What I-S-E-E means for my money

2026-09-03 · by Ash1,240 words

The conventional advice starts with earning. Raise your income, save some of it, then put those savings to work. The logic is tidy, and I don't think it is wrong.

I organise my own money around four priorities.

Investing has first claim on a dollar. Saving takes what is left after investing. Earning is the engine that produces the dollar. Experience says what the money is for.

I-S-E-E. Read aloud, it says I see. That is the point. A lot of writing about money makes simple ideas harder to see. If a post here doesn't leave you saying "oh, I see", I haven't finished it.

This is my argument for each part. I have tried to separate what the data supports from what is simply my taste.

I, for Invest

There are two arguments, sitting at opposite ends of a life. Neither is "investing is the biggest lever", because during accumulation it isn't.

Early, because time is the only input you cannot buy back. You can raise your income at forty-five. You can cut your spending at fifty. You cannot go back and begin compounding at twenty-five. The other levers remain available. This one closes behind you.

Late, because the arithmetic takes over. Once a portfolio reaches a certain size, annual returns exceed anything earning and saving can add. I checked this against hundreds of millionaire profiles. Among those stating net worth, income and savings rate, 86 percent have expected returns larger than their yearly contributions, assuming 7 percent real. Even at a conservative 5 percent, it is 77 percent.

Solve for the crossover and the answer lands near the first million. At the medians for that group, returns overtake contributions at a portfolio of roughly 971,000.

The median age at the first million in the same data is forty. That makes forty a rough marker for the point when returns begin to exceed contributions.

Investing gets first claim because the early opportunity expires, while the late arithmetic eventually takes over.

S, for Save

This is where I expected the data to disagree with me.

Three quarters of the profiles credit earning as their greatest strength. Ten percent credit investing. The people in this data would call earning the stronger lever.

So I tested it. I split them at the median income of about 207,000 and the median savings rate of 33 percent, then looked at when they reached the first million.

Hold income steady and move from below-median saving to above-median saving: the date comes in six years. Hold saving steady and move from below-median income to above-median income: five years.

The savings split is one year larger. Narrowly.

I keep coming back to the middle two groups. A modest earner who saves hard arrives at 38.5. A good earner who doesn't arrives at 39.5. Those are basically the same answer.

Six against five is no landslide, and I wouldn't build a plan around that gap. The practical difference between the levers is too small for a strong claim. Saving still gets its own place because it is the one I can control on a Tuesday.

There is an obvious bias here. A result that fits my framework is exactly the result I am least likely to question hard enough. Read it with that in mind.

The part that undercuts both claims

Neither lever does much until it becomes extreme.

Both charts are mostly flat, followed by a drop in the top bands.

Doubling an income from 100k to 200k moves the date by nothing. Raising a savings rate from 20 percent to 40 percent moves it half a year. Nearly everything happens at the extreme.

In statistical terms, the correlation with age at the first million is -0.25 for savings rate and -0.21 for the log of income. Both are negative. Both are weak. Run them together and they explain 9 percent of the variation in the age people arrived. That leaves 91 percent to something else.

The spread also swallows the medians. When sorted by savings rate, the middle half of each band covers about ten years. A quarter of the lowest savers beat the median of the highest ones. Whatever savings rate does, it is nowhere near deterministic.

So the difference between saving and earning rests on a narrow margin inside two variables that, together, explain little. I would rather say that plainly than pretend the framework stands on firmer evidence.

E, for Earn

Earning is the engine, and the data agrees. The highest income band arrives five years before the median.

Its place in the acronym doesn't make it less important. The letters describe my priorities when a dollar appears, not the causal sequence that produced it.

That leads to the first objection any sensible reader will raise.

You cannot invest before you earn. As a sequence, the order is impossible. There is nothing to invest until something has been earned.

I-S-E-E is a priority order, not a chronology. When a dollar arrives, investing has first claim. Saving takes what remains. Earning is the activity that produced the dollar. Each part has a different job, and Experience makes the purpose explicit.

E, for Experience

Experience is the part with no data behind it at all.

The conventional three pillars deal with accumulation. They say nothing about what the money is for. A plan based only on those pillars therefore points toward the largest possible unspent pile. Bill Perkins made this case better than I will in Die With Zero: the goal is not maximum terminal wealth, and money never converted into life is not a win.

I chose Experience rather than Expenses on purpose. They occupy the same line in a budget but give opposite instructions. Expenses are something to minimise. Experiences are something to buy deliberately.

I have no evidence for this part. It is a value, not a finding, and I won't pretend otherwise. It belongs in the framework because a plan without it leads to an outcome I don't want.

What is untested

The comparison between saving and earning rests on a one-year gap in a sample where income is reported today, while the milestone happened years ago. Someone who arrived at thirty-two has had a decade longer to grow their income than someone who arrived at forty-eight. The arrow could point either way, and this data cannot tell me which.

The investing argument is on firmer ground because the crossover comes from arithmetic rather than correlation.

The Experience part is untested by construction.

Everyone in this data already succeeded. There are no failures in it. I can see what worked, but never what did not.

Next I want the income series rather than the snapshot. The profiles contain thousands of individual income figures, and about a thousand have an age attached. That should be enough to ask whether the early arrivers were earning more at the time or keeping more of it. It would compare saving and earning more directly.

If that changes the conclusion, I will change the framework and say so.