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[continued]
Seriously, that probably isn't your situation. Even after exploring alternative paths to your goals, there are expensive things you want that you will never be able to attain based on your current wealth and income. Assuming you don't win the lottery, receive an inheritance from a long-lost uncle, or find a giant bag of money on the street, you can't change your starting wealth, so project the curve forward again using various incomes. Don't forget to take into account the possibility of not changing your gross income, but increasing the proportion of it you can invest, if that is a possibility. Eventually you should arrive at roughly the income that you need to be "rich" (in the sense of being able to afford everything you actually want). In my experience, this number could very well be much smaller than you would have guessed before you did the whole exercise. It might seem much, much more attainable than it was when your only goal. This is important, because sometimes realizing your goals are more attainable than you thought is the thing that will propel you to take that first step. What that first step should be? I honestly can't say. I don't have any real insight into how to get rich quick; I doubt anyone does. For me personally, the process of assessing what I really wanted from life and how much money I'd need to do it led me, about ten years ago, to make a career change. It wasn't anything super-dramatic or risky, and I had no expectations of becoming wealthy. That wasn't my intent per se - what I wanted was a reasonable assurance, as I approached middle age, that I'd be able to achieve certain goals that were important to me. I left my life of genteel poverty (a.k.a. academia) and joined a small company, and did my best to help make it a somewhat larger company. I succeeded pretty well in that and made more than enough to achieve all the things on my personal list. The remainder, for me, has been gravy. To be fair, I've mostly avoided "shifting the goalposts," that is, wanting more and more expensive things as my wealth increased. That's a trap that is easy to fall into. I think the average person, somehow seeing my bank balance toay, would class me as rich (not obscenely so by any means, but I'm definitely more than well-off). The point is: I never set out to be rich. Ten years ago, I would never have even dreamed of ending up where I did. I didn't join a small company thinking "startup, I might cash out and be rich." I thought it was just... a "small company." I didn't even know what stock options were when I got them - I threw them in a drawer and forgot about them. If they had never amounted to anything and I had just continued to draw my salary to this day... well, I'd probably be just as happy as I am now. Why? Because I evaluated, ten years ago, what I'd actually need to be happy, and realized that I could make a few changes in my life and be fairly confident of being able to afford those things. If the stock-option windfall had never come, I might not be "rich" today by the average person's definition, but I'd still all the major things that I wanted from that list, and more. In other words, I'd be rich by my own definition. |