Posted on August 17, 2020

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by Adam Justice

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category: Uncategorized,

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tags: Finance, Investing,

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Even though the United States has enormous wealth in 2020 a large percentage of people are not happy with their lives. Nearly everyone has an iPhone and new kicks but for most people it feels like they’re trapped. A big reason is because they aren’t following a financial success strategy for millennials.

Strategies and goals are important if you want to be satisfied in life. One of the biggest problems I see for young people is half of them don’t listen to advice and the other half have piss poor advisors.

The good news is that if you’re motivated and play the long game it’s pretty hard not to be successful.

Income streams

Everyone between the age of 20-40 should have multiple streams of income. Everyone’s life will look different but the average person should try and build at least 2 income streams based on their work.

One of the core pillars of my strategy is to balance security with potential, so I always try and work a salaried 9-5 job and then pick up specialized high paying work in the evenings and on the weekend. As a web developer this is pretty easy to do.

However there have been times when I wasn’t enthusiastic about working online. During those times I’ve did everything from making knives to playing guitar for bands.

During most of my life I have considered all my extra income disposable and I’ve mostly wasted it on hobbies. I didn’t follow a success strategy for millennials. It took having a child and becoming a single father for me to truly get serious about investing.

I have been extremely blessed with many talents that are marketable, but having successful side gigs doesn’t pay off unless you make those earnings work for you. This brings me to the next part of my strategy, investment.

Investment

Invest early and invest often. Every free dollar you get should be going toward an investment vehicle of some type, or toward improving your skills and education. Some thought leaders advise young people to spend all their extra income on education until their income is high enough to support larger investments.

I suggest learning from experts that are already successful. Find popular thought leaders in your niche, or check Self Improvement from SelfGrowth.com– – SelfGrowth.com is the most complete guide to information about Self Improvement on the Internet.

As a young person you should ideally invest in higher risk investments that you believe have high chances of success.

The old Wall Street opinion is that at age 21 you should have 90% of your investments allocated to high risk- medium risk and 10% to safe investments. Every 3 years you should move 5% of those high risk investments to safer bets until at age 70 you will have roughly 90% in safe investments and 10% in high risk.

The upside to high risk investments is so great that hitting big with one could mean life changing money at a young age and it could drastically change your life forever.

As long as everything you ever invest in doesn’t fail spectacularly then you will have a decent retirement fund if it comes to that, but risk tolerance is the one thing that separates people that make fortunes from people that don’t.

Even though much of your investments will be in medium-high risk investments you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. You want to hedge your bets and mitigate the risk of total financial loss by diversifying your investments.

For a safe investment I always choose land or gold because in both cases they aren’t making any more of either. We’ve already mined 77% of recoverable gold reserves.

For high risk investments I prefer a mix between stocks, financial products and businesses. Business is crucial because you can invest your time and expertise as well as your money.

I believe that Cryptocurrency will have at least one more big bull run, and if it does it will create many more millionaires. If you have the stomach for volatility the risks are pretty clear cut – and there is a lot of opportunity in cryptocurrency.

How it Looks in Real Life

Now you’re ready to get into the core of our success strategy for millennials – employment.

Let’s say that you work a regular job at $15 per hour and bring home roughly $2,000 after taxes. You also learned leather working at summer camp in your teens and you’ve set up a small part time business making belts, wallets and gun holsters. You add another $800 every month with a small amount of extra work each week.

Part of your high risk investment monies and also your extra work should go into developing an online store that specializes in the materials and tools you use for leather working.

Setting up a website is pretty cheap and easy. The rest of your investment can go into advertisement, search optimization and inventory.

Within a year or two you should have monthly sales in the range of $10,000-$20,000. After paying the bills and re ordering inventory you’ll be able to pocket $2,000-$4,000 so you could potentially quit your day job and run your leather business full time.

Let’s say your website never takes off. You are bringing in $2,000 each month to pay your bills and another $800 from making wallets. You should be putting $700 into higher risk investments and $100 into safe investments every year.

After 5 years you will have invested $42,000 in a range of investments and $6,000 in steady safe investments.

Why Websites?

What makes this a success strategy for millennials and not just a generic success strategy is that we are counting on you to have a certain level of technical aptitude.

A website is an investment with the lowest startup cost, lowest barrier for entry and highest possible return out of anything someone with very little investment capital can do. The trade off is that it’s going to require hard work, dedication and some luck.

I have built a lot of websites in my lifetime but 3 have been very successful. The first was when I was 14 years old and I wasn’t very good at monetizing it. I didn’t really know what to do with it and once I was bored it died, but it was the most successful venture I’ve ever been a part of period.

The second website I ended up selling for a little under $10,000. The third website I sold for about $3,000 after only 9 months of work; it made about $200 each month in ad revenue.

 

 

If I knew as much about the market for selling and monetizing websites as I do now then I would have made much more off each of them.

Even if you don’t have the capital to start an E-commerce website you can start a blog or information website and over time develop several ways to monetize it. You can integrate a storefront later on.

I suggest making websites and online stores that reflect your personal interests. You may not know much about business but you might know a lot about fly fishing.

There is a market for almost anything. It will also help you stay interested. Building a website takes consistent commitment over a period of time, but it’s one of the safest investments of time and money you can make if you stay committed.

Like with employment and investing you should try and diversify the ways you promote your website. In the best case scenario you would get some traffic from social media channels, some traffic organically from search and some traffic direct and from email lists.

These traffic sources will be the crux of the website’s value so develop them all to their full potential.

Let’s Get Started

So this is what your strategy should look like if you’re following my lead.

• 2 Sources of direct income, the second source will be for investment capital
• High level of investment diversified into high, medium and low risk investments
• You should be developing a website at all times. When you hand someone a business card make it a card for the organization you own yourself about a topic you’re interested in.

Grant Cardone says that if you don’t have a million dollars that you should invest any capital in yourself, and I partly agree with that.

The upside to your own business or finishing a high level of education is so high for someone that is young that it doesn’t make sense to buy a $200,000 house that you’ll rent for $700 per month. It doesn’t make sense to stash your money away slowly.

When I say high risk investment that could be law school just as much as it could be Bitcoin. If you truly don’t have any skill that would be a good basis for an online business based on a website maybe you use your income for training to develop such a skill.

Real Estate

So you started investing $700 monthly at 21. Over the next 9 years you’ve put a total of $42,000 into different investments. Let’s say that nothing hit but overall you were able to consistently get 10% returns annually; that $42,000 is now $115,000 on your 30th birthday (calculated using compound interest calculator).

You’re more than well enough off to turn your rent payment into a mortgage and maybe even grab a second rental property to pay that mortgage.

 

 

Always look at a home as a possible investment. Especially if you live in an area where real estate prices are on the rise. Don’t buy the home outright either even though you’re well off now you should use the bank’s money. You only need a 20% down payment in most cases so $40,000 will get you a $200,000 home.

Besides the fact that rent payments do not help you financially a big reason to invest in real estate is that your profits can be tax free. US Tax code section 121 states that if you have lived in your primary residence 2 of the last 5 years then there are no capital gains tax.

For instance let’s say that your $200,000 home has risen in value with the rest of the area (and due to some smart renovations) and in 5 years it’s now worth $450,000. When you sell the home you will be able to keep the $250,000 difference tax free.

 

 

You only paid $40,000 down. You also paid $750 per month for a total of $45,000. You did another $15,000 in renovations so you’ve put roughly $100,000 in that house in the last 5 years. After paying off what’s left of your mortgage with your sale price (roughly $140,000) you’re going to clear $200,000 tax free.

If you’re a married couple filing jointly you can have up to $500,000 in profits free from capital gains tax after the sale of a home.

There is a similar tax loophole for that cheap investment property you bought as well known as a 10-31. It let you defer capital gains on your investment property.

Now that you’re 35 you’ve turned that $42,000 that didn’t do so well into massive wealth that will put you on an entirely different level of lifestyle, and that’s if you didn’t keep up your investing habits after your 30th birthday. You now have the option to double down on some serious investment properties or to enjoy the fruits of your labor.

On the flipside if you followed my success strategy for millennials everything went right you’re a multimillionaire by now, you could skip most of these steps and you can retire off the sale of your leather outlet website.

We’d love to hear about your success strategy for millennials. Send us an email and let us know how you or your friends have succeeded with limited resources at a relatively young age.

 

*This is not intended to be financial or legal advice. Thunderbolt Host and the author are not responsible for the success of your investments and the inherent risk associated with investing.

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