Get rich like Warren Buffett – This tip from 1999 still applies today

• Tips for increasing wealth from Warren Buffett in 1999
• Buffett advises starting early and being “energetic.”
• Keep an eye on smaller companies and index funds

Investment legend Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett, the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, is considered one of the most successful investors of all time. The 90-year-old’s fortune has now grown to over $120 billion, making Buffett one of the richest people in the world. Although he is currently “only” number five on Forbes’ “Billionaires List”, he still belongs to a small, elite circle, as only eight other people in the world own more than 100 billion US dollars. These include the likes of Jeff Bezos, Elon Muskor also Bill Gates.

Buffett’s 1999 tip

If you also want to build a significant fortune, then you should not wait any longer to invest, because compound interest is an investor’s best friend. Warren Buffett gave this advice back in 1999 at the annual shareholder meeting of his investment vehicle Berkshire Hathaway, as CNBC reports. “Start early. I started building this little snowball at the top of a very long incline. The trick to having a very long incline is to either start very young or get very old,” Buffett explained back then and likened investing to a snowball rolling down a hill, getting bigger and bigger. Investors would also have to rely on their own knowledge and intuition, according to the Oracle of Omaha, as Buffett likes to be called. They would have to act “very energetically” as soon as they found a good opportunity.

Buffett also explained during the shareholders’ meeting at the time what he would do if he graduated from college in 1999 and had $10,000 to invest: “I would probably focus on smaller companies because I would be working with smaller amounts and there is a greater chance that something will be overlooked in this area”, he would first sort the companies in question alphabetically and then analyze them. Buffett is also a proponent of index funds, which is why he advises investors to “consistently buy a low-cost S&P 500 index fund.” “I think that’s the thing that almost always makes the most sense,” he is quoted as saying by CNBC. The trick, according to the philanthropist, isn’t picking the right company, but “buying essentially all the big companies in the S&P 500 and doing it consistently and in a very, very cheap way,” he said in an interview with CNBC. “Keep buying it, through thick and thin, and especially through thin.”

From a certain level, however, it hardly makes any difference how much money you actually earn and own, according to the major investor. The size of his fortune is “incomprehensible,” he recently emphasized to CNBC. “If you were to ask me to trade a very significant percentage of my net worth for a few extra years of life or to be able to do what I want to do during those years, I would do it in a second.”

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