It is hard work to become a millionaire. This is especially true if you do it the hard way by starting at zero. There are a few secrets about how to get there that you need to know.

The first big secret, although it is not that big of a secret, is that you are going to have to go out there and take some kind of jump to do it. I was tempted to say risk, but that is not quite the right term. Taking a job has risk. You never know exactly how long you are going to have that job and no job is safe.

Having a job alone is not going to cut it. There are those jobs that will get you there there, but they are doctors, lawyers who bill out at $250 per hour and commercial real estate brokers who do $10M deals. These people are the exceptions. The rest of us need another way.

We all know someone who has been laid off. I live in Houston and can remember when Enron went under. There were a lot of smart people who had nothing to do with the scandal there. There were programmers, office assistants, IT people, and accountants who thought they were on a good place. All of a sudden they saw their retirement accounts go to nothing and were looking for work. This was the big one that caught headlines. How many other cases where a series of circumstances dried up all the cash of a company that had been in business for 50 years? How many times was a new executive get hired that made some ill-calculated decisions that cost millions of dollars where the company responses eventually lead to a “reduction in force”?

You need a job, but never become comfortable with the idea that this is what is going to carry you over to a financial threshold. Even if you worked your life there and put in you maximum amount into your 401K, you are still not looking at millionaire status until many years down the road. What will be the value of a million dollars then? Relying on savings and 401K money also means you have to survive the inevitable market corrections. Nothing is more discouraging than to see eight years of savings vanish because of “irrational exuberance” in the stock market.

All that being the case, you need to take some type of action to ensure your own financial security. The big question becomes what should that jump be and can you actually do it? Eventually you need to put down the copies of the “how to get rich” books and spend your time putting the plan into action.

For those who know what the target path is, it good for you. It is now time to start working. Others have a few ideas and probably more questions about the viability of our ideas than facts. For these people, the best course of action is to take the smallest and least risk components you can and start there.

A good example of low risk item to do – take you existing house, move out and lease it. This is more work and hours on your part, but it takes on less risk. Odds are if you bought a house, you have lived there for a couple of years. The market value is higher than what you paid and the note is at a lower amount than what you can get if you were to get a note for an investment property on the open market right now. Another way of saying all this, the cheapest way of buying a house is to get it for yourself.

Finding another house and packing up the kids stuff is no treat, but you now can now start building equity in two places and earning some cash on the side. When the market values go up, and they will, you gain twice as much as before. I have done this rotation several times and a significant piece of my wealth comes from this. Most people have a significant amount of their wealth tied up in their houses. Why not take advantage of that to its fullest.

One can only add additional rentals every few years. The in-between times are spent saving enough for the next down payment. In other words, there is time on your hands where you can do more. It is not just about doing one thing. To create wealth, we have to constantly look for new opportunities. If we get involved in something that becomes a full time effort, by all means we should focus all of our energy there. But for the new entrepreneur, some experimentation is most likely needed to find your true money making calling.

Take inventory about what you are truly gifted at. Do you mind going up to complete strangers in book stores and coffee shops and engaging them in meaningful conversations? If yes, you need to be in a multi-level-marketing business. I cannot do that and do not want to do that so I have to look elsewhere. I only found this out after failing at a multi-level-marketing. Do you have a specific interest in something and enjoy hunting down suppliers of that? If yes, then consider opening an online store or finding an online channel to sell through.

I have always been a big sports fan. I even went through a period where a friend and I traveled a few parts of the country to visit some of the baseball stadiums. I really enjoy learning about the park history and some of the nuanced statistics of the game. One of the businesses I got into was buying and selling baseball tickets. This lead to buying and selling tickets to other sporting and concert events. This very quickly became a lucrative business for me. I now hire other people to take care of certain aspects of the business. Not only am I making money from doing it, I turned it into another business by teaching people how to do it.

The ticket-selling business was not the first or only other business I had started. Many others flat out did not work or I lost interest. The fact I lost interest proved to me that it was a not a good choice to begin with. When I did have interest in the business, sometimes not matter how much interest you have, if there is not a market, you cannot do anything about it. Buying and selling tickets solved both of these for me.

For me it was buying and selling tickets, for someone else it could be hair care products of children’s toys. The point it is to find an interest you have and discover the ways to formulate a business plan around it.

Start small. Keep the risks to a minimum and most important of all do something.

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