggest hurdle I see in new YouTubers is they want those first videos to be perfect. They shoot a few videos, try to edit them and are never happy with what they see…and never get the channel started.

That’s why I always recommend, just plan out five videos. Outline what you want to say, turn on your camera or phone and just talk through them. Don’t stop for mistakes, UMs or AHs, just shoot all the way through each video. Then…don’t even worry about editing those first five videos. Just get them uploaded to YouTube and make a commitment to do one new video a week.

Because the truth is, none of your videos will ever be perfect…not the first, not the 100th or the thousandth. I’ve uploaded over 700 videos in four years and I still look back as recently as the last six months and am kind of embarrassed at how bad they were.

But that’s how you know you’re learning, getting better and making better videos. Do NOT wait until you learn everything you need to get started because you’ll never get started!

This next million-dollar idea, a lot of you will be skeptical, but can get you to that seven-figures in as little as five years. I’m talking self-publishing your own books and just look at the cash flow in this! I’ve made over $124,000 on my books with some months as high as $4,000 in sales. It’s a big part of my monthly income and totally passive!

There is a learning curve but get started and you can easily publish three or four books a year, averaging a few hundred monthly on each. That means realistically creating an income stream of three- to five-thousand dollars within five years. That’s equivalent to a $1.2 million portfolio on the standard 4% withdrawal!

And this is a lot easier to do than you imagine. I’ll link to a complete video in the description but this process will get you started. For a non-fiction book, start with what you want people to be able to do or learn then break it down into 10 to 15 tasks, working backwards to that goal. Each one of those is going to be a chapter so you do the same within each chapter, break it down into a few tasks and instructions in each. Then you focus on one chapter a week, don’t try to sit down and write a book, just do one chapter at a time.