Earn, save, invest. If you want to get rich, those three things always need to be on your mind. In that order too. 

On a recent call with JPMorgan clients, the CEO, Jamie Dimon, talked about the key to successful wealth building. He said: 

”Investing should be a permanent thing. Save, invest. Save, invest. Guessing at market tops, market bottoms – that is a complete loser’s game. I’ve never seen anyone win at it. The smartest investor in the world, Warren Buffett, would say that is not the way to invest.” 

It’s really not that complicated. You don’t even need to earn a lot of money to become wealthy if you have healthy financial habits. 

My brother, Daniel, who’s seven years younger than I am, told me the other day that he doesn’t feel like investing because he can’t invest a lot of money. So I said, let’s do some calculations. I’ll show you that you can become a millionaire by investing small amounts of money.

My goal is to destroy one of the biggest myths of wealth-building which is that you can only get rich by investing big lumps of money. Here’s where it comes from. Let’s say you want to start investing in an S&P 500 index fund. It’s a relatively low-risk way of getting started.

And you put in $1000 of your money and you wait a year. And you see something like 8% returns, which is about the average for the past 30 years. And you think, “$80? That’s all? What am I supposed to do with that?”