You need 4.5m in the top 2 percent and 8.1m for top 1 percent. It’s amazing how large it is in nominal terms, but it’s literally just an 80 percent increase. You can achieve that in 7 years on average.
You can also use history to judge each generations contributions.
The greatest generation or those born 1900 to 1920 ww2 are often credited for Americas success. But their success was really due to industrialization that allowed our country to become more productive in the 1830s. 1920 to 1960 contributed to American dominance in terms of gdp market share. But We stopped gaining market share from then on. The gen x had a work hard attitude unfortunate they did not work smart so we still were in moderate decline. Anyways with millennials leading the way, things are getting a lot worse a lot faster. Only a matter of time until the Chinese beat us. I blame the baby boomers for terrible parenting of millennials really.
anyways I will end all this rant with a nice Buffett quote:
Someone is sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.
It’s always good to grow assets right. But it is more important to grow your dynasty. If you feel you are becoming too rich then it is time to make a baby. That’ll definitely cut the net worth per capita. Almost equivalent to making yourself poorer!
for example. john d rockefeller died with a net worth of 1.4b at death in 1937. on top of that he also gave away about 530m. and estate tax was about 20% so his dynastic wealth was roughly 1.1b. overall market CAGR is about 10% or 2.7 trillion. if we assume that they spent 4% per year. his family’s net worth should be 130b today. however, his entire dynasty is just worth 11b now. he does have 150 descendants. anyways this is why you should keep money consolidated with power only given to the most capable. everyone else gets a stipend. power is better when it is consolidated.
lol tank Ohai, I will remember your kind words in my time of despair. I will try not to build intellectual walls halting the immigration of your boundless knowledge!
As a fun fact, I’m not as far behind you in these regards as you probably flatter yourself with and I’m a little closer to the P(0) case than you seem to be. Both in the regard that I actually grew up on a farm in an average to below average part of the country, born into a double wide and because I witnessed my parents, P(0) go from born below the poverty line to sound eight figure wealth within a generation. As such, I also grew up in a circle of these types, but I’ll be sure to relay your wise wisdom though! Everything you’re saying is virtually the opposite of what any of those people would recount particularly in terms of challenge and long odds involved, and they’d each tell you a healthy dose of luck was involved first and foremost. Anecdotes aside, statistics also bare out in my favor.
Ok, so we’ve established you were basically making up numbers to go with your platitudes since you just cut your third generation amount by 80-90% in one post. Even in that hacksaw model you failed to account for multiple kids. The reality is wealth in the first to second generation phase is fragile and it takes very little, a misstep or two, some back luck, to set a family back to start (as Nerdy can attest) and I think the key difference in my position is that I’m not so delusional about the realities of starting on square one. It is also the case that you’re opining on two things that you have zero familiarity with, the plight of the median income family incorporating the earnings perspective and the realities of starting on the bottom without the benefits of generations of knowledge or the accompanying opportunity set.
Had you entitled your theory, “Making millions is not difficult for mildly above average people when starting at the finish line, an autobiography” and advised the poors to just be born rich and pipelined into an elite education, it would be more apt, and therefore less silly.
im confused. i thought farmers actually made decent money. how were you a poor farmer in the us?
also are you saying that starting from the bottom now we here is a better story than started from the top, then the botttom, but now we back at top is an inferior story.
how much siblings you got bs? how much you stand to inherit? fuck i often fantasize about inherting a lot of money. i fucking hate working for shit.
anyways what i would hate is say i had a net worth of a billion when i died. and i left it to my 4 children. and 1 child at their death, decides that since i am dying and had an awesome life, im going to give my money to charity and not to my blood relatives. that would make me really mad and disappointed. cuz they are giving away shit that imo doesnt belong to them. gotta run the family wealth like a corporation.
Commercial farmers in the mid west make decent money. The smaller east coast (especially mid-Atlantic) family farms make no money, nearly every family I knew that made their income that way lived below the poverty line. The farm wasn’t our main source of income though, my parents actually bought that after they got the business running and ran it as a highly labor intensive side gig which now that I think about it is kind of an unusual decision. My parents were always adamant about not wanting to be seen as wealthy or have their kids think of themselves that way so I think part of their thought process was that we would grow up throwing hay bales and I think they just liked the idea of the farm.
As far as which story is “better”, I have no idea. All I’m saying is that whether you’re the one bringing a family back from the bottom or the first time up from the bottom, the heavy lifting is done by the first in the line. There’s a reason for the saying, “The first million is the hardest.” Interesting story in that regard, my Dad started his business around 16 and my grandfather sold a large part of the family land to give him the $1,000 to start it and told him “the first thousand is the hardest” and he told me he remembers thinking, “How am I ever going to make another thousand dollars?”
Two siblings, not 100% sure on how it all shakes out, I try to tune that out and live independently of it not letting it factor into my decisions. I know success is a relative term, but I feel pretty confident I would not have achieved what I have if I had had to start from his place.
