Work & Finance

7 Wealth-Boosting Secrets

Take these steps right now, and you’ll amass a bigger fortune in less time

The smell of money is unmistakable. The waft of a full wallet: part leather, part oily paper stock, part sweat. Raymond Chandler wrote in Farewell, My Lovely, “They say money don’t stink. Sometimes I wonder.” Oh, it is indeed a glorious stink. Chandler’s character was a nameless hot dog vendor looking for some graft, but for a lot of guys, that line is the bottom one.

Funny thing about money: It’s the only way to create wealth. Bucks are bricks. Wealth is your Great Wall. Wealth provides security and comfort, and can improve the lives of you and your loved ones. The Great Wall wasn’t built in a day, but these strategies can be under way in 10 minutes. You’ll have to stick to it, but if the hardest step is the first one, we just made your life easier. Embrace these directives and you’ll find that distinctive odor wafting from your own wallet. Maybe money does stink. But wealth? Wealth always smells sweet.

Buy her flowers. In a 15-year Journal of Sociology study of 9,000 people, those who married boosted their net worth a whopping 93 percent faster than those who stayed single. “In all my years of researching individuals and wealth, I can say that the number one way to accumulate, increase, and preserve personal wealth is by getting married and staying married,” says Jay Zagorsky, PhD, of Ohio State University’s Center for Human Resource Research. Why? Often, you’re combining incomes and assets into one household. Married people work hard to buy homes and save for retirement and college. Yes, sometimes divorce is inevitable. But from a purely wealth-based point of view, songwriter Mack Rice said it best: “It’s cheaper to keep her.”

Go to the gym. If your body mass is normal, research shows that your net worth is probably close to double what it would be if you were obese. Call it discrimination, or call it serious business, but the data is real: Employers consider leaner people healthier, more active, and more motivated, says Zagorsky. Therefore, they land the better jobs and earn bigger raises, especially if they’re dealing with outside clients. In a 15-year study authored by Zagorsky and published in Economics & Human Biology, those who dropped their body mass index by nearly six points saw their wealth increase 17 times as much as those who dropped only one BMI point. Why? “When you lose a substantial amount of weight,” says Zagorsky, “you’re often making wholesale positive changes to your life, not just dropping one bad habit.”

Write a letter to your boss. You’ll probably never deliver it, but you will spell out all the ways you have gone above and beyond your job. You will describe all the problems you have solved. (If the letter is short, get back to work.) This is the basis of your argument for a raise, and it’s the first salvo of a salary campaign that goes on for the rest of your career. The goal is to raise your base salary as much as possible. Why? “If you’re overpaid in 2008, chances are you’ll be overpaid at an even better level in 2018,” explains Gil Schwartz, Best Life’s Career Coach columnist.

Make a phone call. CEOs expand their businesses by increasing revenue streams, whether it’s Wal-Mart adding pharmacies or a barkeep adding a jukebox. For you, this means expanding your contacts, says Ivan R. Misner, PhD, author of Truth or Delusion: Busting Networking’s Biggest Myths and founder of Business Network International. You do this—and in turn, increase revenue streams—by networking, which eventually lets you branch out into side jobs or consulting. An effective networker lives by four simple words, says Misner: How can I help? “You have two ears and one mouth,” says Misner. “Use them proportionately.” If you can help people solve problems, you’ll become a very well-connected individual, and those types rarely starve.

Transfer $12.75 to savings. Fred Brock has a secret that is as simple as it is ingenious: When you save money on something, save that money, says the author of Live Well on Less Than You Think. Say you booked a vacation at lastminute.com and saved $700. Then you did the smart thing and waited a few months to buy an iPhone, saving $200. Now, sock that money away rather than spending it on something else. “I have a basic bank savings account,” says Brock. “If I decide I’m saving $7.50 on sodas and $200 a month on lunch, I put that money into that account. Then at the end of the month, I sweep the money into a mutual fund or high-yield online savings account. Then when you say, ‘I’m saving money on lunch,’ you truly are saving it. It really gets fun after a year when you see just how much money and interest you’re accumulating.”