I’m not smart so much as intellectual; which is the polar opposite of what makes people rich.
Exactly this - I can’t fathom giving my life over to the study and practice of something I find dreary just so I can buy bigger/more expensive car(s) and house(s).
Plus I have an exceedingly low threshold for bullshit - which is what all lucrative careers are made of. Gotta know how to kiss everyone’s ass - I never learned to pucker well enough. Maybe you could say I lack the social skills to be “rich”.
I do, however, have a great husband, kid, friends and home - so I don’t feel the lack of being monetarily rich.
I’ve never been motivated, money wise. I mean, never. Even when growing up, I thought that the fact that the US ran on money was not really a good thing. Not that money is evil, but not worth wasting my life for.
Of course I kinda wasted it anyway, but I had fun 
IMHO, you’re rich when you can (a) afford an upper-class lifestyle (whether or not you indulge in it) while (b) not having to work on a regular basis to support it.
I’m not a salesman.
I grew up in the upper lower class. I remember mornings searching roadside ditches to find empty soda bottles we could return for deposit so we would have enough to buy school lunch. We didn’t have the 40 cents. We made barely too much to qualify for free or reduced price school lunches.
I took out a freaking pile of student loans and worked two or three jobs at a time to make my way through university. I worked for a small biotech startup after college earning near poverty wages plus equity. I ate ramen noodles, canned beans or spaghetti-o’s. I ran the grill at the summertime weekly social gatherings of an area club in exchange for being able to take home leftover burgers or chicken. Protein. Yum. I biked miles to and from work to save bus fare.
The startup business was sold. Then the new parent company was sold. I got stock options. The stock went up. I did very well.
No inherited wealth to build from. No welfare. Not much in the line of government help at all (student loan guarantees being the exception).
Just smarts and dedicated hard work and a bit of luck.
If you guys know so much about women, how come you’re here at like the Gas ‘n’ Sip on a Saturday night completely alone drinking beers with no women anywhere?
Same reason.
My name is Rich. I’m also poor. I’m a walkin’ talkin’ contradiction.
For the record, Rich Son of Rich is the worst Klingon name ever.
By my own standards, I am rich. So that’s what I chose.
I’m not rich for the same reason I’m not thin - lack of motivation. I know how to get rich and I know how to get thin, I just don’t want to put in the effort. I WISH I had put in the effort years ago but right now, not so much.
The main two are poor decisions and lack of motivation…the the latter was often a cause for the former. I don’t think I’d be rich if I made better decisions years and years ago, but I’m damn sure I’d have more money that I do now, for several reasons.*
I also checked “Never caught a break.” I mean, let’s face it, there are plenty of rich AND smart people out there who are rich because they inherited/were born into money, or won the lottery, or something along those lines. Maybe their smarts would have made them rich anyway, but we’ll never know.
*1) Studied more and done better in undergrad to bolster my chances of getting a better job.
2) Gone to grad school either sooner if I couldn’t get that better job, or even if I did take that first job out of college and went to grad school at the same time, I could have done more research into how to better pay for it so as not to be $50k more in debt.
3) And when in grad school, do as #1 so I could have actually finished, and had a better chance to get a decent, well-paying job instead of having to slink back to that shitty job I left in the first place.
I am rich. I started out poor- I had a single mom, no support from dad, been on my own since I was 18. Got kicked out of high school.
Now I do what I love, and I get paid a really large amount of money for doing it. There isn’t a ton of demand for what I do, as I’m very specialized, but there aren’t a lot of people who do it. As such, I’m pursued by recruiters and I earn a salary which I would’ve thought impossible fifteen years ago.
Like I said, I make a lot of money. I don’t *feel *rich, but really, who does? I think everyone wants to make more money than they currently make. The only thing I’m really worried about is having enough money for my retirement.
I’m a lover not an earner.
“If you’re so smart, why isn’t your boss rich?”
I received poor parenting and my problems as a kid weren’t properly addressed and handled. As a result, I performed dismally in school, graduated by the skin of my teeth, and squandered my college years and most of my 20’s.
I’m making up for it now by going to college part-time while working full-time. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’ll never be rich, but I can at least be comfortable.
Alrighty then.
Money didn’t even cross my radar when I thought about what I wanted to do for a living when I was a kid. If it had, I’d have applied to Oxford or Cambridge, which I refused to do out of inverse snobbery and because all my teachers thought I should. (I’d been “that kid”, moved up a year at school and still top of the class, but by the time I was 15 or so I was actively distancing myself from the academic kids and hanging around with more popular kids, who were basically wasters, just to prove that I could fit in with the cool crowd :rolleyes: ).
So I ended up going to a decent but unexceptional university, doing a science degree (no money there!). Then in my first year at university I discovered the internet and wasted lots of hours on that. I ended up with an averagely good degree (2:1) and no real sense of ambition.
Still I landed a fairly well paying job within a couple of years, but my money management was terrible. Looking back I could have been saving £1,000 a month for several years as my essential outgoings were so low, but I wasted money on travelling, and having a good time, and also took up gambling on betting exchanges, because I thought I was smarter than other people and could win their money. I wasn’t and I couldn’t, but it took a lot of money before I accepted that fact.
Now, I still have a well paying job, but I also have a daughter and my wife no longer works, so we look to be stuck in the “getting by OK but never going to be rich” category.
I’d like to find a new career because I am stuck in a dying industry (newspapers) but I have no clue what I want to do, or what I am able to do, and I don’t have any savings to fall back on.
Just curious - what do you do? Keep it vague if you have to.
If rich and smart always go together explain Donald Trump!