To say your good fortune is down to luck....

[Shallowstreams]

On threads here I keep reading people saying how they've 'worked hard' and as such can pay off their entire mortgage by mid thirties or similar.

But most people work hard and that's a distant dream. It's only achievable to get and pay off a decent sized mortgage if you've had the luck in whatever shape or form to get an extremely high paying job or a very low mortgage perhaps because of family help or inheritance.

I work very hard and earn very well as does my husband yet our mortgage won't be paid off for many many years, and I'm almost 40.

It just annoys me that people seem to think they've managed to achieve this as they've worked harder than others and are not acknowledging the good fortune that has put them in this position

AIBU?

I agree with you OP.

It amazes me the things that the privileged put down to their own "hard work" and not luck.

We are all born equal, but it's our parents we're born to who make the difference IMO. And that's luck.

YABU to suggest that getting a well paid job is just down to luck. Many people deliberately target a career that pays well and work very hard to reach that goal. High expectations of yourself is important.

I am hoping I could get a promotion and/or better pay. Hopefully my husband has one too. I am hoping my daughter is doing well at school. None of this will be sitting tight and hope for the best of luck though. When we didnt have any of the above it will simply because we havent been working as hard.

Ofcourse unless what you want is very very out of reach and you are dreaming about something very unrealisrically then it could be more due to luck!

YABU

After all, it's just luck that means a particular person was born into a developed nation where property can be owned, rather than into grinding poverty where even tents might depend on someone else's aid budget, or where property you think you own can be expropriated by the local warlord.

Relative wealth in one of the richest nations on the planet is a drop in the ocean of global inequality.

The (many) people who I know paid off early did not inherit any wealth or have extremely highly paid jobs. I don't know (or care) if they worked harder than others (doubt it).

A lot of people would like to buy but never succeed. I imagine they are the only unlucky ones.

Have not read the entire thread but YABU.

Good fortune is absolutely down to hard work but also the ability to risk all you have for your goal.

A lot of it is also choice. Some people work hard but choose career paths with low salary potential. That can be the trade off for a job someone loves sometimes.

I know a lot of people who work hard but don't push themselves out of their comfort zone. There's nothing wrong with that, but I don't think they can expect to develop/get a better paid job without doing so.

I like elements of my job and will find something I love in my sector in time. At the moment I'm 24 and still studying bloody hard (an accelerated CCAB qualification whilst working full time having recently finished a postgrad qualification). It already has opened up far greater salary options than most of my friends have. Lots of people interpret 'working hard' differently.

We paid off our mortgage a year or so ago aged 35 and 38.

There was lots of good luck involved:- born healthy, born bright with skills the world rewards financially, met and married young and contraception did not fail giving us basically 10 years of "DINKY".

There was also hard work / good judgement involved:- Used reliable contraception until we wanted a baby, I took lots of exams that (IMO) you don't have to be overly clever to pass but do have to put in lots of hours, Dh - on realising that his new wife was going to spend her evenings studying rather than having sex with him on the hall floor - went and got a second job.

There was bad luck involved - Dh was made redundant completely unfairly with no warning. But we turned that into good luck as due process was not followed and had it been a fair process he wouldn't have been made redundant. They paid him lots of cash to bugger off basically. But it was still very upsetting and a bit scary at the time.

There was bad judgement involved - with hindsight I wish we had a mortgage of £20k and had gone on a load of amazing holidays in our child free 20s. Instead we went on really nice but sensible holidays and now have no mortgage.

And there is random stuff. We both hate shopping so were still happily sitting on a 20 year old sofa from his parents with the telly resting on packing boxes years into our marriage as we couldn't be arsed to go and buy furniture once we could afford it. I struggle with change (am a bit neurotic!) so even buying a new handbag is surprisingly traumatic for me. (Just bought my third handbag of our 16 year marriage - conveniently absolutely identical to my second handbag except not battered to death! )

But taking it right back to basics - being intelligent enough to do well in education and having parental support - that is a key determinant of success. And that is surely luck of the draw?

Sure you might have worked hard... But you had way more luck in the first place than Krystal born to the drug addict mother with an IQ of 90...

whois I know plenty of intelligent people with nice parents who coast through life.

Besides measuring luck in pounds is such a narrow and fairly soulless way for judging a life. For example, I feel incredibly lucky to have my children in my life but they cost me a fortune and give me less to spend on paying off my mortgage and on stuff. By the parameters set by some on this thread I should be sitting in a corner cursing the day they were born and looking longing at the lives of single childless couples with more disposable income than me.

Also whois taking it back to basics we should all be doing marvellously well what with living in one of the world's richest nations with access to both education and healthcare that is free at the point of use.

whois

Agree.

What you are intelligent at also makes a massive difference. I am very talented at a STEM subject. I make a good salary doing that. If I had that level of ability at (say) drama or art then I would be a failed actress or failed artist. If it was singing then I'd get to the second round of boot camp of the X factor (assuming I could make my nasty teenage chest infection sound appropriately like a life and death situation) before being kicked off.

Because there are some skills (basically the ones that are completely unappreciated as a teenager!) that it is easy to make a living from.

People naturally feel slighted if you tell them either that they are doing well because they were lucky,

I am often told that I am lucky and I always agree, I think it would be arrogant to do otherwise.

I was lucky to be born healthy
I was lucky to be born at a time when women could have careers
I was lucky to be born in a safe country
I was lucky to he born clever
I was lucky to meet my husband
I was lucky to have healthy children
I was lucky that on the day nobody better applied for my job
I was lucky that my background meant that a university snapped me up when there would have been much better candidates
I was lucky that investments paid off
I was lucky to have a certain personality type

I could go on.

Worth a read:

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/may/06/dont-think-youre-lucky-think-again

How can good fortune be down to luck? Fortune is luck.

Totally agree Philoslothy, I feel the exact same way.

It's a mixture as we all know at heart. I am lucky to be the oldest child - we tend to do the best in career terms. Most studies show that. Lucky me.

However I did a lot of things people on this thread did deliberately to make things better financially - chose work that paid well, studied whilst most people at school were out at parties etc.

Someone mentioned money through marriage and said that was luck. Of course it isn't. Although no mumsnetter ever admits it legions of women go after men with money rather than men with none. It's one of the easiest routes for women. however you tend only to attract those men if you are pretty. Big breasts help although I suppose you can work to earn those by way of implants and spend hours at the gym and painting your nails so may be that's hard work. Then it's pretty hard work keeping those very rich men happy - constantly telling them they are wonderful, giving them very good sex whenever they want it, flattering their ego, wearing the sexy underwear they require, hours in high heels.

I was lucky to be born of WWII parents of make do and mend, don't waste the end of the soap or toothpaste and pay back debt and hardly spend in ways most people spend. That savings ethic and our work ethic as a family helps ensure we keep debt down and do well financially or can manage with little money because we know how to eke a little bit of money out.

The most important thing of all is health. No matter how rich you are if you're ill or in pain you have very little at all. I put y health first always (don't drink, don't smoke and yes of course even eating as I do can still mean tomorrow I could get something awful so I have been lucky not to be ill often ).

Surely it is mainly luck? I have been born in England to a middle class family, as opposed to a poor one in Syria, or Iraq or Afghanistan. And I have no chronic illnesses and am not disabled or in pain in any way, and neither are my children. I have not been attacked or assaulted. Again, luck.

I am starting off way better off than so many people. From this point on it is down to hard work. I have made some poor decisions that could have made me better off had I decided differently. So that's entirely my fault. And my hard work at school and uni has helped me do well in life, so that's also down to me.

But the starting point I have been given is all down to luck.

So many very defensive people who can count themselves as 'haves'. If it were all down to hard work, every woman in India and Africa would be rich. But they're not.

Just to deconstruct a post, and I'm not singling this person out, there are lots of similar posts:

When I was in my late teens early 20's, I worked 7 days a week to make money, as I loved both jobs, and liked the money.
Lucky to be born with the intelligence to do the jobs.
Lucky to be (and remain) physically and mentally fit enough to keep doing them.
Lucky to find work you actually enjoyed!

I found another job which was shifts, and worked lots of weekends. Where everyone was going out every weekend, I saved money as was working the weekends. I bought my first house, I could have rented it out when I met Dh, but u sold it for twice what I bought it for.
We now have a tiny mortgage on a large house.
Lucky there were jobs to be found.
Lucky you got in before the housing market went mad.

It's got nothing to do with luck, it's about making the right decisions at the time.

No, it's really not. The hard work certainly helps, but there absolutely is a component of luck to it.

I'm not keen on people who moan about working hard, and are too busy looking at what other people have got

I'm not terribly keen on this chest-beating, self-made man routine that gets trotted out. A lot of people work really really hard, but got dealt, and keep getting dealt, an utterly shit hand, whether that's ill-health, fraud, accidents, deaths, breakdowns...

philosothy so have you done absolutely nothing to make the most of your good fortune.

mumoftwoyoungkids I was once pretty good at some STEM subjects can I come and work with you or would I need to put some effort into studying etc first?

My point is not that luck doesn't exist but that you very very rarely get the rewards afforded by that luck without putting in some effort.

Philoslothy Luck is a funny old thing isn't it. I occassionally wonder about whether my eyesight makes me ridiculously lucky or ridiculously unlucky....

I have terrible terrible eyesight. Of the "walking into walls" type.

How unlucky am I to have my eye sight deteriorate so much before I even turned 20?

On the other hand, my eyesight is completely correctable with either glasses or contact lenses. The optician is now pretty certain that even if the rate of deteriation speeds up massively that the science has got to a point that they will always be able to correct it completely.

How lucky am I to technically have a disability (I am past the "legally blind" point without visual aids) that is completely 100% correctable?!? That is surely lottery win type luck?

Of course the really really lucky thing is that I only vaguely ever think about this. Most of the time I'm too busy living my (seeing) life!

Btw I'm not a have particularly I would actually count myself as a person who has turned away from opportunity and really not made the most of my life. Not because I'm unlucky but because I made the wrong decisions at certain points in my life.

I could blame the above on being unlucky and some of it was beyond my control but for a lot of it I only have myself to blame in all honesty.

Me too, Donatella. I would so like to go back and change a couple of things...

Dona I said above it is a mixture. But some people genuinely think it is all hard work. It never is.

philosothy so have you done absolutely nothing to make the most of your good fortune.. I wouldn't say I have done nothing but I certainly haven't worked harder than the average person and lots of people have less than me by different measures and have worked harder.

I have been spectacularly lucky that my rather average effort levels have paid off.