There’s a reality that doesn’t get discussed enough in personal finance circles: no amount of budgeting, side hustles, or financial discipline will allow the average person in certain countries to build a secure, comfortable life. This isn’t about work ethic or financial literacy. It’s about mathematics, economics, and the stark reality of being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.
We’ve all heard the standard advice. Save ten percent of your income. Invest early and often. Cut out the daily coffee. Build an emergency fund. The problem is that this advice assumes a baseline level of income and economic stability that simply doesn’t exist everywhere. When your entire monthly salary equals what someone in a developed country spends on groceries, the conventional wisdom becomes borderline insulting.
Consider what retirement actually requires. You need to accumulate enough wealth to support yourself for potentially decades without working. This means not only covering your basic needs but also accounting for healthcare costs that typically increase with age, inflation that erodes purchasing power, and the loss of employer-provided benefits. In countries with high inflation rates, weak currencies, limited pension systems, and wages that barely cover current expenses, this equation has no solution.
The average person in these countries faces a triple bind. First, their wages are insufficient to cover both current needs and meaningful savings. After paying for housing, food, utilities, and transportation, there’s nothing left. The suggestion to save even five percent becomes laughable when you’re already making difficult choices about which necessities to prioritize. Second, even if they manage to save something, their local currency often depreciates faster than they can accumulate it. What took years to save can lose half its value in months during a currency crisis. Third, the investment vehicles that allow wealth building in developed countries either don’t exist, are inaccessible to regular people, or are so risky they’re essentially gambling.
This creates a situation where people work their entire lives and end up dependent on family, minimal government support, or continuing to work until they physically cannot. Retirement, in the sense that people in wealthy countries understand it, is not a realistic option. It’s not a goal to work toward but rather a luxury that exists only for a small elite.The standard response to this is emigration, but that’s not a real solution for most people. Moving to another country requires resources, skills that are in demand, language abilities, and often luck with visa lotteries or employer sponsorship. For every person who successfully emigrates and builds a better life, there are hundreds who cannot. They have elderly parents to care for, children in school, jobs they cannot leave, or simply lack the funds for such a massive undertaking. Telling someone to “just move” is like telling someone who’s drowning to “just swim to shore” when the shore is miles away.
What makes this particularly cruel is the global nature of modern media and internet access. People in struggling economies see exactly how others live. They watch the same movies, follow the same influencers, and absorb the same messages about what a successful life should look like. They hear the same advice about retirement planning and wealth building, even though none of it applies to their reality. The contrast between aspiration and possibility creates a unique kind of psychological burden.
Some people respond to this reality with resignation, others with anger, and many with a grinding determination to do what they can despite knowing the odds. They save what little they can, knowing it probably won’t be enough. They educate themselves about finance, even though the system isn’t designed to reward that knowledge. They make sacrifices for their children’s education, hoping the next generation might have better options. This isn’t irrational optimism but rather the human need to feel some agency over one’s circumstances.
The international development community likes to talk about “lifting people out of poverty,” but there’s a massive gap between not being in absolute poverty and having the resources to build genuine financial security. You can be above the poverty line, employed, educated, and working hard while still having zero realistic path to a dignified retirement. The metrics we use to measure economic progress often miss this uncomfortable middle ground.
For those reading this from stable, wealthy countries, the point isn’t to feel guilty but to understand that the conventional wisdom about personal responsibility and financial planning has geographic limits. Someone making the equivalent of three hundred dollars a month cannot budget their way to a comfortable retirement any more than you could flap your arms and fly. The math simply doesn’t work. For those reading this from countries where this reality hits close to home, the point is acknowledgment. Your struggle isn’t a personal failing. You’re not doing something wrong. The game is rigged, and recognizing that is the first step toward making informed decisions about what you can actually control.This doesn’t mean giving up or not trying. It means being realistic about what’s possible, making peace with constraints you didn’t create, and focusing energy on the things you can influence rather than beating yourself up over goals that were never achievable in the first place. Sometimes the bravest thing is to stop pretending that positive thinking and hard work can overcome structural economic realities, and instead to find meaning and satisfaction within the life that’s actually available to you.
