Yet I’m not what you’d describe as rich because of the asymmetry of risk vs rewards, and because of the drag of taxation. Outsized rewards are possibly only if you take outsized risks. When you have a big return, a large percentage of it is taken by the government. This is an additional hurdle over the risk you took. The result is that you take all the risk, and the government shares in the reward.
To break out to a level where you can support yourself and your family purely through requires a true outlier 10x-20x the average return. You can wait a long time, your entire life in fact, to have this kind of outlier.
I’ve sacrificed the best years of my life taking outsized risks and chasing the carrot so to speak. I’ve done well enough to maybe stop working in the next couple of years by age 45. My body kept the score of all the stress and my health paid a heavy price.
The time you have as a healthy person can never be replaced. The trick is to stop spending your time chasing dollars. Let other people take the big risks and get the big rewards, while you sit back and collect a tax of sorts.
The best way to do this is to own a business, which minimizes your tax liabilities, and also minimizes your time investment. This means you have to choose the business very carefully. It should be something that is very low risk, something which allows you to hire labor from the middle and bottom of the bell curve. It should have minimal regulation and licensure required to operate. Likely, it will be completely outside your high tech expertise. That’s good, that’s what you want. You’ll have to learn to operate this kind of business successfully.
By reducing your lifestyle, by not going into debt for anything, by not buying that big house, new car, new computer, etc, and by saving your income, you will be able to afford to buy an existing business like this in cash.
After you’ve mastered the operations and cash flow of one business, you can proceed to buy another.
The richest people I know, both in terms of net worth, but more importantly their time, operate in this fashion. My neighbor owns 38 McDonald’s franchises. He started with a laundromat.
The high tech gambit is a sucker’s game. I know, because I’m the sucker. The answer you are looking for is not “work harder”, or “go into management”. The answer is… stop working! Gradually your dependency on your working income until it’s gone.