Others have provided some good responses, but I'll add in some thoughts.
Reading around the web the advice about "how to get rich" is invariably the same - you must invest money.
I disagree. But that's a separate topic from the rest of your post that warrants its own thread/discussion, so I'll leave it at that for now.
- The classical "what if everybody did this" question. If everybody invested money, then everybody would get rich, but that then would simply make everyone equal again. And, since human beings can only produce so much goods and services per day, all this shuffling of money around wouldn't have accomplished anything but inflation, right? (Actually, since the amount of money in the system is limited, how can everybody get rich?)
Production is not a zero sum game. If we could only produce so much goods and services per day, quality of life wouldn't grow (I.e. as more humans got added, they'd only be able to produce to care for the new humans). Instead, due to technology advancements and such, more production can happen, and quality of life can grow.
That is, even if we all invest, we can all see benefits from it. (And then there's the obvious aside that most won't, few will.)
- Reading around in this forum it seems that around $24k/year is a level of normal, frugal spending for a family of 3. Also, as MMM says, a stock market pays around 10%/year. So that means, to get a living by trading in stock market, you need an ass whooping $240,000 to begin with. So... where do you normally get it (short of robbing a bank)? Even if I could put $200 aside every month (which I can hardly imagine), it would take me a 100 years to get to that point. I suppose compound interest might halve the time, but... it just doesn't add up to me.
See this post:
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-simple-math-behind-early-retirement/Worry about saving a good percentage of your income, rather than some small dollar amount.
Saving half of my income sounds extreme.
Does it? That's about the median savings rate of people on these forums. Or, to put it another way,
over half of us here save more than 50% of our income.
https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/welcome-to-the-forum/mustache-poll-how-much-do-you-save/Maybe you just need to change your perspective/mindset. :)