Small crimes from small fish. You can only take money from people who have less than you, that's how the fraud system works. So you gotta ramp up your frauding slowly.
I was attempting to be facetious and mimic the self help type advice you see about daily habits, but yes, if you want to get away with it, bigger is probably better.
I go out for a chai latte sometimes and bring my daughter with me to get a smoothie. Fuck people who think everyone else should cut back on this shit. Just because you're not wealthy doesn't mean you don't deserve the occasional nice treat to make your life a little less dismal.
I don't know avout deserving, cutting back is just something many do to make ends meet. If you have the money for tea and smoothies then I don't see what the issue for anyone would be.
You can cut back to make ends meet, which we do, and still get the occasional thing to make your life not shit 100% of the time. Would we do better financially if we didn't do the occasional thing to make us happy? Sure. Why though?
I mean, that would be considering there is no interest at all. Yes if you would put it under a mattress, sure. If you would put it in s&p for instance, even on the low end you'd be getting about 6%. At that interest compounded monthly, you'd be able to be a millionaire at about $1000 a month, or $12000 a year. Still a buttload, but not unfeasible for dual earners without children, depending on where you're located and in what industry of course.
It is between retirement savings and a. Net worth includes a home, that crazy expensive half million dollar house is going to seem cheap 30 years from now and is likely going to be a million dollars on it's own.
If you were saving it. Actually you would be investing it so no need to actually save up 1 million. 30 years is on the optimistic side though.
The more common problem seem to be low wages, as those leave nothing to be safed (for 30+ years) at the end of the month.
Those are the numbers of you're not investing your savings. You can use an investment calculator to see what it is if you're investing it, with an assumption of average returns. Non trivial to get a million dollars in 30 years, but way less than $33k.
Bring able to save a significant portion of your income more than the US poverty line for 30 years without some black swan life event happening to drain it also partly depends on being lucky or/and not having children. The median US household makes plenty to become millionaires for maintainkng a reasonable QoL if there aren't any such black swan events or children involved.
For my mom, it was a custody battle for children that initially wiped her life savings. She since has often worked 100 hours weeks at a job that pays above average for a blue collar job to make enough to back up to retire (plus happens to have worked at the same company long enough to get a pension, something they phased out for anyone less senior than her), but that's not something anyone should be expected to do be able to retire, so I'm not quick to judge people for not having accumulated money.
But a lot of people waste money on convenience in ways that definitely add up cumulatively over the decades. $5/day adds up to $150k after adjusting for inflation over 30 years. A $10/month subscription is $10k over 30 years. Reducing costs like that in a few places can cumulatively get you to at least theoretically being on track to be a millionaire.
The QoL aspect is extremely important though. If I can't have one $10/mo subscription... what's the point of being a millionaire in some hypothetical future if I spend my prime years depraved and depressed?
All true. But this is on a linear scale. Worth noting that wealth aggregates exponentially. Which is to say, getting from $0 to $1M is far more difficult than getting from $1M to $2M, thanks to our financial system's method of compounding returns on investment over time.
The cost of one's basic living needs heavily weigh down one's ability to aggregate wealth when one is poor. But basic living costs are trivial to someone who is rich. Same with one's ability to leverage borrowing power. It is very easy to become a billionaire if you can get ahold of a billion dollars in credit. And much of the real value of modern billionaires is measured in their credit-worthiness rather than their real liquidity. Elon Musk is a great example - a guy whose billionaire status is almost entirely bound up in how his car company and his social media company and his aerospace company are valued.
The speculative valuation of these firms is driven by the availability of lending. That's why Tesla, a company that produces less than 1M vehicles/year is valued at twice the market cap of Toyota, a company that produces over 10M vehicles/year.
TL;DR; The millionaire/billionaire distinction isn't linear. It is exponential and heavily speculative. Real utility value isn't what gets measured. And so the distinction between a millionaire and a billionaire is far more about one's ability to borrow money than one's actual accumulated assets.
And much of the real value of modern billionaires is measured in their credit-worthiness rather than their real liquidity. Elon Musk is a great example - a guy whose billionaire status is almost entirely bound up in how his car company and his social media company and his aerospace company are valued.
This describes most figures with a net worth over a few million - most of the time most of that wealth is in the form of non-liquid assets like owning pieces of companies or real estate. Much of their wealth is in their ability to borrow against speculative income from those sources.
I'm currently a millionaire because at the time, it was cheaper to buy then it is to rent. There was a first-time homebuyer bonus also and we only needed 3.5% down. We figured if we just broke even when we wanted to move, it would have been worth it. This was back in 2009. Then, waited 10 years and I can't afford that condo that I bought with my income today.
Yeah, saying millionaire/billionaire as a category is gibberish. You have to be a millionaire if you want to do something crazy, like, I dunno, retire comfortably when you're 65. You have to be a billionaire, well, never. Nobody needs to be a billionaire.
I'd like to be a millionaire, but that is an method to achieve another goal, not the goal itself.
I'd like to vertically farm algae on an industrial scale as an atmospheric carbon sink, and additionally see if there is any way to do so profitably while remaining carbon negative. 1 million dollars would probably be enough to construct a small facility and hire the staff and experts I would need to figure this out.
"Millionare/billionaire" as an identity should be an insult.
Anybody with an industrial mindset will bare minimum want to take any large amount of liquid asset and turn it into production. Build and improve factories, fund research, improve living conditions near your operations. Having money acruing interest can be part of that, but should not be your primary revenue stream.
Don't wait to be a millionaire for that. See if you can find people who are also interested in it and build it as a co-op.
That said, I think you'll run into problems with the square-cube problem. Volume of algae goes up by a cube factor, but they need light. That light has to be fed by energy that has to be gathered by taking up surface area of the Earth, like solar and wind, but that only goes up by a square factor. Hydro and nuclear sources are maybes here, but you'd have to scale way, way up to make that viable (many billions of dollars, not millions). Presumably, you don't want to use energy from carbon-based sources just to suck that carbon back into algae.
Being a millionaire is a good goal if you want to be able to retire before you're ancient. You need something like that just to live. No one needs to be a billionaire - the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is staggering.
Nobody wants to enter professions that require hard work because it pays pittance relative to popular entertainers, and traditional milestone purchases have become moving targets, so why not gamble it all?
Right, but if you stop buying coffee every single day, even a cheap cup, that's like $30-100 saved per month or $1200 or more in a year. That's not nothing. That dread you get around the holidays of "will I have enough money to buy presents?", well, now you can buy presents.
People seriously buy coffees every day? I like coffee, and I have enough disposable income to buy coffees often outside, but honestly never do it. Maybe it's because I grew up poor but it seems an awfully wastefuk habit. I have coffee at home before work, or in the office (free).
If that was a typo, let it retroactively not be. Wastefuk is a great word, especially how you used it, which I read as adjectivizing 'the habits of a Wastefuk.'
Don't be a wastefuk, everyone. Make your coffee at home. But not with k cups.
It's extremely wasteful. In college I was spending a lot on coffee, but as an adult who actually has to worry about budgeting, it's a poverty trap. North America runs on convenience items.
I don't think it's because you grew up poor. It's because why would you buy coffee everyday?
I buy coffee almost everytime I'm at an airport or a train station, but that's like... once every two months? If I would commute by train, I wouldn't buy coffee everytime I'm at the train station, I would just wait until I'm in the office to grab a cup.
But I did buy a coffee daily, when I was in university. There was no way to get a coffee besides buying one, so I bought one. So I think thats the main thing about buying daily, necessity. Some companies only have paid machines, so you buy a coffee daily when at work. In school or university you don't have a coffee machine available, so you buy one daily.
Meh, I'm a M-F daily coffee buyer here. My husband will only drink coffee if we're at breakfast somewhere, and it's just him and I at the house.
I drink plain black gas station coffee though, so my costs are likely negligible to others who prefer more..."fancy" varieties. I pay $1.16 for 20 Oz.
Dutch Bros is giving Starbucks a run for their money here in Texas. Both franchises are PACKED every time I drive past, regardless of time of day. Just...insane drive thru lines. Never had DBs, but I've heard it's decent.
A lot of gas stations sell refill mugs that people use every day. I admit I did do a daily coffee run to a gas station nearby when I worked my last job, but it was because they literally never washed the coffee pot or emptied it out from the day before and it literally had grease all over it. Yeah, it did end up costing me money, but fuck me if I was going to drink that shit. And there was no way to get through that job without a lot of caffeine.
For a sense of proportion, in a housing market where house prices go up 5% a year, a $200k house (which nowadays is cheap), goes up $10k in a year.
So that "trick" barelly slows down the rate at which you're getting further behind on your chance of getting your own place to live, even a cheap on in a moderatelly growing market.
Such barebones saving only works if you're really really close to being able to afford a house, otherwise you're just making your life a bit more miserable for no actual gain as the extra savings are just going to be sucked out in paying for just about anything where realestate costs have an impact (so, not just somthing quite directly affected like your rent, but also pretty much all products and services bought from stores and companies who rent their space).
At this point, if you don't have the income, you won't have the savings. You won't save your way to home ownership by cutting coffee out. But if you're a cup-a-day person from Dunkin or Starbucks or Tims or wherever, start making coffee at home and take back some of your money. I'd much rather make coffee at home and have an extra $1200 per year back.
After making coffee at home and figuring out exactly the way I like it to be made, I hardly ever consider rolling the dice on one if I can help it. Getting it while out and about is only for when I have no other choice (not being home for a long time). The cost savings are just gravy.