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What bad choices have I made in the past 20 years?
You picked pre-law as your undergrad major and didn't do well enough to get into a law school with a free ride. You then did nothing to create any job skills that could have made you worth paying high compensation. Near as I can tell, you choose to wallow in self pity and blame the system rather than doing something about it.
For example, you're web surfing right now instead of spending the time acquiring job skills to earn more pay. Why are you doing that?
What bad choices have I made in the past 20 years?
lets reverse that , can you name the correct choices you made . all your choices we see were one poor one after another starting with your career and lack of motivation and skills .
Our MathJack is a poster child for this. He was on the top of commercial buildings in 100F and subzero fixing HVAC systems. He always says that there is always opportunity in career paths doing things other people don't want to do. I presume he was extremely competent at his job and was compensated appropriately. He saved & invested turning his lifetime income stream into a very comfortable retirement. I'm sure he had dozens of co-workers who spent every penny and didn't have the same outcome.
It certainly helps to win the genetic lottery and be born smart & healthy, to have affluent parents who live in a town with a good school system, and to have parents who impart a good work ethic and stress education & career but plenty of people are enormously successful without all those advantages. They at least have the work ethic and deferred gratification part.
Going back to the initial thread topic, I doubt most wealthy people are going to admit to growing up at least upper middle class because that's not politically correct. My father was an Oral Surgeon. Mom was an Ivy-trained university professor. I don't walk around talking about all the advantages I had. People would resent it. My parents both grew up poor in the depression era. A rags to riches story is fine and everyone applauds. A silver spoon to an affluent life is just rubbing in the fact that most affluent children have an easy path to success if they have the work ethic and deferred gratification stuff passed on to them. I know plenty of people who grew up affluent with every advantage but didn't have the work ethic or the self discipline and went nowhere. Most of them still had a better outcome than someone growing up poverty level.
Actually an associate of mine is a very astute HVAC tech. He does HVAC for super large facilities like airports and has his own business. They are very well paid **AND** they meet very very important needs. They make sure you don't have to sit in an airport for 7 hours in sweltering heat or extreme cold (thankless work maybe but they do it so well you don't even realize they exist and those are the kinds of jobs I'm talking about but a lot of people want flossy sparkly work). But typical snooty arrogance many folks see a guy in a blue shirt and a service van and think "oh poor man". LOL it is so not the case and maybe I shouldn't be telling you.
I once had someone make a nasty reply to me about working security at a particular location. I laughed I asked them how much she got paid? She was a nurse getting $15/hr. I told he that I only do that gig twice a week and that I got paid $150 for six hours of work in cash and its just something I do every now and then to take a break (sometimes I would 'vacation' by switching into another gig for a few months). Further I explained how I get to eat and drink for free and get paid to basically sit and talk with people all night at what amounts to a constant party. And I didn't have to get out of my pajamas until 4PM if push came to shove and of course that wasn't my main line of work. Overall, she had a pretty stupid look on her face and realized that she worked way, way harder than I did and longer and had to get up at onery hours. The point is the arrogant snooty people think "oh I won't seem so elite doing that job so it must be low paying". Strange logic farts they have.
Guys like that HVAC guy could go out and work on one or two installation jobs (he might do HVAC, I might install the telephone lines, network cable, etc.) a day. Each day we might start at 8am, finish by 2pm ,sit around at some Mexican restaurant and chill in the cool breezes while everyone else was fighting rush hour traffic. But the same people would look down at us and sneer at us for wearing blue shirts. I recall meeting two guys that got paid $10K per gig just for resurfacing sporting surfaces. People might sneer at them as 'poor blokes' but not me. They had so much business they were passing cards around asking for help.
The same HVAC guy, he lives in a small 'typically middle class house' and drives a regular ol' automobile and will likely retire to a very, very exotic location.
My observation is that most people go for the typical "what will make the most money careers" (doctor, lawyer) or "what will make them seem cool" or what will impress their friends/buddies/neighbors and all of that "competing with the Jones' " nonsense to the extent of overlooking less flossy options.
Typically the things that no one wants to do often the very things that are the most deeply needed. What most people want to be seen cool for doing or see as the "money maker" aren't necessarily always where the deepest demands for needs met truly are.
Yep. The book The Millionaire Next Door pretty much said the same thing as you did in your post.
It was luck that temp position allowed you to get your foot in the door and ingratiate yourself with the decision-maker. Most places I've worked, temps are rarely hired full-time. Often they are looked down upon.
I'm sad to say it but I know I've seen situations where there are equivalent candidates and the better-looking, more charismatic one gets the nod. These are public-facing jobs so I suppose charisma does matter, but there's an unfairness to it; some people are just not as good looking. Unfortunately I myself was a beneficiary of that. Or I guess fortunate. I suppose it was work.... I worked on my fitness, chose good clothes, had even taken acting & improv classes because I knew presentation skill & ability to hold a room's attention was something I needed. Like I said, I worked to put myself into position but there was a significant luck factor beyond my control.
Not luck, but rather life that put your foot in the door. Just like life puts your foot in any sort of potential employment.
Perhaps the reason that temps are rarely hired is because they didn't treat the position like a job interview. Those that do the hard work may get the job.
Blaming bad luck is just an excuse by folks to justify their lack of being successful. There is no such thing as luck. There is however a lifetime of random occurrences that shape our lives. But that happens to everyone, all the time. Funny how some people always seem to have good "luck" or bad. If you dig deeper, it's more a case of some people making good decisions vs bad, or taking big risks vs no risk, or some people working harder or smarter vs lazy or just the minimum.
Quite likely more about you than politics or social class.
Perhaps you have never studied marketing or psychology. In certain circles, manipulating or controlling men through the control of women is regarded as a veritable science.
You picked pre-law as your undergrad major and didn't do well enough to get into a law school with a free ride. You then did nothing to create any job skills that could have made you worth paying high compensation. Near as I can tell, you choose to wallow in self pity and blame the system rather than doing something about it.
For example, you're web surfing right now instead of spending the time acquiring job skills to earn more pay. Why are you doing that?
right now I'm taking intermittent C-D breaks while writing up upcoming eBay listings and researching prices for my upcoming price guide.
A house you own is, at a minimum, a cost stabilizer and a HEDGE against rent inflation, which I consider crucial to low earners if they are to build wealth. Housing you rent makes landlords wealthy and keeps low earners poor forever.
Yes. I wasn't suggesting against purchasing a house, instead pointing to the wisdom of purchasing something that though not so impressive at first you can easily pay it off and use it as a springboard to acquire something far better rather than taking on a mortgage on a $5M house and a fancy Mercedes when doing so would turn you into a veritable, knuckle-worn slave.
There was a femme she was intent on buying a new car. I warned her, she was just 17 and was hardly making enough money to make it make sense. I warned her against buying a new car to impress her friends, that the debt would make her miserable. I said "Buy a used car, you have many guys in your family that will help you keep it well-maintained for free." I encouraged her to put money toward training of some kind. But nah, she bought the new car to impress her friends (who she hardly ever sees anymore, if at all, and hated herself five+ years later. From what I've gathered, she still keeps it in garage--I suppose after the hell and slavery she went through to keep it she doesn't want to let it go even though the engine is dead.) She was basically forced to work to keep the car.
I had even gone as far as getting her to think about how inexpensive plane trips out of town are compared to how much she would shelling out just for a new car she did not need. "Oh but it wont break down, its new!" (It broke down far more than my work SUV which I probably put a few hundred miles on a day --long road trips sometimes--and that SUV was still running smoothly after ten years and I had bought it 2nd hand!) I even told her that it'd be better for her to buy a house than a brand new car. But she was hard-headed and extremely stubborn. She shelled out $500/month making under $25K a year, impressed a friend or two but she was stuck with that car and debt for six years.
But interestingly, I rode around in a $3K truck and in one month could make 1/2 of what she made in a year. Oh and to this day she caustically blames everyone else for her troubles. She is on psych. meds and she didn't get around to buying a house until over 15 years later.
Last edited by CaptainCommander; 05-28-2016 at 04:44 PM..
The problem we really have in America is not that people don't have a way to become wealthy. The problem we have is that too few these days seem to have a way to enter the middle class.
I don't dispute things have gotten harder for the middle class. But I also think the poor and middle class abandoned "middle class values" at the very time when we needed them most.
As I have said repeatedly on CD, you can't expect to have a strong middle class when a near-majority (around 40%) are having kids outside of marriage. That just doesn't work.
The other thing that would help a lot would be a revolution in eating habits /diet. We simply cannot afford the current diet of heavy meat and processed foods...and that would be true even if the health care companies weren't allowed to run roughshod over us. We simply must find ways to reduce the cost of health care...and much of that can be done by reducing the need for it. We need more "blue zones" in America, as explained in the video:
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