You're Probably On Track to Be a Millionaire (Here's the Math)

If you're 25 today and you have $46,000 invested, you could stop investing altogether. And with average stock market returns, you would get to the age of 65 and you would become a millionaire. But what about other ages? So here's the full data. As you can see, I want you to find the age that's closest to yours and look at that number. If you've already hit it, you could stop contributing today and you would still retire a millionaire. But if you haven't, don't worry because that's what the rest of this video is for. For some of you, these numbers might be surprisingly low. and for others, these might seem like a huge stretch and you're wondering how you're going to get there. What all these targets have in common is that they don't require you to contribute the full $1 million yourself. So today we're going to dive deep into specific reasons as to why you're probably on track to become a millionaire. For those that are feeling behind, you're going to find that nothing in this video is going to be too out of reach. So that's a really good sign. And we're also going to talk about why it doesn't feel easy for most people and what to do about it. And stick around for the second half because there's a way to hit every number in today's video. You will become a millionaire on paper and you might not still feel like one. So we're going to dive deep into why that is later on in this video. The first reason why you're probably on track to become a millionaire is that the bar is actually lower than you think. A lot of people assume that if you want to become a millionaire, you need to have a six-figure salary, a side hustle, or you have to get insanely lucky on a stock pick. All of which is actually quite nice to have, but it's not the main reason why I think that anyone can hit millionaire status. If you are starting at age 25 and you earn average market returns, you need about $290 a month invested to hit $1 million by 65, which is actually less than $10 a day. While an extra 290 per month is not easy to come by, I don't think it's as impossible as many people think. So take somebody earning $60,000 a year, saving 10% of their income into a 401k. That already right there is $500 a month. And if they had a 50% match as part of their 401k plan, that would be closer to $750 per month, way past the $290 required. If you were starting later, it's still not impossible either. At age 30, it's about $436 a month. At age 35, it's $671 a month, and so on, as you can see with this table. So for a lot of people who are working and earning this kind of income, these savings rates aren't out of the ordinary at all and quite achievable. In fact, at the end of June, 2026, Fidelity counted 769,000 401k millionaires on its platform, which is a record. And that's just one 401k provider. And every one of those people got there inside of a plain workplace retirement account, the same kind that many of you already have. Now, if the math is this achievable though, that actually makes me wonder why doesn't everybody hit it? And that's because the math isn't actually the hard part. Real life is the hard part. And there are a few very real reasons why people struggle. First is simply timing. The math is super easy if you're the age of 22 and you have a few years to plan for it. But most people learn personal finance and investing later on, especially after their 20s for many people, and that means the compounding years of their 20s might already be forgotten. It's not like you can go back to your 25-year-old self and say, all right, buddy, put 10% away starting right now, especially if you're the age of 35. So everyone watching today's video is going to be in a different spot financially. Here's the thing, though. Even if you start late, it doesn't mean you can't hit millionaire status. You just have to focus on the next row from the original table that I showed earlier. So if you're the age of 32 right now, I would focus on the age 35 row from the table earlier and ask yourself, how can I get as close to possible to $99,000 by the time we're 35? The second reason why people struggle is that a lot of people actually start below zero in their net worth. If you graduate with student loans or carry credit card debt, you're starting in the negative. And according to Credit Karma, about 31% of Americans have a negative net worth. So for some people getting to zero or a positive net worth is only the first step. It's also a really great achievement, but once you're able to achieve that, then you can set your sights on the million dollar number. And the third reason is that it's not always possible for people to save their money. Rent, childcare, or an emergency car bill could actually derail your savings progress really quickly. So if you can't put away, say, $290 a month at age 25 or $436 per month at age 30, I would start with at least whatever gets you going. Even if it's just $50 or $100 a month, it's better than nothing. And if you're able to get some 401k match dollars on top of this, it's going to go a really long way. I did want to just include this section because I don't want to sell you guys a fantasy here. I've seen a lot of budgets and personal finances, and it's not always just as simple as save 10% and you're going to be good. Back to why you're probably going to be a millionaire though, this next reason is exactly why a later start or a smaller one still works. One habit of people on track to become millionaires is that they also optimize their dollars. And lately, the Federal Reserve just increased interest rates, which means that high-yield savings accounts are starting to pay even more now. Chime, who reached out to sponsor this portion of the video, just increase their APY from 3.75% to 4%. And anyone who signs up through my link will get a boost to 5% APY for the first 90 days. Here's what that looks like on $10,000 in savings. The national average right now sits at 0.37% APY. That means you're going to earn $37 over the course of a year. That same $10,000 at 4% APY though earns $408. And that's an extra $371 from the money that you already had. You just move the account that it was in. Chime also has no monthly fees or minimum requirements and 4% APY is 10 times the national average. Also, if you get the boost to 5% APY, it's not like it goes to 0% after 90 days. You still get the 4% after that, which is pretty awesome. So if you want to move your cash to somewhere where it earns more and gets an exclusive 5% APY boost, I would head over to Chime.com slash Humphrey Boost. Setup takes a few minutes and going through my link will get you the exclusive 5% APY boost and it helps the channel out. Once more, that's Chime.com slash Humphrey Boost. And thank you to Chime for sponsoring this portion of the video. And that's reason number two, which is that you only pay for a fraction of your eventual $1 million. When people picture a millionaire, they picture someone who's earned and saved exactly $1 million, but that's not actually how it works in practice. So let's actually build a million dollars layer by layer and see where each piece comes from. So starting with layer one, that's always going to be you. Let's say you put in $190 a month. I chose this because this is knowing the math that I'm about to show you, but over 40 years, you're going to contribute a total of $92,000 out of your pocket. Layer two is an employer match. Let's pretend your employer matches 50% of your contributions to a 401k. That means if you put in 190, they're putting in $95 a month. And conveniently, this adds up to 286 a month for you in total. And layer three is going to be stock market average returns. Let's pretend you put in that 286 a month and you get 8% compounded, you're going to achieve a million dollars after 40 years. So of that total $1 million, you paid for about 9% of that, which is less than one-tenth of the entire million dollars. The other 91% you got for showing up, taking advantage of the 401k match, and just waiting with time. And that's how you should probably think about it. Also consider the fact that this was a 50% match. If you got a 100% match, it would be even faster, or your contributions would make up even less of that final total. So you're not trying to save a million, you're just trying to save $92,000 slowly over an entire career and then let the market and free money opportunities do their work. Now, what if you're 35, you've got 30 years instead of 40? Well, over 30 years, that's about $161,000 out of your pocket. Your employer will add about $81,000 and then the market will build the other 758K. So even starting 10 years later, you're still only paying about one sixth of your million dollars there. That's not bad. And you can do this same exercise for all the ages. Reason number three today is that time does the heavy lifting, and for your first million, it doesn't even show up evenly throughout your life. It usually shows up really late. Let's use the 25-year-old as our example again, saving about $290 a month the entire way until they're 65. At 10 years in, they'll be 35 years old, and they have about $52,000, and out of that, $34,000 is the money that they put in themselves. In the next 10 years after that, their balance will increase by $117,000, but from the ages of 45 to 55, it's going to increase again by 258K. Then finally, from ages 55 to 65, their balance increases a whopping $573,000. All this compounding is at the end of the curve in this case, and there is no better illustration of the magic of compounding than a graph like this. This graph illustrates the power of compounding after you save your first 100K, saving and investing $833 per month, or about 10K per year for this particular graph. The first 100K is going to take you 7.6 years of saving and investing, which is a very long time, yes, but what's most powerful is these graphs towards the end. Look at the time that it takes you to save and invest from 900K to $1 million. That's $100,000 that you make in basically 1.2 years, which is a fraction of the time that it took you to get your first 100K. That means wealth accumulation is disproportionately a lot slower in the beginning, but once you have a big base of money going, that big base can continue to generate you returns indefinitely into the future. So before you hit your first 100K, you have to realize that every single dollar you save is very important. And that's honestly the reason why you see so many financial gurus online telling you not to buy avocado toast or to never buy coffee out. They're basically coming from a place that they want you to hit 100K as quickly as possible to take advantage of the graph. And maybe they want some clicks too. Me personally, I love a good coffee out, but I was also very conscious of trying to save as much as I could when I was on my way to my first 100k, even if that meant living frugally 95% of the time or living at home. Since we live in an instant gratification world where the majority of people aren't weighing the consequences of their spending, on this channel, we need to be hypervigilant and try to hit that first 100k if you aren't already there. I've also noticed some friends of mine would constantly blame society and they would rage spend because their sentiment is, well, I can't afford anything anyway. I might as well spend my money right now. Or even worse, what I see these days is people try to YOLO it on polymarket or prediction markets in order to get rich faster. Don't do that. Instead, I would try to save diligently and invest your money, especially if you're still early on in your journey. All right, that was my rant and it is now over. So let's talk about reason number four, why I think you're probably on track to become a millionaire and it has to do with the default settings at your workplace. I know what you're probably thinking. Usually the default settings of anything aren't the most optimal, but in the money sense, they can actually be. The good news is that this system is increasingly built to help you on your path to retirement. So one to two generations ago, the default plan for most of these companies was to save nothing. So HR departments made it really hard to contribute to a retirement plan. And people, if they were lucky, maybe they had a pension. But these days, a lot of employers actually now flip that around. And are three features of employers which will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you first we have auto enrollment that means when you start a job you should be automatically opted into your company's 401k or retirement plan and this alone makes the habit of saving incredibly automatic second there's something called auto escalation that's where your contribution will go up by one percent every single year usually right around when you get a raise is the most optimal time but you might want to check your 401k plan documents and just make sure that you're enrolled in this and third if you do absolutely nothing, your plan might default you into a target date fund, which is already a diversified index fund that changes its holdings as you age to fit a prescribed risk tolerance. So if you are lazy and you do the bare minimum and you're automatically enrolled, let's see what happens. On a $60,000 salary, as long as you don't opt out, you may contribute about 3% to a 401k and that's $150 a month. And every year that contribution will go up 1% until it reaches 10%. Year one is going to be $150 a month. By year three, it's $250 a month. And then seven years later, it's $500 a month. The end result here is that by the time you're 65, you're going to actually have $1.4 million and that's without any employer matches and without ever picking a fund. So that's the good news. The lazy path has never been easier as long as you've been automatically enrolled in your plans. That means if you're watching this right now and you self-identify as a lazy person, first of all, let me know in the comments. But number two, you might not have anything to worry about so long as your company that you're working for, they set you up accordingly. If your plan has these features, the single most important thing you can do is just to leave them on. And if they don't have that features, you can build the same thing for yourself in about five minutes. You just want to set up an automatic contribution and put a reminder on your calendar every single year to bump it up 1% and you're done. All right, let's move on to reason number five today, which is that your raises will actually compound your own plan. If you get raises, which hopefully most of you will, this should accelerate the speed in which you actually hit a million dollars. The original assumptions I laid out in this video assume that you are saving, for example, $290 a month for 40 straight years. But in reality, you're going to get promoted, you're going to get raises, your pay is going to go up, you're going to have more money to invest and save. So the rule of thumb here is simple. As long as your contributions to your investment account are going up by a percentage of your paycheck rather than a fixed dollar amount, you're probably going to become a millionaire more often than not. Let's say your contribution grows just 3% a year, roughly in line with typical raises. In year one, you're contributing about $286 a month, but by year 10, it's about $370, and by year 20, it's about $500. If you automate your raises in a way to invest more money, you will end up with way more by the time you're 65, in fact, about 41% more. And that's the true secret of money that you're going to need, because right now I need to actually shatter your dreams very slightly, so sorry in advance. And that is the fact that we've come to the point in the video where I need to talk about the elephant in the room, which is inflation. A million dollars 40 years from now will not feel like a million dollars today. Over the next 40 years, we're going to see inflation between two to 3%. And if we use 3%, that means prices will double about every 24 years. And that means in 40 years from now, your $1 million will feel like it purchases about one third of what it does today. A common rule of thumb for retirement is that you can withdraw about 4% of your portfolio per year. And on a million dollars, that's $40,000 a year. That sounds fine. But in today's dollars, $40,000 a year in say the year 2066 will feel like $12,000 a year right now. So what can you do about this? Let's do the math of the target that actually matters, which is a million dollars in today's money by the time you're 65. If you start at the age of 25, your S tier target is going to be 3.3 million in 2066 dollars. So to get there, you'd start at about $660 a month and let it grow 3% a year with a raise that you get at work. That sounds like a pretty big jump from the $290 a month that we talked about earlier in this video. But here's the thing on a $60,000 salary, $660 a month is about 13% of your pay. With a 50 or 100% match, that means about 7 or 9% of that pay has to come from you. And that's still within reach for a lot of people. And remember from reason number one today, if you put in 10% with a match, that's $750 a month. And if you let that amount also increase with your corresponding raises you get at work, you will end up with about $3.7 million by the time it's the year 2066, easily more than a million bucks in today's dollars. That's why on this channel, I want you guys to aim higher than the numbers from the first half of this video. So three action items I have for you guys today. Number one, I want you to contribute a percentage, not a dollar amount. As long as you're keeping a savings as a percentage of your income, it can also rise as your income increases and a percentage contribution will keep up with inflation. Number two, every time you get a raise, I want you to try to take half of it and put it towards your savings or investments. You can still increase your lifestyle, but at least your savings rate will also climb in this case. And number three, I would keep your long-term money in the stock markets or in assets that outpace inflation. You need to own assets that outpace inflation and stocks have historically been inflation by a wide margin. You can also consider other assets like real estate or alternative assets like gold and silver. I just don't want you to keep your money in a checking account that's earning $0 in interest. So my conclusion for you today is that you're probably on track to become a millionaire more often than you think. And once again, thank you guys for being here and thank you to Chime for sponsoring a portion of this video. If you're wondering what actually changes from $500 versus $1,500 versus $5,000 a month in investing, I want you guys to check out my next video, which will link right here. I'll see you guys in that video or a future one on this channel. Okay, thanks for being here. Bye-bye.