If I Wanted To Make My First $100K In 2026, I'd Do This

“The first £100K is a bitch, but you gotta do it”

Charlie Munger.

The hardest part and the best part of your financial journey will be your first £100K. I believe the first 100K changes everything, as it did for me also. Because the moment you hit it is the moment you stop worrying about tomorrow. You stop worrying about the usual stuff. Rent, utility, petrol, food, electricity, gas.

The point here is that you can’t have a long-term vision while paying rent. It’s extremely challenging. Making money is hard for a lot of people because they don’t have the physical and mental space to think on a long-term vision. I might be extremely optimistic, but I genuinely don’t think people have short-term visions. I think most people know what they want in the long run, but everyday life (the micro day-to-day stuff) gets in their way.

A lot of things helped me reach the milestone in 3 years from ages 22-25. In a simple income summary, I had a full-time 9-5 job and an internet side hustle. But as we all know, everyone seems to be doing that nowadays and most people don’t have £100,000 pounds of breathing space.

That’s why in this video we’re going to dig deeper into my own personal experience and gather useful insights and data points.

I’m going to reverse engineer everything I know so that if I did lose everything and had to make that money from scratch, these are the 6 steps I would follow.

Spend In Alignment With Your Goals This first step means cutting costs wherever necessary. You can’t take any huge bets on yourself (risks), if you’ve got a huge list of recurring expenses.

With any type of income, whether it’s my 9-5 or additional income, I apply the 70/30 rule. I still do this today. I spend 30% of what I make and save and/or invest the remaining 70%.

Now, of course, I’m a 25 year old in London living at his parents house. But I do go on several holidays and eat out whenever I want to. Maybe I’m a little privileged not to pay rent, but that didn’t mean I haven’t bought other things and yet still saved a lot of money.

The purpose is to spend in alignment with your goals.

Based on your values.

That for me was travelling, eating well, but also doing it in a very balanced way. I wasn’t flying first class. I didn’t have everything. But my goal also wasn’t to stop spending entirely.

My goal was to stop spending money on things I didn’t give a shit about. I absolutely loved traveling to the US, Japan, Italy, Spain, Budapest, Copenhagen etc.

Create a 3-value category.

Three areas where you get the most joy from spending money.

For me, that was travel, food, and coffee.

Everyone’s 100K is different. I would spend money, but I wouldn’t be tied to anything that would affect my ability in saving £100K.

No monthly subscriptions. No car insurance. Nothing.

But I also didn’t take the route of:

“don’t buy a £5 takeaway coffee, that’s too expensive.”

Just being realistic a coffee isn’t going to make you any broker than you are. You can’t expense cut your way to £100K on a medium wage not buying coffee.

My approach requires you to be more self-aware, not miserable.

Now, if you are on a low overall income you might not be able to travel or do nice things. But the 70/30 still applies. You still need to increase your income (which we will take about in the final step.)

We do this because the amount you save matters way less than the habit. You can lose money, but the habit will stick with you for life. Unless you consciously try to get rid of it, which you won’t. Because we only self-improve to get rid of habits that don’t serve us.

But in a way, we are still mainly cutting costs. If you’re putting away 70% of your money the moment it lands in your bank account, you are a minimalist with spending. And this isn’t for no reason. As mentioned, this is an important first step for the later stages, as we need cashflow to start spending and reinvesting in more skills (we’ll talk more on this later.)

It’s extremely important that you do this now because looking back three years ago it seems that both the world and the economy is getting worse. I do still live at my parents’ house, but that doesn’t mean I’m not self-aware enough to recognise that the rent is going up. We receive a letter every now and then to hear that the landlord is planning to increase the rent again.

P.S. This is all happening while salaries and pay are staying about the same.

However, regardless of the economy, what we’re talking here is the 6-step system that makes saving to a £100K work.

Financial equation is not 100% your own choice, but about 20% your personal choice and 80% systematic issues.

Be Stingy With Your Time A lot of people think their 9-5 is destroying their dreams while actually it’s their 5-9. It’s all the remaining hours outside of their job.

Let me ask you this.

How do you spend your mornings?

Do you wake up early?

What’s the first thing you give your attention to?

These first two steps, both money and time in alignment with your goals are foundation. The only two things you have right now is time and of course limited capital. Depending on how well you do in these first two steps, you may now have both time and money on your side.

Remove everything so that the only thing that does remain is focus.

We want to create days where you do have 2-4 hours to yourself. Agree or disagree, it takes a lot to get the ball rolling, regardless of the endeavour you choose to take on. What’s important in those hours is not to switch between tasks, but instead go all in on one thing. Which takes us to step three.

Go All in On One Skill To Get Paid This requires some research, learning, and self-education.

“You can get almost anything you want out of life, as long as it’s one thing and you want it far more than anything else.”

Naval Ravikant.

If you observe some of the greatest in any field, their goal and desire wasn’t to have everything. It was to achieve one thing.

An MMA fighter chases a championship belt. A footballer works towards lifting the trophy. A musician strives to hit top charts. Their talents and paths may differ, but they all shared one trait: they chose a single pursuit and committed themselves to it completely.

Now that we are getting to the discipline side of stuff. It’s also important to have a why.

Emotional goals get followed through. Abstract meaningless ones don’t.

You have to tie your goal to your why.

You’re watching this video.

Maybe your current big goal in life is financial.

Maybe it’s to earn £10K a month or save £100K.

But why do it?

Why even save £100?

You need an answer to this before we can move on. For example:

When I hit £100K, I will be able to quit my job and run my business fulltime When I hit £100K, I will be able to sleep better at night When I it £100K, my partner and I will be able to move towards our dream future Your why needs to be crystal clear before you do anything else. If you have burning questions, your why answers the how. Motivation tied to meaning always sticks.

Now. Coming back to the one skill idea. In the business sense, that would be one product, one avatar (audience), and one channel until you hit £100K.

A lot of people on social media who makes content on their financial journey are hitting that mark, which they never would have been able to if they only had their 9-5 job. This is because the medium that is social media has leverage. The sky is the limit.

Just think about every other business that is not on the internet. There is always a limit to what how much they can do and how much they earn. Even for businesses that are not on the internet, the internet still plays a big part for them.

For example, restaurants rely heavily on internet reviews to get new customers. Those with the largest quantity of reviews and best ratings win. I know this because I do it myself. When I want to explore a new restaurant in the city, my first instinct is to check online reviews.

I could go on and on about how having an online presence, building an audience, and showing off your expertise on the internet is the best viable option for business in 2026.

But for now, just choose one thing. This is an extremely important step as the previous steps don’t actually matter if you are not going all in on one skill and increasing your income.

Self-Educate Like Mad If what you’re doing day-to-day is not changing, then you’re aren’t learning.

Real learning always sparks behaviour change.

You could do the same thing for hours and not get decent results. This was a harsh truth I had to overcome, which is that it’s not about the hours you put in but how effective your iteration is overtime. If you keep doing the same things, and getting the same results, you have to do something different to break the loop. You have to recognise that the micro has to change in order for the macro to change. You have to go back to what you’re doing day-to-day and be truthful to yourself on how it’s not working.

Here’s my 4-step process on how to best learn effectively:

Consume a large quantity of the right volume by analysing the top 10% of content (we know it’s the right thing to consume as it’s already working.) Study the difference between the top 10% and the bottom 90% (what are they doing differently?) Figure out the important details that the top 10% use to shine. Completely steer away from and avoid the bottom 90% and their mistakes. Invest Money Smartly Now to step five. To invest money smartly, you need to put your money in the right places. We aren’t going to talk on ISA’s or S&P 500. I’m going to talk about ways you can invest to increase your income.

I’ve recently bought a £2000 Sony camera, invested £1000 on a website that is coming up soon, and purchased several courses to understand content, marketing, branding, and persuasion. These are in the long run minor investments which bring huge leverage on my time.

A lot of rich people have gone broke, and some very broke people have gone rich. That proves it’s not just how much you earn, but what you do with the money.

Billionaires lose millions to make billions.

Millionaires lose thousands to make millions.

And most people are afraid of investing hundreds on their own education.

Don’t be most people.

Increase Your Income You will always make your money from making money. Use your current capital, to make more money.

This of course is all about taking risks. Most people don’t do it because they can’t bet on themselves.

This is why self-improvement comes before business. Even if you want to take the leap of faith in business, you need to first self-improve, which is to come to terms of your own internal strengths and weaknesses. To know yourself. To know where you might fall short and see it way in advance.

Focus on growing your income. Don’t focus on trying too hard to minimise your expenses.

I honestly don’t agree with the frugal mindset because in life you have to spend money by default, but increasing your income is a choice. It’s intentional.

And everything is indeed easy for you right now. The economy might be getting worse, but starting your own business is getting easier by the day. Especially with social media, there is no ceiling to what you can earn in theory. If I could give one advice to my younger self, it would be to double down even harder on increasing your income and thinking strategically on ways to make more money.

Here’s a 2-step process on how to increase your income:

Have an offer Find those who want it Sell something low-ticket to the masses (£50 digital or physical product) or sell something extremely expensive to 1 person ( £5,000 product).

I personally wouldn’t advise on selling a physical product just because of all the headaches that come along with it. Manufacturing, shipping, etc. I’ve done this before. I’ve seen success with it, but it’s not the most viable option. I also wouldn’t sell something extremely expensive to one person.

I would recommend taking the first option.

If you have found what it is that you want to do, I guarantee there are people 2-3 steps behind you who also want to do what you do.

I want to make it clear that if you are already successful doing what you do, it’s because of routine. A system. Which you can package and sell to those who need it. I believe it’s the only way you can continue to do what you love.

But before all of this you will need to find those who need it and the only way to do that with mass is via social media. Which means building an audience. This is probably one of the biggest assets you can have today. It’s why everyone is doing it.

Even an airline company (Ryan Air) is popping out memes 24/7. As well as Keir Starmer, the Prime Minster of the United Kingdom.

Coming back to topic. There are other things that come into play, such as knowing your audience. But it all revolves around one thing. Information.

Knowledge is power. Knowledge of your market is profit.

I’m so glad I started social media 5 years ago. It’s the one thing I thank my younger self for. Social media is indeed the best way you can build in public because from the bat you choose what you’re already naturally good at. And if that energy comes across in your content, people themselves will reach out to you asking you how you do it. It all just comes down to people wanting a result that you already have.

With social media and content, the best thing is that you are the only one getting paid. I believe that’s the biggest benefit of starting a creator business. You don’t really need a team.

If you do have additional income, create another rule for what happens to the extra money you do earn. I just use the same rule of 70/30 as I’ve already built a solid habit of doing that.

There’s way too many things that go into this.

You need to understand the flow of money. Money flows to where value is created. Try to understand how value moves from one person to another. Whoever contributes more value to the chain, they make the most money.

That’s why effort is not as important as you may think.

What you want is impact.

And to create impact you need to be intentional.

I won’t be able to get into all of this here, so if you want more on the how to create impact in public via the creator business process, that is building an audience, and monetising your expertise, there should be a free link below.

The point is you get rewarded for the risks you take. You can’t take risks if you don’t have time and money (steps one and two).

Don’t increase your lifestyle too much while trying to do all of this because then it’s going to impact your ability to invest in yourself.

The day you stop investing in learning is the day you stop investing in your ability to earn more.

Summary

That’s all. That’s the 6-steps.

One extra piece of advice I would also give you, which is probably one of my biggest learning blocks is to start now. That’s the best thing you can do, right now.

The biggest reason for all of the success I have today is that I didn’t try to do everything perfectly. Let go of the need to be perfect. Trying to be perfect is unrealistic and right now we’re trying to be realistic.

Even when I mentioned the 70/30 rule, some months it was 60/40. But I wouldn’t put myself down for it or drop the entire thing altogether.

You won’t make the right choices all of the time. 100% of things at 100% of the time is not going to work. Ironically, the sooner you let go of trying to be perfect, the better off you’ll be. You want to be in control, but the funny thing is, the sooner you let that go the easier all of your wildest ambitions actually get.

In mid 2024 I quit a job that was paying me a £50K salary in London because it was mentally exhausting. So instead, I went travelling around Asia and was eating into my savings. I saved 100K but was depleting it. I stopped what was working and threw in the towel.

And a lesson I learned here regardless if it’s on a small scale or large scale is that we’re constantly doing this in our lives.

We miss a workout, so we throw in the towel and don’t work out for days, week, or months. It’s practically the same thing as the previous example.

“I couldn’t mediate today so I’m not going to do it at all.”

“I couldn’t start an internet side hustle three years ago at the perfect time so I’m not going to start one at all.”

There is no perfect time. But there’s also no setback that puts you so back so much that you just have to throw in the towel.

Learn from everyone. Don’t disregard people because they may have been a little more privileged than you. Everyone has something to teach.

If I only listened to the people who had my exact story, I wouldn’t listen to anybody.

Why would I? I’ve got nothing to learn.

So, keep an open mind during this journey. A person doesn’t have to be in exactly the same situation as you for you to learn something from them.

That’s all.

See you in the next one!

Cheers.

-Serkan