5 Secret Habits of Wealthy Americans

5 Secret Habits of Wealthy Americans
By Farnoosh Torabi | Yahoo! Finance – Mon, May 14, 2012 11:01 AM EDT

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When you’re rich, you can cruise through life at a luxurious speed filled with fancy cars, designer clothes and caviar. But beneath the surface, becoming wealthy and staying wealthy involves hard work, an appetite for risk and a certain mindset that’s not always obvious. Here are some of the secret habits of wealthy people.

1. Bank on Your Street Smarts
“Making money has little to do with logic,” says real estate mogul, author and television star Barbara Corcoran. “It has more to do with trusting your gut.”

In an interview at her Upper East Side Manhattan office, Corcoran reflected on her struggling days in the classroom. “Often I think a prerequisite of making a ton of money is not being smart in school. The cutup in the classroom is often the guy with the big idea who makes a truckload of money.” Despite scoring Ds in high school and college, Corcoran utilized her street smarts and ability to connect with and judge those around her to ultimately grow and sell her Manhattan firm for $66 million in 2001. Today, she is the resident real estate contributor to NBC’s Today show and the sole female investor on ABC’s reality hit Shark Tank, now in its third season.

“You know what’s great about being a dunce in school? You have six-hour days to sit around and think of all kinds of things,” she says. “You get practice at imagination.”

In fact, according to Thomas Stanley’s book The Millionaire Mind, when asked how their high school teachers would have evaluated them, only 11 percent of millionaires said “most intellectually gifted” and just 10 percent  said “highest grade point average.”

2. Identify and Act on Opportunities
When author Ryan D’Agostino was researching his book Rich Like Them, he knocked on nearly 500 doors to the biggest houses in America’s richest neighborhoods, asking the owners inside: what’s your secret? For one, he discovered, the millionaire mind never stops stirring.

“I spoke with a lot of rich people and one habit that I heard more than once was always keep your eye open for that million dollar idea,” says D’Agostino. “I met a travel agent who was once helicopter skiing in western Canada. He wondered what happens to all the helicopters and lodges in the off-season, and it turned out no one was using them. So he set up this whole luxury travel side business where he would take people out in the summer, fly them up to look at glaciers and mountaintops. He made a ton of money doing it.”

Of course, it’s enough to simply have an idea, D’Agostino continues. “The difference was, he acted on it.”

3. Enjoy Your Money
While saving is a key characteristic of some wealthy Americans as they build and grow their riches, D’Agostino says many millionaires he interviewed had a sort of 50/50 rule when it came to managing windfalls of money. “I met this really interesting guy in Scottsdale, Arizona who ran a successful construction company and he told me that whenever he came into any money he didn’t know he was going to have, even if it was just a few hundred dollars, he would put half away and spend the rest on something fun like a vacation for his kids or something nice for his wife,” he says. “He’d say, ‘what’s the point of obsessing over money all the time and saving and scrimping if you don't get to enjoy it and spend it?’ That was maybe my favorite tip of all.”

4. Prioritize Retirement Savings
While paying for their kids to college is considered important for many wealthy Americans, it’s not their top financial priority, noticed D’Agostino. Instead, it’s having enough for retirement. “Person after person told me, ‘retirement first, education second,’” he said. “There’s no such thing as a loan you can take out for retirement, but it is okay to borrow money to pay for college.”

5. Eliminate Self-Doubt
For Corcoran, despite starting out as a woman in a man’s world and feeling intimidated at times, she attributes her success to the core belief that she’s worth it. “The big enemy out there is not the crowd you compete with or what they’re telling you, but your own self-talk. I had to learn to defeat my own self-talk inside that said, ‘you don’t have the right…don't try it.’” Instead, she learned to say to herself, “I have the right to be there,” and the money followed.

When it comes to building financial success, what do you think are some of the tricks to trade? Send me your thoughts on Twitter @Farnoosh and use #FinFit.
                                                                                                                           
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64Please sign in to rate!Please sign in to rate!1Common Sense  •  Pensacola, Florida  •  7 hours ago
They are not talking D students that are just plain not smart. They are talking D students that are intelligent but possibly bored in school. Some of the most intelligent kids have no use for boring teachers or subjects that don't challenge them. I would suspect she was one of those.
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47Please sign in to rate!Please sign in to rate!1Carrie S.  •  Atlanta, Georgia  •  7 hours ago
I completely agree. AND, don't ever tell a teacher this, but there's a CHANCE that the material REALLY IS completely useless and NOT interesting to some people. :) I am a teacher, by the way! :)

19Please sign in to rate!Please sign in to rate!0CARL  •  7 hours ago
I think the point the aurthor is getting at is that people who think outside the realm of whats being solely taught in school, are the one's who are able to think outside of the box. People who dwell on key words like "exceptions", "unique" or "rare" are the ones who talk themselves out of doing whats necessary to become successful. The overwhelming fact of the matter is that the few that dont score good in school probably have a higher chance of becoming one of the few that control most of the wealth in the nation. The others become well rounded, good students that work a nice, safe job and thats the end of their story.

11Please sign in to rate!Please sign in to rate!2Carrie S.  •  Atlanta, Georgia  •  7 hours ago
Carl, I agree completely. I know a lot of students who are not particularly smart, but they are great "Parrots". The teacher tells them something, they spit it back out.

Most of our society is this way. Just go around and tell people that you're trying to lose weight and tell them you're limiting yourself to 1000 calories. You will be surprised how many "professionals" will pop up.

They will tell you that "you're not eating enough calories and this is causing your body to hold on to the extra weight because it thinks you're starving."

How do they know? Are they scientists? Did they do clinical trials? No. They're just repeating the rhetoric.

Is it true? I don't know. Doesn't seem logical though. What were the "bodies" of the Halocaust victims "thinking"? What about all the anorexics? How do they do it, if eating "not enough" calories actually makes you fat?

0Please sign in to rate!Please sign in to rate!0Theo S  •  7 hours ago
New ideas don't generally come from what you are taught. They come from what you observe. And you get rich by acting on the ones that make you money... sometimes lots of it.
60% of all new innovations come from people who were trained in a different discipline...they have to think about the porblem and generate a solution based on their different experience.

1Please sign in to rate!Please sign in to rate!0DAVID  •  6 hours ago
You are right and it's getting worse since schools are now teaching to the lowest common denominator. There is also a difference between going to school to get educated and going to get a piece of paper.

1Please sign in to rate!Please sign in to rate!0Marilyn  •  5 hours ago
Don't agree with her comment about the cutup. Ones I knew back in the day didn't accomplish much. Middle of the roaders did. Lucky ones who had some financiall backing from family or in-laws to take that first chance. As far as the helicopter guy, he must have had money to start with. ... More

0Please sign in to rate!Please sign in to rate!0LearnedHand  •  3 hours ago
I agree with what she said abou the negative self talk. Another thing is, if you have an idea or you decide to take action on something, don't tell other people because they will start to tell you unrealistic it is, blah, blah - Edison, Ford, Einstein - all those "doers' were ppl who accomplished things because they believed in their dreams and hunches and kept going. Every thing in this world started out as a dream or thought in someone's head

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