“Anyone who had/has rich parents”.
Worked my ass off moving up through food industry - from retail to operations manager of a manufacturing plant.
Didn’t get rich until my folks gave me a 6-figure loan to start my own business, with an interest rate so low+generous it was basically free money. That enabled us to take risks in the first 2 years that we never would have attempted otherwise. Some of those paid off.
Hell I wouldn’t have been able to grind out 65+hr weeks in my mid-twenties getting experience if I didn’t have such a great support system, largely enabled due to not having to truly worry about bills or food until I “got on my own feet”.
Yeah, I put work in. But I could’ve done the exact same amount of effort and made many times less money, essentially guaranteed if not for randomly being born to the right situation.
Behind every early retired person is someone who gave them some kind of resource most others likely will never have access to.
Sure!
No serious plans. We’ve currently been focused on our kids first, but are donating time to local food banks and have donated money to some proposed measures and our local Blanchet House.
We aren’t well off enough that pursuing the next step in what people normally put donated time towards is an option; just our 5-10% of our time and money is a lot larger than it was before we hit this point. Neither of us have serious plans to grind for more money again, so this likely wont change.