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eof | 3 years ago

It is very easy to get wealthy (assuming access to western markets and not being party to systemic racism) if you are willing or able to do even one or two things better than most people.

I am working on my second “fortune.” I liked reading the article, even though it kind of hurts to look backward at myself also being too complacent. The decisions I would have had to make to have generational wealth today, a decade later, are far more reasonable than the decisions I actually made.

I went down past 0, and today (a decade later) I own a few properties and have a net worth about 5x my income. My mindset is 1000x different. I am hyper vigilant about staying hedged and frugal.

The absolute number 1 thing you need to do to get rich is save >20% of your income. Whether you make 20k/yr or 200k, if you can pay yourself approximately what you pay the government, even the simplest investment strategies are virtually guaranteed to make you fabulously wealthy by typical standards.

If you are making 20k and can’t find room in your budget to save 4k, obviously you’ve got to increase your income somehow. If you are making average or above average income and can’t save, you can decide if frugality or more income is path of least resistance to higher savings rate.

The other critical thing to getting rich, if you want to do something other than DCA into indexes over decades, is to realize that the opportunities to get way-above-market returns are far, far more numerous if you are taking $10k positions vs $100M positions.

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PaulDavisThe1st|3 years ago

> It is very easy to get wealthy (assuming access to western markets and not being party to systemic racism) if you are willing or able to do even one or two things better than most people.

Given that hardly anyone gets wealthy (as a percentage of the population), either your claim is wrong, or hardly anyone is willing or able to do even one or two things better than most people.

Also, people do not get rich from incomes, as a general rule.

eof|3 years ago

> either your claim is wrong, or hardly anyone is willing or able to do even one or two things better than most people

That is cute, but not logical. Let me offer a third option: people don't do it, despite the fact that it is easy.

I might say, if you have normal body control, it is very easy to make your bed every day. Your logic applied to that same statement might be, "given that roughly half of people don't make their bed every day, either half the population doesn't have normal body control, or your claim is wrong"

There are many things that are very easy to do, without any caveats at all, that most people don't do.

eof|3 years ago

> Also, people do not get rich from incomes, as a general rule.

People who cannot save money that they can invest into their own endeavors or others, very rarely get rich.

Of course it depends on what you mean by "rich." Most of forbes 500 does not get there through income. However, the large majority of self-made people in the 1M-10M networth range did it with initially earned income, which became saved income, and then invested that savings (either in themselves as an entrepreneur, or just in the public markets).