Can I step in, here?
There's rich, and there's rich.
I make about $60K a year. But I have an awesome life. I live like a millionaire. No seriously. I don't have a Ferrari or a penthouse. I've got something better.
I don't go to work.
It's taken me ten years to get here. I own three small businesses, and am a part owner in two more. I worked a day job for ten years, lived at home for two until I bought my first business -- a $40,000 partial stake in a pair of dump trucks that were leased to a contractor -- and spent the next eight years putting every spare cent into savings to buy new business ventures. Some of these are doing very well. One of them is going gangbusters. A few have gone t!ts-up and the companies themselves have gone bankrupt. I net around $5K a month, and I work about ten hours a week. Sometimes less.
My secret? I have a Business degree and a hell of a lot of patience.
Being a business owner is the ONLY way to go. I see you miserable bastards working 50 hours a week including your commute, for the same money, crammed into cubicles, crammed into gridlock, working jobs you hate. You couldn't pay me enough to go back to "work." I've got a next-door neighbor who's a VP at a software company and he makes four times what I do, but his life sucks. All he does is work.
A lot of you have a problem: someone told you that the way to get ahead was to work, and save, and invest, and then retire. HA! Invest? What's a good 401(k) turning right now -- 5%? If you're lucky? My first $40,000 investment netted me $10,000 the first year. Net. That's a 25% return. Now, you may think, "$10,00 a year? I can't live on that!!" And you're right. But in ten years, when you have 5 or more businesses each netting $10K per year -- in my case, one of them considerably more -- well, do the math.
I was lucky: my father owned his own business, and didn't want me to become a coporate guy. He put this idea into my head when I was in college. I just recently bought into his company as an owner.
There's a book -- I hadn't read it when I first went down this road, it was recommended to me by someone when I told them what I was working on. Read *Rich Dad, Poor Dad* by Kyosaki (sp?).
Finish college, go Finance or Business, and then be broke for a few years and save everything. Every dollar. Drink Folgers instead of Starbucks for three years. Rent a basement apartment. Eat homemade skirt steak fajitas and tuna fish. Drive your beater Subaru from high school. Hang out a dive bars and only hit Happy Hour. Use your savings to start a business. Or two. Or five. By the time you're 30, you'll be living like a f---king playboy, and you'll have all day to spend in the gym so you can go compete with the miserable 25-year-olds at night. They'll be whining about the lives they hate, and you'll be saying, "Hey, it's only midnight. I don't have to be anywhere tomorrow. Who wants to go have a drink on my boat?"
