In my ongoing effort to shock you with contrarian (and sometimes counterintuitive) truths about building wealth, I give you this little nugget to chew on today

You cannot become wealthy by investing.

(Please keep this to yourself. If my colleagues in the investment advisory industry knew I said that, they would have me tarred and feathered!)

The investment advisory industry and by that I include brokerages, private bankers, and insurance agents, as well as investment newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and Internet publications is a huge, multibillion-dollar business based on hard work, clever thinking, and sophisticated algorithms. But also on one teensy-weensy lie.

The lie is that you can grow wealthy through investing.

Its not a big lie. Its a teensy-weensy lie. There is plenty of evidence that strategic investing can provide returns that exceed investment costs (brokerage fees, management fees, subscription fees, etc.) and even produce positive returns after inflation.

But for that, you need time. More time than you probably have.

Lets say you have $50,000 to invest. And lets say you invest it according to a really good investment strategy and things go well. Over a 10-year period, you earn an average of 10% per year. If you started on January 1, 2012, by December 31, 2021 your $50,000 would have increased to $129,687.

Thats not bad. But it hardly makes you wealthy. So lets say you extend your investment horizon to 20 years. Beginning with the same $50,000, you would have $336,375 on December 31, 2031.

Thats still not enough to make you rich! So lets say you extend your horizon to 30 years. By December 31, 2041, you would have $872,470.

That would give you $87,200 of yearly income. After taxes, youd take home about $65,000 a year. Thats OK, but its hardly wealthy. And thats after investing for 30 years!

Most of the people reading the newsletter I recently launched, The Palm Beach Letter. dont have 30 years to wait. Based on what I know about our readership, Id say our average reader has 10 to 15 years.

So whats a middle-aged (or older) wealth-seeker to do?

You can start by deconstructing that teensy-weensy lie.

Building wealth involves much more than just investing in stocks and bonds. Most rich people get that way by consistently doing five things:

1. They understand and manage their debt. They dont let debt manage them.
2. They spend their money wisely, getting maximum value for every dollar.
3. They continuously work to increase both their active and their passive incomes.
4. They are aggressive savers, far outpacing their peers.
5. They are disciplined investors. When they find a good strategy, they stick with it.

As you can see, investing is only one of five strategies you must follow to become rich. And of the five, it is arguably the least important.

Most of the rich guys I know spend little or no time investing.

Phil, for example, a very wealthy friend in his 40s, is an expert in municipal bond investing. But he didnt become wealthy by investing in bonds. He got wealthy as a marketing and Internet entrepreneur and by leveraging some debts and eliminating others. Nowadays, he buys and sells bonds but he spends only a few hours a month on it. For Phil, investing is a part-time way to increase the value of his savings. It is not and never has been his primary road to wealth.

Its the same with all my millionaire friends. They all have their own investment preferences and practices. But like Phil, none of them spends more than a small portion of his working time on investing.

As for me, I paid almost no attention to investing until I started writing The Palm Beach Letter. And yet, I managed to go from broke to having a net worth in excess of $50 million all without knowing the first thing about stocks or options or other sophisticated stock market strategies.

Dont get me wrong. Im not saying investing has no value. On the contrary, Im delighted to be an investor now, and I am certain that investing will continue to add to my wealth.

But I dont intend to spend 40 hours a week studying the market. What I will do is spend an hour a week following Tom Dyson and Paul Mampillys advice. The rest of my wealth-building time will be devoted to increasing my income. And I have lots of ways to do that.

If you want to get wealthy in fewer than 30 years, you should do the same. Devote a couple of hours a week to managing your investments and spend the rest of your working time on the other four wealth-building strategies listed above.

I hope this message doesnt disappoint you. Its nice to imagine that you can get rich in 10 years or less by picking great stocks. But its also a delusion. You may be thinking, I dont need to be told to limit my spending or manage my debt. I already know how to do that. My response to that is: Do you?

Or perhaps you dont like my idea that you must must increase your income. Most people reading The Palm Beach Letter have been working hard for 30 or more years to raise families and put their children through school. They want to stop working for income. They want to invest and take it easy.

Giving up your active income is the single-biggest financial mistake you can make. Your active income is essential to building your wealth. If you want to retire some day and dont have at least $250,000 put aside for that purpose, you need more income now.

The good news is that there are all sorts of ways to increase your income. Just as there are all sorts of ways to manage your debt, get more value out of your spending, and ratchet up your savings.

You should pay as much attention to those strategies as you do the stock recommendations you receive.

[Ed. Note. Mark Morgan Ford was the creator of Early To Rise. In 2011, Mark retired from ETR and now writes the Palm Beach Letter . His advice, in our opinion, continues to get better and better with every essay, particularly in the controversial ones we have shared today. We encourage you to read everything you can that has been written by Mark.]

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