Nobody opens the Journal hoping to feel bad about themselves before 7 a.m. Yet here comes Tony Barzar, 60, a grocery cashier in Tucson, strolling onto the front page with a million dollars in his 401(k). He has the easy calm of a man who has never once panic-sold anything. I have panic-sold a sandwich.
Tony started at Price Club in 1986 for $5.85 an hour. Not a typo. Just the eighties. He stayed put when Costco absorbed the chain, and he still scans groceries in the same warehouse today at $32.90 an hour.
Since 1993, he has peeled a small slice off every paycheck into his 401(k). That is it. That is the whole strategy. No hot stock. No crypto phase. No podcast.
The number that matters
The eye-catching numbers are $5.85, $32.90, 1993, and $1 million. None of them is the one that matters.
The number that matters is zero. Zero paused contributions. Zero loans against the balance. Zero cash-outs. Across five bear markets — 1987, the dot-com bust, 2008, 2020, and 2022 — he never gave compounding a single day off.
Compounding — money earning returns, and those returns earning their own returns — did the heavy lifting. His only job was to not interrupt it. He did not.
And the money was never locked in a joyless vault. It bought a house with a pool in 2009 and two trips to Europe. When his wife was diagnosed with stage-3 brain cancer, his benefits covered three surgeries in full and gave him nearly a year of paid leave to sit beside her. “This is my calling,” he told the Journal, “right where I’m at.”
Costco’s finance chief says many thousands of hourly workers have done the same thing. Many thousands of cashiers, quietly out-executing an awful lot of people with monogrammed golf bags.
Why most people break it
Plenty of people earning triple Tony’s wage carry a fraction of his balance. Not because they earned less. Because the compounding kept getting broken.
Contributions get paused in a tight year and never restarted. Loans get taken against the balance. Old accounts get cashed out between jobs because the check was right there, looking friendly.
Never stopping is a habit, not a talent. That is the good news. A habit can be installed at any age.
Install the habit
One: consolidate the scattered old 401(k)s under one roof. An orphaned account from two employers ago is compounding on nobody’s watch.
Two: read the benefits line as hard as the salary line. Three covered surgeries and a year of paid leave did more for Tony’s family than any raise would have.
Three: automate the never-stopping. Tony supplied the discipline by temperament. The Capital Wealth Growth Portfolio supplies it by structure — automatic contributions buying durable, boring compounders on a schedule, no temperament required. Costco itself is the archetype of the kind: membership-renewal economics and decades of doing the same thing well.
You do not wait for a storm to find out whether the roof holds. You glance up while the sky is clear and fix the loose shingle today. If an old 401(k) is sitting somewhere unattended, that is the shingle. A review takes about fifteen minutes — roughly the time it takes Tony to scan a full cart.