Most millionaires are boring

A tweet went viral recently sharing results from the largest study ever conducted on millionaires. It was done by a team at Dave Ramsey’s company, Ramsey Solutions, and it surveyed over 10,000 American millionaires.

The findings were almost aggressively boring.

Most of them were in their 40s or older. Most earned under $100,000 a year. Most had never taken a business loan. Most contributed consistently to their 401(k) plans. Most were, by every visible measure, ordinary people.

No crypto windfalls. No startup exits. No inheritance stories. Just people who made a decent income, lived below their means, and invested consistently for a long time.

The uncomfortable reaction

The replies to the tweet were split almost perfectly down the middle. Half the people said: “See? It’s possible for anyone.” The other half said: “This study is outdated. Try doing that when houses cost $800K and groceries are $300 a week.”

Both sides have a point. And I think the honest answer lives somewhere in between.

The path to a million dollars on a modest income is absolutely harder than it was 25 years ago. Housing costs have outpaced wages in almost every major Canadian city. That’s real, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.

But the core mechanics of the study still hold. The people who built wealth weren’t doing anything clever. They were doing something consistent.

What this looks like in Canada

The American study talks about 401(k) plans. The Canadian equivalent is the RRSP and the TFSA. And we actually have a structural advantage here that Americans don’t: the TFSA.

A TFSA lets your investments grow completely tax-free. No tax when it grows, no tax when you withdraw it. If you’ve been eligible since the TFSA launched in 2009 and have never contributed, you have $109,000 in room as of 2026. That’s a significant head start if you’re just getting going.

Here’s what the math looks like for a Canadian earning a normal income.

If you contribute $7,000 a year to your TFSA (the current annual limit) and invest it in a diversified portfolio earning roughly 7% annually, after 25 years you’d have about $443,000. That’s one account. Add an RRSP on top of that, even with modest contributions, and you’re well into seven figures over a working career.

The catch? It only works if you actually do it. Every year. For decades. And that’s where most people fall off.

The boring part is the whole point

There’s a reason the “millionaire next door” archetype has persisted for 30 years. The original book came out in 1996, the Ramsey study confirmed the same findings decades later, and the pattern hasn’t changed.

Wealth is built through four boring habits:

Spend less than you earn. Not dramatically less. Just consistently less. Enough to have something left over to invest. The gap between income and spending is the single most important number in personal finance, and it’s the one nobody tracks. We’re meticulous about budgeting our coffees and ignoring the things that actually move the needle.

Invest the difference. Not in individual stocks. Not in options. Not in whatever’s trending. Most of the millionaires in the study used plain, boring retirement accounts invested in diversified index funds. Nothing exotic. Nothing exciting.

Give it time. This is the one that gets people. Compound interest does almost nothing in the first few years. It’s disappointing. A $7,000 investment growing at 7% earns you $490 in the first year. That doesn’t change your life. But after year 15, the growth on your growth is doing more work than your contributions. By year 25, it’s doing most of the heavy lifting. The people who quit after three years never see this.

Don’t touch it. The millionaires in the study didn’t cash out during downturns. They didn’t borrow against their retirement accounts. They didn’t panic when the market dropped 30%. They just stayed invested. That’s it. The hardest part of investing isn’t picking the right thing. It’s leaving it alone long enough for it to work.

The “it was easier back then” argument

Some of the sharpest replies to the tweet pointed out that the math changes when housing, healthcare, and education cost what they do today. They’re not wrong.

If you’re living in Toronto or Vancouver and half your take-home pay goes to rent, telling you to “just invest consistently” feels tone-deaf. I get that.

But a few things are worth noting.

First, you don’t need to max out everything to build wealth. Even $200 a month invested from age 25 turns into roughly $244,000 by age 55 at a 7% return. That’s not a million dollars, but it’s not nothing either. The biggest mistake people make is assuming they need to invest a lot, so they invest nothing.

Second, the TFSA didn’t exist for the previous generation. Canadians who started investing in the ’80s and ’90s had RRSPs and taxable accounts. We now have a tax-free account with over $100K in cumulative room. That’s a genuine structural advantage that didn’t exist before.

Third, fees are lower than ever. Self-directed investing through platforms like Wealthsimple and Questrade costs a fraction of what mutual funds charged a generation ago. The millionaires in the old studies were paying 2%+ MERs and still came out ahead. Today you can hold a globally diversified portfolio for under 0.25%.

The game is harder in some ways. But the tools are better in others.

What the study actually proves

The millionaire study isn’t proof that anyone can become a millionaire. It’s proof that most millionaires didn’t do anything special.

They didn’t beat the market. They didn’t start businesses. They didn’t inherit money. They did the most boring possible version of financial planning: earn, save, invest, wait.

The people who look at that and feel discouraged are often comparing themselves to where they think they should be, not to where they’d be if they started now. The math doesn’t care when you start. It just cares that you start.

A million dollars might take you longer than it took someone who bought a house in 1998. That’s fair. But the alternative, doing nothing because the finish line feels too far, guarantees you won’t get there at all.

The unsexy conclusion

There’s no secret. The largest study on millionaires confirmed what every boring financial book has been saying for decades. Live below your means. Invest in something simple and diversified. Don’t try to time the market. Give it decades.

That’s the whole strategy. It’s not exciting. It’s not viral. But it works.