To think that hard work alone does not make you wealthy

[ooohbetty]

I like watching Rich House Poor House and it has got me thinking, a lot of people work hard, hold down jobs, juggle childcare or caring for other relatives, some work long hours and can get help with child care, others don't have childcare but work hard when they can around school hours etc.
Both sets of families in the programme so far seemed to work hard and do their best but are still on the opposite ends of being rich and poor. So if someone says I'm here today with all this wealth because I work hard I think well from where I'm watching the other family seem to be working hard too, I do wonder, if a lot of folk work hard, surely the extra wealth has to come down to the actually vocations they have and possible other sets of circumstances that they have had presented to themselves at the right time in their lives where they can take these opportunities up.
There must be other factors to getting wealthy or am I being daft?

[ConferencePear]

If hard work was the only thing that made you rich my mother would have died a wealthy woman. She didn't.

[Thegiantofillinois]

Which is why a lot of the kids I teach really don't see the point in learning to use a comma correctly or read Macbeth. But hey, it's only me that'll get a fucking if they don't get their aspirational grade. There you go, a job where I can work as hard as I can, but can be completely undone by the lack of hard work in others.

Sorry, worked every day of my half term this week and am full on cleaning the ho u see today and this thread has hit a nerve.

[GnomeDePlume]

Not daft at all. It isn't just about working hard. So much of wealth is about supply and demand. Work hard in something for which there is already a lot of supply then great wealth is unlikely.

[formerbabe]

Money creates money...if I had a couple of million, I could buy a few properties in London, rent them out...live on the rental income and not have to work.

In a few years time I could sell them and make a lovely fat profit.

Meanwhile, someone on minimum wage could slog their guts out all day everyday and make barely enough to live on.

[mygrandchildrenrock]

One of my daughter's is a dentist and her first salary was more than mine at the top of my career, and I am not badly paid by any means.

I talked to her about how she was earning more than many good people who work hard and will continue to do so until they retire. I wanted her to know that yes, she too had worked hard to get to where she was but it didn't make her a better person just a richer one.

My daughter is very generous and kind and knows she earns more than most people. She certainly doesn't look down on people who earn less and realises how lucky she is. She also bought a brand new car with her first salary!

[brasty]

Alan Sugar did not come from absolute poverty. He was given money by his father to buy the first things he sold. He does come from a modest background, but those from absolute poverty do not get the initial start he did.

[corythatwas]

DunkMeInTomatoSoup Fri 03-Nov-17 12:49:13

"Your cleaner, to use your example, would only become wealthy if they speculated and set up a cleaning firm."

Wouldn't be much of a cleaning firm, would it, unless there were other cleaners who were prepared to work hard at just doing the cleaning for her?

That's the bit I don't get about the "I work hard and run my own firm and so could everybody else if they only had as much grit as me"- it's the complete ingratitude of not realising that every boss gets his successes off the backs of the workers lower down and if they all walked out to start their own businesses he'd be nowhere.

[Trailedanderror]

The Tories to be unable to grasp the connection between poverty and not having any money.
The News quiz a couple of weeks back. It's not work that make you rich, it's money.

[Trailedanderror]

^^ about 14 minutes in, very funny.

[brasty]

Yes it is how people make money. Skimming off the money workers make for you, and pocketing it yourself. Basic capitalism.

[FizzyWaterAndElderflower]

I have to agree with risk here too. DP and I have upped and moved country many times. I slept in a car for a fortnight waiting for my first pay packet so I could rent a house for my first job, I've always just upped sticks and gone where the work was rather than what my sisters have done, which was live in a town and refuse to look beyond that town for a job.

Luck helps, money definitely helps, education helps, hard work helps, but if you don't put yourself in the way of it, you'll never get it either.

[Chestervase1]

It’s the old saying “how do you make a small fortune, start with a large one”

[Ttbb]

In order to get rich through hard work the work has to be truly hard. Not long hours in a minimum wage job, that's not easy but it's not hard. People who earn a lot of money by virtue of work ethic start working hard during their childhood and don't stop. They work hard at school to get into university, they work hard at university to get the skills and the qualifications to be able to do really difficult work. They work hard to learn their profession, win clients, climb the corporate ladder, build their own businesses etc. Long hours are not in themselves hard work, just a lot of work.

[20nil]

This has to be considered in a wider social context. A generation ago, when my parents were starting out (now in their 70s), it was possible to become pretty well off if you worked hard. Even if, like them, you didn't have much of an education, and had left school very young. They worked in manual occupations, but there was plenty of work, there were trade unions that made sure people were paid properly, there was overtime, and salaries kept up with inflation. They never took any real risks either. They just worked hard in their dull but permanent and fairly-paid jobs.

I am educated to PhD level and have a professional job, and will never have the standard of living they had. Property is more expansive, the cost of living is rising faster than wages, trade unions are decimated so there's little pressure on employers to pay properly and so on ...

I'm not complaining as I'm better off than a lot of people, but I'm offended by the idea that hard work is some kind of panacea and that the very poor or people just getting by are somehow lazy .

[WiseDad]

Well said Tibb. Hard work isn't just hard because you labour it can be hard because a life time of skill development is needed to perform it. That's a key difference I drum into my kids. Low skilled work will always be low paid as you can get almost anyone to do it. High skilled work might not be well paid as someone has to want to output. High skilled high demand work will be well paid. Just have to figure out what that will be in 20 or 30 years time and do that.

[DunkMeInTomatoSoup]

Skimming off the money workers make for you, and pocketing it yourself. Basic capitalism.

For a moment there I thought you were talking about my union fees paying the indulgent lifestyle of fat gits living off others.

[PoppyPopcorn]

Most really well paid jobs are profiting from other peoples misfortunes as far as I can tell.

Really?

I think there are lots of different aspects to this but I really don't buy into the if you're born comfortable you're set up for life myth. And the old boys network, or how people who didn't go to private school have no chance.

It's not simple at all. Most of the people I know who are successful and earning high salaries have been prepared to do things other people wouldn't do. That might mean moving hundreds of miles away to Uni, or taking a job in a city where they know nobody in order to progress, or work unsocial hours, or move overseas on a secondment. People who are not prepared to move within the UK or push themselves out of their comfort zone are not going to progress.

There's also a lot around people who manage to stay out of trouble during their teens and 20s - picking up criminal records, getting into fights, doing drugs, getting pregnant or getting women pregnant isn't going to maximise your life chances and earning potential, is it?

[SheepyFun]

There's a lot more to it than simply hard work. I lived in the developing world for a couple of years, and met plenty of people who worked very hard. However they were struggling to get by as subsistence farmers - some (especially older women) were illiterate, and couldn't speak the national language, let alone English. Their opportunities were extremely limited. I was working nowhere near as hard as many of them, but had a better quality of life (though it was pretty basic by western standards).

Education (in the broader sense) is what would make the biggest difference - after all, brickies/scaffolders/plasterers are trained; I'm fully aware I couldn't build a wall that was safe. That's just to give a reasonable standard of life; to be genuinely wealthy, other factors come in to play.

[Chestervase1]

20nil the people who go on to be successful do not think how much more difficult it is for them nowadays. It was ever thus. In the 70s it was just as difficult for your parents and they would have paid an average of 5 or 6% interest on mortgages, even 15% at one point. It is true about short-term contracts and poorer employment conditions in general but life is different for many now. Life was just as hard then.

[Radicalrooster]

IQ is probably the single most reliable independent predictor of 'career' success

Socialist tend to hate such statements, as it cuts straight at the heart of the whole 'equality of outcomes' mantra. But as 15% of the population has an IQ of 85 or less, that's 15% of the population that won't be accruing much wealth, no matter how hard they work.

[jobapplicationshock]

I think it is more your background which is the main factor. Lots of rich people don't work hard and lots of poor people do, it's a bit of a fallacy really. The rich ones often attribute it to their hard work though. Nepotism is also an important factor; many, many people wouldn't have what they do or be where they are if they were born into different families. Thinking about BB's photography book

[BakedBeans47]

YANBU there is a massive amount of bollocks talked about hard work

This

I can’t stand it when well off people say “I work hard for my money” well chances are the person who serves your coffee/cleans your office works every bit as hard without a fraction of the reward. A bit of acknowledgment of privilege by these types wouldn’t go amiss

[CaveMum]

Martin Lewis gave a great talk on how to be successful to some students and it was put up on the MSE website. He says you need 4 things to be a success at whatever it is you want:

Talent
Hard work
Focus
Luck

blog.moneysavingexpert.com/2017/08/08/martin-lewis-four-things-need-successful/