Kevin O’Leary says do this every time you get paid. You can make 10x your income without more work. How many millions are you leaving on the table?

“I can’t stand it when I see kids that are making $70,000 a year spending $28 for lunch!” O’Leary said. “I mean, that’s just stupid. Think about that in the context of that being put into an index, and making 8% to 10% for the next 50 years.”

It’s a simple but powerful lesson O’Leary says he picked up from his late mother, Georgette O’Leary, whose portfolio was full of relatively “boring, large-cap” mutual funds that tracked the performance of blue chip companies.

He says that safe and consistent approach helped her build a sizable fortune over time, demonstrating to him how powerful compounding growth can be.

For anyone looking to harness the same power of compounding, O’Leary laid out a simple plan that can grow wealth to 10 times your income, without extra effort.

Save rather than hustle

At its core, O’Leary’s theory is that wealth is not built by big and flashy financial moves, but by boring repetition. Simply saving a fixed percentage of every paycheck (he recommends 15%) and investing it in a plain vanilla index fund could deliver multiple times your annual income within a reasonable time frame.

Let’s say you earn $1,204 a week, which is median individual earnings as of December 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2). That’s roughly $62,500 a year.

On average, American workers saved just 4.5% in 2025, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (3). But if you can save 15%, which is $180 a week or nearly $9,400 a year, your path to financial freedom could be much shorter than your peers.

This annual savings habit is likely to make a big difference, even if you leave the money in a high-interest savings account. But investing it in a low-cost index fund could supercharge your progress. Over the past 10 years, the S&P 500 index has delivered a 14.78% annualized return, according to Vanguard (4). The average return has been closer to 9% over the past 30 years, according to SoFi (5).

With that in mind, saving $9,400 a year and investing it in an index fund that delivers 9% growth annually could get you about $620,000 within 22.5 years. That’s ten-fold your annual salary in just over two decades.

No promotions assumed. No side hustles. No stock-picking genius. Just consistency and time.

Despite its simplicity, most people fail to execute this strategy because of complacency. Here’s how you can avoid derailing your long-term financial plans.

Avoid derailment

If you’re on a path to financial freedom with the simple strategy outlined above, there are two key risks that could derail you: complacency and crisis.