How to Build Wealth in Your 30s — Honestly

Working harder was never the thing that was missing.

Years ago, right after I finished my MBA, admittedly a little older than most of my classmates, my wife and I were merging our finances and starting to look at houses. For the first time in ages, I sat down and looked at the whole picture: savings, investments, the number at the bottom.

My honest reaction was: that’s it?

I’d spent most of my 20s and half my 30s working around the clock in capital markets. Good resume, the credentials to match. And it just hadn’t turned into the big dollars I’d assumed all that effort was finally going to produce.

For a while I told myself it was bad luck: a couple of mass layoffs, an expensive degree I didn’t strictly need. Some of that’s true, but blaming luck, timing or other people doesn’t help me learn anything. The honest answer is harder: I’d never actually decided what I was working toward. I was just trying to make as much as possible and move up. And when you have no target, you have no way to know whether you’re winning.

That’s the thing almost no “how to build wealth in your 30s” article will tell you. They all assume the problem is that you’re not doing enough: save more, earn more, hustle harder. But for a lot of people already doing the things, effort was never the gap. Two other things were: they were watching the wrong number (a balance, when the one that matters is a rate), and they’d never defined what the money was actually for.

I wrote the whole thing up this week — the “that’s it?” moment, why your 30s balance is almost built to look small, and the boring shift that actually changed things for me. It’s the most personal piece I’ve published.

→ Read it here: How to Build Wealth in Your 30s in Canada — Honestly

It’s also, more or less, the thinking behind the startup I’m building. No pitch today — just the story.

— Andrew