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4 Steps to Go From Rags to Riches by Using Your Rags

Mary DeVries
8 min readDec 23, 2020

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Identify your current assets and put them to work building wealth

Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

We all love a good rags to riches story. It gives us hope. If that person started from nothing and made it big maybe I can too.

The more compelling the initial poverty story, the more impressed we are by the rise. We feel tricked if halfway through the story we realize the writer leveraged some assets that we don’t have to bring about their rapid success.

The truth is no one gets rich without taking what they already have and turning it into something more. Let’s be honest, it is a lot easier to get rich if you have a lot of assets to begin with.

I graduated from college with a ton of debt. I married someone with even more debt. Then we both went to grad school racking up additional loans. Neither of us went on to lucrative careers. There were a couple of penny-pinching decades there. But we are now putting three kids through college debt-free, traveling the world, and technically are millionaires.

Rags to riches, right? Sure, and there are many crucial steps we took that got us to where we are today. But we also had a lot of luck and help along the way.

Do you want to be a millionaire? Take whatever rags life has given you and upcycle them into riches.

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Mary DeVries
Mary DeVries

Written by Mary DeVries

I delight, despair and write about a life lived around the world. Fueled by Yorkshire Gold tea.

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