Hitting €100k didn’t bring champagne. It brought calm, perspective, and the quiet freedom to choose without fear of money holding me back.
I woke up in a five-star hotel in Sofia, Bulgaria. The kind of hotel with tall and heavy curtains that let through just enough sunlight to remind you it’s way too early. There was an espresso machine in the corner, a bathrobe hanging off a chair, and a minibar I definitely wasn’t going to touch because of the ridiculously expensive peanuts.
It might sound like success. At least, the version of success my younger self would have imagined. But I wasn’t there for pleasure. I was there for work, with another day of back-to-back meetings ahead of me.
Still half-asleep, I did what I always do in the morning: reaching for my phone and opening my banking app to check my portfolio. And there it was.
Overnight, my total net worth had crossed €100,000.
Not in cash stuffed under a mattress, but slowly built through years of consistent saving, investing, and letting compound growth do its thing. A milestone I’d silently worked toward for years. And now it was real.
The Most Underwhelming Milestone Of All Time
I didn’t know exactly what hitting a number like that would feel like, but I’d imagined something big. Like finishing a marathon and getting that runner’s high everyone talks about. Or solving a puzzle you’ve been working on for months and finally seeing the complete picture.
And I’d love to tell you that’s what happened. That I jumped on the bed, ordered champagne for room service, or took a long and hot bath while listening to some funky music. But the truth when I was staring at the screen? I felt almost nothing.
You can imagine that was genuinely unexpected, because I had cared and slowly built toward this milestone for years. But when the number finally appeared there was no fanfare, only a quiet recognition. A small exhale and lightness like I’d finally put down a heavy backpack I didn’t know I was carrying. A vague mix of distant satisfaction and calm, combined with moments of amazement and confusion that said“Well… that’s underwhelming”.
And just as quickly as that feeling had come, it all went away.
I put the phone down and my focus shifted back to the day ahead. I went to the hotel gym to wake myself up with an early workout, took a shower, had a hearty breakfast and stepped in the taxi to the office.
The day moved on, and so did I.
A Thousand Dinners
The rest of that day was packed with the usual corporate rhythm of ideation, planning, decision-making, and PowerPoint slides that seemed designed to test your attention span more than your intellect.
Yet as the day went by, something was settling inside me.
That vague and distant calmness I’d felt earlier that morning wasn’t fading. If anything, it was getting clearer. Not bigger or more intense, but like a photograph slowly developing. And it wasn’t until later that day, when we were back at the hotel and freshening up for a dinner in the city, that I fully realized what reaching this milestone actually meant.
We were choosing a restaurant. A colleague suggested a place he’d read about. Nice, but not cheap. Probably €80-100 per person.
A year before, I probably would’ve checked the menu prices first and calculated what it would do to my spending room for the rest of the month. And maybe suggested somewhere cheaper while pretending I just wasn’t that hungry.
This time? I just said yes.
Not because €100 didn’t matter anymore. It did, and you can actually do a lot of nice things with money like that. But here’s what changed my perspective: with €100,000, I could now technically afford a dinner like that a thousand times over. That’s almost every day for three (!) full years. The realization didn’t suddenly make me want to spend recklessly, of course, but it did fundamentally shift how I thought about what I could and could not do.
This one dinner wouldn’t create stress that lasted longer than the meal itself. It’s the same thinking behind why I’d already stopped checking my account balance before buying groceries, since the relative impact of smaller amounts like €10 had already changed. But I could now think about whether I wanted to actually do something, not just whether I could afford it, on an even larger scale.
That’s what the milestone had given me. Not happiness, simply more space.
Maybe you’ve felt this shift in your own life, too. That moment when money stops being the first filter for every decision. When “Can I afford this?” becomes “Do I want this?”. It’s subtle, but it changes everything.
If something went wrong in life like getting sick, my car dying, or someone I love needing help, there probably wouldn’t be acute financial stress on top of everything else. There was a buffer now, and it was strong enough that even a severe emergency wouldn’t automatically become a financial crisis. That’s a different kind of freedom. More quiet. Less dramatic. But very real nonetheless.
The overall feeling still remained underwhelming, but you can probably imagine I felt a little lighter and had a really nice dinner that evening. The food was great, but that financial realization made all of it taste just a little bit better.
The Long Walk
Looking back, the anticlimactic feeling actually made total sense. The milestone wasn’t dramatic, because the journey toward it hadn’t been either.
Four years earlier, I’d started my first job after a period of financial stress with literally nothing saved. From there, it was a gradual climb: month by month, paycheck by paycheck, investment by investment.
The saving habits my parents had instilled became automatic, my career growth let me put money away consistently, and the decision to start investing meant compound growth quietly started carrying some of the weight.
The number grew so slowly that crossing the threshold wasn’t some sudden arrival. It was the final step of a very long walk, with the number simply catching up to a reality I’d already been living for a while.
Lottery Winners and Movie Montages
I also realized something else: my expectations didn’t align with reality because they had been shaped by completely wrong stories.
Whenever I’ve seen someone reaching a financial milestone, it’s always been in an extreme situation. Influencers showing their extravagant lifestyles or how they made certain amounts of money in a couple of days. Lottery winners going from broke to millionaires overnight. Movies compressing rags-to-riches stories taking literal years into two-hour transformations.
Building wealth slowly simply doesn’t look like that at all. There’s no camera crew, no dramatic reveal, no confetti, and certainly no moment where life suddenly transforms. If you’ve managed to do it the slow way, the milestone is just an ordinary Thursday morning in a hotel room in Sofia, alone.
No wonder my expectations didn’t match reality.
No Party, Just Peace
Here’s what that quiet morning in Sofia taught me: financial milestones don’t feel the way you expect them to. And that could very well be because our expectations are shaped by examples that don’t show the actual reality of gradually building wealth.
The number didn’t make me experience extreme happiness like I thought it would, and in hindsight it also shouldn’t have. It just made me quieter inside. More at peace. Fewer worries about my financial situation. Knowing that if there were setbacks in life, there would still be enough left to last me a while. Knowing that options existed if I needed them.
It wasn’t a party moment. Instead, it was a peaceful moment.
Maybe that’s what financial milestones actually are, especially when you get to them slowly. Not dramatic transformations that change you when you arrive, but quiet confirmations of the peace you’ve been building along the way.
That morning in the hotel, I wasn’t celebrating something new. I was simply recognizing something that had been there for a while already, just waiting for me to see it clearly.
And no, I still didn’t get those ridiculous minibar peanuts. I promise. Some things just aren’t worth it, no matter how much you’ve got on paper.
If this story gave you something, feel free to pass it on!
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