I’d put another zero or 2 on there for what’s earnable with hard work and smart decisions. A million these days is like upper middle class. It’s a nice, but fairly normal, house in most parts of the country and a good start on a retirement fund. Point is still valid though.
Speaking from Norway: I can agree that order-of-magnitude 10 million USD is earnable in a lifetime. A wage of 100 k USD / yr isn’t absurdly high, and after 45 years that brings you to 4.5 million. So getting to like 10-30 million in a lifetime is still within what I would consider reasonably possible. At 100 mill. it’s getting pretty absurd though.
You just forgot one teeny-tiny thing right there, called taxes. If you have a job paying you 100k a year, that’s not the amount that gets transferred to your bank account. In fact, in high-tax countries you prolly only see like half of that.
And also don’t forget rent and food and stuff like that, which reduces the amount of money you can actually spend on stuff you want even further. So yeah, considering all of that it will be difficult to even achieve a million bucks.
I was initially talking about the total amount earned throughout a career. As a student I lived off roughly 10k USD/year (in Norway). Today I spend quite a bit more, but if my goal in life was to “get rich”, let’s say I could live off 20 k per year. Making ≈200k and paying 40 % tax (the ceiling in Norway is around there), I would still net 140k/yr after “cost of living”, which would bring me to around 5.6 mill (net) throughout a career.
A million is earnable through hard work and smart decisions through one’s lifetime, a billion is absolutely not.
I’d put another zero or 2 on there for what’s earnable with hard work and smart decisions. A million these days is like upper middle class. It’s a nice, but fairly normal, house in most parts of the country and a good start on a retirement fund. Point is still valid though.
I think some luck plays into this too, and I think a good person recognizes this.
Yeah maybe in California where the Cost of Living is abnormally high compared to the rest of the US and the rest of western countries.
Speaking from Norway: I can agree that order-of-magnitude 10 million USD is earnable in a lifetime. A wage of 100 k USD / yr isn’t absurdly high, and after 45 years that brings you to 4.5 million. So getting to like 10-30 million in a lifetime is still within what I would consider reasonably possible. At 100 mill. it’s getting pretty absurd though.
You just forgot one teeny-tiny thing right there, called taxes. If you have a job paying you 100k a year, that’s not the amount that gets transferred to your bank account. In fact, in high-tax countries you prolly only see like half of that. And also don’t forget rent and food and stuff like that, which reduces the amount of money you can actually spend on stuff you want even further. So yeah, considering all of that it will be difficult to even achieve a million bucks.
I was initially talking about the total amount earned throughout a career. As a student I lived off roughly 10k USD/year (in Norway). Today I spend quite a bit more, but if my goal in life was to “get rich”, let’s say I could live off 20 k per year. Making ≈200k and paying 40 % tax (the ceiling in Norway is around there), I would still net 140k/yr after “cost of living”, which would bring me to around 5.6 mill (net) throughout a career.