How to Build Your First $1 Million (Faster Than You Think)

Join the Free Master Your Money Workshop here! Get the Free Automate Your Money Checklist here! Join the community built to help you master your money, stay accountable, and reach financial freedom. 👉 Join Master Money Academy today! In this episode of The Personal Finance Podcast, Andrew reveals the exact path to your first million, 79% of millionaires are self-made and 33% never earned six figures, teaching the 8-step system including automating investments, avoiding debt, maximizing retirement accounts, and using wealth accelerators like business ownership and real estate. Listen to The Business Show here. Join The Master Money Newsletter where you will become smarter with your money in 5 minutes or less per week Here! Partner Deals Go to http://acorns.com/pfp and start automating your investments and get a $5 bonus today! Join the loyalty program for renters at joinbilt.com/PFP Go to http://policygenius.com to get your free life insurance quote. Indeed: Start hiring NOW with a SEVENTY-FIVE DOLLAR SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to upgrade your job post at http://Indeed.com/personalfinance Thanks to Fundrise for Sponsoring the show! Invest in real estate going to http://fundrise.com/pfp Find your next dream home, start searching now. Download the Realtor.com app today DeleteMe: Go to https://joindeleteme.com/PFP20/ and Use Promo Code PFP for 20% off! Links of the Episode Mentioned: How to Build Wealth on a Low Salary How Long it Takes to Go From $100K to $1 Million Ebook: Get that Raise Book: The Millionaire Next Door Connect With Andrew on Social Media: Instagram TikTok Twitter Master Money Website Master Money Youtube Channel The Millionaire Next Door Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Andrew Giancola?

  Now, if you watch this podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube, you've probably noticed the wood slat walls behind us. We wanted this podcast set to look professional, but also not be a project that was overly complicated. And I found these slat walls on Wayfair, and it completely changed this space. And it's now basically the background that you see in every single podcast or piece of content that we record. And that's one of the things that I love about Wayfair. You can shop thousands of products across different styles and budgets, use customer photos and reviews to see how things actually look in real homes, and find something that fits your space. They also have Wayfair Verified Products that are hand vetted by product specialists using a 10-point quality inspection.

• 0:44Andrew Giancola?

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• 1:17Speaker 01

  Wayfair, every style, every home.

• 1:20Andrew Giancola?

  When I started the Personal Finance Podcast, I had no idea how big it could become. I just knew I had something I wanted to share, so I started putting it online. And looking back, I definitely wish I would have started a decade earlier. One of the horror parts about building something online, though, is making it look professional. A website used to mean hiring a developer, figuring out design, and potentially spending thousands of dollars. In fact, on my website, I spent tens of thousands of dollars. That's what impressed me when playing around with Hostinger's AI Website Builder. I told it what kind of website I wanted, and I built the first version in minutes. No coding, no designer or developer needed. And Hostinger doesn't stop at launch.

• 2:04Andrew Giancola?

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• 2:42Andrew Giancola?

  What's up everybody and welcome to the personal finance podcast. I'm your host Andrew, founder of mastermoney.co. And today on the personal finance podcast, we're going to be talking about how to build your first million and do it faster than you think. If you guys have any questions, make sure you join the master money newsletter by going to mastermoney.co/newsletter. And don't forget to follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or whatever podcast player. You love listening to this podcast on it. If you want to help out the show, consider leaving a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. Now today, we're going to be talking through the process of getting to your first million dollars. One of my favorite

• 3:26Andrew Giancola?

  topics to talk about is how to get to your first hundred thousand, because getting to your first hundred thousand makes a big difference when it comes to compound interest and you can watch that take over. But in this episode, what I want to talk through is A, if you haven't gotten to your first hundred thousand yet, there's nothing wrong with that. But B, we want to talk about how to get from that hundred thousand all the way up to a million. We're going to talk through just some of the statistics behind millionaires and what we see with a lot of millionaires out there. But in addition, we're also going to be talking through how long it takes you to go from having your first 100K all the way to getting a million. And then I'm going to give you step by step what I would do if I was starting over trying to get to my first million dollars. Now, when I first started

• 4:09Andrew Giancola?

  my wealth building journey, I thought that millionaires were folks who lived the high life. They lived in a really nice house. They drove Lamborghinis or Ferraris. They had the Clothes, they had the fancy shoes, they had nice jewelry, they all wore Rolex's and or Cartier's, and they were spending left and right. But once you start to look at the data, you realize that no matter what your income is, no matter where you came from, no matter who you are, you can become a millionaire. And so, once I started to read through some of the studies out there, especially early on, the first finance book that I read that really turned this light bulb on was a book called The Millionaire Next Door. Now, they have an updated version called The Next Millionaire Next Door, and there have been numerous studies done since then.

• 4:55Andrew Giancola?

  And what The Millionaire Next Door did is it looked at millionaires to see exactly how they acted. We're going to talk about those statistics here in a second. But I want you to understand this first. No matter who you are, no matter what your financial background was, maybe you grew up poor, your family never had money, you never, ever were told that you could actually become a millionaire, even with a modest salary, even if you don't make a lot of money, you can become a millionaire. And I believe that for every single person listening to this podcast, the reason why this podcast exists is to ignite that fire in your gut, to ignite that fire inside your brain for you to understand that you can do this. You have the greatest opportunity of your entire life right now is that you can become a millionaire.

• 5:40Andrew Giancola?

  And I want you to know that, and I want you to feel that inside, because if you are working towards building wealth, this is the time to take advantage of that. Contrary to popular belief, contrary to what the news is saying, from CNN to Fox News, I don't care who it is, they are all saying the same exact thing, that you are being brought down. But guess what? You are in the greatest wealth building time ever, one of the greatest wealth building times ever. You know why? Because you have access to more information than anybody else. Now, too much information is a big problem, but I'm going to show you the simple way to get there. And if you combine time with a little bit of sweat equity, with a little bit of effort into your income, with a little bit of thought on how you're going to do this,

• 6:23Andrew Giancola?

  we can develop a plan for you to become a millionaire. Because as you're going to see, most millionaires did not inherit their money. Most people out there, if you go out and interview them, they're going to say a huge portion of millionaires inherited their money. Guess what? They're wrong. That's not what the statistics show. And our statistics are being pulled from all different directions, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the government-backed stats.

• 6:48Andrew Giancola?

  And so we're going to go through this and show you what real millionaires look like. Then I'm going to show you how long it's going to take you from get from that 100K to that million. And then I'm going to give you the exact steps I would take. So if that is something you're into, and if you're ready to get on your path to becoming a millionaire, then let's get into it.

• 7:07Andrew Giancola?

  Now, the first thing I want to do is I want to show you how millionaires act. And I want to show you some of the things that millionaires do. Now, we pulled this from a number of different places. One, we looked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which shows how people become millionaires. We looked at Ramsey Solutions, who did the largest millionaire survey ever as of recent. We looked at different global wealth reports like Credit Suisse and a bunch of other places like WealthX, who did all these different surveys of millionaires. In addition, we pulled information from the next millionaire next door, which is the latest and updated version of all the research done originally by Thomas Stanley in the millionaire next door. And we pulled all this information and compiled it to find this data for you.

• 7:51Andrew Giancola?

  And I want you to think through, as I tell you some of the things about millionaires, on how you can apply this to your life. So number one is the million dollar path is shockingly boring, and that's the advantage. So 75 to 80% of millionaires credit long-term consistent investing, not business exits, not stock picking, and not luck to them becoming millionaires. It's long-term consistent investing. Now, if you heard our episode recently, where we talked about how to build wealth on a low salary, we talked about a guy named Ronald Reed. Ronald Reed was a janitor from Vermont, and Ronald Reed was a guy who'd never made much money. And you know what Ronald Reed did? When he died, he had over $8 million because he just invested consistently in blue chip stocks. That's exactly what his strategy was.

• 8:36Andrew Giancola?

  And so the blueprint for a lot of folks who want to become a millionaire is threefold. It is focusing on your career income and increasing that income over time, knowing what to do with that income by automatically investing it, and making sure that time and compounding are on your side. See, a lot of people on TikTok or Instagram or YouTube, they're going to try to tell you about the fast way to build wealth. They're going to try to teach you, hey, Let's build wealth as fast as we possibly can. But guess what comes with speed? Risk. And risk can completely wipe you out and you have to start all the way over again. And so for a lot of us out there, sure, let's get our footing down first to get to our first million. Let's get the process down so that if we want to take more risk, that goes above and beyond.

• 9:17Andrew Giancola?

  The extra cash that you have on hand, this is your foolproof backup plan if you need it. Then if you want to take risk on a business or you want to take risks somewhere else to try to get there even faster, you absolutely can. But this always needs to be working in the background and you can set it up automatically. So you don't have to worry about it. So here's the lesson I want you to learn from the first tip is most millionaires are not exceptional. They're consistent and you need to take that to heart. Consistency is the key. So once you set your plan up, you need to consistently make sure you're investing. And guess what? That is not that hard to do when you set up money automations. Now, the deciding factor number two, this is, this is actually amazing is that income helps and income is going to help a lot. We'll talk more about income in this episode, but it is not the deciding factor.

• 10:02Andrew Giancola?

  In fact, 33% of millionaires, folks who became millionaires, never earned over six figures. Let me say that again, because a lot of people out there say six figures is now middle class or poor. I just heard a report come out that said $180,000 per year and you are living at the poverty level. Well, that was debunked really, really quickly and the author of that revised it to $94,000 a year. And I still think that's ridiculous because you can figure out exactly how to become a millionaire, living on less than six figures. And only 15% of these millionaires held C suite or even VP roles. So that means 85% of people who were millionaires were either middle level managers or below, and they were still able to become millionaires.

• 10:47Andrew Giancola?

  Now, top millionaire careers, this is absolutely amazing. And this came from Ramsey Solutions was teachers, accountants and engineers. Those were the top three. Now, engineers make good money, accountants make good money, but the teachers make good money? No, but they're consistent and they're investing and they understand what to do. School systems do a great job. Job of giving them investment opportunities and a lot of teachers are just really good at learning things and taking action on those things. So your savings rate and your behavior matter more than your income. And I want you to note that because if you can increase your income and you can increase your savings rate and make sure you have the correct behaviors in place, oh, boy, you are an unstoppable force. And that's what I want for each and every single

• 11:32Andrew Giancola?

  one of you. So focus less on how much income you're making. We're going to focus a lot on our income and growing our income. But I want you to focus less on exactly how much you're making right now and focus more on the behaviors that you are going to be taking going forward. Focus on margin creation, meaning creating more margin between your income and expenses, thinking about your expense control, and also automating your investments. That's going to help you not have to worry about your willpower anymore or rely on your willpower. Number three, is living below your means is a nonnegotiable. Now, what does it mean to live below your means? If you do just this alone, meaning you live on less than you make and you invest the difference, you will become very wealthy. That is the golden rule of building wealth is live on less than you

• 12:16Andrew Giancola?

  make and invest the difference. If you can do that, and you could just say that to yourself over and over and over again, and grain that in your brain, that that's really all you have to do to be able to build wealth. Ninety-four percent of millionaires live below their means. Well, duh, because the 6% that don't most likely inherited it, or they got it in some other way, shape or form. And 75% never carry a credit card balance. So for those of you out there who are carrying credit card debt, it's time to get rid of that debt, because if you live on less than you make and you avoid debt, you will really and truthfully build wealth. Now, one thing I want to note is that most of them came back and said that they were frugal. Now, frugal is not cheap. Frugal and cheap are two very different things. The way that I see

• 13:00Andrew Giancola?

  frugal is folks who have decided I value spending money on certain things and spending less on other things. And they have decided to master the arts of spending. Spending is an art form. Spending is not something that you just do, but instead An art form that you need to learn how to think about this. So spending more dollars on wealth accelerators, things that are going to increase your net worth or allow you to buy your financial freedom. That is a great place to put your money instead of a wealth killer like an appreciating asset, like a vehicle or something else. But you have to figure out what you value. Maybe you value vehicles and you want to spend more on vehicles and you don't care about freedom as much as you do buying that brand new car. That's completely fine.

• 13:42Andrew Giancola?

  If that's what you like, use money as a tool to do what you want in life. Just know it's going to take you longer to become a millionaire.

• 13:51Andrew Giancola?

  Insight number four is investing is a system, not a skill. So no millionaire cited stock picking, no billionaire cited day trading or options trading as something that they utilize to become a millionaire. Instead, most used their 401ks, they invested in low cost index funds, they had broad diversification and they had automatic contributions. A good number of them also were a real estate investor. A good number of them also were interested in real estate and some of them were even real estate investors, meaning they had rental properties and they had tenants go into those rental properties. Now, a key stat to include is that the average 401k millionaire invested for 26 years. So if you feel like you're behind with your investments right now and you're 30 years old and you feel like, oh, I should be a millionaire already.

• 14:36Andrew Giancola?

  The average 401k millionaire, it took them 26 years to even get there. So if you feel like you're behind, this statistic shows you that you're not behind. It takes time and as time progresses, as you'll see in a minute, then it starts to really accelerate your path to wealth. The average contribution rate for millionaires was 17%. So where did I get that number to begin to invest 20% of your income as the bare minimum? I think 10% is too low. I think 15% is too low. 20% ensures that you would only have to work typically around 29 years or less. And so when you are investing 20%, the average millionaire invested 17%. So do you think if you invest 20% of your income,

• 15:19Andrew Giancola?

  the chances of you becoming a millionaire are going to increase dramatically? Absolutely. That's where we get those numbers and that's why I want you to be able to. Do this. So what matters more here is automation over over optimization. People over complicate finances, especially when it comes to investing. Let me tell you right now, you can turn on CNBC right now and you can see all the different stock charts and the tickers moving across the bottom. They are having arguments about what the best stocks are right now. Why the market is moving in one direction versus another direction. I see all these Tik Tok experts all of a sudden come on and they're saying this is why the market is moving is going down. This is why the market is going up. It's all just noise. It's all just market noise.

• 16:04Andrew Giancola?

  They tend to over complicate investing intentionally. Wall Street loves to over complicate investing. In fact, I would argue that a lot of people talking about some of these investments don't even really know what they're talking about. And in fact, most of them most likely don't even believe in some of the things that they are saying. And this is where it gets amazing that if you simplify and you automate, you can build wealth literally on autopilot. And that's the overall key, the overarching key that I want you to understand. Number five, homeownership is a major wealth multiplier. So a lot of millionaires out there in this country, they're homeowners. Why? They built up some home equity. And so a lot of people who are classified as millionaires, they have a lot of their wealth in their home.

• 16:49Andrew Giancola?

  I don't want that for you as a wealth builder. So as a wealth builder, sure, you can have equity in your home and that's fantastic. It's fantastic to have that as a backup. It's fantastic to be able to say you're a millionaire because you have home equity. But also you don't want that in the long run to be the majority of your wealth. There are too many Americans right now who have the majority of their net worth in their home. And when that happens, it's not like you can draw down on your home and have the ability to not go deeper into debt and live off that in retirement. So sure, it is amazing to have a home. It is amazing to have equity in the home. That is an asset. That is a true asset. Where some people will say this is not an asset. It's an asset, but it is not what I want to be. My primary asset is not where I want to be the majority of my assets to be.

• 17:33Andrew Giancola?

  Instead, I want them to be in investments that can produce an income that I can live off every Single year in retirement, but in America, homeownership is going to accelerate your path to becoming a millionaire where you don't have to be a landlord. You don't have to be someone out there who has a bunch of exposure to real estate assets. Your own personal residence can help you get to the millionaire path. And so the good thing about homes is they do give you forced savings. They do give you somewhat of an inflation hedge and they do give you a stability tool. And so when you get to retirement age, if you have a paid off home, you're in a much better situation than you could be depending on what the expenses are. And we've talked about running the numbers so many times in this podcast, but if you do total cost of ownership and you have a paid off home and it is less than what it would cost you to rent, then you're in a pretty good situation overall.

• 18:18Andrew Giancola?

  Number six is entrepreneurship is optional, but entrepreneurship is also very powerful. So 33% of millionaires that were surveyed, they actually own a business and 15% of small business owners became millionaires. Most of these businesses took 10 plus years to create real wealth. They took a really, really long time and business can increase your upside. I love having businesses in my portfolio. I would never want to have a portfolio without a business in place because it is the way that I love to build wealth. It is one of the ways and one of my favorite ways to build wealth is to have businesses on hand. But do you have to have a business? No, there are plenty of people who have W2, nine to five jobs, who have built plenty of wealth, becoming 401k millionaires. And so you don't have to have a business to be able to do this,

• 19:02Andrew Giancola?

  but it does help and it does accelerate your path to millionaire status. If you can get that business to work. Now there are a lot of businesses out there who also fail. So you need to know what you're doing and it's not for everyone. Business is not for every single person. You have to be able to dive in and have an understanding of what's going on. This is the parallel path, not the default. This is not what you have to do where a lot of people think, well, I need to own some big business or I need to be able to cash out on some, you know, tech investment in order to be able to build wealth. No, you can do the slow and steady path, but it does absolutely help. Number seven is time is the secret ingredient to building wealth. This is the ingredient that most people don't want to hear. They don't want to talk about, but this is the ingredient that you need to know about is time will absolutely change the way that you think about money.

• 19:48Andrew Giancola?

  Most of you out there are saying to yourself, I feel like I'm behind. I feel like I should be a millionaire by now, but guess what? The average millionaire, according to all these studies, and we went through all of it. The average millionaire is 61 years old. Do you feel behind now? Do you feel like you're actually behind? Cause I'm going to guarantee that you're not. You have so much time left to build wealth that you don't have to worry about it as much as you currently are. If you have a lot of stress and anxiety about feeling behind, guess what? Now's the time to get it together. Now's the time to get your dollars invested so that we can grow our wealth. But you are not behind. Two thirds of those millionaires were between the ages of 60 to 79. And less than 3% are under the age of 35.

• 20:33Andrew Giancola?

  So for all my people under the age of 35 who listen to this podcast, only 3% were millionaires. So 97% were not under the age of 35. So this is going to reset your expectations where you think this is going to be a 10 year plan. It can absolutely be a 10 year plan. If you lock in and you really want to dial in, we'll have an episode coming up on how to build a retirement plan in 10 years or less. So make sure you subscribe to this podcast if you're not. But at the same time, over the course of 20 to 30 years, you should reset your expectations because it really takes 20, 30, 40 years for you to become a millionaire. The early decades feel slow. It feels like you're in a slog. It feels like you're really taking forever to even get there, but you know why? Because your savings rate has to do the majority of the work. Your first 100K, your savings rate is doing all the work.

• 21:14Andrew Giancola?

  Then you get to your second 100K, then your third 100K, and you'll see how this starts to compound as time goes on. Number eight is starting early matters more than almost anything else. So the earlier you can start, the better off you can become. Whereas 2 to 3K a year, starting at age 20 means that you can become a millionaire by age 65. If you start at age 30, you have to put in $6,000 per year. If you start at age 40, it's $14,000 per year, more than double of age 30. And starting at age 50 means $36,000 per year to get to millionaire status by age 65. So time lowers the required effort that you need to make to become a millionaire. If you're listening right now and you're in your twenties and you have not started investing yet, now is the time to get started.

• 21:56Andrew Giancola?

  If you're in your thirties right now and you're listening and you're like, I just got started, you know, somewhat early on, but I'm not really pushing it. It's time to push the envelope right now because the effort that you have to make is so much lower than someone who's in their 40s or someone who is in their 50s. And if you're in your 40s, just getting started, you just saw 14,000 bucks a year, starting at age 40. My friends, you can do this and you can make a huge, huge impact and time is going to lower that required effort and delaying is going to dramatically increase the likelihood that you will not succeed in becoming a millionaire. So the longer you delay, that is going to just make it so much harder. So I want you to think through this and make sure that you are getting started today. Number nine is millionaires think in systems and not events. So they all have repeated behavior. One, they automate their investments.

• 22:41Andrew Giancola?

  Two, they pay themselves first. They don't wait for all their bills to go into play and then they pay themselves. No, they invest first into themselves, then they spend what is left over. Three is they build an emergency fund to protect themselves against life because life is going to happen. And when your car breaks down, you don't want that to derail your progress on building wealth. They make sure they prioritize insurance and risk management and they have diversified income streams over time. So your thought process here when you hear this should be, let's set this up once so it runs forever instead of let's do these 17 things every single month. How many of you are just running all over the place trying to keep up with what you need to do day to day? The last thing you want to do is spend a bunch more time on your finances. Instead, you want to make sure that

• 23:25Andrew Giancola?

  you set up an automated system. So if you want to learn how to automate your money, you can download our free money automation checklist. We'll link it up down in the show notes below so that you can check that out. And I highly encourage you to look at it because it is one of my favorite things that we have done in the last couple of years. And then number 10 is millionaires play defense as much as they play offense. So defense means they get the right insurances, they have the emergency fund in place, they're defending against things that could happen in life and they are anticipating that going to happen before it actually happens. If you let life happen to you, life is going to be so much harder than if you actually anticipate some of these things. So I highly encourage most of you to make sure that this is a mandatory step in your wealth building

• 24:06Andrew Giancola?

  journey. So now what I want to do is I want to look at how long it's going to take you to become a millionaire if you start at 100K. So we have an episode talking about how long it would take you to get to your first 100K. If you haven't heard that one, check that one out. Now let's talk about how long it would take you to get from 100,000 to 1 million.

• 24:24Andrew Giancola?

  If you've been listening to this show for a while, you know it's not just me anymore. It takes a great team behind the scenes to make everything happen. And if I had to hire someone tomorrow, I'd want someone who could jump right in and make an impact. That's why I'd use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. When workplace chaos hits, Indeed Sponsored Jobs helps you reach qualified candidates faster. Your job gets boosted in search results, so you're spending less time searching and more time interviewing the right people. Plus, you only pay for results, which I absolutely love. Sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95% more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored posts. That's a huge advantage when you're trying to grow your business.

• 25:07Andrew Giancola?

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• 25:51Andrew Giancola?

  I've tried sleep trackers, cooling my room, changing my nighttime routine, all the different things. But nothing really matters as much as having the right mattress. And that's one of the reasons I love Lisa. A great mattress is one of those things that you use every single night and you spend a third of your life sleeping. And it can make a huge difference on how you feel the next day. Lisa has mattresses designed for different sleep positions and comfort preferences. And their sleep quiz can help you get matched in less than two minutes. Plus, they're designed and they're assembled in the USA, and they come with free shipping, easy returns, and a 120-night free sleep trial. So go to lisa.com for up to 30%

• 26:33Andrew Giancola?

  Off mattress plus and get an extra $50 off with promo code PFP. Exclusive for my listeners. That's L E E S A dot com promo code PFP for 30% off mattresses plus an extra $50 off. Let them know we sent you in the survey after checkout. Lisa dot com promo code PFP. It's kind of amazing how much can change in just a single year. Every summer, the kids are a little bigger, a little more independent, and life looks a little different than it did the year before. And it reminds me that while we can't predict the future, we can prepare for it. That's one of the reasons I like Policy Genius. See, Policy Genius isn't an insurance

• 27:18Andrew Giancola?

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• 28:00Andrew Giancola?

  how much you can save. That's PolicyGenius.com. One thing I've learned from running multiple businesses is there's usually a gap between how you think work is getting done and how it's actually getting done. And we've had times where we thought we knew the bottleneck, only to realize later, the real issue was somewhere completely different. That's exactly what today's sponsor, Scribe, helps solve. Scribe is a workflow AI platform trusted by 94% of the Fortune 500. And Scribe Optimize turns real workflow data into decisions your AI strategy actually needs, automatically capturing how work happens across approved apps, surfacing inefficiency and opportunities with no interviews and no

• 28:43Andrew Giancola?

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• 29:24Andrew Giancola?

  That's S C R I B E dot H O W slash P F P. All right, so on the screen, we're going to put this chart talking through exactly how long it's going to take you to get to your first million after you have your first $100,000 saved. And so when we look at this chart, one thing I want you to note is we had a couple of assumptions. One assumption was that you're getting a 10% rate of return. Where did I get the 10% rate of return? Just Google S and P 500 historic returns. If you want to adjust that down for inflation, it'd be closer to a 7% rate of return inflation adjusted. After that, what we want to look at is contributing $10,000 every single year. So if this person contributed 10 grand a year, this is how they would get to this number, okay? So from 100K to 200K,

• 30:09Andrew Giancola?

  it would take them five years to get there. And if their cumulative contribution over those five years is $50,000. But as you're going to see, those cumulative contributions go down more and more and more as time goes on. To get from 200K to 300K, it's going to take them three more years. And after those three years, to get from 200K to 300K, it's going to take them three more years. Same exact investments. To get from 300K to 400K is going to take them two more years. So here's the crazy thing about this. Is as you see this as time goes on, the progress that they're making, you can see it just starts to accelerate. Because get to 500K, it's going to take them two more years. To get to 600K, about two more years. Getting to 700K, about a year. 800K, another year. 900 a year. And a million bucks a year.

• 30:54Andrew Giancola?

  And think about this for a second. If you're going to have 10% rate of return at $1 million.

• 30:59Andrew Giancola?

  You're going to see a big difference in how your portfolio compounds. Because over that timeframe, all of a sudden, if you got, say, the S and P 500 did 12% one given year. In fact, last year, the S and P 500 returned approximately 17.9% to investors. Okay, that was the year of 2025, last year. If you had a million dollars invested in the S and P 500, and you got a 17.9% rate of return, your portfolio would make $179,000 in that given year. So you can see why this starts to accelerate as you have more money invested. Does it have to be in the same account? No, but having more dollars invested is the key. And once you get to your first million, this is really going to start to take off.

• 31:43Andrew Giancola?

  And compound interest is going to take over. So the faster you can get there, the more you will see your wealth grow over time. And so I wanted to show you this example, this quick, quick example of how long it actually takes to get to that point in time, once you get your first $100,000 saved, where everything else becomes a little bit easier. Now, to get to your first 100K, it depends on how much you're saving, how much money you have. A lot of you, if you are in an entry level job or just getting started, then it is going to take you a little longer to get to your first 100K. And so you want to try to get to that first 100K quickly, so that you can get to your next 100K, and you can see how much faster this progresses over time as you start to build wealth. So next, I want to get into the exact steps that I would take if I was trying to get to my first million dollars.

• 32:28Andrew Giancola?

  So number one is I would believe that you can do it. There are way too many people right now who do not believe they could become millionaires. But understanding some of the facts that we just gave you, and believing that you could become a millionaire is one of the most important things. 80% of millionaires did not inherit their wealth. So most people out there think that these millionaires inherited their wealth. They did not. And if you have the right mindset, your mindset is everything when it comes to building wealth, you can change your life forever. So I want you to build conviction, number one. Meaning, you have the conviction inside that you are going to become a millionaire. And you say that to yourself, "I am going to become a millionaire. I am the type of person, I'm going to be the first person in my family to become a millionaire." Number two is I want you to learn patience. I want you to understand how long some of this stuff takes.

• 33:13Andrew Giancola?

  In the first 10 years, it's going to feel like a slog. It's going to feel like a grind. But once you get to that point in time where compound interest takes over, it is going to be so much easier for you going forward. Number three, I want you to study compound interest. I want you to take some time to get a financial education. Spend more time listening to this podcast. Spend more time learning and reading books because that is going to help you in the long run. Think about compound interest as time goes on and then track your progress. At least once a year, making sure that you are tracking your net worth and tracking your progress and understanding what the impact of your decisions are. But you gotta believe that you can do this because you're not going to take action if you don't believe in yourself. So you must, must, must believe in yourself before you get started on this journey.

• 33:57Andrew Giancola?

  Now, number two is your income is going to make this way easier. So if you're someone out there right now that is struggling to get by, or maybe you have a really high income and don't really know what to do with those dollars, your income is going to make this easier because the difference between your income and expenses is something we call the gap. And that gap is where wealth is built. But if you are living paycheck to paycheck right now because either you're spending too much of your high income or you don't make enough money, your income is going to be the catalyst that makes everything easier. Every single wealthy person I have ever talked to, their biggest catalyst or the best way that they leveraged their path to wealth was income. Why is that? Because you can only cut back so much.

• 34:41Andrew Giancola?

  And people who are on the poverty line or people who just are not making enough money, they can't cut back anymore. But you can earn an infinite amount, meaning you can earn so much more. And so because of this, we want to make sure that we are trying to earn as much as we possibly can. So one is making sure you're on the right career path. If you are in a career path where you feel as though you will not have enough income to even survive, then it's probably time to change or reconsider your career path. A lot of people will say, hey, money doesn't make you happy. Money makes you a lot happier than you are if you're trying to live paycheck to paycheck. I promise you that it removes stress and anxiety from your life. And if you use it as a tool and you use it properly, it'll create. Freedom for your life and when you have freedom in your life, you are so much happier than folks who have to go through the grind every single day just to survive.

• 35:26Andrew Giancola?

  I don't want that for anybody out there. We are not here to just survive. We are here to thrive. And so because you want to thrive, let's increase our income. So if you're on the wrong career path, A, I would say reconsider. Number two is to focus your time and energy on your day job, meaning learning how to negotiate your salary with your boss. We have a whole entire system on how to negotiate your salary. We have a free ebook if you go to mastermoney.co/resources. You can check that free ebook out. I explain it step by step on exactly how to do that. But secondly, also look into your job and see what are people above me doing right now? What are some of the things that they do that are going to help me moving forward? Look at your skills. What skills do you have in place? And can you utilize those skills to earn more money? And then if you can, consider launching a side business.

• 36:11Andrew Giancola?

  Is there a business where you can earn extra income on the side? That is going to help you take those extra dollars and put them towards investments so that you can build wealth. One in three millionaires, again, never earned a hundred thousand dollars in a given year. But if you leverage your income and you take the difference and invest those dollars, it's going to make it so much easier. Number three is to adjust your portfolio to accumulate, not just preserve. So if your asset allocation is off, meaning the percentage of stocks and bonds that you have, and you don't have the right asset allocation, you are going to have a very hard time building wealth. So instead, what I want you to do is I want you to make sure that your allocation is in growth mode and not preservation mode. See, there's two life cycles when people are adjusting their portfolio.

• 36:53Andrew Giancola?

  There's growth mode and growth mode is when you have a higher percentage in stocks typically, or you have real estate or businesses. Those are the types of things that you want to invest in when we're in growth mode. Then when you're in preservation mode, you can add more things like bonds, or you can add more things like cash reserves. And those are going to help you maintain your portfolio, weather downturns and preserve your wealth so you can enjoy it and live on that money. But you during the accumulation years want to make sure you don't have too much of an allocation in bonds or too much of an allocation in cash. Instead, you want to get your dollars working for you so that it can grow over time. So real estate is fantastic. Stocks are fantastic. Businesses are fantastic. Those are the places you want to put those dollars.

• 37:37Andrew Giancola?

  Now, number four is to make sure you automate your money. Money automation will change your life if you have not done it yet. And so making sure you automate a percentage of your paycheck every single month into your investments, automate your bills and automate your savings. Those are the three areas that, once you get those automated, you don't have to spend so much time on your finances anymore. And the number five is to learn to spend on your values. Because once you learn to spend on your values, you spend so much less in these random, different places. So instead, what I want you to do is to take your extra dollars and spend more on the things that you love and less on the things that you don't love. For a lot of you out there who are pursuing financial freedom or financial independence, the thing that you love is that freedom.

• 38:19Andrew Giancola?

  And so spending more to buy your freedom is one of the best places you could put your dollars. Number six is to avoid debt if you can. So when you're on the millionaire path, avoiding debt as much as possible is very important. Now, if you want to take out a mortgage or anything like that, that's fine. But any high interest debt, any debt above a 6% interest rate, I would avoid at all costs. And the less debt that you take on, the more likely you will be able to reach millionaire status that much faster. Debt is not my favorite thing at all. In fact, the older I get, the less I like debt. When I was younger, I was willing to take on a little bit of debt to build businesses or to leverage certain things. Now, I am much less likely to take on debt than I would have when I was a lot younger. And so if you can avoid debt, that is one of the key things.

• 39:02Andrew Giancola?

  Living on less than you make, investing the difference and avoiding debt, doing those golden rules will ensure that you can't help but become a millionaire. Now, if you do have high interest debt, then we want to make sure that we are focusing on paying that debt down aggressively. If you have credit card debt, if you have high interest student loan debt, or if you have any of that debt in your way, you want to make sure that you get rid of that so that we can start on our millionaire path and really get the ball moving. Number seven is to understand taxes. Now, I want you to think about it this way. Over the course of the next 10 years, if you saved an additional $10,000 per year in taxes, that means you would have an additional $100,000 in opportunity cost that you could get invested or put towards your millionaire status goals. And so to Do this, we need to understand taxes.

• 39:44Andrew Giancola?

  Taxes are one of the cornerstone to understand or have a CPA who understands it in your corner to take care of those things so that you don't have to worry about it anymore. Wealthy people have people on their side who are more knowledgeable than them, who are going to help them through the situation. So for me, I don't like spending way too much time in the weeds on taxes. So instead I hire a CPA who is also a tax strategist who helps me through this process. Now I actually like it a lot more because I see how much money he saves me. But at the same time, understanding tax efficiency is really, really important. So there are things like tax loss harvesting or Roth conversions, or other things that you can do to make a big, big impact. Which leads me to number eight, because this is a great tax efficiency thing for a lot of people out there, is to fill up those retirement accounts. So your HSA has triple tax advantages.

• 40:28Andrew Giancola?

  Your Roth IRA grows tax-free. Your pre-tax accounts mean that you save on tax in that given year. All of those are working towards your advantage and helping you add to your opportunity cost bucket. The more cash you have available to you to help you grow your wealth, the better off you're going to be long-term. And so looking at those different areas can help you tremendously in the long run. Now, a couple of bonus caveats. Real estate can really help you on your millionaire path. Whether it is real estate investing, like buying a single-family homes, you could buy small multifamily homes, you can house hack and reduce your housing costs. All of those will improve your chances of becoming a millionaire very quickly. And then number two is business ownership. If you have a business that's successful or that's earning some sort of income,

• 41:13Andrew Giancola?

  even if it's earning a couple of thousand dollars a month, in addition to your day job, that is going to be a huge wealth multiplier when it comes to getting to your first million dollars. And so finding ways to earn more so that you can take those extra dollars and put them towards your investments is going to change your life forever. So those are the steps that I would take if I was going to try to get to my first million as fast as I possibly could. The faster you want to get there, the more you need to earn. Your income is what's going to get you there faster because you can take that difference and put it towards wealth building activities. Listen, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. I hope you learned a ton about how real millionaires act and some of the things that you can do and some of the big Takeaways that you have today to get to that point in time. If you want to know what you need to do with your next dollar,

• 41:58Andrew Giancola?

  and if you want to have an understanding of how to manage your finances, I highly encourage you to join Master Money Academy. Master Money Academy is our community where people are learning what to do with their next dollar. In addition to doing weekly calls with me, and we have small groups where people who have common goals are working on those same exact common goals. It is the ultimate place for those who are pursuing financial independence, who really want to make sure that they are doing the right things with their next dollar. So I highly encourage you to join Master Money Academy if you have not already. We will link it up down below in the show notes, and I would like to invite every single one of you there. Would love to see you on our next coaching call. We do coaching calls every single week with me live. So would love to see you there. Thank you guys so much for being on this episode. I truly appreciate each and every single one of you,

• 42:43Andrew Giancola?

  and we will see you on the next episode.

• 42:47Speaker 02

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