I suppose it would suck though to have grown up among actual rich people knowing that your BIGLAW salary will never compare

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10445170)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10445381)

I have friends who live REASONABLY comfortably in Manhattan for $20,000/year.

There's no major city where there's nowhere to live that's not less than >5x as expensive as Manhattan. Complicated sentence there but I think I got the message across.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10446835)

Ahh, I see you edited your post above. Lemme see.

Dude, I don't care about legitimizing myself. Really. I couldn't care less what people think of me online, and my online life's never bled over into my real life. I do care about what people here think, but only because I want them to have confidence in where I'm going to take the board. I just want to preserve this place and keep the eternal... err, flame, for lack of a better word, going. But if you're not growing, you're shrinking.

I'm not going to turn this into 4lawschool. The purpose of that site was completely different. I bought it for the content, and then I stuffed the site with ads to make my money back.

My goal here is not to milk this site for whatever I can make off it with ads like 4lawschool. I want to build traffic here and get back the crowd that moved to ATL, and I know it's possible. I won't take the board away from its roots. But you can't expect me to only go so far with this. I'm sorry you think I'm a prick.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10446221)

I don't care if you do some content development-- but please god limit your pie chart bullshit on the sidebars of the site and fuck with the board as little as possible.

Anyway, thanks for hearing me out. I appreciate it.

PS: One final request, while I have you... Please delete the Grad board. TY.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10446225)

As for the grad board, I'm actually going to try to build it, but I haven't even looked at it yet because I haven't brought moderation over there yet.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10446320)

I'll take you at your word. Thanks again. Feel better about all this now.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10446351)

that is more than i would have thought. i don't think i can attain that in law.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10445478)

Being rich is a different universe. Rich means that you don't worry about working - if you want to blow off everything and travel for three months, you do that without hesitation. Rich means that if you fall in love with whatever city/area you stay in for a while, you can actually consider buying a place there without completely rearranging your life and finances. Rich means that you shop without ever looking at a price and that your money earns enough money sitting around to support your daily spending.

Very few people who go into law ever reach a level where they can enjoy this sort of lifestyle. Everybody else is just staking out their slot in the same little economic group. Ultimately, the difference between the Midlaw partner making $320K a year and the in-house guy who topped out at $140K a year is a thousand square feet of house (depending on where they live) and how much they're sweating their kid's college tuition. Their ultimate affluence and wealth might seem disparate to people at that level, but the difference is marginal if you consider what true wealth actually entrails.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10446585)

Essentially, if you earn a salary for the majority of your career and you're not a C-level exec or one of the few people in other professions who attain a similar rank, you'll never be 'rich' in the sense of real wealth. As somebody else already noted, the best you can hope for is solidly upper-middle class. The vast majority of people who practice law are strivers who are completely pleased to attain this level of affluence and could care less if they work for years and years just to be able to claim it, so it actually doesn't work out too badly for most people.

The average law striver is a guy like Meanest Fish who literally gets out of bed each morning for the joy and status he feels is attached with ~$200K salary (what even many TTT doctors makes easily, by the way, not that I'm trolling for docs here). He'll never really be wealthy and law is truly only a marginally prestigious profession, but for him and his ilk, it's the American dream come to full fruition.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10446734)

I'll bump my estimate of wealth up to $8M for the level you need to be at where you have absolutely no money concerns at all and can spend freely living off interest and earnings on your assets.

It's certainly possible to eventually reach that wealth level via being a partner in a large firm or running a very successful smaller firm, but it's not going to happen overnight.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10446795)

Law is not a profession for becoming rich. Banking, specialized medicine, or entrepreneurship are the surest paths to actually becoming wealthy. Fortunately lawyers can go the entrepreneur route, but that takes us back to the problem of most lawyers being socially inept and hilariously risk-averse, not to mention the problem of securing real start-up capital (which can be minimal if you're good, but this gets heavily situational). Still, any Biglaw associate who has real acumen in their field and some business ability would be a lot better off going their own way than sticking around their shitty firm hoping that their hard work is noticed and an equity partnership just falls into their lap before they're 55 years old.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10447017)

I remember many 2Ls at my school started figuring out the way the legal hierarchy actually works, and they all began saying that they knew that just working as a Biglaw associate for a few years probably won't set them up permanently, so now they were all going to stay on for ten years, make partner, THEN lateral or something and become a really rich lawyer who lives an awesome life. It was funny, even back then when the lack of realism in this scenario was a new and grim reality.

This is actually more much more attainable for people who work in v75 type situations where they have a guaranteed form of partnership and don't really work that many hours, but it's obviously much less lucrative than real Biglaw. I'm reading between the lines, but this is probably what twentynine has in mind, not being awarded partnership at Cravath or something. Even so, I know an awful lot of partners in decent firms who aren't worth nearly $5 million, but there are outside considerations how much money people are able to save. Virtually everyone I know who has real money owns something, be it real estate or a lucrative businesses (or businesses). There aren't many other ways to do accumulate real money quickly.

I do know that among people who live lifestyle like "the rich," even a net worth of $10 million isn't really impressive. These people own three, four homes, maintain cars at all of them, boats, have memberships to clubs in every city where they spend time (and they pay a lot for the two months of the year they use them), don't really work, and travel extravagantly whenever they want to. That's a far cry from your average dude who climbed up to partner at his mid-sized law firm after sixteen years in the business.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10447117)

How did they amass their fortunes?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10447260)

2. New money windfalls

Very few people at that level are just regular professionals who just managed to invest and save, and that includes doctors and lawyers. Business and ownership is where real money comes from - everybody else spends years working and saving just to eek out a percentage of what people who generate real wealth are worth. The disparity is huge, and real wealth is rare, like top 0.01% rare. Anybody who thinks they're really going to be "rich" under any definition in law without starting their own firm and doing very well is retarded. It's a striver profession and it always will be - you have to work too hard and too long to get ahead, and even then the rewards are pwned by lots of other professions.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10447605)

I love xoxo's convictions about how everyone with money lives. I know people who are Forbes400 rich who are cheap as anything and will ask about and haggle almost all prices. The only people who think buying without asking how much it costs is "prestigious" are rappers and the nouveau riche.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10448649)

by no means am i a gunner douche or anything. i just think more of you liberal arts degree-having, valuable skill-lacking doods need some perspective.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10446632)

If you aren't born into it, and you went to law school, chances are you have a fair amount of debt and so it's even harder to become wealthy in one generation.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10447193)

but why would this be one of them?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10448426)

it's sad to brag about being not quite 5 but still 3.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10448517)

At least you have a much more reasonable expectation for how much money a couple of lawyers can reasonably accumulate and what that means. Lulz to the rest of the people in this thread modestly estimating that it 'may take a while' before they're worth five million. This is law, and them there's banking and finance numbers.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10448488)

There is much wishful striving in this thread.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10448477)

Somebody snuck a Ducktails ?s thread thread into the on-topic page if you're still trying to squash all that.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=893105&forum_id=2#10448486)