There’s a paradox I keep coming back to:

Making a lot of money is one of the hardest things in the world. At the same time, it’s also one of the simplest.

Both statements can be true, depending on which part of the problem you look at.

On one side, there is structure: where you are born, how much you earn, your health, your obligations. On the other, there is agency: the games you choose to play, how you save, what you own, and how you respond to uncertainty.

The structure can make money feel brutally hard. The agency can make the rules of wealth feel almost embarrassingly simple.

This note is my attempt to separate those two layers, and to write down a framework that works not just for high earners, but also for people starting from low capital and low-leverage work.

1. Structure vs Agency: Two Layers of Money

It’s useful to split your financial life into two parts:

  • Structural layer – things you did not choose:

    • Family background
    • Country, safety net, housing market
    • Starting education, health, disabilities
    • Initial wage level and job options

  • Agency layer – things you do choose:

    • How you spend relative to income
    • Whether you build skills the market pays for
    • Whether you own productive assets at all
    • How you react to fear, envy and boredom

You can be very unlucky in the structural layer. You can still make good moves in the agency layer.

The problem starts when people blur the two:

  • They blame themselves for constraints they never chose.
  • Or they use structural difficulty as a blanket excuse for doing nothing.

A cleaner mental model is:

“My starting position is not my fault. What I do next is my responsibility.”

There is no shame in having low capital. There is only the question: Given these constraints, what is the best game available to me?

2. Why Shame Around Money Is a Category Error

Logically, there is no moral content in a bank balance:

  • A low net worth does not mean you are lazy or stupid.
  • A high net worth does not make you wise or kind.

Yet many people feel shame about not having “enough”. That shame usually comes from:

  • Status narratives – cultures that equate money with merit.
  • Family scripts – “we’re just bad with money”, “people like us never…”.
  • Social comparison – constant exposure to curated lifestyles.

Emotionally, it’s understandable. Rationally, it is misapplied.

If you carry shame into financial decisions, you get distortions:

  • Avoiding basic financial literacy because you “don’t want to feel stupid”.
  • Chasing high-status consumption to compensate for feeling behind.
  • Freezing and doing nothing because every decision feels like a judgement on you.

A healthier stance is:

“My financial state is a dataset, not a verdict.”

From there, you can start designing a system without turning every decision into a referendum on your worth.

3. The Three-Wallet Model: Survival, Stability, Growth

For people with low income and low capital, “just let it compound” often meets a brutal reality: emergencies keep resetting them to zero.

To make compounding possible, you need a simple hierarchy.

Think of your money as three separate “wallets” with different jobs:

3.1 Survival Wallet – Now

This is the money that keeps the lights on this month:

  • Rent or mortgage
  • Food
  • Transport
  • Minimum debt repayments

Rules:

  • You do not invest this.
  • You do not gamble this.
  • The only job of this wallet is: don’t get evicted, don’t starve.

For someone on a low wage, most of the early game is simply making this wallet predictable.

3.2 Stability Wallet – Don’t Get Reset to Zero

This is a small buffer to stop every problem from becoming a full restart:

  • A few hundred pounds at first.
  • Eventually, 1–6 months of essential expenses.
  • Debt reduction and basic insurance also live here conceptually.

Rules:

  • This exists so that when the tyre blows, the boiler breaks, or shifts are cut, you are not forced to raid your future or go into expensive debt.
  • It is boring by design.

Without this wallet, compounding is fragile. One bad month and you are back to the starting line.

3.3 Growth Wallet – The Compounding Engine

This is the capital that is not for lifestyle and not for emergencies:

  • Pension contributions
  • Broad index funds
  • A sensible portfolio
  • A small business or side asset

Rules:

  • You don’t fund holidays from here.
  • You don’t cover routine car repairs from here.
  • You accept volatility in exchange for long-term growth.

For people starting from low capital, the sequence is:

  1. Make Survival a bit less chaotic.
  2. Build a minimal Stability buffer.
  3. Only then start feeding Growth regularly, even with tiny amounts.

The amounts can be small. £20 a month into an index fund is still qualitatively different from £0. It’s the act of creating a Growth Wallet at all that changes the trajectory.

4. Choosing Your Money Game

Once your three wallets exist, the next big decision is which game you are going to play on the income and asset side.

Not everyone has to be an entrepreneur or a stock-picker. In fact, most people shouldn’t be.

I find it useful to think in three broad games.

4.1 Game A – The Career Engine

This is the default game for most people:

  • Increase earning power over time.
  • Keep lifestyle growth slower than income growth.
  • Automate contributions into simple, diversified investments.

Typical moves:

  • Moving from low-skill to higher-skill roles (trades, tech, healthcare, etc.).
  • Choosing employers and locations that pay for your skills.
  • Using pensions and low-fee index funds instead of trying to outsmart the market.

This game does not require you to love finance. It requires you to:

  • Care about your skills.
  • Avoid high-interest debt.
  • Let time work in your favour.

4.2 Game B – The Owner / Capital Allocator

This is closer to the game I play:

  • Own assets: businesses, properties, brands, portfolios.
  • Think in expected value, not guarantees.
  • Allocate capital across opportunities.

Requirements:

  • Tolerance for uncertainty and drawdowns.
  • A genuine interest in how businesses and markets work.
  • Enough surplus (time or money) to actually do the work.

This game is absolutely not for everyone. Information may be free, but temperament is not. If you force yourself into this game while hating every minute of it, you will make emotional decisions at the worst possible times.

4.3 Game C – The Hybrid

Many people are best served by a hybrid:

  • Keep a stable day job.
  • Build a small business, skill, or asset base on the side.
  • Use the surplus to feed the Growth Wallet.

Examples:

  • A contractor who also builds a small rental portfolio over 10–15 years.
  • A nurse who slowly accumulates a globally diversified index portfolio.
  • A developer building a small SaaS product in evenings.

The key is not to chase every game. It is to pick one main game you can actually sustain for a decade, and then stop second-guessing it every month.

5. Behavioural Rails for Normal Humans

Most people do not want to derive option pricing or read balance sheets for fun. That’s fine. You can still give them a working system.

The goal is to use simple rules so they don’t need to reinvent the wheel under stress.

5.1 Automate the Flows

When income arrives:

  1. Survival gets funded (bills, rent, food).
  2. Stability gets a small slice until the buffer is acceptable.
  3. Growth gets a fixed percentage, automatically invested.

Even:

  • Start with 1–5% into Growth,
  • Increase by 1% each year,
  • Leave the allocation alone unless your circumstances change.

Automation removes willpower and mood swings from the equation.

5.2 Guardrails, Not Genius

Some very basic rules carry most of the weight:

  • Avoid high-interest consumer debt wherever possible.
  • Don’t touch leveraged or “get rich quick” products you don’t understand.
  • If you don’t enjoy analysing businesses, buy simple, diversified funds and forget about stock picking.
  • If you do enjoy deep analysis, size positions so that one mistake does not blow up your life.

You don’t need to be clever to get rich. You need to avoid being catastrophically stupid.

5.3 Monthly Check-In

Once a month, 30 minutes is enough to ask:

  • Did I respect the three-wallet structure?
  • Did emergencies come from Stability or did I raid Growth?
  • Did I change my investing behaviour because the world changed, or because I was scared or bored?

The point is not perfection. It is a gentle feedback loop so your behaviour improves over time, even if life is messy.

6. Status, Comparison, and Quiet Wealth

A final piece is recognising how much status and comparison distort financial decisions.

A simple litmus test for any purchase is:

“Am I solving a real problem, or am I trying to signal something?”

Signalling is not always bad. Buying nice clothes, a car you enjoy, or a beautiful home can all be legitimate choices. The issue is when the signalling is unconscious and systematically cannibalises your future freedom.

Every £100/month of extra lifestyle is £100/month that does not enter the Growth Wallet. Over a decade, that gap compounds.

On the comparison side, the only useful benchmark is your own past:

  • Is my Survival less fragile than 2 years ago?
  • Is my Stability buffer bigger?
  • Is my Growth capital larger and more consistent?

You are not running the same race as your colleagues, neighbours, or strangers on the internet. Their structural layer is different. So are their games.

7. The Hard/Easy Paradox, Revisited

So is it hard or easy to get rich?

  • Hard, because:

    • Many people start from structurally bad positions.
    • Crises and bad luck reset progress.
    • Psychology, shame and status games push them into bad decisions.

  • Easy, because:

    • The underlying rules are simple.
    • A basic three-wallet structure plus a sensible game plus a few guardrails will outperform most “clever” strategies over 20–30 years.
    • With today’s access to information and tools, the knowledge itself is no longer scarce.

What actually makes the difference is not secret insight, but whether someone can:

  • Avoid shame long enough to look at their real situation honestly.
  • Pick a game that suits their temperament and constraints.
  • Set up behavioural rails so they don’t need to be a hero every month.

From that point on, wealth stops being a mysterious talent and starts looking more like a calm engineering problem.

The paradox remains, but it becomes less confusing:

Getting rich is hard for the world in aggregate. It can be surprisingly simple for the individual who picks the right game and gets out of their own way.

Appendix: Starting from a Low Income (Concrete Examples)

To make this less abstract, here are a few sketches for people starting from low income in the UK. The numbers are illustrative, not prescriptions.

Example 1 – £1,600/month after tax, renting

Say you take home £1,600/month. Your basics:

  • Rent: £800
  • Bills (energy, council tax, broadband, phone): £250
  • Food: £200
  • Transport: £100
  • Minimum debt payments: £100

That’s £1,450 of essential spending. You have £150 left before you’ve bought anything discretionary.

Using the three-wallet model:

  • Survival (this month): £1,450
  • Stability: £80
  • Growth: £20
  • Discretionary / slack: £50

You could do something like:

  • Set up a standing order of £80 on payday into a separate “buffer” account.
  • Set up a direct debit of £20 into a simple global equity index fund in an ISA or into your workplace pension.

This is not exciting. But after 12 months:

  • Stability: ~£960 (before any emergencies)
  • Growth contributions: £240 plus whatever the market does

If emergencies happen (and they will), they come from the Stability pot first. You may have months where Growth stays at £20 and Stability gets drawn down. That is not failure; that is the system doing its job.

When income rises – say to £1,800 – you can increase Growth to £40 or £50 without touching Survival.

Example 2 – £1,300/month, very tight budget

Suppose after essentials you only have £50 left most months.

In that case, the sequence changes:

  1. Get Survival under control (avoiding overdraft fees, late charges).
  2. Put almost all of that £50 into Stability until you have something like £300–£500.
  3. Only then start allocating a sliver to Growth.

For instance:

  • Months 1–8:

    • £40 to Stability
    • £10 to Growth

  • After Stability reaches, say, £400–£500:

    • £25 to Stability (to continue building)
    • £25 to Growth

The point is not the exact split. The point is:

  • Growth exists at all (even £10/month is a statement of intent).
  • Emergencies don’t automatically kill the compounding engine, because there is a small Stability cushion first.

If your situation is extremely unstable (arrears, threat of eviction, high-interest debts), it is rational to have £0 to Growth for a while and throw everything at Survival + Stability + high-interest debt. That is not “not investing”; it is clearing the ground so future investing is not constantly being undone.

Example 3 – Using a modest pay rise

Someone on low income often feels that a £50–£100/month pay rise “disappears” immediately into life. Using the three-wallet language, you can pre-assign the raise.

Assume your take-home goes from £1,600 to £1,750 (a £150 increase).

You can decide:

  • £50 → lifestyle (it is allowed to feel the benefit of your own work)
  • £50 → Stability
  • £50 → Growth

If you were already putting £20/month into Growth, this takes it to £70/month.

Over 10 years, £70/month at a modest 5–7% annual return is not “rich”, but it is a meaningful, compounding base that would not exist otherwise. The raise has been partially converted into future freedom, not just present consumption.

If You Genuinely Cannot Save Yet

There are situations where the honest answer is:

“Right now, all of my energy has to go into Survival. There is no Stability or Growth yet.”

In that case, the “money work” is different:

  • Avoid new high-interest debt where possible.
  • Check if you are receiving all benefits and support you are entitled to.
  • Look for ways to improve the structural layer: qualifications, moving to a better-paying role, increasing hours if sustainable.

The framework still applies; you are just working mostly on Survival and future earning power, not on compounding yet. There is no shame in being at this stage. It is just a different part of the game.

The numbers above are small on purpose. The idea is not that £20 or £50/month is glamorous. It’s that, for someone on low income, a simple, boring system can:

  • keep Survival out of crisis more often,
  • slowly thicken Stability,
  • and allow Growth to exist at all, rather than always being postponed to “when I finally earn more”.

From there, pay rises and good luck have somewhere productive to land, instead of being fully absorbed by lifestyle inflation and emergencies.