Get Rich Versus Stay Rich
Get Rich Versus Stay Rich
Posted March 10, 2021 by blair
I don’t help people get rich, I help them stay rich. My job as a wealth manager is to help clients hold on to their wealth and to preserve and grow it to keep pace with inflation. My number one priority is to ensure that money is there to meet their goals, when they are ready to spend it. There are a lot of ways to get rich. The most reliable way is to spend less than you earn and invest the rest. Repeat consistently for four to five decades, and you are likely to secure a decent retirement. One of my favorite things about being an advisor is hearing the variety of ways people accumulated wealth.
I’ve seen and heard it all. Stock-based compensation is a common route, as is building a successful, privately-owned business. Then there are high earning professions such as medicine and law. In some cases, I work with the second or third generation of a family. One of my colleagues spoke to a true Tesla millionaire recently. They really do exist, and a few actually took some gains off the table.
A common theme among wealthy individuals is the realization that money earned easily can be lost just as quickly. There is a healthy fear of making a mistake they will regret. Morgan Housel put this perfectly in his book, The Psychology of Money:
There are a million ways to get wealthy , and plenty of books on how to do so. But there’s only one way to stay wealthy: some combination of frugality and paranoia.
This is not the first time I have referenced that quote from Morgan, and I doubt it will be the last. The truth of the matter is that many Americans have made fortunes in recent years. The current bull market, particularly in popular, high growth stocks, has made millionaires out of employees and investors in these companies. Some of them won’t be able to hold on to it.
Few things compare to the high of making millions off a concentrated bet; whether that bet is on a single stock, building a business, or working for a successful start-up. I imagine the brain responds to this high in the same way it does to addiction. The temptation to chase the next high is all-encompassing. I talk to investors all the time who can’t stop chasing that high.
Getting rich and staying rich are two very different skills. Getting rich is exciting, even thrilling, and often includes lots of risk taking. Staying rich is boring, bordering on mundane. That’s because the only way protect wealth with any degree of certainty is to diversify. Diversification by definition means that parts of the portfolio will always be lagging the rest of the market.
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