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Blend three ingredients — a paycheck, discipline and time — and, you, too, can be a millionaire. It’s not always easy, but it’s simple. And you have no excuse not to do it.
Here is the single most important thing you will ever hear about investing: Getting rich is simple.

Not easy, but simple.
And here is the second most important thing you will ever hear about investing: You have no excuse not to do it.Only three ingredients are needed: income, discipline and time. Chances are, you already have two of them, income and time. All you need to do is add the third, discipline. And armed with the following knowledge, that key third ingredient may be a lot easier to find.

Here’s how it works: Say you start with nothing, invest $500 (of your income) a month (a healthy discipline), and let your money ride (over time) in diversified investments. Long term, the stock market returns at least 10% annually. Assuming a 10% return, you’d have $102,000 after 10 years, $380,000 after 20 years, and $1.1 million in 30 years.

Here’s a similar scenario: If you start with a nut of $50,000 and add only $250 per month, you’d have $180,000, $516.000 and $1.4 million after 10, 20, and 30 years, respectively. All this happens through the power of regular investing and a simple-but-powerful concept called compounding.

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Don’t just dream about striking it rich. Learn from those who did.

Twelve years ago, Julie Aigner-Clark was looking for a way to expose Aspen, her 18-month-old daughter, to music and the arts. So she and her husband, Bill, shot a video in the basement of their home. “We borrowed equipment from a friend, put up a black velvet background and used the toys my daughter liked,” she says. The star of the video is a dragon puppet that Aspen used as a washcloth. Other scenes feature Julie’s hand slowly turning the crank on a jack-in-the-box. It’s all very low-budget but also quite soothing. Can you imagine the path to becoming a millionaire starting with such a mundane project?

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Spirits are high among U.S. distillers –- they’re expanding production to meet surging demand overseas and among a new generation of American drinkers. To Wild Turkey master distiller Jimmy Russell, the piercing sounds of a warehouse rising in the Kentucky countryside are the sounds of prosperity. “As long as you see work going on — and the construction, and increasing your size — you know your business is doing well,” said Russell, who started working for the bourbon maker in 1954.

Distillers are expanding their bourbon production and storage and dispatching sales teams around the world, bullish for a traditionally Southern beverage gaining popularity worldwide. Surging exports, the weak U.S. dollar and rising popularity among younger Americans are driving the boom. “It’s an exciting time to be in the bourbon business,” said Max L. Shapira, president of Heaven Hill Distilleries, a family-owned liquor company based in Bardstown, Ky “Most of the time that I’ve been in the business — up until about the last 10 years — everybody was trying to consign the bourbon category to that great liquor store in the sky.”

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Utility stocks may outdo the markets for the next few years. But not all companies in this sector will thrive. Here’s how to pick the likely winners.

Utility stocks are a traditional haven when fear rules the stock market. The sector has certainly worked that way since March. Since the low in the Dow Jones Utility Average ($US:UTIL) on March 28 — roughly two weeks after the Dow Jones Industrial Average ($INDU) put in a temporary bottom March 10 — through the market’s close on July 10, the utility sector has climbed 10%. In that same period, the Dow industrials are down 8%.

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It’s easy for crooks to rip you off at the cash machine, especially if you’re not paying attention. And your PIN won’t offer the protection you might assume it would.

Before Jay Foley inserts his bank card into an ATM slot, he sticks his finger in. Then he wiggles it.

“If any portion of it wiggles with my pinky, I walk away, because odds are somebody has slapped a skimmer on the front,” says Foley, the executive director of the Identity Theft Resource Center in San Diego. “That applies to any kind of payment slot you might run across, such as gas station pumps. Those are favorite places for thieves to work now.”

A skimmer is a device that reads and records all the account information stored electronically on the magnetic strip of an ATM card.
Its mere existence is proof that if you thought familiar, ubiquitous automated teller machines were much too low-tech to attract high-tech cyberthieves, you need to think again.
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