Try this little experiment. Take your annual salary and multiply it by the number of years you have until retirement. Is the result a phenomenally large sum of money? Would you be able to buy all the things you dream about with that money?

Now that looks like a rather simplistic experiment. But think about inflation and periods of unemployment off-setting your salary increments and the experiment probably gives you a good idea of how much you could accumulate over a lifetime. When you consider that you have to take out all your living expenses out of this, the situation would look a bit grim. (Except if you are among the wealthiest 1%).

The purpose of my experiment is to lead to answering the question of financial success. If one were to maximize the income they have earned in order to meet all of ones needs and some of their wants, would that be financial failure? I do not think so.

The philosophy that has underpinned my financial writing for these past few years is that competent financial and investment advise should seek to help an individual meet their needs, sufficiently meet their wants and live a comfortable life. I am skeptical about get-rich-quick schemes, fool-proof trades, or any other mechanism suggested by people to make you money out of nothing. There are too many horror stories of people who have lost all their savings following such schemes.

And yet these schemes will continue because of the brand of financial success that is sold to the public – luxury cars, mansions in prime locations, yachts and vacations in the Caribbean. And all this would supposedly be possible for you if you invest a percentage of your earnings every month in the scheme being sold to you. A ridiculous claim. The hard cold fact is that those luxuries are out of the question to many people who were not born into that kind of privilege. The very few people who make that kind of money despite their humble backgrounds are the exceptions that prove the rule.

I do not wish to impose my understanding of financial success on anyone because of my belief that people should best define what success is to them. However, the version of success you aspire to should not be one which leads you to making costly financial decisions.