Do you want to get rich?
One online forum posted an interesting piece of advice and I quote in part: "Go find three "crappy" minimum wage jobs. Flip burgers in the morning, be a bus boy in the afternoon and take tickets at a movie theatre in the evening.
"Then, save all your earnings. After six months, you should have $20,000 or close to Dh75,000. After two years, you will have enough money to buy your own fast food franchise. Buy it. After a year, you'll be making $100,000 annually."
Sounds easy?
Granting that this formula will work, you can't strictly follow the advice. There's no way you can juggle three jobs, or even two, in Dubai. Part-time work is technically illegal in these parts.
Even if there are no legal obstacles to secondary employment, it can be physically impossible to maintain multiple menial jobs. You'd end up working 20 hours a day and falling sick before you could make it through one year.
Based on the suggested figure, you need to earn and save at least Dh12,500 a month to be able to, perhaps, afford the franchise of your favourite pizza brand after two years.
Unless you're a CEO or a manager with a fat cheque and no financial obligations, that savings goal is ridiculously unrealistic.
In fact, it's more daunting than that. I'm afraid you need to raise more than just Dh300,000 to run a franchise business.
The last time I checked, it would cost me at least Dh1.2 million to buy a franchise of a popular restaurant chain in my home country. That will expand the savings window from two years to eight years.
So, if working doubly hard and saving up is not the way to get rich, what is? You'd certainly be discouraged to hear what the cynics would tell you: if you're poor and you want to get rich, your chance of entering the ranks of the millionaires is nil.
The game is rigged, they say.
Let's face it: there's no game plan that's guaranteed to generate a fortune. People get rich in many ways, either by running a business, investing in stocks or winning the lottery.
Perhaps the best you can do is find a better-paying job, save as much as you can to ensure you won't wallow in debt, and hopefully you'll have some money to dip into by the time you retire.
Going backwards
But don't let your spare money sit doing nothing in the meantime.
If you stash away your cash in a bank account, you may well be going backwards because inflation erodes the meagre interest rates paid by banks these days.
Instead, make your savings work harder for you by investing it.
Warren Buffett applied this technique early on. When he was young, the financial wizard tried many things to make money, from selling soft drinks, chewing gum to delivering newspapers.
At 14, he managed to save $1,200 and used the money to acquire 40 acres of land, which he then leased out to a farmer. He and a friend also bought a used pinball machine in high school and set it up in a barbershop. It turned out to be profitable, so they acquired more machines, eventually expanding their youthful enterprise.
Buffett never stopped investing — and the rest is history.
There are loads of inspiring stories and financial advice on how to become wealthy, but it all boils down to three pretty simply rules to live by.
Get a good paying job. Save hard. Invest wisely.
Even two out of three of those might help a lot.
I wouldn't count too much on just flipping burgers. In fact, unless you start making your money early in life as Buffett did, you're better off concentrating on some basic truths.
