I got into a discussion with someone this weekend over how to get rich. His point is that it’s super easy to get rich when you have a high income such as anything over $100k per year but I don’t believe that’s the case at all and I found two cases to prove my point.
The first is the story of Ronald Read who worked as a janitor and amassed an $8 million dollar fortune. I don’t know what the salary of a janitor is but I’m sure it is far from 100k. The key to Ronald’s wealth were two thing: frugality and long term investing.
The second story comes from a YouTuber Our Rich Journey that worked as a government employee and for most of his career earned under 100k but to be fair there were a few years where he did earn over 100k but that’s only because he moved to San Francisco and had a higher cost of living.
The key to his wealth was again, living frugally and investing as much as possible over the long term. The fundamental problem most people fall into is simply spending every additional amount of income they earn into more things that drain money.
In “Skip The Latte? No! Buy Starbucks Stock” I made the point that if there are things you truly love you should have a mechanism to generate the income to enjoy those things by investing.
If you truly loved financial independence and freedom from corporate or menial job grind then the priority needs to be saving and investing. Earning more money will certainly help make it easier and faster but that’s not the only way.
Share The Wealth
What are you willing to give up to reach financial independence? What are you willing to invest in to make it happen?