<p>I didn’t know where to post this, so I posted it in the parents forum thinking you’d all be more knowledgable about this than high school student. Can anyone list some jobs that could potentially earn someone 200k dollars and up per year? </p>
<p>My dream is to live in manhattan and that is a very expensive lifestyle. I would just like a better idea of possible routes to this dream. </p>
<p>Thank you</p>
<p>When I was a senior in my engineering economics class, my professor addressed this very question. He said, “As engineers, you will have a comfortable income but you will not be rich. However, there is a way to achieve this; marry money!”</p>
<p>Wealth and income are two related but separate things. Living in Manhattan, a salary of 200K alone is not likely to make you wealthy because of how much you have to spend to live there. However, depending on what you spend and how you invest, and how lucky you are finding a place to live, I suppose over time you could become wealthy over time.</p>
<p>When I married my wife she was living with a few roomates in Washington Heights. Even so, it wasn’t dirt cheap, and she made nowhere near 200K. Of course, Washington Heights, though I’ve heard it’s becoming gentrified, is obviously different than the Upper East side. But it is in Manhattan.</p>
<p>To answer your question - doctors, dentists typically make a good living. Even engineers can make 200K, depending where they work abnd what they do, especially if they get into some kind of management. And successful businesspeople, of course.</p>
<p>Commericial real estate broker. (Very cyclical, however.)</p>
<p>Succesful plaintiff’s personal injury attorney. </p>
<p>Cosmetic surgeon (where the patients pay out of pocket/not insurance driven.)</p>
<p>I understand that 200k in manhattan doesn’t go a lot way but I wanted to be somewhat realistic. I was walking around Soho yesterday and I was just amazed at how many people there were that had so much money. How do they do it???</p>
<p>“I was just amazed at how many people there were that had so much money. How do they do it???”</p>
<p>Here in the Northeast we have a saying … “He got his money the old fashioned say. He inherited it.” Marrying money would be another option. We have a saying for that too … “He who marries for money earns it.” YMMV.</p>
<p>As for the rest it’s a potpourri … stars of screens and stage, famous musicians, dotcom millionaires, real estate moguls, top executives of large companies, and a number of Wall Street types. Planning to become one of “these” seems a poor use of time to me … but what do I know?</p>
<p>You can make $200K for a household with two professional salaries and live rather well in a lot of places. Manhatten? Probably not.</p>
<p>I have a friend that’s a private wealth manager - he worked his way up from small private equity to a large mutual fund to private wealth. I know a lot of wealthy tech engineers that made it through ESPP/ESOP. I know people that have done well with small, construction companies.</p>
<p>I know one guy with a Phd in Fine Arts that has a company that does composing, directing and sound design and he’s done many famous projects for Hollywood and clients around the world. He pursued what he loved.</p>
<p>My husband and I are physicians-- but he in a lucrative field (radiology) and I in a less lucrative field (pediatrics). We are quite comfortable-- but we do not live in Manhattan. Also, there are many doctors and people who make a good living but are not wealthy. If you do not inherit money, the way to be wealthy is this: live below your means. We do that, and we have benefitted. Even when we were making a tiny resident’s income, my H saved as much as we could, and we spent as little as possible. It’s about your lifestyle as much as your income.</p>
<p>Sales. Insurance, real estate, B2B…whatever it is, top sales people are top earners. Many downsides, but potential to earn big.</p>
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<p>How did you know that they had “so much money?” Apppearances can be highly deceiving. </p>
<p>Take a look at the book “Green With Envy: A Whole New Way to Look at Financial (Un)happiness” to get a sense of how we really don’t know what’s going on with someone else’s finances.</p>
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Debt.</p>
<p>Just because many people seem to have so much money doesn’t mean that they actually do.</p>
<p>^ Yup.</p>
<p>The house we bought about 18 months ago is a nice house and cost what felt to us like a fair amount of money. We bought from an empty nester couple who said they were retiring to Florida. The house has good bones but needed a face lift. We met the couple a couple of times and they seemed super affluent. Then we moved in and there were a ton of letters from collection agencies that we had to forward to them. A new wave of them started this summer. All was clearly not rosy. And they were 60-somethings. It amazes us.</p>
<p>People do not get ultrarich off their salaries… You will need a job with very good stock options or RSUs followed by an acquisition by a bigger fish. Think tech startups. :)</p>
<p>The richest guy we ever met is a commercial fisherman up in AK. He calls himself a High Liner, whatever that is. We met him at a dinner party in Northern CA. He had a jet. He had a ranch in Mexico. He had a place in HI. He had shoes that told us he was very rich. The shoes always tell the truth on this. He had a college degree, according to my DH who stayed sober enough to recall that very good dinner party. He thinks it was from Oregon State in forestry or something like that.</p>
<p>sewhappy, I believe that. Fishing can be a very profitable business, but it is cutthroat…</p>
<p>The richest guy I ever ran into was a fancy college dropout who started a tech co… His co is still here in Redmond, WA, and I’m using one of their products as we speak :)</p>
<p>The wealthiest person I know is a real estate developer in FL.</p>
<p>Go into almost any business, then move to the top. This means you could do so with a variety of majors, including no college degree at all (but it’s likely easier to accomplish with a degree than without one). </p>
<p>You probably won’t find any slam-dunk paths or else everyone would be doing it and if everyone was doing it and doing it well then it wouldn’t need to pay well due to the plethora of qualified employees. </p>
<p>A key is to find what you’re interested in and then doing it well. Ideally this would be owning your own business in any of a thousand areas, or moving to the top in whatever company you’re working for. It probably would not include working as a government employee but even then, if you rise to the top you can probably do well.</p>
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I know plenty of engineers who have become quite well off and rich. They do so by starting their own companies, by getting decent stock options at a company whose stock increases, and this isn’t limited to startups, and they do so by rising to the senior management level of established companies.</p>
<p>^^Due to certain accounting issues with ISOs, it seems that fewer and fewer established co’s issue them. RSUs seem to be the stock compensation du jour.</p>
<p>I caught some episodes of Million Dollar Listings the other day and I asked the same question: Who can afford to live in a 12 million dollar house? One house was in Newport Beach, CA, and the owner was a plastic surgeon. He didn’t want to take less than 11 million for the house. Another family had a gorgeous house in Rancho something, between LA and San Diego. They wanted 8 million for their house. The owner had at least 7 million in the house, so if he sold it for less, he’d have to write a check. In the end, they found someone to lease the house for 13K/month for 18 months. They were hoping for 30K/month lease, but took the lesser deal to ride out waiting for the 8 million sale to come along. I’m like, Who can afford 13K/month lease, much less buy a house worth 8 million dollars, much less 12 million dollars? They never revealed what the 8 million dollar owner did for a living, but he was not a celebrity.</p>
<p>“wealthy” is relative
The people I know with forestry degrees are very comfortable. They got those forestry degrees to help them learn how to manage inherited land. Of course, where I’m from there’s that saying “land rich, cash poor”</p>
<p>selling movie rights to a book can be lucrative
selling movie rights to lots of books can be even more lucrative
I’ve know people who bought their house with the movie rights of one book and that seems pretty wealthy to me</p>