
Hi, friends!
Happy Sunday! I hope your weekend went well!
One of the things my friends and I like to mock are those articles which are some variation of “she’s 28 and already has $1 million of assets, see how she does it!” or “he’s already owning 3 businesses by age 30 and ready to invest over $2 million, here’s his advice for anyone else.”
Because they’re always a combination of generational wealth, an inheritance, and parents who paid for all college costs. Sometimes it’s like “after a personal loan from her parents was used to buy her brownstone NYC quadplex, she’s now earning $$$$ as a landlord.”
This one really cracked me up.
“In 2016, I retired early at 35. At the time, I had $900,000 saved, and within a few years was able to accumulate a $1 million net worth.
I wasn’t born into money. I didn’t run my own business or start side hustles. I climbed the ladder at my 9-to-5 jobs and lived a frugal life. More importantly, I learned how to be successful from reading books about money, careers and personal health.”
DUH
Just read some books and be frugal, anybody can do it. Why can’t you have $900k saved up by age 35? I mean I didn’t make over 30k a year until I was 30, but hey, that’s just me making excuses.
I have a very strong suspicion that lived a frugal life translates to parents paid all his expenses for many adult years or did that thing where he rents a single room and has almost no expenses because he doesn’t do anything. Or have any kids to pay for. Or have any health issues that cost money.
Just read books!
Do you have any articles etc that constantly piss you off? I also am perpetually annoyed at the redundant “stress is bad for you, don’t be stressed!” articles.
My most hated are “This is what she/he looked like then, wait until you see what she/he looks like now.” That is the lowest form of clickbait imaginable.
Guilty.
Always the (similar) articles about success is so damn fucking easy not as if luck or circumstance of birth had much to do with it.
Like how they forgot to mention that Lemo Skum was the son of a real estate/emerald billionaire whose first VC was daddy.
Or how Bill Gates mom opened the door to IBM.
I’ve always suspected that those people who get written up about are friends/classmates of a bored web writer looking subject matter. Much like the Forbes 30 under 30. As financial vlogger Patrick Boyle snarkily put “29 bankers and 1 fraudster.”
Oh believe me, this must happen all the time. When I first washed up on the shores of Manahatta I got in with some copyeditors and fact checkers at a print news org that shall go unnamed, but it’s referenced constantly in the DOTs and it wasn’t the Post, my favorite. They told me the logrolling was incredible. It affected every aspect of the paper. At a party I asked a young woman who worked on the “Letters to the Editor” page how I might get a letter published. She laughed. “You couldn’t. You don’t represent anything the paper endorses, and you didn’t go to school with anyone, did you? Sometimes one of the parents or employers will get through.”
One of the things these stories leave out is how easily one event can knock a person off track when they don’t start with a big cushion of cash.
It’s especially common if you get sick or hurt with a bad insurance plan, but plenty of other things can come up. Your apartment burns with all your posessions and you have a huge deductable, you get laid off in a place with few options and moving would cost you thousands….
Taking care of family in emergencies is another common circumstance. Such as the true story of Clarence Thomas’s sister, who struggled financially while taking care of an ailing aunt, and not the lies he told about her for years.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1991-07-24-9103220246-story.html
If everything breaks right for you, you may be able to start from nothing. But you can’t judge people when luck doesn’t always smile on them.
My biggest nightmare is my health care situation. I’m crawling toward Medicare, like the figure in Wyeth’s Christina’s World, but that’s a few years off yet. As it is, I get my insurance through my salaried husband, and the bills have been absolutely horrendous and to no obvious improvement. Luckily it’s mostly been:
Health “care” provider: $20,000.
Insurance company: “Lol. Negotiated discount: $6,000”
Me, besieged as if coming under attack from the Knights Templar, with bills/fusillades coming in from all directions: “$20.67 for this, $108.12 for that, & etc.”
If I went on Medicare I’m sure I could stay with my Poverty Health Clinic across the street, everyone else seems to be on Medicare or Medicaid, but then what would happen is anyone’s guess. I’m not sure I’d be admitted to my “not-for-profit” hospital system, and would instead be consigned to one of the City’s public hospitals. There is a joke about those. They’re like the Hotel California: You can check in any time you like, but you can never leave, except feet first, on your way to the public mortuary.
Yeah a friend once described her upbringing as “one car repair away from being fucked most of the time” and yep that was a lot of us.
That’s a good description and I’m going to steal it. It’s not applicable to me now, but it certainly was when I first got married. For many years, in fact.
I came from a working-class family and I managed to accomplish a lot of things and to have a really nice life. I didn’t earn any of it though. Just got lucky.
I finally got a job breaking 30k thanks to a connection with a friend already at that company. A few years later when I broke into my current employer, it was due to very very creative work on my resume by a contracting firm. Hard work doesn’t mean shit for success, I worked way harder at my low-wage retail jobs than I do in the office.
Absolutely. A partial list of jobs where I worked WAY harder for a fraction of the money I get now: dishwasher, dockhand, construction worker, security guard, reporter, adjunct college professor.
A friend asked the other day if I was going to teach college again, and I had to say it just wasn’t cost-effective for me any more. I don’t need the extra money like I used to. What I really need is more spare time.
(wrong post)
900 grand saved?
i mean……even if i’d taken my brothers route of live with mom till you’ve saved enough money to put a sizeable deposit down on a house…..i would not be anywhere close to that
i know the math gets all fucking wonky coz the cost of living is different over here
but you know…i earn like..30 -40 grand a year…depending on how much overtime i take
its enough tho…i can make rent and not need to worry about money too much anymore
but yeah….im gonna be like 900 years old by the time ive saved 900 grand at the couple hundred a month rate i can manage