The Accessibility Of Having Money "Work" For You

"Don't work for your money; make your money work for you," some might say—usually people who are already wealthy or economically stable and can afford the money and time necessary to allow their money to "work for" them in the form of long-term investments and compound interest.  It is not that this recommendation is erroneous, which is untrue.  It is that those positioned to benefit most from the more passive means of generating wealth are the ones who need it the least, and summarizing their approach in (on their own) vague statements like that in the beginning of the post can obscure how inaccessible the implementation is for many.

To obtain the money you can eventually allow to work for you, you need to initially work for pay, likely on a fixed schedule with a particular hourly wage, unless you steal or by extraordinarily fortunate or improbable chance acquire money without any effort (including by being born into a wealthy family or accidentally discovering abandoned money).  There is no such thing as skipping right to secure investments with compound interest unless you are literally born into wealth!  By logical necessity, you cannot just consistently make your money work for you unless you 1) actually have money and 2) have enough money leftover to invest after paying for necessities and/or having some amount of immediately accessible funds for emergencies.

Clearly, those struggling to gain any financial footing due to factors like unexpected layoffs, high costs, and low compensation relative to high costs are incapable of presently acting on this advice.  Besides, there will still probably have to be a period of time after putting the money "to work" where someone would still need to work for their money in a conventional job to, on one hand, amass more money to put to work, and, on the other hand, support themselves while their investments generate significant returns.  This is what the wealthy who have the monetary resources to direct into investments and the leisure time to monitor them closely might overlook.

In their case, it is classist to casually tell others who are struggling that they simply need to make their money work for them instead of working for a wage or a salary.  Making your money "work" for you rather than always having to work for money is the pragmatically superior option, but it is not available to everyone, and sometimes the people who promote this course of action do not acknowledge the barriers to living this out.  While there is nothing classist about the concept, it can easily be promoted in a distinctly classist manner by those who want to exude the illusion of intelligence and self-made success when their passively-generated wealth really stands on no such thing.  They had to possess some amount of wealth already!  More importantly, they likely obtained or maintained it by worker exploitation of some kind or by eager ideological slavery to the social construct of money.

For the kind of wealthy person who treats making money as an amusing game with little to no urgent stakes beyond ego and reputation among other wealthy people of the asinine kind, of course the potential difficulties of putting one's money to work without regularly working hours at a formal job might go unnoticed.  No one is stupid or detached because they are rich, but someone wealthy and willing to treat their money as a fortress might have never thought about how the people most in need of the benefits passive income brings are often unable to pursue it.  Alternatively, they might not care.  To believe in errors or present the inaccessible as the immediate solution to personal finance problems is flawed regardless, and truths about more passive wealth generation cannot be acted upon by those in true need.