Why Your Paycheck Isn t Growing Like It Used To How To Fix It

If you feel like no matter how hard you work, your paycheck just isn't keeping up, you aren't alone. The majority of Americans, statistically, including six-figure earners, feel poor even after getting a pay raise. Well, let me explain what's going on here. Between 2020 to 2026, the median income in the United States grew by around 21.8%, which might make you feel like you should feel wealthier. But there's the other part of this equation you have to also pay attention to. The cost of living or inflation between 2020 to 2026 also went up now by 22.7%, which means you got a pay raise. You thought you'd feel richer, except your rent is more expensive, your groceries are more expensive, your car is more expensive, your travel is more expensive, things are more expensive, and the cost of living has been growing faster than incomes, not to mention that this income growth is the reported numbers. And well, the reported numbers often are not a real reflection of the real inflation that many people feel. For many people, the real inflation is two times the reported inflation numbers. So yes, you got a pay raise, but it didn't even keep up with the reported inflation numbers, which is why the average person feels poorer even after they got a pay raise. Now, this trend of inflation growing faster than wages is not new, but there are some changes happening in 2026 because already in 2026, what we saw happening was that wage growth was slowing down, while at the same time, inflation was going up even before the conflict in the Middle East started. And now because of the conflict in the Middle East, there are more concerns about inflation ramping up even more, which means that this trend could be accelerating in 2026, which is why you want to pay attention to this and really get your money and paychecks in order. That way you can continue building wealth despite what's happening in the world because your wealth, your money, your freedom is not going to go on pause because of other things happening in the economy. So you have to figure out how are you going to control your money despite everything else going on in the world. And that's what I want to break down in this video. So let's break it down step by step by step so you know exactly what to do. The very first thing you have to do before you do anything else is you have to save $2,000 in a separate bank account for an emergency. For some of you, this is going to seem like it's so basic. For others of you, this is going to seem like a mile away. But the reality is sometimes life happens. Sometimes your kid gets sick. Sometimes your car breaks down. You've got to have some cash. That way you don't actually go into credit card debt every time that happens. So you need to start by saving at least $2,000 in a separate bank account, not to spend, but to save in case of an emergency. Then step number two is you need to pay down your credit card debt as fast as possible. And I wanted to talk about these two things together because this is what I call the financial danger zone. I call this the financial danger zone because during this stage, you are at risk. Your money is at risk and people have the ability to screw you over financially, which is why when you were in this financial danger zone, there are specific steps you need to take to get out of this mess as fast as possible. So if you don't have $2,000 put aside, or if you have credit card debt or other payday loans, listen to me very carefully. From now on, until you get out of the financial danger zone, no more eating at restaurants, no more going on vacations, no more buying any brand name clothes, and no more Netflix, period. Now when I say no more Netflix, people get very upset. They say, Jaspreet, what do you mean? Netflix is only $15 a month. It's not about the $15 a month. The average American is watching more than two hours of TV a day. If you were in the financial danger zone, you do not have the luxury or the time to be blowing two hours a day watching TV. You need to be using that time to learn. You need to be using the time to learn how you can earn more money. You need to be using the time to work extra. You need to be using the time to drive an Uber or do whatever you got to do to make some extra money because during this phase, you need to do everything to spend less and earn more. That way you can put aside the $2,000 and pay off this credit card debt because in this phase, you are making everybody else rich. You are susceptible to all the scams, all the stupid systems out there that are just trying to skin you alive financially. You're making the credit card companies rich. You're making your banker rich. You're making the corporations rich, all at your expense, and you have no breathing room. So until you are out of the financial danger zone, you got to get out of that mindset of thinking it's okay to eat at restaurants, to travel, to buy the name brand clothes, or to even have the time for Netflix because this is serious to get out of this mess. Once you get out of the mess, this is where things start to get fun. Step number three is to create a system for your money. One of the things that I like to teach is 75, 15, 10, which says for every dollar that you earn from here on out, $0.75 is the maximum that you can spend. $0.15 is the minimum that you invest. $0.10 is the minimum that you save. Now in order for this to actually work, there's a couple of things I need you to do. Number one, go out and open three different bank accounts. Don't operate out of one bank account because it is very easy to accidentally spend your savings money or your investment money. Your savings are there to protect you against an emergency. Your investments are there to grow that way your money can work harder than you. Your spending is what you used to spend to pay for your rent, or your house, or your car, or your groceries, or your vacations, or whatever. That's what the spending money is for. So go out and create three different bank accounts and then create an automation that anytime you get paid, money hits this bank account. That's where your direct deposit goes. And then you can have an automation that way 15% of your income goes here, 10% of your income goes here, that way you don't accidentally see that money. Why do you want to do this? Well, let's think about what the United States government does. When you go to work and you get paid, what's the first expense you have to pay? It's not your mortgage, it's your taxes. And the government takes their taxes from your paycheck without you even seeing it. Why do they do that? Because they know that if they had you pay your taxes at the end of the year, you probably wouldn't have the money to pay it statistically, which is why they take their share of your income every single time you get paid before you even see the money. That way you can't accidentally spend it. Here you need to tax yourself. But now instead of making the government rich, you're making yourself rich by putting this money aside into your investment account, this money aside into your savings account. And I know what you're going to say, Jaspreet, I'm already struggling. I'm already living paycheck to paycheck. How do you want me to live out of the three quarters of every dollar that I earn? Well, think about what I just said. Taxes. If the government were to raise your taxes by 25% tomorrow, what would you do? Kick, complain, scream, cry, be upset? And then you're going to find a way to pay it. Because if you don't, you're going to go to jail. Think of this like a tax. But now it's not the government taxing you, it's you taxing you. That way you can become wealthy. That way the future you can have freedom. That way the future you can stop working. And the future you will never have to worry about money again. But that requires you to actually put money aside to invest and save. And if you can't start with 75, 15, 10, start smaller, but work your way up. That way you always have money to save and invest first. By the way, for those of you that are investors or want to become investors, I have a free investing newsletter that you can subscribe to. It's called Market Briefs. We have hundreds of thousands of investors that read it every single morning, where we're breaking down what's happening in things like the economy, housing, stocks, crypto, and global markets into a fun, witty, and easy to read newsletter that you can read in less than five minutes. So if you've been looking for an easy way to know what's happening in the world of finance and money and investing, Market Briefs is a super simple and free way to do that. If you'd like to join for free, all you have to do is sign up. And I have a link for you down in the description below. Now, there's a couple of things that I want you to understand about the 75, 15, 10. When it comes to your savings here, you want to build a savings cushion depending on where you are in life. And this should be somewhere between three to 12 months worth of expenses. So figure out how much money you're spending every month. If it's $5,000, that gives you a range. You need to save somewhere between 15 grand and $60,000, depending on where you are in your life. If you're 25 years old, you're fresh out of college, you're not married, you don't got any kids, you don't need a year's worth of savings, maybe just a few months. That way, if you lose your job, you have some money to fall back on and you don't have to worry about bills. If you have kids, you got a wife, you don't like taking a lot of risk, maybe you need six, nine, or 12 months worth of expenses put aside. That way you can feel comfortable knowing that if you got laid off, if you lost your job, if your company went bankrupt, you'd be okay until you can get yourself back on your feet. That's why you want to have this cash. This is not there as a down payment for a house. This is not there to buy a car. This is emergency money. I get it. Savings lose value to inflation. That's not the purpose. This is not money there to make you wealthy. This is there to protect you against an emergency. So put it in a high yield savings account and let it sit there. This investment money, this 15, you can invest this in a lot of different places. You can invest this money into the stock market. You can put this money into your 401k or IRA. You could put this money into real estate. You could put this money into your own knowledge to make yourself smarter. You can use this money to pay down other debts. The idea is this is money that you're using to make yourself wealthy and you want to get a return on your money. You're not going to become wealthy by just paying off your debts, but it can help you not have those expenses anymore. Because the idea is wealth is when you have enough money from your investments coming in, that way you don't have to go to work anymore. And the only way you're going to get there is if you put your money to work. Now, it's a weird concept because we all think that we have to go to work to get paid. But what if I told you that the wealthiest people in the world are playing a very different game? They're not trying to work harder to make more money. That's what everybody else is trying to do. Wealthy people want their money to work harder. They say, hey money, I want to take a break. I want to go on a vacation. Keep putting money in my bank account. And it's a crazy concept until you start to experience it. You don't need millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands or even thousands of dollars to start. You can start with as little as a hundred bucks. But once you start investing, now you can start to see that when you put your money into your investments, if you do it right, over time your investments will grow. We're not talking about trading and trying to make quick money. We're talking about long-term wealth, that money starts to grow and make you money even when you're not working. That way now you can take a nap and you're still getting paid. You can take a vacation, you're still getting paid. And as you work to grow this week after week after week, month after month after month, year after year, that's when it starts to compound and grow and start to build you more wealth. Because now you just keep putting more money into it every single week. Every time you get paid, more money goes into your investments. As your investments make you more money, then more money goes back into your investments. So it starts to build the snowball that gets bigger and bigger. And the beginning is very slow, but as it gets bigger, now you can start to see bigger growth from your money. A 10% return on a hundred bucks is $10. Nothing life-changing. A 10% return on $10,000 is $1,000. Now it's a little bit better. A 10% return on $100,000 is $10,000. But a 10% return on a million dollars is $100,000. See, it's the same percentage return, but as you have the biggest snowball, the dividends, the return, the money that you make is a whole lot more valuable. Now it's a hard process to build that big snowball, but once you take that first step, you just got to worry about the next and the next and the next, and slowly it will start to compound and build over time. But you can't even think about that until you do the first two things right here, because well, your credit card is costing you 15, 18, 25% a year. The market's only grow by 10% a year on average. But this is where once you understand this, you are going to want to put more emphasis onto your investments, because that's how you become wealthy. This brings me to step number four. Now that you have a system for your money, this is where you want to really think about how do you pay off these low interest rate debts, things like your mortgage, things like your car payment. And you have to decide what is right for you, because for some of you, it's not going to make sense to pay off these low interest debts. For others of you, it will make a lot more sense to do so. And this is where you have to understand you. The first thing you want to think about is what are your goals? Some of you watching this are going to say, Jaspreet, I want to live big. I want to travel the world. I want to fly first class. I want the fancy hotels. Others of you will say, my goal is I just want to not have to stress about money anymore. See, that goal is going to have two very different actions that you have to take. If your goal is to not stress about money anymore, then paying off these low interest debts will help you achieve that goal. If your is to fly big and do nice big things around the world, you would need more money. You have to take on more risk. More risk means instead of paying off these low interest debts, you need to be more aggressive with your investments. Now, I personally like the idea of not having any personal debts, because these consumer debts, these consumer loans, things like a car payment or a payment on my cell phone or even a mortgage, these things are just payments on things that don't actually make me any money. So I don't like the idea of having those. So I personally like the idea of out of those consumer debts as fast as possible, because to me, they're just a strain on my finances. That's why there's a couple of rules that I follow here. Rule number one is if it does not put money in my pocket, do not finance it, period. That means no more financing your cell phone, no more financing your furniture, no more financing your car. Yes, buy a car with cash. The only exception to this is your house. And then I'd like to pay that off as fast as possible. Obviously, it doesn't have to happen in five years or 10 years, but working to pay that off, that way I don't have to worry about these consumer debts. Rule number two is my rule of five. If you cannot buy five of them, you cannot afford one of them. This is when it comes to things that are not a necessity for me to survive. When we're talking about luxuries, if I cannot buy five of those Rolexes, I cannot afford one. If I cannot buy five of those trips to Cancun, I cannot afford one. If I cannot buy five of those BMWs, I cannot afford one. Yes, it is a strict rule, but if you can control your spending, it allows you to build more wealth. And my goal isn't for you to live small for the rest of your life, it's to make sacrifices for a portion of your life, that way you can spend the rest of your life without ever having to worry about money again. Because the average person goes day to day to work every single day because they have to. They go to work because they have to make a paycheck because they have to pay these bills. They're not enjoying the process. But what if now you could go to work because you wanted to? And now, because you have these assets, you can go on a vacation without having to worry about the price. You can buy a car and not have to stress about the payments because you don't even have a payment. It's a very different life, but it takes time to get there. A lot of people talk about how to make six figures in six months because everybody wants to sell you the get-rich-quick system, when in reality, I call it a decade of sacrifice. Nobody wants to buy the decade of sacrifice, but the reality is if you actually want to build wealth, you can't get there without a decade of sacrifice. That is, a decade of spending less and earning more so you can invest like crazy. And if you can do that for a decade, you're going to be in a completely different financial situation. But it requires you to actually stay disciplined. Nothing happens without that financial discipline. And this is the discipline of knowing how to spend your money, the discipline of knowing how to save your money, and the discipline to know how to invest your money. Because the people that don't become wealthy, it isn't because they pick the wrong investments. It's because they never started investing in the first place. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to lose money at some point. I always say investing has risks. You're never guaranteed to make money when you invest. In fact, you will lose money at some point. So make sure you always do your own due diligence and never blindly trust a random guy on YouTube. But you have to get started if you ever want to have a chance to build wealth. This brings me to step number five. Now it's time to really focus in on earning more money. And notice when I said this, we're talking about after you've paid off your $2,000 in your credit card debt. Now you have a system for your money. Now you know how to spend your money. Now we're talking about how to earn more money. Why am I talking about this so much later? Because everybody thinks that the first step to fix your money is just make more money. But if you don't know how to control your money, if you don't know how to spend your money, you don't know how to invest your money, you don't know how to save your money, you know what happens? You make more money and now you make your bankers even richer. You make the corporations even because as soon as you get the pay raise, you know what the bank says? You are more credit worthy. How about we give you a new line of credit? How about a new credit card? How about a new nicer, bigger car? Or how about a new nicer, bigger house for you to live in? And now you just keep taking on more and more debt, which is why the average person makes more money and then they feel like they're in a deeper hole than they were before. We've been seeing this statistically even for people making over $100,000 a year, even for people making over a quarter million dollars a year. It's because you don't have this foundation in place. But now once you have the foundation, this earning our money has the biggest impact, the most power. So how do you do it? Well, it depends on where you are. If you like your job, see if you can get a raise at your job. If you don't like your job, but you like your industry that you're working in, see if you can find a new career in a different company. If you hate the job that you're doing, you hate your career, maybe get a new certificate. Maybe try to start a new career. It feels like you're starting over, but who cares? I remember this conversation I used to have with one of my friends. He was an engineer. And when he was 25, 26 years old, he started working and he was telling me about how much he hated his job. He was in the mid-20s. And I said, why don't you try something different? And he said, I am so deep in my career. I just went and got my college degree. I'm a full engineer. Now, how do you expect me to go out and do something else? Well, then he turned 30. You know what happened when he turned 30? He was even more miserable at 30 than he was at 26, because now he's even deeper in his career. And he said the same thing. He said, Jaspreet, man, I don't like my job. I don't know what to do. I don't want to start over because now I'm years into my career. I'm starting to see some growth, but I'm really not happy with what I'm doing and I don't know what to do. I said, well, why don't you switch? Because it's too late. I'm 30 years old. It's too late. Then a few more years go on, 33, 34. And he's telling me the same thing again and again and again. And when it was 34, he said, all right, Jaspreet, I'm so fed up with this. I've been out of college for a decade. I'm finally starting to see the progress in my career, but I hate what I'm doing. Now, I think I'm finally going to make that switch. And that was when he moved and he started a whole new career in a completely different industry. And then he said, I wish I would have done this 10 years ago. The time is going to go on anyways. Might as well make that switch sooner rather than later if you don't like what you were doing. If you don't want to be in the business of working for somebody else, you can start your own side hustle. You can start your own business. There's a lot of things that you can do. My recommendation to anybody here, I don't care if you're working a job or starting your own business, learn AI. And I'm telling you this as somebody who has historically been not tech savvy. I am not the most tech savvy person. But once I started to see how AI is changing the economy, how it's changing the business market, I had to learn AI, which is why I changed my company from Briefs Media to Briefs Finance in 2025 because I realized that if I did not make us an AI forward company, we were going to be out of business or bankrupt within just five years. So learn how to use AI. It'll make it work more productive, more efficient, and hopefully help you earn more money. This brings me to number six. And this is all about asset protection. Because the reality is when you start to have money, and at this stage you will start to have money, you'll start to have assets, you'll start to have wealth. And this is where you have to know how to protect yourself. Numbers number one, have the right insurances. If you have a business, get business insurance. If you have real estate, get real estate investors insurance. You might want to think about life insurance. You got to get your health insurance and all the other stuff in place as well. Then get yourself a good tax advisor, especially if you are investing your money in different types of assets, especially if you have a business. I have worked with good tax advisors and bad tax advisors. And when I worked with bad tax advisors, I thought that I was saving money because they were cheap. What ended up happening is my cheap advisors not only did not file my taxes on time or do it properly, so I had to pay penalties, fines, and fees, but then they also missed out on so many tax saving strategies and opportunities. And I'm telling you this as a licensed attorney. The tax code is a rule book. It gives you a strategy on what you can pay taxes on and what you don't have to pay taxes on. So if you can pay less taxes because the tax code says so, why would you not do that? That's where a good tax advisor can come in. Now, the good tax advisor that I have today, I paid many multiples more to my advisor than I did before, but now we're meeting regularly to not just talk about how the money is doing, but also tax strategy. If your tax advisor is not meeting you to discuss tax strategy, tax strategy means, hey, this is what your tax liability looks like this quarter. Here are some things that you can do to potentially offset your tax liability. If they're not doing that for you, either get them to start doing it or fire them and find a new tax advisor. I'm telling you this because I've had to pay a lot of extra money figuring out the hard way the difference between a good tax advisor and a bad tax advisor. Then get yourself some attorneys. If you have a business, you need your good business attorneys, but you also need to start thinking about your estate planning as well. As you start to build wealth, how do you protect it? How do you pass it on? Even if you don't want to give it to your kids or you don't have kids, you still want to think about how do your assets get protected and passed on because the last thing you want is the government to come in and say how your money gets moved on past you. It's not a fun thing to think about, but it is an important thing as we think about asset protection. On this point, the other thing that I want to say is this is also when you really should be thinking about how do you give as well. You don't need to wait here until start giving, but the more you have, the more you can do. The more you have, the more you can give. The more you have, the more you can help. Think about that as well because living life just for yourself is a very selfish way to live, but if you live life on a mission to serve others, it makes you feel a lot better and it helps other people live a better life as well because we're only on this earth one time. Might as well make it better for somebody else as well. Now, the final point that I want to talk about here is on this journey, we talked about what you need to do with the money. The last thing that I don't want you to forget about is keep learning. Invest in your mindset. Invest in your research as an investor. Invest in your financial education. Read books. Even if it's not directly correlated with finance, I love reading biographies of people that have become incredibly successful because you hear the journeys and the things that they went through. Even though it might not directly apply to your life, you'll see how you can learn from their life journey and potentially apply some of those things to your life as well in ways that you never thought before. Keep learning. Be willing to invest in your own education. Be willing to invest in your own research as an investor to improve your investments. Be willing to invest in your career that we can earn more money. Be willing to invest in you, your health, your mental health, your physical health, your spiritual health. Invest in yourself. Keep learning because if you stop learning, you stop growing as well. Again, if you're an investor, I invite you to join Market Briefs. It's my free newsletter. I have the link for you down in the description. And if you got value out of this video, the best thank you is a referral. So if you could, please share this video with a friend, family member, colleague, or fellow investor. That way we can continue to spread this type of financial education. Thank you. President Trump just confirmed that he wants to get rid of your income tax. Take a listen. I believe the tariffs paid for by foreign countries will like in the past, substantially replace the modern day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love.