I’ve NC for this as it’s a lot of personal detail.
I really wish you’d defined ‘rich’ as it’s so subjective! But I thought I’d answer as although I’m not remotely rich I am pretty comfortably off and in comparison to where I was in my twenties I am rich (to me).
Current situation: living with OH, engaged to be married next month, household income £80k-ish. Late twenties/early thirties. He’s a medic and I’m a psychotherapist. Income pretty evenly split between us atm but will change as his skyrockets while mine (currently £37k) will top out around £45k, plus we’re expecting our first and I’ll be reducing my hours to three days per week. Recently bought our first property, a gorgeous three storey three bedroom house in a lovely area, it’s no mansion but for a first home we’ve done well and chose somewhere we could remain in for the foreseeable.
Our backgrounds: neither of us had any parents go to university, both born in poor areas (me a council estate). Both had difficult/traumatic upbringings, mine from my early teens onwards as home fell apart (divorce, siblings in prison, mental health issues, substance dependencies) and his from being small due to a parent who was aggressive and violent but from a culture where you simply don’t divorce.
OH is naturally very, very smart, but also a hard worker, he won a free scholarship to a private school and decided early on to go into medicine. He’s had very little handed to him on a plate, he’s from an ethnic minority often discriminated against and basically focused on his own education and studied hard with little external support or encouragement. By the time I met him he was 24 and a year out from finishing medical school and then became a doctor.
I did a pointless but enjoyable degree in the arts, volunteered from the age of nineteen in the field I wanted to get into eventually (mental health and substance use), volunteered for a crisis hotline for ten years and did several years in prisons volunteering. Worked nonstop crappy NMW awful jobs from sixteen until I finished a Masters at 26 and qualified as a social worker. The experience I gained in those voluntary roles got me into a social work MA, but it was also a case of right place right time as I was the last intake to receive a bursary and fees paid by the government to train as a social worker. During the Masters I had no financial support from anywhere else so I worked eighty hours per week doing a full time placement, then full time hours delivering pizza evenings and weekends, and continued four hours per week volunteering. I knew people who’d been offered a place on the course and declined it as they just wouldn’t consider that they could pull it off doing two years of 60-80 hour weeks plus academic work on top, so they didn’t accept. People thought I was mad to try but I knew it’d be worthwhile. On weekdays I’d frequently do 9-5 placement then 5.30-midnight delivering pizza, and worked both weekend days too. By the time I got home on a Wednesday night I’d usually already worked 45 hours that week. Unfortunately I was also very unwell with a chronic pain disability that made it even harder due to being in agony a lot and drowsy from medications but I had no choice if I wanted to qualify so I just kept going despite getting sicker and sicker as the two years progressed. I went bankrupt at 24 which sounds awful but was the best solution I could had found to my increasing debt, amassed because my poor health meant I was frequently unable to get to work before my MA, I was always living independently renting and didn’t have anyone to support me and was ineligible for disability benefits due to it not being mobility related and ineligible for tax credits due to being under the age threshold. Had to put rent and food on a credit card and it all spiralled. It taught me there is no safety net. If I hadn’t had access to credit I’d have been homeless. But when I went bankrupt I didn’t foresee ever earning more than NMW or being able to make a dent in it, as my mentality from only ever being in bottom rung jobs was that this was all I could ever expect from life. The idea of earning £20k felt like unimaginable riches to me. I was only in £7k debt when I went bankrupt but I didn’t have much choice as it kept spiralling and the repayments meant I couldn’t afford to live. Thankfully my health improved a little as time went on.
Did a few years as a SW/related poorly paid roles before being asked to train in a psychotherapy discipline by my work and accepting, which overall meant in four years I managed to take my salary from £18k at 26 to £37k at 30. By the time we met I was 28 and he was 24, so both qualified and earning or on the track to earning a decent salary. We also had very compatible goals to buy a house and have children and marry so after the first year of dating and having fun we moved in together and started saving for a home, got it, started TTC, were successful against the odds (I’m subfertile) and here we are.
We both got to this stage by studying and qualifying and then working hard in our respective professions, from poor backgrounds, but we’ve also been blessed to have come across certain opportunities at the right time such as my funded MA (though like I say it didn’t mean I wasn’t still working full time on top of full time study and placements, I’d only have time to do my essays at 1am), him being smart enough to be offered a scholarship (not to detract from his hard work!) etc. But similarly I do think it’s largely due to how hard I’ve worked, against very shit circumstances at times (lost a parent to addiction, went through severe depression and self harming myself, the bankruptcy and disability), I kept putting in 200% and taking on extra and volunteering and seizing every available opportunity in a way that not many people are willing to do. Totally understand the friends who balked at working eighty hour weeks or couldn’t understand why I’d spend my two days off each week volunteering in a prison but ultimately I wound up well rewarded and I have no regrets.
I genuinely never thought I’d be sat here in a house I own (well, mortgage!) with a successful career and a successful fiancé and a healthy (so far) baby on the way. It’s in such contrast to the lives our parents led at our ages. I wish my mother had lived long enough to know I made it through and made a fairly decent success of things.
My advice to anyone wanting to achieve financial security would be to get qualified in a reputable profession (law, medicine, social work, nursing etc) and work hard to advance before having kids. I deliberately waited until my early thirties to start a family as I couldn’t physically have done what I did in my twenties to pull myself out of where I was if I’d had a child to raise, I couldn’t have put the hours in (and it’d have been selfish to have a baby in a house share in debt with a low low paid job unable to provide I think). But even if you have a child it might not be too late.
Oh, and find a partner who has similar goals and values. We both contribute as much as each other to the relationship practically and financially so neither of us is dragging the other along. Thanks to our jobs we saved for a house deposit in two years while also renting and we’re the only couple I know who’ve done that without any family gifts of cash, loans from family, living with family to avoid paying rent etc. I’m proud of that. I only wanted to do this if it was something we could achieve ourselves without relying on others.