YOU ARE RUNNING OUT OF TIME… You can earn MORE than you did 5 years ago and still feel further away from the life you wanted. A home. A family. Enough money left over that one bad month doesn’t ruin everything. US mortgage rates ended Friday at 7.43%. An 8% rate is possible. Meanwhile, the median existing home sold for $429,100 in August, UP 1.6% from a year earlier. At 8%, a $500,000 mortgage over 30 years would cost roughly $3,669 a month BEFORE property taxes, insurance and maintenance. You save for the down payment, then look at the monthly payment and wonder who the hell can afford it. Across Europe and Asia, the war’s impact on energy supplies is putting households under more pressure. In Japan, Italy and South Africa, inflation-adjusted wages are still at or below their pre-pandemic levels. And look at who owns the wealth: America’s richest 1% held 32.5% in Q2, up from 31.1% a year earlier. The entire bottom half’s share fell from 2.4% to 2.3% over that same year. That’s why I worry about people counting entirely on their next pay raise to catch up. When most of that raise disappears into the cost of living, another year of hard work can leave surprisingly little to show for it. My view: start building ownership as soon as your finances allow. Keep an emergency fund, deal with expensive debt, and invest regularly with money you can leave invested for years. You can own small pieces of productive businesses long before you can afford an entire property. Learn what you own, diversify, and build a plan you can stick with when markets fall. That’s the work I share inside The Assembly, my paid investing community with 4,000+ members. My research, trades, valuations and the risks I’m watching, with the reasoning behind each decision. If you’ve been putting this off because you don’t know where to start, come learn with us and ask your questions. Join The Assembly. Give yourself something better than another year of “I’ll figure it out later.” See you inside. I can’t wait to meet you.