Besides winning the lottery or illegal criminal areas or being born into/inheriting it;
What is the quickest and easiest method for a new college graduate with student loan debt to become financially wealthy in the 1% bracket?
Develop an incredibly popular and non-obvious piece of web software, and sell it to a big company.
Start a successful business or get a good job in finance. The aforementioned degree is an MBA from Wharton, right?
The best “guarantee” is to to to law school, or go to medical school, and become a lawyer or doctor. Second to that is probably to go try to find a job on Wall Street, if your college degree / background is good enough to get you in the door.
None of those options are particularly quick and easy - you still have to work hard and be good at your job - but they are pretty well-defined and reasonably certain ways to get wealthy as long as you are capable of holding up your end of the bargain.
There are other ways that may be quicker, and easier, but they’re much more dependent on luck.
This question is too undefined to answer. What is the 1%? What is quick? What is easy?
Top 1% of income is only $400,000 per year. That’s very reachable in the finance industry. Or if you write a best seller.
Top 1% by net worth, however, is about $8.4 million. That will take longer by most routes of gaining income. Almost certainly, it becomes a matter of owning shares in a successful business. Of course, if you could predict what business that would be, you’d already be rich.
There is simply no good answer. In historical terms, though, one can say confidently that no one who has to ask this question of random strangers on the Internet has ever achieved one percent status, so the answers really don’t matter that much.
You could instead take your own company public and strike it rich that way. Or you might join a pre-IPO startup and make millions in options. But even in Silicon Valley, the chances of these things happening are low enough that they amount to winning the lottery.
This is better suited to IMHO than General Questions.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
It’s gonna be hard. Better to be 10% first then seek 1%. American dream is a lie, don’t believe it. Also people skills is much better and versatile than technical skills if you excel in it you will be 10% quite fast.
Law school? Seriously?
99% never make it to the 1%. Aim for the 25th%. Easily obtainable and still very comfortable.
Work hard, and smart. Use connections. Backstab when absolutely necessary.
How’s your ball handling skills?
That’s household income. I don’t have figures handy, but the thresholds for individual income are in the ballpark of 60% of household income, so really it’s probably more like $250k. Good software engineers make that in Silicon Valley.
The easiest way to join the 1% is to marry someone rich.
Lets not forget that typical starting pay is about 45k. Dumbest thing I ever heard. Cute: I am a lawyer and hear a l
Retainer ran out…
Today is actually a good time for top candidates to enroll in law school. We’ve been hearing that the law job market is dead for about five years, and it shows; law school applications are way down, which means student aid money (the kind you don’t have to pay back) is much easier to get. At the same time, the job market is starting to rebound, though probably too late for the 2011 graduates who’ve already given up. I went to a fourth-tier law school, so I know quite a few of those people.
Having said all that, medical school has been and remains a much less rocky path to financial success. The matriculation rate of med schools is higher, the first-year earnings are higher (except for BigLaw hires*), and the future of the job market has far fewer question marks in it. You also don’t have to worry about going to school for three years (or more) only to find yourself locked out of the job market because you didn’t pass the licensing exam.**
This may be a function of the candidates for each type of program; in my experience, any number of law students are there because they didn’t know what else to do with their lives or because they think a JD will help them in a field tangientially related to law.
So my advice is don’t go to law school unless you’re a top candidate (3.5+ undergrad GPA, 165+ LSAT), and you really want to be there.
*the largest firms hire almost exclusively from the top 14 schools, at starting salaries in the $160,000 range. Outside the BigLaw firms, you’ll be very lucky to crack $100K to start. The median salary for first year associates in my state is $50,000.
ETA: in any event, if you want to make truly big money stay away from the professions entirely. The financial sector is where it is and has always been at.
In Canada, one only needs around $200,000 Canadian to be in the “1%” by personal income, as of a couple of years ago.
Practical advice: Put every extra penny into getting those loans paid off, ASAP.
Spend substantially less than you earn. Invest regularly, before budgeting.
Wealth isn’t income. Wealth is what you build up, usually using your income.
Also, don’t marry someone who will not work with you to save and invest, and don’t get divorced.
Get a job making about $35k a year. Managing a fast-food joint would probably get you close.
Or did you mean first-world 1%?