Doubling your net worth in a single year sounds like something you’d see on a billboard next to a guy leaning on a rented Lamborghini. But if you’re early in your wealth building journey, it’s a lot more realistic than you’d think. You can increase your net worth much faster than you expect, and you don’t need a secret stock tip or a cryptocurrency named after a dog to pull it off. You need a handful of boring, repeatable actions and the stubbornness to actually do them.
Earlier this year, Scott and I released a BiggerPockets Money podcast episode on exactly this topic, and it struck a nerve. So I’m laying out the whole framework here, lever by lever, roughly in the order you should pull them.
Full Disclosure: I’ve Never Doubled Mine
Let me start with a confession. My husband Carl and I started tracking our net worth on January 1, 2013, when it sat at about $586,000. By January 2014, it was $869,000. A nice bump, but not a double. The next year it hit $987,000, an increase of about $130,000, which happened to be almost exactly what Carl earned working 40 hours a week. Then came $1,057,000, followed by years where we added $200,000 and then $300,000.
And then there was the stretch from 2018 to 2019, when our net worth climbed by a whopping $29,000. Pop the champagne! Actually, make it the store brand sparkling cider.
Scott, on the other hand, has doubled his net worth more than once. The first time was early on, when he went from almost nothing to his first $20,000 or $30,000. Real estate gave him more big jumps. Then, after Josh Dorkin named him president of BiggerPockets in 2018, the company eventually sold, and Scott’s payout effectively doubled his net worth at the time. He’ll tell you it was luck and timing. I’ll tell you he worked incredibly hard for it. We can both be right.
What our two stories show is that doubling gets much harder as the number gets bigger. If you’re sitting on $3 million, a 100% gain in one year would take some combination of a miracle and a felony. If you’re starting near zero, or you have less than $100,000 and earn a reasonable income, doubling is very possible. That growth won’t come from a mysterious investment return. It’ll come from the actions you take, maybe with a little help from a volatile market.
What Net Worth Actually Means
Net worth is everything you own minus everything you owe. You can move that number by piling up cash, buying assets, watching those assets grow in value, or paying down debt. Every one of those counts.
Say you have $10,000 in debt. Every dollar of new income you throw at that balance raises your net worth by a dollar. Once it’s gone, your net worth is $10,000 higher than it was, and you’ve stopped paying interest to someone else.
The cash side is simple math: your income minus your expenses equals what you can save. Taxes are the wild card. Every dollar you legally keep away from the IRS stays in your pocket instead.
That’s the whole game. There’s no mystery here. We’re just looking for the actions that make the biggest difference for people early in their financial journey.
Lever 1: Cut Your Fixed Expenses First
Fixed expenses are what kills the American budget. These are the bills that show up every month whether you like it or not: housing, car payments, subscriptions, insurance, and utilities. Lower them once and you save money automatically, every single month, without having to make a single heroic decision at the checkout line.
Housing is the big one. If you’re spending right up to the limit of what your income allows, you’re probably spending too much. Early in the journey, that might mean a smaller apartment, a roommate, or buying something well below what the bank says you can afford. Ask yourself how much square footage you actually use. Most of us aren’t hosting a ballroom dance on Tuesdays.
Cars come next. The cheapest option is building a life that doesn’t require one for a few years. If you need a car, a paid-off used economy car is the gold standard. If you have to finance, pay it off fast.
Insurance is where Scott offers a smart move. If you have a solid emergency fund and a high savings rate, raise your deductibles. Your premiums drop every month, and your emergency fund absorbs the rare occasion when you actually need to file a claim. You’ll pay more when something goes wrong, but you’ll pay less every other month of your life.
Subscriptions need a regular audit. Those $12 charges multiply like rabbits when you’re not looking.
Scott likes to start with fixed expenses for a psychological reason, too. It’s demoralizing to skip a $5 coffee when you’re paying $3,000 a month in rent. Once you’ve made the big cut, the small ones feel like they actually matter.
Lever 2: Trim Variable Expenses (Without Becoming a Hermit)
Variable expenses are groceries, restaurants, clothes, entertainment, and the rest of your life stuff. You don’t need new clothes every month. You don’t need the latest phone the day it comes out. And you probably don’t need that emergency bag of Doritos, no matter how persuasive your craving is at 9 p.m.
My favorite approach is to pick one category and commit to cutting it by 5% or 10% this month. Then check in. Did you even notice? Often you won’t, and that’s money you were spending for no real reason.
Scott’s trick is adding friction. He deleted all his saved credit card information from his browser. He admits it’s a pain in the rear, and that’s the point. If Amazon is your weakness, remove your card and re-enter it every time you want something. You’ll be amazed how many purchases die somewhere between “add to cart” and digging out your wallet.
Don’t cut out your friends, though. Drinks with your buddies on a Thursday night are what life is about, and the memories are worth more than the bar tab. That said, I’m a big fan of potluck parties at my house. I started hosting them because I wanted longer conversations than a restaurant allows. I always feel guilty hogging a table while the server hovers nearby. At my house, everyone brings a dish, we drink great beer, and we talk for hours. It also happens to cost a fraction of a night out.
Here’s why expenses come first: every dollar you don’t spend is an after-tax dollar you keep. That’s more powerful than earning an extra dollar, which gets taxed before it ever reaches you.
Lever 3: Follow an Investment Order of Operations
Once you’re accumulating cash, have a plan for where it goes. A tax-advantaged order of operations can boost your savings rate in a hurry.
Start with your employer’s 401(k) match. If your company matches 5% of your salary, that’s an instant 5% bump to your savings rate. Turning that down is like refusing a raise because the paperwork looks boring.
Contributing $10,000 to your 401(k) over the year also might save you $2,000 to $3,000 or more in taxes, depending on your federal and state brackets. That’s real money you get to keep.
A good starting order looks like this: grab the full employer match (if applicable), max out your HSA if you have a qualifying health plan, max out your 401(k), contribute to a Roth IRA, and then invest in a regular brokerage account. Having the order written down means you follow it, instead of tossing money wherever you remember to at the moment.
Lever 4: Build a Budget and Actually Look at It
Yes, it’s my favorite B word. You need a budget, and you need to review your transactions every month.
Before Carl and I had a budget, our money went wherever it felt like going. I’d swipe the credit card at the store without much thought, and then we’d sit at the kitchen table wondering where all our money went. So we started tracking our spending first. Once we knew where the money was leaking, we could build a budget that told it where to go instead.
I started on a piece of paper on the kitchen counter, right by the door to the garage, so I’d see it every time I came home. I’ve since joined the modern era. Now I use Monarch, with all my credit cards, bank accounts, and investment accounts linked, so I can see my whole financial picture at a glance. If it’s the middle of the month and I’m halfway through my spending, great. If I’m way over, I know it’s time to investigate.
Scott and his wife review their spending every week. They compare this month to the same point last month and see how they’re tracking against their goals. (Check out our Resources page for Scott’s Goal Setting Worksheet.) Looking closely also helps you spot savings in categories that seem fixed. Childcare is a big expense for Scott’s family, so he looked into a dependent care FSA. That doesn’t shrink the bill, but it moves part of it pre-tax, which is real cash savings. (And it’s something our company offers. Check in with HR to see what benefits your company offers that you didn’t even know existed!)
Lever 5: Automate Your Savings
Pay yourself first, and make it automatic. If you’re aiming for a 30% savings rate, ask your HR department to send 30% of your paycheck straight to a separate account. It never touches your regular checking account, so you never get tempted to spend it.
That small barrier can be the difference between saving what you planned and saving whatever happens to be left over, which is usually nothing. Save first, then spend what remains.
Lever 6: Invest for the Long Haul
Once the cash is piling up, it needs a job. Put it into something you believe will grow over the next few decades.
For a lot of people, especially in the Boglehead community, that means broad, low-fee, market cap weighted index funds. Others add factor tilts like small cap value. Real estate has worked well for plenty of people, including Scott. There are many right answers here.
The wrong answer is not investing at all. You have to accept some risk in exchange for a reasonable shot at long-term returns, and you need a clear reason for your choice that you can live with when the market gets ugly.
Another wrong answer is buying something because you heard somebody else talking about it. The meme stock frenzy during COVID is a perfect cautionary tale: a huge run-up, then a spectacular collapse. If you want to buy individual stocks, use a small slice of your portfolio and do your homework first. And if you don’t want to invest in real estate, don’t. I skip plenty of investments. I pick what I believe in and invest consistently.
Side note: if you went all in on NFTs and lost, Scott and I would genuinely love to talk to you. It would be a respectful conversation. We just want to know what you were thinking.
Lever 7: Find Out What You’re Worth
We save income for later because many people are already in the highest paying job that fits the life they want. But once you’ve handled the steps above, it’s time to look at what you earn.
Start by researching your market compensation. A shocking number of people have no idea what their skills would fetch elsewhere, or their information is years out of date. The answer might sting. You might discover that nobody would pay you what your current employer does. Or you might learn you’re underpaid by $20,000. Either way, you’re making better decisions with real information.
Scott ran a poll in the BiggerPockets Money community asking what would happen if people lost their jobs. About 12% said they could easily earn more, and about 28% said they’d earn about the same. That means 60% said they’d either earn less or have a noticeably worse quality of life. That’s sobering, and it affects how you should act at work.
Remember too that companies usually spend more to hire new people than to keep current ones, so switching jobs can bring a bigger raise. With AI shaking up the job market, especially in tech, staying put might be the smart play right now. Do the research and you’ll know which camp you’re in.
Lever 8: Have the Promotion Talk (One to Two Years Out)
Don’t storm into your boss’s office demanding a raise. If you don’t have bargaining power, that can backfire spectacularly.
Instead, schedule a meeting a couple of weeks out. Tell your manager you’d like to discuss what it would take to earn a promotion in the next one to two years. That timeframe matters. It gives your boss room to think about projects they need done and connect them to your growth. If their annual budget cycle is coming up, your raise might get baked into next year’s numbers.
Bring ideas. Ask for honest feedback, and ask for it in writing. At BiggerPockets, Scott used development plans for this, which were completely separate from performance improvement plans. The people who stated what they wanted and took on the opportunities offered tended to move up.
Meanwhile, build a praise folder in your email. Any time someone thanks you for great work, save the email there. Go search your inbox for “thank you” right now and start filling it. When it’s time for the big conversation, print the stack and bring it with you. Your boss has to sell your raise to their boss, who sells it to the CFO, so make their job easy.
I also wrote a newsletter piece with ways to make yourself indispensable. My favorite tip is to be the person who follows through. We’ve all worked with someone who says “totally, I’ll do that” and then never does it. I may have even been that person to Scott once or twice. Don’t be that person.
To be fair, Scott admits this lever probably won’t move your net worth this year. But it sets up potentially a much bigger jump down the road.
Lever 9: Make Small Side Bets
If you earn around the median income, side hustles can make a huge difference. At 23, earning $48,000 a year, Scott made bet after bet. He tried tutoring. He drove for Uber. He launched a winter glove rental business. He started a T-shirt company called Trenches Tees. All of them failed.
Who cares? They were cheap lessons with very little money at risk. Then he tried house hacking, and that one changed everything.
That’s the mindset. Read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, test ideas with a nominal amount of money, and learn whether they work before you spend a lot. Any single bet has a high chance of failing, but a few dozen over five years only need a couple of winners to change your financial life. Getting a roommate counts too, and it’s about the lowest-risk bet you can make.
One caveat: this advice is for people early in the journey. Once you’re earning a high income, your time is usually better spent on your main career. Nobody wants the CEO moonlighting at a glove rental stand.
Your Turn
You probably won’t use every lever on this list, and that’s fine. Pick the ones that fit your situation and start this week. Lower one fixed expense, set up one automatic transfer, or schedule one conversation with your boss. Stack enough of those small moves together and you can start to increase your net worth in meaningful ways.
Have you dramatically grown your net worth in a single year? I want to hear your story. Email me at mindy@biggerpocketsmoney.com or reach Scott at scott@biggerpocketsmoney.com, and you might end up on the show.
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