8 ms·

I sometimes seriously wonder if you born around the 1960s, how didn't you become a millionaire? Rents were lower, wages were higher, safe investments like T-bi

I sometimes seriously wonder if you born around the 1960s, how didn't you become a millionaire? Rents were lower, wages were higher, safe investments like T-bills and CD had higher yields, homes exploded in value, education and health care were a fraction of the cost. If you worked at even a minimum wage job you were on track to being a millionaire just by putting money in the bank. I asked my parents about this recently and it turns out they actually are millionaires... I knew the were well off, but thought they had a third or a quarter of that, I literally had no idea.

psyc 5y ago
My parents were born in the 40s, but they’re roughly in the generation you’re talking about. They’re still poor. My mom didn’t work much. My dad didn’t make much. Neither were financially savvy. However, every last one of their 5 siblings is indeed a millionaire after leading relatively modest middle-middle class lifestyles. Maybe one of them you could call upper-middle, but even they traded thriftiness in most areas for the appearance of wealth in others.
- bumby 5y ago
  I see a mix across that generation as well. It seems some of those that struggle kept the mentality that helped their parents flourish: an expectation that you find a stable job and work it for 40 years. They weren’t exactly in the mindset to constantly hustle and constantly learn new skills. When globalization started to pull the rug out from under them in the 1980s many had difficulty remaining relevant in the economy.
losvedir 5y ago
Similarly for milennials graduating around ~2008 like me. I had the good fortune to graduate right into the chasm of the financial collapse, so was happy with my little $28k/yr job. But with Boston not as crazy hot as it is now, and a roommate, rent was only $600/mo, with no need for a car. That meant I had plenty left over to put a bit in a low-cost index fund (VOO) every month, and damn, with the S&P 500 going from 800 then to 4,000 now... you can't help but end up with a good chunk of change in the bank! Graduates now are coming into a hot market, so on the one hand they probably can't expect such appreciation on their investments, but on the other you can get crazy high salaries right off the bat! I seriously think it's far easier to become a millionaire now than any other time in history.
- toto444 5y ago
  You got lucky but most people who graduate during a financial crisis pay for it their whole life. It is harder to get your first job so you get a not so good one and you can easily get stuck in a suboptimal situation for years.
  - dan-robertson 5y ago
    That’s likely true. It seems the people who graduated a year or two later were similar in many ways except that the job market was a lot better. And indeed many people with the option chose to get a little extra education like a masters degree rather than graduating for this reason.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    In the dot-bomb era, a lot of people ended up with job offers rescinded or were laid off from their new jobs and ended up at least underemployed for 3 or 4 years. I consider myself very lucky to have navigated that period with a relatively low salary but no meaningful time unemployed.
- antognini 5y ago
  If nothing else, inflation makes it easier to become a millionaire over time. A millionaire in the early 1900s would be equivalent to someone with $30 million today.
  - lukas099 5y ago
    Yeah, with enough inflation 'millionaire' will mean next to nothing.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- solomonb 5y ago
  I finished school around 2008 as well and would have killed to make $28k/yr.
dan-robertson 5y ago
Often the first trick is having children. It turns out to be a good way to spend a lot of money. Especially having relatively more children. Other ways are avoiding good investments (it’s already easy today and was even easier 40 years ago when brokerages were more high touch and it was harder to find good information. Another aspect is being bad at investing in the typical way: switching from equities to bonds when there’s a market crash), avoiding investing at all (eg just putting money in a savings account), just spending a lot of money on depreciating assets and not saving, and not earning so much money in the early years when compounding pays off the most or the later years due to seeking out things other than high pay. In many ways it’s not so different from today.
- ghaff 5y ago
  People could also end up with extended periods of unemployment. Inflation was brutal around 1980. (~14%) Software development barely existed as a career option and you almost certainly needed a degree to land a job. When I graduated from engineering grad school in 1981, my highest offer was $27K and that was a sector (oil biz) which was pretty high-flying at the time. That's about $80K today which is certainly not nothing but probably on the low end of what a lot of software developers expect. (I had the good timing to go back to grad school--which had been in the plans anyway--just as the oil biz was entering one of its cyclical downturns.)
  - mcguire 5y ago
    "When I graduated from engineering grad school in 1981, my highest offer was $27K and that was a sector (oil biz) which was pretty high-flying at the time." Hey, I remember that! My mother was retired from the bank she worked at for 40 years when the oil biz blew up in the late '80s.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      This was in about 1984. But I was also in the offshore drilling business which was especially sensitive to oil prices given that offshore drilling was relatively expensive.
swiley 5y ago
Condos are still cheap. People need to chill out with the whole detached housing thing, it's not economical in the long run (centuries) and we're rapidly approaching the point where it stops making sense near the coasts of the US. A point many countries have already reached.
- ghaff 5y ago
  >Condos are still cheap. Citation needed with respect to expensive cities. And you don't even need to get very far away from many of those cities--like an hour from Boston, for example--until land isn't really a limiting factor.
  - swiley 5y ago
    At least near DC yeah condos are pretty cheap. I haven't checked Boston but it means housing supply is something that can be increased to meet demand so provided the local regulators are at least partly competent they shouldn't be too expensive.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      In Boston metro I doubt you could find a decent condo in a decent area for much less than $500K. Which you can get a house on some land for an hour outside the city in some communities.
ip26 5y ago
Single earner households were more common, mortgage interest rates were above 10% for years, material goods were more expensive. There was no YouTube for learning home or auto repair. Cars weren't very reliable. Not all roses.
- EVdotIO 5y ago
  Good luck repairing a car now. They are way more reliable, and way more tolerant to owner neglect, but give me an old BMW 2002 or VW bug and I can repair pretty much everything in those machines with my Haynes manuals. Safety on the other hand is orders of magnitude better today.
  - benlivengood 5y ago
    Most faults on modern cars are still mechanical. OBD scanners or adapters are cheap. YouTube has replaced Haynes/Chilton manuals for instructions.
    - EVdotIO 5y ago
      Well yes, obviously. I was simply expanding on the parents comments that it was difficult to learn to repair your car (or potentially a washing machine). I don't think that's necessarily accurate. Yes, YouTube didn't exist, but it was still possible to get information to rebuild a carburetor and Pep Boys has been around since the 30s. Newer cars are just objectively much more complicated, and when it comes to something like replacing a head gasket, sure it's doable, but yeah I'm going to get somebody else to do that. On the other hand, if it was something like an old flathead, I could feel confident doing that on my own.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Most routine maintenance items are still easily DIY-able and there’s likely an enthusiast forum or group to help give some guidance.
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
It's easy. How many people do you know spent every dollar they made? I don't know a single person from the period of 1950-1970 that didn't.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ed25519FUUU 5y ago
  They could have spent and wasted a lot of money, but if at least some of that money went into real estate that they still own, then they’re probably millionaires.
mcguire 5y ago
My mother was the head teller at a bank, with 40+ years of experience. When I graduated from college and got one of my first jobs, I mentioned my salary. She (who had been retired for several years at that time) told me she'd never made more than $25,000 per year.
icedchai 5y ago
Many people spend every dollar they make (and often then some.) That's how. Becoming a millionaire in a couple decades is more about living below your means, and consistently saving and investing. "Just" putting money in the bank would not make you a millionaire. You still need growth.
seoaeu 5y ago
Having $1 million in retirement savings only lets you spend $40-50k per year during retirement. That's a pretty solid amount of money for not having to do any work, but doesn't lend itself to luxurious lifestyle that people think about when you say 'millionaire'.
jacobrussell 5y ago
Starting businesses that went under in 2001 did the trick for mine.
Tiktaalik 5y ago
People of this era spent a lot too! In the 70s and 80s not only was there a bicycle boom, but a sailboat boom too! The working class had money and they spent it. I don't think we'll ever see that level of luxury consumption by the working class ever again. We've all seen the graphs of how wealth decoupled away from the working class after Regan and how poor a share of wealth millennials have compared to their parents.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  60s and 70s were the golden era of light aircraft as well. Lots of working class people flew airplanes as a hobby. (A significant multiple vs today anyway.)
  - FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
    Regulatory changes were a big part of that. IIRC, manufacturers were ruled to be liable for accidents, and they all pretty much stopped making planes. So now planes are rare, very-old Cessnas cost what several cars do instead of what a single car does, and development is so stagnant that leaded avgas is still a thing.
c22 5y ago
My parents ended up retiring with over $1m but growing up I remember constantly feeling like my father was terrible with money (to this day there are 8 cars parked at his house) and he worked a very middle-class middle-management job for his entire life. I'm worried the million they have(/had?) wont stretch for the rest of their remaining lifespan...
jjav 5y ago
> I sometimes seriously wonder if you born around the 1960s, how didn't you become a millionaire? > wages were higher Depends, of course, but for engineering jobs wages are way higher today. I wasn't around in the 60s but my father was making less than $10K (as a professional with a PhD). That's about $80K today according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ I can easily make twice that anywhere (without a PhD) and 3x-5x that if I shop around for best paying jobs. No need to go back to the 60s though. In the 90s, $30K-$40K was a very nice starting salary for a software engineer. That's 52K-70K today. But entry level jobs today are paying far over 100K. I just hired a new grad last year for ~150K. So salaries are certainly much, much higher today.
- aj7 5y ago
  I remember precisely when engineers started getting paid for the first time. 1999. Warning. It’s lifetime expectation of earnings, not instantaneous earnings, and when changes devalue your skills, you’ll be in denial.
- rambojazz 5y ago
  I'm always shocked every time that I read numbers like these. I'm from the EU. I don't know a single company that could afford to pay a single entry level job €100K or more. Realistic numbers for entry level positions are in the neighborhood of €20K. How can a company from EU hire anybody from the US?
  - kasey_junk 5y ago
    They can’t. I’m shocked when I receive job solicitation from EU based companies. I got one from a Spanish company last year where the non-inflation adjusted salary was worse than my first year salary in a non-expensive locale 20 years ago. I’d have chalked it up to just spam except the inquiry included recent conference talks & job history that wasn’t linked in simple ways. Could have been a bot but one that did really interesting connection analysis but not basic salary survey linkage.
    - 5y ago
aj7 5y ago
You are right. But they were not millionaires when $1M was “real money.” Inflation has a lot to do with that. The garbage house in Sunnyvale I bought for $128k in 1979 dollars is worth $2.2M today, but I assure you, it’s still a garbage house, a crash pad for a pair of 60-hour-a-week careerists. To me, real value was curing my wife’s cancer, my phone, the Moderna vaccine, high bypass turbofan engines, connections I’ve made on Twitter, Sci-Hub, zlib, etc.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
There was way less information back then. Investing in funds wasn't preached by every other YouTuber (there wasn't even a YouTube equivalent, obviously). Investment advice was something financial advisors were doing and they have a pretty bad track record. My parents / grandparents had good salaries, got rich with houses, got incredibly early golden pensions, wasted some money with investment funds and market crises (2000, 2008).

psyc 5y ago

My parents were born in the 40s, but they’re roughly in the generation you’re talking about. They’re still poor. My mom didn’t work much. My dad didn’t make much. Neither were financially savvy. However, every last one of their 5 siblings is indeed a millionaire after leading relatively modest middle-middle class lifestyles. Maybe one of them you could call upper-middle, but even they traded thriftiness in most areas for the appearance of wealth in others.

bumby 5y ago
I see a mix across that generation as well. It seems some of those that struggle kept the mentality that helped their parents flourish: an expectation that you find a stable job and work it for 40 years. They weren’t exactly in the mindset to constantly hustle and constantly learn new skills. When globalization started to pull the rug out from under them in the 1980s many had difficulty remaining relevant in the economy.

losvedir 5y ago

Similarly for milennials graduating around ~2008 like me. I had the good fortune to graduate right into the chasm of the financial collapse, so was happy with my little $28k/yr job. But with Boston not as crazy hot as it is now, and a roommate, rent was only $600/mo, with no need for a car. That meant I had plenty left over to put a bit in a low-cost index fund (VOO) every month, and damn, with the S&P 500 going from 800 then to 4,000 now... you can't help but end up with a good chunk of change in the bank! Graduates now are coming into a hot market, so on the one hand they probably can't expect such appreciation on their investments, but on the other you can get crazy high salaries right off the bat! I seriously think it's far easier to become a millionaire now than any other time in history.

toto444 5y ago
You got lucky but most people who graduate during a financial crisis pay for it their whole life. It is harder to get your first job so you get a not so good one and you can easily get stuck in a suboptimal situation for years.
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  That’s likely true. It seems the people who graduated a year or two later were similar in many ways except that the job market was a lot better. And indeed many people with the option chose to get a little extra education like a masters degree rather than graduating for this reason.
- ghaff 5y ago
  In the dot-bomb era, a lot of people ended up with job offers rescinded or were laid off from their new jobs and ended up at least underemployed for 3 or 4 years. I consider myself very lucky to have navigated that period with a relatively low salary but no meaningful time unemployed.
antognini 5y ago
If nothing else, inflation makes it easier to become a millionaire over time. A millionaire in the early 1900s would be equivalent to someone with $30 million today.
- lukas099 5y ago
  Yeah, with enough inflation 'millionaire' will mean next to nothing.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
solomonb 5y ago
I finished school around 2008 as well and would have killed to make $28k/yr.

dan-robertson 5y ago

Often the first trick is having children. It turns out to be a good way to spend a lot of money. Especially having relatively more children. Other ways are avoiding good investments (it’s already easy today and was even easier 40 years ago when brokerages were more high touch and it was harder to find good information. Another aspect is being bad at investing in the typical way: switching from equities to bonds when there’s a market crash), avoiding investing at all (eg just putting money in a savings account), just spending a lot of money on depreciating assets and not saving, and not earning so much money in the early years when compounding pays off the most or the later years due to seeking out things other than high pay. In many ways it’s not so different from today.

ghaff 5y ago
People could also end up with extended periods of unemployment. Inflation was brutal around 1980. (~14%) Software development barely existed as a career option and you almost certainly needed a degree to land a job. When I graduated from engineering grad school in 1981, my highest offer was $27K and that was a sector (oil biz) which was pretty high-flying at the time. That's about $80K today which is certainly not nothing but probably on the low end of what a lot of software developers expect. (I had the good timing to go back to grad school--which had been in the plans anyway--just as the oil biz was entering one of its cyclical downturns.)
- mcguire 5y ago
  "When I graduated from engineering grad school in 1981, my highest offer was $27K and that was a sector (oil biz) which was pretty high-flying at the time." Hey, I remember that! My mother was retired from the bank she worked at for 40 years when the oil biz blew up in the late '80s.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    This was in about 1984. But I was also in the offshore drilling business which was especially sensitive to oil prices given that offshore drilling was relatively expensive.

swiley 5y ago

Condos are still cheap. People need to chill out with the whole detached housing thing, it's not economical in the long run (centuries) and we're rapidly approaching the point where it stops making sense near the coasts of the US. A point many countries have already reached.

ghaff 5y ago
>Condos are still cheap. Citation needed with respect to expensive cities. And you don't even need to get very far away from many of those cities--like an hour from Boston, for example--until land isn't really a limiting factor.
- swiley 5y ago
  At least near DC yeah condos are pretty cheap. I haven't checked Boston but it means housing supply is something that can be increased to meet demand so provided the local regulators are at least partly competent they shouldn't be too expensive.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    In Boston metro I doubt you could find a decent condo in a decent area for much less than $500K. Which you can get a house on some land for an hour outside the city in some communities.

ip26 5y ago

Single earner households were more common, mortgage interest rates were above 10% for years, material goods were more expensive. There was no YouTube for learning home or auto repair. Cars weren't very reliable. Not all roses.

EVdotIO 5y ago
Good luck repairing a car now. They are way more reliable, and way more tolerant to owner neglect, but give me an old BMW 2002 or VW bug and I can repair pretty much everything in those machines with my Haynes manuals. Safety on the other hand is orders of magnitude better today.
- benlivengood 5y ago
  Most faults on modern cars are still mechanical. OBD scanners or adapters are cheap. YouTube has replaced Haynes/Chilton manuals for instructions.
  - EVdotIO 5y ago
    Well yes, obviously. I was simply expanding on the parents comments that it was difficult to learn to repair your car (or potentially a washing machine). I don't think that's necessarily accurate. Yes, YouTube didn't exist, but it was still possible to get information to rebuild a carburetor and Pep Boys has been around since the 30s. Newer cars are just objectively much more complicated, and when it comes to something like replacing a head gasket, sure it's doable, but yeah I'm going to get somebody else to do that. On the other hand, if it was something like an old flathead, I could feel confident doing that on my own.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Most routine maintenance items are still easily DIY-able and there’s likely an enthusiast forum or group to help give some guidance.

andrewmcwatters 5y ago

It's easy. How many people do you know spent every dollar they made? I don't know a single person from the period of 1950-1970 that didn't.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ed25519FUUU 5y ago
They could have spent and wasted a lot of money, but if at least some of that money went into real estate that they still own, then they’re probably millionaires.

mcguire 5y ago

My mother was the head teller at a bank, with 40+ years of experience. When I graduated from college and got one of my first jobs, I mentioned my salary. She (who had been retired for several years at that time) told me she'd never made more than $25,000 per year.

icedchai 5y ago

Many people spend every dollar they make (and often then some.) That's how. Becoming a millionaire in a couple decades is more about living below your means, and consistently saving and investing. "Just" putting money in the bank would not make you a millionaire. You still need growth.

seoaeu 5y ago

Having $1 million in retirement savings only lets you spend $40-50k per year during retirement. That's a pretty solid amount of money for not having to do any work, but doesn't lend itself to luxurious lifestyle that people think about when you say 'millionaire'.

jacobrussell 5y ago

Starting businesses that went under in 2001 did the trick for mine.

Tiktaalik 5y ago

People of this era spent a lot too! In the 70s and 80s not only was there a bicycle boom, but a sailboat boom too! The working class had money and they spent it. I don't think we'll ever see that level of luxury consumption by the working class ever again. We've all seen the graphs of how wealth decoupled away from the working class after Regan and how poor a share of wealth millennials have compared to their parents.

sokoloff 5y ago
60s and 70s were the golden era of light aircraft as well. Lots of working class people flew airplanes as a hobby. (A significant multiple vs today anyway.)
- FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
  Regulatory changes were a big part of that. IIRC, manufacturers were ruled to be liable for accidents, and they all pretty much stopped making planes. So now planes are rare, very-old Cessnas cost what several cars do instead of what a single car does, and development is so stagnant that leaded avgas is still a thing.

c22 5y ago

My parents ended up retiring with over $1m but growing up I remember constantly feeling like my father was terrible with money (to this day there are 8 cars parked at his house) and he worked a very middle-class middle-management job for his entire life. I'm worried the million they have(/had?) wont stretch for the rest of their remaining lifespan...

jjav 5y ago

> I sometimes seriously wonder if you born around the 1960s, how didn't you become a millionaire? > wages were higher Depends, of course, but for engineering jobs wages are way higher today. I wasn't around in the 60s but my father was making less than $10K (as a professional with a PhD). That's about $80K today according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ I can easily make twice that anywhere (without a PhD) and 3x-5x that if I shop around for best paying jobs. No need to go back to the 60s though. In the 90s, $30K-$40K was a very nice starting salary for a software engineer. That's 52K-70K today. But entry level jobs today are paying far over 100K. I just hired a new grad last year for ~150K. So salaries are certainly much, much higher today.

aj7 5y ago
I remember precisely when engineers started getting paid for the first time. 1999. Warning. It’s lifetime expectation of earnings, not instantaneous earnings, and when changes devalue your skills, you’ll be in denial.
rambojazz 5y ago
I'm always shocked every time that I read numbers like these. I'm from the EU. I don't know a single company that could afford to pay a single entry level job €100K or more. Realistic numbers for entry level positions are in the neighborhood of €20K. How can a company from EU hire anybody from the US?
- kasey_junk 5y ago
  They can’t. I’m shocked when I receive job solicitation from EU based companies. I got one from a Spanish company last year where the non-inflation adjusted salary was worse than my first year salary in a non-expensive locale 20 years ago. I’d have chalked it up to just spam except the inquiry included recent conference talks & job history that wasn’t linked in simple ways. Could have been a bot but one that did really interesting connection analysis but not basic salary survey linkage.
  - 5y ago

aj7 5y ago

You are right. But they were not millionaires when $1M was “real money.” Inflation has a lot to do with that. The garbage house in Sunnyvale I bought for $128k in 1979 dollars is worth $2.2M today, but I assure you, it’s still a garbage house, a crash pad for a pair of 60-hour-a-week careerists. To me, real value was curing my wife’s cancer, my phone, the Moderna vaccine, high bypass turbofan engines, connections I’ve made on Twitter, Sci-Hub, zlib, etc.

jokethrowaway 5y ago

There was way less information back then. Investing in funds wasn't preached by every other YouTuber (there wasn't even a YouTube equivalent, obviously). Investment advice was something financial advisors were doing and they have a pretty bad track record. My parents / grandparents had good salaries, got rich with houses, got incredibly early golden pensions, wasted some money with investment funds and market crises (2000, 2008).