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Comment by boriskourt | Hacker News Reader

He was not a poor man, he was not a wealthy man. This project did take 40 years. Which is a great deal of his career and income, there is another nice comment from Jen about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/davidlynch/comments/1nhcgej/comment...

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By that definition, most people are poor. $15 million is much more than most people have. Even split among the four children, it's fine.

He apparently was cash poor and asset rich. Now the opposite is true for his children.

Assets can be easily converted into cash by borrowing against them.

This has the added disadvantage that you will have to pay back this loan with interest. Not everybody can.

It’s not terribly hard to get into that position, if you spend 40 years of your time and treasure on something with resale value instead of on food and experiences.

You can do something similar if you buy a house and keep buying any neighboring house that comes up for sale (and renting them out, perhaps).

> It’s not terribly hard

Uhm, it must be, or more people would do it

Losing weight isn’t terribly hard but still lots have trouble doing it.

Median household income is like $83k. If you were in a median US household and you saved half of all your income every month into something that had a stable 4% return, in 40 years you'd have ~$4M. Not even halfway there.

You'd need a little over 9% of stable returns over that 40 year timeframe to hit that $15M target.

The S&P 500 returns average 7% in real dollars (not inflated dollars).

My calculation makes that about $9m over 40 years.

Sure, but there's a gap between being poor and being wealthy. $15 million is a lot more than most people have and it's certainly enough to be comfortable and not have to worry about money, but it's still categorically different from having the sort of money that gives you institutional power.

Yeah but having a 15M house and say 200k income makes you poor, as a 15M house needs a ton of money to maintain it.

If you are paying property tax in LA based on a 15m valuation, that 200k income will struggle to cover the annual property tax bill let alone any maintenance or anything else.

The property tax is calculated based on the last transaction price of the home, so despite it being estimated at $15m today, the owner would be paying tax on a much lower value (assuming they purchased it many years ago).

Ill trade 5M cash and 200k income for that any day of the week.

The first thing I'd do is sell.

>>The first thing I'd do is sell

Me too. And it looks like that’s what the heirs are doing too.

But for David Lynch, I can see why he might want to live amongst the people involved in financing, making, and distributing movies. Similar to how founders move to the expensive Bay area to be near VCs, talent, etc.

The rule of thumb for upkeep of houses, airplanes, and cars is about 1% annually.

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