10% Rule Gurus love to tell you to save 10% of your income. Do the math. If you save your 10% of your income for the rest of your life and your income never increases, you will be able to retire at age 60+ with the exact same standard of living. Not very inspiring. The alternative is to save 35-50% or more of your income which will definitely affect your standards of living. Are you willing to sacrifice your standard of living in your prime just to live better when you are 60+? Focus on increasing your income generating in your prime. It is hard to save 50% of your income when you bring in the median household income. It is much less difficult when you are generating $250k or more a year. Because you spend so much time working, you will have less time for consumption and your savings rate will increase dramatically by default. You won’t feel deprived because you are spending time building a business that you love, one that will grow and generate scalable income. If you want to take control over your life and freedom-filled millionaire track, you need to start your own business, one that you can control and leverage by virtue of your own good decisions and hard work. Frugal Mindset Being a cheap-ass is self limiting and makes you risk adverse. Risk adverse people can become self sufficient but they can never be the very best. That $5 cup of coffee you saved could have net you a very important meeting with somebody special which could have led to busienss for you. Instead of focusing on depriving yourself of things, focus instead on living a minimalistic Spartan lifetstyle. Not only will you eliminate the feeling of being deprived of things (which you didnt really need in the first place) you start to become more energetic and free because you have more attention span to focus on more important things “It is not impressive to live in a studio apartment when you are forced to, it is impressive if you choose to live in a studio apartment and can afford a mansion” Cutting cup of coffee, coupon clipping is a useless and futile exercise which will not make you rich. Even worse, it will take time away from you, time that could have been spent generating more income or increasing your income generating potential. Focus on minimizing things you don’t need and cut spending on big ticket items.