If you are like me, probably in your childhood you did not meet many rich and successful people because you were born into a family, as many would say, “humble” or low income, or at least middle class.
For this same reason, many people (let’s say the vast majority) are simply used to the fact that, because they do not know successful people, they do not know what truly rich people are like (be careful of the importance, when I speak of truly rich) They don’t know what they are like, they start to believe in different myths and have closed ideas about what they think, what they do, what their habits are, or how they make decisions, especially financial ones.
So I want to tell you about 5 myths of the richest and most successful people, which really are lies, and I’m going to tell you why.
Myth # 1:
The vast majority of people believe that the rich were born rich.
This was not the case, for example, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, who started practically from scratch, created their own success, started their companies in a garage.
We are talking about people who as children did not have, not even their entire families had, not a remote part of the amount of money they have today.
Like these types of cases, there are piles in different amounts and proportions.
Many people when they see someone rich, they really believe that they were privileged, that they had some kind of luck in life, that they were simply born in a “golden cradle.”
Although some people did inherit that fortune (and perhaps some made bad decisions with it, others made it grow even more), the truth is that many of those people who do not appear in the news, those who do not appear on social networks, of those that do not go viral, they created their fortune from scratch:
They started humbly, perhaps they are still humble today (since humility, wealth and poverty are not the same) and they simply created their own destiny. So, to really be rich you don’t need to be born with money, or to have the kind of privileges that the vast majority of people believe in.
Myth # 2:
Believing that the rich have never gone bankrupt.
When they relate wealth, money they have, assets, property, or any number of things, they never imagine that some of them (or many of them) have been through difficulties in the past, even after they have reached wealth. .
Not only when we talk about having started from scratch and having even been in difficulties at the beginning of his life, no!
We talked about how some people like Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Milton Hershey, practically had to declare bankruptcy at some point in their life, because of some decisions they made, simply because the moment was not right in the market, and in short.
In fact, Donald Trump has done it more than once. Even so, all of them managed to recover after this and managed to create even more wealth.
Regardless of the specific names, regardless of Donald Trump, regardless of the way some (I’m just giving examples) have managed to recover from bankruptcy, what they show us, what many people (who don’t even have names known to us) show us is that it is still possible to recover from these difficult situations.
Imagine, if it is possible to recover from bankruptcy after being a multimillionaire in dollars, what is not possible for a person who today at least is not bankrupt , who at least does not have the banks as an enemy because he has destroyed your credit history, who can start with less risk than a person who has already lost everything?
Myth # 3
People believe that rich people just don’t have a spending limit, don’t have a budget, and can spend as much money as they want.
This is very common to see out there, in articles (or videos) where they say “how rich, really, is Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates?”, Where they say that they could spend I do not know how many million dollars a day , for how long, in short.
They think that people are really like that, that they spend on whatever it is, that they have no example of control. Obviously, with these particular examples, we are talking about the richest in the world.
Let’s talk about a person who has a lot of money, but who is not among the richest.
The vast majority of wealthy people have control, they have a budget, and they actually control how much money they are going to spend.
It is very different from spending $ 12,000 or $ 15,000 on a 15-day or 20-day cruise (which is unheard of for someone else) and that, whether it’s a big expense or not, is proportional to your money.
If they’re making $ 1 million a month, it’s probably not going to be a big expense.
That’s where we talk about spending proportionally , but they do control their money, and they do it proportionally; perhaps they do it in better proportions than many of the people today who are earning one or two minimum wages, who perhaps spend (more in proportion) on entertainment and many other things, than the rich do.
Keep in mind that if I have millions, I could buy more expensive things, I could buy a Ferrari of 1, 2, 3 million dollars (there are even Ferraris of 25 million dollars), there are super expensive houses, there are super expensive trips, there are private islands, private jets, etc.
Every time I level up, they will see more “opportunities” to spend more and more money. So, unless there is a control, it will be impossible to get out of that rat race of: income-expense, income-expense.
Myth # 4
The vast majority of people believe that all rich people have their own home, and that it is practically the rich who first think about owning their own home.
It really has been, more or less, the opposite.
When you buy your own home, we talk about having to save money for an investment (a down payment), apart from the costs and expenses of the negotiation itself, probably to be left with a mortgage or a loan with the bank at 20, 30, 15 years (depending), and start paying.
Perhaps there at that point, it is a monthly money that can be very similar to that of a lease.
The vast majority of people say ” I would rather pay a mortgage than pay a rent to another that I will never see again, while with this I am building my equity ” …
Okay, but nobody talks about the initial fee, on the one hand, and everyone talks as if their own home were an investment, an asset that is going to be valued for me and that I will later be able to liquidate and obtain profits on it.
How do those who have 30-year credit do it? When do they do it? When do they really capitalize ?
It is one thing to talk about your own home, it is another thing to talk about real estate and investing in real estate.
If I invest in real estate, I can set up that initial account, start paying a monthly fee at the bank, and collect the rent, which may pay the fee automatically, and I already have an asset that pays for itself, a passive income, that only required me to pay that initial money.
But the most important thing of all is to know that I did not put that down payment on a house that is not going to give me liquid cash every month, and that more likely it will generate expenses, repairs (the roof was damaged, there leaks, water leaks from the ceiling, there are changes of I don’t know what, any number of things that can come up suddenly).
There are taxes that are not surprising, but are fixed and you have to pay them every year (or every month, depending on the country) and many other things, so for most things the house is a liability.
Many rich people know this and put off buying their own home, since they know that they are committing a large amount of their money that they could use to inject capital into their businesses, grow faster, multiply it and perhaps later have the money to buy the house cash, without any problem.
In other words, it is more than all the poor who prioritize home purchases as soon as possible, because they believe that it is the only thing that will remain at the end of life and when they are already in an advanced age (where, if at least you have that, because they will feel a certain level of security).
By putting all their money, hopes, and so on in a home of their own, they may miss out on other opportunities, in addition to lack of education and so on, which simply leads them to make the decision that their home is everything.
It does not mean that a person with a lot of money does not buy a house, of course they buy it, they probably buy it; But it is understanding the difference between an investment and a personal purchase .
Especially people who think that buying a car is an investment: This is an expense, it is a liability, it is not an asset.
Even if the house gains value over time, you have to ask yourself how much was spent, not only in the initial cost that was had, in the installments that are had and in the interest that is paid in the bank, but in everything else : in repairs, in public services, in taxes and in many other things.
And see, if I manage to sell the house later, for a sale price 20% or 30% higher than what I bought it, if with this I am really recovering the investment and making a profit.
Myth # 5:
The vast majority of people believe that rich and successful people had a stroke of luck, or made some kind of risky investment and did well (as they are thinking in terms of the lottery).
Luck really are those elements that the vast majority of people would like to have in their favor when we talk about finances, it is not a surprise that so many people play the lottery, attend casinos, and others hoping that their ticket will be favored.
Or people who think of doing FOREX, currency trading, or think of buying shares and that from one moment to another its value, investing $ 1,000 multiplies by 10 and earning $ 9,000 without doing anything. In short, always waiting for the stroke of luck.
Likewise, when they see a person who already has money, they say ” probably that person was lucky .”
What’s more, when, for example, we see the creators of the game Angry Birds, which is an excellent example, people say “they were lucky because they released the game at the right time, and I don’t know, they took advantage of the growth of the IOS platform ” , anyway.
But when we go to analyze, they had actually made more than 50 games before Angry Birds that had not been successful, we realize that apparently it is not such a sudden success, as many people say, it did not come out overnight, it was not a stroke of luck.
They probably tried, they failed, probably some of the games weren’t total failures and they were profitable, until they hit the right mix.
It does not mean that with that they already have the key to being rich from then on, because perhaps the games that came out later were not as successful as Angry Birds; but hey, regardless of this, the vast majority of people who have created their wealth have achieved it little by little, over the years, prioritizing investment , reducing their expenses, stopping to think about success overnight. , giving up thinking about high-risk investments.
When we talk about the people who made it with luck, with high risk, we are not even talking about the 1% or 2% of those who have enough money.
And if they ever manage to get enough money with this high risk, simply at some point, with that same mentality (as happens to people who play in the casino), they get excited and end up losing everything, or perhaps even worse, staying in debt and having to declare bankruptcy.
So the truth is that this is a type of mentality that many people sadly today have, and they have to change if they want to improve their financial situation; or else, accept that they are simply going to be in this same mediocrity all the time of their lives and stuck by their own mentality and by their own thought patterns.
