Being a millionaire is just saving a portion of income for 30 years and you can easily hit a net worth of a few million dollars.
Being a billionaire requires some level of absurdly lucky success, fraud, exploitation, and rich parents.
I mean, that would be considering there is no interest at all. Yes if you would put it under a mattress, sure. If you would put it in s&p for instance, even on the low end you’d be getting about 6%. At that interest compounded monthly, you’d be able to be a millionaire at about $1000 a month, or $12000 a year. Still a buttload, but not unfeasible for dual earners without children, depending on where you’re located and in what industry of course.
If it takes two people bringing money together to have a million, they are not millionnaires unless they can find another million.
Those are the numbers of you’re not investing your savings. You can use an investment calculator to see what it is if you’re investing it, with an assumption of average returns. Non trivial to get a million dollars in 30 years, but way less than $33k.
Have you tried to have your parents buy you a house when you were 18 ? Many people forget to do this simple step. /s
Funny enough I actually did get parental help to buy a house a couple years back. Just a bit extra on our down payment to ensure we got this house rather than 3 more months of hunting for a good deal, but help is help
And even with an expensive Californian house added to my net worth I’m not even halfway to a millionaire and wouldn’t be able to save money to get there like was suggested. A million dollars is a fuck load
Silly me, they only bought me a mansion. Guess I missed the boat if I’m past 18 now huh?
Bring able to save a significant portion of your income more than the US poverty line for 30 years without some black swan life event happening to drain it also partly depends on being lucky or/and not having children. The median US household makes plenty to become millionaires for maintainkng a reasonable QoL if there aren’t any such black swan events or children involved.
For my mom, it was a custody battle for children that initially wiped her life savings. She since has often worked 100 hours weeks at a job that pays above average for a blue collar job to make enough to back up to retire (plus happens to have worked at the same company long enough to get a pension, something they phased out for anyone less senior than her), but that’s not something anyone should be expected to do be able to retire, so I’m not quick to judge people for not having accumulated money.
But a lot of people waste money on convenience in ways that definitely add up cumulatively over the decades. $5/day adds up to $150k after adjusting for inflation over 30 years. A $10/month subscription is $10k over 30 years. Reducing costs like that in a few places can cumulatively get you to at least theoretically being on track to be a millionaire.
The QoL aspect is extremely important though. If I can’t have one $10/mo subscription… what’s the point of being a millionaire in some hypothetical future if I spend my prime years depraved and depressed?
Sure, but at the median income in the US, you don’t need to be depraved or depressed. At least not for monetary reasons. I’m not saying you need have to cut all subscriptions. A lot of people have much more than one reoccurring charges or spending habits that could either be reduced or cut completely with little to no effect on QoL.
That’s been a point of discussion in financial independence circles. You can rearrange your whole life so you’re saving 60% of your income, and some people have. Are they happy? Often not, and some of them have backed off when they realized they shouldn’t give up so much happiness now for the prospect of being happy later.
I dOn’T KnoW wHo nEEds tO heAr tHIs
🤮🤢
Fuckin nobody, usually
If becoming a millionaire/billionaire is an actual goal for some people, no wonder this planet is fucked.
You pretty much need to be a millionaire if you want to be a home owner in a lot of places, although the problem is the inflated market.
I’d like to be a millionaire, but that is an method to achieve another goal, not the goal itself.
I’d like to vertically farm algae on an industrial scale as an atmospheric carbon sink, and additionally see if there is any way to do so profitably while remaining carbon negative. 1 million dollars would probably be enough to construct a small facility and hire the staff and experts I would need to figure this out.
“Millionare/billionaire” as an identity should be an insult.
Anybody with an industrial mindset will bare minimum want to take any large amount of liquid asset and turn it into production. Build and improve factories, fund research, improve living conditions near your operations. Having money acruing interest can be part of that, but should not be your primary revenue stream.
Don’t wait to be a millionaire for that. See if you can find people who are also interested in it and build it as a co-op.
That said, I think you’ll run into problems with the square-cube problem. Volume of algae goes up by a cube factor, but they need light. That light has to be fed by energy that has to be gathered by taking up surface area of the Earth, like solar and wind, but that only goes up by a square factor. Hydro and nuclear sources are maybes here, but you’d have to scale way, way up to make that viable (many billions of dollars, not millions). Presumably, you don’t want to use energy from carbon-based sources just to suck that carbon back into algae.
Right, but if you stop buying coffee every single day, even a cheap cup, that’s like $30-100 saved per month or $1200 or more in a year. That’s not nothing. That dread you get around the holidays of “will I have enough money to buy presents?”, well, now you can buy presents.
For a sense of proportion, in a housing market where house prices go up 5% a year, a $200k house (which nowadays is cheap), goes up $10k in a year.
So that “trick” barelly slows down the rate at which you’re getting further behind on your chance of getting your own place to live, even a cheap on in a moderatelly growing market.
Such barebones saving only works if you’re really really close to being able to afford a house, otherwise you’re just making your life a bit more miserable for no actual gain as the extra savings are just going to be sucked out in paying for just about anything where realestate costs have an impact (so, not just somthing quite directly affected like your rent, but also pretty much all products and services bought from stores and companies who rent their space).
At this point, if you don’t have the income, you won’t have the savings. You won’t save your way to home ownership by cutting coffee out. But if you’re a cup-a-day person from Dunkin or Starbucks or Tims or wherever, start making coffee at home and take back some of your money. I’d much rather make coffee at home and have an extra $1200 per year back.
People seriously buy coffees every day? I like coffee, and I have enough disposable income to buy coffees often outside, but honestly never do it. Maybe it’s because I grew up poor but it seems an awfully wastefuk habit. I have coffee at home before work, or in the office (free).
A lot of gas stations sell refill mugs that people use every day. I admit I did do a daily coffee run to a gas station nearby when I worked my last job, but it was because they literally never washed the coffee pot or emptied it out from the day before and it literally had grease all over it. Yeah, it did end up costing me money, but fuck me if I was going to drink that shit. And there was no way to get through that job without a lot of caffeine.
I don’t think it’s because you grew up poor. It’s because why would you buy coffee everyday?
I buy coffee almost everytime I’m at an airport or a train station, but that’s like… once every two months? If I would commute by train, I wouldn’t buy coffee everytime I’m at the train station, I would just wait until I’m in the office to grab a cup.
But I did buy a coffee daily, when I was in university. There was no way to get a coffee besides buying one, so I bought one. So I think thats the main thing about buying daily, necessity. Some companies only have paid machines, so you buy a coffee daily when at work. In school or university you don’t have a coffee machine available, so you buy one daily.
In uni we have 30 cent coffee machines and it was the only way to keep my brain going.
Meh, I’m a M-F daily coffee buyer here. My husband will only drink coffee if we’re at breakfast somewhere, and it’s just him and I at the house.
I drink plain black gas station coffee though, so my costs are likely negligible to others who prefer more…“fancy” varieties. I pay $1.16 for 20 Oz.
Dutch Bros is giving Starbucks a run for their money here in Texas. Both franchises are PACKED every time I drive past, regardless of time of day. Just…insane drive thru lines. Never had DBs, but I’ve heard it’s decent.
wastefuk
If that was a typo, let it retroactively not be. Wastefuk is a great word, especially how you used it, which I read as adjectivizing ‘the habits of a Wastefuk.’
Don’t be a wastefuk, everyone. Make your coffee at home. But not with k cups.
Or being born into the family of a former Plantation Owner.
