Building wealth is essential to accomplish a variety of goals, from sending your kids to college to retiring in style. But establishing a solid financial foundation will also help you survive stock market corrections and bear markets, recessions, health emergencies and other setbacks.

Our plan outlined here covers every aspect of your financial life, from investing to insurance to building credit. Most of our advice is basic, because a strong foundation sets you up to reach your financial goals. If you're just starting out, these fundamentals should stay with you throughout your wealth-building journey, although they will likely evolve along with your situation. Even if you have been practicing sound financial principles for decades, all of us can use a refresher every now and then.

Invest Early and Often

Getty Images

In a recent study by GOBankingRates.com, 43% of respondents age 25 to 34 said they weren't investing in stocks, bonds or real estate. They cited familiar reasons for staying on the sidelines--they didn't feel as though they had enough money to invest, they feared losing money in market downturns, or they found investing to be complicated and intimidating. But by sitting things out, they're sacrificing the two most potent forces when it comes to building wealth through investment: time and compounding interest.

Say a 21-year-old invested $100 a month toward retirement and earned an average return of 8% per year. By age 67, without ever increasing that contribution, our investor would have $524,000. But an investor who started at age 30 would net just $254,000 under the same conditions.

Keep Investment Costs Low

Getty Images

You can't control how investments in your portfolio perform, but you can control what you pay for them. The fees you pay for mutual funds or exchange-traded funds may seem trivial, but like your returns, your costs compound and could have a major impact on your portfolio over the long term. Say you invested $10,000 in an actively managed large-company U.S. stock fund charging 1.04% of assets in annual expenses (the category average) and held it for 30 years. Assuming it earns an 8% annualized return, it would grow to nearly $74,000, and you would have paid more than $10,000 in fees. But if you plunked $10,000 into the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF, which tracks the broad U.S. stock market and charges 0.03% in expenses, you'd end up with $100,000 (using the same assumptions), and you'd have paid only $365 in fees.

Another way to keep costs down is to buy stocks when the market declines. Easier said than done, right? A strategy known as dollar-cost averaging can help. By investing a set amount at regular intervals (say, in your 401(k) plan), you'll buy more shares when prices are down and fewer when they're up. The practice lowers your average price per share over time and provides a disciplined way to buy low, "even when your emotional brain is screaming noooo!" says Kristi Sullivan, a certified financial planner based in Denver.

Diversify Your Investments

Getty Images

There's always a bull market somewhere, the saying goes. Spreading your investments across a diverse array of assets boosts your chances of capitalizing on booming corners of the market, which can shift drastically from year to year. For evidence, take a look at the Callan Institute's periodic table of investment returns, which tracks the returns of nine investment indexes. Large-company U.S. stocks were the big winners in 2019, returning 31%. But in 2018, you'd have done best by holding cash. The year before that, emerging-markets stocks reigned.

Spreading your bets means you're less susceptible to a sharp drawdown in any one type of investment. "The reason that diversification works is that you are including investments that are not correlated to one another. When one investment does well, another will act differently," says Thomas Rindahl, a CFP in Scottsdale, Ariz. As a result, a diversified portfolio is likely to lag any investment that's going gangbusters but will hold up when that investment slides, providing smoother results over time.

Invest Age-Appropriately

Getty Images

Asset allocation--how your portfolio is divvied up