Getting Wealthy vs. Staying Wealthy | Hacker News Reader

Getting Wealthy vs. Staying Wealthy

collabfund.com

48 pointsakeck25 comments

Haha, I like how the article starts by saying that becoming wealthy has multiple books on it and there's a million ways to do it (as if it is something easy).

Don't get me wrong, the writer is a very good and the article is very well-written, but the the thought process of the writer was very weak.

The reality is that most of the people in the world, 99% will never become wealthy, much less because of their investments.

To start writing a story that basically outlines that the stock market has up and downs, with nothing really important about it. Anybody that has invested in the stock market for sometime knows those obvious things and if that's all I need to stay wealthy...

I guess I already know how to stay wealthy, as I've lived all my life frugal and worried about what may happen. Now, can you please write an article on how to get wealthy?

Thanks

Honestly based on the title I though the writer was going to talk about systemic racism and wealth and how wealthy black people end up poor a bit disappointed it wasn't though to say why we always emphasize this is weird to me rather than why such inequality exists in the first place the conversation is instead about helping a very small subset of people as if they're in some way better than the rest instead of what it usually is, luck.

I can relate. I'm not black, but I was born in a third world country and can relate with that problem.

It's like, the author either already was born wealthy, or had a royal flush in his hands regarding his education, culture and family to make him successful.

If he's so smart about it, first write something that would make ordinary people wealthy. And by ordinary I don't mean a financial trader, but somebody making your coffee at Starbucks or delivering your amazon packages.

I've read quite a few of those "million books" about getting wealthy and none of them worked so far, hehe!

It is very easy to get wealthy (assuming access to western markets and not being party to systemic racism) if you are willing or able to do even one or two things better than most people.

I am working on my second “fortune.” I liked reading the article, even though it kind of hurts to look backward at myself also being too complacent. The decisions I would have had to make to have generational wealth today, a decade later, are far more reasonable than the decisions I actually made.

I went down past 0, and today (a decade later) I own a few properties and have a net worth about 5x my income. My mindset is 1000x different. I am hyper vigilant about staying hedged and frugal.

The absolute number 1 thing you need to do to get rich is save >20% of your income. Whether you make 20k/yr or 200k, if you can pay yourself approximately what you pay the government, even the simplest investment strategies are virtually guaranteed to make you fabulously wealthy by typical standards.

If you are making 20k and can’t find room in your budget to save 4k, obviously you’ve got to increase your income somehow. If you are making average or above average income and can’t save, you can decide if frugality or more income is path of least resistance to higher savings rate.

The other critical thing to getting rich, if you want to do something other than DCA into indexes over decades, is to realize that the opportunities to get way-above-market returns are far, far more numerous if you are taking $10k positions vs $100M positions.

> It is very easy to get wealthy (assuming access to western markets and not being party to systemic racism) if you are willing or able to do even one or two things better than most people.

Given that hardly anyone gets wealthy (as a percentage of the population), either your claim is wrong, or hardly anyone is willing or able to do even one or two things better than most people.

Also, people do not get rich from incomes, as a general rule.

> either your claim is wrong, or hardly anyone is willing or able to do even one or two things better than most people

That is cute, but not logical. Let me offer a third option: people don't do it, despite the fact that it is easy.

I might say, if you have normal body control, it is very easy to make your bed every day. Your logic applied to that same statement might be, "given that roughly half of people don't make their bed every day, either half the population doesn't have normal body control, or your claim is wrong"

There are many things that are very easy to do, without any caveats at all, that most people don't do.

Simple is not the same as easy.

Your plan is simple, but someone making 20k/yr probably does not share your belief that making much more than that is easy to do.

They may not share my belief, but that doesn’t change the facts.

https://spike.co.nz/glenns-blog/the-elephant-and-the-stake/

> Also, people do not get rich from incomes, as a general rule.

People who cannot save money that they can invest into their own endeavors or others, very rarely get rich.

Of course it depends on what you mean by "rich." Most of forbes 500 does not get there through income. However, the large majority of self-made people in the 1M-10M networth range did it with initially earned income, which became saved income, and then invested that savings (either in themselves as an entrepreneur, or just in the public markets).

Seeing Collab prompted me to re-read the "Email to a former board member" the founder of CircleUp wrote to partner:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XToJhxt8srHHsRhe35bAa18w...

Context here: https://ryancaldbeck.medium.com/transitions-fa7ce4af435

Did they ever address this? I find it so weird in SV culture that when someone does something terrible no one is allowed to talk about it and the people who did it just stay quiet for a few months and then go back to posting the same vacuous financial advice blog posts as before.

I'd hate to add a tired cliche, but as the saying goes, the best way to amass a small fortune is to start with a large fortune.

HMW posted a good piece describing the problem with Youtubers who's schtick is "how to get rich" videos: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=C3FyIev_f8s

The best part for me is this:

A barbelled personality – optimistic about the future, but paranoid about what will prevent you from getting to the future – is vital.

Optimism is usually defined as a belief that things will go well. But that’s incomplete. Sensible optimism is a belief that the odds are in your favor, and over time things will balance out to a good outcome even if what happens in between is filled with misery. And in fact you know it will be filled with misery. You can be optimistic that the long-term growth trajectory is up and to the right, but equally sure that the road between now and then is filled with landmines, and always will be. Those two things are not mutually exclusive

So the conclusion for 90% of the public is... index funds?

That doesn't sound like any new revelation.

That's not how I read it. Index funds are conservative, but the author points out a big difference between the optimism + paranoia ideal mindset vs. the conservative mindset. With index funds, you'll never go poor, but you'll never be wealthy either unless you earn a top 0.5% income. The returns (~6% historically) are too low for compounding to make one wealthy in a lifetime. To become wealthy you need to either own a very rare skill that is compensated in the millions per year, or you need to earn better returns through carefully calculated risk-taking. I'm taking the latter route with Grizzly Bulls as there's nothing extraordinary about my skill set.

Hmmm.... My spam nose is tingling.

Second post today on HN with a link to a blog post on collabfund.....

I think that happens a lot when one story links to a site and someone else finds another article on that site interesting enough to submit. I’m sure dang can look into the correlation across accounts, but I’ve seen this happen often enough that it doesn’t ring alarm bells for me.

It's quite common to see another link from the same website on the frontpage. This happens because someone else browses the website after finding the first article on HN and posts another article that they find interesting.

Edit: I see someone else beat me to it.

Step 1: have money Step 2: don’t lose said money.

So the conclusion is... Things have been good that means things will be good forever! Let's see about that

This "blog post" is nothing but an entire chapter copied verbatim from "Psychology of Money". That seems to go well beyond fair use doctrine.

The author is the writer of "Psychology of Money".

Mea culpa. Thanks for pointing out my error.

The blogpost is written by the author of the book

The post was published by the author of the book, so while the copy/paste may seem lazy, there probably isn't a copyright issue.

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