How to Make a Million Dollars

Although it’s likely we will see the first trillionaire in our lifetimes, becoming a millionaire is still the benchmark most people hold in high regard as indicating that they’ve made it.

How You Can Make a Million Dollars

1. Start a Business
2. Invest in Real Estate
3. Buy Stocks
4. Take Advantage of Employer Matches
5. Stick to a Budget
6. Learn a Lucrative New Skill
7. Retail Arbitrage
8. Sell Your Knowledge
9. Brand Yourself

Do you remember playing Monopoly as a kid? The premise of the game was simple: you moved around the board, buying properties. When people landed on the properties, you got paid. If you improved the properties, you got paid more. And if you owned all the properties in the same neighborhood, you got paid more. The problem is that other people might own some of those properties. In order to win Monopoly, you couldn’t just rely on luck. You had to learn how to bargain with other players, strike deals, think on your feet, and make long term plans.

As it turns out, Monopoly provides a great lesson on working your way up toward becoming a self made millionaire. It takes time, and you have to be smart in terms of how you go about it. You cannot just simply rely on passing GO and collecting $200 every time to win the game.

Of course, when it comes to real life, working your way up to a seven-figure nest egg gets a little more complicated. There is no budgeting in Monopoly. There are no college tuitions to pay for or major life events, like weddings. When it comes to real life personal finance, it’s not just about how much money you make, but about how much money you can keep.

Even so, a surprising number of people are millionaires. In fact, roughly 22 million people in the United States have seven figures in net worth. That’s around seven percent of the country! You’re also more likely to become a millionaire in the United States than you are in the rest of the world because in total there are about 56 million millionaires on a planet of more than six billion people. Most millionaires in the United States, contrary to popular belief, did not become millionaires by inheriting their wealth. Rather, they became millionaires over the course of several decades, by simply setting aside a portion of their wages into investments that grew over time. That’s the power of compound interest at work.

Of course, it’s still fun to think of Scrooge McDuck diving into a pile of money whenever you think of becoming a millionaire. But having a net worth of seven figures is more within reach than you might think. For starters, net worth is calculated by taking the balance of your assets and liabilities. If your home is paid off, that goes into your asset column (or whatever is paid off, even if it’s not the entire thing). If you’ve been working for a few decades and put away five percent of your weekly or biweekly paycheck into a retirement account, then it may not be as hard as you think to become a millionaire.

So, becoming a millionaire is not that hard to achieve if you own your home and have been in the workforce for a few decades. But what if you want to get there sooner? Can you?

9 Ways to Make a Million Dollars

If you’re looking to kickstart your financial journey to millions, try one of these nine investments:

1. Start a Business

One way to become a millionaire is to start a business. These days you don’t need a large business loan and brick and mortar presence to start a business. You just need some panache and an account with Shopify, Amazon, or some other platform where you can process online transactions.

Depending on what you sell, you can often also get away with not carrying any inventory either. For example, if you are selling apparel or home goods, you can start an online store and order items directly from the supplier when a customer makes a purchase.

Of course, with the online market as saturated as it is (with 7.9 million online businesses worldwide and 2.1 million in the United States alone) you will need a little more than a flair for design and a credit card number in order to actually make your business work. You will have to be dedicated to running your business and seeing it through challenges. And even though, technically, the only thing you need is a selling platform, you are most likely going to have to put money into marketing your business through venues like social media.

2. Invest in Real Estate

Real estate investing is a classic way to make money. In the main, there are two ways to go about it: renting and flipping. Renting involves building up a portfolio of rental properties, which of course involves screening tenants, collecting rent, and servicing and improving your properties.

Some investors do not like the involvement of this approach, so they outsource it to a property manager. Others flip homes instead, which involves buying homes at the lowest price you can get, improving the home, and putting it back on the market.

Some home flippers get really into the remodel themselves, contributing their artistic sense to the project and deriving enjoyment from the experience of rekindling the charm of an older home. Others are more hands off, buying distressed properties, like foreclosed homes, and putting a crew to work and reselling them as quickly as possible.

Whatever the case may be, it’s a myth to think that you need to be a wealthy person in order to get into real estate. The biggest part of becoming successful in real estate investing is probably centered around getting creative with your deals, which in some cases can even involve learning how to invest in real estate with no money.

3. Buy Stocks

The vast majority of millionaires in this country got there through real estate (discussed above) or shares of stock. This is especially true for the average, everyday retail investor (meaning, someone with a nine-to-five job whose wealth building is a side activity). If you allocate a portion of your paycheck into an IRA, it’s likely that the IRA consists of stocks, bonds, mutual funds, an index fund, or ETFs. In short, all these options involve the stock market.

For some individuals, learning how to buy and sell stocks has proved advantageous. However, in order to do that successfully, you need to have software that can read the algorithms of the market and make predictions about what stock prices will do, otherwise you are shooting in the dark.

Penny stocks, as they are often called, are often extremely volatile and anything but a source of passive income. For most people, trying to become a self made millionaire from the financial success of one cheap stock “going to the moon” is bad investment advice. And so is the classic adage of buy low, sell high with individual stocks, because it’s next to impossible to predict when the lows and highs will happen. Did you know that around 80% of day traders lose money, while 10% break even? Only one out of 10 people using their own personal capital to buy and sell stocks based on price swings actually make money.

Other investors play the long game by dollar cost averaging, and though it takes time, it’s a far more likely path to becoming wealthy. This involves putting the same amount of money into the stock market on a consistent basis, regardless of whatever the prices are doing—no matter whether the market is bullish or bearish. Typically, this strategy involves purchasing stocks that are undervalued and produce dividends. As your portfolio grows, the trickles of dividends join together to become a mighty river. If you want to see how that can play out over time, it helps to look at a stock dividend calculator.

You may even consider joining our Weekly Stock Trading Room expert-driven stock investment advice.

4. Take Advantage of Employer Matches

Speaking of investing in the stock market, one of the easiest ways for a person to reach the million dollar benchmark is not through buying and selling stocks, or even building your own investment portfolio of dividend stocks through research. Rather, it’s through the patient dedication of dollar cost averaging by socking away a portion of your paycheck week after week. This is especially true if the company you work for will match your retirement contributions. Many do, and some do for up to five percent of your paycheck.

For example, if your biweekly paycheck is $2k and you allocate five percent of that toward a company sponsored IRA, that $100 turns into $200, half of which is essentially free extra money.

But wait…there’s more. After just 10 years of working at the same place, even a portfolio growing at a modest eight percent would turn into $81,356. If you did the same thing for 40 years, instead of one decade, you’d be close to $1.5 million. Welcome to the millionaires’ club—and you didn’t even have to do it in your spare time.

Another great thing about company sponsored plans with matching contributions is that you can elect to have your investments managed. A money manager will do a better job balancing the investment portfolio for long term growth, for example, by building a foundation of recession proof stocks.

5. Stick to a Budget

Many millionaires will tell you that it’s not about how much money you make, it’s about how much money you keep. The reality of making more money is that you somehow magically find your cost of living going up as well. More money means you can move into a nicer home. It means buying a nicer car. It trickles down into daily purchases, like buying craft beers instead of the standard brand names, shopping at boutique clothing stores instead of Target, or whatever else is applicable to your situation.

Did you know that the Queen of England eats her breakfast out of Tupperware containers? She is said to live very frugally, despite having a personal net worth of $600 million (that’s excluding assets that belong to the crown) and being the largest feudal landholder in modern times.

Likewise, you might be surprised to find that many millionaires have not changed their standard of living as they’ve gained wealth or increased their income through promotions and professional growth. In fact, in many cases, this was the key to their wealth building, as it allowed them to accelerate their saving and investments. However, there certainly is room to treat yourself when you have more money. You just have to know how to do it right and make sure you maintain and emergency fund, which is where a budget comes in.

6. Learn a Lucrative New Skill

Most people in the workforce will move through their professional life by getting paid for their time, not their skills or the actual value of the services they offer. And while this is the norm, that doesn’t mean it’s what you have to embrace.

This is especially true if you offer a high worth skill, such as graphic design, accounting, copywriting, coaching, advising, or consulting. When you have a skill that’s in high demand and you work for yourself, you can charge what your services are worth to clients instead of letting someone else set your salary and collect the rest.

Of course, there is room for working in the context of a salaried job with a high worth skill if you negotiate your pay with your employer. If you’ve hit the glass ceiling at your current workplace, and you have a skill that you know is worth more than what you’re getting paid, it might be time to look for a workplace that will pay you what you deserve.

Of course, the biggest part of developing a lucrative skill is learning and mastering that skill, which is more often than not an ongoing project. But you can always get better and make more money by finding higher end clients.

7. Retail Arbitrage

If you don’t know what retail arbitrage is, this one might come as a surprise. Have you ever noticed that brick and mortar retailers routinely put items out for sales, especially at certain times of the year? For instance, in January, after the holiday season is over, stores will often steeply discount certain items to empty out the store for new merchandise while claiming them as losses on their upcoming tax returns.

This is a great time of the year to scoop up items on sale and relist them on eBay, Amazon, Craigslist, and the many re-selling apps that have sprung up over the years. You might wonder how you can actually make money doing this. It’s true that you won’t get rich doing this with a handful of items every year, but if you’re willing to invest a little time, energy, and money into it, you can make some serious dough.

Imagine, for instance, going into the clearance section of an electronics store, buying everything, and reselling it over the internet for thousands of dollars in profit. Rinse and repeat, as they say. The profits get bigger when you can do this with hot-selling, big ticket items. Once you’ve built up a successful practice of doing this, you can even assemble a team to join you, which will help you cover more ground and make more sales.

The great thing about retail arbitrage is that you can do it with anything. And because the global internet marketplace is so vast, there is a strong chance that someone needs whatever you are reselling, and are willing to pay the normal price—not the 50% discount you received because you bought it after Christmas.

8. Sell Your Knowledge

In the groundbreaking book 4 Hour Work Week, Timothy Ferriss described selling your knowledge as the ultimate item to sell on the internet. There are no startup costs, and not that much investment in terms of time.

The way he lays it out, if you’ve read two or three books on a given subject and can write an eBook or design a course, you can build an online platform and start charging people to learn what you know.

You don’t need to be the expert you might think you need to be. You just need to package what you know well enough. Moreover, you can really sell information about any area that you like, whether that’s computer programming or how to have a better relationship.

Take into consideration that many everyday people think they don’t have the time or money to invest in the financial goal of hitting millionaire status. This is why the route of selling your knowledge can be a great way to start building some wealth, or at least get the ball rolling and developing the mindset of successful people.

How much time would it take to read three books about a topic you’re very familiar with, whether it’s art history, filing taxes, or raising kids? How much time would it take to write a small 10,000-word document and upload it as an eBook on Amazon? If you’re like most people, you probably have a few hours in the evening and weekends that you can devote to this instead of watching sports or catching up on your favorite shows. It will takes a little sacrifice, but the startup costs are low, and if you can use social media to market your knowledge, the payoff can be a great source of passive cash flow.

9. Brand Yourself

We live in an unusual age where anyone with a little personality or unique flair can essentially package themselves as entertainment, or even more, as a lifestyle brand. One look at social media platforms will show you that a number of people have successfully made themselves into influencers, spreading their love of food, fitness, travel, dance, or whatever else across the globe on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

These individuals have successfully branded themselves. In many cases, the more successful of such individuals get paid to promote products.

For example, an influencer with 30k fans can charge around $200 per video post to promote a product, service, or location (in addition to getting free food, travel arrangements, or products). As your following grows, you will get paid more and endorsed by larger brands.

Of course, there is a catch to this, and the catch is that by many estimates, organic social media growth is already dead on most major platforms. You will have to pay to get your message across, but the upside is that paid ads are very inexpensive, and you can direct them toward very specific types of people.

There Are Many Ways to Become a Millionaire

At the end of the day, with a little careful planning, you can get to a million dollar net worth quite easily. It all depends on how quickly you want to amass that wealth and how dedicated you are to saving. Thankfully, there are plenty of ways to grow your money, you just have to find one that resonates with your skills and interests.

It’s also important to realize that the money you save is just as important as the money you make. Sign up for a free Infinity Investing Membership to learn more about the strategies that have the greatest chances of creating financial freedom. Don’t put off that million dollar bank account any longer—join today!

Bonus Video