Saving more on your daily expenses will help you build wealth. Flickr/Raúl Hernández González This post from Bernie Klinder, EMBA, entrepreneur, investor, and consultant, originally appeared on Quora as an answer to the question, "Why are some wealthy people so frugal?"

One of things you learn quickly when managing your wealth is how difficult it is to get a decent return on your money without a lot of risk.

Getting a 5% or 10% return year-over-year is considered doing well. Investors get really excited over 15% returns.

But if I can save 15% or more on things I buy every day, and add the savings to an account that earns interest, then the money compounds and grows.

People get nickled and dimed on stupid stuff all day long. They shop based on convenience and waste money on lottery tickets, overpriced snacks, interest on credit cards, bank fees, etc. When the average person saves money on a purchase, he or she often views it as having more money to spend on other things.

If you understand wealth, you look at it differently: You paid dearly for the money earned as direct income. Between federal, state, local, Social Security, and local sales tax, about half your income is gone before you can do anything with it. So for every dollar you earn at your job, you might keep 60 cents or less of it.

So a dollar saved is worth nearly $2 earned. If you start to figure out how many hours you have to work to earn $100 after taxes, you'll view your cable bill differently.

Most people have a lot of debt and very little savings. The goal is just the opposite: You should save 15% of your pretax income via tax-deferred investments like a 401(k) and an additional 20% to 25% of your after-tax income. As you can guess, I have a strict budget even though I'm in the top income bracket and wealthier than 95% of Americans.

Fifty percent of my after-tax income goes to my mandatory household bills: Mortgage, car payment, utilities, etc. But what if I can consistently save an additional 10% a month on the other half by looking for frugal ways to save money — saving 10% here and 20% there on the things I buy consistently, like gas, groceries, household staples, and major purchases? This isn't uncommon among high-income individuals. Households with more than $100,000 in annual income are among the most likely to use coupons.

For example, by not spending $10 a day for lunch or overpriced coffee, you'll save $200. Let's keep the math simple and assume you save that $200 every month. At the end of 12 months, you'll have $2,400. If you save an additional $50, you'll end up with $3,000. Big deal, right?

But if you add that amount to an investment for a few years, it's huge. Even investing that portion in my conservative bond fund, that change adds up:

Here is what $200 a month adds up to: The Calculator Site

Here is $250 a month:

The Calculator Site That's a $7,000 difference. Not impressed? Imagine you are a making a higher level of income, and multiple your savings amount by 10 to $2,500 a month. That's a $70,000 difference!

Now let's look at it from another point of view. Let's assume you were born wealthy, and you have a trust fund with $10 million in it, earning the same 3.5% interest. That would give you $350,000 a year of income (pretax) without ever touching the principal. Monthly, that's $29,500 of "beer money."

But if you decided to scale back a little bit and dropped your income to a "mere" $20,000 a month, you'd have an additional $1.4 million in your account in just 10 years, earning $392,000 a year in interest.

As I mentioned in my post "Is it true that the more money you have the richer you will get?" wealth has a certain momentum to it. It's hard to get things going, but if you develop the right habits and spend less than you earn, your money will grow over time. Pennies saved become dimes, dimes become dollars, etc. As it grows, your money will start to work for you, instead of you working so hard for money.