Buy stock. I had little when I started and was able to retire at 63 just 12 years later.
In 2009 I had $13,000 and bought Ford stock which tripled in 1 year. In 2014 I bought Apple after the 7-1 split then sold it after it rose 47% for Netflix which also split 7-1 and went up 30% then started to go below the $100 split price so I sold at a $11,000 loss and I bought Nvidia at $62.25 and held it for 2 years till aug 2018 and bought AMD in sept which I still own. If I had waited 1 month I could have bought 1/3 more AMD stock as the price had fallen....
I made a few mistakes with buying on margin and selling nvidia too soon as it split 10-1 in 2025. I could have had several millions more.
Right now I am waiting on the tariff trade talks to work out and the AI to cause the stock to keep going up as OpenAI and AMD made a deal last year that OpenAI would buy AMD stock for 1 penny apiece if they met 4 levels each agreed on (no details on them I know).
AMD stock has to get to $300 this year then up to $600 in 4 years with each level to be met. The companies thinking their plan to work or they would not be betting so much on the deal.
SpaceX will have an IPO sometime mid to late 2026 so I am waiting on that and will sell my AMD as I expect the SpaceX stock will at least double but will likely go much higher in the first few weeks.
They also own Starlink and it may be spun out as a IPO someday.
Since you're sharing your story, let me share mine.
Among my many other stock market and real estate investments (some profitable, some not so profitable), I began purchasing Ford Senior Debentures (stock ticker: F-PA) about that same time. They had a nominal value of $25, and paid dividends of $1.875 annually (= 7.5% p.a.). But they were then selling for about $8-9 a share (bankruptcy was feared), meaning I was effectively getting roughly 25% p.a.
In additional to plowing back my quarterly dividends into new shares, I also purchased additional shares from my own savings.
Within a short time, F-PA amounted to roughly half my entire account!
The stock price slowly worked its way back up - to $11 a share, $13 a share, etc. - but I kept at it. When the share price had just about reached its nominal value, FORD exercised its option and forcibly bought the debentures back, which disappointed me somewhat.
I may have made individual investments that (unexpectedly) skyrocketed and delivered phenomenal short-term profits, but no one such stock ever accounted for more than, say, 5% of my total - and it was usually a one-time thing yielding a windfall profit. But my FORD senior debentures were the one investment that I consciously pursued with determination over a longer period of time, and it really paid off in absolute terms.
(And the one time, in 15 years, that I ever asked my M-L account manager for her advice on my picks, in the mid-teens, when FORD was offering a voluntary buy-back for I think it was $15 a share, she explained that M-L was "mediating" that offer and she thus was forbidden to voice an opinion. That wised me up a lot!)
Regards,