Not all people can afford buying a hardware wallet, but there is another option, non-custodial mobile wallets. So you don't have to keep coins on exchanges.
You can set up a non custodial wallet (12 or 24 key word seed), send funds to that wallet, then delete the wallet (ensuring the seed words are safe) then re-access the mobile device wallet at a later date. You could even set up a time locked transaction to send funds to that wallet address at a predetermined date into the future.