Wealth and poverty is an arc through time.

[Plane]

............... upper-class families took 300 to 450 years before their scions fell back into the middle class. Throughout society, poor families, taken as a whole, took an equal amount of time — 10 to 15 generations — to work their way up into the middle class..............................

For example, about 100 Mellons are alive today sharing $12 billion, the fruit of a bank their forefather Andrew W. Mellon founded in the mid-1800s. The several hundred living members of the Rockefellers share $10 billion in wealth that started when John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil in 1870.

With just $1 billion, the Kennedy family’s wealth is eclipsed by the assets of less romantic family dynasties (the wealthiest family in the world, the Waltons, trace their riches to the founding of Wal-Mart in 1962), but the 30 Kennedy heirs live with a name associated with America’s Camelot.

Time will tell how long it takes those heirs to end up driving a cab.

http://blogs.ancestry.com/cm/2015/05/22/do-you-come-from-royal-blood-your-last-name-may-tell-you/?utm_source=taboola&utm_medium=referral&o_xid=64393&o_lid=64393&o_sch=Content+Marketing

[kimba1]

it might go quicker. reality tv shows a lot of kids of the rich and I maybe wrong but many are not exactly self-supporting.ex. kardashians  but then the competent kids would not be in the public and are having real jobs. ex. trump kids

[Plane]

  Individuals that found fortunes are the exception, they exist , like Sam Walton and Bill Gates, but most of the well off are members of a family that is progressing together.

    And it certainly can happen faster than this article states, but there are reasons that it seems that the general rule is slowly progressing through the social strata.

     One reason is that we develop habits that make us fit where we are,  people who win the lottery suddenly have fortunes that put them in the .oo1% income levels , but many of these do not keep the fortune , they do not know how to maintain the fortune. Habits are pretty sticky and can keep a family on a plane for generations unless the habits are so productive that they cause an upward trend or so wasteful that they produce an downwards trend.

   Just as only a few people individually amass huge fortunes , only a few ever have the opportunity and ability to by themselves destroy a large fortune.

[kimba1]

don`t forget a cultural aspect that can hinder a persons ability to hold money. I lost count all the reasons people tell me why they don`t save money.

[Plane]

Exactly!

Culture is very tied to family, and conserves itself over generations.

But a good habit that helps is a good thing for a legacy.

A bad habit is equally hard to loose.

People who break out of this sort of trajectory are geniuses or athletes .

[Xavier_Onassis]

The least well known fact about wealth acquisition in America is that you are very unlikely to become really wealthy by working for it. Growing wealth effectively almost always involves some form of regular and intelligent investing.

[kimba1]

intelligent investing.....

uhm....

do you know how many people I have to explain a value of a stock is. ex. msft at $83 per share needed to be explained that each share cost $83.
I`m not kidding.
I have to bite my lip a lot when people vaguely talk about anything related to finance.

[Xavier_Onassis]

On several occasions, I have commented on the success of specific mutual funds, by stating some results, such as in the past year, PRHSX (T Rowe Price Health Science) has appreciated 41.9%.

Among comments are that just buying a single stock could gain  lot more, and that the Florida Lottery might have a payout in the millions.
These statements are all true, but do not take into account that investing in Apple is many times as risky, and investing in the lottery ticket, millions of times as risky.

There is clear balance between risk and gains that some people do not seem capable of understanding.  The stock market, which is the basis of mutual funds is not at all like the lottery. In the lottery, the winner is usually just one person, and never more than a few. Everyone else loses everything. In the stock market, there are days when nearly all stocks rise in price. There are no days in which everyone wins the lottery.  Investing in a solid company like Apple is very unlikely to result in you losing everything (unless you invest on  the margin). It is even less probable that a mutual fund will result in anyone losing it all.

To successfully invest, you have to be aware of the odds.

[kimba1]

Sadly alot of folks can't figure out the odds.

[Xavier_Onassis]

There is ample information on who can explain the odds to the prospective investor.

But they find nut cases like Cramer and Porter Stansberry more entertaining and choose to believe them.

In 2040, those dried foods you bought to save you when the economy collapsed will be inedible and unused, since Armageddon never came.

The evidence that Armageddon is quite clear: for 2000 years they have been predicting it, and it has never arrived.

It would make more sense to believe in the future in which we all drive autogyros and live under the oceans.