My number one piece of advice for 2025.

PAY YOURSELF FIRST, ONE HOUR A DAY OF YOUR INCOME—AUTOMATICALLY!

In 2025 I am back on my crusade to help you save more automatically.  Why?  Because it WORKS. In 2025 – PAY YOURSELF FIRST.

It’s really simple you deserve to keep part of your paycheck and the only way to make it happen is to make it automatic.  Budgeting won’t work. And discipline takes too much time.

So stop making it hard on yourself.  Make it easy.

Here’s the formula and I call it the “MILLIONAIRE POWER HOUR”.  Watch the video.  It’s five minutes and it can change your life forever.

We spent a month creating this with a team. It’s awesome and I really think it will help you. If you like it, please “like it” or comment and let me know. Then I can get it a sense if we should do more of these. They should teach this stuff in school but they don’t unfortunately, so please pass it along to your kids and your friends that you think could benefit from it too!

Now back to your summary of what you need to do:

In 2025 you need to have one simple goal based on three simple rules that work. Ready?

1. PAY YOURSELF FIRST
2. PAY YOURSELF FIRST: One hour a day of your income
3. PAY YOURSELF: Automatically for LIFE

You’re going to work about 2,000 hours this year assuming you have a job.  Most Americans will work over their lifetime up to 90,000 hours.  Don’t do all this work—and not get the freedom from your efforts.  PAY YOURSELF FIRST means when you earn a paycheck the first person who gets paid is YOU.  If you go to work from 9am and work until 5pm, your first hour is yours to keep!

The way you do this is you move the money into a 401k, 403b or IRA account.  If you don’t have one of those retirement accounts then get an IRA account today and get it set up automatically.  Ask your employer if you can have the money automatically moved from your paycheck to your IRA account.  If they won’t do it then have your paycheck automatically deposited, and you then set up your bank account to automatically move the money into your IRA account before you can touch it.

Finally, make sure you put the money in the retirement account in a place that it will grow. I suggest you look at your 401K plan closely and review the “Target Dated Mutual Fund Options”. They should be low cost, and they work great because they are automatic. They are automatically diversified for you based on age and automatically rebalanced. There’s estimated to be over  $800 billion dollars now in these funds, and people who use them are getting better results typically then trying to do it themselves. Why? Because it’s automatic!

Now go rock 2025 and make this your best year ever.

Your friend,
David Bach
10-Time New York Times bestselling author