3 Big Myths About Money

The truth about money is that anyone can have it – and lots of it! With the right mindset, education, and dedication, anyone can become financially independent. Our goal is to help provide you with the mindset and the education necessary to achieve your financial goals, and part of creating the mindset first requires that we dispel some common myths that keep people from attaining wealth.

Here are the some of the most common myths that you must remove from your head before you can truly start to think likely the wealthy think:

Myth #1: The wealthy are born, not made

Most people are conditioned from a young age to believe that the wealthy are somehow different than the rest of us. We believe that wealth is something that is bestowed upon us, as opposed to something each and every one of us has the ability to create from the resources we have at our disposal.

Despite the common belief, most wealthy folks achieve their wealth – they don’t acquire it through inheritance or birthright. Here are some eye-opening statistics from … book, “The Millionaire Next Door”:

  • Only 19 percent of millionaires receive any income or wealth of any kind from a trust fund or an estate
  • Fewer than 20 percent of millionaires inherited 10 percent or more of their wealth.
  • More than half of all millionaires never a single dime of inheritance.
  • Nearly half of all millionaires never received any support in funding a college education from their parents or other relatives.
  • Fewer than 10 percent of millionaires believe they will ever receive an inheritance in the future.

While it might make you feel better to believe that getting rich is a matter of being born into it, that’s not the case.

Myth #2: There’s not enough to go around

This is one of the most common beliefs among those who are not rich – they believe that money is a scarce resource that’s difficult to come by. But, the wealthy have a different mindset; they believe that there is more than enough money in the world to go around, and that attaining wealth is just a simple matter of going after it.

I’ll have more to say about this in another article, but consider this: Starbucks had revenue of $7.8 billion in 2006. That’s over $21 million dollars per day that people in this country are spending on coffee, an obvious non-necessity. And this is just at Starbucks. Imagine how much people are spending at other coffee-houses. And imagine how much people are spending on other non-essentials besides coffee.

People spend literally trillions of dollars per year on non-necessities. And this is just individual consumers. Businesses spend literally trillions more dollars every year.

My point is, there is plenty of money to go around; you just need to go after it.

Myth #3: I’m not smart enough to get rich

Many people believe that to get rich, you have to be smart. That somehow being book-smart or having a high IQ provides people with an additional benefit towards creating wealth. Not only is this not true, but the opposite may just be the case – higher intelligence may be a predictor of financial difficulty.

While there is evidence that IQ is related to income – which makes sense because higher-IQ folks tend to go to college, and a degree is a predictor of income – there is no relationship between IQ and the ability to achieve wealth. A study published by Ohio State University researchers just this year found no relationship between measured intelligence and the person’s ability to become wealthy.

The study further concluded that those with higher levels of intelligence are more likely to fall into financial distress, either by maxing out their credit cards or missing payments.

Bottom line: If you’re smart enough to be reading this article, you’re smart enough to achieve wealth and financial independence.