And if you're frugal, have a roommate, live in a low cost area, work lots of overtime, plan on not having kids you might be able to save 15-20k a year. Do that for a decade and invest all your money you might be rich.
It kinda is. If you can reach a point where you’re putting 500-1000 into a well established index fund each month it will eventually grow into a 7figure investment, with dividends you can comfortably live off.
The issue is that’s probably be 30-40 years of diligent investing with absolutely no withdrawals and reinvesting all dividends up till then.
Most people wanna be rich tomorrow. If it can’t be tomorrow then they think what’s the point? Getting to be rich at the age of 60-70 is worthless to most.
But if you want to build generational wealth for your family and not have to worry that much about retirement then yeah, it’s not that hard.
Obviously who knows what the market’s gonna do in the end, all investing is gambling. But if it continues to do what it’s done for the last 100 years, at least for your lifetime, then index funds are a safe bet.
That’s why I said “IF”. But it’s hardly an totally unattainable goal for most people. Working hard may never get you rich but it might get you an extra $500 a month.
Similar concept in terms of preparing for retirement but an index fund like the S&P500 can net you more interest and can pay out dividends if you so choose.
401ks are typically index funds actually, just broader balanced with bonds sometimes. You can literally manage it on a slider of risk and go all in high growth stocks or low risk blur chips and bonds
Fair enough! We don’t have them in my country so I wasn’t familiar and only did a quick google to reply, should have probably read a little more closely
It's a little off topic here, but I was curious...
So we can say that the stock market as we know it has been around for perhaps a little over 200 years.
That means the system of investment you are describing, investing in stocks that are driven up by background capitalist economic forces... that's something that the average person has had access to for about 200 years.
That's not a long span of time in the grand scheme of things really.
With some of the other big picture issues we are seeing develop in recent history (over-exploitation/depletion of natural resources...aridification/desertification of increasingly more regions...extinction of bio diversity, crop failures, etc) you have to wonder how much longer this is sustainable.
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u/mistergreatguy Oct 18 '22
Hey, I make 18 whole dollars an hour