16 ms·
OK, You're Rich. Now What?
- sigzero 15y agoIf I am rich, I help other people.
- DrJ 15y agoeasier said then done!
- sigzero 15y agoCertainly, but being "rich" I would figure out a way.
- iaskwhy 15y agoNot really. If you are rich you may have some investments you would like to make and, in doing so, you are helping other people: you create jobs, you generate wealth for everyone, you might even make the world a better place depending on what your investment is.
- TeMPOraL 15y agoIf wealth is what people want to give you money for, you should be able to get rich by helping people.
- diego 15y agoThe only thing that happens when you're rich is that you can help more people. If you were not helping people before (whatever that means to you), you probably won't do it after.
- klbarry 15y agoNot true at all. Many people would be much more willing to give once basic expenses are taken care of (60k-100K annual income).
- tobtoh 15y agoWhat you said intuitively appears true, but it's actually not the case in real life. Helping others is not limited by time or money - you can help others in large or small ways. And the OP is absolutely correct, if you are not already helping others in some way, having more money won't change your behaviour. On a related note, I was talking to an university alumni director in Australia (where philanthropy is not culturally ingrained like in the US) and she was telling me the statistics on donations. If a student did not make a donation to the university within 5 years of leaving, 96% of them would never make a donation. However, if they made a donation within 5 years, a very large percentage of them would continue to make donations (regular or irregular) over their lifetime. How much they initially donated was irrelevant - it was the initial act of donating that determined the probability of them continuing to donate. Similarly, if you are not prepared to donate a few dollars when on a 'low' income, you are unlikely to change your behaviour when you are on a 'high' income.
- Eliezer 15y agoAgree with parent, disagree with grandparent. If there's one thing you learn when you're doing philanthropy, it's that people who give to charity this year will probably give to charity next year; and people who are planning to give to charity "next year" will, next year, be planning to give to charity "next year". Donors donate, nondonors don't.
- sigzero 15y agoGood point. Glad I do help people now then. Will make it easier when I get "rich". :)
- benologist 15y agohttp://kiva.org/ http://kiva.org/ You can help people now, and as a bonus you generally get your money back too.
- skybrian 15y agoIf you're serious about charity, you should be reading http://www.givewell.org/ http://www.givewell.org/
- samic 15y agodon't give the money to him! he's lying!
- arkitaip 15y agoGoogle actually invited some very high profile people to teach its staff about wealth and investing http://www.sanfranmag.com/story/best-investment-advice-youll-never-get http://www.sanfranmag.com/story/best-investment-advice-youll...
- chopsueyar 15y agoI thought being rich was having liquid assets, not a billion dollars in stock that would decrease in worth as you sell large chunks of it.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- holdenc 15y agoIs this question really that hard to answer? I'll take some stabs: - Dalton (school) for the kids, and a nice donation to the alma matter to assure legacy status - Museum board memberships for the wife - A vanity career in writing, photography or abstract art - The best therapist money can buy
- iskander 15y agoAre there any high profile examples of people who didn't change their lifestyle much at all?
- matwood 15y agoProbably, but the problem is if they didn't change much they are probably not high profile. The millionaire next door type of thing.
- corin_ 15y agoIt's quite possible to be high profile because of what made you rich, not because of how you spend money. Bill Gates would still be known even if he lived in a $1500/month appartment, drove a car worth $500 and left all his money unused in a bank account.
- ericb 15y agoAt one time, Warren Buffett would have been a perfect example, but I think he has a private plane now, which dilutes the impression a bit.
- cagenut 15y agoSolve education. Use the results to solve food & energy.
- nazgulnarsil 15y agoenergy is solved. http://www.energyfromthorium.com/history.html http://www.energyfromthorium.com/history.html potable water is solved as a side effect of thorium reactors. food was solved by the Bosch-Haber process, it's a matter of distribution now.
- pstuart 15y agoAlmost. There's the little trick of getting establishment buy-in.
- ugh 15y agoPolitics and engineering are not the same.
- nazgulnarsil 15y agoI have some nice beach front property to sell to anyone thinking they're going to solve a political problem.
- ugh 15y agoTons of political problems have been solved in the past†. If politics were incapable of solving problems society wouldn’t exist. It’s just that you can’t go about solving political problems like you would go about solving engineering problems. That’s all. †A few examples of relatively targeted efforts to achieve set political goals: - Women’s suffrage in the UK and other countries - Abolishment of the death penalty in France and other countries - The civil rights movement in the US Those are all high-profile examples but solving problems in a way that doesn’t cause chaos or disasters is one of the core tasks of any political system.
- 15y ago
- dr_ 15y agoStart a spaceship company.
- mahyarm 15y agodr_ is the secret account of elon musk.
- dfischer 15y agoThis is exactly why I want to be rich.
- rdl 15y agoI wanted to get absurdly (>$25b) rich to be the guy who financed the first mission to Mars, as a private venture. I think Elon is going to beat me to it. Somehow, this doesn't really upset me at all.
- maeon3 15y agoWhen I read: "Give your money away" as an item in the list, I clicked "x" on the window. I was expecting advice on how to keep the money, not on how to blow it all like an idiot.
- mahmud 15y agofund the thowra.
- alttab 15y agoThe most interesting thing about the article was that the advice was not just for the rich, but general investment advice for anyone. It seemed as though this sample suggested passive investment with an emphasis on diversification of speculative tech stocks. This would be especially important to paper millionaires who "have the money" who now need to safely and wisely get it to cash. Not a problem for most of us yet, but I'd imagine I'd hit the books if I legally obtained access to millions like some of these founders have. I'd also imagine experienced founders who have seen checks for millions before would already know what to do.
- reasonattlm 15y agoBeing rich means that you have mastered how to turn time into money. Great. So you've got the hang of half of the game - which is no time to sit back and rest on your laurels. Now you have to master turning money into time. http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2008/02/what-is-wealth.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2008/02/what-is-wealth.ph... We all go through engineering our cycles of property and time; how can we best optimize time to generate property that can be used to make our time more effective? We do this in small ways and large, but everyone does it. Some people do it so effectively they launch themselves into property escape velocity, exponentially increasing the effectiveness of their time and exploring the outer limits of what it means to maintain ownership of a great deal of property. Interestingly, despite the grand importance of time as the absolute foundation of wealth, very little progress has been made in the most obvious optimization of all: creating property that can create more time. More heartbeats, more health, more time spent alive and active. Rejuvenation medicine, capable of repairing the damage of aging. Tissue engineering to generate replacements for worn organs. The cure for cancer. If you could do all that, then the much more productive form of escape velocity becomes possible - longevity escape velocity. Why strive to maintain an empire of property that will crumble to dust when the degenerations of age catch up with you when you could be that fit-looking guy having a blast swimming in the breakers every other Sunday for as long as you like? Wealth is exactly time, and here we are, bordering the era of biotechnology for the repair of aging. Planning ahead for the best possible personal future starts with investment now. Think about it.
- jodrellblank 15y agoInterestingly, despite the grand importance of time as the absolute foundation of wealth, very little progress has been made in the most obvious optimization of all: creating property that can create more time. Very little process ... since when? Doesn't all the progress from the belief in disease as unbalanced humours to MRI machines and lab grown bladders count? Universal cure for cancer, organ regrowth and regeneration, these aren't going to be single inventions by a single small team in one project, all changes in the world which make them more likely are progress. when you could be that fit-looking guy having a blast swimming in the breakers every other Sunday for as long as you like? If you could implant a realistic memory of you swimming in the breakers every other Sunday for a thousand years, such that you felt like you had had a long life, would you?
- briggsbio 15y agoThis article pisses me off. This is certainly a giant windfall, but Reid is already wealthy and has shown that he doesn't fall into the ridiculous sensationalist stereotypes proffered by this moronic journalist. And he's been building this company for 8 fricking years! Hoffman one of the most visionary and prolific angel investors and (never met but hear he is) a fantastic person. He had a substantial exit when one of the largest internet acquisitions happened with PayPal (anyone know his total take?). And with his stake in Facebook he's had "paper X00 millionaire" status for quite a while. And Zynga? And about a hundred other angel investments? Not to mention that with the liquidity now afforded by the secondary markets, the term "paper millionaire" is ringing a bit hollow when talking about the elite consumer Internet companies who have active demand in SecondMarket and the like. So to characterize him as this rags to riches story illustrative of the flash-in-the-pan excess of some new dot-com "bubble.0" is frankly disgusting. Oh, and to answer the journalist's question of what to do with all that money? Do what Reid has done, and usher in the next generation of successful startups (with surely some casualties along the way, but hey, that's investing).
- Kilimanjaro 15y agoI am always coding like a maniac to make enough money so I can finally retire to do what I love most, coding.
- aj700 15y agoIf I were American, and I was suddenly rich, the first priority would be to get out of the land of God and guns and sexual repression known as the USA. Yes, it's a great place to spend time, but not all of the time. It has many advantages for the entrepreneur. I love it. But the ignorance and attitudes put me right off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Austrian_citizens http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Austrian_... You can "invest" your way into an Austrian passport, then live anywhere in Europe you like. Favourite tax havens include Monaco, Switzerland, Britain (non-dom). Europe is not more civilised because it is older, but because we are prepared to pay for public education, because we do not have world's strongest streak of anti-intellectualism and minarchism. We are socially liberal in what we demand but conservative in behaviour. Equality, nationalism, feminism and statism are not dirty words. Flame away.
- nazgulnarsil 15y agothe others are plenty arguable but nationalism is a plenty dirty word. imaginary lines don't alleviate moral responsibility.
- hristov 15y agoOf course there are people calling themselves "wealth psychologists" now.
- yason 15y agoI wouldn't need billions, really. Not even millions. Just some income, I wouldn't mind if it was capital income, if some benevolent gazillionaire would pay me a modest lifetime allowance, or if I inherited some poor but filthy rich relative as long as nobody told me what to work on. I'd just sit down for probably four hours every day and write code for whatever open source project I'd feel like contributing to the most each time of the year. Sometimes possibly writing my own software, sometimes fixing stuff in other software, or sometimes just redesigning stuff. Minus all effort to convince people to accept my patches. But open source anyway. I think that open source is my best bet of making a difference in the world; I mean such a difference that scales. I have four hours to spare these days. But those would be the code-writing hours only. I would need the ten other hours, while doing all kinds of everyday stuff, to think about what to write the following day. I can't do that now that I'm working: I merely spend the four hours to unwind from what I did for work, to get back to normal. On the other hand, if I had lots of money then I'd feel being obliged to put that money into good use. Not just investing it into the most convenient index fund I happened to find: it would be my money and I'd be pretty picky about it. And managing money would take time; I'm afraid it'd take enough time to once again prevent me from just coding whatever I want.
- edanm 15y agoI once read a great article on asktog, called "How I made a Small Fortune (out of a much larger one)". It dealt with advice, from someone who got a lot of shares of Apple when they IPOed. For some reason I can't seem to find it anywhere. Can anyone provide a link?
- known 15y agoCreate jobs in the economy
- antihero 15y agoBuy a pub. That's what I'd do.