Oh, and don’t bother with rockstar “feed the poor” promotions. Most of the money they raise ends up in the pockets of dictators and brigands. Trade is the best anti-poverty tool in the human toolbox, as China and India have shown.

We are spoiled. Once you pay attention to world news, you miss out on how fortunate you really are. Net worth does not seem to important anymore

The job/career element means very little in a global economy. There are 4 times the number of Chinese college graduates as USA college graduates. That is why your need practical entrepreneurship – or what others are dubbing – alternative income streams.

And a final point needs to be made. Frugality is also a response to our brothers/sisters in the human race. Most Africans live on a dollar a day and yet we Americans get upset when the power goes off during a storm.

If you think about it, each household could approach their wheel differently. Some people start off with purely Business as the basis of their net worth. Some do so with purely Real Estate (as several of my friends have). These people are very financially stable which shows that even with a concentrated wheel — and in fact, perhaps *because* of one — they have become wildly wealthy.

I find, especially from reading PF blogs, that a lot of “frugal” people use it as a crutch and excuse to underachieve and ultimately not care about being responsible for their lives ( while often having irrational dislike of those who ARE responsible). I speak out of experience as a “frugal” poor person. I find a lot of people waste energy trying to save 1 dollar, when the energy could probably be spent EARNING thousands more. Increasing income through one of the means ( job, business, investments,etc) is a much more productive use of life/time.

Sometimes being frugal is expensive.

1. Work. I’ve worked in Silicon Valley for over 20 years and am now in my primary “earning phase” of life.

2. Entrepreneurial income; my wife is self-employed. But I work too hard in my primary job to bother with web income or whatever, especially since it would be taxed at 45%.

3. Compound interest; we invest in several private “hard money” funds that pay 10-13%. Given the tax issues, we’d rather use our money to make money than spend more of our time to make money.

4. Windfalls; I work in startups, and always exercise my stock, no matter how bad things look for the startup. This strategy has worked twice in the past and my current startup is going well. Also, if you have the opportunity to do so, early exercise of stock options means the money from the “liquidity event” is taxed as a capital gain as opposed to income.

5. We have no debt outside our mortgage, and while we’re fairly frugal and do all the usual stuff to save money, we aren’t annoying or self-righteous about it. One often overlooked aspect of frugality is it’s effectively untaxed savings – every penny saved is literally a penny earned, so as you make more money and get taxed at higher rates, the “relative rate of return” from frugality is actually higher.

We also have a house but that’s it as far as direct exposure to real estate goes. The hard money funds have enough real estate exposure for me.

Sustainable living has to be a part of any wealth building. For me, using up resources w/o regard to the consequences is immoral and impractical.

However, there are those people who were born rich and for them I’m speaking a foreign language!