By Shaun Montoya
The year I turned 19 I began to dream of working on Wall Street because we were in the midst of a total financial crisis and I began having thoughts on how the country can change its failing economics. The year I turned 23 I broke into my first job on the street and began to study wealth attainment, from rags to riches. I started a blog to begin materializing some of these thoughts into the minds of those of our generation, because part of what I believe is that our immense wealth gap from rich to poor is contributed by an education system that lacks the education of wealth at the bottom and not at the top.
Rich money, poor money. A lot’s in the mindset.
I’m currently a non-wealthy middle-class 23 year-old Millennial, to say the least, studying the riches in money-making Manhattan on my very own shiny penny.
In fact I went to Wall Street to study and earn wealth, because it’s the only place that “befit my high-minded ambitions”. I started initially by coming into contact with very wealthy men by cold-calling their offices. To say the least, the rich can be very, very witty when they’re angrily condemning what they believe is your shit job wasting their precious minutes, but believe it or not a select few of them a day actually appreciate an ambitious kid in New York trying to earn their business. Speaking to these gentlemen has helped to realize some poverty-driven mentalities that I’ll get into at some point. But more importantly on the street, I’ve taken myself under the wing of two seasoned self-made millionaire stockbrokers to learn a thing or two about the techniques and habits of being a successful businessman, all while studying for my Series 7 licensing for shit money. I’ve read many books on becoming wealthy, including the driest content of all in my government-sponsored Series 7 study material.
And what I have learned thus far about wealth wasn’t as obvious to me as it might have been for others. I mean, there is literally on average tens of billions of dollars that change hands from one person to another in the U.S. economy every. single. day. It circumvents the country all around us, passing through us like radio waves in search of antennas. And you know who has a rod? The fucking rich people and their rich mindsets, striving to catch signal by any means: through entrepreneurship, through smart investments, through just about any creative means possible. And they’re succeeding only because they understand wealth, just enough so that they believe their income should not be isolated solely by the wages paid by your business owner and his company’s labor budget, but from just about every angle you can possibly conceive of outside of wages.
And by the way, what did public schools teach us all about making money? Along with our parents and their parents long ago, we’ve heard “study hard and get a good job.” You see, no teacher taught us how to make real money, and it’s probably because millionaires don’t teach high school. But to the others in the 1% club, working for wages is not only one of many ways to earn money, but it’s just about the least significant form of income (especially for the 0.1% club). You see there is no antenna of wealth found by earning a fixed dollar amount of your boss’s earnings. In fact, at the very top of a very successful business, the top boss’s income comes as a nice chunk of his or her consumers’ income, which could be millions of people and what money they have, all being seduced by your top boss and his business, funneled into his pockets from all corners of the country, to him and his antennal wallet.
And if it’s a fortune 500 company, it doesn’t just go to one top boss. It might go to several individuals, essentially anyone who has an ownership stake in the business, of whom share a portion of the profits. I mean granted, it may not be as stable as a guaranteed fixed income of $60k a year, but if its a multi-million dollar business, no one is talking about $60k.
What do they call these people again? Oh yeah, shareholders. Ah, the evil shareholders we all hate down here at the bottom. Now why is it we hate rich people again? Is it because we loathe the money they earn that we want a slice of? Actually when I was a young teenager I hated the 1%. It just seemed like it was a buzz among us modest Millennials. I remember thinking that they were greedy spineless psychopaths who sold their souls for another million bucks. Of course, if a million bucks showed up in my pocket that wouldn’t be so bad. But hypocrisy is pretty much fixed in a teenager’s growth path and I was content with the ignorance of integrity. Or maybe I just felt self-entitled for my hard work of doing nothing all day.
But a million bucks doesn’t just show up in one’s pocket, no matter how entitled you may feel to it. That’s why courageous men and women begin businesses, to take a stake in potential profits if they worked hard, and because working hard under someone else’s business didn’t always pay dividends without a mix of brown-nosing office politics and years of patience and diligence. Thus, they become shareholders of their own hard work with their name on it, and what’s even more is that they become shareholders of other businesses with the excess cash they store. What I mean is that they buy stock (shareholder interest) in other companies, collecting dividends and increasing their cash pile, and really all they did was save some cash and buy a stake in the company. They then go on to engage in an array of different businesses, actively or passively, and increase their wealth because at some point or another, in their journey outside of the 9-5 grind, they learned how to make money.
Here’s what it boils down to from here: in a $16 trillion a year economy, $43 billion of those dollars circulate around us in this country each and every single day on average. Wealth is represented by greenbacks, but wealth isn’t the nicely sewn paper dollars in your wallet, it is a multi-dimensional power that liberates your ability to engage in the world freely, and it exists all around us. It is as light is, available to a lower class of people of whose eyes are closed shut. Wealth is not money, it is nothing more or less than a special capacity at which you are able to engage with the world. As your wealth increases, so your capacity. As your capacity increases, so your wealth. And riches are shy and timid, and they are only seduced by the boldest and aggressive of those among us.
So here’s what money advice I wish to offer in short (as I’m actually now legally licensed to (capable of) giving investment advice): Get out of debt completely above all. Live off 90 percent of your income. Pay yourself the other 10 percent without fail. Grow your money, and then put your money to work for you. Invest your savings in mutual funds and hold it. Come to me for help. Watch your money grow and learn what’s happening to it. Then invest in stocks, or bonds, or real estate, or options, or anything that befits your profile. Come to me for help. Go out into the wind and accomplish your dreams. Start a business. Start a charity. Stick your hand out into the world and stop some of the world’s cash flow dead in it’s tracks. Be bold. Don’t live your life working for someone else, have others work for you. Have money work for you. Take a goddamn risk because if you don’t, you force yourself into relying on the rich above you to pay for your life, and the incompetent government below you to catch you if they fail.
Money isn’t everything to life, but freedom most certainly is.
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