system
July 25, 2012, 10:26pm
#21
F - In Zimbabwean Dollars
It’s not that anyone is smarter than the average AF poster, it’s that clearly everyone posting on AF is an outlier (we’re all special).
$10mm is not that high of a bar for someone in high finance or who works at a senior position in a successful decently sized corporation, or grows and sells their own business. If you read corporate proxies for a living, you would see that there are any number of even relatively small capitalization companies where the CEO makes $500k - $5mm and has up to a multi-million dollar parachute if the company gets taken out (not including equity options in most cases). Those are pre-tax figures, but you have to assume they’re going to work in such a role over a multi-year time period and will be investing the money somehow instead of leaving it under the mattress. I have met lots and lots of these people during company visits and I can tell that none of them had super powers or was an incredible genius, although clearly they’re all smart and hard working.
Basically, if you don’t make $10mm during an executive career in a successful corporation or in high finance, you’re probably doing it wrong. I personally know at least half a dozen hedge fund managers in their early 40s who have 8 figure net worths and they are nowhere near the pinnacle of the field. To keep this in perspective, to be in the top 1% of household net worth according to the New York Times, the bar is $8.4mm. So we’re talking about being somewhat into the top 1% but not grossly so.
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/measuring-the-top-1-by-wealth-not-income/
How many CEOs or hedge fund managers post on this site? My measurement is number of posts. It has a negative correlation with income (there are exceptions, but for the most part I think it’s true).
None, but you have no clue what people will become. My guess is most people who post here are under 30. Plenty of runway.
system
August 2, 2012, 8:16am
#24
ohai:
I have no doubt that many AF people will fall into category C. However, $10 million seems like an optimistic projection. There is the matter of lost income or temporarily depressed earnings due to career volatility. I would be surprised if finance people experience no periods of disrupted earnings throughout their careers.
That and also who would want to do finance for their entire life??? After your bank account is loaded there are other things to go do.
F brosef; everyone knows you get a 20000% increase in salary after getting the charter.