Thankfully, financial advisers are around to offer valuable advice on the best ways for plucky non-millionaires to get a seat on the exciting not-poverty train. And what exceptional suggestions they are! 

The first one, in a recent piece entitled What To Do If You Can’t Afford To Buy A House Right Now, was save more money. Now that is some out-of-the-box thinking!

No.2 was to invest your money in things that will make more money, like stocks and stuff. Again, brilliant – although, as with suggestion No.1, there’s just the vaguest chance that such a notion may have already flitted across the mind of someone taking steps towards consolidating their future wealth.  

The third is to pay the very people being interviewed to give you financial advice – and since they’ve been responsible for the previous two spectacular insights, that sounds like a shrewd investment!

The other two sage suggestions – get in early with wealth building (… um, aren’t we past that at this stage?) and do your homework (reading this article counts, right?) – might seem to be as applicable to the situation at hand as “wash daily” and “already be more rich”, but the important lesson is that apparently, being a financial consultant is a doddle.

So I’ve decided to set myself up as one, and thus here are my Five Street Steps To Wealthatunity – ideas that you may have overlooked but that are just as useful and practical as those evidently being touted by the current, more technically qualified advisory classes.

While you’re going through the budget to find an extra few dollars a week you can squirrel away, why not also assemble a rag-tag team of quirky individuals with different but complimentary skills to stage an audacious raid on a casino?

Sure, the thrill of denying yourself that extra coffee in the name of frugality is almost the same as donning a catsuit and rappelling down the side of The Star casino as your team stages an elaborate diversion on the gaming room floor, but as the old saying goes: you’ve got to steal money to make money.  

More specifically, perfect time travel in order to go to the past and open a bank account with $10 in it, and then wait for compound interest to make you a billionaire. Hello deposit!

Of course, if you’re going back before 1966 you’ll need to have that $10 in Australian pounds, and if it’s before 1910 you’ll need it in pounds sterling, and if it’s earlier than 1788 then you might struggle to find a bank at all.

Maybe you should make it $15, just to be on the safe side.

After all, the entire economic system is geared to ensure that wealth just adds to itself, so if you’re looking to improve your prospects, why not start with vast sums of money? Once you have that, it’s incredibly easy to make millions more simply by doing nothing – or even by making objectively terrible business decisions.

To use a contemporary example, the most recent tranche of Channel 10 investors, including Gina Rinehart, James Packer and Lachlan Murdoch, threw down about $400 million in an astute investment that’s now … um, the station’s now in voluntary receivership.

Reckon they’re going to be applying for temp jobs to make ends meet? Exactly: be more like them and make bold financial decisions, using your vast unearned stores of inherited wealth. Simple!

One thing that recent advice pieces fail to do is complain about uppity Millennials wah-wahing about not being able to afford housing when they don’t even have the common decency to have been born before 1975, unlike the vast majority of columnists who regularly moan about how young people need to lose their sense of entitlement (to shelter).

And, despite all the evidence suggesting today’s young people are more frugal, take fewer drugs and work longer hours than the Baby Boomers and beyond, it’s pretty much obligatory to insist that the victims of decades of lousy economic policy still somehow brought all this on themselves by their assumed personal failings.

So: because you kids are all so damn smart, why don’t you just go invent the next Facebook or something with your internets and Snapchats and hippity-hop music? That’ll make you all the bitcoins you need. Also, fix my damn router.

A widely shared report from investment bank USB concluded that a person on an average income would have to save for 40 years to afford a deposit on an equally average Sydney house. And while that sounds like a long time, that’s only because you’re considering it from the perspective of a puny mortal. 

Why not instead allow yourself to be fed upon by an emotionally distant yet irresistibly seductive vampire and join their ageless ranks, walking the world in the shadows and feeding on the warm blood of the living while knowing the sweet sting of immortality?

Sure, you’ll be an empty, lifeless husk tormented by an insatiable hunger that can never been quenched, but that’s the Sydney property market for you.

Andrew P. Street is a columnist known for his wit, not his financial acumen. Do not follow any advice from this article. Seriously.

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