Originally Posted by wstar

No offense, I just wouldn't call that "significant". You're still in the same ballpark. Lots of people make a little more for a while (and some don't). But being able to establish yourself at a completely new level of society is a different thing (as in: your dad worked manual labor, but you're a multi-millionaire-for-life living it responsibly and not necessarily required to "work" for a living anymore).

The most common counter-example is the middle-class guy who gets rich on a successful small business or investment idea at a relatively early age, but even among those a high percentage will fall right back to their "natural level" in well under 10 years by pissing it away and making poor financial choices.

When I was 19 I had already overtaken my dad's salary from his long term career by a hefty chunk. 15+ years later, and I still probably out-earn him by a little (he's continued to do well late into his career, and hasn't retired yet). In the big picture though, we're still in the same approximate economic class. We're both comfortably upper-middle, but lack the sort of stable, long-term financial freedom to truly be called upper class.

I've known a lot of people all across the economic scale, but I know very very few that made a large upward jump in their adult lives and vaulted into a new category (and kept it). The average seems to be a lot of people getting "a little" ahead, and a few people backsliding tremendously to balance things out.

Trying to pull this back to thread-relevance though, my point was: Generally when you see someone who's obviously rich upper class, it's a statistical safe assumption they were born that way.