I know what you’re thinking… How can someone become a millionaire on a teacher’s salary? It sounds impossible, but high school teacher Andrew Hallam accomplished this milestone by age 40 on a regular teacher’s salary! No, he didn’t invest it in lottery tickets, either! Instead, he learned to live without incurring debt, and he understood how to invest his savings in safe ways to provide the greatest return.
Andrew wrote Millionaire Teacher: The Nine Rules of Wealth You Should Have Learned in School to share his knowledge with other teachers so they could take charge of their own financial futures. The first edition was published in 2011, but he updated the book in 2017 to keep the information current and timely. If you decided to purchase it, be sure to get the most recent edition.
I read Millionaire Teacher a few months ago, and it totally changed the way I think about saving and investing my money. Before I read it, I never felt confident about managing my own investments. Books about finances tend to be dry and difficult to understand, so the concepts always seemed just out of reach.
However, Andrew’s writing style makes Millionaire Teacher an easy read. Not only is the book witty and entertaining, Andrew makes the concepts easy to understand, probably because he’s a teacher. He does a terrific job of breaking complex financial concepts down into simple ideas using stories and analogies. For example, he shares his version of entrepreneur Willie Wonka and the chocolate factory, and uses it to explain how the stock market works, elaborating with manufactured details to illustrate the basic concepts of finance and investing.
Even if you don’t think you have a single extra penny to save and invest, you should read Millionaire Teacher. After a few chapters you’ll be convinced that you CAN save for the future. Andrew explains how you can manage your money yourself, and he describes how to avoid the pitfalls of hiring a financial manager.
Are you worried about losing your savings if you try to manage it yourself? If so, you’ll be glad to know that Andrew doesn’t promote risky strategies like picking individual stocks or timing the market so that you try to buy low and sell high. According to Andrew,
“It’s not timing the market that matters, it’s time IN the market.”
His strategies are based on setting up a portfolio of a few rock-solid index funds and bonds and holding them over time. He explains exactly how to do this and where to invest your money so that you are not paying high fees.
If you aren’t convinced that you need to read this book now, remember that the sooner you apply these principles, the greater the payoff in the future. These concepts are especially important for young adults to master now because they have time to ride out the ups and downs of the stock market. Small regular investments now will pay off in a big way in the future. For that reason, Millionaire Teacher would make a terrific gift for any new teacher or teacher-to-be, but it’s also a great read for veteran teachers. In fact, it’s an awesome book for just about anyone who wants to take control of their finances and achieve financial freedom by the time they retire.
I wish I had read Millionaire Teacher years ago, because I’ve made a lot of mistakes due to my lack of understanding about how to invest wisely. However, now that I know how easy it is to manage my own money, I’m excited to begin applying these principles to my own finances from this point forward. As they say, better late than never! To check it out for yourself, click one of the title links in this post to find it on Amazon where you can look inside the book and read buyer reviews. I know you’ll find it to be a life-changing guide to financial success!
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