Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I did not read all the pages. I did read some of them.
Here is my take and how I live my life.
I am 51 years old. My wife is 46. We have 6 kids. The youngest is 9 the oldest is 24
We own a home that we purchased in late 2010.
We have maxed out on our retirement accounts.
My wife and I both work and make into the 6 figures. We have a couple other sources of income. I have continued to move up within my organization at work as has my wife. We also drive older cars. At one time we thought that a home of our own was out of reach in our area. We spent our money on toys. Some I had acquired long ago others we bought while married. Since 2006 we have sold off our toys. They cost a lot to own anyway. LOL
our focus is making and saving money, something that we should have done a long time ago. We are on track though and will hit the 7 figure net worth hopefully within five years. We also plan on working longer to continue saving money. Our goal is to hit the $5 million mark. Our financial planner does not see any reason we should not be able to get there at the rate we are going. No guarantee but you get my point.
What keeps us going is traditional family values. We don't drink, smoke, or take drugs. We keep ourselves in good shape. We have a balanced lifestyle. We go to Church on Sundays. We are involved in our kids life, school, and other activities.
What do we teach our kids? We teach them that if they want the same or a better life then they need to work for it. We teach them that it is better to make money from interest than to have to pay interest to someone else. We teach our kids that it cost a lot to live where we live and if they want to continue on here then they can not rely on McDonalds or some other low wage job. They will need to get an education or start a business of their own. While our son's friends are spending money on cool cars, they have been saving money. One of our sons has a goal of getting his BSN and working at the Hospital with us. He goes to school and works. With summer he is working two jobs. He figures by the time he finishes school he will have saved close to $40,000 and paid for his education. he plans on using his money for a down payment on a home when he starts working as an RN.
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.
Actually you created the luck by being fit, wearing the right clothes and improving your presentation skill. And the so called luck smiles on the well prepared.
In my case there were plenty of temp positions that were for a duration between 1 week and 3 months. Everyone else wanted only full time work and applied for those. I knew that if I went the same route I will be one of the 65 candidates 2 months later. So I called around and found which ones had a possibility of a full time job. I knew that the 1 and 2 week jobs, even if they led to full time opening would not allow me to demonstrate my job skill. A two month job was the right amount of time to show my preparedness and make my boss depend on me. Yes there was always the risk that I might not get it. But taking that chance and working hard on it was what got me the job. I created my own luck, but 90 % was preparing and executing the temp job.
So, I guess we can make some arithmetic estimates of "working hard". A millionaire works 20 times as hard as a 50k grunt, a billionaire is 20,000 times as hard working. You are not laughing yet? I dont really know why people use this oxymoron rationalization. A society/economy is a parasitic coercive pyramid extracting labor and resources from many to reward few with disproportioned share of the collective output. You can use whatever rationale, from "hard work" to the will of the Universe, to justify why some should fleece 200,000 times more than the others, but sad truth is that free, independent people would never allow 20,000 ratios of "hard work" to happen. It is not about you or hard work, it is all about "the coercive system" that allows parasitic relationships of 200,000 kind.
Hard Work.
That's a term that gets misunderstood and misused too often. I'll give my take on what that means, FWIW.
Hard Work means doing things that no one else wants to do, such as working holidays or late night shifts. It means showing up to work when you're sick, or just don't feel like it. It can mean working on commission rather than being paid for every hour you're clocked in.
It can mean forgoing a desk job to swing a hammer on a roofing crew so that you can actually be in demand, at least until you have the groundwork in place to wear a white shirt to work. It means doing whatever it takes to pursue a goal, even with no guarantee that you'll even come close.
It can mean putting everything you own on the line to be self employed, a high percentage of millionaires are self employed.
It means learning to invest in the stock market or real estate, even when those investments are tanking.
Hard Work can be defined as sacrifice and believing in yourself when no one else does.
i can tell you this: My family was not "lower class". They just didn't have much money.
I started working at age 12, to help my mom buy school clothes for my younger brother and myself. From that day on, she never had to buy us a stitch of clothing. And we were both growing very fast.
At age 27, i was newly married and my bride was expecting our first child. We needed so many things, for her and for the baby. I was able to get a job working for the state, an office job. I hated it!!! I just could not work indoors in a cubicle. It near drove me crazy. Unlike so many milennials, i did not quit. I continued to work there for 4 long, awful years. But i had an idea.
I got to know somw guys in dot at the state level. I would volunteer to go out on the road whenever they needed someone. Heaven knows, nobody else wanted to! They would rather stay indoors in the air conditioning. But for me, it was freedom, and i loved being on the road.
I put in for a contract with the state, hauling some gravel. They knew me, so i got the contract. I was able to finally quit that awful job, and be out on the road working as an independent contractor.
I hired young neighborhood guys to work with me. We rehabilitated an old dump truck, and got it running again. From there on, i never looked back. I lived very frugally and owed no money for my new company. We all just worked and worked. Some of you don't know anything about having to make a payroll. That meant, some weeks i didn't get a paycheck. I had a wife and 2 little girls to feed and dress. That's why we never spent much money. We just saved it.
35 years later, i sold that business for much more than a million $$$. I have now been retired for 3 years. I still don't spend much money, even though we could now have whatever we want. I married a lady who feels the same as i do about money: It's to save, not blow on trifles.
Do i feel that being wealthy is immoral? That i don't deserve what i earned? Hell no!
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.
Luck is a poor people thing. They make poor decisions and then say they had bad luck. Wealthy people make bad decisions too. They call them bad decisions, learn from them, and try not to repeat them.
Remember the 1996 best seller "The Millionaire Next Door?" The same premise. Those who are hard working, frugal, and lucky enough to make it are often from modest roots. And a lot of their children are on the way back there.
So, I guess we can make some arithmetic estimates of "working hard". A millionaire works 20 times as hard as a 50k grunt, a billionaire is 20,000 times as hard working. You are not laughing yet? I dont really know why people use this oxymoron rationalization. A society/economy is a parasitic coercive pyramid extracting labor and resources from many to reward few with disproportioned share of the collective output. You can use whatever rationale, from "hard work" to the will of the Universe, to justify why some should fleece 200,000 times more than the others, but sad truth is that free, independent people would never allow 20,000 ratios of "hard work" to happen. It is not about you or hard work, it is all about "the coercive system" that allows parasitic relationships of 200,000 kind.
This is BY FAR the best response in this thread. Now, I'm more of a moderate and I believe in capitalism, this poster doesn't sound that happy about capitalism but that's irrelevant to the FACTS that they presented which are completely true.
It's never been about working hard in America, it's always been about working smart. It's always been putting your resources to WORK in the most productive use, to create the best returns in an efficient amount of time.
Working smart is all about taking the resources that you have currently (time, energy, knowledge, connections, and capital) and investing them to let's say double your assets/net worth within 18 months. Then investing again to double them again within 12 months. Then investing again to double them again within 24 months. Then investing again to double them within another 24 months. And on and on.
Not saying you will not "sweat" while working smart, but the people who focus on working smart while also focusing on not falling into the poverty traps on the way up (like not having kids before you can afford them) are more likely to climb to the middle class and even onto the higher class.
Last edited by jotucker99; 05-29-2016 at 06:42 AM..
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
