One of the first things I noticed when my husband and I moved from being poor to being financially stable and then rich was how our conversations changed. I don't mean the talks we had with each other. I mean the talks we had with friends, coworkers, and even people we didn't know. We never talked about this new subject with our family before. Money was the subject.
When Brad and I had a lot of debt and lived in a four-room mobile home, we never talked about money at parties, work events, or family gatherings. It was considered rude to talk about legal money unless you were talking about a drop in income or how Uncle Sam stole more money from you. But as our finances got better and we started putting our savings into investments, a whole new world opened up to us. We noticed that we were talking about money with more and more people who weren't our family and friends. It was the most strange thing ever.
One conversation stands out more than the others. I was finishing up a bagel and a cup of coffee in the break room at work when one of my coworkers came in and sat down next to me. He was 52 years old and a gentleman. After we said our hellos, he dropped a bombshell on me. "Next month, I'm going to retire." I gave her a blank look and asked, "You're what?" He repeated his answer, and then he said that he had noticed I never ate lunch in the cafeteria and always brought my own coffee in a thermos to work. He asked me what I was going to do when I got old. At the time, I was 31.
I laughed and said that Brad and I probably wouldn't be able to retire for another 30 years or so. Then he looked me in the eye and said, "If you want to, you can do it faster than that." He then told me about a 15-year plan that he and his wife had used to save enough money so that they could quit working for good. I was speechless. Nobody had ever talked to me like that about money. I learned that rich people talk about money, but middle-class people and others don't, unless they have something bad to say about it.
How will this affect you? Simple as that. Start acting like rich people do and start talking to people who can help you about money. When was the last time you talked to your "rich" Uncle about money that didn't involve a loan? Start asking people who have money what they think you should do with it and how you should work with it. Don't get personal or ask for details about their money, but do ask them what they would do. If you're like me, your family probably didn't have a savings account very often. When I had $5,000 in a savings account for the first time, I panicked because I knew I HAD to do something with it, but I didn't know WHAT. I thought that having a plan for how to invest money was like sending a rocket to the moon. I didn't know anything about it at all!
Start talking to financial experts or wealthy family members. If no one in your family is wealthy, set up a meeting with the "rich" person in your town. Ask the person that everyone knows what advice they would give to someone who is just starting out. When I was 32, I did the same thing. I called a man worth $25 million and asked to meet with him for 30 minutes. I was willing to pay him his consultant rate. He charged $400 for each hour.
The best way to think like a rich person is to start making plans and goals for what you want to do with the money you are saving. If you're like me and don't know what to do with your money, talk to people who invest and ask them how they do it.
