Most people have had someone in there life say “money makes the world go round” or something similar. This is a common sentiment that many people in today’s society believe. While I do not necessarily completely agree, it is important to know how much power money does carry in this age. I am not trying to sell people on the idea that you have to be a millionaire to be happy, but if you don’t understand money and make yourself go broke, you definitely will be unhappy.

Now I am not going to give you an entire semester long class worth of information in this article, but I do want to give you a piece of information that you can maybe keep in your mind that could set you on the right path. Now the slogan, if you will, that I am going to use is a slight modification from something I heard and resonated with me.

Don’t spend the money you earn, spend the money your money earns.

Now this may or may not immediately jump out as amazing advice. Now, we cant all live off the interest that our millions of dollars in our investment portfolio brings in. The idea is that this can be a guiding idea that may help start your financial knowledge.

If you started today by making a budget that allows you to invest only a small amount of money every paycheck and are guided by the principle that you don’t spend excess money from your hard earned cash and only spend the money that your money earns in interest, it will help you to continue to grow that investment by continually adding to it and only spending the interest above inflation that it makes.

Now obviously you should probably let it grow to a decent amount before you skim off the top. Yet, just knowing this principle could help you make better choices with your money, rather than yoloing it on some wall street’s bets play.

Now whatever strategy for investing you use, whether it be a more hands on options or futures strategy or a dividend paying stock strategy. It is important you have the discipline to not withdraw it or forget to send your money into your account with every paycheck.

The idea with your investments should be to never sell the stocks you buy, now this does not apply to day trading, but also generally day trading is never a good idea. If you plan your investments on the idea that you never sell once you buy a stock, you will generally always succeed. If you are investing in index funds, all the major ones have always to date recovered beyond what they were at before a crash. So having the discipline of never selling even in a bad market will eventually lead you to higher gains. If you can, the best strategy is to actually buy into very large and safe funds during a downturn so you get the absolute best price on the stocks for when they recover.

One last idea I will leave you with is if you want to be rich, act like you are rich, and I don’t mean go out and buy a fancy car that you can’t afford. I mean invest and spend your money like a successful person. Research how rich people decide when and how to spend their money. Many will not buy things like cars unless it is below a certain percentage of their overall income for the year. Now not all of use can afford to do that and many of us need a reliable car, but if you are deciding between a car like an Audi or a Subaru, maybe buy the Subaru that has a much lower monthly payment and put the extra money you would have spent each month on the Audi into an investment account.

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