Are you tired of never quite achieving your goals? Of feeling like the deck is always stacked against you? Sometimes, it isn’t “The System” that’s at fault.

Sometimes, it’s you.

Or, maybe you consider yourself middle-class but just can’t seem to crack a higher tax bracket. Your life of relative ease is being eroded with every passing day and suddenly you’re doing things you’d never previously dreamed of doing before, like “trusting” fruits from your fruit vendor until your next pay cheque comes.

The world’s wealthiest people have by and large accumulated their assets not by, as some people want to think, some secret handshake and admission in a secret society, but usually by acquiring smart habits that have allowed them to amass their fortune and, importantly, expand it. It’s easy to get rich. All it needs is a stroke of luck and a random sequence of lottery numbers. It’s a completely different matter to be wealthy. Wealth is the ability to make riches sustainable by allowing it to grow and make more money. According to the National Endowment for Financial Education, about 70 per cent of people who win a lottery or receive a large windfall go bankrupt within a few years.

As they say: Easy come, easy go.

The truth is, it takes effort and discipline to maintain wealth. We’ve often discussed the macro approaches to wealth generation — budgeting, saving, avoiding bad debt, investing, and creating multiple income streams — but there are little daily habits that the wealthy typically cultivate which underpin these macro approaches and guarantee success.

See how many you emulate.

• Wealthy people don’t sleep in late habitually. Surveys have shown that at least half of self-made millionaires and about 90 per cent of top executives get up three hours before their workday really begins, checking mail, eating a healthy breakfast, reading the news, or just strategising because this is the time that the brain is most efficient.

• They don’t generally eat unhealthily. They drink moderately. Additionally, they get exercise regularly and understand the importance of getting adequate sleep. Wealthy people value their health. Poor health habits are the starting point for so-called bad luck, which is really disease or hospitalisation which originates from ignoring healthy lifestyle decisions.

• Successful people read to improve themselves. And, no, we’re not speaking here about the blog posts of popular influencers. The wealthy know that reading, in addition to growing their vocabulary and keeping their minds sharp, helps increase knowledge, causing them to more readily spot opportunities which can ultimately translate into them making more money. In fact, recent research suggests that two-thirds of the wealthy spend less than an hour every day watching TV and surfing the Internet unless it is job-related. Instead, they spend time pursuing personal development, networking, and engaging in side jobs or businesses. How many hours do you allocate for mindless leisure each day?

• Have you noticed that people of means are always volunteering, donating, organising for charity drives, and so on? This is because they understand a basic life principle: You make room for more abundance when you give. Besides, by doing things like volunteering you expand your network, thus putting you in a position of taking advantage of opportunities you might not come across trolling people on social media.

• The wealthy typically avoid trafficking in excess. Take extreme gambling, for instance. It’s usually the poorest people who go overboard with this. You see it all the time. Men who open and close the betting shops. People who play the lottery as though it’s their job. Every day of the week. Hoping to one day strike it rich. If the cumulative amount of money you spend on gambling isn’t something you can really afford to lose, say, you’d be better served using those funds for further education, eg, it’s a problem.

• They say no to negative or toxic people. Their friends are usually like-minded. Are you friends with people with a poverty mindset? Are they always saying things like: “Poor people like us can’t do such and such”? Is your circle of friends dominated by people who only nastily criticise others? Remember, like begets like. You would not deliberately put yourself in a room with somebody inflicted with COVID. Practise isolation from people who can infect you with their negativity; put yourself instead in an environment where your dreams for financial well-being will be watered and nurtured. Consider also finding a mentor who is a successful person you want to emulate.

There’s a quote attributed to the author and business executive Sean Covey that says: “Depending on what they are, our habits will either make us or break us. We become what we repeatedly do.” As we come to the end of the year, it’s worth reminding yourselves of this as you articulate what your financial plans for 2022 will be and the habits you will cultivate to achieve them, because your habits have everything to do with your financial outlook.