David Bach

And this is a statistic that hasn't changed in 20 years.

So when I wrote The Automatic Millionaire 20 years ago, we had six, seven out of 10 people living paycheck to paycheck.

It's actually gotten harder for a lot of Americans.

Half of Americans today have less than $1,000 in savings.

At the same standpoint, we've had a whole lot of people become extremely wealthy on ordinary incomes.

We have 24 million Americans today that are now millionaires.

And the question is, what's the difference between these two?

Because it's not always income.

And what I learned having been a financial advisor and worked with a lot of ordinary people, people who were teachers and firemen and garbage men and ordinary hardworking Americans.

Some people would even call them blue collar Americans.

These people built real financial security on an ordinary income, and they were able to retire in their 50s or early 60s at the latest.

And what it came down to was not what most people taught them to do.

They didn't budget.

Because they basically budgeting doesn't work.

It's very hard.

It's very complicated.

They didn't worry about the fact they didn't make a lot of money.

They just figured out how to pay themselves first.

And they didn't have a lot of discipline.

What they did is they made it all automatic.