One effortless phone call will make you a millionaire!

You read the title correct. I am going to teach you how with just one phone call you can add one million dollars to your retirement.

Call your cable company and get them to lower your bill by $100 a month. Now invest that $100 a month at 7% interest annually and in a little over 46 years you will have one million dollars.

How I just put myself on a path to one million dollars

I just called my cable company and knocked $100 off my service. It cost me 15 minutes of my life to negotiate the deal. I still have the same service as I did before but I am paying $100 a month less.

Son’t believe me, try it yourself. Go call your cable company and ask them what they can offer you. Tell them you aren’t sure if it is worth it to stay with them or that you can no longer afford it. look at your bill and check out all the different fees and services you are paying. Look into the other service providers in your area and know what special deals they offer. Go into the phone call prepared to discuss with them and I promise you they will offer to lower your bill.

The key is to avoid the dreaded lifestyle creep and not spend the money you just saved but instead invest it each month and watch it grow into a fortune.

How compound interest turns $100 a month into a millions over time

What if I told you $100 invested every month in an account earning 10% over 46 years equals over one million dollars. Would you believe me?

Thanks to a simple concept called compound interest, the fact is true that $100 a month invested over 46 years at 10% interest will net you over one million dollars.

I know it sounds crazy. If you save $100 a month that’s only $12,00 a year; times 46 years is only $55,200. This is why you need to invest the money and get it working for you.

Lets do some math. $1200 times 10% interest equals $1320. Congratulations, in your first year of investing, you just earned $120 for doing nothing.

Now the next year you will earn interest not only on the initial $1200 but also on the $120 you earned. You will also earn interest on the new $1200 you invested this year. Congratulations, in your 2nd year of investing you earned $252.

If you continue on this trajectory after 10 years toy will have saved $10,000 and earned $8,000 in interest.

In 20 years you will have saved $24,000 and earned $48,000 in interest.

In 30 years you will have saved $36,000 and earned $170,000 in interest.

In 46 years you will have saved $55,200 and earned over $940,000 in interest.

And if you are patient enough to wait 60 years you will have saved $72,000 and earned $3.7 million in interest

Below is a chart that illustrates how much you would have at the end of certain benchmark years for 7% and 10% annual interest earnings. This was calculated using a $1000 initial investment and $100 a month investments.

Where I put my money to earn 10%

You might be thinking that 10% earnings annually is not possible. But it is.

I am going to tell you exactly where I am investing my $100 monthly in order to capitalize on compounding and reach the one million mark.

Once I got off the phone with my cable company, my next move was to sign in to my banking app and initiate a regular direct deposit from my paycheck directly into my etrade account for $100 a month.

Now each month after the deposit is made i invest that $100 in one of several total market index funds that I hold in my portfolio.

Index funds mimic certain sectors of the market or even the whole market. There are also wonderful funds set up to mimic the S&P 500 and the Dow.

Historically, the stock market has averaged gains of 7-9% annually.

Below is a chart that shows the growth of the Dow Jones Industrial average going all the way back to 1915. It shows where the Dow started and ended each year and what the gain was. Some years were up and some were down but the average gain over time is right in line with our expectations of 7-9%.

If you go back 46 years to 1974, the DOW was at $759.13. 46 years later at the start of 2020 it was $28,868.80. That is an average annual gain of 7.95%. And that is starting on a year (1974) where the down took a 27%loss.

If you got into the market at the start of the following year you would have an annual gain of 8.65%.

Take the 70 year period from 1950 -2020 and you get an average annual gain of 7.35%.

Play around with these numbers and see for yourself. Just make sure you are using averages over long periods of time. If you take small snapshots, especially around the 90s when the market exploded or 2000’s when we saw big corrections, it wont work. But average them together over a 30 or 40 year period and you will see come in right around 7%.

For example, take the 10 year period from 1990 to 2000 and you end up with a 15% gain. Pretty sweet, But if you stretch that out to the 20 year period from 1990-2010 you get a more reasonable 7% gain.

While we can not guarantee future performance will always match the past, it is all we have to go by and if you ask me, 100 years of results is apretty damn good sample size. That is why whenever I estimate my future returns I use about 7%