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Comment by rufus_foreman | Hacker News Reader

>> In 1945, as a high school sophomore, Buffett and a friend spent $25 to purchase a used pinball machine, which they placed in the local barber shop. Within months, they owned several machines in three different barber shops across Omaha. They sold the business later in the year for $1,200

That's ~$20k in today's dollars in a few months while still in high school.

>> At 15, Warren made more than $175 monthly delivering Washington Post newspapers

~$3k a month in today's dollars.

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A 15 year old today cannot make ~$3k a month delivering Washington Post newspapers. I think the point still stands what much of wealth gain is lucky opportunity windows, such as being alive during a time where a job like newspaper delivery pays 3k a month.

Yup. When I had a newspaper route in the 1980s, I was getting paid the same per paper delivered as my grandfather was 50 years prior: 2 cents.

It reminds me of how people shit on today's college students without realizing how much college costs have risen. I get the initial "kids these days" reaction, but holy moly, fellow olds, please use Google to update your priors a bit.

I am so lucky to have delivered newspapers in the 2000s for 3ct a piece, in a village. I am sorry that you didn't have this great opportunity.

Drives me bonkers.

There was a time when you could just work a minimum wage part time over the summer and it would pay for college the rest of the year.

Now, you can work minimum wage full time year-round and if you're lucky, you MIGHT cover tuition at a community college if you're still living with your parents and they don't charge rent.

I think you're exaggerating a little bit. It doesn't help whatever point you're trying to make.

Average community college tuition cost[0]: $3,400/yr.

$3400/yr is $70/week in order to pay your tuition without a loan. Your argument is only lucky people making minimum wage for 40 hours/week, who have their rent paid for, can save $70/week?

[0] https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-community-college

US minimum wage is $7.25; 40 hours a week would be $14,500 in pre-tax income. Average car ownership, per AAA, costs $10,728. Adding in the $3,400 for tuition leaves an entire $372 for food, clothing, hygiene, entertainment, and medical expenses. Seems reasonable!

Setting aside quickly Googled statistics and the risks of using averages to understand individual situations, plus the wide state-by-state variation in support to community college, let's just take the minimum wage and your $70/week number. Let's also set aside how it's quite hard to get 40 hours per week these days in a lot of jobs because of corporate schedule fuckery that was much less severe when I was punching a McDonald's clock.

That's circa 10 hours per week of pay or 25% of their time. Is that number a lot? I would say yes. I don't know many people who can save 25% of their gross pay. If that's you, congrats.

I see this all the time when talking about minimum wage earners. At least you admitted it is not realistic, but you still presented it anyway.

We admit they're in the 0th percentile of earners, but then pretend like their expenses should be the median or mean expenses.

Why would somebody earning essentially the zeroth percentile wages be paying for 50th percentile car ownership?

The other common example is how minimum wage earners can't afford an average 2br rental in any state.

If minimum wage earners are paying for the 50th percentile apartments, who exactly is living in 30th percentile apartments?

Just to be clear, I presented it to mock your approach of jumping in with a quickly-googled national average number and acting like it means anything here.

No other expenses in life?

I made maybe $100 a month delivering newspapers in the 1970s. It wasn't practical to make much more because the territories were fixed and there was a long waiting list to get one.

I made about $120 a month delivering newspapers in the 1980s in a terrible, small, rust-belt town. With all the overhead involved, it came out to less than $2 an hour.

Nobody was "lucky" to have a paper delivery route.

If there were more people who wanted to deliver papers for that price than there were delivery routes available, then you were indeed lucky if you had one.

Maybe not, but they can probably make that (and potentially a lot more) with a minor YouTube hustle.

YouTube is far from a sure thing. For every channel that reaches even moderate success there are many, many more that go nowhere.

>> much of wealth gain is lucky opportunity windows

He sold gum, he sold Coke bottles, he sold magazines, he worked in a grocery store, he delivered newspapers, he sold golf balls, he sold stamps, he detailed cars, he invested in stock, he invested in land, he went to business school, he worked as an investment salesman, he worked as a stock analyst, he worked as a general partner, then chairman, then CEO at a company.

The lucky opportunity was 82 years to compound returns.

The question is why he wouldn't quit at 50 with a few hundred million and live off of the money instead of spending the next 42 years making more money which he will then give away to someone else to decide what to do with after he dies.

The only feasible answer is that billionaires are insane hoarders, walling off society's resources for literally no reason.

They are not hoarding anything people need (like food or clothing). They are not even hoarding anything people don't need (like gold or diamonds). The "money" (they don't hoard cash either) they accumulate is _investment_ which translates into _power_ to change the world.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power:_A_New_Social_Analysis

my daughter is 14, her friend makes $17 hour working at a juice store. She makes about 300/week.

In 1987 I was making about 25/hour doing programming as a senior in high school.

There are always opportunities and those opportunities are not the same in every era.

Kids today are making 100K being influencers opening toys on youtube

Kids today are making 100K playing online poker

Kids today are making $$ writing apps

Kids today are making $$ selling pot

The point is not paper delivery, the point is there is a mindset. I will never be a billionaire because I will stop trying to make money once I have "enough"

> my daughter is 14, her friend makes $17 hour working at a juice store. She makes about 300/week.

This is not 3k a month. This is less than 1/3 of that.

Take $300 a week for a year, that is $15,600. Say that was invested this year, what do you think that would be worth 82 years from now?

Maybe a lot!

Also maybe nothing.

Also, the 15 year old is going to wait 82 years, happily becoming a billionaire or whatever at 97 years young?

There’s no way anyone who was doing delivery of newspapers in the 1940s and making $175 nominal.

Newspapers then cost roughly 5 cents apiece, and in Omaha a route with 100 doors would take 90 minutes. Your monthly gross sales for a seven day route of that size would be $150, and the vast of that would go to purchase papers. You’d probably net $25, and then get $15 in tips.

That’s about the same amount I made on my route in the late 1970s when adjusted for inflation.

He had 3 routes, this was in DC, not Omaha:

"Young Warren attended the DC public school Alice Deal Junior High and he graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School.

Buffett says delivering papers at age 14 instilled the importance of hard work and reliability.

Wartime Washington was short of adult men and for that reason, says Buffett, he was able to get multiple paper routes at the Westchester Apartments, a five-building complex that was home to the city’s elite.

“I also learned,” he says, “that if you did a good job you were going to move up. The very fact that I did a good job in Spring Valley got me the Westchester routes later on.”"

Thanks for the additional info.

Let's assume for a moment that $0.05 is still a good price for newspapers, and assume that the carrier received 20%, or a penny apiece. Also assume that he delivers every day. That's about 580 papers day. If they're really dense subscribers, I guess you could make a delivery every 10 seconds, so about 95 minutes to deliver that number if you never wait for an elevator, climb stairs, etc.

Certainly was a great opportunity for Warren, but an outlier for paper delivery earnings.

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