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How to Become a Millionaire: A Step by Step Guide

[ad_1] The post How to Become a Millionaire: A Step by Step Guide appeared first on Millennial Money. Many dream of becoming a millionaire, but few people ever achieve that status. That’s because if you want to make a lot of money, you have to work very hard for it and have a tremendous amount of discipline.  Yet by following the right strategy and making the right investment decisions, anyone can become a millionaire—yourself included. Let’s find out how! Top Ways to Become a Millionaire Diversify your income streams Minimize taxes Invest, invest, invest Avoid bad debt Slash your expenses Save every month Invest in real estate Stick to a budget Get paid more at work Figure out your X factor Travel wisely Keep your eye on the crypto market 1. Diversify your income streams Unless you come from a wealthy family, you’re going to have to hustle harder than the rest to become a millionaire. There’s no easy way around it. Take a look at how many hours you’re currently putting into the average workweek and how many of those hours are genuinely productive. If you want to become a millionaire, you’ll have to work harder and smarter than the rest. It’s that simple. If you’re only working the standard 40-hour workweek, you may want to consider upping your production for a certain period of time.  One of the best ways to get more for your time each week is to start a side hustle. If your only income is from your day job, you will always be reliant upon your employer’s paycheck. By starting a side hustle or launching your own business, you’ll add another valuable income stream and gain valuable skills along the way. Although launching your business might take significant work upfront, the benefits are exponential. Once revenue starts to pick up, you can start to outsource the daily operations and scale yourself out of the business. Every additional income stream you create will significantly help your journey to become a millionaire. Learn More: Best Online Business Ideas for 2021 Passive Income Ideas to Make You Money 2. Minimize taxes  One key to becoming a millionaire is protecting your wealth, and this requires minimizing taxes. Take a look at most wealthy people and you’ll see this is a strategy by which they live and breathe.  As soon as you start making money, your best bet is to hire a tax consultant or certified financial planner. This professional can then identify opportunities for you to claim tax credits and reduce what you owe without causing any IRS issues.  The goal is to get your taxable income as close to zero as possible through qualified deductions. The more deductions you can legitimately itemize (e.g., phone, internet, transportation, and office expenses), the more your taxes go down.  Depositing money into your retirement accounts is another proven method for minimizing your taxable income.  Learn More: Federal Income Tax Guide for 2021 3. Invest, invest, invest If you want to make real strides, you have to invest in the stock market and take advantage of compound interest. This means opening an investment account and investing in stocks, index funds, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and bonds. There are two ways to do this. You can open a brokerage account for short-term and medium-term growth, but you’ll have to pay taxes on any capital gains and dividend yields you bring in each year.  The other method is to open a tax-friendly retirement plan like a traditional individual retirement account (IRA), Roth IRA, 401(k), Roth 401(k), or a Solo 401(k) or SEP IRA if you’re self-employed. You won’t be able to touch the money in these accounts until retirement age without penalty, but retirement plans are the best way to maximize long-term tax advantages.  Learn More: How to Start Investing 4. Avoid bad debt  There are two types of debt: positive (good) debt and negative (bad) debt.  If there’s one thing the average millionaire is good at, it’s avoiding bad debt and capitalizing on good debt.  An example of good debt is real estate, as it allows you to own your own home (or investment properties) and add to your own net worth over time. Student loan debt could also be considered positive because it can help you advance your career and bring in more money. (Student loans can be bad though, if, for example, you don’t land a high-paying job after school or you have a large, high interest rate loan.) Even credit card debt can be positive if you pay down your balances every month. Not only does this boost your credit score, but you can also collect cash back and travel rewards points just for making everyday purchases. What you want to avoid at all costs is bad debt like high-interest credit card balances that you can’t afford to pay off. Bad debt can also include high-interest car loans or personal loans that set you back hundreds of dollars each month. Making matters worse, high-interest debt can spiral out of control if an unforeseen financial obstacle pops up (e.g., you need expensive surgery that costs thousands out of pocket). If you want to become a millionaire, you have to avoid bad debt, plain and simple. Once you’re free and clear from bad debt, you can start saving and investing, which is the only way to reach your financial goals.  Learn MOre: Ways to Get Out of Debt Fast How to Get Out of Credit Card Debt 5. Slash your expenses  When you think of a millionaire, you may envision a lavish lifestyle of yacht parties and popping bottles. But these are the types of shenanigans you shouldn’t even consider until after you have several million saved in liquid assets. And even then, you have to be very careful about blowing your riches away, which can happen all too easily.  The truth is that most millionaires are great at being frugal. Myself included! Even after achieving success with Millennial Money

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Completely Honest Review of Reach Mobile

[ad_1] Reach Mobile is a service designed to provide high-quality phone and data plans at affordable rates. They pride themselves on having great coverage and fantastic customer service — all at a fair price. Interested in trying it out? Read this completely honest Reach Mobile review to help you decide! {Psst! Be sure to check out all my other completely honest reviews, too!} I had the opportunity to try out the Reach Mobile service and give an honest review. (This post is sponsored by Reach Mobile. Links used in this post are my affiliate links. All opinions are my own.) If you are in the market for a new phone service or are looking to lower your monthly rates, I definitely recommend checking out Reach Mobile. As I’ll explore in this post, it may or may not be a good fit for you. How Reach Mobile Works To get started with Reach Mobile (or to check and see how much it would cost to switch to Reach Mobile): Go here and choose how many lines you want to have on your plan. (The price per line goes down with a multiple-line group plan.) Then, choose the plan you’d like to use. You will automatically get 50% off your first three months by signing up through my link here. This discount should show for you at the checkout page. Next, fill in your information to create an account and go through the checkout process. Note: Reach is one of the few post-paid services that doesn’t require a credit check. Upon activating your plan, you will be charged on a monthly basis on the 7th of every month (your first month is pro-rated accordingly).* You will also be charged a one-time shipping fee of $3 for them to send your SIM card and welcome kit in the mail. If you activate your plan within 7 days of receiving your SIM, the shipping fee will be refunded. You will receive a welcome kit with your SIM card and instructions on setting up the phone service within 3-7 business days. Once you have received your welcome kit, just follow the simple instructions to set up your phone. (You will already need to have your own phone. If you don’t have one, Reach Mobile does offer unlocked, contract-free phones on their site.) Activating through the Reach app should take you about 15 minutes and then you are good to go! If you want to cancel your Reach Mobile phone plan at any time, you can do so without any penalties or extra charges. You will just pay through the end of the month you cancelled in. There is no contract and there are no hidden fees. *Important note: As it states on their website: “At the time of activation, a temporary hold will be placed on your credit card for the total value of the plan purchased.” Reach explained to me that they do this in lieu of a credit check to ensure payment can be made successfully. How Much Does Reach Mobile Cost? Depending upon the number of phone lines and the service you choose, Reach Mobile will be anywhere from $30/month for the Basic Plan up to $65/month for the Unlimited Plan for one phone. Each line comes with unlimited talk and text. If you add more than one phone to your plan, the rates lower per phone. However, all data (except for the All-in Unlimited Plan) is shared — so if you choose the Basic Plan and you have two lines, you will be sharing the 3GB between the two lines. One cool feature that Reach Mobile told me about when I chatted with their customer service was that you’ll only be charged for the data plan you use. So if you sign up for the People’s Choice 12GB plan ($55/month), but you only use 8GB that month, you’ll just be billed for the Moderate 8GB Plan ($40/month). In addition, if you sign up through my link (or use coupon code MSM503 at checkout), you’ll get 50% off the first three months. This would be a great way to try out the service very inexpensively and if it’s not for you, you can cancel at the end of the three months. What is the Service Like? According to Reviews.org: “Reach Mobile is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), which means it piggybacks on another network to provide coverage. In this case, Reach Mobile uses Verizon’s network, which just so happens to be the best in the country.  But there is a catch with Reach Mobile’s coverage. Since Reach is an MVNO, it can be deprioritized on the Verizon network. You might notice your data speeds and signal bars drop out of the blue, especially when you’re in a congested area. That’s because the Verizon network deprioritizes Reach Mobile users in favor of its own users. Think of it like a big pizza pie. If you’re feeding a group of people with a single large pepperoni, there are only so many slices to go around. It makes sense that the folks who paid more for the pizza (Verizon users) should get the most slices, as opposed to the folks who paid much less for the pizza (Reach users).” Reach Mobile Gives Back One of the things I love about Reach Mobile is their commitment to giving back. According to their website, “Reach contributes connectivity to Get a plan, Give a plan on behalf of every data plan, every month.” They go on to say on their site: “When you purchase a data plan with us, we donate the value of 10% of your data plan to a shared pool, which is used to fund and provide connectivity to recipients around the world. Connections given through Get a plan, Give a plan are allocated to individuals associated with our three nonprofit partners in the US, India, and Nigeria. Every time you purchase a data plan with Reach Mobile, you’re providing connectivity to someone that desperately needs

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Existing home sales data: A bad sign for housing market?

[ad_1] According to the National Association of Realtors, existing home sales for April’s housing market came in at 5,8500,000. This was a miss from estimates and the third straight month of declines in sales. I have been saying we should expect home sales to moderate since the end of summer 2020, and that is what we see in this report. This sales trend looks very normal to me. We saw a massive move-up in sales in the second half of 2020 and now were are getting the correcting declines. In the last existing home sales article for HousingWire, I wrote that we should see some sales prints under 5,840,000. We didn’t see that in this report but we should see some in the future. My biggest fear for the U.S. housing market for 2020 to 2024 is that home prices could escalate to an unhealthy level. Since the end of summer 2020, I have been expressing this concern in various interviews, including on Bloomberg Financial. Having the best housing demographics ever during the years 2020-2024, along with the lowest mortgage rates, gives you the best supply of replacement buyers ever. This is one of those advantage/disadvantage situations. The disadvantage is that total inventory levels are shallow, creating a bidding frenzy for the few homes on the market without too much growth in mortgage demand. Even though we do not see a credit boom, the bulk of existing-home sales demand is from primary-residence mortgage buyers. This content is exclusively for HW+ members. Start an HW+ Membership now for less than $1 per day. Your HW+ Membership includes: Unlimited access to HW+ articles and analysis Exclusive access to the HW+ Slack community and virtual events HousingWire Magazine delivered to your home or office BECOME A MEMBER TODAY Already a member? log in The post Existing home sales data: A bad sign for housing market? appeared first on HousingWire. [ad_2] Source link

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Making sense of the markets this week: May 24, 2021

[ad_1] Each week, Cut the Crap Investing founder Dale Roberts shares financial headlines and offers context for Canadian investors. Stocks could fall when the Fed fights inflation How do the U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks fight inflation? By increasing rates. And the fear is that inflation-fighting in 2021 will kill stocks. Let’s back up a bit and look at how that works. As always, one of the greatest threats to stocks is bonds. Higher rates will increase borrowing costs to cool inflation and cool off the economy. By design, the rate increases could put a heavy lid on, or even reverse, economic growth.  In this post on Yahoo! Finance, hedge fund manager Dan Niles suggests that stocks could fall by 10% to 20% when we see those rate increases.  From that post… “‘If you’ve got food prices, energy prices, shelter prices moving up as rapidly as they are, the Fed’s not going to have any choice,’ he said, predicting that the Fed could signal the beginning of a move to wind down its monthly $120-billion-a-month pace of asset purchases by this summer. ‘They can say what they want, but this reminds me to some degree of them saying back in 2007 that the subprime crisis was well-contained. Obviously it wasn’t’.” (That said, as we discovered in last week’s post, higher rates don’t have to follow inflation. After the Second World War, we had robust inflation, but rates were suppressed.)  But are stock losses the only possible outcome of this central bank strategy? This post from BMO offers that while rising rates can cause stocks to fall in the short term, positive gains have more often followed a rising-rate environment.  From that BMO post…  “On the flipside, CFRA Research, an independent investment research firm, found that in the 16 times the Federal Reserve cut rates since World War II, the stock market was higher six months later 11 times, while it was still higher 12-months later 13 times.” And this Barron’s post offers…  “If the broader economy is expanding, this thinking goes, higher rates may simply reflect the rising pace of economic activity. Economic expansion has historically been an underpinning of corporate earnings growth, which historically has often been identified as a driver of long-term stock returns.” Barron’s suggests a buying opportunity might present itself…  “In the U.S., large-capitalization equities have frequently staged a short-term dip as investors assess the change in environment, but these episodes have frequently proven to be buying opportunities.” This post from Economics Help offers a very good overview on the effects of rising rates. It also suggests that a rising-rate environment contributed to two notable UK recessions.  This tweet and chart courtesy of Lance Roberts and Real Investment Advice looks at the U.S. Fed fund rate versus U.S. stocks from 1982. We can see a rising-rate environment accompanied market corrections in some periods. Aggressive rate increases contributed to the recessions and severe stock market corrections known as the dot-com crash in the early 2000s and the financial crisis that began in 2008.  pic.twitter.com/lmY2AdO5g6 — Lance Roberts (@LanceRoberts) May 20, 2021   Roberts offers that many articles or studies only look at short-term stock returns, not how the rate increases play out over the next two or three years, or more.  Here is the tell-all table on rising rates and U.S. stock returns.  Source: Lance Roberts and Real Investment Advice Stock market corrections show up, eventually. Some corrections are minor and others are more significant. And, yes, we see that word “recession” appear with regularity. Rising rates more than did the job of cooling off the economy, on more than a few occasions. And, certainly, recessions are the big game changers—and perhaps the greatest risk.  This post shows the returns and inflation in the year following the first rate increase. We can see the distinction between periods of low and moderate-to-high inflation.  Keep in mind that certain kinds of stocks can thrive in periods of a rising-rate environment, and that includes banks and insurance companies—where Candians and Canadian markets are notoriously overweight. In this Million Dollar Journey post, I showed how REITs can (surprisingly) enjoy a rising-rate environment.  We can use short-term bonds and bond ladders to provide greater income over time in a rising-rate environment. We know that long-term bonds (treasuries) will usually show their worth when meaningful stock-market corrections occur. They can go up in price as stocks are getting hit. But, of course, the longer-term bonds will get hit in price as bond rates rise.  In this post we discussed the bond barbell (long and short bonds).  The rate environment is out of our control. What we can control is our asset allocation and our portfolio risk level.  Be prepared—for corrections and recessions alike.  The duopoly of Home Depot and Lowe’s Readers will know that I love wide moats and oligopolies, so I wanted to devote some space to two U.S.-based home renovation retailers that dominate their space.  We all know Home Depot and Lowe’s, as they have significant operations in Canada and the U.S. Lowe’s also owns and operates the Rona brand.  We own Lowe’s stock in one of my wife’s accounts, and were happy to see their earnings report this week. In fact, both Lowe’s and Home Depot reported this week.  This near-duopoly is on an impressive run. They were 2020 pandemic proof, in the work-from-home and work-on-your-home pandemic economy. And they are turning out to be wonderful economic recovery stocks.  Courtesy of Seeking Alpha, here’s the overview for Lowe’s for the first quarter of 2021:  Source: Seeking Alpha That is some incredible growth on the revenue and earnings fronts. And here are the topline numbers for Home Depot for the first quarter of 2021:  Source: Seeking Alpha They are both very well-run companies that operate in a very profitable space, with plenty of growth. I’d be more than happy to own Home Depot as well.  Investors might bolt on his home-reno tag team if they manage their own

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4 Things You Need to Know about Oatly, Which Just Went Public

[ad_1] The post 4 Things You Need to Know about Oatly, Which Just Went Public appeared first on Millennial Money. Oat milk has been all the rage in recent years, quickly becoming the second most popular plant-based milk in the United States behind almond milk. One of the leaders in that category, Oatly (NASDAQ: OTLY), just went public this week with a traditional IPO, with shares immediately surging out of the gates on Thursday after the offering priced at $17 on Wednesday evening. Here are four things food investors need to know about the Swedish company. What is Oatly? Oatly is the largest oat milk company in the world, offering a wide variety of products including milks, ice cream, yogurt, and more. The company argues that its oat-based offerings can help combat climate change since plant-based dairy products have a lower carbon footprint than traditional animal-based alternatives. Oatly estimates that its products produce 80% less in greenhouse gas emissions, require 79% less land usage, and require 60% less energy consumption. In terms of distribution, Oatly offers its products at roughly 60,000 retail locations and at over 32,000 coffee shops. The company entered the Chinese market in 2018 with specialty coffee and tea products and now has roughly 9,500 foodservice and retail points of sale. Oatly is the clear leader in the category of alternative dairy products, enjoying a dominant 53% market share in its home market of Sweden. The company is also the top-selling brand in the oat category in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany. Strong revenue growth but widening losses Sales are booming, with Oatly’s revenue more than doubling in 2020 to $421.4 million. The company is investing heavily in the business, leading to an operating loss of $47.1 million last year.  Losses widened last year, with Oatly posting a net loss of $60.4 million in 2020, compared to $35.6 million in red ink for 2019. Adjusted EBITDA was negative $32.3 million, similarly worse compared to negative $20.7 million in 2019. Nearly majority-controlled Oatly’s largest existing shareholder is Nativus, which is a subsidiary of China Resources Verlinvest Health. Through all of its affiliated entities, China Resources Verlinvest Health is expected to wield 45.9% to 47.5% of all voting power (depending on whether or not the underwriters exercise the greenshoe option), giving it outsized influence in all matters related to corporate governance. That level of voting power narrowly falls short of majority control, which would require at least 50% voting power. However, it’s worth noting that cofounders Rickard and Bjorn Oste control another 4.4% through an Oste Ventures entity that the brothers own. Management often votes in line with prominent shareholders, which could effectively mean public investors will have little to no say in how Oatly is run. Geographic breakdown Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) is Oatly’s largest geographical segment, with the Americas coming in second. Asia is a bit smaller but growing rapidly. Geographic Segment 2020 Revenue YOY Growth EMEA $302.9 million 88% Americas $100.2 million 156% Asia $53.7 million 427% Data source: Prospectus Oatly says that continued geographic expansion will be instrumental for future growth. Pick Like A Pro The next blockbuster IPO? 2021 could be one of the biggest years for IPOs in stock market history. Yet, with just a small fraction of IPOs historically driving nearly all the profits, who will you trust to uncover the most innovative and high-upside IPOs in the coming months? There’s a company that “called” these businesses long before they hit it big. They first recommended Netflix in 2004 at $1.85 per share, Amazon in 2002 at $15.31 per share, and Apple back in the iPod Shuffle era at $4.97 per share. Take a look where they are now. That company: The Motley Fool. For people ready to make investing part of their strategy for financial freedom, take a look at The Motley Fool’s flagship investing service, Stock Advisor. They just announced their top 10 “best buys now” across the entire stock market. Whether you’re starting with $100, $500, or more, you should check out the full details. Click here to learn more The post 4 Things You Need to Know about Oatly, Which Just Went Public appeared first on Millennial Money. [ad_2] Source link

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Beachcomber Seashell Bags only $7.99 shipped!

[ad_1] Planning to visit the beach this summer? These Beachcomber Seashell Bags are great for collecting sea shells! Jane has these Beachcomber Seashell Bags for just $7.99 shipped right now! Made from waterproof nylon, the mesh material allows you to simply rinse your bag with your shells off when finished and leave the sand behind! These also work great for nature walks and are the perfect bag for kiddos to store treasures they find along the way. Choose from five colors. Psst! We love Jane! Looking for other great Jane deals? Check out our custom Jane page for more of our hand-picked favorite deals each day! [ad_2] Source link

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