Focus on these 3 ‘magic numbers’ to become a millionaire in Canada — how do you stack up?

There’s simply so much wealth-building advice out there that it’s easy to feel a little overwhelmed. If you ask ChatGPT “how to become a millionaire,” you’re likely to get a flood of endless money hacks, conflicting advice and complex economic theory.

But you don’t need any of that to get into the seven-figure club. In fact, you can chart a course to the $1 million milestone by simply focusing on three essential numbers. Here’s a closer look.

Net worth

You can’t make intentional progress if you don’t know your own value. That’s why the most basic number you should be tracking on a consistent basis is your net worth.

Although calculating your net worth should be relatively easy, many Canadians wouldn’t know where to start. In a 2022 survey from Maru Public Opinion (1), about 70% of Canadians considered themselves to be financially literate, which means nearly one-third of all adults didn’t feel well-versed on finances and could be struggling to accurately measure and understand their wealth and financial status.

Fortunately, you don’t need sophisticated tools or AI to track your net worth. A simple spreadsheet that lists all of your assets and liabilities and calculates the difference between the two is an effective strategy to map out the data.

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Savings Rate

If you’re trying to build wealth, it’s essential to track the amount of money you or your family save in any given year. In fact, when you monitor and raise your savings rate high enough to meet your savings goal, you can make your journey to millionaire status a lot shorter.

Unfortunately, most Canadian families struggle to save much. In the first quarter of 2025, the Household Savings Rate in Canada dipped to 5.7% from 6% at the end of 2024, according to Statistics Canada (2).

A family earning $100,000 a year would save just $5,700 a year at this pace and would take 175 years to get to $1 million in savings. But, by contrast, if the same family can raise their annual savings rate to 20%, it would take them just 50 years to get to that target.

These numbers show why tracking and boosting your savings rate is so crucial to build wealth and why so many millionaires and billionaires are notoriously frugal.

Rate of return

The final ingredient in the wealth creation recipe is the rate of return on your savings.

Where you place your savings is just as important as how much you save. If you’re stacking $20,000 a year under a mattress, you will take several decades to get to millionaire status. Plus, by the time you get there, inflation would have drastically reduced the value of a million dollars. Instead, if you invest in robust growth stocks, real estate or fixed income opportunities, you could get to the seven-figure club a lot faster.

The Vanguard S&P 500 Index ETF (TSX:VFV), for example, has delivered an annualized return of approximately 17.17% since its inception in 2012 (3). If a Canadian investor assumes a similar return going forward and invests $1,000 per month into VFV, they could reach the $1 million target in less than 20 years.

For someone with a diversified portfolio spread across bonds, real estate, stocks and cryptocurrency, it’s essential to measure the total combined return on all your assets every year to see if you’re making good progress towards your goal.

Keep these strategies in mind, and you could be well on your way to joining the millionaire’s club.

Article sources

We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our editorial ethics and guidelines.

Maru Public Opinion: Canadians halfheartedly ring in 2022 (1); Statistics Canada: Gross domestic product, income and expenditure, first quarter 2025 (2); Vanguard: Vanguard S&P 500 Index ETF Factsheet (3)