How I Will Be Rich

This is part of my ongoing theme “The 8 Step Process to Being Rich“.

Let’s face it, you’ve got to start somewhere. Unless you were born in to an extremely wealthy family or had some sort of windfall to obtain your wealth, you are going to need a job. If you want to run your own business, you need start-up capital. If you want to be a full time investor, you’ve got to raise the money to invest somewhere. If you want to be a professional blogger, you’ve got to get money to pay the bills when you’re first starting out. So it’s pretty apparent that most everyone needs a job at their early stage in their career. You need to build up a bank account so you have the funds to achieve “the big picture”.

While people are in high school and even a little bit in to college, they tend to get jobs at the fast food restaurants and the local shoe stores. They work for minimum wage and swear that as soon as they can they are out of that place. We’ve all been there and now it’s time to find a job that we can hang with for a while. Here are some ways to hunt down that job that you won’t hate.

• Pay Attention to Yourself
  Think about all the things that you enjoy and all the things that you are good at. Go ahead and brainstorm. Get a piece of paper out and just start listing things. You’ve always been a huge football fan, see if there’s opportunities in your community to coach football. You’ve always loved math and money, look in to and study accounting. The options are limitless. I think if you really start brainstorming all of your interests and talents, you will come up with some career opportunities that will work for you. In my case, I’ve always been a math person. I am one of those odd people that enjoys math problems and likes solving things like they were puzzles. I now work at a shutter company as basically an engineer. I get odd shape windows and window sizes and I figure out how the heck we’re going to make shutters for that window. It’s math, it’s a puzzle and most of the time, I enjoy it.
• Think Outside the Box (Extremely Cliche, I know)
  Some people may not believe this but when I was in elementary school and high school, my dream job was not to work in the exciting field of window coverings. Shocking, I know… The point is that there might be industries that can use your knowledge or talent that you haven’t even thought of yet. Explore opportunities that you never really thought of as opportunities before. For people who love math, there are other jobs out there other than a math teacher or an accountant. If you love history, there are other opportunities than a history teacher. You can work in a museum, giving tours or find a job as a documentary editor. The idea is that there are positions in almost any field you can think of that might be able to use your knowledge and skills.
• Patience is Very Important
  You don’t want to get stuck back in a job that you hate. It’s a good idea to be patient and hold out for that right job. It’s ok to pass on job opportunities that you don’t think you will be happy working in day in and day out. If you are patient and refuse to settle for a job that will drive you crazy, you will enjoy life a whole lot more. Nothing is worse than going from a job that you hate where you work 18-20 hours a week to a job that you hate where you work 40-60 hours a week. Hold out for the right opportunity.

Follow these steps, find a job that you don’t hate and start banking some money. Once you’ve got some money in your bank account, move on to Step 2: Open a Roth IRA and invest the maximum each year.

-M

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