How do you lose 25 years?

Imagine work­ing hard for 25 years, but mak­ing no progress towards improv­ing your sta­tion in life?

What if you can’t retire? What if the future pro­mo­tions, and rais­es, and com­pa­ny-pro­vid­ed social wel­fare you expect don’t mate­ri­al­ize?

If you’re part of the mid­dle class and not pur­pose­ly build­ing wealth, you in for an unfor­tu­nate sur­prise. From “Stuck in the Middle”:

[…] in infla­tion-adjust­ed dol­lars, after the Great Recession ham­mered incomes and a limp recov­ery failed to boost them, the aver­age U.S. fam­i­ly is in the same spot as it was in 1989.

Twenty-five years, zero gains.

Heard of Japan’s lost decade? For mid­dle-class fam­i­lies, this has been a lost quar­ter-cen­tu­ry.

I’m not a big fan of scar­ing peo­ple into action, but it’s only get­ting hard­er to suc­ceed finan­cial­ly in the world. It does­n’t take a lot to get start­ed, it just takes get­ting start­ed and the courage to con­tin­ue.

Oh, and a plan. Like the one in my book.