The habits of successful people

Have you tried being born into wealth?

I tried real hard, but I got born into lower middle class by mistake. My bad, I should've tugged harder on my bootstraps while I was an incorporeal potentiality.

I don't even buy avocado toast, I should be a billionaire by now

That's your problem. If you never buy it in the first place, you can't stop buying it. You can't save nothing from nothing!

Here, let me help you out:

Be rich

Squander your money on avocado toast and greater luxuries

Stop squandering your money on these things

Now you're rich.

If you don't do 2., how can you expect 3. to work?!
Own a home, at least

My father has not gifted me the bootstraps made from billions in exploited labour, but the exploitation of coffee producers tastes like I'm already there.

the primary habit of successful people is fucking over ignorant poor people who don't realize they're being fucked over

I get the feeling that the ultra successful also fuck people over who very well do realize that they are being fucked over
- I was just at a depressing job fair trying to recruit for maintenance. It was held at a plant set to close in 3 days. Most of the people I talked to were there for 30 years. It was partially employee owned. Somehow a person in power (I don't know the piece of shit's title) convinced the employees to sell their share at the promise of expansion and investment.
  
  The person in power closed the shop, cashed out, and retired. Will not have to worry about a thing. 200 some people and families now have their lives upended at the benefit to few.
  
  This kind of aligns more with the person you responded to but still relevant.
- Powerlessness is the key demographic
Also, make sure you own at least one media giant. Then, you can use it to spread agit-prop about how our society shouldn't do anything that inconveniences rich a$$holes.

It’s less a lack of willingness - I’m just never presented with opportunities to massively defraud corporations

You don't defraud corporations, that'll earn you the scorn of powerful people. You defraud poor people.
- Well that doesn’t sound nearly as fun
- Oh, you can defraud shareholders as well. You just have to tell more compelling lies and secure the right accomplices. Get the auditors on board and you can ride the sinking ship for at least a couple years before you finally run out of cash and the entire organization collapses within a matter of days.
You gotta create that opportunity. This guy decided to fake being a real company and started sending invoices to Google and Facebook to the tune of 120 million.

Or what about having rich parents or relatives?

Step 1: Be rich.

Step 2: Don't be unrich.

If anyone is curious if the girl was buying a single $5 coffee per day, contributing that $35 into a basic S&P 500 fund each week, and doing so for 2 years she should have about $4500 in her account. Now, if she's buying coffee supplies at a grocery store to replace buying it at take out , we'd have to subtract the cost of coffee supplies from the $4500 to know how much she truly saved making coffee at home.

Providing she doesn't spiral into a coffee hobby.
- Stay away from espresso and super "high end" artisan beans and you can have a very solid coffee hobby for not a whole lot of $$. We do a mix of drip, French press, and cold brew. The cost per cup is basically the same for each and the equipment was not very expensive.
You got me curious, so I did the math for us.

I am a drip coffee person, drink far too much coffee (40 oz) throughout the day, and work on a fairly large corporate campus so I have easy access to hot/fresh coffee that I can purchase. Even though there are multiple branded places to get coffee from on campus, they have similar pricing.

Small (12 oz): 4x @ $2.65/pop = $10.60/day

Medium (16 oz): 3x @ $2.95/pop = $8.85/day

Large (20 oz): 2x @ $3.25/pop = $6.50/day. This is obviously the cheapest choice, but will result in a cold bottom half of the cup due to drinking my coffee slowly vs pounding it

My wife and I split a pot of coffee. It takes us 3 oz of coffee beans to brew it. I can buy a 20 oz bag of the coffee beans we use for $15.29, which works out to $2.30/pot. We often stock up on the beans when they go on sale, but I don't know what we paid for them the last time around.

So.. since my wife also drinks coffee let's say that the price spread between purchased already brewed coffee vs brewed at home coffee is between $6.50-$10.60/day. Splitting the difference = $8.85. Doing that 365 days/year = $3,120 saved.

The fact that I have coworkers who drink a similar quantity of espresso based (more $$) drinks at work is insane.

Do this over a 25 year career, invest the money monthly ($260), plan for a conservative 5% rete of return and you'll have $162,577 - only half of which is principal.

Apply this pattern of thinking over a number of different spending categories and you'll be way better off financially. That said, the stats on the billionaire class are eye watering and no amount of frugality will catch any of us up to them.
- Boiling the water costs money too.
I don’t know how anyone can survive on a cup of coffee a day.
- Usually people eat some food and drink some water, as well as the coffee, during their day
It likely wasn't just the one cup
I calculated that if I only drink coffee at home I spend about 1000€ a year on it.

Have you tried having rich parents?

Must go cheaper: caffeine pills.

Caffeine powder. The best part of waking up, is snorting rail of FDA certified caffeine. You WILL have to explain some things to HR, but they will trust your explanation because of everything else in your HR binder.

They can rip my vanilla latte out of my cold dead hands.

I've been smashing my own avocados like a chump!

Ah yes, but have you tried brewing avocado coffee at home?
- This could work

Just get a small loan of a few million bucks from your dad!

SBF tried but went too greedy.

Sensible move to save money though.

The key to the Massive Fraud strategy is that you have to already be in the tax bracket that allows for privileges like massive fraud. If you try to do it without meeting that lone prerequisite you end up being arrested by the IRS.

Still tastes better at least

Eight O'Clock whole beans fresh ground and percolated to perfection. chef's kiss

Fatgirlhedonist might not be a millionaire, because hardly anybody is - and anybody who promised her she would be was full of shit - but making her own coffee has certainly left her with money she didn't have before. I've always saved money the same way, by doing as many things as I can for myself. I really don't see how there's anything wrong with that.

I'm going to downvote you anyway, not because what you said was untrue or hurtful or disrespectful in any way, but because you're harshing the general unforgiving vibe of the room and I need to stand with my fellow mob.
- I upvoted them.

Being a millionaire is easily doable now on a regular 9-5 job if you're paid fairly. In my city at least, I can tell you that a software dev can reach millionaire status within about 20 years of work. No fraud needed unless you count ETF investments or software dev as fraud.

It's not always the case.

Bill Gates I feel earned his money.

But, I agree, the others definitely exploited people

The guy whose mom was on the board for IBM and who convinced them to invest into her sons' garage company? Being born to wealthy and powerful parents really does wonders for your ability to become filthy rich, does it not?
- The guy started learning to program when he was 13 and had already written a lot of software and done a lot before Ms dos
  
  I tried to look up the IBM claim but couldn't find anything.
  
  But, what has that got to do with exploitation?
  
  Or are you trying to argue he exploited IBM....
You don't think Microsoft has exploited anyone??
- Well. You're making the claim, let's see the receipts. They pay their workers well, I haven't heard any evidence they get treated like slaves like bezos
  
  I knew I'd get downvoted but Lemmy people, but I've heard no evidence otherwise.
  
  Bill got rich because of windows 95, and it was a really good product.
  
  He made a lot of his riches before the Internet and before IE
  
  Also, I did try early Debian back in those days, and Linux simply was unusable for consumers back then.
You just can’t accumulate that much wealth from nothing without being charismatic, smart and a leader . Like Alexander the Great

But even the best of them have caused thousands of crushed lives and careers in a long trail. Ruthless is a mild word to describe
I recommend the Behind the Bastards episode on him. He had a ton of opportunities available to him normal people don't, including ones that aren't strictly financial. For instance, he was allowed to ignore most of his other subjects in high school to concentrate on computer stuff. As a person who had similar interests in computers and sometimes not an interest in some other classes, that's a huge advantage.

While I didn't have too hard a time in school (only needed 2 classes to pass my final year), being able to concentrate on just computers(which were my electives) would have been far less stressful and would have allowed more concentration. That's just one of many intangible benefits.
- I also learned how to program at 13 in my free time
  
  I didn't ignore any subjects in school. In fact, I actually did well in high school...
  
  But I'm sure people will try to look at my life and try to make thousands of different excuses to explain that, especially if I founded Microsoft. But it was just because I enjoyed programming and worked hard too.(Like I spent days copying coffee from a basic book for a game)

Maybe there are people with such a skewed worldview that they consider anything short of a billionaire 'unsuccesful' but building wealth of few million is perfectly within reach for average middle class person and simple life-style changes like this are a key part of getting there. No fraud needed. If you want to stay middle-class then by doing middle-class things is how you stay there and buying $5 coffees daily and financing a car are good examples of that.

If you make a couple million dollars as a middle class person, without familial connections, you've at best committed fraud on a massive scale, or been involved in something highly illegal.

Median income in the US is between 37K and 80K depending where you look and what figures you use. At 80K, it would take a person 12.5 years to make a million dollars. That's not paying taxes, not paying living expenses, and generally somehow living in a bubble where you owe nothing and get to keep 100% of the check. In a more realistic scenario where half that income is taxed or expended on living expenses, that's 25 years per million.

Between inflation and price gouging by vendors and retailers of popular products, nobody alive today with a middle class job is ever going to have a hope of saving up a million dollars, there is no 'lifestyle' choices a person can make even with a well paying job that's ever going to see them become a millionaire in their lifetime, let alone a multimillionaire without fraud or illegal activity.
- Yeah if you're going to save money from your wage and store that on your bank account, then you can forget it.
  
  This is where investing and index funds come in. To reach $1 million by age 65 with a 7% annual return, a 25-year-old would need to invest approximately $5,009 per year, or about $417 per month. That's perfectly within reach for average middle-class person.