Just because a lot of people fail at it doesn't mean that those who might want to take the risk shouldn't be made aware of the benefits. I would personally rather deal with failure for the shot at making more income. It's not for everyone, and they can certainly stay on the beaten path and do just fine. (so long as their debt doesn't spiral out of control) I'm not saying that people should dedicate their lives to home businesses, but they can try different things on the side to see what works with a minimal risk of catastrophic failure.
If you are a software developer in any major city in the US and you’re just really good at your bog standard enterprise developer type jobs or yet another software as a service CRUD app developer, you’re already probably in the 80th income percentile. If your goal is increasing net worth, it’s quite easy to live a comfortable middle class lifestyle and still put aside enough to have a couple of million and a paid off house in 15 to 20 years just by putting money in an index fund.
There is really little risk of being long term unemployed as a software developer if you keep your skills in line with the local market and keep your network strong. This is coming from being a developer for the past 20 years. I’m not talking about how much I have personally saved, just how easy it is to get a job or at least a contract. It’s even easier for dual income earners. You can literally save an entire second income or put it toward net worth building.
On second thought, the best “investment” I guess is a working spouse and a happy marriage. Statistics back that up.
With all respect, this logic fails to account for the rising taxpayer/dependent ratio.
If American tax rates will reach that of Europe, even dual income high earners, will just break the comfortable level — way less what I deserve with my position in society. And even that will worsen further over time.
At some t/d ratio, the nation will simply turn into a "transfer economy" — when cash value of all pensions/savings withdrawals/welfare/rents will begin closing on on the total income of working populace. That's something close to what we had in Eastern Europe when Bloc collapsed.
You don't realise the severity of issue until you calculate that NPV of an average boomer generation person, might've been higher 40 years ago, than NPV of savings and future contributions of highest earning young people today.
I’m going to repeat a previous argument in a way that hopefully doesn’t get my hand slapped and my comment flagged:
There is an easy answer to that: a pro immigration policy for both high skilled labor that creates a jobs by starting businesses and low skilled labor that can do the work that our native born society is too old to do.
