WEBVTT 00:00:00.160 --> 00:00:33.790 Before I became a pastor, I spent twenty five years managing money for millionaires and a few billionaires. And I need you to sit with that for a second because in your head right now, you're probably picturing me working with a CEO in a corner office or maybe a pro athlete or maybe an entertainer or a rapper, and I did have a lot of those type of people as clients. But here's what may surprise some of you. Most of my millionaire clients weren't in the c suites. They weren't on the football field. 00:00:33.790 --> 00:01:04.130 They weren't on the basketball court. They weren't on a stage singing. Guess what? They were teachers, bus drivers, nurses, city and county government workers, people who had decent paychecks, but they weren't the type of people who would have ever been on the cover of a magazine. I used to sit across the table from them and pull up their statements on my computer and watch their faces full of surprise when they realized the kind of wealth they had built. 00:01:04.450 --> 00:01:27.870 Some of them couldn't believe the numbers. They couldn't believe that they were real millionaires, liquid millionaires. I remember I had a public school teacher. She asked me she said, Lee, I need you to check that twice because she just couldn't believe it. So let me tell you what I told her and what I'm going to tell you for the next few minutes, and it's this. 00:01:28.430 --> 00:02:03.770 Becoming a millionaire is not reserved for the exceptional. It is available to the disciplined. I think I wanna say that again. Becoming a millionaire is not just reserved for the exceptional, but it is available to those who are disciplined. And by the end of this video, you're gonna know exactly what that discipline looks like, not in theory, but from someone, me, who watched hundreds of ordinary people become millionaires in real life. 00:02:04.545 --> 00:02:48.075 So let's get into Okay. Before we go any further, I have to clear up something because this is where 90% of the people get it wrong. A millionaire is not someone who makes a million dollars a year. A millionaire is someone whose net worth, meaning their assets minus their liabilities, equals a million dollars or more. Now let me say that again. 00:02:48.635 --> 00:03:19.035 Net worth, not income, makes you a millionaire. Now this distinction changed how I did my job. You see, early in my career, I'd meet people with impressive titles and nice cars and big homes. And then when they would come to see me and sit in my office, I assumed that they were multimillionaires. I mean, based on how they were dressed and based on their reputation, and we didn't even have social media back in the eighties. 00:03:19.400 --> 00:03:50.670 So, you know, you just looked at what people had on and what they drove and where they lived, and you made an assumption about them. And then once I ran their numbers, I found out that they were leveraged up to their eyeballs. They had high income, but they also had high debt. And they had a high lifestyle, but they had a low net worth. I used to have a phrase I used with my staff back when I was an investment adviser, and I would say this. 00:03:50.670 --> 00:04:38.705 I would say, you can be income rich and asset poor. And I don't want you to be income rich, to make a lot of money, but then if you spend it all, you're gonna be asset poor. So I'd sit down with someone making $58,000 a year who had been quietly investing since their twenties, and they were driving a paid off Honda Accord. They were living in a modest house for fifteen years, and they had a 7 figure portfolio with me, and nobody would have ever guessed it. They were the quintessential millionaire next door, and nobody even knew it. 00:04:38.705 --> 00:05:13.530 And I'm here to tell you that's not a coincidence. That's math plus discipline plus time, and that's what this whole episode is about. So here's the verse that anchors everything I'm about to teach you, one of my favorite verses. It's found in Proverbs chapter 10 verse four, and it says, lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth. Now notice what it doesn't say. 00:05:13.850 --> 00:05:50.010 It doesn't say lucky hands bring wealth. It doesn't say hands that inherited something bring wealth. It doesn't say that hands with a business degree or a college degree brings wealth. It says diligent hands bring wealth, consistent hands, hands that show up and do the boring thing over and over again. So, yes, becoming a millionaire is simple, but I wanna be honest with you the way I was with my clients. 00:05:50.330 --> 00:06:18.070 Simple and easy are two different things. Simple means anyone can understand the steps, and I'm gonna help you understand that today. But easy means it doesn't cost you anything to follow them. So in order to become a millionaire, it's gonna cost you something because you're gonna have to learn how to exercise discipline. This is simple, but it's not easy. 00:06:18.310 --> 00:06:43.970 And that's exactly why most people never become millionaires. Not because they don't know what to do, but because they won't stay diligent enough to see it work. Now let's talk about what the diligent ones actually did. Hey, y'all. I've watched hundreds of regular people cross the million dollar mark. 00:06:44.210 --> 00:07:22.575 When I was in the investment business for twenty five years, people just like you became what I like to call everyday millionaires. And when I strip away all the noise, it always came down to really just a handful of behaviors. And I wanna walk through these behaviors with you one at a time because I believe you have the potential to become a multimillionaire. You just need to know what to do. So here's what these everyday millionaires or what I call the millionaires next door did. 00:07:23.135 --> 00:07:48.455 First, they earned an above average income. Now here's something that may take some pressure off of you right now. You don't need to make 6 figures to become a millionaire. I wanna say that over again. You don't have to make a $100,000 or more or to make multiple 6 figures to become a millionaire, and I mean that literally. 00:07:49.095 --> 00:08:16.100 A large number of my millionaire clients never crossed the $100,000 mark as it relates to their annual income. And how about this? They never crossed it their entire careers. So they worked thirty, thirty five, forty years and never hit a $100,000. But what they did have was a good income and an income that they continually maximized. 00:08:16.415 --> 00:08:43.420 The nurse got her certification that bumped up her pay grade. The government worker took the promotion exam. The bus driver picked up overtime routes during the years he was building his wealth, And none of them needed to be rich to start. They needed to be intentional about growing what they had. So here's the truth I need you to hear. 00:08:43.820 --> 00:09:10.370 It's not how much you make, it's what you do with what you make. I wanna say that again, you all. It's not how much you make that will make you a millionaire. It's what you do with what you make. As many of you know, I got drafted by the National Football League when I came out of college, And I remember some of my teammates were literally making millions of dollars, and, unfortunately, my career didn't last long. 00:09:10.370 --> 00:09:30.760 It really wasn't even a career. In fact, NFL for me stood for not for long. But I was out of the NFL after one year, and my buddies were still making. Some of them were making a million dollars. And here I was, a struggling stockbroker making $25,000 a year, and they were making a million. 00:09:30.760 --> 00:10:08.230 And we were, let's say, in our mid twenties. Well, five to ten years later, I was doing great, and some of these guys were broke. Now I didn't make a lot of money, but I learned how to take care of what I had. They made a lot of money, but, unfortunately, they did not take care of what they had. So I've watched a lot of high earners end up with nothing to show for it, but then I've seen people with modest incomes build wealth that blessed generations. 00:10:09.005 --> 00:10:25.260 So you gotta know this. Income is good. Income is a tool, but income is not the trophy, you all. Net worth is the trophy. Having real wealth is the trophy, not income. 00:10:25.420 --> 00:10:59.690 Number two, they spent less than they earned. Now here's the hard truth that you may not hear on Instagram or TikTok or on social media, but I have to say this. You cannot out earn bad spending habits. In other words, you can't make enough money to, outdo your bad spending habits. You see, I've sat across the table from a whole lot of people who made 6 figures, and they were one bad paycheck away from a bounced check. 00:10:59.770 --> 00:11:45.875 And yet I've sat across the table from modest income families who had a fully funded retirement account, who had six, seven, eight, nine months of cash reserves. And the difference was never the paycheck. The difference was the gap between what came in and what went out and what they did with that gap. The millionaires I work with lived below their means and invested the difference, not invested what was left over after their lifestyle, but they flipped the order. They invested first, and their lifestyle got whatever was left. 00:11:45.875 --> 00:12:16.295 Now that's a completely different posture toward money, and it's a completely different result twenty years later. This is also, by the way, very biblical. You see, stewardship isn't about how much money you make. It's about how faithfully you manage what's been entrusted to you. Luke sixteen ten tells us that whoever is faithful in a little will be faithful in much. 00:12:16.750 --> 00:12:55.680 You see, your spending habits on a small income are training you for how you'll handle a large income. And if you can't manage that gap now, more income won't fix it. It'll just make the mess bigger, which leads us to the third principle. They regularly invested for growth. You see, the millionaires I worked with treated investing like a bill they had to pay, not a leftover, not an afterthought, not something they'd get to, once things settle down. 00:12:56.315 --> 00:13:18.150 It was a nonnegotiable. The same way their mortgage or their light bill was a nonnegotiable. They consistently put money into growth stocks, into mutual funds, into ETFs. Some even branched off into real estate once they had a foundation. But here's the part most people skip. 00:13:18.710 --> 00:13:54.875 They kept investing whether the market was up or whether the market was down. That's called dollar cost averaging. And I want to explain this because it's the difference between people who build wealth and people who panic their way out of building wealth. Dollar cost averaging means you invest a fixed amount on a regular schedule regardless of what the market is doing that week. So when prices are down, your same dollar amount buys more shares. 00:13:55.275 --> 00:14:25.985 But when prices are up, it buys fewer shares. So over time, it smooths out the ride and takes the emotion and the fear and the greed and the panic selling completely out of the equation. Most people do the opposite. They invest when the market feels good, and they pull back when it feels scary, which means they're buying high and they're selling low. The exact reverse of what it takes to build wealth. 00:14:26.225 --> 00:15:08.740 My everyday millionaire clients didn't have a crystal ball, and neither did I. They just had a system, and they trusted the system more than they trusted their emotions. Number four, they automated their discipline. In other words, their contributions came out before they ever touched their paycheck. And y'all, that's very important because they made the decision months before or years before, and they made that decision because they knew that they might not have had the discipline to do it on their own, so they put it on autopilot. 00:15:09.060 --> 00:15:44.800 Willpower runs out, but systems don't. So if your wealth building depends on how you feel every single payday, you will eventually fail, not because you're weak, but because you're human. So you just need to build the system once and let the system do the discipline for you. Number five, they let time work for them. Y'all, this is the secret sauce, so I saved it for last on purpose. 00:15:44.880 --> 00:16:14.780 Ecclesiastes eleven one says, ship your grain across the sea. After many days, you will receive a return. Now I want you to think about this verse, what it is actually describing. It's describing a merchant who sent his goods out on a ship, and he doesn't see the return come back to him that day or even that week or probably not even that month. He has to release it. 00:16:14.940 --> 00:16:42.870 He has to trust the process. He has to wait, sometimes for a long time, sometimes for an uncertain stretch before the return comes back to him. And that is exactly what investing is. You release the money into the market, and the return doesn't show up on your timeline. It shows up on time's timeline. 00:16:43.190 --> 00:17:08.870 So here's the statement I want you to remember more than anything else in this video, and it is this. It's not timing the market that will make you a millionaire. It's time in the market that will make you a millionaire. So let me show you the math on that because the numbers are almost hard to believe you all. Check this out. 00:17:09.190 --> 00:17:51.765 If you start investing at 35 years old and put away $450 a month into an s and p 500 index fund and you average roughly 10% annually, you will cross the $1,000,000 mark sometime in your sixties. Not because you got lucky, not because you picked the right stock at the right moment, but because you gave your money enough time to compound. And here's the tragedy that I have watched play out over and over again. Most people, they wait. They wait until their debt is paid off. 00:17:51.765 --> 00:18:20.325 They wait until they get a raise. They wait until things settle down. And then next thing you know, they hit their sixties or seventies, and they're wondering why the million dollars never showed up, not realizing that the ten years they waited to start is exactly the ten years that would have made all the difference. So you all, this is so important, to our young people. You gotta start now. 00:18:20.325 --> 00:18:47.605 I know things are tight. I know you may have a car note, and I know you got other things you're doing, but time is the one ingredient in this recipe that you can never buy back. So if you just let time work for you, you can become a millionaire sooner than you think. So let's land the plane. Becoming a millionaire was never about a big salary. 00:18:48.085 --> 00:19:10.320 It was never about a flashing title or a corner office. Every single regular millionaire I sat across from for twenty five years did the same things I just talked to you about. They grew their income. They spent below their means. They invested consistently. 00:19:10.480 --> 00:19:35.970 They automated the discipline, and they gave it time. And none of that, you all, requires a finance degree. None of that requires an inheritance. None of that requires you to work on Wall Street like I did. It requires diligent hands, the kind that Proverbs ten four talks about. 00:19:36.530 --> 00:20:12.655 And I wanna say this plainly because I didn't leave the investment business just to teach people how to get rich. I left to teach people how to become faithful stewards because scripture never treats wealth as the goal. It treats wealth as a tool entrusted to you for kingdom purposes bigger than your own comfort. So that teacher I told you about at the top of this video, she didn't just build a portfolio. She built what we call margin. 00:20:12.655 --> 00:20:41.580 Margin is when you have room. It's when you have enough room in your budget and in your life to bless your kids, to walk with the kind of freedom, financially. Instead of financial fear, you have financial freedom. That is how you win with money. I don't want you to leave this video and just feel inspired for twenty minutes and then go back to doing what you were doing before. 00:20:42.035 --> 00:21:07.141 I wanna give you permission to start right now. So the first step is to subscribe by hitting the button below because we're covering these type of topics week after week, and we want you to be involved. So remember, diligent hands bring wealth. So go be diligent, and I'll see you in the next one.