15 Ways to Accelerate Your Journey to $1,000,000
You know, Alexa, accelerating isn't just about putting your foot on the gas and pushing full steam ahead. In fact, that's the last step. Before you can accelerate, you have to optimize your machine to run smoothly and efficiently and remove as many obstacles as possible before you start.
And just a heads up—keep an eye on our channel for our video coming out next week called "15 Things That Slow You Down on Your Journey to $1 Million." You might think it's only the opposite to everything we spoke about in this video, but it is not. Okay? It's a lot more focused on a few very specific important factors.
Now, we know you want to get to the fun part where you stomp on that gas and fly—and we do too! So here are 15 ways to accelerate your journey to $1 million.
Starting off at number one, and you might not be expecting this, but eat fatty fish, leafy greens, whole grains, dark chocolate, and eggs. All of these foods improve your brain health and cognitive function by protecting your brain from oxidative stress, improving communication between cells, and giving you better memory and attention. They also reduce anxiety and give you a steady release of glucose, which is the brain's main energy source. If you want to reduce drag, this is where you start.
Number two: Run, cycle, swim, lift, and do yoga. You don't have to do all of them every day or at once, but filling your week up with a mix of these four exercises will help you to hit all of your markers for increasing your horsepower. Aerobic exercise like running, cycling, and swimming increases blood flow to your brain, which helps with the growth of new brain cells. Lifting weights reduces insulin resistance, yoga and tai chi reduces stress, gives you a creative boost, and helps you to control your emotions during stressful situations. Your acceleration to $1 million will be stressful, so you need all the help you can get.
Number three: Train your mind to be flexible and resilient. Nothing runs perfectly the first time you do it. You invest all of your savings in a plan that totally fails, and you lose all of your savings. You go back to the workforce, sacrifice, and save again, and go in for round two. The only way to do that is through resilience. You need to be tough enough to not give up when you fail—and it will probably happen at some point. So if you don't have the mindset to push forward despite a failure, then you've got to create that by setting small goals, allowing yourself to fail, and getting back up again. Get used to feeling rejected by shooting your shot with people out of your league. Build up your confidence in yourself by running a marathon even though you've never run before. Smaller failures prepare you for bigger leaps.
Number four: Never stop learning. On one hand, continuous education will open up higher-paying job opportunities. Developing a thirst for learning will make you curious and excited about trading the stock market, real estate investment, and market needs, which are all accelerators to $1 million. On the other hand, when you never stop learning, you essentially make sure your tires can handle the speed. Your mind can handle the wealth of experiences, information, and details you need to know to get to your $1 million. Some parts of this journey are going to be boring, so you need to push yourself to learn enough to make it interesting. You also have to know when to outsource your education if it's not your strong point.
What trusted resources can you turn to that will use its expertise to work for you? Because it's decisions like these that reduce your drag. The question is, are you ready to remove your obstacles? Your biggest obstacle is you and your lack of control. You fix this by keeping score.
And speaking of number five: Winners keep score. Not only do you know exactly how much you make every month, but you also need to know how much you're spending every day, what you're spending it on, how much you're investing, and how long it'll take you to reach $1 million based on your current behavior. Let's look at some very general numbers for a second.
The average yearly salary in the US is $59,000. The cost of living for one person is about $38,266 and $85,100 per year. That would take 166.37 years! If you invest the $6,000 with the compound interest and average annual return of 7%, it'll take you 42 years to reach 1 million. That's still too long, though, right? But at least by keeping score and working out your numbers, you know what you need to do: spend way less money, make more money, and invest more money.
And this is where Masterworks, the sponsor of today's video, comes in. They specialize in buying and selling art and collectibles. You don't have to know anything about the industry yourself to make money from it; you just have to work with the right people, and they're the right people. Their numbers will give you a good idea of why so many people trust them with accelerating their journey to 1 million.
Firstly, they've distributed back a total of over $60 million in investor proceeds across their 23 exits—and that's to investors who didn't know a thing about art. Over 900,000 members have signed on so far, and that number grows by the day. They've got over $1 billion in assets under management and previous investable offerings from art icons like Picasso, Basquiat, and Banksy. And you can still skip that waitlist and start investing today by going to the QR code on screen or masterworks.io.
Loans and real estate investments are considered good debt. They've got lower interest rates and tax deductions on interest payments. Bad debt doesn't generate long-term value—think credit cards for everyday expenses, payday loans, or auto loans, which depreciate quickly. They've got higher interest rates and no tax benefits; they affect your credit score negatively, not positively.
You can pay off bad debt using a few different strategies.
One: The debt snowball method focuses on paying off the smallest debt first to build momentum, and then you apply the payments from paid-off debts to the next smallest debt.
Two: With the debt avalanche method, you pay off the debt with the highest interest rate first, which saves more money in the long run.
Three: You can try to consolidate, where you combine multiple debts into a single loan with a lower interest rate. It simplifies your payments, but read the fine print here because the low-interest rates sometimes increase after a period of time.
So, choose one of these strategies and work out your payment plan in line with that. Also, make sure you can call all the creditors to reduce your interest payments, and if you truly see no way out, consider filing for bankruptcy. It doesn't have to be a financial life sentence if you're smart and strict about fixing your credit score. In fact, we've seen people come back with a decent home loan 2 to 3 years after filing for bankruptcy, so there is room for improvement.
Number seven: Live in a place with high earnings and a low cost of living. Some places will attract you with their super high earnings, and while you may consider the higher cost of living, you don't realize just how much it eats away at your earnings until you actually are living there.
If you're a social person, if you don't like cooking and you're easily persuaded by the latest fashion and tech trends, then you're going to spend way more than you think when you're living in a lively city. If you work remotely, you can live in a cheaper city and save a significant amount of money. Find that balance between high earnings, low cost of living, and minimal temptations.
Number eight: Optimize your tax strategies. Optimize your tax strategies by deciding whether to go for itemized deductions or standard deductions. Add up all of your possible itemized deductions and see if they total more than the standard deduction amount. If they do, itemizing will shave off more of your taxable income, which means you pay less in taxes. If not, stick with the standard deduction; it's easier and might just save you more money.
If you've got some bigger bills, like expensive medical treatments or you donated a lot of money to charity, itemizing could drop your taxable income significantly, saving you money. Now, it's more work to track and report all of those singular expenses, but it could be worth it depending on your spending throughout the year.
And now let's talk about accelerating your journey, shall we? You increase your income, and you do this while working your regular job. Here's how.
Number nine: Create and sell online courses. On your journey to $1 million, you're going to learn a lot. Once you've learned to keep score and you calculate exactly how much it'll take you to reach $1 million based on your current earnings and behavior, you can create a course to help people learn from the mistakes you made.
Your journey will also get you obsessed with one thing—whether it's fitness, nutrition, debt removal, maximizing high earnings and low cost of living, learning about art, or stock trading. Whatever it is, something is going to grab your attention. You'll go down a few rabbit holes and learn from firsthand experience. People will ask you about it, and you'll realize how much valuable information and details you have to share. So you start writing everything down, mainly for yourself at first, probably in Google Docs, which you can easily convert into a PDF file.
You work on the graphics, the format, the content; it'll take about three months to write it if you're working on it about two hours a day, five days a week. You've got 50 pages of content, which you charge $50 for. If you sell 80 courses, you make $4,000. You know that's more than possible! And once you've written the course, that's it; you just need to market it and keep on going.
Number ten: Learn to code, write a program, and then sell it. Python is one of the most popular programming languages, and it's loved for its simplicity and readability. It's excellent for beginners; it's used in data science, machine learning, web development, automation, and more. JavaScript is essential for web development, as the backbone of interactive web pages. Learning JavaScript allows you to do everything from simple web modifications to complex front-end development, and there are a ton of more programs you can learn.
What industry do you work in right now? What do you wish would function or run better? Maybe you work in payments and you wish your invoicing system was more streamlined and automated. Maybe you work in publishing and you wish tracking authors, editors, deadlines, and content would be easier to find. Whatever problem you have in your current industry, it can be fixed with a well-written program. You know the ins and outs of your industry, so use that knowledge to write a unique program. It takes a few months to a year to learn how to code, depending on the complexity of what you want. It can take a few months to a year to develop what you want.
You can first sell it to your current company or shop it elsewhere, and then you sell, invest that money from the sale, and write another program.
Number eleven: Become a consultant in your industry. Leverage the experience and knowledge you already have to become a consultant in your industry. A consultant gives expert advice in certain areas, like business, education, law, human resources, health care, finance, marketing—any industry really. If you have extensive knowledge and experience, then you can share that with an organization to help solve specific problems.
You leverage former colleagues, industry contacts, and professional networking sites like LinkedIn to find your first clients. Consultants often charge higher rates than what is typically earned by employees in smaller roles because they need to cover their own benefits and operational costs. It's rarely a full-time job because you come in as needed, and you can work for multiple clients, which allows you to decide how much time you want to work. Whatever industry you're in, you can become a consultant, and everything you earn as a consultant as a side gig gets put into an investment fund. You live on that money from your first job and invest everything from the second one.
Number twelve: Buy and rent homes. Investing in real estate is one of the accelerators that always comes up, and there's a reason for that. But there's something that people often miss when they first buy and rent: the point of renting is to earn equity, not income. For the first five years, you're not really going to make any money from your rental property, but then after that five years, the rent goes up a little bit, and that mortgage stays the same.
In ten years, again, that rent goes up, and the mortgage stays the same, and now you have equity. So, you can sell and make some money. If you're young and living with your parents, stay there as long as possible. Just because you can afford a place of your own doesn't mean that you should live there; that reduces the value of the real estate investment.
Pay your parents some minimal rent just to reduce your guilt. Start with an apartment purchase. Buy in an up-and-coming area, and you can spot up-and-coming areas by the coffee shops. If they're popping up, they're popping off. The same with new gyms and co-working spaces. Invest in quality appliances and furnishings; don't skimp on this. It's these little things that will allow you to increase the rent. Don't charge your rent that's too unaffordable, but enough so it doesn't leave you with a significant loss after factoring in the mortgage plus 20% for operational costs.
Number thirteen: Invest in the stock market. Even if you've only got $50 left at the end of the month, you need to put some of that into the stock market. That's how you start watching it every day and learning more about it, but start simple with a strategy like index funds and ETFs. They give you instant diversification and have lower risk compared to individual stocks. Mutual funds are also diversified and managed by professionals. Robinhood, Charles Schwab, and Fidelity brokerage are user-friendly, but do your own research, okay? Find one that works best for you in your area.
If you're just starting out, then $100 to $500 is good enough. Check on your investments weekly. We say weekly at first because it's good to get into the habit of seeing what's happening rather than just forgetting about it. Use your broker's website or app to review your portfolio's performance, check your balances, and read about statements. Learn to recognize common chart patterns such as head and shoulders, double tops, and bottoms. Use technical indicators and moving averages, like relative strength index and Bollinger Bands, to identify trends and trading signals.
Spread your investments across different sectors, asset classes, and geographies to reduce your risk.
Number fourteen: Use compound interest. Because alongside your stock trading, you're going to be using compound interest to grow your wealth. The earlier you start investing, the more time your money has to grow. Even small amounts can grow significantly over long periods due to the power of compounding.
Now, this one's relatively easy. First, you invest regularly. Regular contributions to your investment account can significantly increase the amount of compound interest you earn. This often is referred to as dollar-cost averaging. You choose higher interest rates. Higher interest rates accelerate the growth of your investments; it also comes with more risk, though, so balance your risk tolerance with your rewards. The more your interest is compounded, the more you'll earn. Monthly compounding generates more interest than annual compounding. Then, you reinvest your earnings; let your interest earn interest. Don't withdraw it.
And number fifteen: Maximize your contributions to tax-advantaged retirement accounts. The money you put into your retirement accounts is made with pre-tax dollars, so you don't pay taxes on whatever you contribute. It reduces your overall tax, so you can invest more upfront. Your employers will also often match your contribution—it's essentially free money that boosts your retirement savings. The compounding effect means that the returns you earn each year generate additional returns, accelerating the growth of your investments over time.
By taking advantage of these accounts, you can increase the amount of money you invest, reduce your tax liability, and boost the growth potential of your investment.
And since you stuck with us until the end, Alex, of course, you're getting a bonus today: don't have dependents until you're halfway there. Because accelerating your journey to $1 million takes time and energy and big sacrifice—working two jobs, cutting expenses—that's almost impossible when you have a family that depends on you.
You either need a supportive partner who also works so you've got the time and money to put toward $1 million, or you need to focus on this on your own. If you've already got a family and you want to get to $1 million and you're not halfway there, then something's got to give. You're going to have to make a sacrifice somewhere. It might be sacrificing your sleep, your relationship, or time with your children.
It's a big ask for everyone, so if you can wait to have dependents joining you on this journey, then wait, my friend. With these strategies, if you're disciplined, you work hard, and you invest, you should cut down the average time to reach that $1 million from 24 years to 10 years—and from there it just snowballs: 10 years to 1 million, 14 years to 2 million. But as you can see, it still takes time, so you also need to be patient. Don't give up, but start right now!