Is business the only way to become a millionaire?
"Not at all. The Millionaire Next Door offers a book full of anecdotes on couples that earned money and saved their way to being millionaires. I believe about 1/3 or so had businesses, but the rest were employed and simply saved wisely.  $3860/yr saved for 40 years at 8% will return $1M. Adjust the numbers to hit a million sooner or reach a higher goal.  The Author might be accused of survey bias. This is the phenomenon of studying the final results without looking at the pool of people years prior. Little Adv' is correct that while 1/3 of millionaires may have gotten that way by starting a business, that says nothing about how many businesses need to start to find the one millionaire that resulted.  I view the book more as a lesson of ""spend beneath your means"" and focus on his anecdotes of the dual income couples who saved their way to this status. If you are in no rush, get this book from your library and spend the few hours to read it. In response to my Friend Dilip's comment, MoneyChimp offers a good look at compound growth (for the S&P) over time. The 40 years ending 2012, which obviously include the 'lost decade,' returned a CAGR of 9.78%. Not to be confused with the average 11.43%. When I pull the numbers for each year's return and apply an annual $3860 deposit, the 40 years ends with $2.2M. A 1% fee, or 1% lower return resulted in $1.6M.  If 8% isn't conservative, of course you can run the numbers you wish. The 40 years contained both a lost decade and two great ones. Will the 3 decades post-lost average to get the Quad-Decade period to 8%+? I don't know." That's actually a pretty good way to get bankrupt quick. You can get rich quick through lottery, gambling, mere saving or investing wisely, or marrying someone from the Kennedy or Bush clans. Starting a business is one of the ways to become a millionaire, but definitely not the only one.
"It is difficult to become a millionaire in the short term (a few years) working at a 9-to-5 job, unless you get lucky (win the lottery, inheritance, gambling at a casino, etc). However, if you max out your employer's Retirement Plan (401k, 403b) for the next 30 years, and you average a 5% rate of return on your investment, you will reach millionaire status.  Many people would consider this ""easy"" and ""automatic"". Of course, this assumes you are able to max our your retirement savings at the start of your career, and keep it going.  The idea is that if you get in the habit of saving early in your career and live modestly, it becomes an automatic thing. Unfortunately, the value of $1 million after 30 years of inflation will be eroded somewhat.  (Sorry.) If you don't want to wait 30 years, then you need to look at a different strategy.  Work harder or take risks.  Some options:" If you could find a breakdown, I suspect that it would show not just that they are self employed but own their own company. There are many people that are self employed, many of them make a good living at it, but are not millionaires.  My neighbour the plumber is a perfect example of this sort of self-employed and comfortable but not rich person. The key to wealth growth is to own (a significant part of) a company.  It one way to leverage a smaller amount of money to something much larger.  Plough your profits back in to the company to grow it, pay yourself reasonably for some time as the company grows.  After it is some size, you can afford to pay yourself more of the profits, if not sell it as a going concern to someone else. One last thought - I am assuming that your book is claiming that they made their money through self-employment, instead of choosing to become self employed  after striking rich somewhere.  If I were to win the lottery, I might then become a self-employed something, but in that case it was not my self-employment that got me there. There is no 1 2 3 to being successful. Everyone's story is different but generally there is some composition of connections, networking, dedication and opportunity involved.   Anyone offering easy steps to being financially successful is a scammer and anyone willing to buy into it is a chump.   Go out and build a network, learn and offer product/service that has demand is the most general you can be. "I can name far more non-real estate millionaires than those who are. That statistic isn't only not valid, it's not even close.  Update: The correct quote is ""90% of all Millionaires become so through owning Real Estate"" and it's attributed to Andrew Carnegie. Given that he was born in 1835, I can imagine that his statement was true at he time, but not today." "The ""coin flip"" argument made in the article is absurd.  My old boss had a saying, ""the harder I work, the luckier I get.""  He came from nothing, worked maniacally to become an Olympian, and later in life became a multi-millionaire.  This is a common story among self-made people.  I DO think that the rich have significant advantages:  education, contact networks, access to startup capital, etc.  These are very helpful, but don't assure success.  Their lack is not insurmountable by the ambitious.  I also think those advantages have expanded in recent years.  Monetary policy has resulted in a large pool of investable funds being made available to to the financial sector, who earn high incomes with rent-seeking tactics." Stay in school, learn everything you can, and spend as little money as possible.  And realize that the chances of you dropping out and becoming a millionaire are much lower than the chances of you staying in school and becoming a millionaire.  You're unlikely to be a good investor if you make bets with negative expected payoffs. Think about Wall Street. It's the most highly paid occupation in the world and it's nothing but a casino. I don't think the article is saying that success is only luck, or that there aren't successes built far more on genius than luck, but that luck is the main factor in the majority of cases of great wealth. Playing the markets is simple...always look for the sucker in the room and outsmart him. Of course if you can't tell who that sucker is it's probably you. If the strategy you described could make you rich, cnbc staff would all be billionaires. There are no shortcuts, do your research and decide on a strategy then stick to it in all weather or until you find a  better one. Well, I'm sorry that you're so thin-skinned. Here's a simple logical relation that I think absolutely holds true: hard work is neither necessary nor sufficient for success. It's certainly to be valued, but not as a form of cult worship.  There are so many people who are smarter, more tenacious and work harder than anyone you've ever known -- and they were cut down by malaria, murder, or a god damned piano falling on their heads. Them are the breaks. For every billionaire/famous person out there, there're at least 100 also-rans with analogous talent and prospects (at one point).  Chance rules us all, and it takes NOTHING away from the hard-working to admit that. "I think there's a measure of confirmation bias here. If you talk to somebody that started a successful business and got a million out of it, he'd say ""it's easy, just do this and that, like I did"". If you consider this as isolated incident, you would ignore thousands of others that did exactly the same and still struggle to break even, or are earning much less, or just went broke and moved on long time ago. You will almost never hear about these as books titled ""How I tried to start a business and failed"" sell much worse than success stories. So I do not think there's a guaranteed easy way - otherwise we'd have much more millionaires than we do now :) However, it does not mean any of those ways is not worth trying - whatever failure rate there is, it's less than 100% failure rate of not trying anything.  You have to choose what fits your abilities and personality best - frugality, risk, inventiveness? Then hope you get as lucky as those ""it's easy"" people are, I guess." Million Dollar Marketing Machine is a top tier business venture that offers the new business owner the opportunity to make large sums of money earning money in sums greater than $500 per transaction.  The financial transactions can be as high as $12,000.  Each business owner collects their own money and they have the opportunity to have their own websites set up by the company of Million Dollar Marketing Machine.  Previously known as Million Dollar Marketing Formula.  Affiliation to the Pizza Box Business. I disagree that it is a silly way to do business. I think many industries are actually moving in the direction of MLM. The whole idea with a successful MLM like amway is that they spend no money on advertising. Did you know most companies spend about a third of their revenue back into advertising? Amway instead pays back that money as a bonus to their distributors. I can't remember which year off the top of my head but a couple years ago amway paid back over 4 billion dollars in bonus to their people. Now look at Uber, they are kind of cutting out the middle man also. Interesting right? Just to punch it in, my friend owns bars/restaurants and is a multi millionaire at the age of 29. His career choice wasn't corporate ladder, but entrepreneur.   I'm investing his wealth and he is giving me a generous deal, I'm starting my own investment firm and having him as a client is the only client I need to be potentially a millionaire as well too.   Don't pigeonhole yourself like everyone else does, but also know what you are capable of. Some people just aren't made to be their own boss as much as they say they could so it takes a bit of swallowing your pride and moving along to your best pathway.  I could no way ever work for someone else so I swallowed my pride in a way and went my own path by saying bye to the corporate world. Some people think this is the ultimate goal, but I would relinquish potentially moving up that ladder and having that sort of prestige etc. Robert Kiyosaki repeatedly stressed that starting your own business is risk free and the easiest way to get rich, yet he's never done it - and has actually failed in business 3 times. He won't release his real estate investment history or his stock market investments.   After failing many times he had no money until he joined network marketing groups to sell these books, he has made his money from his courses and books and has probably lost money from actual investments - I say this because most of his property investments were bought when market prices were very high. He's also stated that he essentially speculates on stock prices, when his broker phones him with the idea that a stock is about to go up he will shift lots of money into those stocks.  If you'd like to read more, this exposes everything about him: [http://www.johntreed.com/Kiyosaki.html#bothsides](http://www.johntreed.com/Kiyosaki.html#bothsides)  [Wall street journal article about him and Donald Trump.](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116052181216688592.html?mod=money_page_left_hs)  [Another video about 'get rich quick real estate gurus' ](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx2KMUvqRIM&amp;feature=player_embedded)  This is turning into a cult following with people spending thousands on credit cards to go to these courses and receive this poor advice, please watch this BBC documentary to see the way people are acting about this 'get rich quick real estate' scheme: [BBC Iplayer link](http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b017xgn6/Money_Who_Wants_to_be_a_Millionaire/) any business selling for only 1,000 will not be worth getting into. marketing alone should cost you more than that if you have any genuine hope of turning a profit. buy some books instead. work for someone, learn the ropes, read books, practice what you read at work, then start something with your savings in 5 years.