LogFAQs > #930947840

LinkPizza posted...

Just wanting it isnt enough. For example, you got lucky landing your job. Not everybody who wants it will get it. There could have been people who wanted it more than you that you didnt know about, for instance.

But I'm not capable of FI because of my high income, but it does bring the date closer. I'm capable because of frugal habits and would arrive at FI ten years later if I didn't have a high income because compounding would take care of the work instead of direct investing.

I would say I got a high income job because I optimized for it. Googled "highest paying college majors" and chose two to pursue that looked the most interesting. Then Googled "highest paying jobs" and "highest paying graduate degrees" within those college majors and chose what looked like I'd enjoy the most and had the highest income for someone who was around 25th percentile (so even being below average I'd be high income). Spent time reading books about interview skills and social skills and practicing them (which was a really difficult transformation for me as the painfully shy and unsocial person I was in undergrad). I'd say I was conscious of luck affecting income and attempted to minimize the role that luck plays at each step.

LinkPizza posted...

Not to mention, life can shot on you at any moment. Like expensive hospital bills, paying for some kind of accident, or even deaths on a family. Those are a few costly things that could happen to anybody. Someone could be on track to get that passive income, the. Have too many bills piling up where they have to pay and cant really afford to do anything about it anymore.

This is definitely a possibility. Some people have just bad things happen that are out of their control. FI not something that any individual can do, but a huge amount of individuals are capable of it if they would individually like to pursue it.

A BS holder reasonably makes 60k, if they can invest 20k a year (pre-tax) then they could have a passive income of 40k in 22 years, mid-40's if they got a job right out of college. Combining shared expenses and dual incomes (and even having a kid) into this, you need about 15 years for a normal married couple each holding a BS and contributing 20k to hit about the inflation-adjusted median household income in the US. And that's without really optimizing for increased income, just being the average person going to college. A cashier won't be able to FI, but there usually isn't anything stopping the cashier from going and getting a better job, even a well paying AS.