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How I Built My Wealth
Early To Rise Presents:
By: Michael Masterson©Copyright 2011 by Early to Rise
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COPY distributed.How I Built My Wealth | www.earlytorise.com 1
Early to Rise
The Day I Decided to “Get Rich”
It doesn’t take genius to get rich.  Nor are special talents required.  You don’t need to be
lucky.  And you certainly don’t need to be privileged. You do, however, have to make getting
rich a priority in your life –– and be willing to
focus the majority of your time and energy on
doing what it takes to build real wealth.
Change yourself from
Spender to Wealth Builder
The Spender believes that buying things —
and especially status symbols — makes him
richer.  He drives a Mercedes, wears Zegna
suits, sports a Rolex watch, etc.  As his income grows, the Spender buys more and more
expensive things — because that is the only
way he can signal to himself and others that
he is improving himself financially.
The Wealth Builder doesn’t fall into that trap.
He understands that improving his financial
position means increasing his net worth.  To
that end, he hates spending money on depreciating assets (anything with a value that diminishes over time), because he knows that
each such purchase makes him poorer.  Poorer
immediately and much poorer in the long run.
The Wealth Builder takes pleasure from growing richer, and he does so by putting almost
all of his extra money into appreciating assets.
WEALTH-BUILDING
REQUIREMENT No. 1:
Get to Work One Hour Earlier
and Leave One Hour Later
The first and most important lesson I’ve
learned in my wealth-building history is this:
To get more out of something, you have to put
more into it.
To make more money than you are making
now, you will have to work more.  To make a
lot more money, you will have to work more
and differently.
This may seem too obvious to mention, but it
came as a bit of a surprise to me.
Since so many of us got to know work by doing work we didn’t care about, we learned
(and now it’s deep in our bones) that work is
hard, dull, and boring.  With that idea in mind,
it’s no wonder we look for promises of quickand-easy money.
They don’t exist.
To become wealthy, you need to put yourself
in the profit stream of a thriving business and
contribute to that profit stream by exercising a
financially valuable skill.  Whether that skill
is selling, marketing, product development, or
profit management, it will take you time to get
good at it.
That’s one of the reasons I believe — as Ben
Franklin did — that the most important thing
you can do to acquire wealth is get to work
early each morning.  The extra time gives you
a tremendous advantage over everyone and
everything you compete against.  Plus, the
discipline of doing something most people are
not willing to do will pay off in just about every other area of your life.
If, in addition to coming in early, you stay an
hour later than the rest of your co-workers,
you will accelerate your wealth-building time
line even more.
How I Built My WealthHow I Built My Wealth | www.earlytorise.com 2
Early to Rise
So be at your desk tomorrow morning an hour
earlier than the rest of the world, stay an hour
after everyone else goes home, and everything
else — the brilliant moneymaking ideas, the
diligent follow-through, the sticking to priorities, and the devilish details — will all follow.
WEALTH-BUILDING
REQUIREMENT No. 2:
Master a Financially Valuable Skill
A financially valuable skill is not speaking
French or ballroom dancing. These are great
to know, and enhance the richness of your life,
but they are not skills that people will pay you
a ton of money for.
Financially valuable skills, are those that
contribute to the profits of a business –– for
example, selling or marketing or product development or profit management.  And every
one of these skills requires the ability to speak
well, write well, and think well.
Speaking and writing well is important, because in any organization or organized system, power moves inexorably to those who are
persuasive. The means of communication you
develop don’t matter so much.  What counts
is that you have a way to convince people that
your ideas are worthwhile.
By “thinking well,” I mean having the ability
to analyze a problem and figure out its component parts — what it is made up of and how
important each of these pieces is. If you apply this thinking to a business situation — say,
analyzing a market — you can figure out solutions before your colleagues have begun to
figure out the problems.
Great marketers are really great thinkers.  They
look at a complicated market, break it down
into understandable patterns, and develop a
selling program that reflects those patterns.  If
you can figure out how to sell products/services when everybody else is throwing up their
hands in despair, you’ll be rich and powerful
sooner (probably) than you even want to be.
To make a high income (in excess of $100,000),
you almost have to do these three things.
Spend some time today thinking about how
you can improve your ability to (1) persuade,
(2) communicate ideas, and (3) solve problems power to persuade and to speak, write,
and think –– and how you might use these
skills to get your income up to at least to
$100,000.  More if you want more.
WEALTH-BUILDING
REQUIREMENT No. 3:
Earn More Than You Spend
If you continue to get up early and follow my
advice, your income will climb.  How do I
know that?  Because the world is starved for
ambitious, hardworking, and focused people.
But no matter how high you boost your income, you won’t acquire wealth unless you
learn to spend less than you make.  It is the
money we save, not the money we make, that
determines our wealth.
If you have enjoyed a growing income, you
already understand (all too well) what I’m
talking about.  Make more money and things
get better: your car, your clothes, even (and
most expensively) your home address. That’s
fine so long as there is a limit.  But for many
(if not most) income builders, the desire to
spend is always two steps ahead of the ability
to earn.  If you fall into that trap, you will have
the accoutrements of wealth but never its most How I Built My Wealth | www.earlytorise.com 3
Early to Rise
valuable benefits: financial peace of mind and
the freedom to stop working.
The hard part is the mental discipline.
I had to get into the habit of calculating my net
worth every month. It forces you to come face
to face with exactly how much you’re earning… and where that money is going.
It can be scary to see those numbers. But,
it’s even scarier to not know what those
numbers are.
Then, make yourself a promise, like I did: I
promised myself that I would do whatever
it took to make sure that each new total was
larger than the one before. It’s a commitment
to becoming wealthier every day.
That may seem like a simple promise, but it
had a profound impact on the way I thought
about myself, my job, my business relationships, and about wealth building itself.
It made me see — almost instantly — that
many of my habits (including some of my
spending habits) were financially unhealthy.
It also gave me, at times, the panicked energy I needed to do something drastic — to
start something new or end something that
had gone wrong.
You’ll have to be scrupulously honest.  The
temptation to meet your goal by overvaluing a
particular asset may be strong, so be aware of
it and resist it.
Counting your money is an unseemly activity..  But it will remind you of the progress
you’re making — and that will give you the
mental strength to continue.  Ultimately, it
will make spending less than you earn automatic.  And that means your future wealth will
be guaranteed.
Don’t dismiss this little technique because
it’s simple.  All the best and most powerful
things in life are simple.  This WILL make a
difference.
WEALTH-BUILDING
REQUIREMENT No. 4:
Choose Investments That Keep Your
Risks Low and Your Profits High
The traditional idea about investment returns
is that the more you want to earn the more risk
you have to take.  However, it is possible to
get a higher-than-average return with muchless-than-typical risk.
Let’s start by assuming that you begin your
wealth-accumulation program with monthly
savings of $1,000. Let’s figure that by working hard and smart you are able to increase
that $12,000 by $3,000 a year. And, finally,
let’s assume that you are 45 years old and
have 20 years of income-producing years in
your future.  (If you are younger than that,
the numbers I’ll show you will turn out to be
much, much more favorable.)
Over a 20-year time period, putting away
the savings mentioned above, the total “extra” income you’ll have socked away will be
about $800,000. That’s not bad.  It shows you
the power of consistent savings.  And that
$800,000 invested at an average of 12% interest would give you $96,000 a year to live on
in your retirement year
But the numbers I’ve cited so far do not include the effect of compound interest.
If you put all that extra money in the bank and
earn an average of 3% interest compounded annually, you’d have about twice the amounts cited above.  If you could do better than that — say, How I Built My Wealth | www.earlytorise.com 4
Early to Rise
5% — you’d end up with four times as much.
7% would give you about five times as much.
10% would give you about six times that
much, or between $5 million and $15 million.
It’s not easy to get 10% over time, but I believe it can be done if you invest in things
you know.
Here’s how to do it…
WEALTH-BUILDING
REQUIREMENT No. 5:
45% of Your Savings Should Be in
Conservative Passive Investments
Invest 25% of your savings in your home
To be sure that your home appreciates in value, don’t buy a house until you really know
the local real-estate market. Spend as much
time as you need to scout around, to speak
to people, to watch what’s going on.  When
you are confident that you know the neighborhoods and can recognize properties that
are either overvalued or potential winners, do
what the real-estate pros recommend: Buy a
modestly priced house in an good or up-andcoming neighborhood.
Invest 10% of your savings in stocks
Next, you’ll want money in the stock market.  I recommend that you select a balanced
mutual fund that is meant to “track” the Dow
Jones Industrials. Don’t mess around picking individual stocks or timing your investments (pulling them in and out of the market
depending on economic conditions and other
factors).  Just put your money in and let it enjoy the historic 9% return stocks have given
investors for 70 years.
Invest 10% of your savings in secured loans
The next category — secured loans — is an
important but usually over-looked part of any
Wealth Builder’s investment portfolio.  Secured loans are wonderful because they pay a
decent rate of return — higher than bank savings accounts — with virtually no more risk.
To make things simple, I recommend tax-free
municipal bonds.  If you go for the safe ones
— triple A— you’ll get about 4.75% return in
today’s market.  That equates to about 7% to
8% before taxes.
The first 45% of your invested wealth will
appreciate slowly, steadily, and safely
Take time choosing these investments to begin with, but I believe you’ll do better in the
long run by leaving these investments alone.
Take the time you’ll save by not actively managing your home, your index funds, and your
bonds, and invest it in the management of the
active portion of your investments: (1) a highyield business opportunity and (2) investment
real estate.
WEALTH-BUILDING
REQUIREMENT No. 6:
Invest 25-30% of Your
Savings in a Side Business —
Something You Know
No matter where you put your money, you
will get better returns in the long run if you
select investments you understand — and if
you continue to learn more about those investments for as long as you are investing in them.
To get the greatest yield with the “active” part
of your investment portfolio, you need to invest in something you are committed to knowing about. How I Built My Wealth | www.earlytorise.com 5
Early to Rise
What types of investments are appropriate for
this portion of your savings?
In my view — and this is an opinion that won’t
find much support among financial planners and
stock gurus — you should probably not put your
high-yield money into such traditional high-yield
investment vehicles as futures, options, microcap stocks, precious metals, and currencies. I
could go on, but you get the idea: Don’t invest
in risky investments unless you intend to become
an investment expert. Most people don’t have the
time or intelligence for that.  I certainly don’t.
And most of the world’s wealthiest people
don’t either.
You may be the rare exception.  If so, learn about
day trading or hedging or spreads, etc.  Figure
out how to make money on covered calls and
micro-spreads and the like. But if you are not
a natural financial genius and you already have
the distraction of a full-time job, I recommend
you invest your money in a side business that
you can learn about on a part-time basis.
WEALTH-BUILDING
REQUIREMENT No. 7:
Invest 20-25% of Your Savings
in High-Yield Real Estate
The wonderful thing about real estate is how
quickly it seems to expand. You buy a condo this
year with the cash you got back from last year’s
taxes.  It’s barely enough to get you to closing,
but you throw some extra dollars at it and fix the
property up.  Eventually, as your rent increases to
match the property’s appreciated value, what was
a net cash expense becomes a net cash positive.
Year after year, you purchase more and better
properties.  Some, you keep for the long haul.
Others, you sell for a profit and then invest that
money in two (or more) up-and-comers.  You
develop an intimate knowledge of the market.
You can see the specs for a property in a given
neighborhood and, sight unseen, know just
how much you should pay for it.  You learn to
separate your feelings from your actions.  You
buy value and you sell into a rising demand.
Before you know it, five years have passed.
Then 10.  And then 20.  One day, you add it
all up and realize you have accumulated more
than $10 million worth of real estate. What
seemed like a part-time hobby has become, in
retrospect, a retirement windfall.
Why This Is the Best Time
Ever to Build Wealth
Some see economic recovery just over the next
hill. It doesn’t look that way to me.  Still, I’m certain that now is the best time ever to build wealth.
Why?  Because now is always the best time.
Now is always the best time to start something
good.  Good things take time, and time is one
thing that is definitely limited.  The sooner
you begin, the faster you’ll get there.
This is universally true, but it’s especially true
when the goal is to build wealth.  You can’t
control the economy. You can’t predict the
markets. You can’t ultimately protect yourself from disaster.  But you can make yourself
richer tomorrow than you are today.
There’s always something you can do.  Work
an extra hour in the morning. Work another
extra hour before you go home at night. Sell
an extra widget.  Start a partnership.  Cook up
a moneymaking idea.
Remember, every dollar you earn today is
more valuable than a dollar you earn tomorrow How I Built My Wealth | www.earlytorise.com 6
Early to Rise
— because of the value of compound interest.
And every financially valuable secret you
learn today is more valuable than it would be
if you learned it tomorrow — because of the
value of compound knowledge.
Some specific business ideas are certainly
better delayed. (I’ve decided to put off buying an apartment house in my neighborhood
because I’m convinced local real-estate
prices will be lower next year.)  But wealthbuilding action — taking positive steps to
achieve your financial goals — is always
best done immediately.
Be cognizant of the times we live in — the
slowing economy, the burgeoning debt, etc.
— but be equally aware of the passing of time.
Every day that passes is 24 hours of opportunity you won’t have again.  Why not put a bit
of that time to work for you right now?
A Business Veteran Who’s Not
Afraid to Tell It like It Is
He helped take one business from nothing... to
$100 million in revenues. Then, after a short
retirement, he helped a second company grow
from $8 million to more than $300 million.
He got out of the real estate market before it
tanked. He anticipated the recent stock market crisis and got out in time to protect his investments.
In a nutshell, he’s run successful businesses for
more than four decades and he knows how to
teach others - that means you - to do the same.
I’m talking, of course, about Michael Masterson. He’s not only an entrepreneur, premier
business consultant, and investor, but also the
author of the New York Times, Wall Street
Journal, and Amazon bestsellers Changing
the Channel: 12 Easy Ways to Make Millions
for Your Business, Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero
to $100 Million in No Time Flat, and Seven
Years to Seven Figures, among others.
But he hasn’t forgot his roots as an entrepreneur, or what made him successful - as has
happened with other successful biz people
who take a rosy (and hazy) view of their rise
to the top when they set out to write their own
business tomes.
We’ve carefully selected his most breakthrough,
contrarian, and counterintuitive business principles and put them together in one place. It’s
available in The True Path to Profits: A Master
Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Success.
By learning from the “master” you can transform your own ventures. By learning the right
way to start a business you minimize your risk
of losing time and money.
But this isn’t useful only for start ups. Whether
you already have your own company or work
for somebody else you’ll learn principles and
“business rules” that will improve put you in
line for promotion after promotion.
You’ll know:
• The Anti-Trend Guide to developing 7-figure products.
• How to get your competitors - yes, your
competitors - to tell you exactly where to
find new customers.
• The 3 Key Elements that Must Work Together for Your Ads to Work
• The “right” mistakes to help your business grow
• And much more...
Find out more about The True Path to Profits
here.