I once heard a great piece of advice which said that if you want to learn how to make more money, find someone making more money and do what they do. I might take it a step further and say ‘listen to what they tell you’.
I recall a recent story about a barber in town who owns not only his store but his entire city block. He built a multimillion dollar net worth by cutting hair and scaling out his profits into a real estate mini-empire. When his son became old enough and wanted to learn how to make money, his father, the barber, told him he would take him under his wing, show him how to run his real estate holdings and teach him how he grew a small start into a fortune.
But his son decided to go to college and study engineering because he ‘thought there might be money in it’.
The point of this is that since I’ve gotten a lucrative career and started and grown my business, I’ve learned something about people. Most of them have no idea what they are talking about when it comes to money or how to make money.
According to PayScale.com, the average stock broker with 5-9 years of experience makes a little under $52,000 a year. The average stock broker with 10-19 years of experience makes quite a bit more, almost $118,000 per year.
So I ask you, how much does your broker make? Do either of them trade stocks for a living? Even a successful stock broker who makes over $100k, if asked, would say their REAL advice to make money is ‘become a stock broker for other people and do it for at least 10 years’. Kind of different from what they tell you, isn’t it (‘invest in foreign markets!’)?
If not, why do you think they know how to make money in the stock market? Or how to invest to make money? They don’t, or they’d be doing that for themselves.
So, if you owned a small business, and it was making, say $1,000,000 in revenue per year, you’d be a great person to tell other people how to do just that. How do your grow from there? Building a business to even that size is really something, something ALMOST NO ONE HAS EVER DONE. How do you learn to grow from there?
The book store is full of books about investing written by people who have nothing in any market, anywhere. There are tons of business books by people who only worked as executives in existing companies. Honestly, these guys are NOT the guys you should be listening to. Those guys on CNBC? Almost none of them have a cent in the market. Remember that when they tell you what’s ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for the economy.
