How to Become a Millionaire with $35 a Week

I believe saving $35 a week will set you on a path that ends with you meeting all your financial goals, and even becoming a millionaire if you so choose! The key to building wealth is the millionaire mindset, not the amount of money you make, what you do, where you live, what your education level is, or anything else. Yes, those are all factors, but the one sole reason you’ll be a millionaire in America is because you consciously decide to! It is my belief that once you master saving $35 a week towards a savings and investing goal, you will have broken through into the millionaire mindset, which many people could do, but don’t.

Your initial thought is that I’m crazy, and it would take a thousand years to get to a million by saving just $35 a week. You’re partially right, it would take forever to save a million dollars with just $35 a week, but the really crazy part is that the amount of money you start with really doesn’t matter at all. I believe everyone can save the amount of $5,000 in 3 years’ time, and then invest that $5,000 to earn another $1,000 over the next 3 years. To a lot of people, that sounds like a lot of money, and a lot of time! It might be, but let’s break it down into greater detail:

Saving $5,000 in 3 years means saving $1,667 per year. $1,667 per year is $139 per month. Which is $35 per week. For a married couple, think about what $35 buys you. A pair of jeans? A night out at a Mexican place? A week’s worth of Starbucks coffee drinks? Doesn’t seem like much, does it? Well, it isn’t much, and no matter what your current income is, as long as you have a full time job, I would bet every cent I have that I could help you find a way to save $35 a week. Ok, so now what? It took you 3 years to save $5,000, which is nice. Everyone likes looking at that in their savings account, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not life-changing. Here’s where my philosophy takes over. I believe that once people train themselves to save with a mind toward investing, they start building momentum. Once you start seeing the impact you’re having on that savings account over time, I’m betting it’ll not only get easier to do, you’ll be able to save more. What you’re doing is disciplining your mind to see money differently. Instead of seeing your monthly income as the money you have to support your lifestyle, you start seeing your lifestyle as a means of increasing how much you can save!! Once you’ve saved $35 a week for a month or three, it will be in your mind every time you stop at Starbucks, or roll through the department store. You’ll get much better at prioritizing your purchases. You’ll wait to buy those jeans until they’re on sale. You’ll plan to get happy hour pricing for dinner by going early. You’ll make coffee at home, you’ll bring lunch to work, and shock yourself at how you’re starting to think you can save $50 dollars or even $100 a week!

Ok, so starting to see things a bit differently now, but still, no life-changing wealth building going on. You might disagree, but I maintain that the mindset change is the most important part of building lasting wealth and financial security for you and your family. The key is, by learning the long term value of your daily decisions, you’re now thinking strategically with your everyday life, putting you in the same category as people like Warren Buffett. Now that you’ve changed your mindset, it doesn’t matter whether you make $30,000 a year or $100,000, you’re equipped to start building wealth. Let’s say all you did was save $5,000 over that 3 year period. You scratched and clawed, missed it some months, made up for it over other months and now you have $5,000 in a savings account. Great! Now let’s do more Warren Buffett stuff and invest it! Average stock market returns are around 7% annually over long periods of time. Could do better, could do worse, but it’s a good general benchmark. 7% of $5,000 is $350, so after one year of your money invested in simple index funds, let’s say, you now have $5,350 if you elected to re-invest your earnings. The year after that, the 7% is now calculated off of your $5,350, so your return is now $374.50. Not cosmic, but almost $25 more than last year, and you now have $5,724.50 in your account. Let’s go to year 3 of investing, another 7%, and your total is now $6,125.22. Once again, that’s pretty cool, your money is making money, you made over $1,000 in 3 years of investing, but $6,125.22 is still not life changing, and we’re 6 years along. You saved for 3 years, invested for 3 years, and now our total is just over 6 grand. Here’s where I prove to you that the mindset is more important than anything else when it comes to personal wealth building and financial security.

Now let’s do some other math, the math that comes as a result of your mindset changing. Let’s say that after 6 months of saving $35 a week, you reduce your cable bill, you only watch a few channels anyways. Or you cut out Starbucks entirely, and now you and your spouse make your coffee at home. Or you only go shopping for clothes once a month now, because you really dislike how guilty you feel buying things you know you don’t need. These specific items are just examples, we all spend frivolously on certain things, but we also all have the ability to cut these costs down, or even out completely. However it happens, slowly, you’re starting to save more and more money. Instead of your goal of $139 a month, you’re finding that you’re able to save $160, $180, $200 per month now, and you’re starting to do the math to figure out how soon you’ll get to that $5,000 goal. If you’re able to save $180 a month for the last 6 months of the year, your savings jumps to $1,914 after only a year! If you invest it at that same 7% per year while you continue to save for the next year, you’ve got $4,207.98! After 2 years, you or your spouse might be in line for a raise. Between the 2 of you, it’s very fair to think you might be earning as a household another $100 per month. However, both of you are starting to notice how quickly the money grows in the investment account, so of that extra $100, you’re saving $80 of it. Now you’re saving $260 a month, so in year 3, you save $3,120. Your investment account is now $4,502.54. In total, after 3 years, you now have $7,622.54. Once your mindset changed from “how can my salary support my lifestyle” into “how can I change my lifestyle to maximize my savings with my income,” you beat all your projections, and you significantly decreased the time to get to 6 grand in savings! At this point you are now thinking like a wealthy person, and it is only a matter of time until you are literally a millionaire!

You know all the principles! Save, invest, re-invest, and when you get raises, invest more. Furthermore, once you start seeing the power of investment and compounding returns, you’re going to want to learn better ways to invest. You’re going to find a niche like real estate where you can sometimes get 3-4 times the stock market returns. Your $7,000 dollars in 3 years is going to turn into $100,000 in 10 years, because once you master the idea of finding ways to increase your investing, it’s easier and easier to automatically save more and more of your family’s income.

The beauty of this idea is that it assumes you only save $35 a week, and it still relays the concept of adjusting your life to enable you to prioritize saving and investing. My example uses a married couple by themselves, but it could be a single person, a large family, or any combination, for some $35 a week is a tighter squeeze, but I stand by my wager that I could help anyone with a full time job get to that number. Many people will find that they can afford to save much more than $35 a week (or $139 a month), and that accelerates their wealth building exponentially. A change this small in the beginning trains your mind to think like millionaire investors, after that, it’s a matter of time and effort until you meet all your financial goals!