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How to get rich without getting lucky

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Re: How to get rich without getting lucky

#301

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> Having some talent at hiring and managing people helped. Luck. > Spending my teenage years writing clever little programs in 6502 assembly language on my Commodore 64 instead of smoking weed and partying helped. Lucky enough to grow up with access to a computer in a time when that wasn't common. > Having a strong knack for math and computer science helped. Luck again.

Are you saying everything is luck? come on... My dad taught me about investing when I was a teenager. I actually applied this for the next 20+ years. Was this luck ?

Yes. You were lucky to be born into a family with money to invest and to grow up with a father around. Not everyone has those advantages.

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky

#302
post #269

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spending a lot of effort on living frugal. There's just something off-putting about the thought of spending decades living frugally There's a whole range there. You don't have to live on ramen. But you can be really aggressive about insurance premiums, utility bills, etc. You can learn home & auto repair & maintenance. You can make major life structure choices (Can your family live with one car?). These all can make…

> Can your family live with one car It's really funny to read that. It's probably very american to think 2 cars per family is the norm. I think if I group the 10 adults I see the most on average, we own 2 cars together. And we are all between 30 and 55.

"Norm" is probably more than two cars. I have a 17 year-old. When he gets his license, we have a car waiting for him (OK: it needs a bunch of repairs, but whatever). Right now, it's a pain in the ass to drive him places (like to & from work).

In my neck of the woods, the average is probably 4-6 cars per family.

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky

#303
post #125

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Sorry, but it's a bit rich when people who literally won the lottery call for hard work. The reality is you got lucky. There were probably many people who worked harder than you and saved more than you who will never enjoy anything close to your success. And that's okay. All wealth is based on luck or coercion (really, just coercion). This is trivially true if you understand what wealth is: claims on the labor-time o…

Wouldn't you agree that the harder someone works, the greater their chance of becoming rich? You seem to argue that the OP has absolutely no claim to the wealth that he has worked for and his preferable situation is due entirely to luck. This is of course preposterous and easily disproved, so I'm curious to know what your answer to this question is. Assuming your answer is, "no, not entirely" then my follow up questi…

There's a couple key points that I think help bridge the gap of understanding between these two points of view about Hard Work vs Luck (and I'll completely ignore things like existing advantages of birth/wealth, and coercion, as those points are really separate):

1) Hard Work is enabling factor for "luck", just like being born under the right circumstances is. Hard work does pay off, and thus it's valid to say "hard work helped me get here". What we're calling "luck" isn't a purely random roll of the dice. Working hard tilts the odds of good luck much further in your favor.

2) While Hard Work enables better statistical odds at the luck game, you have to be careful to understand that it's still just statistical odds in a luck game, and that structurally there can only be a small percentage of people who "win". If every single person worked equally (very) hard, the luck advantage of working hard would diminish to zero, and only luck (remember we're ignore other factors like wealth/coercion) would remain to differentiate the small percentage of winners. Because wealth is pretty much defined as having more than someone else (or else pricing/inflation will just readjust everyone back to the norm), not everyone can have more than the average. This is what blows a hole in the idea that anyone can work hard in order to achieve success. Anyone can work hard to increase their odds, but the odds are small without other advantages, and many may work hard and still fail.

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky

#304

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Go read mr money Mustache (but take it with a grain of salt and ignore the cult bits) and 'the millionaire next door' https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ (the older stuff is better, he's making bank through the blog so caveat emptor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millionaire_Next_Door

Keep in mind MMM started with a sizable inheritance to kickstart his nest egg and currently works full time talking about living frugally. Take from that what you will.

A correction: The house I was referring to was not actually an inheritance. It was a leftover from an abandoned house building business, funded via the usual business means (some personal money, lots of loans, etc.), acquired prior to 'retirement'.

It provided 5-6 years of rental revenue and a $400,000 final payday.

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky

#305

Isn't this the tenth how-to-get-rich post today? I guess that's fairly standard, and I ignore them, but they're getting votes today. I'm a little surprised that —since every other thread on HN is about hacking your diet/wardrobe/matress to counteract the crushing depression you get from your job— nobody is putting one and one together. There is more to life than money. I don't want to sound too hippy but there is. Th…

You didn't read his last sentence.

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can your family live with one car It's really funny to read that. It's probably very american to think 2 cars per family is the norm. I think if I group the 10 adults I see the most on average, we own 2 cars together. And we are all between 30 and 55.

"Norm" is probably more than two cars. I have a 17 year-old. When he gets his license, we have a car waiting for him (OK: it needs a bunch of repairs, but whatever). Right now, it's a pain in the ass to drive him places (like to & from work). In my neck of the woods, the average is probably 4-6 cars per family.

It's really exotic for me :)

I always thought so funny the american TV shows depicting a 16 years old fighting his parent over his/her first car, and finally getting it.

My brother and I, we shared one small motorbike ^^

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky

#307

I really doubt you can get rich by not being lucky. I was like Naval and thought many of my achievements were due to sheer hard work. And then I read this article about luck: http://nautil.us/blog/-the-key-to-good-luck-is-an-open-mind And I got the book mentioned in the article - The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman. One of the exercises in the book is to think over how things have unfolded in your life - what would ha…

Everyone is lucky. We are lucky to have been born. Some of us are "more lucky" than others. It all depends on how you wanna measure lucky. I think the idea that most of these articles are trying to drive home is that we shouldn't depend on ALL LUCK alone. But rather craft a deliberate plan to achieve whatever we wish to. Whatever the steps that lead to our dreams, there will always be an element of luck.

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

N=1, but shopping at Trader Joe's in NYC will save you money -- if you can bear the crowds.

NYC is definitely an N=1, most other places in the country Trader Joe's is quite expensive. The food is high quality (and value good) but in absolute terms, more expensive than discount supermarkets.

> NYC is definitely an N=1

Where I live in California, my options are Safeway, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's, and a co-op more-organic-than-thou each egg has a name tag and resume type place. Trader Joe's is by far the cheapest of them all. The fact that Trader Joe's fixes their prices nationwide makes them much cheaper than the alternatives in expensive metros.

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good counterpoint and something my Dad points out often. He was very frugal, worked long hours and saved as much as he could so him and my mom could have a good retirement. She passed away at 42, so that never happened. He has so many regrets and wishes he invested more of his money & time in experiences with her while she was alive. I think there needs to be a balance. The trend of working crazy hours to s…

There are tons of people who spent their money living it up and got old and are really struggling and having difficult times with tons of regrets. I suspect more than those who saved and died young.

Yes, I agree. I am not proposing spending all of your money living it up, but to find a healthy balance. It doesn't have to go in the extreme in either direction.

Re: How to get rich without getting lucky

#310

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> They tend to hide the fact that they went into the process with an inheritance to fund their their nest egg and are working nearly full time in their "retirement" as paid frugal advocates. Whoah, do you have evidence of this? I mean, yeah, some people have certain advantages, but if they are being paid for advocacy and if it's a trust-fund baby thing that would be really interesting. On balance though, I'm not real…

I found it on his own blog, though it's almost impossible to locate now. Basically he inherited a family house, lived in it for a few years, and sold it for a large sum of money (in addition to holding a $100,000 + a year job and saving from it). As for the paid advocacy, have a look at their financials. You'll see a non-trivial amount of income from advertising on the website and speaking. EDIT: The house wasn't inh…

He went into the house building business with one other business partner. This partner generally failed to meet his end of the obligations, and MMM took a big loss in the process. Getting the house out of the business was not a big win, it was merely a partial recoup of his own invested capital.
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