Certain pieces of money advice are considered classics for a reason. Just about any financial advisor will tell you to build and maintain an emergency fund or invest enough in a workplace retirement plan to receive an employer match because these are moves that make sense for almost any client.

For many investing pros, building a portfolio out of low-cost index funds falls into that category. By matching the returns of a broad stock market index, the thinking goes, an average investor can come out ahead in the long run — even over professional investors attempting to beat the market. Over the 15 years that ended June 30, just 12% of actively managed funds that track large-company U.S. stocks outperformed the S&P 500, according to S&P Global.

But Jim Cramer doesn’t want you to be an average investor. In his new book “How to Make Money in Any Market,” the host of CNBC’s “Mad Money” lays out what he calls a “radical” plan to help readers build long-term wealth.

“Let’s free ourselves from the rigid, tried-but-not-true approach that keeps you shackled by the chains of middling returns,” he writes.

Instead of the index funds-only approach, Cramer says your portfolio should be divided into three parts.

“I want individual stocks, I want index funds and I want a little bit of gold or crypto,” he tells CNBC Make It. “And that way I feel that you’ll have the ability to be able to retire much earlier than other people.”

Here’s how things break down.

Cramer doesn’t completely depart with investing orthodoxy. He still sees the need for low-cost, broadly diversified investments.

“A wealth-building portfolio needs to have a hefty dose of index funds,” he says. “I think you can put 50% in index funds.”

His reasoning is funds that track indexes such as the S&P 500 or the Nasdaq 100 offer a kind of anchor for the riskier parts of your portfolio. By investing across hundreds of stocks, you lower the odds that a sharp decline in any one of them will drag down your entire strategy.

“I need to anchor you in diversification as insurance against picking a few wrong stocks,” he writes in his book. “You are going to make mistakes with some of your stocks.”

To build wealth, Cramer says you’ll need to go beyond index investing alone and branch into individual stocks.

“I hate average, even as I accept it as a necessary evil in a diversified portfolio,” he writes in his book. “Are you proud of being average in any other walk of life? Would you have bought a book called Making Money the Average Way by Mediocre Joe? The S&P is average.”

To outperform the indexes, Cramer suggests building a portfolio of five individual stocks, the sum total of which should be roughly equal to what you invest in index funds. Cramer envisions a 50/50 split between these two parts of your portfolio, or, more accurately, something like 45/45, with the rest reserved for a third type of investment.

The bulk of your stocks, he says, should be high-quality growth stocks. These should be firms you expect to deliver consistent growth over the course of decades, he says — companies with growing earnings, innovative products or services, and durable competitive advantages over peers.

If you’re younger, Cramer says one or two of your five stocks should be more speculative stocks — names you think can deliver sky-high returns but that come with a substantial risk of loss. These stocks have a chance to deliver needle-moving returns that can greatly boost your wealth, Cramer says.

And if they go bust, “you’re young and you got your whole life to make that money back,” he says.

All of your stock picks, Cramer says, should be rooted in fundamental research that you check in on regularly. At a bare minimum, you should be listening in on quarterly earnings calls for the company’s whose stocks you own, he says.

 “A casual observer can spend four hours a year on an individual stock,” Cramer says. “If you can’t, then you do have to default to an index fund.”

Cramer says a small portion of your assets should be in what he calls a hedge or insurance against your other investments.

“I mean something that’s likely to perform independent of the stock market, that won’t necessarily crater if the stock market goes way down,” Cramer writes.

His two favorites: gold and bitcoin.

Cramer recommends keeping 5% to 10% of your portfolio in one of these assets not because he expects them to make you rich, but because they might hold up as stores of value if calamity struck elsewhere in the market.

Cramer posits that spiraling national debt, for instance, could eventually be a major disruptive force in the economy. Having an investment that could benefit in that scenario, Cramer says, is like having insurance on a house. You hope never to use it, but it brings you comfort that it’s there.

“Unlike speculators who are buying gold or crypto and hoping it will make them rich, we are just using them to weather the storm,” Cramer writes. “We’ll make a killing through our stock investments. This hedge will simply let us sleep at night.”

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