How about you? Are you suffering any of the symptoms above? If you are, then it’s time to take your personal finance into your own hands.

The truth is, you have always been personally responsible for your personal finance matters. Maybe most of you avoid taking charge of your own wealth and welfare, and as a result become overwhelmed when the economy takes a turn for the rough.

You complain and you blame, but nothing changes.

You could have avoided a lot of pain. If only you had created a solid wealth building strategy early in your life or career, you would be in a much more favorable financial position.

Do you have good wealth building strategies? It’s always a good time to start now! Having a strategy is important if you want to secure wealth for yourself and your family.

Here are four of the most important, simple to apply wealth building strategies that work for everyone:

Start making a budget

Making a budget to record your income and spending is the most basic strategy you can do.

Many people spend their money almost randomly, without any thought about how much they actually spend. This kind of random behavior is why they always run out of money at the end of the month.

To avoid not knowing where your hard earned money has gone, start writing down the income sources you have. Next to that list, create a list of all the expenses that you make routinely each month.

From this list, sum up your income and expenses then subtract your income with your expenses. Your aim is to have a positive number, which means your income is bigger than your expense. If you have a negative number, then go through your expenses list and find out what expense you can reduce or even cut out completely.

Save the extra money you have

When you have a positive number, it means you have extra money at the end of the month.

What do you do with this extra money? Some people might be tempted to spend it, but you know better right? Of course you save this extra money and put it in savings account!

Saving your money over time increases your value. If previously you always spent more than you earned, now you can start to build a small savings account. The main benefit of this simple act is that you also start to increase your self confidence and self esteem.

No matter how much money you can save, even if it is only a small amount, you must save it. Don’t be tempted to use it for unnecessary purchases. The more money you can save, the faster you can move on to the most profitable wealth building strategy.

Create control over your debt

Personally, I have always lived debt free. My motto is “If you can’t afford it in cash, it means you can’t afford it” (except for buying a house, a car, and school tuition).

Many people though do live with debt. This is the kind of debt that makes them unable to sleep at night. The most common random strategy to pay off their debt is to borrow money – make even more debt!

This is a terrible negative circle that make people miserable. To avoid this, you must control your debt. The aim of controlling your debt is to start reducing your debt amount slowly until you are free from debt or at least have only a small debt to pay.

You can control your debt by paying off your smaller debts. This will give you a sense of accomplishment and encouragement to start paying off your bigger debts.

If the debt is big enough, paying it off could take a very long time. That’s alright, the most important thing is to be patient and persevere. By staying consistent, you will start to develop the habit of good money practices.

Plus, being patient and diligent is an important character for the most important of these four wealth building strategies.

Wisely invest the money you save

This is the part of the strategy that most people don’t even get to in their entire lives. Only a small number of people have the luxury to invest money to increase their wealth.

However, being able to invest is not a luxury at all. It simply means that you are starting to reap the rewards of patiently making a budget, steadily saving money, and reducing your debt.

Investing your money is very important to create more wealth for your present and your future. The purpose of investing is to leverage your money to create more money, without active participation from your part.

There are many investment options that you can choose, including mutual funds, bonds and obligations, or more active investments such as property investing or investing in private businesses.

The most important thing is to make sure you educate yourself about these options. Many people make the mistake of going the popular route, only to have their hard earned money disappear due to ignorance. By educating yourself, you ensure you make only the best investment decisions for yourself.

Once you start to receive the results of your investment, repeat the process! Revise your budget, increase your savings, reduce your debt even more, and diversify your investments. These are the positive wealth building strategies that are sure to create more wealth for you over time.

Simply put, to become wealthy over time you basically need to make, save and invest money wisely. The smarter you are at doing this the faster you become wealthy. Assuming you’ve read my other articles on How to Get Rich (the making of and management of money) then you are ready to look at the 3 most common wealth building strategies of the super wealthy.

1. Investing in Paper Assets (Stocks, Bonds, Funds, Currency)

Investing in “paper assets” is a great way to start building wealth. It teaches you the principals of money management, capital, rates of returns, risk etc. You can invest in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, commodities, and foreign exchange (“Forex”). Each of these options presents various levels of risk and reward and requires thorough research before you start. You don’t necessarily have to read the Wall Street Journal daily or subscribe to Fortune magazine in order to be a good stock investor. But you should at least get trained by an expert or have access to wholly independent financial advice from an experienced investor.

To help you get started, a basic overview of the paper assets investment landscape goes like this: There are 2 types of investments; ownership investments in which you own part of the asset (a stock is a good example) and loan investments in which you lend money to someone and they pay you interest (a bond is a good example). In many cases, you are looking for growth investments and those are ownership-type investments. (Bonds rarely provide a way to make you wealthy. Rather, they are a way to protect your wealth once you have it). Warren Buffett is a great example of someone who created massive wealth through investing in paper assets.

2. Investing in Real Estate

Real estate is another great way to build wealth. With real estate, you typically buy a property and then make money through selling it eventually for a much higher value than its purchase price and/or becoming a landlord and letting the property. One of the advantages of real estate investing is using the principle of leverage (i.e. a mortgage) to buy an asset that you otherwise couldn’t afford. Leverage isn’t commonly available in paper assets investing (although you can buy on margin but this can be risky if you don’t know what you’re doing!).

Real estate investing can be focused on either residential, commercial or land. Wealth building through real estate involves buying and selling a property – sometimes referred to as “flipping” or “trading” and often involves “rehabbing” a property (i.e. fixing it up)- to give the fastest and best rate of return.. However, landlording is a more standard approach that requires more time to build wealth, generating a small income in the meantime from the rental income after subtracting all expenses. Want to know how to build wealth quickly with real estate? Consider buying a distressed property using leverage, fixing it up, and selling it again quickly. However, watch for market fluctuations in supply and demand and availability of capital in order to use this strategy effectively. Donald Trump is a great example of someone who created massive wealth through real estate investing.

3. Starting, or Owning a Business

Starting, or owning a business is another common wealth-building strategy. Starting a business doesn’t always make you really wealthy right away. It takes time and energy to build the income of a business and its capital value, but it can make you wealthy over time if managed effectively. Therefore, if you have previous experience of running a business it can sometime makes more sense to buy an existing business and simply run it better. Want to know how to build wealth starting or owning a business? Find something that you love to do and that solves the needs of a target market. Then sell that product or service through relentless marketing and sales. Create efficient systems to sell more, more often. And work towards growing the value of your business by making it less dependent on you so that you can eventually sell it to a new owner. Bill Gates is a great example of someone who created serious wealth by starting a business.

Whatever way you chose to start building wealth, always remember those words from the mouth of antihero Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street…”Money never sleeps pal”. Different asset class values will shift in time (daily/monthly/annually) and according to market cycles. It’s also a good idea to scrutinize your assets and then take steps to re-balance your portfolio periodically. You also need to match risk to what stage you are in life. So, want to know how to build wealth quickly? It’s simple: Take your hard-earned money, save as much as you can as you go and then choose a strategy (from above) and consistently, month by month, year by year, apply yourself to these wealth building strategies.

Remember, building wealth doesn’t happen overnight. But with education, time, diligence, research and hard work, you can go from wondering how to build wealth to actually becoming wealthy and enjoying your millions! Mastering wealth building will ensure that money you earn isn’t flitted away carelessly and that you get to secure your financial independence! Discover how to build wealth using simple, effective