<prompt> Human: So this is sort of ok, mostly a brag post, but I just checked Mint and noticed that I finally cracked 100,000 net worth! Whats more, it happened exactly five years after I started getting serious and tracking my finances. This is kind of a milestone for me, because I didnt come from a rich family, and I started out with thousands in student loans though not as bad as some folks and very little assets the starting 1,500 was my guess of what my crappy car was worth.There isnt any magic secret here, but if you just keep saving investing, you will see growth over time. A few tips, most of which are pretty much standard advice in rpersonalfinance: Wherever possible, set up automatic savings, so it comes out of your paycheck and you never have the chance to see that money and spend it. I cant stress how key this is for me. I try to set it up so I always feel poor in that after I pay all the bills, my checking account balance is a little bit tight. It encourages me not to waste money on nonsense, and if I have to transfer from savings for a big purchase, it makes me stop and think about it more. Invest in low-cost index funds. If youre unsure where to get started, check out the resources in the sidebar, or the Bogleheads wiki. If youre totally clueless, the Vanguard Target Date Funds are a very sensible and easy place to put your money for now, while you learn more about investing. Change jobs to get raises. Maybe in the olden days you could stay put at one company and get promoted with a big raise, but Ive found my good raises come when I move companies. I usually stay at one place long enough to learn some new things and take on more responsibility with a fancier title, and then I use that as leverage to get a new job with pay fitting the title. I started out working in a callcenter answering tech support calls for 33kyear, and Im now a software engineer making 75k. Edit: The intermediate step was teaching myself programming and then doing QA for a software companyEdit: Added some more information about investing, I shouldnt have acted like it was super obvious. It gets talked about over and over here, but its always new to somebody. Also, because several people have asked, I am 29 years old, I do have a bachelors degree, but I majored in biology with a math minor. I didnt study computer science in college.Edit2: A lot of people have been asking about how I made the transition from helpdesk to software dev. I wrote about that a bit here I would suggest not applying directly for software engineer jobs, but for something closely related. In my case, after doing phone tech support, I taught myself some programming and got a job as a test engineer sometimes also listed as QA Engineer for a company that builds web applications. Then, I was able to demonstrate my abilities by automating large parts of the testing process: bringing up virtual machines, automating browser interactions with Selenium, etc. After about a year and a half, they had a software engineer opening, and I applied. It was probably the easiest interview Id ever done, because Id already been working directly with those people, they knew me and they knew what I could do.If youre looking to learn to code, there are great resources here. I started off with Python, which I still think is a great language for beginners, but if you want something that is immediately marketable, JavaScript is probably the way to go these days.  <response>: Congrats on the progress. I recently started using Mint to track every aspect of my finances and in doing so has made me keenly aware of balances of every one of my accounts. After two months of seeing the balance on credit cards not go down nearly as fast as i would like to it finally prompted me to focus on debt reduction. Just in 6 weeks credit utilization went from 32 to now 9.8. I anticipate within two months to have that at 1 only due to day to day usage for cash back. Seeing the the net worth really drove home the idea that debt reduction is basically in the bank. 