Increase Your Wealth With These 15 Life Hacks

Building wealth is more than just asking for a raise at work or negotiating that next salary increase. It’s about investing strategically, promoting your talents, broadening the scope of your network as well as being committed to lifelong learning.

Increase Your Wealth With These 15 Life Hacks:

1. Get a Mentor

Mentorship is one of the greatest tools for broadening your network in profitable ways. Find a mentor is your niche with the type of experience that aligns with where you want to go. Don’t just look for job titles either – look at the person’s philosophy of life and values and make sure these align with yours. The more tailored your mentor’s background is to yours – the more successful your relationship will be.

Virtual mentorship like the ones available at Aspire-Canada reduces the time commitment and allows you to connect with mentors in different fields all over the world. It’s great in building a multi-mentor strategy.

Read: Why a Multi-Mentor Strategy is good for your Career

2. Don’t Confuse Job Title With Wealth

Working a 9-5 job will rarely give you wealth. What it gives you are the tools to get wealthy. A good salary , great experience, access to mentors are all ingredients to unlocking real wealth if you use them wisely.  A good wealth building strategy however, isn’t just asking for a raise or working tirelessly to reach the top – its investing strategically and using the assets you have wisely. You don’t need to become a full-fledged minimalist, but it’s time to trim the proverbial fat. Look at your budget and identify the ways you’re throwing away money on overpriced nonessentials. Spa treatments, expensive restaurants, retail shopping excursions and unused gym memberships are excesses that can sabotage your financial health.

3. Don’t Shy Away From Self-Promotion

Whether you’re advertising your skills or a business, you need to feel comfortable doing it. Promotion can sometimes feel pushy, but it’s a crucial part of business — especially if you’re trying to establish a customer base. Use social media, local advertising and other marketing methods to get your name out there.

4. Monetize Your Talents

If you dream of earning $1 billion, start with your talents. If you have a valuable skill, you could create a business around your talents. Whether you’re a skilled programmer with a vision for launching a development company or a fashionista ready to create your own product line, use your interests, passions and abilities to make money.

5. Practice Gratitude

Ellen Rogin and Lisa Kueng, authors of Picture Your Prosperity: Smart Money Moves to Turn Your Vision into Reality argue that the more you appreciate what you currently have, the more likely it is that you’ll be better off — financially — in the future.

Gratitude is referred to as “the Mother of All Virtues” – it is the virtue from which, all others are birthed – and it is absolutely essential for personal growth and success.

6. Stop Wishing and Start Setting Goals

Wealthy people don’t allow their successes to hinge on hopes or dreams. They commit to success by working to achieve clearly defined goals. Set some goals for the next week, month, six months and beyond. Define your goals and outline the smaller steps you should be taking to achieve them. A good calendar system helps.

7. Channel Your Intuition for Growth & Success

Clear the clutter in the mind. Some messiness might be acceptable as part of the “creative mindset,” but eventually clutter becomes a distraction to your work — whether you realize it or not.

8. Learn From Other People’s Mistakes

Wealthy people are driven by a desire to learn and grow. By asking a lot of questions, you can learn from other people’s mistakes and experiences, gain knowledge about your field and create strong relationships with people.

9. Invest Your Money

The days of just putting your money in a bank account and building wealth are gone. In a low-interest-rate world, you will need to ensure that your money works for you. Just beating inflation means that you have to take deliberate steps to invest wisely to make a good rate of return. You work hard, and your money should, too. Make your money work for you by investing in stocks, mutual funds, real estate and other vehicles that can help you build wealth.

Read: How to Set up an Investment Club

10. Adopt a “Million Dollar” Personality

“The Science of Success” is a collection of writings by and about Napoleon Hill, who studied the habits of more than 500 wealthy people to write his 1937 book, “Think and Grow Rich.” But in “The Science of Success,” one piece of advice states you can adopt a “million-dollar personality” if you “adjust yourself to all circumstances, pleasant or otherwise, without losing your composure or showing your temper. Remember that silence may be much more effective than your angry words.”

Certified financial planner and CPA Tom Corley, who conducted a five-year study on 233 wealthy and 128 poor people to write his book “Rich Habits,” seems to agree:

“It seems the poor cannot control their emotions,” Corley wrote on his Rich Habits website in 2013. “Forty-three percent of the poor admitted to losing their temper at least once in the past month vs. 19 percent of the wealthy.”

11. Maintain a Daily To-Do List

In his book “Rich Habits,” Corley stumbled upon another finding: Wealthy and successful people utilize to-do lists in order to achieve their goals. In fact, his research showed that 81 percent of the wealthy maintain a to-do list vs. 19 percent of poor people.

“Successful people are goal-oriented,” Corley wrote in his book. “They create goals all the time. Daily goals are represented in their daily to-do lists.”

So before you start your day, “compile a daily goal/to-do list. List only those things that have a realistic probability — 80 percent chance — of being completed that day,” he advised. “Prioritize this list and set a specific time in which to tackled them.”

12. Cut Out the TV Habit

Only 23 percent of the rich admitted to watching more than an hour of TV a day, compared with 77 percent of poor people. And, 78 percent of the people who watch more than an hour of TV a day are tuning in to reality TV. That leaves time for wealthy folks to do other things that broaden their financial horizons, such as reading.

For this reason, Corley considers watching TV a “poverty habit” instead of a “rich habit.”

13. Network, Network, Network

Successful people tend to dedicate time to widening their circles of acquaintance and influence, whether through business organizations, LinkedIn or groups that attract ambitious, entrepreneurial minds.

To expand your professional network, tap into your existing network first. For example, reach out to your old college classmates or professors, and even ask your friends and family members if they can help you find people to connect with.

14. Block Your Time

New York Times best-selling author Brendon Burchard — who’s been photographed next to uber-successful people like Oprah, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Tony Robbins, Arianna Huffington and more — is an advocate of blocking out time for yourself.