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Comment by throwaway713 | Hacker News Reader

I've always wondered why we don't see more people with $50M-$100M saved up over a lifetime. The average person can't do it, but there are plenty of doctor/lawyer or tech manager couples in the Bay Area or NYC that can save $100k-$150k per year. Max out retirement accounts, invest in index funds, assume 7% return, assume a long life of 90 years, and... that ends up being a lot of money.

Not saying that couples who are capable of saving that much per year are actually doing it, but rather, you would think it would at least be more common than it is.

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Anyone who isn't a business owner or high level executive would retire far before they reach the amount of money required to have $50M when they die. Most people aren't trying to just accumulate wealth. Even those that do accumulate massive wealth are doing it because they enjoy the job/power that comes with the job, not because they need more money.

Some of it's keeping-up-with-the-Joneses, some of it's that living anywhere that's particularly pleasant to live and also near your employment, is usually expensive because other people want to live there, too, and some of it's that those with the means tend to spend a ton more directly on their kids in hopes of advantaging their kids in life—college tuition, say, so this comes out of the parents' savings rather than being debt on the kids, or tutoring, or "experiences" that their prep school councilor said the admissions guy he's friends with at Stanford really likes to see, or whatever—and, especially in the well-off-but-not-rich range (so there's a kind of trap here where people tend to get stuck moving "up the ladder", burn lots of cash in zero-sum competition with each other over housing that hits the sweet spot between commute time and quality of public schools (those above this level just send their kids to private schools).

Then there's the tendency of US medical or elder care (say, for your not-rich parents) to put a huge dent in one's savings in a relatively short span of time.

$50M is a lot. Unless you assume the person is working 40 years with $10k/month invested at 7% return - you're not even cracking $25M. And 40 years would mean you've been investing $10k/month since the early 1980s at this point. So, yeah, of course almost no one was freaking doing that back then.

Very few people are investing that much and very few are interested in working for that long when they do have that much.

Most people here with $10M+ in NW didn't get it through hardwork over 40 years - they got it through an IPO or some big lawsuit or whatever.

Probably because people want to spend what they make. If you live in SV, you see people driving Teslas, and you think, "I want to do that too." So, next time you fly first class for the family vacation, and stay at the pricey villa. On your next trip, you add a couple of private tours, and can't find a good return flight, so you buy some NetJets credits. Next thing you know, you're spending 65k/year for a nanny (to support those high-paying Google T6 jobs), and it's eating into the 200k/year savings it would take to reach that level of wealth.

Most people end up spending close to what they make. Most people don't save like what 100M would require you to save.

> Probably because people want to spend what they make. If you live in SV, you see people driving Teslas, and you think, "I want to do that too." So, next time you fly first class for the family vacation, and stay at the pricey villa. On your next trip, you add a couple of private tours, and can't find a good return flight, so you buy some NetJets credits. Next thing you know, you're spending 65k/year for a nanny (to support those high-paying Google T6 jobs), and it's eating into the 200k/year savings it would take to reach that level of wealth.

Don't forget to blog about the struggle of being a working parent in tech, but how great it is that you manage to make space in your schedule for plenty of quality time with your kids anyway, while forgetting to mention the double-median-income amount of money you're dropping on child care every year ("newborns are so hard you guys LOL #blessed #stressed" has a "night nanny" and sleeps great most every night).

Bonus points if post it while a startup founder or "CEO".

One thing is, the benefit of IRAs and 401Ks are capped so that you can't put more than (20-25K?) in them each year. Anything else you want to save comes from after-tax income. Still, even with only half of your income available after tax, a lot of professional couples would be able to put aside 75-100K or so if they really stretched and maybe lived a bit below their means.

But I think the real reason you don't see people with 50MM, is that long before that you'd not need to work anymore. Why would you keep going to work every day if you had 10MM in the bank? It's more than you could spend in the remainder of your life. You'd need to spend 700K per year just to keep up with your passive earnings, and that's with a paid-off house and no debt.

Also, if you're a person who has been happily frugal for your working life, you're not going to change into a spendthrift overnight. You already came to the realization that an expensive car is meaningless, you're probably living in a place you are happy in already, near friends and family, etc. You're a person who will be making more per year than they ever could in a job, so why try to make more?

> Why would you keep going to work every day if you had 10MM in the bank?

The question Messrs. Bezos and Musk ask themselves every morning.

If they were simply workers, and not business owners, my guess is they would have bailed out long before. Being the owner of a successful business is a far cry from being a 9-5'er. I'd imagine it's intrinsically rewarding to grow your own company

I think the more salient point is that there is no natural endpoint to whatever it is that you think you're doing.

Sold more EVs than any other company? Go into space, and try to sell batteries!

Built the biggest e-commerce company in the Euro-sphere? Go into space, and sit in on board meetings while it gets even bigger!

I get it. I'm pretty sure they don't!

Although Bezos has stopped running Amazon in order to do what he loves, Blue Origin.

And Elon is already doing what he loves.

If either of them had been commuting to a cubicle to work for BigCorp instead, they might have stopped at 10MM.

Fairly sure there's a lot of people at amazon and elsewhere who've passed that threshold and are still working. Sure, maybe they "love what they do", but that seems like a relevant point, much more so than the US$10M.

IRAs/401ks are top out at upper middle class. They assuming you are deferring 15% of income until you hit $26,000, i.e. and income of @173,000. Employer match and HSAs save you some more.

Then you start using rich people tax breaks like long term gains, insurance products, real estate, etc.

I’d rather retire early than bust my ass until I’m 70 to (try to) make $100 million.

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