Manage Your Money Like A F*cking Grown-Up

Win at adulting with this financial expert’s guide. It’s the best advice you never had.

Who wants to be a millionaire? Maybe a better question is: how much do you have to earn to become a millionaire? $13K a month? $17K a month? Society teaches us to confuse income with wealth. But it isn’t the same thing at all. I know many, many people who earn ridiculous amounts of money, but are still in debt, anxious and trapped.

Income vs Wealth: Spot the Difference

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you start earning $1800 a month when you’re 25. And that every year you get a raise of three per cent until you stop working at 65. Let’s imagine that nothing ever goes wrong and you never miss a pay cheque in all that time. That would mean that you, with a very ordinary salary, would earn more than $1.6 million in your lifetime. That would buy you about 700,000 McDonald’s Big Macs and a lot of heartburn. You would have earned $180,000 by the age of 32.

But many people earn $1800 a month and most of them don’t end up being rich, obviously, because they spend nearly all of their money. Now, let’s take that same scenario, with you earning your $1800 a month from age 25, but you save a third of it every month in a shoebox. You’d have saved $180,000 by age 43! And this is before you start investing that money.