5 Habits That Really Build Wealth

Making significant money in a world where tax and inflation reigns supreme can be a truly monumental task. In an attempt to lure unsuspecting money-hungry individuals, get-rich-quick schemes abound the internet and phone lines. While they look good at face value, they very often achieve the total opposite of what they promise in the form of lifesavings being wiped from innocent people’s accounts.

But amidst the flurry of schemes and scams; there are some very legitimate and often overlooked ways to grow your wealth.

1: Budgeting

Living below or at least within your means is a sure-fire way to become wealthy over time. This is not possible without stringent budgeting.

Budgeting allows you to not only live within your means, but you’ll be surprised how much extra money you have for discretional spending after you allow for expenses.

As a rule of thumb, generally you want to break your budget down according to your pay frequency. This makes sense; as the whole purpose of a budget is to figure out how to make your money last until your next paycheck (hopefully) with some excess funds left in the end.

There are some great resources online to help you to work out your budget. I actually enjoy using this one provided by Australia’s Commonwealth Bank of Australia here.

If you’d like to try it yourself, here is a simple way to figure out your weekly budget:

A: Find your weekly wage by opening up your weekly payslip and looking at the “after tax” income. If you are paid at a different frequency, calculate how much you are paid in a year and then divide this number by 52.

B: Deduct your weekly expenses. If netflix costs you $19 a month but you are working out your weekly budget; divide 19 by 4 to give you your weekly expense. If insurance costs $564 a year, divide this number by 52. I usually overexaggerate my expenses slightly so that I naturally build up a cash cushion before I even start saving.

C: Deduct your total weekly expenses from your total weekly income to determine whether you are living above, within, or below your means. If the end number is positive, this is extra money that you can invest or save, or, if you are that way inclined, treat yourself with. To keep motivation high, I like to refer to this surplus as “wealth money”.

Aim to get this final number to grow over time by selecting better deals and finding lower prices for weekly goods.

2: Cooking at Home, from Scratch

While buying fast food or pre-made meals from chains and grocery stores can seem like using a real life time-jumping cheat code; in reality, it can defeat your bank account faster than you can say “Cyberpunk".

A better way to win the game of wealth is to cook at home, and from scratch at that.

Not only are your meals going to be monumentally healthier, fresher, and, with a bit of practice; better tasting, but you’ll be able to bulk buy a lot of your ingredients all while selecting better value products.

As someone who works in a grocery store, I know for a fact that home-brand products are usually sourced from the exact same suppliers who sell their products next to them for double the price. The quality is the same, where the home-brand saves money is in the packaging. Pasta is the same, bread is the same; ingredients are the same.

Cook a little more than you will eat in one sitting to save for your lunch when you next work. This saves me $25 a week that I put into growth investments like this set and forget fund here.

3: Grow your Own Veggies

To further enhance your money saving ploy from cooking at home, you should really be substituting your fresh food from the grocery store with fresh food from your own property. Whether you have a lot of spare land or a kitchen windowsill; every plant you grow is more money saved. Not to mention the cleaner air in and around your home from more oxygen-producing plants.

If you are blessed with a large backyard, find a plot of neglected space that gets plenty of sun. Purchase a bag or two of 25L potting mix to prepare the topsoil, and place your selected seedlings in the soil at a safe distance apart to prevent overcrowding.

Those who have a little less space; make use of what you’ve got. It’s a popular approach to grow a row of fresh herbs along a kitchen windowsill in a self-watering planter box like this, or in a small planter box like this one here on a balcony.

To successfully grow your plants as easily as possible, you want to pick seasonal plants. I use this great worldwide seasonal planting guide here.

No matter where or how you grow your veggies, you will save valuable time and money and will level up the flavours in your dishes with the freshest produce you can possibly get. Above all else though, remember to water your plants enough daily for the soil to darken. To further boost your harvest, consider picking up some organic liquid fertiliser (like this)to mix into the watering once a week.

4: Investing

You’ve heard it before and you’ll hear it again; if you action only one of these 5 habits, investing will provide the greatest opportunity to improve your financial quality of life. The world’s richest people are measured by their stock market equity for a reason; it is the single most used investment avenue in the world. Super funds are all over it, conglomerates are all over it; Warren Buffet is all over it.

Not only are investment markets pivotal wealth builders, they also force an investor to increase their perspective on world events and how these events trickle into the stock markets.

Educated investments, namely in the stock market, are the most steadfast way for the majority of us to really change our approach and ability to generate lifechanging wealth. The world elite all make their money from how they perform, not how many hours they work, and the stock market provides this exact same opportunity. Work smarter; and you can fulfill your wildest dreams.

For those who are not sure where to get started, there are some great set-and-forget investment funds around. For dollar-cost averaging (automatic weekly investments) each week, I use growth-aggressive Spaceship which has netted me monumental returns for a hands-off growth fund (50% in 9 months). For appreciating cashback from online purchases, I use RAIZ where I have generated over $300 thus far simply from buying what I intended to anyway.

If you would like to test your luck out in the big world of stock markets as a lone ranger; here are some free, indispensable resources that got me started:

🤓 CommSec Learn (AUS)

🤑 Motley Fool (AUS)

🧠 Australian Financial Review (AUS)

💲 Motley Fool (USA)

5: Being Frugal

Budgeting is one step, but in order for your budget to work in the first place you need to squeeze every penny. No one ever said “I have too much money left”. Instead, “I don’t have enough money” is the much more popular exclamation.

Being frugal does not just simply mean to save money, it really means to save money through wiser purchase decisions. For example, say you’re shopping for some much needed new clothes and you come across the predicament of a brand label or fast fashion/plain t-shirt. The brand label shirt costs $80, is made in China, but has the brand’s logo plastered across the front so that everyone knows what you purchased. Contrastingly, the fast fashion, plain t-shirt costs $25, is also made in China, and has no visible logos or labeling however matches more outfits because of it’s simplified design. Which would you choose?

Often times, this type of materialistic decision is what separates those who live outside their means from the people who live within their means — the walking definitions of “wealthy”. The literal face of American money, Benjamin Franklin, once said “Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people that they don’t like”. What this simply means is that whether you pay $80 or $25 for that piece of clothing, you still have a t-shirt in the end. The difference depends on whether you prefer form, or function.

Being frugal is all about getting the most from the least, and here are two programs I use to help stretch a dollar:

🍯 Honey (for online purchases)

🎟 Groupon (for in person purchases)

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