[logfromblammo]

I think that the point was that everyone can make conscious choices that will lead to millionaire status. Avoidable mistakes can derail that, but cautious living can eliminate the luck factor.

Anyone born in the US, regardless of social status or ability, can become educated as an electrician, gain work experience up to master status, then incorporate as a subcontractor business to employ both less-experienced and less-ambitious electricians. Between the value of the business and index fund investments, and judicious use of insurance, that person will be a millionaire (by net worth) by the time they reach age 65.

If you choose to work at McDonald's when you graduate high school instead of the journeyman program of IBEW Local X, or even choose a less valuable skill in the building trades, the path is more difficult, more competitive, and less forgiving, but is still theoretically possible. If you go to college and get an engineering degree, the path is easier, but requires more up-front investment. If you go to college and get a degree in art history, that might be one of those avoidable mistakes that I mentioned earlier.

One of the decisions that must be made is "how many children will I support?" If you want to be a millionaire, the correct answer is zero. If you abandon completely the idea of raising children, you can certainly be a millionaire by the time you retire. The process will usually include establishing yourself as a small-business owner with near-guaranteed local demand. Most professions simply do not earn enough to provide sufficient margins for savings and investment unless you also employ the labor of someone besides yourself.

[Noos]

I'm not sure that they can. There's luck in that you don't hurt your back doing a trade, or get electrocuted, or you don't show up to work one day to find the doors closed because of something the boss did. There's luck in that someone doesn't invent something that makes your field or your customer base obsolete; wal-mart and online shopping seemed to have destroyed malls and mid-tier retailers, with ripple effects to many businesses.

There's luck in that the government doesn't decide to cut down; I had a lot of engineers apply for retail jobs when I was a kid because the local plant was shut down, and they would have had to leave the state to get jobs in their field.

Luck I feel is the external environment acting in a way that remains favorable to your plans and ideas. It can happen at every tier of life, and the only way to counter it is to have enough individual resources acquired to respond to the change.

[logfromblammo]

I did slip in "judicious use of insurance". Insuring against bad luck precludes making some additional investments that could take advantage of good luck.

But even so, ancestor post was not referring to people who failed to become millionaires due to bad luck, but the level of wealth one can attain without good luck. For those wealthier, someone can always come along, point to a spot in their life story and say, "here is where you got lucky". It might just be at t=0, when they were born to a statistically unlikely set of parents, but there will be something.

Perhaps Mark Cuban's dog liked the smell of your butt. Maybe you were assigned to be Martha Stewart's cellie in the clink. You wore a particularly ugly sweater during a nationally televised political forum. You lost a lot of weight eating sandwiches from one chain, just as that brand needed a new ad campaign, and they forgot to ask around among your former classmates about your non-dietary habits.

For every lucky break, there are plenty more people who toil away their whole lives and never get ahead. The ceiling for those who never catch a break is far, far below those who got lucky at least once.

[ss2003]

That's quite a straw man universe you live in.