15 Ways to Safe Guard Sudden Wealth
So you just sold your business, sold some land for 100x what you paid for, inherited a lot of money, retired rich, or won the lottery. Now what? Need a game plan, my friend? And by the end of this video, you'll not only know the most effective ways to never be poor again, but also keep those who want your money away from your hard-earned treasure.
Here are 15 ways to safeguard sudden wealth. Welcome to Alux, the place where future billionaires come to get inspired. Sudden wealth or financial windfalls are moments in your life where the amount of money you have available is exponentially higher than usual.
And the first thing you should do is to buy that new AI crypto everyone's talking about. Just kidding. Don't do that. Okay, do not do that. The first thing you do is to not tell a soul. If you want this money to have the largest impact possible on your life, you need to be focused.
Okay, this isn't a team sport. Statistically, the more people giving you their input on what you should do with the money, the lower the outcome you'll experience. So shut it, sit on it, and think it through very carefully. If this amount is life-changing, we recommend you don't even tell your spouse until things are certain.
If your partner is more emotional than you, be sure to prepare them beforehand because it's really easy for their mind to immediately find things to spend it on. Pretty soon your kids will blabber about your money at school or at the park and now everybody knows. Don't tell your colleagues, family, or neighbors, and you'll be golden.
Rich and anonymous is the way to go. Get rid of high-interest debt immediately in your life. You've got several elements that contribute to your poverty; debt is by far the biggest one. Fortunately for you, now you've got the funds to buy your freedom back from the banking masters.
Credit cards, payday loans, anything with a really high interest rate should be paid off immediately. If you know the difference between good debt and bad debt, here we want to make sure that you clean up all the bad debt. Don't pay off your house or buy a bigger one just yet; we'll get to that in a second, and we promise it'll make sense.
Max out your retirement. If you live in the U.S, the government incentivizes you to contribute to your retirement. So if your employer matches your contribution, max out your 401K. Do the same for your partner, the IRA next, and then HSA. If you're in Europe or the financially developed side of the world, see if your employer matches to some degree our contributions to your retirement plan.
Established companies offer a 50% match up to six percent of your salary—that's an immediate fifty percent on your investment just for looking into it. You might not get another opportunity like this one, so it pays to be smart with your money. Instead of paying off your house, 75 percent of it should go toward rental properties or at least the S&P 500.
Look, we know how this will sound, but you're not going to touch the money. Instead, you'll use it to buy something that makes you money every month. Instead of paying off your house and then living in it, paying for utilities and everything else, you buy a rental property which will pay off your mortgage every month on your behalf.
This way, you no longer have to worry about the mortgage on your place and once they're done paying it off for you, you still retain that rental as an asset that pays you and your family every month forever. If you don't have enough for a place, just stick with an index fund like the S&P 500 through Vanguard. Throw 75 percent of your windfall into it. On average, it'll appreciate by 10% per year.
If you're disciplined, you take less than that out and never touch the principal. Instead of going on holiday, 10% to alternative investments with proven track records. Like we know you want to splurge, but remember this is all about self-control, keeping up with this idea that you want to spend the interest, not the principal.
Why not invest in something with a good track record? One market has already bounced back from the COVID crash, record inflation, and supply chain turmoil quicker than any other. And if you're really in the know, this isn't going to be a secret the ultra-wealthy have used for centuries.
And since you're kinda rich now, you might want to do as the rich do. We're talking about art. Over the last 27 years, art consistently outperformed traditional investments like stock, real estate, and gold. Today's sponsor, Masterworks, has already generated over 45 million dollars in art sales with net proceeds distributed to investors like you.
With Masterworks, instead of buying an entire painting, you invest in a portion of it. They buy the painting, hold it, and then sell it for a profit. Those profits get split between investors. Masterworks has gone 14 for 14 every single exit, handing back a positive return to investors like you.
Normally, there's a waitlist to join these rich investors, but since you're part of the Alux family, if you go to alux.com/art right now, you can skip the waitlist and make your first investment. So instead of going on holiday on your dime, invest cash and use the profits to splurge. Allow Picasso or Banksy to pay for your future holiday. That's alux.com/art or click the link in the description.
Get an accountant or tax advisor to make sure everything is by the book. The most common mistake people make is they get their hands on the money, immediately spend it, and never think about the financial implications. Next thing you know, you get hit with a tax bill bigger than anything you've ever seen in your life because you forgot to pay taxes on your windfall and the IRS now wants to talk.
A decent tax consultant costs two thousand dollars a year, and they can make sure to save you 10x in the process. So find one and allow them to see where you can save some money. You are under no obligation to pay more taxes than you are legally required. Don't screw around because now you've got something to lose.
There are two main things here:
Divorce is expensive, and the windfall will be split between the three of you—yourself, your spouse, and your lawyers. Money gets you two to three times the attention you've had before, so don't screw around and blow this for a little squeeze.
If people know you've got money, they're more likely to try and get it from you. This means actual security concerns—people trying to rob you or scam you, or legal stuff like they're gonna sue you. And as we've established at the previous point, lawyers are expensive. You don't need the attention; you're happy without having to carry the financial burden that you used to.
So play it smart. Control your spending urges. You're like a kid with chocolate in front of them on the table being asked not to touch it while the adults leave the room. You gotta have patience.
Okay, you think that getting the money is the hard part, but you're wrong. By the time they've been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress. Within five years of retirement, an estimated 60 percent of former NBA players are broke.
So why does that happen? Well, they can't stop spending. First, you pay for drinks and food and trips and clothes, and other people tell you you're so cool. Then it's an extra car even though you don't really drive much, a better zip code, and now you can't afford to keep all the things that you've bought.
So you need to sell some stuff, but you're now accustomed to a certain lifestyle and it's messing with your head, and so you end up depressed. Control yourself. Okay, you're an adult with access to a tool. Money is supposed to provide you with safety and less stress, so don't use it like candy.
Consider inflation and adjust for it. Most people think that keeping it in a bank account or under a mattress is the way to go. Indeed, that's the way to go down. Every year your money is worth less. One hundred thousand dollars today buys you a nice car; one hundred thousand dollars ten years ago bought you an apartment; one hundred thousand dollars twenty-five years ago bought you an entry-level house.
Realistically, you will lose six percent of your wealth every year. The government likes to say it's only three to five percent at most, but it isn't. In times of high inflation, the purchasing power of your money—meaning how much you can buy with the same amount—drops significantly. So don't hold on to that money.
Money fills the hands of those who don't know how to invest it. And on a similar note, you gotta get smart about money. If some of the things that we've mentioned so far seemed kind of complicated to you, it's because you lack a basic understanding of money.
The great news is that this is an excellent position to grow from, and this early stage will have the largest positive impact ever in your financial growth because you got so many low-hanging fruits to solve. Once you understand the basics, you'll realize the game of money and wealth is extremely fun.
And when you get it right, you get rewarded with beauty, toys, and even happiness. But it's not like you read one book and now you know money. It's a lot of little things that compound over time. If you are lucky enough to have a financial windfall, the highest return on time invested you can possibly have is a piece of content called Principles of Wealth Building.
You can find it in the Alux app; it costs only 34.99. But since you're a regular viewer, we'll let you in on a little secret. Instead of paying 35 bucks for it, you can pay 15 for a monthly or 99 for a yearly subscription and get access to all of the learning packs by Alux for a month, plus our daily Alux coaching sessions.
If you don't have the Alux app on your phone, we don't even know what you're waiting for. Okay, go to alux.com/app right now and download it. Do you see how valuable our free content is? Well, we're saving the really good stuff for the app, so go to alux.com/app to go get it. Go through the Principles of Wealth Building pack and make sure you never go broke again.
Consider the lifetime cost of ownership for the things you buy. Rich people think differently than regular folks. They look at something called TCO, or total cost of ownership. You think buying a new car or a new house has one cost—what you pay to get it—but that's not the case.
Let's say you buy a holiday home for 250,000 dollars—that's the cost of purchase. Maybe you need to fix the roof; that's ten thousand dollars in repairs. The kitchen needs an upgrade, so you put another thirty thousand dollars into it. The place has a pool, so now you have to hire someone to come and clean the pool twice a month for one thousand dollars.
Since you're not there all the time, you need someone to check in on the place once in a while and maybe do some maintenance—maybe install a couple of security cameras and sensors; that's another 5K, plus the ongoing subscription on those things. Then there's insurance, property tax, utility taxes, etc. You get the point.
In your mind, you think the holiday house costs 250,000 dollars because that's what you paid for it, but over the course of the next 20 years, it'll cost you another one hundred and fifty thousand dollars at least. So the TCO is more likely around four hundred thousand dollars with an ongoing cost of twenty thousand dollars a year unless you're renting it out on Airbnb, in which case you need to incorporate as a business, have a property manager to deal with guests, etc.
Then you should realize just how much owning it is costing you. Now you're not gonna like what's coming next, but do not give away parts of the principal to your family or friends. Sorry folks, nobody gets a branch of the apple tree. Oh, you want apples? Sure, we'll give you some next year when the tree bears some fruit but they're not taking a branch right now.
We know it's going to be hard looking at that pile of money and thinking that you can miraculously solve your family's financial problems, but look—the truth is they’re bad with money. That's why they have financial problems.
Financial problems are not solved by money because they're not caused by money in the first place. Financial problems are usually the result of bad financial choices, and giving people with a bad financial track record more money is only going to get more of the same.
If you want to help, offer advice, hire them if you have to, or at most give them something of the interest on your money, but never—and we mean never—touch the principal. And if you think that was harsh, do not give away a portion of it to charity.
Look, charity doesn't solve problems; it just creates a dependency problem. We've talked to hundreds of NGOs when we were deciding to build the first Alux International School in Uganda because we needed a model that we could replicate in every country in the world.
The process we learned how the majority of them are structured and how cash is really deployed. Only about 15 percent of the money that you give to charity ends up in the hands of those who need it. Over the past 60 years, at least one trillion dollars of development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa, and not even half of that ended up actually being deployed.
Why? Because charities use donations to pay for staff, for marketing, for galas, t-shirts, and for PR events, and mask it all as an operational cost when they get their hands on large amounts of money. There's even corruption in terms of the companies used to do the actual building, so they invoice things that were never to be found in reality, or they need to be constantly renewed and maintained, as explained in the total cost of ownership fit.
That's why when we decided to donate a portion of our app revenue to helping developing communities, we actually flew there, paid the invoices ourselves, and our impact act has been tenfold versus large organizations, despite us being a fairly small media company.
If you really want to give to charity, don't give them the money. Don't give them the fish; give them fishing rods and show them how to fish. Even better, teach them how to make their own fishing rods. Move the money out of the country. If you're fortunate enough to have true wealth—the kind you want to make sure you protect for generations to come—well, it's always wise to have some of it outside of the country.
We're not the conspiracy theory guys—no tinfoil hats here—but when Silicon Valley Bank went under, we saw a large chunk of our wealth go out of sight overnight. Lucky for us, we're incorporated both in the U.S. and in Europe, so for us, it was business as usual, and we were able to make payroll.
It's the same with your money. Go where the rich people go. Go to Puerto Rico or somewhere else with great beaches. Buy a place in Spain or Portugal, get yourself a golden visa so you can live and work anywhere. If you like Asia, do it there. Get a second passport and have some of your money abroad. You never know when it might come in handy and save the day.
And the last thing on our list is to develop a vision for the rest of your life. Look, there's nothing more powerful than a person who knows where they're going. This fortune you have on your hands might be the ticket to a brand new life. What do you want that life to be? Who do you want to be? What does that person do? How does that person act? What habits do they have?
Who are they surrounded by? What kind of emotions do they experience? Where do they live? How do they live? We want you to take the rest of today and think about these specific questions and come up with some concrete answers.
Don't do it for us, okay? Do it for yourself because it's important. We know you guys are smart, so if you suddenly found five hundred thousand dollars coming your way, what would you do with it? Let us know in the comments, and since you've watched until the very end, you've earned yourself a secret bonus.
We learned a secret to building wealth pretty early on, and it's worked for everyone who's applied it: give advice to others and then follow it yourself. Everything we've ever said in our videos, we've done ourselves. It's made us millions, and it still does.
In a closed circle with Dr. Jordan Peterson, he told us about the difference in behavior between helping yourself and helping others. If your dog was sick and you took it to the vet, and they prescribed some pills in a certain regimen, you would follow that plan to a T. But we don't do the same thing with ourselves, do we?
We go to the doctor, they tell us to lose some weight or get a certain regiment, and we don't do it. Why is there a discrepancy between how one treats themselves and how we treat those who we are responsible for when our life is way more important than that of the dog, for example? You need to treat yourself as if you're someone you were responsible for helping because you are.
Even better, put into practice yourself what you advise other people to do. If a true friend came to you and told you about a financial windfall and that they need help making sure it lasts and protect their family over the long term, would you tell them to blow it all on jet skis and chains? Or would you tell them to play it safe and do the things you saw in an Alux video?
If moving forward you're about to treat yourself as if you were someone you were responsible for, write the word dog in the comments. It'll confuse the hell out of everyone else who doesn't watch the video until the end, but we will know who the true Aluxers are.
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