The Grim Truth About Getting Rich...

depends on your definitions...

here are some of mine...

http://www.plusaf.com/falklaws.htm#5th

my mom, with an 8th-grade education and some good intuition (much better than mine ever was) put me through college on a $5000 settlement from an auto accident i was in when i was about ten years old.

when i graduated college, i got a job at a basic wage that was roughly twice what my dad ever made, even up to the time he retired at age 62, in 1960. i was making about $8-9k a year in '68.

mom also consipired, through her stock market investing, to help me pay off the mortgage no my first ($24K or so) home, around 1975. In 1978, i sold it and moved to california and bought a smaller home on a smaller lot for about $97,000.

by using stock options and socking away up to 20% of my income per year, i paid off that $70K mortgage about ten or fifteen years ago, and own my home, free and clear. i retired at age 57.5, never having made more than about $110K a year, gross, before taxes, and never having paid off FICA before about September, year after year. so, i basically spent 34 years in industry, barely keeping up with the Congress' taxes and the IRSl.

today my home could be sold for about $850k, and my wife (second, and after alimony, etc. to the first one) and i are thinking of upsizing to a two-or-three times bigger house in north carolina for maybe $450k or so, but with an acre or so of land, not the 60x100 lot my no-attic-no-basement home sits on now in CA.

luck? sure. skill? some. saving like crazy? pretty much. do i have everything i want in life? pretty much.

do i own equities and "play the stock market"? you betcha. it's averaged about 8% a year for the last multiple score of years, and even a conservative investor with some financial advice can beat inflation with pretty low risk. diversify, and cut losses when you have them.

don't EVER invest in ANYTHING offered by ANYONE who cold-calls you on the phone or that you stumble across on the internet.

pay off your highest-interest debts first, and monitor your income and outgo. if you behave like a child with money, you'll pay the piper later on.

start an IRA as soon as you can; preferably as soon as any employer offers one to you. or a 401(k). start with the minimum possible payment.

when you get a raise, put part of it towards the ira/401 and take the rest home, until you've maxed out what you can put into the deferred investments. then put some into non-tax-deferred, the same way.

in 1970 i owned a $5700 car and had maybe a few thousand in savings. thanks to a mother with an eighth-grade education and some stinginess on my part, my net worth is currently comfortably into seven digits.

the stock market is not a roulette table, nor is it a game of dice. you can play it intelligently and limit your losses, just as you can walk away from a one-armed bandit if it stops paying you to play.

you're 31. you should have started when you were 20, but if you start now, you'll probably have one more digit of wealth in your account than if you wait 'til you're 40 or 45.

imnsho....



now i gotta quote this on my website so it doesn't get lost....

 

Wow...

There's five minutes of my life I'll never get back.

What a stinking pile that "article" is.

If you want to see the results of not taking the WHOLE pill every day, like the nice man in the white coat told the author to do, read it for yourself.

My not so humble opinion as usual. YMMV

 

whew! for a moment i thought you might be trying to insult me...


ps.
don't follow any of the advice in my rant and let us know how you do, financially, twenty years from now. as i tried to say, some luck, maybe a little skill, but stupidity to not listen....

8)

 

getting rich is quite difficult when you start with less than nothing and don't have anyone to help you out too much. (as is the case with me and my husband) in fact, we are pleased with ourselves for having everything we own paid off except the new car and my deferred student loans. plus almost $5K in the bank (which will go up at the end of this month with a little luck, it's been a good month for us) and for the average age between the 2 of us being 24 years old, that's doing OK considering how we started out. i get the occasional $20-30 check from my mom and plane tickets to come home and visit from my dad, but that's about it as far as outside support goes.

a lot of self-proclaimed "self made men" aren't really that. thank you plusaf for acknowledging that you were not the sole factor in your success story and that you had family looking out for you. i know of some arrogant younger folks who seem to think they paid for everything that was given to them, and that kind of superiority complex is not pretty.

i will refrain from any additional comments so as not to piss everyone off.

 

guess you gotta wanna be first

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(galaxee\";p=\"100356)</div>

What? Are you trying to set a precedent here or something? :lol:

 

galaxee,

if you feel the need, go ahead and piss us off. its good for me anyway. makes me get off my lazy nice person when someone disagrees with me. i do it grudgingly but it almost always does me good.

my problem is im too lazy to get up and stoke the fires in my head...gotta be prodded into thinking

i guess that is why i come here. because there are many opinions and views and i grow from hearing another side of the same story. i have learned a lot here that i previously took for granted.

 

I take issue with their definition of 'rich'. I don't disagree that $400k a year with no job is rich, but I disagree that it is the minimum amount that makes one rich.

I have been investing since I was 17 (thanks to a wonderful gift from my granny). I am only 25, but my husband and I own a 4 bedroom house. Our only debt (other than the mortgage) is one car payment and student loans. We carry no credit card debt. We contribute to the maximum matching amount to my husband's 401k and have matching company stock. I invest in a (non-matched) 401k through my workplace, and I own shares in mutual funds and stocks. We are currently rebuilding our savings (we are slowly furnishing our house and we don't like to pay interest). I may not be 'rich', but I think I will get there eventually.

That article is useless and depressing. Why would you set your goal so high that it will most likely never be achieved? The author seems to be relatively intelligent. Why doesn't he spend his time and energy on something useful instead of griping about how he'll never be fabulously wealthy?

 

a lot of people will complain about how Bill Gates and Microsoft got their wealth. but its becoming apparent that greed is probably not the main reason.

for Gates, the biggest reason is the desire to be the best and do the best he could which he has for the most part acomplished quite nicely. he has amassed great wealth in a very short period of time but has given it away almost as fast. he is the greatest benefactor of all time beating the 2nd greatest by over 20 fold. a qoute from him about wealth.

The Wisdom of William Gates
============================

Most everyone I know is struggling to get more money,
even the well off.

Far too many struggle just to make ends meet.

Bill Gates is the world's richest man.
A lot of people don't like him just because he is rich.

These are a few of Bill Gate's quotes.
Whether you like him or not, I suggest that you heed wisdom from
the world's richest man.


Life is not fair, get used to it.

Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.

Every day were saying, "How can we keep this customer happy?"
How can we get ahead in innovation by doing this,
because if we don't, somebody else will.

Television is not real life. In real life people actually have
to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off
and very few employers are interested in helping you find
yourself.

In this business, by the time you realize you're in trouble,
it's too late to save yourself. Unless you're running scared
all the time, you're gone.

If you can't make it good, at least make it look good.

It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed
the lessons of failure.

If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss.
He doesn't have tenure.

Success is a lousy teacher.
It seduces smart people into thinking they can't lose.

640K ought to be enough for anybody.

I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not
that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a
certain amount of memory is enough for all time.

Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life
has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades;
they'll give you as many chances as you want to get the right
answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING.

Often you have to rely on intuition.

I realized about 10 years ago that my wealth has to go back to
society. A fortune, the size of which is hard to imagine, is best
not passed on to one's children. It's not constructive for them.

Until we're educating every kid in a fantastic way, until every
inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.

If you're asking whether I intentionally mess up my hair, no, I
don't. And certain things, like my freckles, they're just
there. I don't do anything consciously. I suppose I could get
contact lenses. I suppose I could comb my hair more often.

If there's one cultural quality we have, it's that we always see
ourselves as an underdog.

Microsoft was founded with a vision of a computer on every desk,
and in every home. We've never wavered from that vision.

If you get health, then you have opportunity for literacy.
Health first, then literacy. Once you have literacy, then you
have a chance to bring in the new tools of communication. Let
people reach out and have access to the latest advances.

My value is still so much higher than I ever expected it to be
by a factor of about 50. So the fact that at one point it was
say, a factor of 60, well - that wealth is all going back to
society anyway.

There will be 'two societies' in the future: high-paid knowledge
workers and low-paid service workers.

I'm committed to one company. This is the industry I've decided
to work in.

I'm in the same traffic as everybody else. I'm in the same
airplane delay as everybody else. I sit in the same coach seat
as everybody else.

I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that
says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the
quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again.

I don't think it's constructive to grow up having billions of
dollars. The idea that I will take a sizeable portion of my
fortune and have them inherit that, I don't think that would be
to society's benefit or to their benefit. I've spoken out about
this before... my philosophy of giving back my wealth to
society.

~William "Bill" H. Gates~

 

Read "The Millionaire Next Door." Some of Suze Orman's stuff is good too, although she's become quite annoying with her GM endorsement.
(Can you say: Sell-out?)

Anyway, there are those with whom money accumulates and those with whom it disappears. You can opt to be on either side depending upon your choices.

By the way, the rich ones aren't the ones driving the Hummer H2's with the interest-only mortgages. Wealth is not how much you've spent, it's how much you haven't spent.

Here's a question: how wealthy are you?

If the answer is: "I earn X dollars per year" then you don't understand the question.

If the answer is "In liquid investments I have about X years of living expenses. In equity in real estate I have about a X % of a year's salary. My student loans will be paid off in X years. My monthly operating expenses are X% of my after tax income and I carry no revolving debt. At my age and at current rates I should be able to retire in X years."

Now you are on your way.

Nate

 

i am wealthy because

i am healthy.
i earn enough to provide for my basic needs and to help others around me.
i currently put 20% of my income into a 401K
i make less than 35,000 a year

 

I live in a relatively expensive part of the country where there are more millionaires than 'normal' folk. The rich have one thing in common that the rest of us do not. They have a starting nest egg inherited or loaned from other well-to-do family members. My best friend loved to tell how her son made his first million before he was 21. What she never included in the story is that she lent him $5,000,000 to do it. He then bought and sold a radio station for a quick turnover. She also bought him his first San Francisco house for cash when he was 20. He never had house payments. She also bought him his first few cars for cash. Never had a car payment. He was over 25 yo and STILL using her credit cards which her trust paid the balance off monthly till she died. Yea, he 'earned' his first million early, but could take chances the rest of us could never dream of. She recently died and left each of her two children a cool 5 million, PLUS each a rental house in the most expensive part of the SF Bay Area. Both said son and his sister have different dads and each dad is worth hundreds of millions of dollars which will go to the 'kids' both at regular intervals over their lives and the rest upon dad's death. This scenario is more 'normal' where I live, than not. However, this is NOT normal for most of the country. Moral of my story? BE AWARE when you hear of near financial 'miracles'. Dig for the "Rest of the Story". While we all know there are truly some miracle fortunes made (Bill Gates) My personal experience is hard work gets you TIRED but not rich UNLESS there are mitigating circumstances. I live here too and have 'made' it (to a far lesser degree) on my own. I saved till I was 40 before I could buy my first house, and till I was 50 before I could afford my Prius. But I did this with NO inheritance, NO lawsuit winnings, NO family money. I started a business from scratch and built it up MYSELF. My friend could never see what the difference was between her 'good fortune' and my (modest) fortune as far as how it was achieved. To her money is money no matter where it comes from. THIS points out the disconnect between the haves and have nots. The haves don't even understand why everyone does not have what they do, and therefore the have nots are nothing more than lazy 'haves-in-waiting/wanting'.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(DaveinOlyWA\";p=\"100436)</div>

I kind of like Bill Gates, but I'd hardly see him as someone to look up to.
As you say, he has striven to be the best. But what he has been striven to be the best at is as the leader of a very successful software company and NOT as the leader of a company that makes great software.

Most of his success with microsoft has been in marketing his products, and NOT in the design of those products. Personally, I think a better model would be someone who strove to make the best product and made money doing so. Not someone who strove to make the best profits and settling on his product being "good enough" to pull that off.

And I found your list of quotes intrigueing but you missed one of his best from about 15 years ago when he was quoted as saying that charity was unimportant to him and that was why he gave such a pittance of his income to charity. At the time, the amount he gave to charity was truly miniscule. When he said that, he was ridiculed in the press and very soon after that he created his foundation. Your list of quotes seems to suggest that he developed some kind of epiphany about charities about 10 years ago, and now he does indeed give tons of money to charity. But history suggests that he was shamed into doing so initially.

But even with his gigantic charitable giving, I suspect that there are millions of people who give much larger percentages of their incomes to charity. Gates does give tons of money and that is wonderful, but I suspect the percentage that he gives pales in comparison to some "regular folks" I know who truly give gigantic amounts, considering how much they make.

That said, I still kind of like Bill Gates. But he is hardly a hero.

 

The funny thing about this thread is that I would be willing to bet that the majority of the people on this board are "rich".

Would you consider the top 25% of Federal Income Tax filers as rich? How about the top 10%?

You might be supprised to know that to be in the top 25% of tax filers in 2002 (includes joint returns by married couples), you need only to have had an Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) of $56,401. To be in the top 10%, an AGI of only $92,663 is necessary.

For those who might wonder what exactly Adjusted Gross Income is... It is defined as "Your income after certain allowable adjustments from your total income, such as IRA contributions, alimony paid, moving expenses, and Keogh account contributions. You use your AGI amount as a basis for various calculations, including determining the limitations on your itemized deductions." It does not include itemized deductions, such as your mortgage interest.

An AGI of $56,401 is easily obtainable by an engineer with 7 years of experience, or by a dual-income household. An AGI of $92,663 is fairly easily obtained by a dual-income househould consisting of two professional workers, such as engineers.

 

Many of us might think of "rich" as anyone who has more than they do. The media doesn't help. Being fascinated with others and what they have is not much different than voyeurism. Everyday above ground is a great day.

I like the idea of rich being much more than money. I have my basic needs. I own my home. I was able to help my daughter through college. I can buy frivolous things when I want. I go to ballgames, theatre, movies, and camping at will. I can fill up my gas tank when it is low (the Prius helps).

Heck, I could AFFORD a Prius on a 24 month car loan.

I can pick up the check when I take my parents to a restaurant. I sleep well at night. I help who I can. I have a wonderful wife.

Yes sirree, I am wealthy beyond imagination.

 

Mystery Squid,

You will probably appreciate the remark my librarian friend made when my husband was saying that financially we probably really shouldn't take that trip to England to visit my daughter-in-law's family:

"I never yet heard of anyone on his death-bed saying he wished he hadn't taken that trip to ____ so that he would now have the money to pay the doctors."

And yes, we're rich. Not by the standards of a lot of people, but definitely by the standards of others. We're both retired and drawing teacher retirement. I was able to stay home to raise my own kids, even though we could have qualified for free lunches for them, because I sewed and gardened and canned and cooked and bargain-shopped, and because my husband could fix darned near anything. (The most expensive washed I had for years was $5 and a book of green stamps.)

We managed to sell our tiny first house for more than we paid for the one we live in now--timing. I went to work when the kids were a little older, and that made a difference. Later, when the kids moved out, I noticed that instead of living paycheck to paycheck our bank account was growing.
Now we're both drawing teacher retirement and the absolute minimum on social security--most school districts are not on social security--so we qualify for medicare. In very recent years I inherited some money. I put some of it into teacher retirement for three extra years, and I bought myself a grand piano. Who ever would have thought that when we lived paycheck to ("Can you hold this check till Friday?") paycheck? We charge almost everything, but we do not pay interest because we pay it each month. I wrote a check for the Prius, and we're able to do stuff for our kids.

My husband, who was orphaned quite young, was raised by a grandmother who truly loved him. And I was raised with a huge extended family, with parents, grandparents, and a particular aunt standing out in my memory. And that brings me to the real reason we're rich. We have four children and we're extremely proud of them, as well as the spouses of the three who are married. They have provided us with five wonderful, smart, and talented grandchildren, ages 2 to 18, and they all live near enough for us to be able to enjoy the grandkids. What more could one need to feel wealthy?

Beth

 

Waste my money and I can make more money.
Waste my time and . . . wait a second, I just read all these posts !!!