I'm going to say something heretical here, but: I'm increasingly convinced that the whole compound interest thing is bullshit. Not math-wise, the math checks out. Just propaganda-wise. In practice, with interest rates available to general population, a typical person isn't going to accumulate any meaningful wealth unless they were already wealthy.
Say you're saving $500 a month for 10 years, on an account with 5% interest rate. After 10 years, you have $76,281, i.e. $16,281 over the $60,000 you put in. It's just 27% more - and that's assuming you can find an investment with real 5% interest rate, and without taking inflation into account. It's also assuming the banks won't pull off something funny, or that your country doesn't redenominate your currency. In this scenario of continuous savings, it takes about 27 years for the interest to double the amount of money you have. Again, if you can find something that pays you real 5% of interest. The real rates on low-risk accounts seem to be sub-1% these days.
I've been running some back-of-the-envelope calculations like these every now and then, and I'm yet to see a scenario in which compound interests gives me anything in a reasonable time frame. As it is, my wealth-accumulating strategy is just "spend less, and earn more" - with the latter part doing almost all the difference. But I can only pull this off because I'm privileged to work in tech industry, which has more money than it knows what to do with - it's not something I can recommend to my relatives with more mundane jobs.
(I guess I could get into real estate investment? I think I have too low risk tolerance for it, and I also have plenty of ethical concerns about getting rich off flipping houses.)
The trick with "if you live frugally and invest you'll end up with tons of money" is that unless you take risks and are lucky, "end up" is likely to come around your retirement age, when you'll have little use for "tons of money" except paying for medical bills - so you'll pass it on to the next generation, to give them a shot at the life you wanted to have.