The Ladder of Wealth Money · Time · Relationships

You are not falling behind because you are doing something wrong. You are falling behind because nobody told you the rules of the game you are actually playing.

You Already Know Something Is Wrong

You work hard. You are not reckless. You make reasonable decisions. And yet the gap never closes. The bills keep coming. The savings never quite materialise. The thing you are supposed to be building keeps getting pushed to later — and later never arrives.

You are not imagining it. Most people sense that their finances are getting harder — that working the same way produces less ground gained than it used to. Few sit down and work out exactly why. When I did, running through the real numbers on inflation, taxes, cost of living, and what assets actually return once you go to spend them, my estimate is that even the safe haven — real estate — returns about 1% per year in realized purchasing power when all is said and done.

I may be wrong. The math is complex and the variables are real. But whether that number is exactly right or not, it represents the problem I set out to resolve. And this course — while it may not yet get all the way there — takes a valiant stab at it.

The Ladder

There is a sequence to how a life gets built. Most people are trying to climb without understanding the rungs — or they are reaching for a higher rung before the one beneath it can bear weight.

Resources rotate up. Without some breathing room in finances, everything else is much more difficult — not impossible, but harder than it has to be, and fragile in ways that keep pulling you back down.

Once you manage to grab some breathing room, there is a progression that keeps everything stable and moving forward. The rungs do not replace each other — you maintain what is below while building what is above.

Money is not the goal. It is merely the starting line.

"When possible, trade dollars for time — and time for relationships."