MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA. June 25th, 2026 – Melbourne founder James Sackl has published a new essay arguing against the standard Australian financial advice to save your way to wealth. The piece, titled “Don’t Save Money,” went live this week at jamessackl.com.au.
Sackl is the founder of Wallace Biotechnologies and Terraform Technologies, both Singapore-domiciled, and publishes on the same site under his Golden Age banner.
“Everyone gets the same line drummed into them young,” Sackl writes in the opening of the essay. “Spend less than you bring in, tuck a bit away every week, and you’ll be comfortable one day. Sure. Your mum and dad would approve. It’s also the slowest road to anywhere I know of.”
The essay sets out a case Sackl says he learned by doing both ends of it. Saving, he argues, has a hard floor and most people are not far above it to begin with.
Earning has no equivalent ceiling, and the right offer to the right person can pay for years off the back of one afternoon. What most people are actually short on, in his telling, is not frugality but the willingness to put a price on their own hour and refuse work below it.
He writes from experience. At twenty-one he founded a company by walking door to door in Melbourne, pitching advertising space on a website that did not yet exist, and banked 21,000 dollars in pre-orders before a line of code was written. During the COVID-19 pandemic he designed an all-in-one rapid antigen test pen that did 130 million dollars in sales.
“Saving has a floor. You trim, then trim more, and one day there’s nothing left to trim. Earning has no ceiling,” Sackl says in the essay. “All the money that ever made a real difference to me came out of the hours I spent earning, not a cent of it out of the hours I spent doing without.”
The structural argument behind the companies
The thesis is consistent with how Sackl architects his current ventures. Wallace Biotechnologies, a Singapore-domiciled biotech company, is being built to extend human health span and the health of the environment over a multi-decade horizon.
Terraform Technologies is an energy and resources infrastructure company harnessing fusion energy, primarily the sun, to produce cheap resources at scale.
Both companies are deliberately structured for long-horizon resource availability rather than quarterly output, a principle Sackl says applies equally to how individuals should manage their time.
“Squeeze forty dollars off some bill and you’ve burned a clear hour doing it,” Sackl writes. “The forty you’d have made back by Friday anyway. The clear hour you don’t get back till you’ve slept.”
