Billionaire investor Warren Buffett is one of the wealthiest people in the world, and he keeps getting richer.
On Tuesday, Buffett's wealth reached an all-time high, topping $81.5 billion, Money reports. The Oracle of Omaha's net worth rose even further to $81.6 billion on Wednesday, according to Bloomberg.
He's seen an increase of over $8 billion in the last 12 months alone, and he currently stands as the third richest person on the planet, behind Amazon's Jeff Bezos at No. 2 and his good friend Bill Gates at No. 1.
The Nebraska native got started early: He purchased his first stock at age 11.
After earning a master's degree from Columbia University in 1951, Buffett bought Berkshire Hathaway in 1962 and took over as CEO, using the textile manufacturer as a holding company. It has since grown to encompass major brands such as Geico and Kraft Heinz.
The majority of Buffett's wealth comes from his 18 percent stake in the business, but he also independently owns shares in Wells Fargo, IBM and a few other companies.
While reaching the same level of wealth as Buffett himself is near-impossible, there's plenty to learn from his investing style. Here are three tips for growing your wealth, straight from the legend himself. After all, if it worked for him, it could work for you.
Think long-term
Buffett decides a business is worth investing in because it will last. He purchased See's Candies with longtime business partner Charlie Munger in 1972 and spent more than $1 billion on Coca-Cola stock in 1988 — both of which turned out to be good bets and which he still owns today.
"We sort of know it when we see it," Buffett said during the the Berkshire Hathaway 2017 Annual Shareholders Meeting. "It would tend to be a business that for one reason or another we can look out five or 10 or 20 years, and decide that the competitive advantage that it had at the present would last over that period."
Once Buffett makes a purchase, he tends to hold on to it. "His approach is to be really sure of something before he buys it, and one of the ways he exercises that discipline is to sort of almost never sell. Not never sell, because he does sell stocks, but he sort of says to himself, 'I know I'm almost never going to sell it, I've really got to like it before I get into it,'" Buffett's biographer Roger Lowenstein, author of "Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist," explained to Yahoo's Alexis Christoforous.
Don't try to play the market
No one can predict the ups and downs of the stock market, including .
To truly grow retirement savings, Buffett advises investing in index funds, which he says are "the thing that makes the most sense practically all of the time."
Index funds hold every stock in an index such as the S&P 500, including big-name companies such as Apple, Microsoft and Google. Because this type of fund is highly diversified, it stays relatively constant and avoids the risk that comes with picking individual stocks. They're also pretty cheap, which maximizes the amount investors take home.
Stick with it
Even when choosing low risk options like index funds, there are going to be inevitable highs and lows in the market. But don't let dips scare you out of investing at all.
Stay the course, Buffett says, even when you see market fluctuations or a bad headline: "Keep buying it through thick and thin, and especially through thin. … American business is going to do fine over time, so you know the investment universe is going to do very well."
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