The teacher example is an extreme version of the long game. There is a middle path - where you focus on investing, invest in your health, treat your job less as a job and more as a career.
Or maybe... She got lucky with some investments, maybe real estate. That reminds me all the stories of engineers who retire early by "saving instead of spending" that start by "I got 500k from stocks when the startup I worked for got bought out".
Sure, saving every year and investing instead of buying everything credit is a good thing, just like avoid to sink all your savings + 25 years mortgage when you buy a house, and many Americans especially need to be reminded that. But showing a lady who end up with 6M "just by playing the long game" sounds a lot like the old Adam Smith/American dream bullshit. "If you work hard and save, one day you'll be a millionaire". That's bullshit. You can't become a millionaire just by saving your blue collar salary (or school teacher salary) and saving up instead of overspending.
I've always been surprised how much traction this saying gets. If you look around, not only is it untrue, it's actually the opposite. The hardest, most boring, most unpleasant jobs are generally the lowest paid: custodian, service industry, tellers, cashiers, csr's, etc. The most fun, desirable and easiest jobs are generally the higher paying ones: management, tech, academia, etc. Optimizing life for hard work is misguided and reaps only coincidental benefits. It's more directly about value, moving up the value chain, which generally ends up reducing "hardness".
For one thing, your hardest examples are easy to learn and execute. The barrier to entry is low and a lot of people can do it. Not so much with tech, for example. There's a lot of work you have to put in before anyone is going to pay you and you may be breaking new ground. The ongoing work is often very hard, very complex and not fun.
Ignoring inflation for the moment, if you invest $1750/month and the stock market returns 10%, after 35 years, you'll have roughly $6 million. So that means the teacher only needed to save $21k each year, and dump into index funds.
(The pre-inflation annualized return for the S&P 500 from 1980 to 2015 was 12.97% - if you use that for your assumptions, you only need to invest $875/month or $10,500 each year. Obviously after 35 years, that money will have lost some steam due to inflation, but it will have grown a ridiculous amount).
Footnote: The "retired teacher" article didn't seem to mention investments, beyond a few savings bonds and calling it a "portfolio", - or the actual time span of saving money. Just that she "worked" for 35 years.
However, the numbers aren’t totally bonkers. Suppose she invested $15,000 saved from her first year, which would be hard but not totally impossible on a teacher’s salary.
If that makes 7 percent per year for 35 years, it will be worth about $160,000 at retirement. That’s just for the first year. Money earned and invested the next year will earn a bit less, though with raises, etc, perhaps she could invest a bit more....
The perverse reality for many professions is that, when you are youngest and best able to take advantage of the magic of compound interest, you are barely paid enough to survive independently. After paying for loans to cover college and graduate school, a public school teacher would be lucky to save $15,000 a year 10 years after starting their career.
https://work.chron.com/annual-salary-firstyear-teacher-5573....
It would not be particularly pleasant, but as I said, it would be hard (possibly hard enough to merit a newspaper article), but not impossible.
Why would i skim off all money in the first 10 years of my working life if i know the pie gets bigger, but my share as a working class person is getting smaller and smaller?
Appendix A [1] contains the salary schedule for Chicago Public Schools, which shows that in the current school year a first-year teacher ("step 1") with a bachelor's degree ("lane 1") earns between $57,000 and $69,000 per year, depending on the length of the school year in the particular school they are appointed to. A master's degree ("lane 2") bumps the pay by somewhere in the range of $4,000-5,000.
Being a coach on the sports team earns an additional $26.21 per hour of coaching, participating in after-school non-coaching, non-instructional activities earns $40.90 per hour, and after-school instructional activities earn $47.62 per hour.
It appears as though a teacher could add $5,000 or more per year with only an hour of extra time per school day.
If a teacher wanted to be frugal and save money, it surely appears possible.
Also it looks like half or more of th emoney cam from a relative that happeded to move in with her yeaars before dying.
the lady got given a house to live in for free and had no requirement for money.
This article can be summed up as: long term efforts chipping away at something can ALSO pay off.
I am yet to see a success story that is not heavily leaning on situation or luck. our system is simply not fair and i really tire of bullshit like this trying to pretend that it has some purpose or value beyond exploitation.