How to Become a Millionaire

Thousands of books have been written on “How to Become a Millionaire”, some more relevant and interesting than others, but MillionaireCorner.com is taking a research based approach to tell you how other individuals have become Millionaires. In the next few weeks we will be chronicling the stories of some individual Millionaires as well as identifying and explaining the key factors that tend to have the most relevance to ultimately becoming a millionaire.

For every rule, there is an exception. Our goal is to present the research that highlights similarities in attitudes, approaches and investments that apply to a significant percentage of millionaires to allow us to learn from them.

Overall, the following factors apply to a significant portion of millionaires and ultra millionaires:

-More often than not, wealthy households are highly educated. While some Business Owners may have only a college degree, for the most part a graduate school education of some type (i.e. MBA, JD, PhD, etc) has been achieved. Only small portions of the oldest millionaires have only a high school education.
-Almost all millionaires attribute their success to hard work and, indeed, the average hours worked per household increases as wealth levels increase.
-The wealthiest households generally are business owners. Professionals (i.e. doctors, lawyers, etc.) generally cap out at about $15 million while business owners and senior executives exceed those numbers.
-The wealthiest investors have slightly more aggressive risk tolerance than others. They are not the most aggressive but they are generally not overly conservative.
-Wealthy investors generally use professional advisors of various types. The number of advisors and their expertise varies based on wealth level. Additionally, wealthy households often manage a piece of their assets “on their own”.
-Portfolios are well balanced between stocks and bonds, managed accounts and other types of investments, including alternative investments.
-Real estate, especially income producing real estate, continues to be an important part of the overall portfolio.
-Wealthy investors are continually looking to invest in new ideas or businesses. The most successful often invest in a venture related to something they know and understand rather than an unknown idea or concept.

In the next few weeks, Millionaire Corner will discuss each of the above topics in depth and allow you to determine how you compare to some of the wealthiest households. There may be opportunities you have not considered or even a fresh way to look at your portfolio. Perhaps we can assist you in determining whether or not to invest in a crazy idea or to at least take a structured approach to considering various alternatives.

Today there are 13.5 million millionaires. Millionaire Corner would like to increase the number of millionaires and perhaps some of our insights will help you achieve this goal.