>You're not going to get rich renting your time to an employer
poor goldman sachs execs. how ripepd off they are to only be making millions/year when they could fire thier boss and start a subway franchise. poor a-list actors only making $20/million per film. Most small businesses,startups fail. Odds are a doctor making 7-figures will become more rich compared to an entrepreneur who dropped out of college.
A-list actors are pretty much defined by being the extremely narrow elite of the profession (entry into which elite requires work and talent and lots of luck) whose income is determined by their value licensing their personal brand to attach to things.
> Odds are a doctor making 7-figures will become more rich compared to an entrepreneur who dropped out of college.
Sure, but most doctors don’t make 7 figures. Anesthesiologists (the highest paid medical occupation code in BLS data) have a national mean salary of $271K.
Most people with a very high salary end up with an expensive lifestyle to match it. If they lose their job, they’ll need to find another one before long. In this sense, they are not that different from someone making 1/10th the salary.
The main difference between being rich and being wealthy is owning and controlling your time.
I hear this argument a lot. Why would lifestyles become more expensive if you become an exec but not a successful entrepreneur? Successful entrepreneurs like fancy, nice things too.
That’s true, but the entrepreneur owns some piece of an income-generating asset. If the exec stops working, their income immediately goes to zero, and if they didn’t save or get some equity, their wealth could be near zero too. The entrepreneur can stop working, but still be left with both income and a valuable asset (their piece of the business).
The exec can invest his excess income into income-generating assets as well, with no problem. In addition, he can use his constant cash flow as collateral to take out a loan to invest in same income generating asset. And the variance for the exec is much lower than for the entrepreneur (failure rate much much higher for startup founders).
I feel like those places are the exceptions rather than the baseline. Working as a software developer in Europe, I make around 18k Euros after taxes per year.
While I will eventually make a bit more, it would take me 74 years to make a million even if I were to save 75% of my wages, assuming that inflation is of no concern (or that modest investments that match it are in place).
Not everyone is well paid, hence a side hustle and any means of passive income make sense - especially if it scales without issues (such as software, videos, music etc.).
Again, the original point isn’t that it’s impossible to get rich by selling your time but that you’ll most likely need some leverage (i.e. in the form of owning a business)
Becoming a doctor in the US is the most sure fire way to become wealthy across a whole occupation class. Less so today, as they are being squeezed, but they had a goldmine from 1980 to 2010s.
If you’re not becoming wealthy with these kinds of average incomes, you’re doing something wrong:
> Or an engineer at FAANG+M? There's literally millions of us
“Software and Web Developers, Programmers, and Testers”, total, in the US are under 2 million, and FAANG+M are a small fraction of that. FAANG+M is around 1 million total employees, but most of that is Amazon, non-software.
The idea that there are millions of FAANGN+M software engineers is simply nowhere close to true.
Do you like upper middle class better? No, they're not flying private jets but unless they're right out of school with a lot of debt they're probably pretty comfortable.
Top executives and superstars can make lots of money. There are also very few of them and there's a winner-take-all mechanic. I wouldn't choose that as a path to wealth unless I have some unfair advantage. It's not a path available to your average person.
> Odds are a doctor making 7-figures will become more rich compared to an entrepreneur who dropped out of college.
The only doctors that make that much are either superstars with a brand of their own, or entrepreneurs with their own practice.
Doctors these days don't make that much money, but it varies a lot depending on location and specialization. I'd rather be a programmer or a lawyer from a money perspective.
poor goldman sachs execs. how ripepd off they are to only be making millions/year when they could fire thier boss and start a subway franchise. poor a-list actors only making $20/million per film. Most small businesses,startups fail. Odds are a doctor making 7-figures will become more rich compared to an entrepreneur who dropped out of college.