Your Wealth Window – How Many Months Do You Have Left?

There are only two types of people – those who outlive their money and those who don’t.

Of course everyone wants to be in the latter group, but most Australians don’t fall into that category.

I found that you need to do the hard things now so that you have an easier life later, however most people do the easy things now and have a hard life later.

They don’t learn to delay gratification, spend less than they earn, save invest and keep re-investing till they have a substantial asset base.

The longer you your time frame between now and when you want to leave the rat race the easier it is going to be for you to build a substantial asset base to provide their retirement income you can’t outlive.

For many the problem is that this is too far out in the future and it’s too hard to have the financial discipline to save and invest – there are too many reasons to spend money today.

How long is your wealth window?

Your “wealth window” is the period of your life during which you can convert your human capital (income) into invested capital.

As you progress through life this “wealth window” is constantly getting shorter and shorter, one pay cheque and one month at a time.

Humans are good at a lot of things, but putting time in perspective is not one of them.

Your Life in Weeks  graphically shows how quickly time flies. This is a portion of their great blog:

This is a long human life in years:

And here’s a human life in months:

And here you can see a human life in weeks:

In the graphic above each row of weeks makes up one year.

So it shows how many weeks it takes to turn a newborn into a 90-year-old.

I guess when you look at the last graphic, it seems like you have countless weeks and there’s no rush to start building your investment portfolio.

Unfortunately that’s not true – and take it from somebody who has lived over 3,500 weeks – these weeks zoom past quickly.

The weeks in the graphic above are your weeks – that’s all you’ve got.

How are you using them?

Are you taking advantage of them?

To help give you some perspective, I’ll share one more chart from Wait But Why  which shows how a typical American spends their weeks:

from Property UpdateProperty Update https://propertyupdate.com.au/your-wealth-window-how-many-months-do-you-have-left/