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… where “nothing” can mean a number of things. Like any of these: You came from modest means; You earn a moderate income; You were not born rich; You are not receiving a seven-figure inheritance or trust fund; You are saddled with debt; You know that your salary should do more for you than just pay the bills. Despite any of these constraints, the tools on this page can help you increase your wealth by hundreds to thousands to even hundreds of thousands!
Many different types of products are featured here, but they all fall within one of two key categories:
- Building wealth through savvy personal finance;
- Enjoying your wealth along the way.
These are both important components to the Build Wealth Pro (“BWP”) lifestyle. It involves prudent money-management for a prosperous future – combined with opportunities to enjoy such prosperity right now. Finance resources include tools to manage household profit better, invest smarter, grow revenue (i.e., make more), cut costs, spend less, build for education and/or retirement, optimize taxes, navigate rates to your advantage, gain from real-property, and more. Enjoyment suggestions will span travel, entertainment, music, film, health, beauty, and fitness.
For each recommended item, the areas that it helps with are highlighted in bold, for easier reference. Words underlined in color on this page contain links to additional information on the opportunities recommended. Many of these are affiliate links. This simply means that I may receive a small commission, at no additional cost to you, if you purchase a featured item through a link shown. For example, as an Amazon Associate, I may earn a commission from qualifying purchases. But rest assured, all items featured below are recommended for their quality and ability to support a BWP lifestyle – not for their small, occasional commission potential.
Welcome to your curated toolkit: where wealth can exceed income, fitness applies to finances, and where personal profit, invisible to most, is identified, extracted, and harvested to build wealth. Please check back here often because new resources are added constantly. Or, you can subscribe here … so that we can let you know when additional tools have been added. Enjoy!
Cheapskates rule! At least if you ask Jeff Yeager. I recommend his book … How to Retire the Cheapskate Way: The Ultimate Cheapskate’s Guide to a Better, Earlier, Happier Retirement. Its premise is that you cannot control what you earn from your job or what you make off investments. The only thing you can control is what you spend, before and during retirement.
While Build Wealth Pro encourages cost cutting and shows you how to underpay for almost anything, it’s part of BWP’s broader, more holistic process that combines cost-minimization with revenue-maximization, where constant utilization of your personal profit drives both short and long-term wealth. All that said, this book complements the Build Wealth Pro system … and is a great read if you want to drill down deep to control the cost side of your equation. Plus, it’s quite funny. You can get it for cheap (like a $1) or even free! While it’s worth so much more, even Jeff Yeager himself would love these deals!
Have you considered eM Client for your email-processing? While your investing activities as a BWP do not require desktop-email software, you’ll probably want to follow the full, holistic approach of Build Wealth Pro … where your investing is just a part of your wealth-generating activities. Much of your activity will be growing your revenues [making more money] and slashing certain costs. This process is 10x easier from a strong computer-based email & project management application. In the early years for me, this was Microsoft-Outlook. But after their switch to the MS-Exchange platform and all its compatibility issues, combined with so many problems exporting their data via PST-files … I began to look for a better alternative. The blogs and reviews I found were pretty unanimous in favor of eM Client as the answer. I’ve been a satisfied user of eM Client ever since.
eM Client integrates email, calendars, contacts, tasks and instant messaging in a single desktop application for Windows and Mac computers. It easily imports data from Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, Thunderbird, Gmail, Outlook.com, Exchange, Office 365, iCloud, and Yahoo accounts. Its built-in data backup makes the difficulties with Outlook’s PST’s … a thing of the past. eM Client’s free app is great and allows you to use it for two email addresses/accounts. But if you’re like me, you may use 5 or more email addresses/accounts for various profit-enhancing activities. Then you’d want their pro version that will process unlimited email addresses/accounts of yours through its one software interface! All for less than half the cost of Outlook! Naturally, this opportunity aligns well with one of the mantras for a BWP (get more, for less). Don’t get me wrong – Microsoft has some amazing software … but now they have some strong competition in the email/project-management piece of it all. Check out eM Client.
Do you Excel at things? This tool is so handy for all things finance. Even if you’ve never used spreadsheets for school or work, Microsoft makes it so easy now. They’ve built-in so much of the how-to help tips … right where you need them, partly to keep pace with Apple and Google software. But Microsoft’s Excel is the one you want for mastery of your personal finances.
I’ve used many a spreadsheet, going back to Lotus 1-2-3, and many of the recent apps for investing and budgeting. Excel just eclipses them all, in terms of ease, power and ability. If you think a calculator and paper will do, think again: the beauty of an Excel file is that you can store simple math calculations for your budget and investment items … then easily edit them anytime. Check out their “Microsoft 365 Family” option – when you do the math per app, per person … it boils down to a cost of about 15-cents a month for Excel! Consider adding Excel as one of your early and most-impactful steps toward financial fitness.
Do you value Fidelity? Looking beyond your relationships or “Hi-Fi” sound system … Fidelity Investments is a major, solid, American-based financial services company. They are trusted by investors and Build Wealth Pros alike. While investment results may vary, I personally have had numerous wins using Fidelity, including:
- Overall rate of return at TRIPLE the economy’s;
- Pure profit at 5-figure level from just one product;
- Stock-level yields … on bonds;
- Over 10% of lifetime portfolio profits from Fidelity holdings.
Customers of BWP are shown how to easily utilize Fidelity offerings within their overall activities. But if you are not ready to become a Build Wealth Pro yet, then adding Fidelity to any of your finance activities … is better than doing nothing. Many of their items don’t require a broker/advisor. If their $2.5 trillion in assets under management makes you feel small, two ways they stand out among the giants is that they have tons of local stores and amazingly powerful apps for all major platforms (Amazon, Android, Apple, even Google Assistant!).
You’ll want to try Fiverr, especially when you embrace BWP’s methods to increase revenues, profitably; i.e., make more money, at minimal costs to earn the new money. A common way to do so is to get a side-gig or side-hustle going, beyond your day job. Fiverr can help in two different ways. First, if you have an idea and just need help or resources to get it done, they have a huge pool of English-speaking freelancers from around the globe that can help with any project a side-hustle would need to get out there. I’ve found their quality to be great, at about 10% of the cost of USA-based support. Second, Fiverr also has online courses to learn a skill that you may need to get your side-business going.
Like to drive? Well, as you drive your profits forward, using BWP-maneuvers, you’ll enjoy Google Drive as your cloud backup for all your wealth-building deals. It will save any file format (I’ve even stashed backups of my entire websites there). It’s easy to create folders, setup automatic syncs, do manual or partial syncs … and they give you 15GB free! If you need more space, it’s only $6/month for 30GB of space. Plus, with their simple app, you can easily manage all your storage and backups from your phone, pad or tablet.
Investopedia is a good resource to use at times, especially when you want to understand what a certain finance term or phrase means. Their Dot-Com site’s footer has an alphabetical index of terms that comes in handy. And their book version has several amusing cartoons to give you a laugh or two while you learn personal finance.
Familiar with Kiplinger? If not, then you should get acquainted … soon. Kiplinger’s is a personal finance magazine that is rich in useful content. I’ve used it extensively for trends, inspiration and additional knowledge. You’re never too expert to learn more, ever. You can often get Kiplinger’s print edition for under $3 a month or the digital version for under $1 a month.
I personally use and recommend Microsoft’s Office as key software for any and all of your wealth-building activities. Even when I used to commute to a job where I worked for somebody else, having my own license for Microsoft Office enabled me to get more done. The most important component for wealth-builders is their Excel app – although having their Word and/or PowerPoint apps can also be quite useful. Their larger suites bundle other apps like Outlook, Access and Publisher. To get the best option, you’ll want to decide three things: (1) how many apps? (2) pay up front or monthly? (3) buy direct or indirect?
For the 1st decision, you can use one app by itself or a suite of three to nine apps. On the 2nd decision, the monthly plan could be best if you want the latest improvements and updates, constantly … or if you have six people in your family [or six friends who would split the cost with you] … or like to use your software across multiple computers or devices. For example, if you split Microsoft 365 Family with five other friends or relatives, your cost per app could be as low as 15-cents a month! Alternatively, since each release of Office will generally be compatible with a current operating system for about 10 years, you could buy a single license, for one device, that could last you 10 years. So, if you pay up front, your effective monthly cost over those 10 years could be as low as 42-cents per app.
Regarding the 3rd decision, the effective costs just mentioned use prices listed direct from Microsoft (in August, 2020). However, many respected and trusted retailers and resellers will buy licenses in bulk from Microsoft, which allows them to pass on discounted bundles to you. I’ve seen current release suites for 25% off and prior releases [like Office 2016 v. 2019] for 50% off!
Morningstar has the data you need to start building wealth from core investment products like mutual funds, ETFs, stocks and bonds. Morningstar’s website is so loaded with stats that the challenge is knowing which metrics you need and which you don’t. But fear not. There are great options for guided-help.
- Why Moats Matter: The Morningstar Approach to Stock Investing is a comprehensive guide to Morningstar’s approach to stock-picking, written by two of their own executives.
- Section 3 or Unit 7 of the Amplify Income into Wealth, using Profit series … both show exactly how to use only the Morningstar data that you need to build significant wealth from even moderate income, without getting lost in data overload.
If you have (or want to start) a side business or gig or monetizable hobby, then a website can help you grow its sales revenue. I suggest you explore Namecheap for its dynamic duo: it can help you grow your top-line and help you shrink your bottom-line. Both of which fuel more of your personal profit. As Build Wealth Pro’s guides show, more profit fuels short and long-term wealth escalation.
Namecheap provides domain names and hosting plans for your website. While GoDaddy and a few other major providers can match Namecheap on deep initial discounts, nobody comes close to Namecheap’s lowest costs in the long-term (after an initial promo ends). Plus, at every product level, Namecheap simply gives more quality features and benefits. For example, even their entry-level hosting includes HTTP/2 & GZIP compression – two spec’s that are offered by competitors only at the high-performance levels of hosting. At every level, Namecheap gives more … for less. Namecheap has also extended into security for business or personal internet use. Want maximum privacy and security when browsing the web? Your own VPN [Virtual Private Network] may be the solution.
Concerned about your Personal Finances? If you’re unsure what to do about it, you are not alone. But there is affordable help at your fingertips. The Amplify Income into Wealth book series or master book set both show how to use moderate 5-figure income to tackle debt and build 6 or even 7-figure wealth.
This module teaches you how to identify, extract and exploit household profit. Then it shows how to use that profit to fuel short and long-term wealth. It covers budgeting, cash-flow, saving for education, retirement planning, and extensive investing maneuvers for diversification, long-term wealth and short-term fun. It combines unique strategies and methods with easy-to-follow steps to generate market-busting returns and personal finance health beyond income level.
Want to work less than 40 hours a week? Interested in leaving “the 9 to 5” grind? Then you’ll want to get The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Tim Ferriss. I am forever grateful to a friend who referred me to this book and I’ve read it more than once. I love reading Tim’s versions of certain Build Wealth Pro tenets, like never paying full price and negotiating virtually everything. And it’s full of great ideas for revenue beyond a paycheck. But I really credit this book to motivating me to escalate my own escape from the commute-based grind. I continue to this day to strive to apply some of his countless tips and tricks for effective and efficient project and time-management … like batching, outsourcing, rejecting most requests, and offshoring. You can even listen to it free.
Within your set of tools for retirement, I encourage you to get to know Voya. Voya Financial is a large, quality, American-based investment management and financial services company. They offer many high performing wealth-building tools that an aspiring Build Wealth Pro needs. In fact, profit from my holdings through Voya is nearly six-times my investment! Equally amazing, total return on my Voya assets is nearly 2.5 times above our economy’s overall long-term return! Please keep in mind that investment results do vary. But they’re one of the good ones. Here’s their app to learn more.
As you may already know from Build Wealth Pro (“BWP”) tutorials, you don’t need to immerse yourself in financial news while steadily growing your wealth. But if you want that kind of info, then you’ll love Yahoo Finance. It is the largest business and financial news platform in the world, providing unrivaled access to data, insights, original video, and editorial content. And as explained in the BWP guides [especially Section 6 and Unit 12], when you are ready to sell a holding, real-time data, free at Yahoo Finance, can help you actualize even more gain from the transaction.
I hope you enjoyed the tips and tools within this list. Please let me know if you:
- Have a question on any of these suggestions.
- Would like to be notified when additional tools are added to this page (just put “tools” in the box below your email).
- Have a request for a certain type of product or service recommendation.
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About Lance
Lance Watkins is a professional wealth-builder, accredited investor, personal finance expert, and founder of Build Wealth Pro (“BWP”). After growing corporate profits by millions, during his investment banking work on Wall Street and beyond, Lance built a way to use such corporate finance techniques to improve personal finances. His methods enable those with little to no finance knowledge to command their finances like a CFO, equipping them to build notable wealth from moderate income.