Allways buy income-generating assets

As I said at the start of this section, the most important rule is to know the difference between an asset and a liability. Once you understand the difference, concentrate your efforts on only buying income-generating assets. That's the best way to get started on a path to becoming rich. Keep doing that, and your asset column will grow. Focus on keeping liabilities and expenses down. This will make more money available to continue pouring into the asset column. Soon, the asset base will be
so deep that you can afford to look at more speculative investments. Investments that may have returns of 100 percent to infinity. Investments that for $5,000 are soon turned into $1 million or more. Investments that the middle class calls "too risky."

The investment is not risky. It's the lack of simple financial intelligence, beginning with financial literacy, that causes the individual to be "too risky".

If you do what the masses do, you get the following picture:
Income = Work for Owner
Expense = Work for Government
Asset = (none)
Liability = Work for Bank

As an employee who is also a homeowner, your working efforts are generally as follows:

1. You work for someone else. Most people, working for a paycheck, are making the owner, or the shareholders richer. Your efforts and success will help provide for the owner's success and retirement.
2. You work for the government. The government takes its share from your paycheck before you even see it. By working harder, you simply increase the amount of taxes taken by the government - most people work from January to May just for the government.
3. You work for the bank. After taxes, your next largest expense is usually your mortgage and credit card debt.

The problem with simply working harder is that each of these three levels takes a greater share of your increased efforts. You need to learn how to have your increased efforts benefit you and your family directly.

Once you have decided to concentrate on minding your own business, how do you set your goals? For most people, they must keep their profession and rely on their wages to fund their acquisition of assets.