I am not sure how to put it, but I was wondering how many dopers are rich and highly successful people in their real lives.
I know, I know that success is not always measured in terms of wealth and position of a person, but let that be.
I might be wrong, but is seems that the rich and powerful do not subscribe to message boards in general. Do people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, CEOs of conglomerates and banks etc., or even people near the top of the corporate success ladder or climbing it fast, ever subscribe to online forums and message boards?
I know many celebreties have their own blogs and twitter accounts, but that is not the same as participating on message boards.
So what is the reason we don’t find these people on forums like this one. Is it that they do not have the time to participate or they do not find it interesting to post or read stuff off the boards or what?
As a follow up of this question, I am going to try and set up a poll to figure out the profile of the dopers with the respect to the same question.
I have not set up a poll before and therefore if I make a mess of it, I request the admins or mods to correct it.
I also assume that the identity of the voters on this poll remains anonymous.
What’s the cutoff for the “high earner” part of HENRY? There might be a decent number of people on the board who make good money but don’t have enough saved up to qualify as really rich.
One may have ancestral wealth, or won a lottery, or something. That does not count.
I am only trying to understand the profile of individuals who subscribe to message boards.
And if the histogram indicates my assumption to be true, that the rich and successful are less likely to be found on message boards, then I would like to understand why so?
Being rich is based on net worth and not income. There are plenty of people making several hundred thousand dollars a year who live paycheck or even much go further into debt each month. There are plenty of multi-millionaires who got that way by diligently investing a significant part of their more meager income over time. They aren’t really related concepts.
Of course savings matter. Don’t look at wealth as income only. If I have $10M in the bank and no debt, I can draw on that (and not care about the interest) for years. That gives me a very different profile than someone who makes $100k a year and has $2000 a month in house payments.
Also, don’t generalize this board to “messageboards.” Each will have its own population.
And remember that a poll about income on the internet is worth about the paper its printed on.
I would have to agree that not taking into account net worth pretty much makes the poll useless. You should read a book called "the millionaire next door’ and you will realize that people who have a high net worth are for the most part very average people who are just good savers and life below their means.
Someone making $80k a year but who saves $40k a year and has a net worth of 1.2 million is much wealthier then someone making $200K who spends $199k a year with little or no savings. Having money doesn’t mean being flashy.
Yes, this thread is really asking two potentially very different things. One is “How many rich people post here?” and the other is “How many people with high incomes post here?” The two are correlated, certainly, but you can absolutely have one without the other.
My wife and I should be in the 100k+ bracket, but our salaries are depressed by where we live, which has one of the worst pay scales in the country for comparable work.
Well, I know for a fact there are at least several six-figure earning upper-middle class corporate types like me who post here. Before it was became a pay site, a lot of lawyers, investment bankers and management consultant types used to post of Vault. But that’s also a career web site that tends to cater to upper income professions.
If I were to hazard a guess, a lot of rich and successful types probably don’t post here probably for the same reason a lot of posters here sometimes turn me off (or may be turned off by me). Everyone likes to bitch about work or their boss or the government or whatever from time to time. However, it gets to a point with some people that they clearly have a very different perspective on the world that I (and presumably other higher income people) just can’t relate to. And from what I’ve seen, if someone like me posts the wrong thing, it can be taken the wrong way and people get offended or resentful. Things me or my friends might say to each other as a joke might be really offensive and hurtful to someone trying to make ends meet on $20k a year.
I would those differences just get worse as income rises. For example, the partner who runs my group invited us all up to his house for a Christmas party. A pretty nice gesture actually since the firm didn’t have one this year. But there might also be an unintended perception of “hey everyone! Look at my Rich Guy House! This is what all your hard work buys!”
Well, I checked a box in the poll before I read that you didn’t want combined income. On my own, I have little to none. My hubby makes ~90K/year at his job, plus we have a couple of investment properties (17 units total) that bring in some money. I manage the investment properties, but my day-to-day health is not good enough for me to really get a ‘paying job’, and I draw no salary from the job I do have. I just use the money we have as I need to. If it’s something frivolous and cheap, I just buy it. If it’s something frivolous and expensive, I check with hubby first, as he manages the finances.
I’m unemployed and my unemployment finally ran out (I was on many, many state and federal extensions). My income, not counting my wife’s, is now $0.00.
Every market research study I’ve done runs into trouble getting people to report their income at the higher end. They’re all anonymous, but people don’t like reporting that.
