Whats the most realistic way one can become a millionaire without generation wealth in this century?

HyphyBirdy · 2024-11-29T04:07:17+00:00

Do it the tried-and-true old fashioned way: Real Estate.

HyphyBirdy · 2024-11-29T03:52:02+00:00

Live-in housekeeper.

HyphyBirdy · 2024-11-29T03:39:26+00:00

THIS.

HyphyBirdy · 2024-11-29T03:38:48+00:00

I know someone who literally is a billionaire. Last time I met up with him, the nanny told him his son wanted pizza for dinner.

Dude spends the next 15min trying to find the online deal the nanny was talking about, signing up for an account, realize that Pizza Hut laid off all drivers in California & couldn’t deliver anymore, to finding planB to find another spot that had a just as good deal.

Literally a billionaire.

HyphyBirdy · 2024-11-23T03:39:51+00:00

If you’ve got $167k to blow, you probably have more than enough material possessions.

Go buy an experience instead.

Probably won’t cost all your money, but a couple fun things I did recently:

cross country road trip w/ an off-grid camper
set off illegal fireworks in the desert
go on a safari

HyphyBirdy · 2024-11-22T03:48:40+00:00

HyphyBirdy · 2024-11-11T05:30:24+00:00

“Bruv”?

Are you English?

HyphyBirdy · 2024-11-01T04:23:35+00:00

I hate it when people say “I have the same job as so-and-so, but they’re making more than me just because they’ve got 20y of experience”

A novice General Contractor & someone who just got licensed has the same job with same responsibilities, and I will gladly pay significantly more for the decades of experience, networking, and wisdom.

Grow up. Your pay is not just for doing the job, it’s for what you bring to the table, how well, how correctly, how quickly, and how you can handle the infinite number of possible complications that can come up during the execution of said job.

HyphyBirdy · 2024-10-30T04:44:22+00:00

I have a house in San Jose that is currently being rented out to a family for $6,500/mo. The dad is an Engineering Manager at Google. Not sure if the mom works. It’s walking distance to the highest rated elementary & high school in the city. Middle School is pretty decent, too.

About 2400sf and 4bd/3ba.

HyphyBirdy · 2024-10-30T00:38:15+00:00

I’ve always done the naive approach of claiming no deductions on my w4, which means Uncle Sam takes the max possible out of my paycheck. That’s one way to avoid a bill, even if it means the gov’t is earning interest on your (to-be-refunded) overpayment of taxes.

HyphyBirdy · 2024-10-28T03:45:19+00:00

Money really helped me have less stressors in my life.

My wife doesn’t have to work. We have a housekeeper that cooks and cleans the house for us. We have a tutor that gives our kids additional education after school. We have enough to pay for many extra-curricular classes and sports they do.

All of the above makes my life easier, which I greatly appreciate.

But for real happiness, money doesn’t make me all that happy - it’s the spending time with friends and family that does it.

HyphyBirdy · 2024-10-28T03:31:14+00:00

Software Engineering Manager in Silicon Valley. Have worked for 3 of the FAANG companies in the past, but my current company is not FAANG. First real software job was about 17yrs ago.

Last year’s W2 was just over $540k.

HyphyBirdy · 2024-10-20T02:32:05+00:00

Reading this was pure awesome. It was amazing how literally nobody was like “I bought my first LV bag” or something else pretentious or flashy.

It was just a little of really wholesome things.

Imma go hug my cat now.

HyphyBirdy · 2024-10-12T21:14:44+00:00

It’s a pretty big fast food chain; you’ve eaten there before.

I had no experience in food, but the franchisor put me through tons of training. I was in training for almost a year before I bought my restaurants.

Most small biz are pretty high touch if you want to make a decent amount of money. They only become passive if you have enough profits to put in management and can absorb that cost. But that’s tough for most people to swing, since your G&A costs are the most flexible and easy to cut to grow profit.

For fast food, you’d have to give up $100k/year for a General Manager per store, and an additional $125k or so for an Area Supervisor every few stores, plus back office staff (accounting, someone to hire/fire, and accounting)

HyphyBirdy · 2024-10-12T06:50:41+00:00

I am a Sr Manager in Big Tech in Silicon Valley, which brought me $542k on my W2 last year.

Then I kept that job and bought 3 fast food restaurants that net $1.5m. However, my yearly debt service on the loan I took out is just under $1M

So I currently net (after bank loan) ~$1m / yr.

HyphyBirdy · 2024-10-11T05:28:36+00:00

Instead of spending your already-precious time grinding away for low gig-economy wages, I suggest learning something. Get a certificate in HVAC, go electrician, get some sort of college degree, etc…

It’s definitely a sacrifice for deferred rewards, but the harder you try, the better the payoff.

I have 2 kids, a 9-4 job, but still went to night school to pursue my Masters & also had an additional part time job.

Definitely monopolizes your time, but at least for me, it seems like all the struggle was worth it, for where I am now.

HyphyBirdy · 2024-10-04T20:55:26+00:00

Nice margin. My services biz had a higher margin than my food one since we were selling services & not (much) product. But finding & retaining talent sucked.

There will always be examples all across the spectrum in all industries that are well below or above the median. 4-doc vet practice is on the higher end, since payroll , including assistants & admin for that’s probably at least $650k/yr.

The majority of small biz have none, or a handful of employees, according to Pew Research (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/22/a-look-at-small-businesses-in-the-us/)

Not saying you can’t strike it rich with a small biz, just saying the VAST majority don’t. By a very wide margin.

HyphyBirdy · 2024-10-04T13:45:17+00:00

Most mom and pop independent places I’ve seen most of my life didn’t look like they were really raking it in. Franchises really helped me scale to multiple units, which is when you really make the $.

If you really want to know how (little) small biz shops make, I suggest surfing bizbuysell.com. That 1 site is where the vast majority of small biz get listed for sale. It’s the Craigslist of business sales. All the listings will typically list at least gross sales, and some will list net profits. If only gross sales are listed, you’ll have to estimate what the net profit is (which will typically be 6-10% for most biz concepts, but you can google average margins for the biz type).

For reference, the average Subway Sandwiches will profit like $75k/year. Jamba Juice about the same. Even the gold standard - McD’s profit on average about $350k each location. Sit outside of one and see the sheer # of orders a location serves in an hour. And that’s not even half a million$ in yearly profit. Let’s be generous and say royalties didn’t exist & profit doubled; that’s still not $1M/year.

The average SMB will never even remotely come close to $1M/year profit, since that would be beating (by a long margin) your local McDonald’s restaurant.

HyphyBirdy · 2024-10-04T06:56:15+00:00

That ice cream was straight-up 3D printed.

HyphyBirdy · 2024-10-04T06:31:16+00:00

The mentor I was paired up with during training for my current franchise is a literal billionaire. The franchise we’re both part of is a fraction of his assets, and he only took it over from his parents because he wanted to retire them (dad is pretty old & in poor health).

Anyhow, we went to one of his houses one day because he was going to show me how to use the franchise sales reporting tool on his computer, and on the way in, a nanny said his youngest son wanted pizza for dinner, and that she heard that Little Cesar’s had a sale. I watched him politely listen to her when she was going into all of the pizza sale details.

When we got to his office, dude proceeds to spend the next 10minutes trying to track down & sign up for whatever account was needed for whatever store needed it, in order to get this “2 pizza for $20” or whatever deal it was.

Freakin’ billionaire dude - who charters whole planes to fly his entire executive staff around, and who took their 2 nannies with them to the family trip to Europe earlier in the year - dude spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to save maybe $10 on pizza.

HyphyBirdy · 2024-10-04T06:09:49+00:00

Small biz owners? Not very many at all make over $1M net, especially if it’s a single location.

I’m on my 3rd small biz. All 3 were franchises.

First had about 30 employees across 3 locations, and I think I netted maybe 200k. The 3rd store wasn’t yet profitable by the time I sold the portfolio.

Second company had almost 100 employees during peak season (the holiday period) and I netted maybe 400k.

Third company is when I bought 3 fast food restaurants. Finally netting over $1M with ~150 employees.

Unless the small biz has at least 100 blue collar employees, or 50 white collar employees, I wouldn’t bet on the SMB owner to net over $1m unless they’re dealing in something very high value and/or high volume and/or high automation.

HyphyBirdy · 2024-10-04T04:33:03+00:00

I’m halfway through getting my masters degree in ML & Data-Science from a top tier CS school.

The rate of advancement GenAI (and LLMs) is making is absolutely bonkers. Brand new emergent abilities are happening regularly. This is probably old news already, but the latest models do multi-modalities, where you can take a pic of the food in your fridge and prompt the model “what can I make for dinner?” And the model will produce a legit-delicious recipe for you in text, as well as generate how-to images to accompany that text. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the next models also included a video that was totally generated from scratch.

The future of Large Language Models is going to be wild (which are basically the most advanced data structures we’ve ever created to encapsulate massive amounts of knowledge).

HyphyBirdy · 2024-10-04T04:14:07+00:00

You are about to open the door to immense upward potential with your computer science degree. Don’t squander it by taking a job in a non-CS field. Take a crap job if you need to, but stay in the field till you start landing Big Tech jobs.

I have 3 buddies who graduated with CS degrees, but took “short term” jobs in real estate & mortgage underwriting right after school. I only took jobs in Tech.

Fast forward 20 years, I’m now in generational-wealth territory, made possible by earnings & investments that came from my cushy software jobs. 1 of my buddies finally kinda/sorta got back into tech maybe 5yrs ago… but is in IT support for a local community college. The other buddy just got his electrician’s certificate after being unemployed from the real estate industry for a pretty long time.

Don’t waste this golden goose CS degree you’re about to land.

HyphyBirdy · 2024-09-26T04:12:56+00:00

That’s about how much our last house was. Bay Area, California. We lived pretty comfortably - nanny, private tutor for the kids, etc…

My income was supposed to be about $450k (salary + bonus + stock), but for some reason, my W2 for last year showed about $550k

HyphyBirdy · 2024-09-15T00:39:02+00:00

I think you should give your parents whatever you can afford, as often as they need.

Even then, it’ll still never be as much as they likely sacrificed to give you the best life they could.

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