Hard and smart, with good negotiating skills, in the right industry.
Let’s also assume you save every penny, you don’t buy a single thing, from food to shelter.
Let’s assume that inflation is zero, and you work for 50 years at this level from 20 to 70.
You will have earned $22.5 million.
Not bad. Remember this is without spending a single cent.
Now how do you think you get to a net worth of $220m? Or $2200 million? By working ten or one hundred times harder
You don’t get rich from working hard. You get rich by being rich and letting it snowball. $40k a year in an 8% return for 50 years gets you about the same.
Which is rich.
Don't get me wrong. I would love to have that kind of money. I would retire immediately if that was in my bank account.
But we're comparing to people who have 100x that. Or nowadays apparently literal trillionaires.
Like there's rich and then there's rich
Keep in mind that the situation that the OP suggested is a sort of spherical cow. Substantially more people earn <40k per year than earn 450k per year. It is extremely unlikely to earn that kind of money over that kind of timeframe, nevermind being able to save every single cent of it
And there are people 1000 times richer.
The way to may 22m isn’t working this crazy way, it’s to invest in the stock market and try to have a larger slice of everyone else’s work.
'Tax the Rich' politicians will never give you a number when you ask just who they are talking about. It has to be fluid. Bernie Sanders used to rail on millionaires until he became one. Now he only says billionaires.
I'm also poor relative to the to 0.1% of people, but I still make a ridiculous amount of money compared to the minimum wage worker. If were better able to provide for everyone by taxing me more then I'd be all for it.
i agree. "capitalist" is the word for what people really mean when they talk about "the rich"