15 Steps To Force Your Way Out Of Poverty

Poor people work just as hard, if not harder, than those born into wealth. However, that hard work rarely translates into wealth because poverty, as a system, is designed for survival, not growth. You have just enough to get by until tomorrow but never enough to get out completely. Poor education, a predatory financial system, and low job opportunities all bundle up into making sure you stay poor forever. There's no clearly laid out path to escape it, so in most cases, you have to brute force your way out.

And this is how you do it: welcome to Alux, the place where future billionaires come to get inspired.

Step one: Accept that things have to change. It's time that you and yourself have a little talk. Sit yourself down and think about your life, the life your children will live, and what will happen if things remain the same. Contrary to what you're thinking, most poor people get really good at living the poor lifestyle. They find a rhythm, and although it sounds hard to believe, they get complacent. This doesn't mean that they like or enjoy their lifestyle; it just means they're not in a rush to change anything. In order for one to escape the trap of poverty, this needs to become a priority. Everything about the poor lifestyle will need to change, and for most people, this is their current identity. Of course, they're scared to lose it. The truth is, though, this person needs to vanish—okay, straight up disappear. You'll have to get rid of your current self and become someone else. You'll have to sacrifice the people who are not benefiting your growth; sometimes, these are even your friends or family. You can't help others until you help yourself first, right? Right now, you're in no position to help anyone, so things need to change. Once you understand mentally and emotionally that you have no other option but to change, well, the process can finally begin.

Step two: Honestly analyze your life. You can't put everything down; you cannot make any real progress until you get a clear inventory of your life in as much detail as possible. This isn't about making yourself look good; instead, be brutally honest with yourself. Begin with your finances. How much money do you earn and have coming in? How much do you spend every month? Break everything down into relevant topics like food, transportation, subscriptions, utilities, entertainment, clothing, family care, health, and so on. Most people, regardless of their financial situation, have no idea just how much money goes where. If you never tracked your expenses, do it for 30 days—but do it in a brutally honest fashion. The moment you close in on getting this personal report done, you'll be shocked at how much money you spend that maybe could be put to better use. Either way, you need this clear image because it'll allow you to move on to step number three.

Step three: Identify the bare minimum for survival. This is where you're going to put in some work. Go through the personal profile and identify the minimum amount you need to survive. This means you'll allocate resources to only the most vital parts: keeping the lights on, keeping the water and the gas running, and some food that's just good enough to get the job done. The speed at which you're able to escape poverty depends entirely on your ability to live as minimalistically as possible. It will suck, okay? But your life sucks right now, either way, and if you identify the bare minimum for survival, you're ready for step number four.

Step four: Cut everything else out for at least six months. One of the main ways that poverty screws you over is by putting you in a constant state of urgency. Right? You need money now—in cash, not dividends over the next three to five years. You simply can't afford to spend a couple of months training or looking for better opportunities if every week and every month is eaten up by immediate and unavoidable priorities. This is where cutting everything else out that's not absolutely necessary comes into play. You need to build up a couple of months' worth of breathing room. This is the part that people don't want to do. Growth is the result of sacrificing the present for a better future, and most people don't want to sacrifice anything, right? So be brutally honest with yourself: what do you really have to lose? Six months of relative misery for a shot to have a better life long term? You will get out of this situation by making the most out of the resources you already have at your disposal. Give yourself every advantage you can and rid yourself of everything that's making your journey longer. This needs to happen now, okay? The longer you stay in poverty, the higher the price it is to get out. This is why some people end up in generational poverty; they never stop bleeding. Your priority becomes spending as little money as possible so that with the little that's left over, you can start to build momentum.

Step number five: Get a job or increase your work volume. This is where you use the resources you got from the previous point. If you don't have a job, get one. As much as you would like to become a millionaire long-term, you need to focus on the next six to twelve months of your life. You have to do anything you can to increase your income. If you already have a job, the simplest way to earn more is to increase your work volume. One or two hours per day while living minimally will make a difference, especially if your current workplace will pay for overtime. Remember that everything over 40 hours a week will be paid 50% more, and if there are no opportunities to increase the volume at your current workplace, use the gig economy: deliver for Postmates or Gloo, drive for Uber, find jobs on Craigslist, help small businesses in your area in any way that gets you paid. Right now, you can't get fancied just yet, okay? You need as much extra cash as possible.

Step number six: Prioritize immediate high-interest debt. Because you're now spending less than you were before and hopefully you found a way to slightly increase your income, now it's time to address the biggest pains in your life: debt. The system is set up in such a way that it takes advantage of poor and less educated people. Just because you throw a credit card away doesn't mean the money you owe goes away with it—never. From this day forward, you will never use payday loans again, okay? Look at all the debt you have and see which one has the highest interest. The interest is the percentage in your contract of what you'll pay on top of the money you borrowed. If you don't know, make it a priority to find out. Almost everything you earn that doesn't go toward your survival should go to paying off the high-interest debt you carry. Why? Because every day that debt isn't paid, you owe more and more money. Debt is the modern version of chains, okay? As long as you have it, you can never be free.

Step number seven: Save one month's worth of essential money. Because you've done the analysis in step three, you now know exactly how much money you need to survive month to month. We know saving money is not your forte, but this step is crucial. What happens if you lose your job or you have a medical emergency? Without savings, you would go into more debt, more chains, less freedom, more poverty for an even longer period of time. This is how you have to think about your savings: you have them there to protect yourself against darker times because you know, damn well, it's just a matter of time until those darker times come. You're literally in a race to get this minimum fund ready as quickly as possible. It's the first major step toward escaping the urgency that poverty puts you in.

Step eight: Pride aside, take every handout you can get. You've got no idea just how many systems are set in place to help you because, well, the truth is, they suck at letting everybody know about them. If you can eat for free, do it. If your neighbor can take care of your child while you're at work, do it. If the city allows you to use public transportation because of your financial status, do it. Okay? You're never too good to ride the bus or walk to work, especially now when this money can go toward paying off the bad debt you've gotten yourself into or it could be used for your savings fund. Use the food stamps! Don't buy yourself a PS5 with a stimulus check. Find programs in your area designed to help. One of the most underutilized resources out there are libraries. You know, those buildings you never go into? Libraries are extremely cool, and if they were to invent them today, the subscription to them would cost a fortune. At this stage, it's all about making progress, okay? Put your pride aside and keep your head down and keep pushing forward. Always remember the long-term game you're playing.

Step number nine: Identify sustainable opportunities to increase your income. At step five, you forced yourself to increase your work volume. Although this does get the job done for a short to medium period of time, it will take a toll on you. If your last focus was to increase the number of hours per workday that you can monetize, well now it's time to increase your pay per hour. There are two ways to get this done: first, a promotion within the organization you currently work for, and second, a higher-paying job in a different organization. The key word here, though, is sustainable, meaning that once you make the switch, you can confidently predict you'll earn more than you're currently earning for the foreseeable twelve months. This isn't going to happen on its own; you'll need to use the little remaining time in your day to look for other employment opportunities. Leverage the good work you're doing to build trust with your prospective employers. Be honest, okay? Let them know you're disciplined and a hard worker and would be willing to make the switch for this specific salary. It's easy to scoff at an additional $5 per hour, but if you're currently earning $15 an hour, an extra five would mean you just increased your work income by 33%. Some promotions will require you to take on more responsibility or quickly build a new skill set, and since this is what will get you out of the hole, say yes—yes to every opportunity and figure it out along the way. This is your priority in life. You need the extra income.

Step ten: Start to build good credit. In the words of Jay-Z, you know what's more important than throwing money in the strip club? Credit. The reason the system has you pinned down and locked into poverty is because of debt, and credit is just a different term for debt. The more the system is confident you can pay off your debts, the better terms you get. Here's how you build good credit fast: First, you pay your bills on time. Payment history is the single biggest factor that affects your credit scores, and late payments can stay on your credit report for seven years. So make it a priority to pay on time every single time. Second, make more than one payment per month. The lower you keep your balance, the quicker your credit goes up. Instead of paying it off once at the end of the month, pay it off every two weeks. And third, ask for higher credit limits, because when your credit limit goes up and your balance stays the same, it instantly lowers your overall credit utilization, which in turn improves your credit. Once you can show the money people that you're good with money consistently, you're ready for step eleven.

Step eleven: Refinance long-term debts for better terms. As long as you carry heavy debt with you, you'll never be free. Everything you do should be focused on getting you out of poverty, and debt is how poverty is measured in the modern world. One of the best ways to improve your financial situation is by refinancing long-term debts. If you've done everything right up until this point, you should have no problem getting better terms when you refinance. This means you can either pay less per month or pay the same but rid yourself of debt sooner than before. Simply walk into a bank, let them know about the debt you've got under your bad terms, and show them your new good credit, and get it paid with a new debt that has a lot less strain on your finances. Banks will offer these consultations for free. It's their business to make sure they can offer you a better deal than their competitors, so use this competition for your personal gain.

Step twelve: Save four months' worth of essential money. Okay, so by this point, your life is starting to feel better, right? You feel more in control, and things start to line up for you. But this is where people usually screw everything up and fall back into old habits. Others will see you do just a bit better and immediately come to drag you back to where you started. "No" will become your most commonly spoken word. It's easy to identify money vacuums—people are services that just want your money. You keep your head down and move forward, okay? Don't allow anything to sabotage your mission. It worked so far, which is why you finally found yourself in a position to build some runway. Use this position to put aside four months of essential money. This is your new priority because, look, okay, shit's going to inevitably hit the fan at some point, and you need to be ready to deal with it. If you don't, all that you've built could fall like a house of cards and set you back to the beginning. You didn't come this far just to come this far and go back.

Step thirteen: Use free resources to build your skill set and monetize that. So this first half of this piece forced you to get things under control, while the second half got you ready and in position for this right here. This is how you're going to make the leap from poverty to the middle class. The marketplace will pay you in proportion to what you can offer it. You need a valuable skill set that you can monetize. Fortunately for you, you live in the best time in history for this. You have an entire library of value at your disposal for free, so use the internet to learn things that people will pay for. You could learn how to restore old furniture online. You could learn to use Microsoft Excel on YouTube and literally double your salary. Learn how to manage a social media profile, learn graphic design. This is the beauty of the age that we live in. For anything you wish to learn, there's someone out there who documented everything and made it available for free. At this stage, never pay for anything you can get for free and pay close attention to people who want your money. As a rule of thumb, there are no get-rich-quick schemes. These are just people who want to get rich off of you.

Step fourteen: Become a contractor instead of an employee. This is where the leap actually takes place. The moment you go from being an employee to being a contractor is the crucial point in your trajectory. There are two main reasons why becoming a business is better than working in a business. First of all, flexibility. You're not locked into a single revenue source; you can serve the one that pays you more and more than one client at a time. And two: taxes and benefits. Society has decided that contractors are worth more to the marketplace than employees, so it gives them better terms. You pay less in taxes, and you enjoy more freedoms. The day you decide to work for yourself, the marketplace begins to treat you differently. If you're decent at what you do, you will make a decent living. But you—if you come from poverty—there's a hunger in there that these other people can't relate to. This hunger will be your competitive advantage. It will not allow you to settle for just this; it will push you forward. Sooner than later, you'll find yourself in a position to expand, and that is when you bring in some help.

Step number fifteen: Group source your way out of poverty. By yourself, you can force your way out of poverty and cross the line into the middle class, but it's all still dependent on you to keep performing. To be safe, you'll need to keep moving up until you're as far away as you can be from the life you used to live. That is where you'll need other people to help you, and in exchange, you will help them do the same. People bring leverage—the collective is stronger than the sum of its parts. You have your strengths and your weaknesses. If this new reality that you're building is going to last, you need to cover the weaknesses, and other people can do that for you. If you've made it out of poverty, it's your responsibility to help others do the same. But be very careful with who you choose to help because some people will want to be helped, while others will just want your money and will make it their mission to take it from you. Sacrifice and prioritize the long term over the short term, my friend. Never forget that.

And if you're ready to make the sacrifice and start investing in yourself, we've got everything you need within the Alux app. Through daily coaching sessions and dozens of collections curated by industry experts, you'll learn how to play the game, level up, and crush your goals in a fraction of the time it would take you otherwise. The app isn't cheap because we've poured millions of dollars into making it a premium resource for high-level managers, CEOs, and entrepreneurs. But just for the cost of a nice meal at a restaurant, you can unlock access for a full year. Even better, download the app on your phone and scan the QR code on screen for 25% off your annual subscription.

Now, we’re curious, Aluxers. Those of you who made it out of poverty, how did you escape it? Tell us your story in the comments so that the community knows it is possible. And as for those of you still with us, you're getting a bonus bit of information: 18% of all in poverty learn the above lessons and get out. That's right, one out of five people born into poverty manages to move up in society, giving their children an even better opportunity for upward mobility.

Here's something you probably don't know: a study by Fidelity Investments found that 88% of millionaires are self-made millionaires, meaning they grew up in middle class or poor families. Only 12% of the rich people alive today inherited their fortune, and that number is dropping rapidly. Approximately 41% of self-made millionaires came from poor households, according to research done by Thomas C. Corley. That's almost half. The middle class is being shrunk down, and the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Very soon, the world will be split into halves and have-nots, and this is the time you have to decide on which side of that split you want to end up on.

Technology, advanced education, money, and health will all be soon commercialized to a degree unseen before. Our world is slowly becoming a pay-to-win game. We hope you're ready. If you are, please write the word "ready" in the comment section so we know you're ready for what's coming. We'll see you back here next time, Aluxers. Until then, take care.