When you think about millionaires, what comes to mind?
Fancy car?
Big house?
Bling?
Lavish lifestyle?
That is how we are conditioned to view millionaires but that is not the reality.
In 2017, Chris Hogan and his team conducted the largest study of U.S. millionaires. They interviewed 10,000 millionaires and published their findings in his book Everyday Millionaires. I highly recommend reading this book just to see all the statistics. Here are a few:
- Only 3% of millionaires inherited their millionaire status. 79% are 100% self made. 5% of millionaires inherited $100,000 or less.
- 8 out of 10 millionaires come from families at or below the middle-class income level.
- 97% of millionaires believe they control their own destinies.
- The number one contributing factor to millionaires’ high net worth is investing in retirement plans (401K).
- The average millionaire hit the $1 million mark for the first time at 49 year old after years of hard work. Only 5% of millionaires got there in ten years or less.
- Not one of the 10,000 millionaires surveyed put single stock in their top three wealth contributing factors.
- 79% of millionaires did not attend prestigious private schools–62% graduated from public state schools, 8% attended community college, and 9% never graduated college at all.
- One-third of millionaires never had a six-figure household income in a single working year. Only 31% of them averaged $100,000 household income a year, and only 7% averaged over $200,000 household income over the course of their career.
- Only 18% of millionaires own a business, 82% work for companies. Top three occupations for millionaires are engineer, accountant and teacher.
- Only 15% of millionaires are in senior leadership positions in their companies and only 7% are C-suite executives.
What are your thoughts and why is this important?
The results of this study show that becoming a self made millionaire is not unattainable. You don’t have to pick the winning stock, make half a million dollars a year, be at the top of the corporate ladder or have all the best connections. In reality, building wealth takes consistency, patience, diligence and time because this is a long term play. There really is no way to shortcut this process.
We are trained to believe that building wealth is unattainable for the average American. Therefore, we jump at get rich quick schemes, make risky trades in the Stock Market and spend too much money trying to “look” rich. In reality we need to budget, live below our means, invest for retirement, use a budget and put systems in place to automate our wealth building.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
