[jandrewrogers]

There are three levers for increasing wealth: increase savings rate, increase income, increase rate of return. For the average person, these are listed in order of difficulty, hence why most personal finance advice starts with increasing your savings rate.

Owning a small business is a chance at increasing rate of return. That's playing personal finance on hard mode for the average person. If you are risk averse, you'll be much better served focusing on increasing your savings rate and income.

[sokoloff]

I think there’s a large subset of the population who is in savings and checking accounts (often with meaningful amounts of money that sit there for a long time) who could trivially easily increase their rate of return by buying VTSAX with a portion of those funds.

[jandrewrogers]

That is a fair point. I was assuming a VTSAX-like return as the default low-effort path but many people don't even do that.