5 Common Mistakes That Prevent Most People From Getting Rich

 Many of you wish to save some money and get rich. 

But before you begin creating your plan of action to achieve your financial goals, it is important to make sure that you are not unknowingly holding yourself back from your own financial independence.

Through my years of experience I have learned that there are five common mistakes that prevent the majority of us from becoming wealthy. Let's talk about them one by one.

1. It Never Occur To Them

At the top of the list it is that it never occurs to them to become rich. The average person has grown up in a family where he's never met or known anyone who is wealthy. 

He goes to school, socializes with people who are not wealthy. He works with people who are not wealthy. He has a reference group or social circle outside at work or not wealthy and he has no role models who are wealthy.

If this has happened to you throughout your formative years after the age of 20 or so, you can actually grow up and become a fully mature adult in our society and it may never occur that is just as possible for you to become wealthy as for anyone else.

So the first reason why people don't get rich is because it never occurs to them that is possible for them. And if it never occurs to them they never take any the steps necessary to make it a reality.

2. They Never Decide To Get Rich

The second reason that people don't get rich is that they never decide to. The primary cause for underachievement and failure is that the great majority of people don't decide to be successful. 

Even if a person reads a book or attends a lecturer or associates with people who are financially successful, nothing changes until he makes a decision. 

If he doesn't decide to take the first step, he ends up staying as he is. 

If you continue to do what you always done, you continue to get what you've always got.

3. They Procrastinate Too Much

The third reason that people don't become wealthy is procrastination. 

People always have a good reason not to begin doing what they know they need to do to achieve financial independence. 

It's always the wrong month, the wrong season or the wrong year. There always seems to be a reason to procrastinate. 

As a result they keep putting it off month by month, year by year until it's too late. 

Even if it occurred to a person that they can become wealthy and they have made a decision to change, procrastination will push all their plan into the indefinite future and nothing will ever happen.

4. They Are Not Able To Delay Gratification

The fourth reason that people retire poor is what economists call the inability to delay gratification. The great majority of people have a irresistible temptation to spend every single penny they make in whatever else they can borrow or buy on credit.

If you cannot delay gratification and discipline yourself to refrain from spending everything you make, you cannot become wealthy.

W Clement Stone once said: 

"if you cannot save money, then the seeds of greatness are not in you"

If you cannot practice budgeting as a lifelong habit it will be impossible for you to achieve financial independence.

5. They Lack Time Perspective

The fifth reason that people retire poor is perhaps as important if not more important than all the others.

It's a lack of time perspective. Time perspective is defined as the amount of time that you take into consideration when planning your day to day activities and when making important decisions in your life.

The young couple that begins putting fifty dollars a month the side in a scholarship fund so that their newborn child can go to the college or university is a couple with long time perspective as  they are willing to sacrifice the short term to assure better results and outcomes in the long term.

People with long term perspective almost invariably move-up economically in the course in their lifetimes.

Well, these are the five reasons why most people don't become wealthy.