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Charles
年龄: 41
注册时间: 2005-03-15
帖子: 17
来自: Hamilton
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 Making it to the top
It's never easy, but getting rich is still being done every day. All it takes is leverage.
NEW YORK - The idea that anyone can make it here is so key to our national self-image it ought to be printed on the dollar bill.
Which is why it's hard to ignore an increasing number of economists' claims that the U.S. no longer lives up to its promise and that getting ahead is getting so tough that the very idea of the American dream is threatened.
Some economists and policy makers worry about the dramatic widening of the gap between rich and poor. The top 1 percent of American families, for example, now own as much as the bottom 95 percent combined, the highest such gap among developed nations.
Does that suggest that the American dream may be moving out of reach?
Although growing inequality offends many Americans' sense of fairness, there's no conclusive evidence -- at least not yet -- that it has lessened the odds of getting ahead, especially if you're already middle class.
"Access to the top is still as open -- or closed -- as it used to be," says New York University economist Edward Wolff, one of the nation's leading experts on wealth and a vocal critic of income inequality.
Getting rich will never be easy, whether you start poor or somewhere north of the middle. But the claim that the rich have pulled the drawbridge up behind them is simply false. In an economy as dynamic as this one, they can't.
In the stories below, you'll hear from real people about how they made the American Dream work for them -- and see how you can make it work for you.
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最后进行编辑的是 Charles on 2005-04-14, 16:58, 总计第 1 次编辑
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Charles
年龄: 41
注册时间: 2005-03-15
帖子: 17
来自: Hamilton
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Your first investment: Education
The first stop on the path to wealth absolutely has to be college.
NEW YORK - Even if you're more realist than optimist, the first stop on the path to wealth absolutely has to be college. People with a bachelors degree make 70 percent more than those with only a high school diploma, an advantage that adds an additional million bucks in earnings over their working lives.
Graduate degrees can be worth much, much more. Salaries for doctors and lawyers are all over the map, but consider that the median income of a cardiac surgeon is $400,000, according to Medical Economics magazine's 2003 earnings survey.
The average partner in many of the nation's elite law firms makes $1 million or more. (You're invited to tear those numbers out and nail them to your teenager's bedroom door.)
Plenty of mid-career workers go back to school too, and with good reason. According to the Graduate Management Admission Council, an M.B.A. typically makes almost 50 percent more after graduation than when he or she entered the program.
Education, of course, is not cheap, particularly the elite kind. Four years at Harvard and three more at its law school currently run about $300,000. Most students borrow to finance at least some of their education. In 2002 the average undergraduate debt was $18,900, according to the student loan finance company Nellie Mae. Grad students owed $31,700 on top of that. Law and medical students finished school carrying an average debt load of $91,700.
In this respect, though, investing in an education is like investing in real estate or in a business. It involves leverage, spending other people's money -- be it a Pell Grant, a student loan or a gift from Mom and Dad -- to increase the value of an asset. The asset here is your most valuable one, the earning power of your brain.
While a high school senior in rural Roseville, Calif., Arturo Gonzalez, the son of a Mexican-born railroad worker, painted HARVARD OR BUST on the side of his beat-up VW bug.
"I'm sure people thought it was a joke," he says. Five years later, Gonz醠ez was working his way through Harvard Law School. Today, at 44, he's a partner at Morrison & Foerster, a large San Francisco-based law firm where the average partner made $740,000 in 2003, according to The American Lawyer magazine.
"For a kid who grew up in a house of modest means, borrowing $30,000 to go to law school did seem daunting," says Gonzalez. "But I wanted to go to Harvard, and was not about to let money or the lack thereof stop me. When I first began at Morrison & Foerster in 1985, my salary was $38,000, which I thought was pretty good. It was almost twice as much as my father was making working for the railroad."
As with any investment, there's risk involved in getting an education, even when the payoff appears rock-solid. The rise of managed care, for instance, has reduced wages for primary-care physicians. And software engineers face tough competition from abroad that didn't exist just five years ago.
Still, the trend is strongly in favor of investing as much in education as possible. NYU economist Wolff points out that the ratio of the average earnings of a college to a high school graduate has more than doubled since 1980. The biggest risk is foregoing the opportunity to get as much education as you can.
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Charles
年龄: 41
注册时间: 2005-03-15
帖子: 17
来自: Hamilton
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The real estate path
Fortunes have been made using the leverage of real estate, accessible to most "regular" people.
NEW YORK - The appeal of real estate is simple: It's one area where regular people can get a significant amount of investment leverage.
If you have decent credit and $20,000 to put down, you shouldn't have much trouble getting a mortgage for $100,000. Invest that money wisely -- in a home whose value appreciates, or a rental property that produces net income -- and you can reap a big profit from a modest outlay. No wonder that almost a quarter of all home purchases are now done for investment purposes, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Fortunes have been made. Lisa Van Deusen arrived from Vietnam with her parents in 1978. The family was virtually penniless. Her mother worked as a seamstress, while her father worked on an assembly line building electronic components. "We lived on rice and soy sauce for a while," she says.
Van Deusen, now 31, started out as a real estate broker after college (education, remember?). Then she and her fianc?(now husband) Todd started buying and selling for themselves. Along the way, they've accumulated property worth $5 million, in which they have about 40 percent equity.
Their first deal in 2000 started as a home purchase. The couple scraped together $25,000 to put down on a $230,000 condominium in northern California. When Todd got a job in Santa Barbara, they sold the condo for about $400,000.
Van Deusen used the proceeds to wipe out her credit-card debt, pay for her wedding and buy a 1996 Lexus. That left her with $50,000 that she and her husband used to buy a condo in Santa Barbara. Within a year its value rose $125,000.
The couple then borrowed against their equity in the property to buy more. Now they own six single-family homes, a triplex in Arizona and at press time were closing on a 30-unit rental property in upstate New York. They're also looking for opportunities in Texas and Oklahoma.
"Basically I had $50,000, and I've been playing with the bank's money," she says.
The flip side of making a fortune, of course, is losing your shirt. Rising home values have made real estate today's "obvious" path to wealth. In 1999, tech stocks were this "obvious." No one wants to learn that lesson twice.
Rising interest rates can knock a big chunk off the value of any property you buy today, especially in an overheated market. If that happens, can you afford to sit on that investment for five or 10 years until the real estate market comes back?
Van Deusen says that for the last few years she and her husband just bought whenever and whatever they could. But about a year ago, after they sat down with a financial planner and looked at what they had, they began to diversify by property type and location, as well as by asset class, purchasing those investments of yesteryear -- stocks and bonds -- for the first time.
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最后进行编辑的是 Charles on 2005-04-14, 16:51, 总计第 1 次编辑
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Charles
年龄: 41
注册时间: 2005-03-15
帖子: 17
来自: Hamilton
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Being your own boss
There's no upper limit -- or lower, alas -- to how far you can go being self-employed.
NEW YORK - "The thing about being self-employed," says Thomas Stanley, co-author of "The Millionaire Next Door," "is that there's no upper limit."
According to the Federal Reserve Board, between 1992 and 2001 the average net worth of self-employed people rose from $714,500 to $1.2 million, five times that of the average working stiff. Given that eye-popping differential, is there any reason not to quit your day job and get cracking on that business plan?
For starters, there's not much in the way of a downward limit for the self-employed either. About one out of three businesses fail within four years, according to the Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy. And a business crisis can all too easily translate into a personal one. One study found that about 20 percent of people filing for personal bankruptcy claimed some business debts.
That's because starting a business very often requires -- surprise -- leverage. The SBA says that about 80 percent of all small businesses have some kind of debt on their books.
The good news is that, as with real estate investors, would-be entrepreneurs have remarkably easy access to other people's money these days.
In February, members of the National Federation of Independent Business reported that they paid an average rate of 6.7 percent for short-term loans vs. 10.1 percent just four years ago. The long slide in interest rates has gone hand in hand with a blossoming of small enterprise. There were, for example, nearly 3 million more sole proprietorships in the U.S. in 2003 than in 1993.
Some businesses still have trouble getting outside financing, however -- particularly those starting from scratch. Owners often have to throw in a lot of their own resources and put their own credit on the line.
That can be a heady gamble. Just ask former manicurist Rosie Herman of Tomball, Texas. She developed her One Minute Manicure line of hand and nail treatments after she went $75,000 into debt paying for fertility treatments. After putting her twin girls to bed, she'd stay up at night experimenting.
"I never planned this to last," she says. "I just wanted to get out of debt."
To do that,though, she went further into debt, funding her business with as many credit cards as she could get.
"I kept applying for more credit cards, getting $1,500 credit on each," she says. She even rang up $10,000 buying supplies on her sister's credit cards.
That's a gut-wrenching level of risk most people wouldn't -- and probably shouldn't -- be willing to take. But funding a business with plastic is common enough among small businesses. The SBA says that about 44 percent of small businesses in 1998 were borrowing from personal credit cards.
Risk can be a heck of a motivator. "I was under stress knowing I was in debt, and I was making it worse and spending money every day," says Herman. "I had to do something to make the sales."
She went to stores and beauty parlors trying to convince them to buy her stuff. Often, she says, they slammed the door in her face. But she pressed on.
"I created the demand by going around and making people try it, making my own buzz," she says. Result: Over the past five years, she's done about $20 million in sales.
If you have good credit and a solid business plan, your own start-up might not be as harrowing as Herman's was. But remember, no matter how hard or easy it is to borrow, the odds on any new business are always long.
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Charles
年龄: 41
注册时间: 2005-03-15
帖子: 17
来自: Hamilton
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Does the stock market matter any more?
Yes, but definitely not as a quick way to wealth. Think "nest egg."
NEW YORK - So does that 1999 way of getting rich, the stock market, matter anymore? Yes, but definitely not as a quick way to wealth.
One of the reasons that people thought you could get rich in a hurry buying stocks a few years ago was that many people did. The S&P 500 returned about 28 percent a year for the five years ending in 1999. It was fun while it lasted, but that party is long over.
The optimists expect stock returns in the high single digits for the foreseeable future. That's enough to move you up quite a few rungs on the economic ladder and provide for a nice retirement if you save diligently, but it won't push you into the top income tier unless you're practically there already.
"You're not going to get rich with investing," says Coral Gables, Fla. financial planner Harold Evensky. "You're going to get rich inventing widgets, or by being an outstanding person in your professional field, or by putting sweat equity into real estate or a business."
Over the long run, though, the stock market still offers a good return, particularly if you start early.
A return of, say, 6 percent a year doesn't sound very dramatic, but over twenty, thirty or forty years of investing, that can mean serious money. And at substantially a lower risk than Rosie Herman took on.
Good thing. After all, not everybody is wired to make it in business or in real estate. Not everyone is cut out for grad school either. But there's no earthly reason that every American can't have a nice, fat nest egg.
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