How to be a Millionaire in 10 Years (Starting from $0)

What's up, you guys? It's Graham here. So let's talk about something that probably most of us want to achieve at some point, and that is the milestone of becoming a millionaire. I remember growing up I wanted to achieve this, and I heard the term millionaire. I imagined some rich businessman with a convertible red Corvette parked in front of a mansion that is right on the golf course. That's something that I just wanted to achieve at some point in my life.

Now, in reality, becoming a millionaire is not living in a beachfront mansion playing golf all day. Instead, it's sitting in your garage making YouTube videos on a Saturday at 5:00 p.m., living in a duplex, and driving a ten-year-old Lotus that you bought used. I realize by now you're probably asking yourself, "Wait a second, Graham, how can I have free time on a Saturday at 5:00 p.m. to make YouTube videos and live in a duplex and buy a used Lotus?" And you know what? That's a really good question, and we should discuss this.

I say this as basically someone who started off with a few thousand dollars—pretty much whatever I had saved up from working throughout high school— to being worth over a million dollars by the time I was 26. Now I'm in the multi-millions, all of that without rich parents and without a sugar mama. So, let's break this down and explain some of these strategies that you can replicate as well to go from being worth nothing to being worth over a million dollars in the next ten years.

But before I get into the specifics, here's where you first need to start in order to make this actually work because I promise without this part, your plan will absolutely fail. When it comes to increasing your net worth, it makes very little difference how much money you actually make. Now, you might be thinking to yourself that that makes absolutely no sense—I've gone crazy, dislike, unsub; Graham is lying to us. But let me explain.

When it comes to increasing your net worth, what really matters the most is how much of your income you can actually save, not necessarily how much money you can make. I can't even tell you how many people I know making five hundred thousand dollars a year, but they spend four hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year on random bullsh**. I've seen so many people who make 250 thousand dollars a year who somehow live paycheck to paycheck with absolutely nothing to show for it because they rent a very expensive house in the hills with a nice view, they lease a Ferrari, and they take very fancy Instagram pictures from vacations they have spent $20,000 on.

On the other hand, I've seen people who make $80,000 a year who somehow are able to save $40,000 a year and invest that consistently. I've seen so many people who are worth more earning $100,000 a year than the dude who's making seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year simply because the $100,000-a-year person saves more. If you guys want to know the secret about how I was able to become a multi-millionaire in my 20s, it's because I lived and spent like I was broke.

I pretty much spent my money as though I'm making a McDonald's salary—that sounds like celery—like I'm making a McDonald's celery salary—with an S. No matter how much money I make in a year, I spend the exact same amount. I don't care if I make nothing in a month or if I make a hundred thousand dollars in a month; my spending doesn't change at all. Instead, I wear $4 and $0.99 shirts from H&M. I buy clothes on Black Friday because this was like 60% off. I live in a duplex so I could rent out the other side and pretty much just live for free. I make food at home instead of going out to expensive restaurants.

I also make sure to smash that like button if you haven't already! Now, I get that this might be pretty extreme, and it's not for everybody, but the reality is that most very successful people don't necessarily have an income problem—they have a spending problem. And if you're watching this video, chances are you already have the ambition to go out there and try to make as much money as you possibly can. It's just you need to be prepared to make the sacrifice, really hunkering down for the next ten years, saving and investing as much money as you can, and that will set you up for the rest of your life.

You really got to think to yourself: is one decade of frugal living worth it for an entire lifetime of freedom? To never have to do something you don't want to do? To never have to worry about losing your job? Or never have to listen to the boss that you hate? It's definitely not for everyone, and there are many people who feel that they just deserve to spend money because they've worked hard for it, and that's totally fine. But you know what? That's not me.

By living frugally, I have never once felt deprived because of that. If I really wanted to go out and get the Lamborghini that I've been saying I've been wanting for like the last year, I can go out and buy one right after this video—in cash! But I'll tell you something, the real joy doesn't come from going out and buying those things; that comes from having the choice that if you wanted to, you could. Just think about that for a second. Enjoyment comes from the freedom of choice, not the choice itself.

But I realize this is some hippy New Age sh**. You know what I mean, that's been my experience. So, with that said, if you're not able to get your spending under control, you really only have two options. The first one is that you need to make a ton of money starting a business to the point where it doesn't matter how much money you spend, or you need to make a very speculative investment that pays off very, very well.

Now that might sound pretty black and white, but when you break it down, you need to save $273 every single day for 10 years in order to save up enough money to say you have a million dollars. That's a lot for 99.999% of the population to handle. But here's the thing: when it comes to doing this, usually just saving up money alone will not get you to that point. Now what you realistically need to do in order to speed up this process is invest your money.

Even though I've been able to keep my expenses pretty low, the reality is that I would not have become a millionaire by 26 if I didn't invest my money. It's as simple as that. The fact is that you can really only do so much on your own before you need a little help. So that's why you should really have your money working for you. If you want a million dollars in the next 10 years, what that breaks down to is investing six thousand dollars a month every single month at a 7% annual return. Congratulations! After ten years, you have become a millionaire from investing six thousand dollars a month.

Unfortunately, though, that's easier said than done. The reality is that investing six thousand dollars a month for the majority of the population is simply not doable because remember that works out to be seventy-two thousand dollars a year. After you pay taxes—and that's also 72 thousand dollars a year after you paid all of your living expenses like food, shelter, car bits—life just adds up. If you're actually earning that much money in order to save $72,000 a year, chances are you're making more like a hundred fifty thousand dollars a year gross and you're living frugally at the same time.

So, when it comes to actually making that amount of money or saving that amount of money, rarely does that happen from strictly a salary job, especially if you're watching this and not already making $150,000 a year. If you are in one of these careers, or you do have a great job that's paying you over $150,000 a year, like I said, congratulations! It's really just a numbers game of saving six thousand dollars a month over ten years at a 7% return, and there you go—that is how you become a millionaire in ten years.

Now, earlier in the video, I gave an example of someone who's making $80,000 a year. After paying taxes and saving half of that income, that works out to be $40,000 a year, or $3,300 a month. Even when it comes to investing this, chances are you're not going to be able to get a high enough return to become a millionaire in 10 years by simply investing $40,000 a year. For example, if you invest $40,000 a year and take the typical 8% average stock market return over 10 years, you're only going to be at seven hundred and twelve thousand dollars—that's nearly three hundred thousand dollars shy of your $1,000,000 goal.

However, by investing your forty thousand dollars a year at an 8% return, you could still become a millionaire. It's just going to take you thirteen years to do it, not quite our 10 years that we're going for here. So, in order to increase your return without too much risk of losing all of your money, you need to actively work on your investments to increase that return.

For many of you who have watched my channel already, you know my favorite way of doing that is in real estate. Now here's how you can do this, and yes, I totally understand I'm definitely simplifying things a lot, but here's the basic concept. So, let's take our example: you're making $80,000 a year after taxes, and from that, you're able to save $40,000 a year.

With that extra forty thousand dollars that you save, you use thirty thousand dollars of that as a down payment towards real estate, and then the remaining ten thousand dollars you spend on renovating that property you just bought. In order now to increase those returns, this relies on you finding a property that you could buy for twenty thousand dollars below what it's worth. So this means you end up buying a $200,000 property for one hundred and eighty thousand dollars.

Then from there, you're gonna be spending your remaining ten thousand dollars renovating the property. Typically, when you do this, any renovation you do should at least double the return in terms of equity. When you spend ten thousand dollars renovating a property, it should bring up the value of the property by twenty thousand dollars. Sometimes it's a little bit more, sometimes a little bit less, but again, this is my example.

In this example, you've invested $40,000 total in this property—again, $30,000 is a down payment, $10,000 in a renovation—but in return, you've received back an additional $40,000 worth of equity in the property, essentially just doubling your money. Now, you should have $80,000 worth of equity in the property that should hopefully be generating you about an 8% cash-on-cash return that you could then use and save to reinvest back into the next deal.

Now, if you can go and find one of those properties every single year and then reinvest all of the profit, you will be worth way more than 1 million dollars within 10 years. That's pretty much what I ended up doing, except here in Los Angeles with much more expensive properties. If that example sounds a little bit far-fetched to you, just keep in mind that was a real example from Mike Ross, who I had on my channel earlier this year, who became a millionaire at the age of 25 doing exactly that.

He's a prime example of someone who became a millionaire in really about seven years by working a day job, living frugally, and reinvesting all of that back into real estate. But what about now for everyone else who isn't making $80,000 a year? Because if you're watching this right now and you're making $25,000 a year, the chance of you becoming a millionaire without taking some incredible risk is just... it's realistically not gonna happen.

So, in order to do this, you really need to work now on increasing your income so you can save and invest more. When it comes to actually becoming a millionaire in ten years starting from nothing, without right now having income, you really need to work in an industry where your income is not tied to how many hours you work. Because if you're paid per hour, unless you're already making like $500 an hour or something like that, there's only so many hours in a day that you could work.

Over a decade of doing that, it's very easy to get burnt out very, very quickly. So instead, if you're working in a sales environment or anything where your income is not tied to the amount of hours you work, but instead by the results that you get, it becomes very easy to scale up very quickly to a very high income.

I know a lot of people, for instance, that are making over two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year as a real estate agent, and they're only 2 or 3 years in the business. While this definitely is not the norm and many people don't ever achieve those sort of numbers in sales, the reality is that if you're very good at what you do, you can achieve some incredibly high income very quickly and become a millionaire in just really a few years.

That's how I was able to do this. I worked as a real estate agent; I was able to leverage my time as effectively as I possibly could and then funneled all of that money back into real estate investing. And here I am today, making YouTube videos about doing exactly that. Sales can really be a great career path for those that are into it, that find it exciting, that like to work with people, and really want to make as much money as they can and not get paid per hour.

Another option here would be to go ahead and start your own business. Now, I know that this might be a big commitment for many people to make, but the reality is that if you hit it big in business and you find something that you really enjoy doing, oftentimes you could scale up very quickly and make a lot of money.

Anything you could do online has the potential to scale up very quickly. I know many people who are now making a hundred thousand dollars a month in profit who a year ago were not making anything. In short-term, if these people can just live frugally, save as much of that as they can, and just ride it out for a few years, they will have over a million dollars saved up and will never have to work another day in their life.

Online scalability is absolutely amazing. For the same amount of work it takes you to reach ten people online, you could expand that and replicate that to reach ten thousand or a hundred thousand people. Because of that, you can leverage your effort, not your time, to make significantly more money.

If this video ends up getting pushed to my non-audience, first of all, what's up, non-audience? Thank you so much for watching! If you haven't already, make sure to smash that subscribe button. I have a feeling though that most people would say this is wildly unrealistic and that the average person isn't able to do this, and you know what? They're absolutely right. The average person is never gonna do this.

The average person is never going to try; the average person is going to think this is a massive waste of time, and the average person is never going to want to make the sacrifice needed to actually make that happen. If you guys want the harsh reality, that mentality is exactly why they are average. But I have a feeling though that if you’re watching this, especially towards the end, you don't categorize yourself as someone who is just average.

Trust me when I say this: that if I believed that none of this was achievable, I never would have achieved it. I was able to achieve this because I had the belief that I could actually do it, and that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. You will need to think the exact same way, and if you follow this, cut back on your spending, put in the work, invest consistently long term, and work in an industry where your income isn't determined by the amount of hours that you work but by the results that you get, you too could become a millionaire in the next ten years.

By the way, for anyone interested in my program, the Real Estate Agent Academy, which details how you can grow your business as a real estate agent, I'll be offering $100 off for the first ten people with this coupon code: "just100off." Again, for the first ten people. If you've made it to this point in the video, I feel like you know—there you go!

I'm not putting this in the description; I don't really mention this anywhere else, so it's just right here for anyone who's made it to this point. So anyway, that's it! I hope you guys enjoy. Again, thank you so much for watching. I really appreciate it. If you haven't already subscribed, you know I think it's pretty self-explanatory—subscribe, like button. Also, add me on Snapchat and Instagram; I'm posting pretty much daily. If you want to be a part of it there, feel free to be a part of it there.

Thank you again! Until next time.