If you’ve ever wondered how to get rich: this article is for you.
Most people who want to be rich picture a single moment. A windfall, say, or a startup exit. The research points somewhere duller. When Thomas Stanley and William Danko studied American millionaires in the 1990s, about 80 percent turned out to be first-generation wealthy, which means they built the money themselves (Stanley and Danko, 1996). They earned steadily, spent less than they made, and then left the difference alone for a very long time.
That’s the premise of this list. Fourteen steps, in roughly the order they start paying off. Some are about earning more. Some are about keeping more. A few exist purely to stop you from wrecking what you’ve built, which is a bigger problem than most guides admit. None of them requires a trust fund, though a couple require patience, and that’s the part nobody enjoys.
A quick note before we start. The examples lean American (401(k)s, IRAs) because that’s where most of the good data lives. If you’re elsewhere, look for the local equivalent of each account. Everything here is general information, not personal financial advice.
1. Decide what rich means to you
Rich is a moving target. For one person it’s a paid-off flat and the freedom to turn down a bad client. For another it’s seven figures and a boat. If you never pick a number, you’ll chase the horizon indefinitely, and every raise will feel like it should have been bigger.
The research on money and mood is kinder than the old line about happiness flattening out at $75,000. Killingsworth, Kahneman and Mellers (2023) went back through the data together and found that, for most people, happiness keeps rising with income. The plateau showed up only among the least happy group. So more money probably helps. It just can’t tell you what you’re building toward, and that question deserves some honest time, whether you call it figuring out what you actually want from life or something less grand.
Your move: write one sentence that defines “rich” for you, then attach a figure to it, even a rough one. You can revise it in a year.
2. Look at what you actually spend
You can’t steer by feel. People overestimate the one big purchase they remember and ignore the small repeated ones that add up quietly. So spend a month recording everything, or export your bank statements into a spreadsheet and sort them by category. It’s tedious. It’s also the cheapest financial education available.
You’re hunting for patterns, not guilt. Maybe it’s a subscription you forgot about, or delivery fees that quietly became a habit. Maybe it’s a rent-to-income ratio that explains why saving feels impossible no matter how disciplined you are. Knowing your own numbers is a form of taking responsibility for your actions, and it’s what separates a plan from a wish.
If a spreadsheet makes your eyes glaze over, an app that reads your bank feed does the same job with less effort. Pick whichever you’ll still be using in March.
A quick experiment: tag every transaction from the last 30 days as a need, a want or a regret, then see how big the regret pile is.
3. Build a cash cushion before you invest
Investing with no buffer is how people end up selling at the worst possible moment to pay for a car repair. The Federal Reserve’s annual household survey shows how common that exposure is. In 2022, 2023 and 2024, 63 percent of adults said they’d cover a surprise $400 expense using cash or its equivalent. The other 37 percent would have used another method, such as borrowing or selling something, or couldn’t pay at all.
A common target is three to six months of essential expenses in an account you can reach quickly. Don’t try to get there in one go. Aim for one month first, then build outward. Life gets easier to handle when there’s something soft under the uncertainty in life that you can’t plan for.
Start small: set up a transfer for the day after payday, even if it’s only $25, and let that account grow without checking it every week.
4. Get rid of expensive debt
Federal Reserve data from 2026 puts the average interest rate on credit card accounts that carry a balance above 21 percent. A $5,000 balance at 22 percent costs about $1,100 a year, and you haven’t bought anything new. No reliable investment can promise to out-earn that, which is why paying it off is usually the best return available to you.
So once the starter cushion exists, this is the next target. List every debt next to its real interest rate. Pay the minimum on all of them, then send every spare dollar to one in particular. Cheap debt, like a low-rate mortgage, is a different story. It can sit there while you invest, though whether it should depends on your numbers and on how well you sleep while owing money.
There are two popular ways to pick that one debt. Going after the highest rate first saves the most interest. Going after the smallest balance first gives you quick wins and fewer bills to track. The first is cheaper on paper and the second is easier to stick with, so the better method is whichever one you’ll actually finish. Once a card is cleared, pay it in full every month. Carrying a balance undoes almost everything else on this list.
Most people have never written down the actual rates on what they owe. Log in to each lender today and do it, because you can’t beat a number you haven’t looked at.
5. Automate your savings rate
Willpower is a bad system. Thaler and Benartzi (2004) tested a plan called Save More Tomorrow at a US company, where employees agreed in advance to raise their contributions each time they received a raise. Average savings rates climbed from 3.5 percent to 13.6 percent over about 40 months. It was one firm and not a randomized trial, so hold the exact figures loosely. The logic holds up anyway. People save more when the decision gets made once, ahead of time, and the money never passes through their hands.
Think of it as a promise to your future self. The rules for keeping a promise apply here as they do anywhere: make it specific and automatic, and make it awkward to wriggle out of. A common rule of thumb is 15 percent of gross income, employer match included. If that feels impossible today, begin lower. The habit matters more than the starting number.
Before the next payday, raise your automatic transfer by one percentage point. Then raise it again whenever your pay goes up.
6. Raise your earning power
Cutting expenses has a floor. Income doesn’t, or at least not one that’s close. Bureau of Labor Statistics data for the first quarter of 2025 put median weekly earnings for full-time workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher at $1,754, against $953 for high school graduates with no college. Over a year, that’s a gap of more than $41,000.
Those are medians across millions of people, so they tell you nothing certain about you. A degree isn’t the only road, either. Apprenticeships and professional certificates pay well too, as do plain hard-to-replace skills. What counts is the direction: learn things the market already pays for. Getting good at finding and checking information is one of those skills, and research skills make every other skill faster to pick up.
Skills compound too, just less visibly than money. Someone who writes clearly, handles a spreadsheet and can lead a small team usually gets the more interesting problems, and those lead to the better-paid roles. So volunteer for work that stretches you a little. It’s uncomfortable, and it’s often the shortest route to a bigger title.
Here’s a simple way in: pull up ten job ads for the role you’d like in two years, tally which skills show up most, and choose one to learn this quarter.
7. Ask for more, and know when to move
Waiting to be noticed is a slow way to get a raise. Keep a running list of what you’ve delivered, such as a project that shipped on time or a cost you cut, and have the conversation with a specific number in mind.
Changing employers is the other lever. The Atlanta Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker follows the pay of individual workers over time, and since 1997 it has shown job switchers out-earning job stayers in the large majority of months, by around 0.7 percentage points on average. That premium isn’t fixed. In early 2025 it vanished, and stayers briefly came out ahead. Switching helps most when employers are hiring, and it can backfire when they aren’t.
Before your next review, write down your best results of the past year and look up the market rate for your role in a salary survey. Then ask.
8. Add a second income, with limits
A side income speeds up everything else because it grows the one part of the equation you control directly. Freelancing and tutoring are common starting points, and a small online shop works too. The money just has to come from outside your main paycheck.
The cost is you. Burnout is a lousy way to build wealth. Cap the hours before you begin, and judge the project by what it pays per hour after expenses. If it earns less than your day job and you don’t enjoy it either, you’ve created a hobby with a tax return. Protecting your work-life balance is far easier before the side project takes over your evenings than after.
One more decision matters as much as the project itself, and that’s where the money goes. Route side income straight into savings, ideally the day it arrives. Money that lands in your everyday account has a way of dissolving into everyday spending.
Give it a go: list three things people have already asked you for help with, then put a price on one of them.
9. Use tax-advantaged accounts
Tax rules are dull and worth more than most hot tips. For 2026, the IRS has set the US contribution limit at $24,500 for 401(k) plans and $7,500 for IRAs. If your employer matches contributions, grab the full match before doing almost anything else with spare cash. It’s an instant return you won’t find anywhere else.
Roth accounts take the tax now and let qualifying withdrawals come out tax-free later. Traditional accounts work the other way around. Which is better depends on whether your tax rate will be higher or lower in retirement, and nobody knows that. Outside the US, look for the same idea under another name: ISAs in the UK, TFSAs in Canada, IKE and IKZE in Poland. One caution applies almost everywhere. Retirement accounts usually penalize early withdrawals, so lock money away only after the cushion from step 3 is in place.
Time does most of the heavy lifting here. Assume a steady 7 percent a year, which is an illustration and not a promise. Put away $400 a month for 30 years and you’d end up with roughly $488,000 from $144,000 of contributions. Wait ten years to start and the 20-year total is about $208,000. The same monthly amount, but less than half the result.
Test it this week: find out whether your employer offers a match, and what percentage you need to contribute to collect all of it.
10. Buy the whole market and leave it alone
Stock picking sounds like how rich people get rich. For most of us, the evidence says otherwise. S&P Dow Jones Indices’ SPIVA scorecard for year-end 2025 found that 79 percent of active large-cap US equity funds trailed the S&P 500 that year, and over 15 years roughly nine in ten did. Professionals with research teams lose to a cheap index fund most of the time. That should adjust your expectations for what an evening of stock-tip videos will do.
Your own behavior is the second drag. Morningstar’s Mind the Gap research keeps finding that investors earn less than the funds they hold, by about 1.2 percentage points a year over ten-year windows, and it traces the shortfall to the timing and size of their purchases and sales. Take $500 a month over 30 years. At 7 percent that grows to about $610,000, while at 5.8 percent it reaches only about $483,000. The difference comes from behavior.
If choosing funds feels like homework, target-date and other all-in-one allocation funds are worth a look. In Morningstar’s latest study, investors in allocation funds captured about 92 percent of those funds’ returns, one of the best shares among fund types. Fewer decisions, it seems, means fewer mistakes.
Boring funds bought on a schedule are the answer, and watching headlines all day works against you. If you catch yourself doomscrolling market news, close the app. A quick experiment: choose one low-cost, broadly diversified index fund, check its annual fee, and set up a monthly purchase. Then don’t open the account for a month.
11. Ignore anything that promises fast money
Get-rich-quick pitches share one habit. They attach a date to a result that real compounding can’t deliver on a schedule. Day trading and paid courses that sell a lifestyle both fit the pattern. My own rule is that urgency in a pitch counts as a red flag all by itself.
Morningstar offers a harsh example. Its analysts estimated that from January 2024 through June 2026, the average dollar invested in crypto ETFs lost about 5.8 percent a year, even though the funds themselves gained 8.5 percent a year. The gap comes from when investors bought and sold, since the funds’ own returns were positive. That’s what chasing excitement costs.
Fear of missing out drives most of this behavior. When you feel a rush to act before it’s too late, treat the rush as information about your mood rather than about the investment. A good rule is to wait 48 hours before putting money into anything you heard about from a friend or a feed.
12. Don’t let your lifestyle grow with your pay
This is where plenty of high earners lose. A raise arrives, and the budget quietly expands to meet it, first with a bigger flat and then with a nicer car. Stanley and Danko (1996) reported that the millionaires they surveyed lived well below their means and typically invested more than a fifth of their income. Their wealth came from the gap between earning and spending.
Part of the pull comes from the people around you. It’s hard to stay put when everyone you know seems to be upgrading, so learning to stop comparing yourself to others is a financial skill as much as an emotional one. Here’s what an upgrade can really cost. Say your $1,200 rent could become $1,600 right when your raise lands. That extra $400 a month is the same $400 that would grow to about $208,000 over 20 years at 7 percent.
You don’t have to ban upgrades. Just split each raise instead of spending all of it. Next time, do this: before the first higher paycheck arrives, decide that half of the increase goes to savings automatically and half is yours to spend.
13. Spend big on what matters and cut the rest
Frugality across the board is miserable, and it rarely lasts. A better approach is to pick the two or three things you truly care about and trim ruthlessly everywhere else. Housing, transport and food usually dominate a budget, so a few percentage points saved there outweigh a lifetime of skipped lattes. Buying a lightly used car dodges the steepest drop in value.
Waste is the other quiet leak. Food that spoils, gadgets that gather dust, a service you pay for and never use. Learning how to cut waste at home usually saves money as a side effect.
Give it a go: look at your three biggest expense categories and ask which one you’d miss least if it shrank by 15 percent.
14. Surround yourself with people who know more
Money advice from peers is often shaky, and from the internet it’s often worse. Find people a few steps ahead of you. That might be a mentor, or a manager who is good at their job. If your situation gets complicated, a fee-only financial adviser can help. Fee-only means they’re paid by you, not by commissions on what they sell, which changes whose interests they serve. Ask any adviser how they get paid before you ask anything else.
Referrals and honest feedback both arrive through people. If meeting new ones feels awkward, building your social skills pays off well beyond your bank balance. Most people are flattered when someone asks for their advice, and they rarely say no to a specific, small question.
Start small: email one person whose career you admire and ask a single concrete question that takes them two minutes to answer.
What to do when you slip
You will. Some month, spending will run away from you, or a transfer will get skipped, or you’ll buy something you regret by the time the package arrives. Or you’ll sell in a panic when the market drops and regret it by the weekend. The plan doesn’t fail when this happens. It fails if you stay off track.
Start with the damage in plain numbers. How much did you overspend, or how much did you lose? Naming the figure usually shrinks it. Then resist the urge to punish yourself with an extreme budget, because those collapse within weeks. Restart your automatic transfers at the old level and carry on.
Next, look for the trigger. Was it stress, boredom, or a night out? Spending that follows a pattern can be redirected once you’ve seen the pattern. And on a rough day, it helps to know how to turn a bad day around before it turns into a bad month. Build in a ten-minute money check once a week, too. It’s simple: balances, last week’s spending, done. Slips shrink when you spot them in days rather than months.
Keep one rule that survives everything else: never skip two months in a row. One slip is noise. Two starts to look like a new habit.
If the slip happens in the market, the rule is simpler still. Don’t sell in a panic. Morningstar’s data on the investor return gap is basically a record of what that panic costs.
Conclusion
You don’t need to do all fourteen things this month. Pick one. If you’re short on cash, build the cushion. If you have a card balance at 22 percent, kill it. If your employer offers a match you aren’t collecting, fix that today. Wealth rarely arrives with a bang. It accumulates through dull decisions repeated over years, and the earlier you set them up, the less effort they need.
For more practical guides on habits and money, browse the Self Improvement section. Then choose your first step and put a date next to it.
