Use THIS to become a Millionaire

So you want to become a millionaire?  No you don't, you actually want to be financially independent which means being a multimillionaire.  How do I know? I've had years of experience planning to become financially independent.

How did you become a multimillionaire?  What is the secret?

Before I reveal the secret weapon that you can use to accumulate wealth, the first thing you need to know is that you can apply it to all kinds of assets including cryptocurrency. Stocks, bonds, real estate - it works with all of them to help you build your wealth.

Shortcuts

As for my personal journey to build wealth over the years, did I luck into any shortcuts? Let's find out...

Did I inherit a million dollars?  Nope.  As the oldest child of immigrants to the United States my parents always said the favorite child would end up with the dominos set.  Funny thing is, I don't think we ever owned a dominos set. In addition, thankfully my mom is still alive so no inheritance has come my way and hopefully it won't for many years.  We immigrated so my father could work in the automobile factories in Detroit - good honest work... 

Did I win the lottery?  I don't play the lotto and if you don't play you can't win. No scratch offs here.

Did I ride Bitcoin to the moon?  Unfortunately I didn't have a single Satoshi until I first got into crypto in November of last year. Yes, I timed the market perfectly to ride it all the way down to our current state.

A little background on me

I was the first in my family to graduate from high school and go to college. My two younger brothers, both born in the states and "yankees" as we affectionately called them, followed suit.  At the age of 50, my father decided to go to college and get his degree.  He would later go on to match me by getting his MBA, talk about being a proud son.  Thank you to the company who hired me out of college and had a tuition program which paid for almost all of my masters program.

But now back to the secret of wealth building. The good news is you have free access to the one thing that really made the difference for me in reaching my financial goals.  It is something so simple, yet so powerful...

The Multimillionaire Tool and Secret Sauce

Becoming a multimillionaire takes hard work and time and spreadsheets!  Yes, I owe much of my financial success to the power of spreadsheets.  Those great little programs didn't actually create any wealth, but they laid out the path of how to get there and gave me a clear understanding on how to grow money over the long term. When you understand how money works, particularly compounding, anything is possible financially.

I highly encourage everyone starting out to come up with your personal financial goals.  How much money do you want to have?  How much money will you need to live on to retire?  If it seems a long way away, there is no better time than now to start plugging numbers into a spreadsheet to plan it all out and see how it can and will unfold if you execute on that plan.

The basic calculations are easy.  Just start with a column that is your current age or the current year and build a formula to add one to each row beneath.  Your next column is how much money you have, followed by how much money you will invest, followed by how much money you get passively from the growth that year to give you your year end total. This last part is secret sauce. That amount of growth percentage can really change things, I always used 10% growth as a baseline which shaped how I invested (largely in low cost index funds) prior to getting into crypto.

Understand how compound growth works year-over-year and you are well on your way to financial independence. Spreadsheets clearly demonstrate how the compounding adds up over time. 

I started saving fairly early with 401Ks in my first job and maxed those out for a number of years.  I never missed the money I never touched and in reality I never had to live on any sort of budget (and I despise budgets despite them being spreadsheet reliant).  I started a brokerage account to save even more outside of my 401k.  You can live on less than you make, believe me other people live on a lot less than you make, and after the savings were taken out I knew I could spend everything else. No budgets needed - awesome...

There are some basic calculations that are helpful to understand in finance.  For example, you can pretty much live on 4% of your money and safely make it last forever.  For each million dollars you have, that equates to $40K annually ($1,000,000 x .04).  So if you need $80K, well then save $2M.  In my case I figured $100K a year would do nicely so $2.5M was the target way back in the day when I got started.  The spreadsheet just built the roadmap to get there.

Spreadsheets helped me understand it wasn't how much I made that was important, it was how much I saved and how I invested it that really mattered.  I have friends who either made a lot more money than me or who spent a lot more money (or both in most cases).  When I semi-retired in my mid-40's and fully "retired" in my early 50's, I'd see my old friends worried if they will ever be able to retire yet alone pay off all those wonderful things they owned.  The thing here is that many of them are being replaced in the workforce by younger works who understand technology better and are cheaper to the employer both in terms of salary and health benefits.  As a result, it is all catching up to them now as they didn't plan or prepare for this eventuality. They didn't use any spreadsheets. Even if you plan to work well into your 60's, expect your career to take a major detour well before then which will impact your earnings capacity.

For me, financial independence is much more important than fancy houses or cars (two things that don't interest me at all).  The high from those purchases doesn't last long anyway.  I'm happy still living in the house I bought in my 20's that I quickly paid off in a few years, yup thanks to spreadsheets showing me how and paying off a 15-year loan putting in extra money each month.  I'm happy to pay cash for a car that is a few years old rather than financing the latest model or leasing something I will never own.  Spreadsheets have shown me the way.

My kids educations?  Well back when they were born in 2007 and 2008 I calculated it would cost about $100K each for them to attend a decent four-year university way out starting in 2025 and 2026 respectively.  With the help of spreadsheets and 529 plans, figuring out how to pay for all that education wasn't so tough. Now that my kids are both in high school I often hear other parents fretting about their impending college costs. Their lack of planning has caught up to them.

Spreadsheet Roots

It all started with a program called Lotus back in the day, and then Excel and now Google sheets. I'm fairly new to crypto still and guess how I am figuring it all out - thanks to spreadsheets.  I have a bunch of different spreadsheets showing me the way.  They are only as good as what you put into them, and this is where crypto is a bit trickier to figure out, but I'll master them all eventually.  Since I already have my stock investments in place and no debt, I'm financially independent so crypto is just icing on the cake. My goal here is passive income, which is different than the wealth building I focused on with stocks and mutual funds but the basic principles are still the same. Spreadsheets map it all out for me as I have new goals thanks to crypto. The crypto will allow me to change my lifestyles in ways I didn't even imagine when following the spreadsheets plans out over the years.

Having financial independence also allowed me to dive deep into crypto once I discovered this cool new financial world previously just a vague notion I had only heard about in passing. It allows me to do what I want on a daily basis including writing articles for Publish0x, writing eBooks, creating NFTs, researching new DeFi projects, starting a YouTube channel and more importantly spending time with my family. I still work at times, but only when I choose to doing what I want to. I don't work the entire summer now so I can hang out with my wife (a teacher), kids and our dog. Time is more precious than money, but money buys you time.

Spreadsheets have given me time!

It is also important to note that spreadsheets are even more critical when it comes to crypto because the compounding doesn't take place on a yearly basis as with stocks and many other investments. In some crypto projects I compound monthly, in others I'm compounding weekly and in some of my yield farms and DeFi projects I compound daily. Talk about turbo charging your spreadsheet. You can see an example of this power in my last article covering a new protocol, StableFund - 1.5% daily returns from trading bots. The compounding results are truly amazing in the world of crypto.

I hope this article helps inspire some of you, especially those of you in your 20's and 30's, to really use spreadsheets as a way to figure out how money works.  The time you invest in them will teach you exactly what you need to do in order to reach your goals.  Play with the inputs, especially the returns, and see how that will impact where you will be at 40, 50, 60 and beyond.  A bit of understanding and some fairly simple moves will set you on a path to financial freedom allowing you to do what you want, when you want, and fully enjoy your life.