It’s not impossible to get rich on a salary if you save 30-50% of your income every month, invest in the right places, and have great financial discipline to not spend your gains. Only problem is that following this path it will take you 20-30 years to get rich to the point that you are in the top 1% of the country, even if your salary is high (unless you have large ESOPS).
Otherwise, by the time you are rich, you will be old and your youth will pass you by. I don’t want to be a millionaire at the age of 60, when I retire.
I wanted it in my 30s.
So I had only one way – to build a business.
Btw this is no excuse for not saving or investing.
I have saved 30% or more of my income like clockwork since 2015, invested it in the right mutual funds that gave me over 20% return annually (thanks to bull market), and still my corpus has not even crossed 1 crore. If I keep doing this for 20 years more, at the ripe age of 56 no doubt I will probably have a 20 cr corpus. But what will I do with money when I am an old man?
It would be nice to have money when I am old too I guess. I can retire in peace without worrying about money.
But I prefer to be rich now when I am in my 30s and hopefully have time on my side.
And I got that blessing from my business. My shares in LawSikho, after we did an IPO this year, are worth at least 100 cr now. It goes up and down with share price. Despite volatility, it has been above 100 cr. You can verify this – as a promoter of a public company this information is in the public domain.
This is the magic of starting a business. I could never make this kind of money from a job.
I actually saw my boss’ Income Tax Return when I was working at my first job. It was like an intervention from God. Some secretary accidentally copied me in an email which had all the ITRs of several partners at the firm. Looking at that I realised that I can’t slog all my life for this. I had to find another way.
And that way was to start a business. Within months I had quit my job to start my startup.
Btw, I don’t want you to randomly quit your job and startup. There is a better way now.
If you follow my method, you don’t even have to take the risk of quitting. You can start a business as a side hustle.
You don’t have to tell your boss.
You don’t have to do anything unethical.
And no you definitely do not need capital to start a business, especially when you are going to start a services business. You can simply offer bookkeeping, tax filing and finance related services to US SMEs and startups, and make more than 1 cr per year that puts you on a fastrack to be rich and gives you the financial freedom you want.
If I was back in that situation when I had to quit, I would simply focus on 7 things:
- Start a services or consulting business that requires no capital – on the side
- Build a website, make the brochure, pitch clients after work hours or on the weekend
- Build a strong personal brand and create content that brings inbound client enquiries
- Build marketing funnels and cold email campaigns that bring a steady stream of clients
- Focus on building a relationship with clients in the US or EU or UK, where price of services is much higher, learn the skills necessary for this if I did not have them
- Start putting in place a team of freelancers that can deliver without my involvement
- Quit my job only after I start earning enough (I have to earn at least half of my salary working on weekends before I quit)
Then I would aim to scale it to 1 cr revenue per year.
It’s no big deal btw. Many of my students have achieved this. Some of them are even on upwork. Just yesterday one of my students shared that she earned over 100k USD verified earning on Upwork only (she has more clients outside upwork too)
This is Ankita, she started learning how to crack the US market from India almost 2 years back. Before that she was litigating in Delhi.
Once she cracked the US SME and startup market there was no looking back
She has even started an US entity which enabled her to raise her rates
Anyone from India, once they have some income, should open an US LLC and bank account which enables them to earn more and get more work too!
It will take discipline, effort and consistency, but anyone can do it. Just like me, just like Ankita, and my hundreds of other Skill Arbitrage alumni.
Here is a finance and accounting professional and our alumni who is killing it as a consultant after rejecting the usual career path of doing a job:
Raunak Mutha, a young Jodhpur based accountant and finance professional quit his job at a big company in India to start his own independent practice in Jodhpur, and started pitching to US clients for bookkeeping, accounting and tax filing services.
In 1.5 years, he has completed over 71 projects on Upwork alone and also works with clients directly and earns around 1.5-2 lakhs per month.
Most of his income is from international clients who pay far more than Indian clients.
He is soon looking at hiring juniors to scale his firm further this year.
Here is another accounting and finance professional from Jamnagar who is on the way:
Jayesh Bhanushali, a Jamnagar-based accountant, quit his job and shifted to independent practice, and since joining Skill Arbitrage in March last year, has worked on over 150 assignments for clients in US, UAE, Germany, Canada and several other advanced economies, and has also launched his own website as a remote accountant and tax consultant: https://jbglobalfiling.com/
He earns around 1.5 lakhs per month and his income is rapidly increasing. Here are some of the testimonials from his previous clients on his Fiverr profile:
What if I told you ‘insane’ was working fifty hours a week in some office for fifty years at the end of which they tell you to piss off; ending up in some retirement village hoping to die before suffering the indignity of trying to make it to the toilet on time? Wouldn’t you consider that to be insane? ~ Steve Buscemi (Con Air, paramount)
Do you want to know how you can start building your own consulting business offering bookkeeping, tax filing and finance related services to US SMEs and startups on the side, without investing any capital, and make more than 1 cr per year that puts you on a fastrack to be rich?