Where does the upper class make thei money in chi? (Chicago: 2013, mortgage)

[JacksonPanther]

Correct decisions in order to gain wealth, from a guys point of view:

1. Go to college to study a high earning field. Law, medicine, engineering. Or get your MBA from a top school as soon as possible.
2. Do not be a regular guy at work. If you're a doctor, be chief resident. If you're a lawyer, get on the partner track. If you're corporate, you should be flying up the management ranks.
3. Have your parents die and leave you everything, including life insurance.
4. Marry young. Nothing wastes money more than being single, blowing money on a bachelor apartment and lifestyle. Chasing women is super expensive.
5. Working spouse, with similar income. No teachers or nurses! Remember the Huxtables - a gynecologist married to a lawyer == a huge brownstone in NYC!
6. Choose a spouse who's parents have already "made it." If her parents have expensive cars, boat, vacation home, ski condo in CO, you get to use all this stuff for free, whereas your peers have to pay for that lifestyle.
7. No kids! Ok, that may be unreasonable. Kids are fine, but no stay at home mom! Back to work 6 weeks after giving birth.
8. Have her parents nearby willing to provide free day care.
9. Buy a house at the top of your income level. Play the game of assuming the market will go up, and you will therefore make larger sums of equity than if you had bought a cheaper home.
10. As your incomes increase (remember, you're almost a partner in your firm by this point) buy a more expensive home.
11. Repeat #10 as desired.

[Attrill]

Originally Posted by JacksonPanther

Correct decisions in order to gain wealth, from a guys point of view...

Good lord that is the most assbackwards way of looking at things I've ever seen. Getting a degree is important, and I won't argue with that. I also won't argue with standing out at work, but the best way to do that is to go into a field you like and are interested in - not just pick some random field. In terms of the rest...

Originally Posted by JacksonPanther

3. Have your parents die and leave you everything, including life insurance.

No one has any control over that type of stuff, pointless advice.

Originally Posted by JacksonPanther

4. Marry young. Nothing wastes money more than being single, blowing money on a bachelor apartment and lifestyle. Chasing women is super expensive.

If chasing women is "super expensive", you're chasing the wrong type of women - and you're pretty much a loser if all you offer is money. I've always thought it's hilarious that loser guys try to look rich to talk up a woman, and then whine like babies when the women figure out they were full of crap. The solution - don't be a lying piece of 5#!&!

Originally Posted by JacksonPanther

5. Working spouse, with similar income. No teachers or nurses! Remember the Huxtables - a gynecologist married to a lawyer == a huge brownstone in NYC!

Ummm...ok. While it is important to have a two earner family, you should really try to broaden your horizons and get out of the 80's. Unless you're a guy making some serious money, you're not going to marry a woman who's making some serious money, so your advice is pretty dumb.

Originally Posted by JacksonPanther

6. Choose a spouse who's parents have already "made it." If her parents have expensive cars, boat, vacation home, ski condo in CO, you get to use all this stuff for free, whereas your peers have to pay for that lifestyle.
.

See directly above. In fact, you seem to mostly just focus on marrying someone wealthy for awhile after this point.

Originally Posted by JacksonPanther

9. Buy a house at the top of your income level. Play the game of assuming the market will go up, and you will therefore make larger sums of equity than if you had bought a cheaper home.
10. As your incomes increase (remember, you're almost a partner in your firm by this point) buy a more expensive home.
11. Repeat #10 as desired.

Getting into real estate, and staying in it for the long term, can be very helpful. But you also have to have good judgement on where you buy, when you decide to trade up, and how much debt you can carry. Simply making assumptions and lookng for a bigger house is a sure path to disaster.

[jwaiter]

Where does the upper class make thei money in chi?

Here's one example:

Kenneth C. Griffin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kenneth Cordele Griffin is an American hedge fund manager. He is the founder and CEO of Citadel LLC, a Chicago-based investment firm. As of 2012, he has an estimated net worth of $3 billion....His 2005 compensation was ranked 13th at $210 million.

His 2011 salary was $700 million, that's $1.9 million per day (even on non-work days).

[emathias]

Originally Posted by Attrill

...
No one has any control over that type of stuff, pointless advice.
...

I'm pretty sure that's a key part of a point he's trying to make - that a large component of getting really rich is largely through chance. Anyone who claims otherwise is, to use your vernacular, a "lying sack of 5#!&!"

[JacksonPanther]

Originally Posted by Attrill

Good lord that is the most assbackwards way of looking at things I've ever seen. Getting a degree is important, and I won't argue with that. I also won't argue with standing out at work, but the best way to do that is to go into a field you like and are interested in - not just pick some random field.

That "love what you do and the money will come" is a load of crap that gets fed to the middle classes. Of course we can point to a few individuals who went to college in a liberal arts field and became millionaires, but the vast majority who do that end up at Starbucks after school, and struggle for most of their lives.

Even picking a high earning field you "love" is no guarantee of wealth. There are many doctors who struggle, because they are general practitioners. There are many lawyers who struggle, because they are public defenders. If you choose these options, it sets you on a path that for the vast majority will not lead to wealth. If you want wealth, you need to make different choices.

In terms of things you can control, there's lots of things you can't control that end up deciding if you will be wealthy or not. If you buy real estate at the peak and then there is a long protracted downward spiral, you will not be wealthy. If you and your spouse each make low six figures and your spouse decides to stop working to raise the kids, or home school, you will not be wealthy. If your parents saved and have a home worth something, a few hundred grand in savings, and a big life insurance policy, their untimely death could indeed send you into the ranks of the wealthy. A lot of the people we see who appear wealthy got that way through a succession of correct choices, and some lucky breaks. That's reality.

Not sure how my statement that chasing women is expensive, turned into being a lying sack of *****. Single guys go out to bars and nightclubs, where drinks are expensive. Single guys buy clothing appropriate for nightlife, which can be expensive. Single guys pay for dates. Not sure why this is controversial.

I only made one point out of eleven that said anything about the wealth of the spouse.

[nearnorth]

Originally Posted by marothisu

Then on top of that, it has two world class universities which pay its professors and researchers pretty well.

Ha. "Pretty well" for professors and researchers, even at top universities, is usually low 6 figures- basically like middle management in the corporate world. (Med schools can be an exception, since they have to compete with what MD's can earn elsewhere.) There is far more money being made at universities by football coaches, basketball coaches, and upper-level administrators (in that order).

I agree with the rest of your post, though.

[nearnorth]

Originally Posted by JacksonPanther

4. Marry young. Nothing wastes money more than being single, blowing money on a bachelor apartment and lifestyle. Chasing women is super expensive.

Young marriages have high divorce rates. Divorce can be a lot more expensive than chasing women.

Originally Posted by JacksonPanther

9. Buy a house at the top of your income level. Play the game of assuming the market will go up

That works sometimes, but there are quite a lot of people out there who are screwed because they did exactly that in the early 2000's.

Some of your other points were solid, though.

[nearnorth]

Originally Posted by Attrill

Houses can be a pretty poor way to judge how much money someone makes.

This is true. Many people with large houses are wealthy, but many others are making large monthly payments while living paycheck-to-paycheck on an upper middle class salary (or two middle class salaries) to maintain the illusion of wealth. When you look at the data for many of the suburbs that people refer to as "affluent" you see that the median household income is something like $100-150K and the median home price is something like $700K. That's a lot of people stretched pretty thin.

[marothisu]

Originally Posted by nearnorth

Ha. "Pretty well" for professors and researchers, even at top universities, is usually low 6 figures- basically like middle management in the corporate world. (Med schools can be an exception, since they have to compete with what MD's can earn elsewhere.) There is far more money being made at universities by football coaches, basketball coaches, and upper-level administrators (in that order).

I agree with the rest of your post, though.

Well they won't pay you in the millions, that's for sure, but I am pretty sure that some tenured professors at U of Chicago and Northwestern are making a good salary. Not high six figures, but at least $200K/year The school I went to in Iowa's professors were making $130K-$150K/year. The deans of schools were making a minimum of $250K/year with a few making around $400K/year (i.e. Engineering school). It's a good school but not on the level of U Chicago or Northwestern and doesn't have even close to their endowment levels. And yeah, of course coaches of football/basketball at high major sports schools make more money than any professor.

[Mod cut: Off topic.]

[emathias]

Originally Posted by nearnorth

...
That's a lot of people stretched pretty thin.

Actually, it's usually more indicative of housing stability. People buy a house, live there 30 years and, at least until recently, voilà, it's worth a lot more than they could ever afford on only their retirement income.

Or it's indicative of a low home ownership rate, where renters bring down the average income. In the wealthy suburbs, though, it's usually reason a) above.