Your Wealth Success Plan

Wealth Accumulation Driver #4:

Your Wealth Success Plan

We’ve already covered the first three wealth drivers – Lower Your Burn Rate, Maximize the Value of You, and Build Your Wealth Generating Machine.

These powerful drivers help keep your living expenses relative to your income, maximize your income, and allow you to generate reliable long-term returns on your investments.

The first three drivers form your own Millionaire Foundry, whose output is the cash that builds your wealth foundation.

The fourth and final driver ensures the first three are synchronized and optimized, and keeps you on course for the long-term.

Your Wealth Success Plan is like your navigation app for your wealth accumulation journey.

It’s an absolute fact that what we plan and measure has a much higher chance of getting done.

The mere act of planning forces us to identify where we want to go, and requires us to generate a path and timeline to get there.

As A First Generation Millionaire, I learned firsthand of the importance and benefits of developing and maintaining a clear, detailed wealth success plan to guide me throughout my journey.

The process of mapping out a long-term financial plan helped me see how all the little decisions and sacrifices would eventually add up to one very large result.

And this made a world of difference in sticking with those decisions, even when I felt the deep pain of sacrifice.

I didn’t have any mentors to give me a clue as to whether I was using the right approach, or even if I was on the right path.

Much of my discovery was by trial and error, and from applying pieces of what I’d learned in the latest book or article I’d read.

As I experienced successes and failures, I recorded what I learned.

My wealth success plan became a living, dynamic, and flexible guide wire.

When I made a wrong turn, I had to recalculate the path to get back on course to my final destination.

Sometimes the path I believed to be a sure thing was blocked by unexpected obstacles, and I had to backtrack.

Other times, the approach I was using was out-of-date, and my plan needed an update to reflect the new normal, either in the economy or my situation.

I continuously captured those adjustments, repeatedly recalculated my route, and eventually reached my destination of $1,000,000 in liquid, investible cash at age 43.

For all of the mistakes, rerouting, and reprogramming, the effort I put into financial planning rewarded me with success.

Along the way, I discovered another massive benefit of a plan.

It made me hold myself accountable to take the steps I committed to, in order to create my brighter financial future.

Our memories sometimes give us an out when we can’t remember specifically what we said we’d do. Or by when we’d do it.

One’s memory can become especially selective when the going gets tough.

And I guarantee it will get tough.

The reality is that planning can be tedious, even stressful, and the lengthy journey to financial success even more so.

When constructing your first financial plan, sometimes the dreams for your financial future crash against the rocks of reality.

The act of planning forces you to get real.

You may realize it will take a lot longer than you thought. Or that you need to make radical changes to your current lifestyle or income.

After all, if you can’t make it work on paper, in a spreadsheet, or in an online calculator, it’s not going to work in real life.

Although painful, at least you know that you need to make adjustments to your path if you want to get to your ultimate destination.

All this is not easy. I’ve been there.

But in embracing wealth planning, what helped me overcome the rough parts was my overwhelming desire to create a different financial life than I grew up in as part of the struggling segment of the middle class.

I had a vivid vision of a brighter financial future, and I was willing to work hard, sacrifice, and persevere to bring that vision into reality.

My vision was supercharged by my ‘why’ – or purpose – for building wealth.

I was driven by the desire to build a financial foundation that would give me the financial security that I craved growing up.

I would never have to fear ending up ‘on the street’.

I believe my childhood money experiences, which led to my purpose and vision of how my life would look once I reached my financial goals, were a major factor in why I became rich.

My most important learning on successful financial planning is that you must have two parts working together.

First is your plan, which is a timed roadmap showing the route to your final destination, along with key checkpoints, so that you know you’re traveling in the right direction.

Second is your purpose for seeking your destination

Your financial plan guides you, while a strong purpose pushes you through the difficult times you’ll certainly experience along the way.

Building wealth is simple, it’s just not easy

Planning is very powerful and makes your journey a little easier, which is good news.

But the bad news is that if you’re unwilling to invest the effort to thoughtfully and carefully craft a master financial plan and timeline to reach your goals, you’re unlikely to be successful.

Why?

The first part of planning is to define success both by the goal to be attained and the time it will take.

Would you begin an important trip without knowing your final destination and how much time you have to get there?

And if you don’t define your destination in advance, how do you know when you’re off course or if you’ve already arrived?

Your master plan requires careful consideration because personal wealth isn’t generated in a vacuum, and few people succeed in creating wealth that lasts a lifetime.

It’s hard because life and human nature can derail of the best of intentions.

And the precise amount of wealth required for you to feel the deep peace of mind you deserve, and the purpose for your wealth, may vary widely from another person. Therefore it’s critical you identify your unique needs up front.

My millionaire journey taught me that one’s purpose — the underlying reason — to achieve a goal is often the most important ingredient in fueling the perseverance required to reach it.

Having a ‘bright and shiny’ vision of the benefits of your success, burned deep into your mind, may be the one thing that sustains you through the inevitable difficult times during the journey.

The power of purpose and vision, and the degree of its personal importance, can never be underestimated.

Thomas Edison was driven by it while he experienced over 1000 — yes, 1000 — failures while developing the first commercially viable incandescent light bulb.

Mother Theresa was driven by it as she endured extreme personal sacrifice to fulfill what she held as her purpose and vision to help the poorest of the poor.

Abe Lincoln was driven by it as he persevered and thrived through countless setbacks, failures, and personal losses on his path to one of the most remarkable and important presidencies of all U.S. history.

Steve Jobs was driven by it as he overcame being fired from his own company, only to later seize control and reinvent music and communication as we know it today, while creating one the highest valued companies of all time.

One of my favorite TED videos on the idea of success, purpose, perseverance, and overcoming failure talks about the secret ingredient of grit as the key to success, both among children and adults.

What’s YOUR purpose for your pursuit of financial independence? And do you have grit?

Those who have a general purpose, like “I just want more money” or “I just want to be rich” are unlikely to accumulate significant wealth.

It’s hard to build a bright and shiny picture of one’s future based on generalities.

And their purpose just isn’t strong enough to push them through the difficult times they’ll surely experience.

Or to make the necessary sacrifices.

Or to burrow through or around immovable obstacles that stand in the way of their deserved success.

If you’re serious about wealth accumulation, invest some time right now to really think through your purpose for attaining your financial destination.

Write it down.

What will having reached your goal mean to you and your loved ones?

What does that day in your future, when you reach the big goal, look like?

It’s only with your purpose clearly defined that you should begin crafting the wealth accumulation plan that will bring your financial dreams into reality.

And don’t get hung up on the format that the first draft of your plan should take.

There are many excellent online calculators that will help you map, year by year, the checkpoints to your ultimate destination. I’ve found that Yahoo! Finance can be a great starting place for a wide range of easy-to-use calculators.

Some waste weeks of valuable time deciding on format, when they’d be better served to just jump in and capture their broad thoughts in a simple written or word processor document.

Finally,  one of my biggest mistakes in developing my financial plan was to not get some outside perspective for guidance and validation.

If I was able to do it over again, I would  get the invaluable help that an objective, fee-only financial planner can provide.

Although I believe you must ‘own’ your plan, they may help you steer around obstacles or even show you how you might get to your destination faster.

By working on developing Your Wealth Success Plan, you’ll be ahead of the millions who wish for wealth – or ‘want more money’ — but who don’t develop a clear path and commitment to get there.

Once your financial plan is clearly defined and documented, you’ll join an elite group that immediately has much higher odds of reaching their financial destination.

In fact, it’s also likely that you’ll feel an certain peace of mind that comes from having a solid financial plan, even though you  may have many miles to travel before you reach your destination.

At Millionaire Foundry, in the coming months, we’ll cover in even more detail the importance of building Your Wealth Success Plan.

Wealth Is Freedom!

A First Generation Millionaire