How To Build Wealth And Retire By The Time You're 35

I'll explain in 8 minutes

Tim Denning

Jun 26, 2026

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Retiring by 35 seems totally unrealistic.

But no one ever told me that as a teenager. My brother and I started building businesses together when I was 16. We both wanted to retire early. That was our entire life goal, and we talked about it often.

We nearly retired when I was 26. But not quite.

My brother eventually retired at 32 doing his own thing. I retired at 34. That’s not a flex because I know you don’t give a sh*t. I share it because the nuance behind the headline will completely change your life.

Retiring early isn’t what you think it is

Retirement is one of the most confusing words in human history.

You were raised to believe by society that retirement equals working like a dog doing work you mostly hate (but pretended to like) until you’re 65. Then doing nothing after you turn 65 and driving around in a caravan and relaxing.

The first step to retiring early is to change your definition of what retirement is.

My brother and I chose an unusual definition of retirement. We were raised in an odd way. Our parents were unconventional in every sense. Our dad worked about 3 hours a day since I was born, and he raised us.

Other parents used to give us sh*t and say our dad was more like a mother. They used to make all sorts of gender-related jokes about him, saying he was a man dressing as a woman and doing housework like a little b*tch.

Our family wasn’t rich, though.

Our parents believed that extreme wealth was silly and having free time was the ultimate flex of true wealth. That turned into our dad working 3 hours a day. The rest of the time he’d hang out with us, smoke a pipe, and read philosophy books.

As my brother and I reached adulthood, we were accidentally molded by this lifestyle our dad lived and that allowed him to drive us wherever we wanted to go.

We decided our definition of retirement was to quit doing work we didn’t enjoy as soon as possible. The second part was that we wouldn’t get told what to do by a boss. And the third part was that we would still work for ourselves, but retirement meant making a certain amount of money would no longer be our goal. When those three criteria were met, we would have retired.

As it turns out, we achieved our definition of retirement quite early. We could have got there by 25 years old if we’d been a little less immature, but everything is f*cking easy in hindsight.

What it means to build wealth

Most people in the old economy think of wealth as investing some money and being patient for a few decades. Or being an entrepreneur and taking wildly absurd risks.

In the new digital economy, this is no longer the case. There isn’t one path anymore.

Create digital assets

If you don’t show up in AI search or in google, you’re invisible.

That means you’ll be applying (asking for permission) to get opportunities. This is the equivalent of slavery and you will be underpaid, used, and abused. Just ask anyone who’s tried to break into Hollywood.

The pushback I get on this one is some version of “I don’t want to be on social media blah, blah, blah.” When people can’t find you online, you look like a coward.

Cowards don’t get opportunities.

They just sit in silence for decades, hoping and praying someone will discover them. How do I know? I was a coward for 10+ years.

The reason people don’t become visible online is because they make it all about themselves and how they look. And they think people care about them when they don’t. If you die tomorrow, your family will think about you 99% less within 4 weeks.

Sooo… you must build digital assets – a portfolio of work, social media profiles, an email list, testimonials, and case studies, etc. “I’m a nice guy” or “I have this qualification” or “I worked as X for 10 years” don’t cut it anymore.

AI wipes out all of the “trust me” and replaces it with “prove it or f*ck off.”

Become a radical self-learner that pisses off Harvard types

People think they self-learn.

But they lie to themselves. Self-learning is no longer about consuming information – that’s not learning. Self-learning is valuing execution that creates wisdom.

Consuming information has been replaced with new skills.

Writer Dan Koe says the new high value skills are agency, taste, persuasion, persistence, and iteration.

He says the trouble is you can’t go watch a bunch of Youtube videos to learn them. You can only learn them through execution.

Being an experience-led self-learner is crucial. You don’t magically make a lot of money by finding the right opportunity. No. You iterate your way to wealth by starting basic and treating life like a video game, where the only goal is to level up.

Get around stupidly rich people who fart loudly

I recently paid $32,000 to join a mastermind.

Within 5 minutes I had buyer’s remorse. I couldn’t stomach it – the investment felt more like an expense. Then I jumped on one Zoom call with the other members. The first person I met on the call was making $1M+ a month by himself with no team.

It broke my brain.

I then met another gentleman. Seemed like a normal guy. After a few days of chatting in messenger with him, I find out he drives two Ferraris and owns a yacht worth more than most people make in their lifetime.

A week later I was looking for a new accountant. My current one felt out of touch, slow, and like he wasn’t adding value. I met a new accountant. Same age as me. He was worth tens of millions of dollars. We started hanging out. I met him at his office.

In one meeting, he shared with me how the richest families generate wealth through commercial property.

It once again broke my brain.

In a handful of weeks, my entire view of the world changed. All because I got around people far wealthier and more successful than I am. It sounds cliché as hell, but getting around the right people literally makes you money.

If your entire network is made up of people with a scarcity mindset, you won’t become wealthier no matter how hard you try.

The cheat code is just to pay to get around the right people through private groups and masterminds. Most people won’t, though, so that’s an advantage for you if you buck the trend.

Hoard financial assets like you’re King Charles

I didn’t want to go here. But I must.

There’s no way you can talk about building wealth without talking about owning assets and investing. Yes, it makes me sound like old man Warren Buffett, but there’s no other path to wealth without ownership.

Someone once explained to me that financial assets are delayed consumption. You store the value from your work in an asset, so that in the future you can sell that asset to redeem the money and spend it on food, shelter, and living.

If you don’t own assets, then you end up either 1) not storing any money at all 2) or storing money in bad ways, like a bank account.

The main skills to develop here are:

Understand how the financial system works
Understand what assets to own and how much money to put in each (asset allocation)

I forced myself to read 100s of finance books early in my career to ensure I had a basic understanding of the economy. Then I owned different financial assets to understand the pros and cons through actual experience instead of theory.

When you own, say, shares in Nvidia, it bizarrely forces you to pay attention more because your money is on the line. This is what I did.

Instead of investing money in buying a nice home, fancy car (I drove a Honda Civic for 10 years), designer clothes, or endless holidays to Europe – I focused on investing in financial assets.

*The old girl that got me through years of corporate slavery*

At the start, I made peanuts.

But after 10 years of compounding, I’ve made more money from this practice than I could have ever imagined. My investment in Amazon alone did over 300% in gains since I bought it. Even with all the hard work in the world, I could never have made that sort of return for literally a few hours of research and clicking the buy button.

Not everyone is wired to be a sophisticated investor, though.

That’s why, for most people, index funds are the smarter choice. You still need to know what index fund to buy, but it’s ten times easier than trying to figure out what single investment to make from the millions of options available.

Hoard financial assets, instead of trying to impress others and getting into huge debt.

Take calculated risks that give you runny poos

By definition, wealth doesn’t exist without some small risks. True learning doesn’t happen without taking a risk either. Because what is learning? Being willing to change. When you learn, you become a different person.

But change isn’t safe, comfortable, or easy.

Most people fail in life because they refuse to change and just accept their excuses as facts. To access wealth the aim isn’t to be reckless and take stupid risks, which is what mainstream society believes.

The aim is to take calculated risks.

It’s to understand the downsides so you can limit the risk, but to focus on the upside which a lot of the time is exponentially higher. Fastest way to stay in poverty is to focus on all the risks and downsides and try to think through them.

You can’t.

Nothing good ever came out of comfort and a lack of risk-taking. That’s just a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory golden elevator to the pits of financial hell, where one overdue car payment can force you onto the street. No thanks, man.

I once read a quote that said, “Playing it safe isn’t actually safe. You’re just trading the chance of winning for the guarantee of nothing.” That changed how I thought about risk. Most people are guaranteed of nothing in life and they don’t even realize it.

I’m not too proud to say that was me for a long time. But there is a way out, and it’s through taking some calculated risks that make you feel like doing a poo. Yep. Poo.

As author James Altucher once said, walk around and poo your pants once in a while. That’s how you feel what it’s really like to live.

Work smarter with leverage instead of work harder

Working smarter sounds obvious. And it is.

You know you shouldn’t work harder to make more money. Yet here’s where I’ll be real with you for a second. I know this too. Yet I still try to work harder to make more money because it’s our default programming.

The factory worker age taught us to value hard work. It taught us to work harder if we wanted to get ahead. And while we should know better… we don’t. We naturally go back to working hard without even realizing it.

The path out of hard-work-hell is to build leverage.

This idea used to be woo-woo. Only millionaires truly got it. Now with the invention of AI basic leverage is available to all of us. You can outsource some of what you do for $20 a month. Once you have AI leverage you can then look to add leverage from code, outsourcing to humans, building a social media audience, etc.

The goal isn’t to do everything yourself. The goal is to get so good at what you do that you mostly get paid for ideas and thinking while a system takes care of the income-earning tasks.

That creates a whole new conversation.

To get paid for ideas and thinking, you need to become a master in your field.

You need to become so good at what you do your value becomes undeniable. I’ve obsessed over this idea.

When you meet someone who’s incredible at what they do their energy is infectious. When they can prove their mastery to you in a few minutes, it’s so incredibly rare, that you probably start telling people about it without even realizing it.

That’s the power of mastery.

Competition vanishes because it’s so rare. It’s simple to become a master but hard to do because it takes discipline and dedication to pass the threshold of effort needed.

But if you can become a master, you’ll never have to worry about building wealth again. People will be lining up to get your help and pay you. Read that again.

I’ve experienced this firsthand. I’ve obsessed over my field for 12 years. People who’ve experienced it describe me as totally insane.

Last week that resulted in 7000 new leads. It means I get to pick and choose what I do and who I work with because for that 7 days there were 7000 people lining up. Yes, I just sounded like a wanker, but I have no other way to describe it.

Could you not become wealthy if you had 7000 people in 7 days wanting your help? Of course you could.

Choose mastery.

Stay away from the hobby mindset, being passionate, following the conventional path, people pleasing, asking for permission, and anything else that doesn’t force you to apply an insane amount of effort to your goal.

Become debt-free sooner than your mommy and daddy did

People carry enormous debt for too long.

It’s cool for the X/Twitter finance bros to push the idea of getting into debt to buy property and stocks. What they leave out is what debt does to your brain.

It’s hard to feel good when you’ve got loads of debt. All it takes is for the economy to get the flu or an employer to hang some employees to increase profits and you’re suddenly vulnerable.

Being debt-free is modern freedom.

It’s not as fancy… and you may not be as rich – but you buy back peace of mind. And peace of mind feels incredible when you escape constant stress, burnout, and always having to ask permission to take a day off.

Being debt-free sounds easy but it’s not. When you can delay paying for things to some distant future the temptation to indulge is more addictive than heroin. The only solution I’ve found was to stop trying to impress people by buying stuff.

I went even more extreme.

I made it a game to see how much fun I could have without spending a single dollar. I tracked win streaks where I didn’t make any significant purchases.

And I did one more thing that forced me to cop a lot of insults…

I lived with my parents.

People ridiculed me for it. My family made fun of me. And I didn’t care because I did what I had to do. After a while people just stopped talking about it because they couldn’t get a reaction out of me. They saw a grown man living at home and assumed I was a failure.

But I believed a different story.

I believed I was doing something incredibly important with my life and I needed to give myself the financial runway to get there. That belief eventually paid off and the critics turned into fans (as they always do).

If you worry about what everyone thinks, you’ll take on debt to buy stuff that makes you look more successful.

If you forget about what everyone thinks, you’ll have the discipline to make smarter financial decisions and stay away from the crack cocaine that is debt. Choose wisely.

What determines whether you retire at 35 or 65

If I had to put it down to one thing, it’d be this: the amount of money you decide you need to fund your lifestyle.

If wealth feels like a $10M mansion and a Mercedes convertible with 3 kids at private school and a golden retriever named Snuffles, you’ll be working longer and harder than someone like me.

On the flip side, if you decide you don’t need to live some wild Instagram bikini babe life, then you can earn decent money without going overboard and retire earlier.

I got to retire at 34 because I had zero debt, no credit cards, and I rented a student apartment with my girlfriend (now wife). It didn’t take as much money as you might think to leave my old life behind.

But here’s the part I’m not supposed to tell you…

Many people who retire early end up having to come out of retirement because they screw it all up. So me retiring at 34 isn’t the important part. Staying retired is.

That’s why I drive a basic car, live in a modest 1971 single-story house, and why both my daughters will be going to public school which costs $0.

The less money you need, the less you need to earn. And the easier it is to reach retirement and stay there until death.

That’s how you build wealth and retire at 35. It’s not s*xy but it is simple and achievable for most people.

This article is for informational purposes only, it should not be considered financial, tax or legal advice. Consult a financial professional before making any major financial decisions.

P.S.

I’ve just opened enrollment for my new workshop:

Create a 6-Figure Business Model in 60 Minutes

Pretty obvious premise.

Come for an hour.

Leave with your own 6-Figure Business Model.

Perfect for you if you are…