My dear child:
I could have started investing at twenty-five. I started at thirty-two.
Seven years. I've made worse investments and backed worse men, and none of it cost me what those seven quiet years cost me.
I finally did the math in my fifties, and I wished I hadn't. Three hundred dollars a month into a simple index fund, from twenty-five to sixty-five, at the sort of return an index fund has managed over a long life. It finishes near a million. The same three hundred, the same fund, begun at thirty-two, finishes near HALF of that.
The earlier start put in twenty-five thousand dollars more, spread across a whole working life. It came back four hundred and sixty thousand ahead. Every dollar paid in during those extra seven years returned about eighteen.
That's the cruelty of it. Waiting never feels like a decision. Nothing leaves your account, no cheque is written, nobody sends you a receipt. It's the only expensive thing you can buy by doing nothing at all, and the bill takes thirty years to arrive.
I wasn't sitting and doing nothing in those seven years. I was waiting to earn more, waiting to feel certain, waiting to become the sort of man who was ready to take a little risk. The certainty never arrived. The years went anyway.
So don't sit down tonight and decide how much. You aren't ready to decide how much. Decide one thing only: whether anything at all goes in before this month ends. That single answer is the whole distance between those two numbers.
If you haven’t started, start today. If you’ve already started, keep going.
One thing I'd tell my younger self: You were never waiting for the money. You were waiting to feel ready, and readiness is not a thing that arrives.
From the bookshelf: "The Richest Man in Babylon" by George S. Clason. A hundred years old and still the plainest case ever made for paying yourself first, starting with whatever you have.
A question to sit with: What amount could you start with this month without thinking twice about it? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.
Yours sincerely,
