Growing your wealth

Once you have made your major purchases, paid off the short term debt (if any) for those purchases, and built up your emergency savings, then you can shift your income towards investment. You may not be able to start tomorrow with investing $1500 per month, but you can start with one or two hundred, and as you pay off debt, shift the flow of cash toward investment. Your goal should be to have purchased all of the household and transportation items in the first 18 to 36 months, and all items except housing should be paid off in 48 months. Then you need to stretch the service life of these items to ten to fifteen years.

If you want to be able to direct a large part of your income to investment, you will have to find ways to live well on less money. During this entire period, you need to be frugal with the small expenses and day to day purchases. While I recommend that paying more for quality food is a good idea, you really have to be tight with your money with other daily expenses. Avoid shopping for entertainment and purchasing convenience items. Make your own meals and spend your time on self-improvement rather than paying for entertainment. Focus on building and maintaining relationships with others.

Continually review necessary expenses to make sure you are spending your money wisely. If your regular expenses fall, shift the funds to investment. As your income increases due to raises or overtime, review the actual dollar amounts being deposited in each expense type, and when possible, increase investment.

Review your expenses by budget category and expense type every month and adjust the budgeted amounts to fit reality. Also, always keep thinking about how you could reduce expenditures or be more satisfied with the same dollars spent.

If you continue with this process over a period of one to two years, you will find that you will be able to allocate more and more of your income to investments which will allow you to live well in the future.

At the end of each month, send a check in the amount of the balance in your investment savings account to your investment brokerage account. If you are new to investment, your first investment should probably be a large-cap growth mutual fund with low expenses. Large-Cap means that the fund is made up of stock from larger companies, which should mean more security and less volatility than smaller company stock. Growth means that the fund is intended for those with an investment strategy of more than 5 years and that the goal is to take moderate risk to increase the investment. Low fees and expenses are very important for the long-term investor, always compare fees when considering a mutual fund. Take a look at the Vanguard Group, they are known for keeping the fees and expenses of investment low. You can either start an account with Vanguard directly or work through a discount broker such as Scottrade. Typically you will need a minimum of $3,000 to buy into a fund, and once in, you may make minimum additional payments of $100. As you research and learn more about investments, you may find more potential in individual stocks.

The purpose of this article is to help you get started building up your investment. For information on how to invest and how to know when you can afford to retire, see the Retire Early Page.