How to ACTUALLY Get Rich in 2026…

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]If you want to be rich, it all comes down to six rules every wealthy person I know follows every single month. And even though I worked in investment banking for 9 years, nobody handed me these. I had to learn them the hard way because your salary, it's just a starting point. What actually builds wealth is what you do with the money once it hits your account. And most people never learn that. The first rule is the one that rewired how I think about money entirely. And it comes down to a single equation. That is the wealth equation. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. There are only three things you can do with your money. Earn it, keep it, grow it. Most people spend their entire career optimizing for one.

[00:00:42]The wealthy optimize for the other two.

[00:00:45]Here's what I mean. The gap between what you earn and what you spend is the only number that determines whether you get richer or stay stuck. Everything else, the job title, the bonus, the postcode, that's all just a distraction from what really matters. I worked in banking for 9 years and I was seeing people earn silly amounts of money, huge salaries, but virtually no gap. The number on that pay slip was huge. The number that actually mattered was zero. And this is what I mean. Someone earning say 80,000 who spends 70,000 builds less wealth than someone earning 40,000 who spends 25,000. The first person saves 5,000 a year. The second saves 15,000. Three times more on half the salary. And you can widen that gap two ways. Earn more or spend less. We'll come back to which one has more leverage. But first, the equation itself. Wealth isn't about income, it's about the gap. The obvious question is, do you actually know what your gap is right now? Because most people don't. And that's where rule two comes in, the income multiplier. And this is one of the most overlooked rules in personal finance. Your spending has a floor. You can only cut so much. But your income doesn't have a ceiling. So why does every piece of money advice start with cutting back? I tested this in my own career. Over 9 years in banking. I went from earning £35,000 to £120,000 base salary. And I broken down every year of that progression in another video which I'll link right here. And the thing I'll tell anyone starting out now is that the difference between those two numbers wasn't cutting subscriptions. It wasn't skipping coffees. It was negotiating. It was switching jobs. And it was asking for what I was worth. The cutting side of the equation never moved my life. But the earning side very much did. So if you think about it, if you're spending 2,000 a month, the absolute most you can save by cutting is 2,000 and only if you live on nothing. That's your flaw. But your income, there's no version of the maths where you've earned the maximum. A pay rise, a side income, a new skill, a different job. Every one of those moves the ceiling up. And that ceiling actually doesn't exist. This is why two people with the same expenses can end up in completely different places. One spent 10 years getting really good at saving every single month. The other spent 10 years getting really good at earning every single month. It's the same discipline. It's the same effort, but often it's 10x the result. And the part that nobody says out loud is that cutting back is comfortable. It feels really responsible. There is absolutely a time and place for that. This is a personal finance channel and I have specific videos on budgeting and saving.

[00:03:24]But the earning side, it is uncomfortable. It means asking for the raise, charging the higher rate, building the thing on the side, having the conversation you've been avoiding.

[00:03:33]That's why most people optimize for the smaller number. But if you're watching this, you're going to do both from now.

[00:03:38]So, if income is the lever, the question now becomes, what happens when it actually starts going up? Because here's the trap that most people fall into.

[00:03:48]Most people earn more and then they spend more. And a year later, that gap that we spoke about, it hasn't moved an inch. And that's rule number three, the lifestyle creep detector. In my first year in investment banking, I bought a white Audi A3 convertible. It was secondhand, but still. It was £15,000 in cash and that was 13 years ago. So obviously worth more today. And I paid it from the savings that I'd built up from working in retail whilst I was at uni and also from the paycheck I was getting whilst in banking. I told myself I deserved it. I got the graduate offer that was very competitive and this was my reward. I absolutely didn't need a new car. I just wanted what I thought a graduate banker was supposed to drive. A year in, a friend on the same scheme, same starting salary, same year, used her version of that money as a deposit on a house. And at the time, it felt like she was being boring and that I was enjoying the job. But looking back, I'd absorbed my pay rise into something that lost value the moment I drove her home.

[00:04:47]She put hers into something that has since doubled. Same income for the same year, two completely different positions from that money a decade later. That's what's called lifestyle creep, and I've fallen into it. And I'm not alone. A study found that 26% of people earning six figures still live paycheck to paycheck. It's something that most people don't realize because it happens so slowly. But rule number three is the lifestyle creep detector, and you need one. A 10,000 payriseise feels like 10,000, but after tax is closer to 6,000. If you absorb half of that into nice dinners, a better car lease, a flat with one more bedroom, you've kept maybe 3,000. That's 250 a month. That pay rise was supposed to change your life or bring you closer to financial security, but instead you moved your gap by 250 a month. And I don't want to pass on the message that you should absolutely not reward yourself or treat yourself. But I really, really recommend always making sure that when your income comes up, make sure that that gap does widen. You don't need to keep your cost exactly the same, but you don't want it to increase in the same rate that your income goes up. And it happens at every salary.

[00:05:55]Every income bracket has its own version of normal. The holidays people take, the cars people drive, the postcodes people live in. The moment your salary crosses into a new bracket, the new normal starts pulling at you. And most people don't notice that they're being pulled until the lifestyle is locked in and that gap is gone. So the detector is one question. Every time your income goes up, ask, did my gap go up with it? Not your spending, not your lifestyle, the gap from rule number one. Because earning more only matters if more of it stays. And once more of it stays, the next question is what you actually do with it. And that is rule number four.

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[00:07:29]Rule number four, spend on what compounds, not what decays. Here's a rule that took me years of earning well to actually understand. Every pound or every dollar you spend is doing one of two things. It's either compounding or it's decaying. Nothing stays still. And most people spend the majority of their money on the wrong side of that line.

[00:07:50]Decaying is what most spending looks like. The car loses value the second you drive it off. The clothes go out of style. The takeaway is gone in 20 minutes. None of that is wrong. You are absolutely allowed to enjoy your life.

[00:08:02]But understand what it is. You are exchanging money for something that will be worth less or nothing. You might enjoy it in the time, but that doesn't take away from the fact that that money is decaying. Compounding is the other category, and it's the one that nobody teaches you to look for. A $200 course that lands you a 5,000 pay rise. A $40 book that changes how you think about your career for the next decade, $1,000 laptop that makes you two times more productive, the gym membership that makes you a lot more healthier. These don't feel like investments at the till.

[00:08:35]They feel like spending, but the return curves up instead of down. And here's the question that will really change how you spend. and look at it from this lens. In 5 years, will I still be glad that I bought this thing? If the answer is yes, it's probably compounding. If you can't answer the question, it's probably decaying. That single filter applied consistently redirects thousands a year towards things that actually move your life. And just remember that compounding spending doesn't have to be financial. As we've discussed, it doesn't have to be stocks, property, investments. It can be on spending on things that pay you back in other ways.

[00:09:10]A coach, a house cleaner, a meal planning service, a mentor, a flight to be in the right room. The bills that bill might look expensive in the moment, but that return over time can make it a very cheap purchase in comparison. Rule number five, build one asset that earns while you sleep. Think about how a salary works. You trade an hour and you get paid for an hour. If you stop trading hours, the money stops. There's a hard ceiling on how many hours you have and there's a hard floor on how little sleep you can survive on. That's the maths of every job, every freelance gig, every consulting day rate. Time in, money out. The moment you stop, that income stops. An asset breaks that maths. An asset is everything you build once that keeps paying you. It's a course that you record in a month and sell for the next 5 years. It's a book that sells on for years. It's a YouTube channel. It's a rental property. It's a piece of software. It's equity in a company. The work for most of these is front-loaded. The income isn't. I want to explain how this looks like in numbers. If you spend 100 hours building something that earns you 500 a month, that's 6,000 a year for hours you've already worked. Year 2 is still 6,000.

[00:10:20]Year three is the same. By year five, you've earned 30,000 from that initial 100 hours of work. That's 300 an hour and it keeps going. No salary on earth pays like that because no salary is detached from your time. I'm always encouraging people and talking about on this channel ways to earn money outside of your day job. One person in my community, they were also challenged by our business coach to get started on their YouTube channel and just get to 250 subscribers by the time they come to the next coaching call.

[00:10:49]>> And I kind of had a homework uh from you to reach out to reach um to achieve uh 250 subscribers. Um, I now I now have 1,000.

[00:11:04]>> She came back with 1,000 subscribers and it took her 3 months and now she's on her way to monetize. That's 3 months of going all in and now she could potentially scale that >> within your next couple of videos. Maybe if you had an idea about, I don't know, a a checklist um or a PDF guide or a quiz or something like that that you think would add value to your viewers's world, but they would be willing to part ways with their email address and their name at the very least.

[00:11:34]>> Um and then you can then get them into an email list, a simple email list. So, um my personal favorite is kit. By the way, if you want to know more about this community or learn more specifically from this business coach, Robin, I've linked his book and the membership in the description. We currently have a promotional and you can find all the details below. So, if you've earned more, you've protected the gap, you've spent on what compounds and build something that pays you when you're not there, you've already done more than 95% of what most people will. But there's one rule left, and it's the one that nobody teaches because it's not a tactic. is the thing that all five of the other rules depend on. And rule number six is stay around money longer than feels comfortable. As the saying goes, if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. And one of the biggest predictors of wealth, it isn't intelligence, it's proximity.

[00:12:26]It's who you spend your time around.

[00:12:27]It's what's normal in the rooms that you're in. And most people leave those rooms too early because staying in it feels uncomfortable. Every income bracket has its own version of normal.

[00:12:38]In one room, a 30,000 salary is the goal. In another, it's the floor. In one room, owning a home is the dream. In another, it's the starter move. In one room, building a business is risky. In another, not building one is risky. But the room you spend the most time in is slowly going to become your ceiling.

[00:12:58]Your standards will calibrate to the people around you. And it's not that you should stop spending time with the people you're hanging out with. It just means you need to open up doors to other rooms where the possibilities of what you can achieve are different. And this is probably harder said than done because when you walk into a room where everyone earns more than you, builds more than you, knows more than you, your first instinct is to leave. It feels like you don't belong, like you're behind, like everyone can tell that you're not where you're supposed to be.

[00:13:28]So, you go back to the room that you're comfortable in, where you're the smartest person, where the conversations make sense, and your earning capacity stays exactly where it was. Some of the most successful people I know didn't avoid that discomfort. In fact, they pushed into the rooms where they felt out of place, whether it was the conference, the dinner, the job, the friend group, the industry, long enough for that standard to become their standard. Long enough to learn what those people knew. Long enough that six figures stopped sounding like a lot of money because nobody around them was talking like it was one. This rule is so often overlooked, but it is one of the most important on this entire list because you can know the wealth equation. You could focus on your income. You could dodge the lifestyle people. You could spend on things that compound and build an asset. But if you don't have that community around you, if you aren't around people who also want to be better with money, grow their wealth, are comfortable with talking about money, then it does make it so much harder to keep up the momentum and the consistency to want to achieve more.

[00:14:24]That is it. Thank you so much for watching. If you like this video, I've also made a video that covers most things that you need to know about money. It goes deeper into the how behind every rule you just learned. I'll link it right here.