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- How the Wealthy Collapse Decades of Compounding into Years
How the Wealthy Collapse Decades of Compounding into Years
Most investors are stuck on the 10-year clock. UHNWIs stack faster ones.
Hi ,
Time is the one resource you can’t earn back. You can make more money, you can take more risk—but once time is gone, it’s gone. Yet most investors act like the clock will tick forever.
We chase liquidity. We stress over market cycles. We celebrate a few points of alpha. And in the process, we ignore the questions that really matter: how fast is my wealth compounding, and how long can I keep it compounding?
This week I want to get you paying attention to the right clocks. Not the kind on the wall, but the ones running inside your portfolio.
When I bought my first company, I saw what no stock portfolio could deliver: a decade of compounding collapsed into a handful of years by actively investing in the right assets.
Later, as I stacked private credit and real estate, the pattern repeated. And became scalable via a diversified portfolio.
Because whether you realize it or not, every asset you own is on a clock. Some tick slowly, doubling your money once a decade. Others tick fast, collapsing years of growth into a handful of turns.
The wealthiest investors don’t waste time trying to predict the market’s next move. They decide which clocks they want running — and then they stack them to work together.
In this issue you’ll learn:
Stack Shift: How the Rule of 72 exposes the compounding gap.
Case Study: How Dutch pension funds built an $85B platform by turning illiquidity into an advantage.
Playbook: The “compounding clocks” framework that the wealthy use to stack timelines and accelerate wealth.
Let’s start with why most investors are on the wrong clock, and how you can reset yours.
— Walker Deibel
WSJ & USA Today Bestselling Author of Buy Then Build
Founder, Build Wealth
SHIFT YOUR STACK
The Most Valuable Asset You Own Isn’t Money. It’s Time.
Each market runs on its own clock.
Take the public markets: At the long-term average of ~7% in the S&P 500, it takes about 10 years to double your money. Want to go from $1M to $20M? Best case scenario, that’s three decades of compounding. But three flawless decades. No drawdowns. No taxes. No mistakes.
In contrast, private investments keep time differently. Instead of grinding at that ~7%, the Yale Endowment has compounded at ~9.5% annually over the past 10 years and ~10.3% annually over 20 years. That difference—two or three percentage points—may sound small, but over decades it’s the difference between staying comfortable and building generational wealth.
That’s the compounding gap most investors miss. Liquidity in public markets comes at the cost of velocity.
Private markets (i.e. business acquisitions, private credit, real assets) offer access to higher-return strategies that can reset the doubling clock. Vanguard’s latest outlook suggests private equity could outpace public markets by ~3.5% annually.
7% → Double every ~10 years
20% → Double every ~3.6 years
Same dollars. Different clocks.
The wealthy aren’t optimizing allocations. They are engineering time.
That’s why the real question isn’t what’s the return? It’s how long will this clock take to get me where I want to go?
Because the wealthiest investors know: money can be replaced. Time cannot.
CASE STUDY
Image: 'Real Time' installation by Dutch designer Maarten Baas. Source: Design Milk/cc by-sa-2.0
The Dutch Pension Playbook
If you’ve ever seen Martin Baas’ Real Time artwork in Amsterdam, you know how mesmerizing it is to watch time literally tick by. Now imagine that kind of attention applied to investing. That’s how Dutch pensions work. While other retirement systems treat time as something to measure in quarters or cycles, the Netherlands treat it as an engine for compounding.
Dutch pension funds manage over $1.7 trillion, and unlike most U.S. retirement systems that cling to stocks and bonds, they allocate 30–40% into private markets: real estate, private credit, infrastructure, and direct ownership in businesses.
Why? Because liquidity kills compounding.
The Dutch have institutionalized illiquidity as a system-level advantage, designing portfolios around 10–12% blended returns across private markets that double every 6–7 years. Over a 30-year career, that difference provides exponential gains.
The best example? Two of the largest Dutch funds, ABP and PGGM, built their own private equity platform—AlpInvest Partners. What started as a back-office solution to manage PE commitments grew into an $85 billion secondaries powerhouse—so effective it was acquired by Carlyle.
When we look at how AlpInvest scaled, we see the same pattern experienced stacking private credit and real estate: long-term, locked-in capital creating velocity no stock portfolio could match.
This is the backbone of Dutch retirement wealth. Pensions there are engineered to compound across generations, using illiquidity as a deliberate tool. Instead of chasing quarterly results, they build systems that reliably stack wealth over decades—consistently ranking among the top-performing retirement funds in the world.
The takeaway: You don’t need $1.7 trillion to use this playbook — you just need to decide which clocks you want running.
Then audit your own portfolio with our Toolbox in The Playbook.
Remember, Illiquidity offers stability to a structure like the pension funds.
THE PLAYBOOK
The 4-Step Time Horizon Multiplier
Ultra-wealthy investors design their portfolios around clocks, rather than “chasing returns.” Each clock tells you how fast capital doubles, and how long it can keep doubling.
The mistake most accredited investors make is living on a single clock: public equities. That’s why their wealth compounds slowly, and why they can never catch up to those who stack multiple timelines at once.
Here’s the framework UHNWIs use that you can apply today:
1. Diagnose your clocks
Run the Rule of 72 across your current portfolio. [Check out our toolbox below] At ~7% (the S&P 500’s long-term average), you’re doubling about every 10 years. At ~12–15% (private credit), it’s every 5–6 years. At 20%+ (growth equity), every 3–4 years.
If most of your wealth sits on the 10-year clock, you’re moving in the slowest car. Compounding at that rate takes longer than one lifetime …unless you’re a vampire.
2. Identify your gaps
Which clocks are missing from your portfolio? Are you over-exposed to slow compounding? Do you have at least one “fast clock” to accelerate velocity?
At Build Wealth, we’ve sourced, diligenced, negotiated for LP advantages, and personally invested in multiple private offerings that give investors access to these faster clocks. Just this week we closed the final tranche of the 007 video game investment. Right now, we have a real estate Legacy Fund, a credit fund, and an oil well rollup open.
You can always see current offerings here: buildwealth.investnext.com
3. Stack intentionally
UHNWIs don’t abandon slow clocks, they layer on top of them with faster ones. Some capital stays liquid and steady. The rest is allocated to private credit, private equity, and energy/tax-sheltered assets that compress decades of compounding into years.
In short: keep steady capital in public markets, but layer on faster clocks through private credit, private equity, and energy. That’s how you build a warchest.
4. Commit to duration
Compounding only works if you stay on the clock. Liquidity is comfort. Illiquidity is commitment. When your capital is locked up, so is your discipline. UHNWIs lean into this because it forces them to think longer, act smarter, and time does the work.
By stacking credit and real estate funds, you’re diversifying both assets and time horizons. This is how resilience is built.
With disciplined stacking across multiple clocks, a $5M portfolio can realistically grow into $50M over a full investing career. The key is deliberately choosing which clocks to set running, and for how long, not trying to time the market.
LP move of the week: Run the Rule of 72 on your portfolio today. Circle which clocks you’re on, spot the gaps, and decide what timeline you want to build from here.
Your Compounding Calculator
Most investors talk about IRR, but few actually run the math.
We’ve built a ToolBox to make it simple. Plug in an expected return, and it shows you how many years it takes to double your money using the Rule of 72.
It’s built for private investors who want clarity, not theory:
LPs comparing fund commitments.
DIY allocators weighing public vs private assets.
Wealth planners modeling how long different clocks will run.
Because when you see the doubling timeline in black and white, you stop guessing and start designing.
WEALTH REBELLION
Breaking Free from the Wrong Clock
“Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the mediocre” - Warren Buffett
Wall Street conditions investors to measure success in quarters. Earnings season. Fed meetings. Election cycles.
But wealthy families don’t measure wealth in 90-day increments. They think in decades.
Everything in this issue boils down to one truth: wealth isn’t about chasing returns — it’s about choosing clocks. And the clock you choose determines the wealth you build.
That’s why the real rebellion requires deliberately stepping off Wall Street’s clock. Choosing illiquidity over liquidity. Patience over panic. Compounding over noise.
When you step into private equity, private credit, or real assets, you’re not just buying exposure — you’re buying time. You’re freeing yourself from the short-term panic cycle and locking into long-term compounding where discipline multiplies.
The investors who win — really win — aren’t the ones glued to CNBC. They’re the ones who engineer decades of compounding and let time do the heavy lifting.
Cultural shift: In an age addicted to liquidity, choosing illiquidity is the rebellion.
So the question is: which clock are you choosing?
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