How to be Wealthy in Your 30s (2024 Edition)

Alright, let’s transition into something that might resemble—oh yeah, this is what we call, in an affectionate way, the messy middle. Oh yeah, it’s right. So, in your 30s, this is when a lot of people fall behind, but I want to say it’s not their fault. We all have our kind of own responsibility, but this is a hard decade. This is a hard stage of life. There are a thousand different things pulling you in a thousand different directions. You’re likely getting married; you’re having kids; you’re buying a house; you’re buying a car; you’re advancing in your career; you’re impacting your community. And all of a sudden, you’re like, “Holy cow, I’m not in control of my life anymore.”

Now, I want, ’cause Rebie in our show prep meeting was like, “Guys, but you have to make sure everybody knows this is still a positive decade. Lots of greatness, even though it’s messy. There is still a lot of greatness here.” It’s the old country music lyric that we always love to say: “The days are long, but the years are short.” But it is one of those things where I want to put—we actually have two charts that we like to show. The first one, on the financial stages of life, you can see your disposable income gets squeezed in this messy middle. It is one of those things, as you have the family growing, you’re getting married, you’re buying houses, all the other responsibilities of life just start pulling on everything that’s coming in. Your income is getting stretched and allocated. It seems like almost immediately. So that’s one stress that creates the messy middle.

But besides income, what else is getting squeezed? The next thing is your time. And I think for a lot of people, this is the hardest part, right? We recognize that with all the stuff that we have going on, we don’t actually have time for anything. We want to be great at our job, and we want to be great parents, we want to be great community participants, we want to be great at drinking a gallon of water a day, we want to be great at eating, we want to be great—all these things. And all of a sudden, you recognize, “Holy cow, I woke up, I tried to be great in everything I did, and now it’s time to go to bed again.” You are not alone; this stage is difficult, and it’s supposed to be difficult. And it’s not just difficult for you; it’s difficult for all the people that are going through it right now. And I think even the people that are maybe on the other side of it, they would realize—they would agree, “Yeah, it was difficult. It was hard, but you can make it through it, and there are ways to get ahead even as you’re going through this messy stage of life.”

Yeah, so let’s kind of go ahead and how do you get ahead in this? We want to cover a few of these things. I think it’s not losing focus. We all have blind spots; we get busy. So it’s important just to make sure we don’t leave behind some important stuff just in the chaos that’s kind of coming through life naturally. The first thing is don’t overlook the power of risk management. What I mean specifically—there’s a reason the Financial Order of Operations has two steps that focus on emergency reserves. It’s highest deductible covered, which is step one, and then it’s emergency reserves, which is 3 to 6 months on step four. Don’t let your busyness let you overlook just setting up that core basis that’s going to keep you protected and also keep you from letting a health care emergency or your car, you know, having a car accident or your car losing a radiator, something that you don’t see happening on Tuesday, derailing your financial future.

Yeah, I think it’s so interesting; a lot of folks in their 20s, Brian, they’ll say, “You know what, I’ve got $10,000. I need to save up $10,000, an emergency fund of $10,000.” And then life goes on, and life goes on, and life goes on, and they don’t recognize that they actually need to change that. “Oh well, it was $10,000, but then I got married, and now I got a mortgage, and now I’ve got kids. That trip to Burger King is no longer a number one for me; it’s number one, two kids’ meals, and then whatever my spouse wants.” It’s a different type of thing you have to do. So, one of the things that you might need to do in your 30s, especially if you’ve not done it in a while, is you might have to think about that ‘b’ word. And I think you know the ‘b’ word I’m talking about; you may have to look at a budget.

Yeah, we say that for an emergency fund you need 3 to 6 months of your expenses and liquid cash available. Well, do you actually know what your expenses are? Do you actually know where your dollars are going? Have you tracked to say, “Okay, this is how much I spend on utilities, and this is what my mortgage is, and this is how much we eat out, and this is what the grocery bill is,” and this is all of the other things? If you’ve not worked through that exercise, perhaps it’s time to do that if, for no other reason, to make sure you have your risks covered, just like what you said on emergency reserves.

Well, what I love is we’ve tried to create things to help you kind of accelerate your success because, you know, the abundance cycle is what drives us here. We’re going to load you up with all the free advice, all the information, let you become the best version of yourself. But we realized we needed to create some additional tools, some additional resources. So, one of the tools that we’ve added is the Know Your Number course. If you go to learn.moneyguy.com, we have the Know Your Number course. And within the Know Your Number course is actually budgeting. You can work through some budgeting worksheets and other things. And what I love about, you know, really marrying the budgeting process with the Know Your Number course is it lets you kind of then play with the toggles of the tool to kind of see, “Hey, if I put an extra $100 to work for me a month, what is that actually going to create for me in the future?” Because now you can squeeze. How do you cut your expenses? How do you maximize income? All these things are interrelated, but don’t skip steps. If you’re having struggles with getting to saving and investing 20–25% or having struggles getting to emergency reserves, you’ve got to know exactly where every dollar that comes into your army of dollars is going, and a budget is the way you’re going to fix that.

I love it. Now, Brian, one of the things I think is interesting, we’re talking about how to be wealthy at different ages and different stages. One of the questions we might have is, “Okay, what do my peers look like if I just think about broadly the folks around me?” We know right now the mean American in their 30s has just $9,888. If you look at the wealth multiplier and you think about what that $9,888 can turn into, that’s fantastic. But I would argue someone at $39 with $119,000 saved versus someone at 31 with $199,000 saved is very, very different. So, I do think this is that decade, Brian, where you need to start getting serious about it. You need to start really paying attention to make sure that you’re not falling behind because it is so easy to fall behind in this decade.

Well, and what’s cool to me is that when you’re in your 30s, we know that you’re getting serious about life. I think you do recognize you’re not at the midlife crisis phase, but you’re definitely kind of getting purpose and your whys figured out. This is the phase still where if you realize and you said, “You know what, I just got a 6% pay raise. If I take 3 to 4% of that, I could effectively increase my retirement income by 15 to 20%. That’s incredible and still a lot of bang for every good decision you make.” So, remember, maximize every incremental decision that comes your way because this is the moment to capture still a lot of opportunity in the messy middle of the 30s. For more information, check out our free resources.