I realized something the other day, about that ‘Team Street Smart’ having three times the net worth of the ‘Book Smarts.’ It sounds impressive on the surface, but if you start looking into it at all, well…
Here’s the Book smart ages: 39,34,32,31,29,29, 26,26,25. Average age: 30.1
Here’s the Street smart ages: 41,37,37,32,31,29,28,22,21. Average age: 30.8
That doesn’t seem like much of a difference, but you really need to look at # of ‘working years’, that is, how long could they have been out there working fulltime?
The Street team don’t have any degrees past high school, so we can say they have had about (30.8 - 18) years in which to earn money. That’s 12.8 years over which they could have been employed full time and accumulating money.
The Book Team is a bit more difficult. They all have at least a Bachelor degree, three have law degrees (that’s at least three more years, yes?) and it would surprise me if there weren’t at least two MBAs scattered among the rest – what do those take? At very least two more years? Guessing wildly, I’ll say that on average they were ‘in school’ until 18 + 4 (for the BA) + 1.5 (for advanced degrees) years, or 23.5 years. So they’ve only been accumulating money for (30.1 - 23.5) years, or 6.6 years!
12.8 versus 6.6 years could explain most of the ‘three times’ greater net worth right there. Is there a remaining tilt in favor of the Street smarts accumulating money faster?
Hardly. Because I think we should assume that these people paid for some to all of their first four years of college themselves, and probably an even greater percentage of the cost of studying for the advanced degrees. Some through savings and/or summer jobs, sure, but it’s a rare college student who doesn’t graduate with hefty loans to be paid off.
I have no way of knowing how much debt these people accumulated, but we can play guessing games. Here’s one (probably not insanely inaccurate) guess:
Let’s say the students’ contribution for those 5.5 additional years of schooling came to half of the total costs, and that the total cost per year of schooling was $15 thousand. 1/2 times 5.5 time $15,000 = $41,250.00, ignoring interest and all that goodness.
So under those assumptions, the members of the BookSmart Team had to earn an average of $41,000 over living expenses during just 6.6 years of post-school work just to get out of debt. Only after that would their ‘accumulated wealth’ start being ‘counted’. By countrast, every single buck the Street Smart team managed to save over 12.8 years counted.
Bottom line, comparing their net worths at that point in their lives has got to be an utterly meaningless way to judge the relative success of the two teams.
Which I’m sure Trump & Burnett and Co all knew, but they had to find SOMETHING they could use make the chances of the StreetSmart crew look less hopeless.
