The 4 Minute Millionaire

The 4 Minute Millionaire is a collection of 44 short lessons sourced from the best finance books, each paired with an action item to help you get closer to financial freedom in just 4 minutes a day.

When it comes to achieving financial independence, many people defeat themselves before they even begin. If you think learning about money is useless until you have a lot, you’ll likely never accumulate any of it.

“Do not discount your ability to save and invest because life forces you to save and invest small at first,” I wrote. “It matters. What you do with your money counts more than how much you have.”

In Playing With FIRE, Scott Rieckens gave the example of a woman who didn’t see a way to early retirement because she and her boyfriend made less than $50,000 per year between the two of them. Eventually, however, they found ways to live on just 65% of that money, thus saving and investing some $18,000 per year!

Nowadays, $100 can buy you a fractional share of Amazon, an entire bundle of personal finance courses, or a piece of equity in someone’s crowdfunding campaign. Even with small amounts of money, the possibilities are almost endless.

Don’t feel bad about starting small. Take pride in it. Just start, and you’ll be well on your way.

In 2018, Tom Lee from Fundstrat had a bad summer. A year before, he had hailed Bitcoin as a replacement for gold and made a bold price prediction. Worse, he had advised his clients to pour millions of dollars into the asset!

Now, the price was down 75%, and, for a total of three years, Tom Lee looked like an idiot. And then, suddenly, he was a genius. Bitcoin surpassed its 2017-high and outpaced Lee’s past predictions.

“Risk” means that something might go up or down, but it also means that it’ll go somewhere. Take no risk, on the other hand, and you — or your money, in this case — is guaranteed to stay put. “There is no asset without risk, so if you avoid risk, you’ll also avoid building wealth. The trick is to make the risk endurable, both financially and emotionally.”

Risk is something to be managed rather than avoided. In Tom Lee’s case, he advised his clients to only put a small portion of their portfolio into Bitcoin, and I’m sure he gave them a point at which to cut their losses as well.

“Make the risks you take small enough so you can tolerate them, and then wait for your hypotheses to play out. That’s what great investors do.”