This crap pops up in the weirdest places. There was a discussion in a video game forum about winding up with more money than you know what to do with and a couple of whining idiots popped up and cried “why does that never happen in the real world?”

It does. All the time, if you’re willing to work hard and make good decisions. But no…. they don’t want to hear that. They want all that success right now. They want it on a silver platter or it doesn’t happen!

Fuck these people.

I decided to take it off the forum because it’s way off topic and doesn’t belong there anyhow. So I’m going to give some real world examples here, something these morons would never accept because they are stuck in this “nobody can do that!” mindset that is based on nothing but the bullshit that they throw around on the Internet.

My parents weren’t rich. My mother’s parents were, but my parents didn’t benefit from that at all. My parents never went to college. My mother could have, but instead, she chose to get married. My father struggled for a long time at low-wage jobs and growing up, we never had a lot. They had a house that they got from the G.I. Bill because my father was in the Navy. The one thing that my father had though was a rock-solid work ethic. He worked his ass off every single day for years and years. He learned everything that he could and worked his way up into upper management and from there, he made money. He also made a lot of very smart financial decisions. We always lived within our means. They made very sure that both my sister and I got very good educations, first through private schools, which cost a lot of money in those days and they scrimped and saved to get us there, and then through college, which we both paid for 100% on our own. No loans at all. We worked. Hard.

My father died relatively early on, back in the early 2000s, but by the time my mother retired, they were well off. She could do whatever she wanted. She could buy new cars, she could buy houses, which the last one she did, she paid cash for. Trust me, I know what she had when she died. She was flush. She had well over a million dollars in her bank account and a lot more than that in investments.

Not enough? My wife’s parents. They also started from nothing. While they both had college degrees, they only went so far. My mother-in-law was a teacher at a local elementary school and my father-in-law ran a dairy for most of his life and thereafter, ran an insurance branch. They never lived high on the hog, but I know what they had. Both of them died in the last 2 years and my wife is the executor of their estate. They lived in a house worth a million dollars. Was it an extravagant house? No, but you build that equity over time. Their stock portfolio was massive, we just managed to finish rolling our portion of it into our accounts. We are still finding money that they had stuffed away in various accounts. Our money manager is still finding this stuff! In the last couple of months, she came to us and said “you’ve got ten years to figure out where to put $900,000!” We’re finding real estate that we knew nothing about. There are millions of dollars in assets just sitting there. They came from nothing and made a bundle. They never lived extravagantly, but they never wanted for anything either.

Okay, my sister and her husband. Obviously, my sister came from the same background I did, but today, she runs the entire fiscal dealings of a good sized city. Her husband only worked for one company in his life and he worked from the very bottom to the very top and when he retired, he had a solid pension that will keep them going forever. They own a couple of homes and once my sister retires in, I think, another 2 years, since she works for a government entity and has put in her time, they’re looking at buying a ranch in Montana or something, it’s either Montana or Wyoming, and riding horses for the rest of their lives.

Same thing with my wife and I. Started out with very little, built it into a lot. It was all hard work. My wife just got a promotion and a giant raise and now they’re talking about doing it again in the next year. She will have more than doubled her salary in just about 13 months. She doesn’t even have to work, we could both retire right now since I, too, have a pension coming, but my boss is going to retire, he’s in his 80s now, and once he does, I get a big promotion and a huge raise and my pension, day one, goes up incredibly, not that I care. I’m working because I love it. I have no interest in retiring any time soon. It’s not about the money, it’s about enjoying the work.

So what, that’s 4 success stories? More if you count each individual. It’s not impossible to do. It’s not simple, it takes really hard work, but it can be done if you really set your mind to it and refuse to give up.

I’m going to give one story where it didn’t work too, although there are others. They all share the same in common. They didn’t work hard. I do have plenty of examples of that, so it’s not like I’m saying everyone I know is a multi-millionaire.

I know someone, I’ve talked about them before, who has really done nothing of any substance in his life. He made himself a professional student and didn’t graduate from college until he was in his mid-30s. We told him not to do that and he ignored us. In fact, you’ll find that a common theme here. He came out with a crap degree that wasn’t any  good for anything and he has never held a steady job in his life. Not ever. He has struggled every day and he has surrounded himself, mostly, with others who also struggle every day. We have told him time and time again what he’s doing wrong, but he refuses to do anything about it because he’s always looking for the easy way out. We try to help him when we can. We just gave him a car. We might just pay off his house, which wasn’t his fault, his father was an idiot and got a second mortgage, just so he could keep his mother happy in the style that he wanted her to become accustomed to. When one of his cats had kittens, we took two kittens and paid to have the mother fixed so she’d stop having kittens. He currently has 13 cats. Our kittens got fixed last Wednesday. They’re doing fine. They’re not happy with the e-collars, but they’re managing.

I’m not trying to put anyone down, but this is stuff that anyone can do if they can be patient, be responsible, work hard and not do dumb things. I’ve got lots of examples that it can be done and plenty of examples that it wasn’t. Not that it  couldn’t have been, but that it wasn’t. When someone tells you that it can’t be done, laugh in their face because you can find millions of people who did it. Was it easy? No. It was really hard, take it from me, but it was worth it to struggle through the lean times to get to the point that we are today. It was hard work and today, most people don’t want to do hard work. They want to believe that they’re special, but they’re not. They need to earn their way to comfort. I did. A lot of people around me did. The only thing they had in common was a strong work ethic and the desire to succeed.

If you don’t have that, then you deserve to fail. You have no one to blame but yourself. Stop whining and get to work before it’s too late. You have nowhere to go but up.