Yes yes very true indeed

Making more money can certainly help to make sure you have more savings or better credit- but these things are independent of earnings to a degree. A person with a minimum wage job can easily have a great credit score- especially with support from parents and family, co-signers to allow them access to loans for things like automobiles, starting a responsible credit history earlier in life etc.

There are of course extremes- it’s circumstantial. If you’re making so little money you can barely eat or have a place to sleep, if you have little or no “frivolous spending” on top of that- you can’t really save money. But... say you have no family or support and are in that situation- and say you are living somewhere that rent is $2000+ a month for a studio- well... making a couple hundred more dollars a month isn’t likely to help you. You may have circumstances like court judgments that can limit your ability to work of advance, and may take decades or more to be able to get stable enough to gain the resources to invest in improvement- so there’s also a curve of improvement where perhaps it is still “better” but taking 69 years to go from poverty to slightly less poverty is well... not functionally a quantifiable difference if you don’t feel benefit from that- or the benefit is not proportional.

It can all get very complex and individualized.That’s why tax attorneys and accountants and such make so much money and are in such demand. The difference between keeping millions of dollars or losing it- or for those that make less thousands of hundreds- can come down to simple “tricks” and intelligent use of tax shelters and other financial instruments. For some people- having a HUGE deductible on insurance makes better fiscal sense, for some- leasing is smarter than buying, blah blah.

Here’s an important phrase: “you can’t expense your way to profit.” In other words- you cannot simply cut costs until you are profitable. Cost cutting is a VERY important strategy for profit and financial health. In personal finance you will end up With more money in your pocket by saving $10 a day than by increasing pay by $10 a day. But at a point- there is nowhere to cut costs that doesn’t cause discomfort. Then cutting costs hurts your ability to function or expand. Then at a point- there is nowhere legal or ethical it can be done. Then there is a point where you literally cannot cut costs any more. Once you reach your floor- there is no way you can legally or ethically save more money- or you have eschewed laws or ethics and have NO way left- the only options is to increase earnings.

But this causes issues. A person who makes $50k a year and spends most of it will generally have a pretty comfortable life- if you compare their life to a financially healthy person making $120k a year- they’ll probably have similar lifestyles- because a person making $120k who is financially healthy likely isn’t spending more than 1/2-2/3 of their take home. They are saving or investing almost as much as the person making $50k takes home in a year. The person making $50k, to be financially healthy- should be living more like a person making $20k or even $15k a year- and saving and investing the rest. Of course- most people don’t WANT to live that way. Society looks down on people for “being cheap” or “penny pinching” or “looking poor.”

But many wealthy people you meet will be very frugal. They don’t buy homes and cars for everyone they know, they haggle on prices- even on things like a $100 pair of shoes, I once saw a multi millionaire business owner friend haggle with a street vendor selling bags of oranges for $10. $10 for a bag of oranges is already a good deal- but he wanted a better price- and the vendor gave him a better deal. That’s how self made wealth often behaves. Loaning money to family and friends rarely- and charging interest or with other strings when they do.

It may seem repugnant to you- but most people do not get wealthy by spending money- they get wealthy by making money and saving money. It’s a behavior one is born with or learns- to always be looking for a better deal, always be negotiating the terms that are most favorable for them. My friend wanted oranges- a $10 bag was a good deal. He would have bought it for $10- but what was the harm (to him) in asking for a discount? If the vendor would have said “no. It’s $10...” my friend still would have bought them- but he said “ok. I’ll take less...” and so my friend paid $5. A 50% discount.

I have him an earful- I thought it was wrong to chip at a poor street vendor who that $5 would mean more to than my rich asshole pal- but... the wealthy often separate money from morality to large degrees- those who are extremely wealthy can of course afford to be more ethically minded- but there’s the image and reality. A charitable donation that makes you look good or buys free press or works as a tax shield... a campaign to raise millions for cancer research while at the same time cutting healthcare to your employees to make higher profits... there’s perception as reality- there is good done one place and bad another place.

Getting away from morals- the point is that self made money tends to share certain traits and behaviors. You don’t generally get rich and then learn about money all of a sudden- you learn to handle money and those skills help make you rich. Without the skills and mindset to make and keep wealth- you’re mostly looking at luck- and even then you’re very likely to lose your wealth if you stumble into it by luck unless you have the skill set to manage that degree of wealth.

Tl:dr/I’m conclusion- while the idea that making more money would be a sure fire way to improve finances- it isn’t. Not always, not for everyone and every situation. That knowledge- that “financial intelligence” and the discipline to do it- is a huge part of what separates the financially comfortable from the not so much. It is a huge component of generational poverty- those who grow up without people to teach and instill in them finically prudent behaviors and financial discipline are at a disadvantage. You can’t seek to learn something if you don’t even know what it is that you do not know.