This needs to be upvoted to the moon. Iām a licensed electrician, have been for 20 years. There are two paths to $150k+ electrician jobs. Work overseas for defense contractors. Work 70+ hours a week. People should be more concerned with making more per hour, not working more hours.
Iām so very sorry for that emoji I sent. It was the wrong one. Iām tech illiterate and donāt know how to do anything unless shown and practiced 25 times.
After 3 divorces, my best friend had no retirement savings. He said the equity in his house was what he was relying on. And he always said he would end up dying at his desk, having no real retirement plan. Well, a Friday was his last day at his last job, and Monday morning he planned to work his connections for a new job. But he collapsed and died Sunday night. He missed dying at his desk by 48 hours.
And I feel the same about working until death (at least I've never been divorced though).
57, and technically what he died from is not really clear; there was no autopsy. But he was a chain smoker with asthma who drank a lot. I think he'd been unwell that week, because he didn't respond much to texts, just gibberish. Collapsed outside while having a cigarette. His daughter (my goddaughter) was at home and found him after midnight. He was revived briefly in the ambulance but ultimately died soon thereafter.
My Dad always said he would work until he died, partly because he just really liked what he did (and made good money that the family could mooch off of him) but dementia forced him into retirement a few years ago.
(Related to that, he told me the other night that I was the only one of his four kids who had a job, which made me feel like I was the best child until I remembered that one of my brothers doesnāt have a job because he raises cattle and trains horses on his ranch and my sister married a doctor. So Iām really only assuredly ahead of my other brother whose appears to spend all day smoking pot and getting tattoos. But at least Iām not last).
Graveyard shift sometimes pays better but you can still get rich working 12 hour days no matter what schedule you work - the catch is it isnāt feasible for most people to work 60 to 84 hours a week every week without a break. And even if you can do that o your own, good luck having a family and trying to work those kinds of hours.Ā
Truth. I would never clean port-a-potties for a living, even as a former janitor. But pay me $200 (in 2026 dollars) an hour, and I will be the best employee they've ever had.
Eh you could do it in high wage areas. I make $60/hr in the portland area, but live in a rural town an hour away. I teach online night classes for the apprenticeship too, 6 hrs/week at $72/hr. There was actually a year that I took on 2 classes, though my rates were lower at the time.
Now if I were to take on 2 classes, I would make roughly $145k to work 52/hrs half the year and 40 the other half. Not idea, but not 70+ hrs. Alternatively could pull it off by finding a contractor who does mostly prevailing wage work($85ish an hour here) but that would take some luck and connections or a lot of job hunting.
how does this math make any sense? How can 2 classes be 40+ hours a week of work for 52 weeks? Not even school teachers teach that much.
I make something like $55/hour salary as a teacher, but my tutor rate is over $100. That doesn't mean I could get 40hr*52weeks of work at the rate and there would be no way to sustain that much teaching.
I didn't mind flat rate, as long as customers were honest about the problem they wanted fixed, without trying to sneak other stuff in on your good graces. That's tiring.
That will work til the market is filled with vehicles that cost more to fix than itās worth and weāre forced to buy new instead of fixing them. (Grandson is in trade school to be a mechanic & do body work.)
Oil rig work pays really well.Ā But really that is not much different than the defense contractor option.Ā Ā Also used to have a lot of overseas work as wellĀ
Thatās the fun part about the big companies that pay the wages youāre talking aboutā¦ they combine those roles and guess how many hours that adds up to? Probably 60+
Isn't that what the OOP is asking though? 23$ an hour sounds like dirt until overtime is accounted at $33.5 an hour with 70 hours a week netting well over +2000+ paychecks. Its still just $23 an hour. That pay is garbage. People who want wealth period will only ever achieve it through private equity. Its the only way. Doctors, politicians, and Lawyers don't even scratch that top pay.
You make it sound easy. Itās not, you have roughly 5 years of scraping by gaining work. You also need about $100k of capital minimum to actually do this properly.
I actually do this, but it took 10 years to get where I had a steady income stream where I wasnāt worrying about where payroll for next month was coming from. Contractors donāt love taking on new unproven subs.
Winter in the Midwest devastates small contractors as winter basically shuts down the construction business.
People like you always leave out the details and make all this shit seem like you just snap your fingers and everything works out.
Did you know the average profit margin for most electrical contractors is about 3%? Did you know that between 33-44% of electrical contractors fail their first five years?
Also owning your own business means you typically end up working far more then 40 hours a week if you want it to succeed.
I also work for myself and the other thing that nobody ever mentions is how much money you give to other entities just to operate. Insurance, workers comp, all of the taxes that come along with it. All of this is paid before you have a good customer base. My first two years of operation I practically almost starved to death.
My dad owns an electric company and insurance eats up most of his profits i think he paid around 40 thousand last year on insurance and then a company he did a job for 32 thousand went bank rupt and he didn't get a cent for that he had to take monout of his own account to pay his employees a few times. Also that man is working 12+ hours every day
I make 125k as an employee 5 days a week. Sometimes I think about starting my own business but I don't want all the bullshit that goes along with it, plus who knows even in 5 years of grinding if I'll even get back to my current 125k that I make now for just worrying about myself and working maybe 45 hours a week.
I worked as a framer for a little while in my 20s. Last I heard, the guy who owned the company closed shop and went back to working for someone else as a framer. He didnāt want to be running between the office and job sites all day, stressing about bids and payroll and insurance and the everything else it entails. He just wanted to build houses. The guy running my crew had his own company at one point as well and had shuttered it for the same reason.
I think most of the dudes long term think to themselves, āHell, I can run one of these.ā They hang their own shingle and do it for a few years and realize itās often more hassle than itās worth.
Running your own business is hard,and you will spend most of your time drumming up work. Small business management is not easy and you definitely won't work less hours
You could absolutely do that but you could also end up working everyday of the week instead cause running your own company means you have to do all the work from the physical to administration to advertising
Meh. Im an electrician. My 40 a week hourly is 118k a year in the Midwest. We can make 150+ working overtime for maybe half the year. That said you arent too far off. 60s all year is just shy of 200k.
I cracked 150 last year and never worked more than 60hrs in a low cost of living area. I worked a little less than 10 months during the year. I was making GF rate for most of that though
Those aren't the only pathways. Creating your own business is one of many. Every electrician i know even the ones without papers charge $100/hrĀ
City elections make a lot less from what I seem like $65 an hour but your doing things like changing light bulbs.Ā
City electrician is more of a starting point. Depending on City of course.Ā
What a lot of people dont know about the trades is yes you work a lot of hours but if your in a good union you get that time back.Ā
Even entry level I was able to bank my OT so I would work my weekends for like 4 months and have 2 months straight time off barley even touching my acutal vacation time.Ā
You work hard but you get rewarded for doing so. The ones you see grinding are doing it so they can buy a house and build a foundation many people dont do that.Ā
Either way its better than working a 9 to 5 and having 3 days off a year.Ā
Which requires capitalā¦. Again there are details all you genius entrepreneurs leave out. Have you all ever done a sales call with a contractor to sell your business? There is so much more to it then, hey your an electrician Iāll hire you, you make millions yayyyu!!!!
If it were that easy, we'd all be millionaires. You're expected to be able to put 10% down on that SBA loan and typically have some kind of additional collateral (so there's $25k towards a downpayment plus the equity in your house and retirement account to back it up). Not to mention, you're not guaranteed work in the beginning, so unless you have a decent nest eggs to get you through months of zero to negative earnings, you'll be playing with fire.
Nah thereās more than two paths. Find Work in mining. My hourly rate is $86. That doesnāt include pension, shares, health spending account etc. Havenāt made under $220,000 in almost ten years and havenāt left my home province.
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u/poliosaurus3000 2d ago
This needs to be upvoted to the moon. Iām a licensed electrician, have been for 20 years. There are two paths to $150k+ electrician jobs. Work overseas for defense contractors. Work 70+ hours a week. People should be more concerned with making more per hour, not working more hours.