<p>I’m in on that !!! :)</p>
<p>Paul Muni plays a wrongly convicted man who escapes from a chain gang - in the great movie “I’m a Fugitive From a Chain Gang”, which was based on a true story. </p>
<p>He is betrayed, and as he leaves the woman he loves forever and fades literally into shadow, she calls out, “How do you live?” and he replies from the darkness, “I steal.” </p>
<p>I believe he became a Wall Street salesman of derivatives to pension funds. Summered in the Hamptons.</p>
<p>^ reminds me of the line:</p>
<p>“My parents are in the iron and steel business. My mother irons, and my father steals” :D</p>
<p>“I’m a Fugitive From a Chain Gang” was based on the life of Robert Elliot Burns. After escaping from a chain gang to which he was sentenced for his part in an armed robbery he moved to Chicago, renovated apartment buildings and eventually became a magazine editor and publisher. After his release from his second stint in prison (after his recapture) he worked a series of blue collar jobs.</p>
<p>The whole summered in the Hamptons, derivatives story makes for a better movie, 'tho.</p>
<p>You want the magic formula for general success? It’s good family values + studies + hard work + saving + investing. That’s it. </p>
<p>It’ll take you some time. It took me 40 years (I’m 44 right now). I’m one of those that you say that lives well without working, but it’s because I STUDIED and WORKED and SAVED like crazy. And living “well” is very relative. </p>
<p>I live off investments, that is, off of all the money I DIDN’T SPEND STUPIDLY which is now working for me producing RENT (from real estate, businesses, bonds, etc). I’m not like the rich you see on TV or in rap videos. I don’t have a yacht, a plane, a posse around me at da club, or all those expensive toys, but do not wake up in the morning to go to work; I stopped “working”. I just watch over my investments. </p>
<p>How much do I make? My monthly income from investments is about 60 times what a minimum wage worker makes (which I once was), and it’s more than enough for me. I actually continue to save for the future, both mine and my family’s.</p>
<p>So that’s it. Shortcuts normally don’t work because if you only make money, without good values and knowledge, you won’t really enjoy your life. What’s the use of travelling the world if you’re an ignorant fool that doesn’t know anything about the world? Good values + study + work + save + invest. Get to it. See you at the beach club.</p>
<p>Work is not about money. Work is about walking into a store and seeing the stuff you designed sit on the shelf, or your buildings built, or your patients saved, or important contributions you made to your field, or about the difference you made in someone’s life.</p>
<p>Some people live and die by Atlas Shrugged. I prefer Soul of a New Machine :)</p>
<p>I think one thing that’s missing from this discussion is that an individual’s ability to earn a lot of money also depends on his own personal qualities–his drive, his work ethic, but also his talents and intelligence. Some people are never going to be rich, no matter how hard they work, because they won’t have the talents necessary to get into a line of work where you can make a great deal of money.
I think it’s true that to become super-rich (without inheriting it or winning the lottery), you have to be willing to take on significant risk–and not everybody who takes on significant risk will get rich–most of them will lose, in fact. That’s why it’s called risk.
If you want to be pretty rich, and you’re smart enough and willing to work enough, you can go into a professional field and be pretty sure of making good money.</p>
<p>I plan to sit on my duff and write the best selling novel that will make me millions. I mean, if E.L. James (Fifty Shades of Grey series) could take someone else’s premise, write the most poorly written and stupid novel possible, but somehow capture the attention and awe of millions of people, why couldn’t I? </p>
<p>I’m thinking, I’m thinking…</p>
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<p>I agree. Its interesting that more than a few or the super-rich are actually rather unsuited to work for others. They have to be in charge, and its from that population that you get the superrich (and the destitute, ironically). For some of these people, the actual “risk” isn’t as great as it seems, because they were going to be fired from their other jobs anyway. And for others they instinctively know that they can’t work for an organization that they don’t run. I think Jobs and Gates were in that camp.</p>
<p>Of course this is far afield from merely being able to pay cash for BMW and belong to a country club.</p>
<p>Nrdsb4 – haha – good luck. I don’t know how Fifty Shades hit the jackpot. Crazy things can happen. </p>
<p>Nelsoneas – 60x minimum wage should be enough! LOL.</p>
<p>My advice – don’t do what I did – five kids = five college tuitions. What was I (were we?) thinking? Sure, in theory they could have all gotten massive financial aid, had they been harder working, brighter, more magnificent in every way. But alas, they did not. Still, would not trade it. They are my treasure and my joy. (when they aren’t making me crazy)</p>
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<p>Are you suggesting that people who are not wealthy necessarily spends money “stupidly”? If you have enough investments that they spin off more than $900,000 per year (being 60 times minimum wage), you didn’t get that by working some minimum wage job, or even a normal $40K or so job.</p>
<p>People who even make lower middle class wages can’t save enough to buy investments that produce that level of income.</p>
<p>There is a lot of very succcesful folks out there. They pay cash for BMWs, go on great vacations, pre-pay college tuition, etc. I would add that most of these people went to school, studied hard, graduated, went to professional school and work hard. It’s no mystery.</p>
<p>It is wonderful if you can earn a living while doing something you LOVE, but many are fine with having a way to earn money and doing what they love for fun. Studying hard and getting a good education and lots of useful skills just gives you a wider range of options and opportunities that you can choose how best to use. H & I feel very fortunate that both of us have really enjoyed the things we do–both for compensation and for fun. We hope our kids are similarly fortunate and believe with the skill set they are acquiring there is a good chance of it.</p>
<p>It saddens me to see folks who work at jobs they obviously barely tolerate and are counting the minutes until the job is over and the days until they can retire. It would be tough working in an environment when you have lots of folks like that around you–toxic.</p>
<p>Jerry Groopman writes about medicine in the New Yorker and in many books. (Disclosure: my kid knew his kid pretty well.) In one piece about dying patients, he notes he’s never had a patient say they wish they’d spent more time in the office. They sometimes spend their remaining days trying to cobble together relationships that have been neglected or failed, which is a sad way to spend your last days.</p>
<p>There is a cost.</p>
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There are a wide variety of ways to get wealthy. Some involve the traditional college route, with a high starting salary. Some do not. For example, many of the best known billionaires in the US were college drop outs such as Gates, Zuckerberg, and Jobs. </p>
<p>I started a successful Internet company, which grew to be a greater source of income than my 6-figure day job in engineering. The Internet company did not require a college degree and used little from my college classes (my major was in an unrelated field). It also did not require a significant financial investment since I did the initial programming myself. I wouldn’t even say it required working hard since I started the initial website as a hobby, spending an average of less than 10 hours per week. Instead it was more having a good idea and being talented enough to implement it well. </p>
<p>I’d agree that a larger portion of wealthy persons go through a more traditional route and work in a field with an above average salary, such as tech or professional degree (med, law, MBA) and have had positive results in that field for a variety of possible reasons (stock options, investments, promotions, …)</p>
<p>Regarding paying for BMWs in cash, as I mentioned earlier in the thread, an Experian survey found that persons in the US with a $250k+ income are most likely to own the same 3 car car makes as persons with a lower income – Honda, Toyota, and Ford. If anything I’d expect driving a BMW to have a lower correlation with net worth than comparable luxury makes (Acura, Lexus, Lincoln, Infinity…) because you are more likely to find persons buying for the brand name instead of the car.</p>
<p>Some people just work hard or had a great idea and started their own business. Other people come from a rich family and have the extra resources or put those resources into making more money.</p>
<p>Now, there are people who just live wayyy beyond their means and probably have lots of debt. My gf and I are both from middle class suburbs where people had nice 2000sqft+ 2 story houses but drove modest cars, and lived within their means. However, when she was going to school, the area we lived in was filled with people with the opposite mentality. These posers had a “luxury over necessity” mentality. These people drove cars like Porsches, Bentleys, nicer model Mercedez Benzes and BMWs. But… I would see them pull into their rundown 1 bedroom apartment with 5 people living in it. There were a couple of those kind of people in our apartment complex as well. I wasn’t surprised to find out that the area was well known for people committing welfare fraud. </p>
<p>I had a friend whose family was very rich and he always had nice things and nice cars. He didn’t take advantage(in terms of securing his future) of that and just played around and didn’t go to school or anything. So when his family went broke, he was screwed, no college degree, no work ethic. </p>
<p>So some people earn it, some people don’t. Just work hard for what you want and you can have that stuff too!</p>
<p>Getting a good education and skills so you can use your mind and not only your body is priceless. It offers more options.</p>
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<p>I worked for years in the ICU and witnessed many end of life scenarios. What you have described is not limited to the wealthy. Many middle class and poor find themselves doing the exact same thing. We all think we have lots of time to “fix things”…until we don’t. And then we tend to scramble.</p>
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<p>My husband always said he wouldn’t want to drive a flashy car. He usually drives some kind of GMC, “plain and humble,” paid for with cash. Imagine my surprise last year when I found out his “humble” car had cost $10K more than my “luxury” car. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>My SIL was surprised to find that a Mercedes coupe was actually very reasonably priced–about the same cost as the “sensible” Volvos she had driven for decades. She decided to indulge herself and enjoyed the car for many years. She also felt very safe driving it, as it is a pretty heavy car. </p>
<p>Car prices aren’t all as different among brands as we sometimes think.</p>