Take pride in doing good work. Find a job that will reward you for it. Be lucky. Don't pay more for things than they are worth to you.
Redditors who are rich (net worth $1 million+) - how did you get rich?
11–20 of 185 posts
Re: Redditors who are rich (net worth $1 million+) - how did you get rich?
#12Easiest way: No kids. Two good incomes. Reliably saving 20%. Mid 40s. No college debt or health issues. That should get you to about a million in assets.
Maybe that's the easiest, but not the most common. According to Millionaire Next Door, there are kids, sometimes only one income, savings of 15%+, and late 50s.
Re: Redditors who are rich (net worth $1 million+) - how did you get rich?
#13Easiest way: No kids. Two good incomes. Reliably saving 20%. Mid 40s. No college debt or health issues. That should get you to about a million in assets.
Maybe that's the easiest, but not the most common. According to Millionaire Next Door, there are kids, sometimes only one income, savings of 15%+, and late 50s.
Right. Kids do tend to be a quadruple whammy though:
* Basic living costs (food and clothing and fun).
* Childcare requires either expensive daycare or a parent not working / limited working.
* Money needs to be saved for college.
* Require more bedrooms, which drives up housing costs although it's arguable whether this has an impact on net worth. (This may be double-counting the first point, but going from a $100k condo to a $400k house because of a child is more than just living costs.)
Add those up and yes it probably takes another 10-20 years to meet your net worth goals. OTOH, you have a safety net when you get older. And, you know, a kid.
Re: Redditors who are rich (net worth $1 million+) - how did you get rich?
#14Entrepreneurism seems under-represented: most of the responses seem to be inheritance or stock investments. I'm wondering if that reflects on the reddit community makeup, the type of people who would answer this question, or just that growing a successful startup is really hard / rare.
Re: Redditors who are rich (net worth $1 million+) - how did you get rich?
#15Entrepreneurism seems under-represented: most of the responses seem to be inheritance or stock investments. I'm wondering if that reflects on the reddit community makeup, the type of people who would answer this question, or just that growing a successful startup is really hard / rare.
9/10 start-ups fail, just like most other forms of new business. I believe we could apply Bayes' Law here...
Re: Redditors who are rich (net worth $1 million+) - how did you get rich?
#16Easiest way: No kids. Two good incomes. Reliably saving 20%. Mid 40s. No college debt or health issues. That should get you to about a million in assets.
Kids are cool to have whether you have money or not. Well, if you decide to have kids, anyway, and are responsible for the act of raising a family, either poor or rich or somewhere in between, then its great whether you're saving for your first million or not saving at all .. no amount of money will ever buy the pure joy of raising ones family and watching the growth daily, hand in hand. Its something all humans have the potential to have in common with each other. Life is a struggle, even for the rich.
Debt is definitely the first thing to avoid.
I've made my riches, modestly, by working hard. Hard work, being paid to do things you like to do, having a strong investment in the tools one needs to work hard, then getting on with it. By work, I mean, 'do something that someone else needs done, well'.
Also: get paid. The world is a big, wild, woolly place, and if someone is going to pay you well to haul bricks all day, get out there and haul bricks, to get PAID. Doing a good job means also, getting paid well. Because the person you are working for wants to pay you well, and for little other reason than that your hard work is valuable to them.
This is the nature of the realms in which money, our subject today, becomes of any use: someone else thinks its worth it to do/make BLAH, even if you personally don't.
Re: Redditors who are rich (net worth $1 million+) - how did you get rich?
#17Entrepreneurism seems under-represented: most of the responses seem to be inheritance or stock investments. I'm wondering if that reflects on the reddit community makeup, the type of people who would answer this question, or just that growing a successful startup is really hard / rare.
9/10 start-ups fail, just like most other forms of new business. I believe we could apply Bayes' Law here...
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Re: Redditors who are rich (net worth $1 million+) - how did you get rich?
#18Entrepreneurism seems under-represented: most of the responses seem to be inheritance or stock investments. I'm wondering if that reflects on the reddit community makeup, the type of people who would answer this question, or just that growing a successful startup is really hard / rare.
9/10 start-ups fail, just like most other forms of new business. I believe we could apply Bayes' Law here...
That is crazy talk. The rate for small businesses as a whole is around 50% failure within the first 5 years.
There are exceptions to that rule and ways to increase the odds. As an example, 90% of franchise businesses are still running after 5 years.
Re: Redditors who are rich (net worth $1 million+) - how did you get rich?
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
9/10 start-ups fail, just like most other forms of new business. I believe we could apply Bayes' Law here...
That is crazy talk. The rate for small businesses as a whole is around 50% failure within the first 5 years. There are exceptions to that rule and ways to increase the odds. As an example, 90% of franchise businesses are still running after 5 years.
Anecdata: Walk down a main commercial street in any large metropolis and count the number of completely unviable businesses (these are the ones that turn over their real estate every few months). These are further polluting the statistics.
Re: Redditors who are rich (net worth $1 million+) - how did you get rich?
#20Easiest way: No kids. Two good incomes. Reliably saving 20%. Mid 40s. No college debt or health issues. That should get you to about a million in assets.
I fulfill all the above (except that I have a son, but he's young so the only big cost is daycare, around 13K/year), so where's my million!?
In order to develop a successful model, one should also have negative examples, i.e. people who could have had ~$1M in their mid 40s but do not. The greatest mistakes I made that I see with hindsight are (i) doing a PhD in EE where a MS was more than enough and then taking too long to finish that and (ii) taking too long to get acquainted with the concept of creating wealth, a la http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html; I'd say that, had I read Hackers and Painters 15 years ago (it wasn't printed at that time or course), my life would have been different (or maybe not, it's easy to get caught with might have beens). That's why I buy a copy of this book to many young people I know who are starting life.