“Anyone who had/has rich parents”.
Worked my ass off moving up through food industry - from retail to operations manager of a manufacturing plant.
Didn’t get rich until my folks gave me a 6-figure loan to start my own business, with an interest rate so low+generous it was basically free money. That enabled us to take risks in the first 2 years that we never would have attempted otherwise. Some of those paid off.
Hell I wouldn’t have been able to grind out 65+hr weeks in my mid-twenties getting experience if I didn’t have such a great support system, largely enabled due to not having to truly worry about bills or food until I “got on my own feet”.
Yeah, I put work in. But I could’ve done the exact same amount of effort and made many times less money, essentially guaranteed if not for randomly being born to the right situation.
Behind every early retired person is someone who gave them some kind of resource most others likely will never have access to.
Thanks for sharing some of your story and acknowledging an important aspect of your success.
Do you have any plans to use your position to help change the system (political, educational or otherwise)?
Sure!
No serious plans. We’ve currently been focused on our kids first, but are donating time to local food banks and have donated money to some proposed measures and our local Blanchet House.
We aren’t well off enough that pursuing the next step in what people normally put donated time towards is an option; just our 5-10% of our time and money is a lot larger than it was before we hit this point. Neither of us have serious plans to grind for more money again, so this likely wont change.
Did you ever pay off that 6 figure loan? What would happen if you didn’t?
I assume the 6 figure loan is done that way to avoid paying taxes on a gift, so I wonder if there’s any repercussions for not paying the loan back. Or maybe your parents would claim that as a loss on their taxes and end up paying less taxes from it.
Paid it off the third year after we got some consistent business in the industry(food software and logistics). Paid about $400 in interest over that time.
Yep, it was so they could give me far more than the limit on gifts per year and not get taxed.
I sold my half of the business to my cofounder about 2 years ago. Been retired and just raising my kids while my wife is getting back into her field(she was stay at home while I built my business).
Lemmy’s primary demographic is like, developers/engineers who get paid enough to spend most of the day doing shit other than work and still live comfortably. (And Redditors that decided they were too cool for closed-source corporate malware.)
To be fair, this is not correct, instead the last one should read “any kid who had rich parents”
Can confirm. Am pretty smart, have wealthy parents, slept walked into well paying job after years of depression/inactivity because I had a safety net that meant I didn’t need to slave away at a minimum wage job to avoid destitution.
Goddamn if that doesn’t check out.
A good example for this is Tommy Wiseau (there are a dozen like him). He is dumb and did a bad movie. But he had the money to keep filming and the crew stayed because they need their paycheck. He thrown a huge amount in aggressive advertising. Years later he is making money without doing anything.
I dunno, I think he might have figured out how to bottle lightning because he had another show after The Room that was the same kind of “so bad it’s good” as The Room was. He’d have to be pretty delusional to think he was making high art after the way The Room was received, so to realize what people liked about his art (assuming he didn’t know that in the first place) and not immediately just churning out garbage instead tells me he does have talent. Entertainingly bad is a hard line to deliberately walk.
Plus there’s no evidence he was born into money. Maybe a bunch fell out of a plane with him.
I’m smart and had middle class parents and went into the family profession. I have a friend who’s smart as hell, but had unsupportive and poor parents, she’s just learned she’s a perfect match for a variety of office work, as well as learning that given her talents and what she likes there’s a well paid and respected profession that she could do well in. When I was her age I had my degree and was working in my field for middle class pay.
I’ve been coming to harsh understanding of how deep inter generational wealth and class goes through knowing her
