I have been listening to Chris Hogan on the Dave Ramsey show on Sirius XM radio for the past several months and decided to pick up his book Everyday Millionaires: How Ordinary People Built Extraordinary Wealth - and How You Can Too and I was impressed the quality of advice it offered.
In this book Hogan points out that most people are not born wealthy and they don't become wealthy through inheritance or working for a living. Hogan outlines the fact that most millionaires work ordinary jobs such as teacher, accountant and engineer and became wealthy by making regular, consistent contributions to stable investment plans. Quite often millionaires became rich by participating in simple workplace pension plans over a number years. This was something taught to me in a first year Finance course, when we learned about present-value-of-money equations and future-value-of-money equations. It's a mathematical truth that Hogan's advice works.
When it comes to wealth, good habits beat everything else. When most of the world went into COVID-19 quarantine, I kept hearing that I should grow a brand or building up reputation as an online "influencer". I continually see pitches trying to sell bad multi-level-marketing business opportunities to regular people and people making other risk moves to get their "big break" when truthfully the clearest path to wealth and success can be as straightforward as working a good job, saving 10-15% of salary, investing it in a stable investment portfolio, and keeping up this activity for a number of years. One doesn't need to move money into risky investments or leverage credit into complicated real estate deals (like some trashier books recommend).
We live in a world of spenders, not savers and based on the number of people who have avoided paying rent in the last few months or taken government handouts, one would think that the secret to wealth, freedom and stability is unavailable to most people. This is not true and it's not new advice either. The book, The Richest Man in Babylon was written in 1926 offers an almost identical path to personal wealth. The main reason that people struggle with money is that they have have low incomes and put everything they earn into the basic necessities of life or more often they have bad habits.
It's not that Chris Hogan was born to a wealthy family - he is an African American man who grew up in a single parent house, run by his mother in Kentucky. Hogan's first career was a lowly-paid Assistant Coach in American College Football. Many millionaires don't have college degrees. What Hogan is offering is sovereignty to people who are struggling - an honorable path to increased wealth and personal freedom without all the aggravation of trying to catch a big break. Just work and save. Someone in Canada with a company pension plan, who makes regular contributions to an RRSP or Tax Free Savings account will retire with plenty of money. Other countries have very similar savings plans. It is important to use them.
I don't have any particular insight into when governments are going to stop providing COVID-19 relief payments but I know it would be reckless and irresponsible for them to go on forever. Hogan's plan isn't about greed - people will want to grow families, get educations, pay for weddings, and help out their kids. Holding back a little money and saving it will ultimately be a lot more rewarding than spending money on dining in restaurants and buying luxury items a person doesn't need and maybe can't afford, Hogan's approach is also a lot less stressful than constant networking and sales or getting tied up in other investments that are hard to move into cash when life changes.
If COVID-19 has taught us anything, it is that a lot of our business and investing was reckless and impractical. People who received their big break like sports heroes and actors can't make money when people can't go to the stadium or attend the movies. Chris Hogan has done the research and lived through the experience of growing into a wealthy man and provided a responsible way to growth wealth and his book strongly suggests that his methods are available to you.
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