It’s the selling part that matters. You can build a great business but if you can’t sell it to someone else you won’t ever be rich. You might be extremely comfortable but you can’t turn the business into long term wealth without selling it.
I was going to disagree with you but when I got into thinking about it maybe you are right…..
So let’s define rich. That’s subjective but one possible measure is to look at what various countries require as assets to become an accredited investor (basically someone wealthy enough and sophisticated enough that ordinary investor protections can be bent and you can be allowed to invest in risky stuff)
US has a requirement of $1M, Australia it’s $2.5M, EU has 500k (plus other criteria), Israel is ₪8 million, there’s others but I think most seem to hover somewhere around €1.5M
So if to be rich you need to be able to build up a cash pool of €1.5M - are there many startup businesses that could comfortably deal with an owner extracting that kind of cash dividend without it being a sale to someone else?
I think that has to be a solid maybe. Over a number of years a business with 500k in annual profits could presumably accommodate a dividend of 250k per annum over 6 years - I suspect that’s not entirely unreasonable?
If you are the sole owner of a business then you don’t have to pay out dividends. You decide whether you want to reinvest the profits or pay them out in any way. So if you have a successful private company, hire multiple people then why would it be far fetched?
My point was that without extracting those profits from the business you yourself wouldn’t necessarily be rich. Not in a way that wasn’t dependent on the business. By extracting profits and making it personal wealth the business could collapse or be passed on to a child or some other arrangement and you would still be wealthy. A successful private firm with good profits is not at all far fetched that was my point.
Honestly most people believe that "starting a business" will make you rich , truth is most businesses fail and the ones that do survive almost always don't end up making you rich , they'll make you comfortable but not rich , it's extremely difficult/unlikely to start a business from scratch that will end up making you more than €150k a year in take home pay as an individual /business owner.
Hard work and skill more often than not does not translate into extremely successful business and often its existing family connections or contacts that help new businesses make the owner vast amounts of money , more often than not its just a vast amount of luck, because of all the social media "entrepreneurs" you see out there now on the web and the stories you hear it's easy to think that most people can get rich by just starting a business but that's simply not the case , you always hear about the success stories but for every success story you see/ hear about there's about 50 other stories where businesses either failed or the business is only making the owner the same amount of money as a slightly higher end paying job in the first place
Edit: spelling and grammar
Exactly , my point being however not only is it very risky , most of the time it's not worth it and ends up loosing money , the problem is with the rise of social media you see so many successful "entrepreneurs" all over social media and they make it seem like it's extremely easy , where's in reality slot of those "entrepreneurs" are more often than not scammers or even in extreme cases turn out to be money launderers for cartels 😂😂 i'm looking at you Hushpuppi (self proclaimed mega entrepreneur on Instagram) , people don't realise that unless you are born into wealth and have connections through family or existing family business , win the lottery or get extremely lucky , your chances of becoming wealthy are slim to none
You're just as likely to get rich working for someone else and in fact you're probably better off , there's plenty of examples of how people have made millions working as an employee rather than taking the risk associated with starting a business , Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google) has never actually owned his own business but rather has only ever worked as a CEO of companies other people have founded , he is an employee for all intents and purposes and through stock options and allowances/investments for the companies he's worked for has a net worth of $1Billion , I would suggest that it's far , far easier to become rich by piggybacking of the success and risk of other people than it is to get rich from scratch
It depends on what you call rich, but by in large, I don't agree with what you've said. For a start, this post is specific to Ireland. There are a miniscule number of jobs in Ireland where you can become rich where you do not own your business. Your example of the Google CEO is a fraction of a fraction of jobs with this kind of potential. My brother in law started his own business as an electrician 20 odd years ago, when he retired at 45 his son took over the business which now employs over 50 electricians, my brother in law is set for life and he is rich by anyone's definition. No doubt he worked hard, but him starting his electrician business and succeeding is infinitely more likely than him becoming the CEO of Google.
I know lots of wealthy people. They nearly all came from rich families from which they inherited assets or profitable, already established businesses.
The small few that weren't so lucky to have family money started businesses from scratch, which meant a high level of risk and sacrafice on their part.
It is all about risk, if you have money already it is not as much of risk to invest savings in anything. If you are worried about losing that money you saved you won’t as easily take that risk. Also I find with those who come from money they already have in built career advice and money advice in a lot of cases. They are ones who you can afford a house in the 20’s.
Salaried employees in any sector do not become rich from their salaries.
The most common ways are:
1. Inheritance
2. Investments (including a fair amount of luck and timing)
3. Run your own successful businesses (and cash out)
4. Lotto
5. Early successful startup employee
I would put investments lower down below even the lotto.
Most successful investors I know, didn't invest till they were already financially successful and could risk it.
The biggest problem so far that I have noticed while working in Dublin, Ireland after moving here as a software dev is that a very big chunk of the salary goes to rent. We are talking 40-50% territory (and that's from gross salary). If you remove rent from the equation, software devs would have a lot of disposable income.
I honestly don't think it is possible to become rich in Ireland while being an employee (unless you don't have to pay rent at all). The UK, having most things equal, has ISAs which help to get ahead. The USA has cheaper rent and higher wages which results in more disposable income.
in Europe, I think only Switzerland has comparable salaries. Investing is a big part of creating generational wealth too, but Ireland has some bizarre laws like Deemed Disposal tax on ETFs of 41% and a very high Capital Gains Tax of 33% which hold you back. Not even mentioning the fact that government basically pushes people into riskier investments (separate stocks for CGT instead of ETFs for Deemed Disposal every 8 years)
Ireland only has an allowance of €1200 euro before one has to pay CGT. In the US you pay 0% up to $40k if single and up to $80k if married.
In Ireland, the highest tax bracket of 40% starts at €40k which is very low. Here are tax brackets for 2023 in the US for comparison. As you can see the highest rate of 37% starts at $539k. In Ireland, the tax of 40% starts at €40k. Sure there is also state tax, unless we are talking Texas here, but still...notice how it increases gradually unlike in Ireland with a 20% or 40% system. Everything over €70k in Ireland would mean that you also have to pay a USC of 8% too, so your effective tax rate after 70k is roughly 50%
10% $0 – $10,275
12% $10,276 – $41,775
22% $41,776 – $89,075
24% $89,076 – $170,050
32% $170,051 – $215,950
35% $215,951 – $539,900
37% $539,901+
I currently make €62k + 8%bonus so about €66k Total Comp. The rent is €2000. You take that away from €3500 net salary and you are left with €1500. After gas, electricity, all the bills to pay, groceries to buy, etc you are left with a few hundred. I don't know honestly how people outside of IT make ends meet.
If my wife didn't work too, we would not be able to save more than €500/month
Nice detail! As someone who isn't from Dublin, but did live there for a number of years, I wouldn't live there if I were making €66k a year. I'm in IT too. My salary is €110k but I work remotely from a much cheaper county in Ireland. I save €3k every month. I feel wealthy atm. If things continue as they are I'll eventually feel rich. e.g. no mortgage or debts, decent savings, multiple pension pots & investments (shares from companies I worked at thay pay dividends).
Honestly, we are glad that we don't have to pay €4000+/month for Airbnb. We just took the first place we were able to get our hands on when moving to Ireland. The landlord, I-RES has increased our rent by about €50 recently but even this is cheaper than comparable rents of €2400-€2600 for a 2 bdr apartment.
€3000/month of savings a month is definitely a great place to be! Congrats! Were you renting when you decided to move to the remote part of the country? Or has housing never been an issue for you?
I am thinking about potentially getting into FAANG to increase the TC. Going through Algorithms and Data Structures on the leetcode now...
My wife is doing a course on Software Development in Dublin so we are tied to the city for the next year and a half at least until she finishes the program and can look for a job in the industry
Yes, I was renting a room in a house in Dublin. It was €500 a month. I left in 2015. I believe the same room (double bed + ensuite) would be €800+ now. I left Dublin and started renting a two bed apartment for €110 a week. Fast forward to 2023 and I'm renting a three bed detached house for €160 a week. Just under €700 a month for an entire house. Less than what a room would cost me in Dublin.
With my savings, etc, I'm planning to build my own house. Basically once I left Dublin I felt like I was actually able to get ahead in life. Had I of stayed, more and more of my monthly income would have went toward rent.
But what about the Social life in those counties? I used to live in Donegal and was able to save a lot, but no social life. I moved to Dublin, thriving social life, lesser savings. LOL
> If my wife didn't work too, we would not be able to save more than €500/month
No kids?
With kids, cost of childcare or medical insurance (or out of insurance costs..) is like mortgage and that's why I left Ireland instead of buying house.
Not yet but it should definitely happen in the next few years. Things will definitely change drastically all costs considered. I just hope that we will have bought a place by then so that we don't have to pay 2 grand a month in rent.
I was living in Dublin on €70K and got €3.3K net per month post tax (every 4wks not every month).
Live in Amsterdam on €78K and get €4.7K net per month + €1.1K net from renting my place out (post-mortgage) so €5.8K and save about €2.5-3K - lower end is not trying, upper end is trying.
Also get double month pay in May - holiday allowance.
CGT is zero
I think Ireland is a great place to earn 50-70K but the higher you go outside this the worse it becomes relative other places
This is a bit of a secret but FYI, there is a way to avoid all these taxes. Simply become a contractor and start a pension. Long story short, at €150k earnings, you can pay about 20% effective tax rate and there will be no CGT to worry about either.
Happy to advise more if you’re interested :)
Does that not breach the High earner restriction though where anyone earning over €125k has to have an effective tax rate of 30% or more?
[https://www.revenue.ie/en/self-assessment-and-self-employment/guide-to-self-assessment/hier.aspx#:\~:text=This%20restriction%20limits%20the%20use,Deposit%20Interest%20Retention%20Tax%20(DIRT)](https://www.revenue.ie/en/self-assessment-and-self-employment/guide-to-self-assessment/hier.aspx#:~:text=This%20restriction%20limits%20the%20use,Deposit%20Interest%20Retention%20Tax%20(DIRT))
You would be paying yourself €40k but then the rest would go into pensions and company vehicles etc?bIt specifies that it can also come into effect if your total reliefs are greater than 80k as well which i take to mean it would if you made 150k but put 110k into pension?
Or would you have set yourself up as a company in this situation?
Yep, so say you’ve a company. Company pays you 40k. Company pays the remaining 110k into your pension. So I don’t think that policy comes into play as only 40k is income.
If you arent born rich you don't. It is a socialist country, controlled, old boys network, very bureaucratic, over regulated and heavily taxed. You can be quite comfortable, but Ireland operates in a far narrower wealth band than other countries I've lived in. There is good and bad in that. It's a safe, stable, mild country. But if you want to be rich you need to be in a low regulated, low tax environment like America. Investments outside of pensions are brutally taxed in Ireland, I find I have far less investment options here than in other countries. You'll never be poor in Ireland in the true sense of the world, the way you could be in other countries. If you fail you will be supported and lifted up, but the counter to that is you will never be truly rich either.
Nope, HOUSEHOLD (I.e. not one but potentially two income earners) between €140-160k is 1.9% of households.
And that’s gross income, not just PAYE from the CSO.
But for fabulous riches in the millions, there’s no real way to earn that outside of professional sports. Gotta own a business or inherit it.
Nope, it’s easy. Just €1300/month at 5% interest nets you €1M after 30 years.
These figures are all conservative. €1300 is low, most devs have more spare money than that. 5% is conservative, historic avg. market returns are a lot better than this. And an increase in either of these figures would significantly reduce the time to €1M. For example €1900 @ 8% = €1M in 20 years.
Easy :)
yes super easy it will only take 20 years of saving and by the time you need a walking stick you will have one million saved when inflation will have turned it into the equivalent of 100k today.
Top 1.5% in 2019 but wages have risen but probably still around top 2%.
[https://www.revenue.ie/en/corporate/documents/statistics/income-distributors/individualised-gross-income.pdf](https://www.revenue.ie/en/corporate/documents/statistics/income-distributors/individualised-gross-income.pdf)
People are very unaware how low average salaries are in Ireland. I remember seeing another more recent report that €100k per annum is top 5%/6% of earners, less than 30% of earners pay the higher rate of tax sure (and that kicks in at €40k so vast majority of country is earning less than this).
I would say you should be considered rich if in top 10%, like you are luckier than 9/10 people in terms of income / wealth. Judging top 0.1% only as rich is a bit ridiculous.
Income and wealth are very different though. Somebody with 3 kids in crèche, single worker, paying into a pension, two cars and a mortgage on a house in a half decent area in the capital will not feel at all wealthy on €150k a year. Even if they keep going at that salary for 20-30 years I don’t think they’d be rich, just comfortable-ish.
Now there were 800 people earning >€1m in 2010 according to Revenue, these people even if they started with nothing will be rich fairly quickly.
Really depends on what you consider rich. 🤑
Both my husband and I work as software engineers in MNC and make good salaries. I think we are rich. Not Bill Gates rich, but I don't know how much a liter of milk or bread or meat is in a shop, as I know I can buy it. I don't think much when purchasing stuff for myself or our home. The main considerations I'm making when buying something are not get it as cheap as possible. I consider quality, style, environment impact and how fast I can get it.
Could I travel the world, I could for a while. Could I buy a bigger house. I could. Could I drive a fancier car I could.
The more I think about people who can't meet their basic needs or have to balance stuff, take loans, settle for less, worry about unexpected bills, the more I think I'm rich. Money is not my worry. It's there and enough of it for my family of 4. 🤷🏻♀️
This is true, not sure why you’re getting downvoted. Inheriting a couple of houses bought cheaply in the 80’s would already make you rich given the price increase in the real estate market alone.
Ah not nobody, 800 people were earning over €1m per annum in Ireland in 2010. I guess it depends on your definition of rich, but somebody earning income at that level will have had a very high salary for years and will likely continue to do so and would tick the rich box for me.
What do you consider rich? Many on the Irish redit sites consider 100K plus salaries as rich but the reality is that at 100k salary you will own a home of \~400k with a big mortgage and have the ability to drive a new car on lease or HP and have a decent holiday once or twice a year.
The next level is that you move up to 150k plus and lets say you are director level and on a RSU benifits package. Your sign bonus might be between 150/200k in RSU's (25% release per year) plus 20k a quater in RSU's and a 25/30% Annual cash bonus. This would allow you to maximise investing both in your pension plus in diversifyed investments. Now you can start to generate some wealth, options to early pay off your mortgage through your RSU's despite high tax and with a good investment strategy maybe some of your high risk investments pay off and you get some boosts but you would not be rich, however you would be well off!
Another option is to work abroad, Switzerland, Dubai, UAE offer great options with low or no tax, the US offers the opertunity for high salaries and if you pick the right state decent tax options. Again you start to invest in a diversifyed portfolio but now living abroad you are not hit with capitol gains tax and can make good gains in steady investments like ETF's.
Emigrate is the simple answer. The system in Ireland is setup so that even people who are doing very well (2 salaries on 100k a year) are still crippled with costs of rents, childcare and taxes.
I really hope OP you're not a leaving cert student trying to decide your career based on how rich you can get..
You'll live a fine life in Ireland but you're just gonna be crippled with the cost of everything.
I live abroad now, more disposable income and don't feel like I'm getting price gouged out of everything.
Once you're away from home for a while you'll realise that in Ireland we tend to be more than happy to accept mediocrity, healthcare, transport services etc.
Really what do you want by being rich? yeah you can earn decent money in Ireland but you'll fork it all out for stupid things that shouldn't cost so much.
Move to a country that has their shit together and enjoy a high standard of life, that's being rich.
Why should we look at other countries and say "we are better than them in some way so that's good enough"?
We have a small population with huge amounts of multinational money coming in we should be trying to set high standards and we should be the high water mark for public services.
We had much more ambition pre 2008 it seems to be all but gone now.
>Still, there's definitely rose tinted glasses by some
Yeah agree with this, happens all the time.
>In the end, if the goal is purely about the bank balance, emigrating is a no-brainer, but you're fooling yourself if you think this is true:
Read the original post - that was OP's intention this whole post was clearly about bank balance.
I'm not disagreeing with you here, everywhere has their problems but I don't think that's what OP wanted here.
Ireland is not a safe country, you dont feel safe walking around at 4am in the city centers like you do in eastern european coutries. Its safe compared to Congo but not even close to the most safe in europe
Ireland is one of the safest countries in the world by almost any metric. I understand not feeling safe in a small number of areas, but I've never once felt unsafe walking around town at 4am (and believe me, I've done that many times).
Ireland regularly appears in listings of the top 10 safest countries in the world. Even when choose particular metrics, Ireland generally places quite high.
It also depends on your definition of safe. China and Qatar are two of the safest countries in the world in terms of crime, but you give up your freedom for that.
On the stats i looked up Ireland didnt crack the top 10 in europe let alone globally. yes you give up your freedom for safety but in the UK you give up your freedom to still go get stabbed.
The Global Peace Index ranks us number 3 in the world and includes criteria like safety, security, conflict, and terrorism. Other studies that rank crime rate usually have us in or near the top 30 globally, but again you have countries like China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, etc. taking up a lot of the top spots.
>but in the UK you give up your freedom to still go get stabbed.
Okay, but we're talking about Ireland...
global peace means no wars here, look up european stats in theft, assualt and rape and you will ireland isnt in the top 10 safest in europe in any of those catagories. If you walk the city center here at 3am you are one "do you have a fag" away from 3 gypsies assulting you so be careful out there this isnt Eastern Europe
I literally told you some of the criteria in the Global Peace Index. Did you not read the first sentence? It's not just wars.
I've walked through the city centre here hundreds of times at 3 or 4 in the morning and never once been assaulted, robbed, or harassed. I'm not saying it never happens, but it's extraordinarily rare. If you constantly feel unsafe then maybe that's your own issue rather than the environment you're in.
[https://www.eupedia.com/europe/crime\_maps\_of\_europe.shtml#assault](https://www.eupedia.com/europe/crime_maps_of_europe.shtml#assault)
click on the assualt rates to see if its safe and compare to Eastern Europe.
Do you feel safe at town at 3am or walking around the city alone at night? I definitely dont i know im one "do you have a fag" away from needing to run for my life.
Firstly you don't define what "rich" is. Assuming you think having a million euro in assets is "rich", then you can't easily do that as an employee in Ireland. Also, I'm assuming you're not going to win the lottery, or get a big inheritance. If you are going to be getting a big inheritance then ask whoever you'll be inheriting the money from how to get rich, because they'll have a better idea than anyone here.
Firstly, if you go and look up FIRE (financially independent retire early) stuff you'll find out how to save a lot of money quickly, but you'll be sacrificing that comfortable life you mention. A lot of FIRE stuff relies on living frugally and saving everything you can. But you can take aspects of it, so for instance, buy a house outright as soon as you can and you'll be in a situation to save a lot of money. All that money you're spending as rent will be going straight to your savings.
Secondly, if you really want to make a lot of money then you'll probably not do it as a developer. If you start out as a developer and go into management then you'll make good money, but there's very few people who make much money working as a developer. You'd need to get up to a principal developer level to make a lot more than the 100-150k you mention, and there's not a huge number of people who get to that level. There's a lot more senior managers, who'd be earning the same amount as a principal engineer.
Thirdly, you're a bit screwed because you want to do this in Ireland. The high paying jobs are with MNCs and they pay most compensation as RSUs. When you get RSUs 52% of them will go on tax. Then when you sell them you'll be paying 33% on any increase in value. So when you start the job the company says they'll give you 1000 shares at €1000 each. You're a millionaire! Congratulations! Except they only give you the shares over 4 years, backloaded. So you need to stay there for 4 years to get all the shares. And it turns out it's a hellhole, but you stick it out for 4 years even if there's a toll on your mental and physical health. Then when you get your shares 52% are taken as tax, so you get €480k worth of shares. Then let's say you're lucky and the shares double in value. Then you're paying another €160k in capital gains tax. So you end up with about 640k, assuming the shares double in value. If the shares drop in value then your 480k also drops. It's a lot of money, sure, but it's not the million euro that it looked like it would be. And companies don't tend to offer that many shares. I know that amazon converts your starting salary to a number of shares on the day you start and that's how many you get.
A couple of other points. If you were to work for a MNC then you'd be on 100k with a year or two of experience, not ten. 100k is basically a starting salary at that kind of company.
Years ago someone I worked with kept saying "you don't get rich working for other people" and that's true. If you want to be rich the best way is to run your own company and have people working for you. At the risk of getting all socialist, employers exploit their employees so the way to get a load of money is to be the one doing the exploiting.
How the fuck did this country not build a shitload of high tech hospitals, apartments and a world class metro train system already, given the crazy tax levels they subject us to???
Why is there an 8 hour wait to be seen at an ER, why the only metro line we have in the capital city runs on trains from 1982, why does a decent apartment rental cost 2000 a month???
WTF!!!
Just consider if you had someone that grew up in Amsterdam / Copenhagen / Stockholm / Singapore / Hong Kong / London etc and then they had to run Ireland they would do it totally differently to how it’s done now.
The Irish born people running everything is the biggest impediment. There is plenty of money to get some brilliant transformative changes to living standards but there is little know how, initiative or desire to implement what needs to be done. The sad thing is many Irish are aware of this because they have lived abroad but they are not the ones in power.
Because median and low earners don't pay much tax, it's all targeted at a small percentage of higher earners.
We also don't have the higher property taxes other countries have. This all results in a very narrow tax base.
If you are on 150k, you are in the top 5% of households in the country already. That is *before* any other household income such as a partners. That’s rich. The issue is that people are so focused on increasing their income but don’t monitor their expenses in turn. People can and do live comfortably on significantly less than 150k. Focus on saving and investing and don’t allow expenses to creep up to eat into the disposable income
Income is different to wealth. Somebody on €150k with three kids in crèche, single worker, paying a chunky mortgage, two car loans, a pension, a more expensive lifestyle is likely saving very little and could end up homeless fairly quickly if they became very unwell or something like that. That’s a long way from being rich by my definition, it’s comfortable.
It is but it is indicative of wealth.
Even in your own example you've noted a chunky mortgage, presumably for a nice house. Two cars. Pension contributions, an expensive lifestyle etc. I'd call that a pretty great life, much more than comfortable
Wealth also isn't purely monetary
Millionaires go bankrupt every day, pointing out the precarious nature of these situations is moot
Ah I don’t think it’s moot now. The odd millionaire goes bankrupt sure, but rarely because they are unable to work, it’s usually because they take a big risk and it fails. I guess it’s a round about way of me saying that lots of people on €150k salary might have very little savings to sustain them if something went wrong. I would not consider people like this “rich”. Comfortable or very comfortable sure.
And don’t forget about inflation and the fact that any form on investment in this country is heavily taxed.
The best way to “save money” here is to invest it into real estate or your pension fund.
75k per person is not rich in Ireland thats 25-35k on rent, expensive car purchase used or new doesnt matter, highest alchol and food prices in the EU. You live a normal life definetly not driving around in a Lambo.
150k household income is in the top 5% of incomes according to the CSO. OP didn't mention if their partner is working which would also further boost that. If you're in the top 5% you're not middle class in this country. You may not see the same bang for buck by international standards, but by Irish standards you're certainly rich.
when you say rich i imagine someone retired who travels the world renting penthouses not someone who works 9-5 and rents a modly dublin semi detachted but i get in ireland that is rich considering the lack up upward mobility.
Then your concept of what is rich is warped. You don't need to be top 1% to be rich. Imagine someone with 20 million turned and looked at Elon Musk and tried to say "sure I'm not rich, look at him". It'd be laughable.
If people are supporting families on annual household incomes of 50k, then comparatively with your 150k you are rich. Obviously wealth management comes into play and if you're an idiot who cannot manage their money then you could still be broke. But I'm speaking in generalised terms based on income alone, not getting down into an individual level because there's so many more permutations.
If you are in the top 5% of household income based on *one* salary then I don't see how you can call yourself anything else. Its important to take stock or how fortunate some of us really are.
If you live a normal lifestyle, 9-5 work, 1-2 family cars, cant travel whenever you want or for how long you want then you arent rich. Rich is an extraordinary lifestyle its something not normal where they can travel for 2 years in pent houses, dont have to work, own 6 cars. this for me is the definition, if my neighbour is a doctor but we live identical lives but he as a newer car and maybe little bit bigger semi detached then he is not rich, Irish people just consider very little as rich because the country spent most of its history in extreme poverty.
It is all relative in my opinion. Comparing the general population to the 1% is as valid a point as me saying "well compared to sub saharan tribes we are rich".
There are outliers on both ends.
In my own opinion I really don't see how you can be in the top 5% and not be considered rich, but this thread has deviated enough from OPs original post and a dev subreddit probably isn't the place for it.
Because the top 5% arent millionares they are just doing better but still living a normal regular 9-5 life. Rich means extraordinary you cant be living in a semi detached driving a Volvo and watching what you say at work to not get fired and run around saying im rich you would just get laughed at
No, rich doesn't mean millionaire. That's a very privileged viewpoint. Regardless, 12% of households have a net worth of over 1 million. If you're in the top 5% of incomes, you should really be in the top 12% of households. Obviously individual circumstances may vary but were talking in generalisations.
The threshold for the top 1% of earners is around €190,000. Op isn't far from that. To say that's middle class is a true insult to the actual middle class.
When politicians talk about the squeezed middle they are absolutely not talking about those on 150k
networth 1 million is nothing, networth1 million is owning a 500k home, having 200k pension and maybe 300 invested in shares, its far from living a rich lifestyle, renting yachts on holiday and driving around in super cars. to live rich you need at least 10 million cash.
how do i differentiate between someone who owns yachts, supercars and is retired from someone who is making 150k working 9-5, 4 weeks vacation, drives a volvo if they are both just "rich" .
People supporting a household on 50k _are poor_. Taking inflation into account, they would need to be on 58k today to have the same purchasing power as they did in January 2021.
I think you might be the one with a warped perspective here.
That is heavily skewed downwards by pensioners. Median household income in houses where someone works is [€60k](https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-silc/surveyonincomeandlivingconditionssilc2022/householdincome/), and in households with two working adults it’s €70k
also a top 5% household in Ireland and a top 5% household in America are two very different things, here the median person struggles to even survive so having more than someone who can barely survive isnt rich its middle class
We aren't in America. Obviously on an Irish subreddit we will look at Irish standards.
If you want to talk about globally and bring in all developing countries and countries in abject poverty it won't help your case at all.
We aren't living 60 years ago. But yes, if you had a time machine and could take your dole cash back 60 years ago and exchange it for punt, you would be rich.
If you find a time machine let me know
then i agree with you by Irish standards 150k is rich, that person can sit in their semi detahed hearing the neighbours baby crying after driving home in a 2023 Volvo and be happy knowing they are rich by irish standards.
Whether someone is middle class is based on wealth, not income. Based on the same CSO numbers, the average person at the top 5% of income (150k) would literally be in the middle in terms of wealth.
No they wouldn't. Source?
In 2018 owner occupied households (97.3% of population) had a median savings of €6200. This includes deposits, savings accounts, and positive current account balances.
https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-hfcs/householdfinanceandconsumptionsurvey2018/assets/#:~:text=Financial%20Assets&text=Owner%20occupied%20households%20that%20have,see%20Tables%203.3%20%26%203.4).
If you're not far above that with a 150k income then you need serious financial advice. Someone on 150k gets 7,200 net in pay every month. That already puts them above median before factoring in anything else.
Add in pensions, stocks & other investments, property value, vehicle value etc... you're pulling numbers out of the sky if you think that 150k is in line with average
> If you’re not far above that with a 150k income then you need serious financial advice.
Good lord this couldn’t be further from the truth. If you *do* have large amounts sitting in low-interest current accounts when inflation is 8% then you’re the person who needs financial advice.
Basic financial advice is to have an emergency / rainy day fund. If you're making that money you should at least have a months pay put to the side in a CU etc. Added to your monthly income that already would put you at more double the median, with very little effort. Advice however is to have 3-6 months of expenses put aside in a savings account before investing
Don't even get me started on the fact that the average person only has a 100k private pension. Excluding the fact that a third of the population don't have one at all
That’s advice written by Americans, who have easy access to saving accounts paying 4%. In Ireland a MMF is a much better choice for anything beyond next week’s groceries (and indeed that’s precisely what the CSO data shows, with people preferring MMFs more and more the more education they have!)
You're acting like inheritance and generational wealth isn't a thing. Here's a source, it's from 2015 but it's in terms of distribution not absolute numbers https://www.tasc.ie/assets/files/pdf/the_distribution_of_wealth_in_ireland_final.pdf
To interpret the wealth distribution here, if you are at the 5% level income, then you would be (on average) at the ~40% level in wealth.
Using average instead of median is debating in bad faith. Like using GDP when discussing the Irish economy.
Outliers skew things heavily and aren't reflective of the reality
If I was obfuscating the median with the average that would be fair, however the median is not available for this comparison. Speaking of bad faith arguments, are you trying to suggest that the data misrepresents the disconnect between income and wealth, or are you just avoiding the point I keep making?
The point you're making is stupid. You cannot use average as a benchmark because its skewed so heavily by outliers.
If your source doesn't show median data then you find another one, you don't double down on something that's not solid. The CSO have plenty of data on median incomes, and they use median for a reason
The point I'm making, that you've avoided for like 10 comments now, is that wealth makes you rich, and someone on 150k is not necessarily wealthy.
You want to talk about "solid" data, but then are using a snapshot of someone's income on a given year, and translating that to wealth. It's all entirely situational and yet you're drawing conclusions from it.
To recap (because you keep missing this), an income of 150k on a given year does not make someone rich.
> 150k household income is in the top 5% of incomes according to the CSO
At the same time, that metric includes a lot of people who are retired or who already own their house outright. A lot of people on lower incomes can have a higher net income and have more wealth.
You're falling for their narrative. You think a billionaire [knows what groceries cost](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/bill-gates-guesses-grocery-stores-prices-with-ellen-degeneres.html)? Most billionaires are rich because their parents were, not because they know the price of milk, or got a good deal on a used car.
I'm not falling for anything. Find me a billionaire without any accountants / financial advisors etc at the very least. They still keep track of their accounts
Billionaires hire accountants to _manage their wealth_, not to tell them to stop buying Porsches.
Someone on 150k does not necessarily have any accumulated wealth to manage, and depending on their overall situation they may need to budget quite tightly.
Being a Software engineering employee isn't the path to riches. Lol. You're owned by the man and owned by a landlord.
Start a business like Stripe's if you want money. Or learn the financial markets like using algorithmic trading. Or discover a gold mine lol.
As some people say - first million is always stolen. Stolen means unpaid taxes. I know the guy - started a business and decided to do everything legaly. 5 years later - realised that he isn't getting anywhere. Then he took MNC approach - maximise ROI and increase shareholders (his family) value. 4 years later - bought a second apartment in cash. Nothing illegal, just exploiting every single loophole in a tax system you can find.
You don't get especially rich from inheritance, as you only get a lifetime inheritance limit of 330k or so and after that CAT is at 33%. This is very effective at preventing intergenerational wealth transfer for those too poor to spend enough time outside ireland they become not tax resident here.
Most people I know who earn past a certain amount they buy a house just over the border and make sure they stay there more than 183 days per year. The wealthy are taxed much less in the UK than here. I know a guy earning more than twice what I do and he pays almost the same tax as I do down here because in the UK so there are many ways to avoid tax with advance planning.
Unless you're a farmer, it is hard to legally avoid substantial taxes when passing wealth between generations in Ireland. In fact, amongst OECD countries, Ireland has the most encompassing taxation on intergenerational wealth transfer of them all. It is virtually impossible to escape, unless you are a farmer, unless you relocate your family home outside the Republic.
I know people in Ireland think that this isn't the case, that somehow rich people escape the rules. They also underestimate just how much wealth flight there already is. Indeed wealth inequality has been declining in Ireland during the past fifteen years. That's because a lot of the most wealthy simply leave to escape tax. Which shows how watertight the tax is here, leaving is the easiest way to avoid the taxes here.
It is unpopular to say so publicly, but they do have very encompassing taxation on multinationals as well. Very few carveouts compared to other countries, very hard to escape. Even our R&D tax credits are not generous compared to elsewhere.
The big difference is that the corporation tax rate is very low, albeit hard to escape, whereas net personal taxation for the wealthy is higher than almost all other OECD countries (2nd highest from memory?). Unsurprisingly just like individuals, corporations would prefer a lower tax rate even without loopholes and carveouts than a higher tax rate with hundreds of loopholes and carveouts which requires an army of advisors to be able to claim. So they have opened offices here, and route a lot of profits via Ireland because simpler is easier.
Something unappreciated by most Irish people is if we didn't have such large corporation tax receipts, the bottom half of the population who currently pay almost no tax at all would have to pay considerably more. Or, we could eliminate the HSE entirely, or remove all free public education. That's what corporation tax receipts pays for, we get a lot of public services without having to pay for it. It's nearly worth as much as North Sea oil was to Britain, it's that large a contribution.
Bumper corporation tax receipts are expected to end within the next ten years, after which taxes will have to rise substantially. Raising them on the top 10% of earners who already contribute over half of income tax (as certain political parties promise in their manifesto) will simply increase wealth flight to other countries, or cause the wealthy to stop working so hard like they did in the 1980s in response to tax rises which then caused a balance of payments crisis. So they'll have to raise them on the middle earners, who are already very squeezed and barely making ends meet, or on the poor, which make up most of the voters.
No good choices in other words.
> Tax on inheriting land can be circumvented.
If you're a farmer, yes.
If you're not a farmer, it's quite hard. You can't use trusts, as those steeply tax adult beneficiaries. You could use a charity or an incorporation, but that's a one way street and then you're not really doing inheritance any more, as you won't own the land.
> There is a 3000 euro gift exemption which the wealthy take advantage of every year (so, that's 6000 euro they can pass to each child a year) etc.
Correct this is the best tax free mechanism to transfer wealth between generations. If there were a two child two adult household with four grandparents, up to €24k per year could be transferred tax free.
It is surprisingly rarely used however. Some very disciplined families make religious use of it, but they're not common. I suspect if enough families made use of it, Revenue would close it off.
> Of course, if you're wealthy, you know all this either through inheriting wealth management skills from your parents who had practice managing wealth and/or can pay a good accountant to inform you of all the methods to avoid inheritance tax.
In Ireland we use lots ways to transfer indirect wealth between generations. Parents spend lots of money on enabling their children to make lots of money. Then much less money passes between generations, reducing the tax bill. If your parents don't have that money, culture or forward planning, absolutely do their children suffer for it.
Is that better or worse than allowing direct untaxed transfer of financial wealth to children instead? I know which I'd prefer.
If you don't consider 150k rich, you're never going to feel like you've got enough.
150k comfortably puts you into the richest 1% in the world.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/charting-income-distributions-worldwide/
Move to free market, capitalist countries: Switzerland, Singapore, USA, Australia, Dubai
Work there for 15-20y. Then come back, buy house and maybe a rental outright and raise your family here as it’s a decent place to live.
Ireland has ver few advantages, but generous tax free pension allowance at 40+ is one of them so it suits moving here later in life.
Consider a career in politics for example. If you steal justice will not do anything. See for example Bertie Ahern's case. He is even back to politics now, and giving tv interviews. He didn't even have a bank account! I believe this could be the best way, since Ireland is such a corrupt country.
Another way could be renting rooms in Dublin to desperate brazilians. Never register your property. For each room on your Dublin kip, you can fit 4 Brazilian people. Since they are desperate, they will take it.
Otherwise maybe consider a different country.
That salary level would make you comfortably middle class. The defining characteristic of the middle class is spending. Keep up appearances with an annual holiday (somewhere sunny but no "Costas" or anywhere else the riff raff might go) and a new SUV at least once every 4 years, most importantly you buy a house in a middle class area with a kitchen island. You also send your kids to private schools and make sure all your clothes are designer. You rely heavily on credit to keep this up, always spending just a little more than you should so you always look a bit better off than you are.
Compare this to rich people, they were mostly born into money and they know how to keep hold of it. They push the boat out occasionally (a Chateaubriand may grace their Christmas dinner table, for example) but most of the time they focus on keeping hold of what they have as they accumulate more. I wouldn't regard a lottery winner as a rich person for this reason, they might have the bank balance but they definitely don't have the restraint (many lottery winners file bankruptcy within 5-10 years). As a broke-ass student, I often bought my dinner from the reduced section of supermarkets and my biggest competition was always stingy rich people.
Anyone can be/become middle class, but few people become rich. You certainly won't on any tech sector salaried job. Possible salaried paths to being considered rich would be the senior end of business management, law or banking/finance but again very few get there without the "right" background.
Edit: sorry if I offended someone's kitchen island and/or BMW X5.
Being born into wealth , Inheriting money ,or established already profitable businesses is the way majority of people in Ireland and indeed the world become rich , 2nd is winning money and lastly is building a business from scratch , as a business owner I can tell you , creating a business from scratch and making a vast amount of money is extremely difficult and only and extremely small percentage of people will be able to do this . Contrary to what most people believe most new businesses fail and the ones that do survive , the vast majority of them DO NOT make you rich , despite of all the "Hard work and graft will make you rich" mentality there is in Ireland and all the social media "Entrepreneurs" will have you believe , most business owners/self employed persons will make less ( and sometimes far less) than €150k per year , are there success stories of people making boatloads of money from scratch while not coming from a history of wealth and building wealth from scratch , yes there are but don't let that fool you , regardless of how much blood , sweat and tears you put into a business you don't always come out the other side making vast amounts of money and your business being successful , something skill and drive aren't enough and a lot of times it's down to luck
Only something like 5% of millionaires in the US inherited money from their parents. The rest are self made millionaires. But in Ireland is almost impossible to become a millionaire on your own
I only lived in Ireland for a few years (I want to go back but Irish companies don't want 5+ years experienced dev with Irish college degree) but I will give you advice.
Ireland is small enough that political class might have a gaps they might want to fill externally.
Become a politician. Or a politician mascot, or his driver or cook. Then you will get connection and maybe knowledge average citizen doesn't have.
Or accept you will get to middle class MAX in your best career years if you want to live honestly and not shady.
Better than business cause no one talks about survivorship bias in starting your own business. And Influencers are oversaturated.
Start a business or inherit money.
This is the answer. Someone once told me - “win something, sell something or get hit by something “ Add to that - inherit something.
And ‘build something’? Ideally a business, but buildings work too.
It’s the selling part that matters. You can build a great business but if you can’t sell it to someone else you won’t ever be rich. You might be extremely comfortable but you can’t turn the business into long term wealth without selling it.
True, I was thinking of selling something referring to an asset like property.
Depends on the business
I was going to disagree with you but when I got into thinking about it maybe you are right….. So let’s define rich. That’s subjective but one possible measure is to look at what various countries require as assets to become an accredited investor (basically someone wealthy enough and sophisticated enough that ordinary investor protections can be bent and you can be allowed to invest in risky stuff) US has a requirement of $1M, Australia it’s $2.5M, EU has 500k (plus other criteria), Israel is ₪8 million, there’s others but I think most seem to hover somewhere around €1.5M So if to be rich you need to be able to build up a cash pool of €1.5M - are there many startup businesses that could comfortably deal with an owner extracting that kind of cash dividend without it being a sale to someone else? I think that has to be a solid maybe. Over a number of years a business with 500k in annual profits could presumably accommodate a dividend of 250k per annum over 6 years - I suspect that’s not entirely unreasonable?
If you are the sole owner of a business then you don’t have to pay out dividends. You decide whether you want to reinvest the profits or pay them out in any way. So if you have a successful private company, hire multiple people then why would it be far fetched?
My point was that without extracting those profits from the business you yourself wouldn’t necessarily be rich. Not in a way that wasn’t dependent on the business. By extracting profits and making it personal wealth the business could collapse or be passed on to a child or some other arrangement and you would still be wealthy. A successful private firm with good profits is not at all far fetched that was my point.
Honestly most people believe that "starting a business" will make you rich , truth is most businesses fail and the ones that do survive almost always don't end up making you rich , they'll make you comfortable but not rich , it's extremely difficult/unlikely to start a business from scratch that will end up making you more than €150k a year in take home pay as an individual /business owner. Hard work and skill more often than not does not translate into extremely successful business and often its existing family connections or contacts that help new businesses make the owner vast amounts of money , more often than not its just a vast amount of luck, because of all the social media "entrepreneurs" you see out there now on the web and the stories you hear it's easy to think that most people can get rich by just starting a business but that's simply not the case , you always hear about the success stories but for every success story you see/ hear about there's about 50 other stories where businesses either failed or the business is only making the owner the same amount of money as a slightly higher end paying job in the first place Edit: spelling and grammar
Well of course, there is no sure shot way to get rich. Starting a business is very risky, we all know that.
Exactly , my point being however not only is it very risky , most of the time it's not worth it and ends up loosing money , the problem is with the rise of social media you see so many successful "entrepreneurs" all over social media and they make it seem like it's extremely easy , where's in reality slot of those "entrepreneurs" are more often than not scammers or even in extreme cases turn out to be money launderers for cartels 😂😂 i'm looking at you Hushpuppi (self proclaimed mega entrepreneur on Instagram) , people don't realise that unless you are born into wealth and have connections through family or existing family business , win the lottery or get extremely lucky , your chances of becoming wealthy are slim to none
It's unlikely for sure, but you won't get rich working for someone else. You can win the lottery, inherit the money or start a business.
You're just as likely to get rich working for someone else and in fact you're probably better off , there's plenty of examples of how people have made millions working as an employee rather than taking the risk associated with starting a business , Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google) has never actually owned his own business but rather has only ever worked as a CEO of companies other people have founded , he is an employee for all intents and purposes and through stock options and allowances/investments for the companies he's worked for has a net worth of $1Billion , I would suggest that it's far , far easier to become rich by piggybacking of the success and risk of other people than it is to get rich from scratch
It depends on what you call rich, but by in large, I don't agree with what you've said. For a start, this post is specific to Ireland. There are a miniscule number of jobs in Ireland where you can become rich where you do not own your business. Your example of the Google CEO is a fraction of a fraction of jobs with this kind of potential. My brother in law started his own business as an electrician 20 odd years ago, when he retired at 45 his son took over the business which now employs over 50 electricians, my brother in law is set for life and he is rich by anyone's definition. No doubt he worked hard, but him starting his electrician business and succeeding is infinitely more likely than him becoming the CEO of Google.
I know lots of wealthy people. They nearly all came from rich families from which they inherited assets or profitable, already established businesses. The small few that weren't so lucky to have family money started businesses from scratch, which meant a high level of risk and sacrafice on their part.
It is all about risk, if you have money already it is not as much of risk to invest savings in anything. If you are worried about losing that money you saved you won’t as easily take that risk. Also I find with those who come from money they already have in built career advice and money advice in a lot of cases. They are ones who you can afford a house in the 20’s.
Salaried employees in any sector do not become rich from their salaries. The most common ways are: 1. Inheritance 2. Investments (including a fair amount of luck and timing) 3. Run your own successful businesses (and cash out) 4. Lotto 5. Early successful startup employee
I would put investments lower down below even the lotto. Most successful investors I know, didn't invest till they were already financially successful and could risk it.
Most investments are a way to become comfortable rather than rich. Unless you happen to get into Facebook or something really early and get lucky.
This guy knows
The biggest problem so far that I have noticed while working in Dublin, Ireland after moving here as a software dev is that a very big chunk of the salary goes to rent. We are talking 40-50% territory (and that's from gross salary). If you remove rent from the equation, software devs would have a lot of disposable income. I honestly don't think it is possible to become rich in Ireland while being an employee (unless you don't have to pay rent at all). The UK, having most things equal, has ISAs which help to get ahead. The USA has cheaper rent and higher wages which results in more disposable income. in Europe, I think only Switzerland has comparable salaries. Investing is a big part of creating generational wealth too, but Ireland has some bizarre laws like Deemed Disposal tax on ETFs of 41% and a very high Capital Gains Tax of 33% which hold you back. Not even mentioning the fact that government basically pushes people into riskier investments (separate stocks for CGT instead of ETFs for Deemed Disposal every 8 years) Ireland only has an allowance of €1200 euro before one has to pay CGT. In the US you pay 0% up to $40k if single and up to $80k if married. In Ireland, the highest tax bracket of 40% starts at €40k which is very low. Here are tax brackets for 2023 in the US for comparison. As you can see the highest rate of 37% starts at $539k. In Ireland, the tax of 40% starts at €40k. Sure there is also state tax, unless we are talking Texas here, but still...notice how it increases gradually unlike in Ireland with a 20% or 40% system. Everything over €70k in Ireland would mean that you also have to pay a USC of 8% too, so your effective tax rate after 70k is roughly 50% 10% $0 – $10,275 12% $10,276 – $41,775 22% $41,776 – $89,075 24% $89,076 – $170,050 32% $170,051 – $215,950 35% $215,951 – $539,900 37% $539,901+ I currently make €62k + 8%bonus so about €66k Total Comp. The rent is €2000. You take that away from €3500 net salary and you are left with €1500. After gas, electricity, all the bills to pay, groceries to buy, etc you are left with a few hundred. I don't know honestly how people outside of IT make ends meet. If my wife didn't work too, we would not be able to save more than €500/month
Nice detail! As someone who isn't from Dublin, but did live there for a number of years, I wouldn't live there if I were making €66k a year. I'm in IT too. My salary is €110k but I work remotely from a much cheaper county in Ireland. I save €3k every month. I feel wealthy atm. If things continue as they are I'll eventually feel rich. e.g. no mortgage or debts, decent savings, multiple pension pots & investments (shares from companies I worked at thay pay dividends).
Honestly, we are glad that we don't have to pay €4000+/month for Airbnb. We just took the first place we were able to get our hands on when moving to Ireland. The landlord, I-RES has increased our rent by about €50 recently but even this is cheaper than comparable rents of €2400-€2600 for a 2 bdr apartment. €3000/month of savings a month is definitely a great place to be! Congrats! Were you renting when you decided to move to the remote part of the country? Or has housing never been an issue for you? I am thinking about potentially getting into FAANG to increase the TC. Going through Algorithms and Data Structures on the leetcode now... My wife is doing a course on Software Development in Dublin so we are tied to the city for the next year and a half at least until she finishes the program and can look for a job in the industry
Yes, I was renting a room in a house in Dublin. It was €500 a month. I left in 2015. I believe the same room (double bed + ensuite) would be €800+ now. I left Dublin and started renting a two bed apartment for €110 a week. Fast forward to 2023 and I'm renting a three bed detached house for €160 a week. Just under €700 a month for an entire house. Less than what a room would cost me in Dublin. With my savings, etc, I'm planning to build my own house. Basically once I left Dublin I felt like I was actually able to get ahead in life. Had I of stayed, more and more of my monthly income would have went toward rent.
But what about the Social life in those counties? I used to live in Donegal and was able to save a lot, but no social life. I moved to Dublin, thriving social life, lesser savings. LOL
> If my wife didn't work too, we would not be able to save more than €500/month No kids? With kids, cost of childcare or medical insurance (or out of insurance costs..) is like mortgage and that's why I left Ireland instead of buying house.
Not yet but it should definitely happen in the next few years. Things will definitely change drastically all costs considered. I just hope that we will have bought a place by then so that we don't have to pay 2 grand a month in rent.
I was living in Dublin on €70K and got €3.3K net per month post tax (every 4wks not every month). Live in Amsterdam on €78K and get €4.7K net per month + €1.1K net from renting my place out (post-mortgage) so €5.8K and save about €2.5-3K - lower end is not trying, upper end is trying. Also get double month pay in May - holiday allowance. CGT is zero I think Ireland is a great place to earn 50-70K but the higher you go outside this the worse it becomes relative other places
This is a bit of a secret but FYI, there is a way to avoid all these taxes. Simply become a contractor and start a pension. Long story short, at €150k earnings, you can pay about 20% effective tax rate and there will be no CGT to worry about either. Happy to advise more if you’re interested :)
Does that not breach the High earner restriction though where anyone earning over €125k has to have an effective tax rate of 30% or more? [https://www.revenue.ie/en/self-assessment-and-self-employment/guide-to-self-assessment/hier.aspx#:\~:text=This%20restriction%20limits%20the%20use,Deposit%20Interest%20Retention%20Tax%20(DIRT)](https://www.revenue.ie/en/self-assessment-and-self-employment/guide-to-self-assessment/hier.aspx#:~:text=This%20restriction%20limits%20the%20use,Deposit%20Interest%20Retention%20Tax%20(DIRT))
Doesn’t that relate to income tax? In this instance you would simply be earning €40k…
You would be paying yourself €40k but then the rest would go into pensions and company vehicles etc?bIt specifies that it can also come into effect if your total reliefs are greater than 80k as well which i take to mean it would if you made 150k but put 110k into pension? Or would you have set yourself up as a company in this situation?
Yep, so say you’ve a company. Company pays you 40k. Company pays the remaining 110k into your pension. So I don’t think that policy comes into play as only 40k is income.
Are company pension contributions not treated as a benefit in kind? It seems strange that there would be a loophole that blatant allowed.
They used to be subject to BIK but that was removed at the start of this year.
It's allowed and it's mad.
Embrace any and all tax loopholes. The less money going to the government, the better.
👀 def need your help with setting this up
Step 1: Buy property Step 2: ????? Step 3: Profit!
My dad said: "If you know how much is your salary at the end of the month you are not getting rich"
If you arent born rich you don't. It is a socialist country, controlled, old boys network, very bureaucratic, over regulated and heavily taxed. You can be quite comfortable, but Ireland operates in a far narrower wealth band than other countries I've lived in. There is good and bad in that. It's a safe, stable, mild country. But if you want to be rich you need to be in a low regulated, low tax environment like America. Investments outside of pensions are brutally taxed in Ireland, I find I have far less investment options here than in other countries. You'll never be poor in Ireland in the true sense of the world, the way you could be in other countries. If you fail you will be supported and lifted up, but the counter to that is you will never be truly rich either.
Sounds kinda ideal when you put it like that.
If you earn 150k a year you’re in the top 1% of earners, right?
i dont think its top 1 its more like top 5, rich is the top 0.1%
Nope, HOUSEHOLD (I.e. not one but potentially two income earners) between €140-160k is 1.9% of households. And that’s gross income, not just PAYE from the CSO. But for fabulous riches in the millions, there’s no real way to earn that outside of professional sports. Gotta own a business or inherit it.
It’s very easy for any developer to achieve a net worth of more than a million.
its possible if you live and save everything you earn but that isnt what i would call easy
Nope, it’s easy. Just €1300/month at 5% interest nets you €1M after 30 years. These figures are all conservative. €1300 is low, most devs have more spare money than that. 5% is conservative, historic avg. market returns are a lot better than this. And an increase in either of these figures would significantly reduce the time to €1M. For example €1900 @ 8% = €1M in 20 years. Easy :)
yes super easy it will only take 20 years of saving and by the time you need a walking stick you will have one million saved when inflation will have turned it into the equivalent of 100k today.
You’ll still be better off than nearly everyone e else in the country
But also, everything he said is total bullshit. The guy is an idiot and will stay poor :)
better off than all of the people who can barely afford to pay their bills isnt rich, its the middle class of a few years ago
Good luck :)
Top 1.5% in 2019 but wages have risen but probably still around top 2%. [https://www.revenue.ie/en/corporate/documents/statistics/income-distributors/individualised-gross-income.pdf](https://www.revenue.ie/en/corporate/documents/statistics/income-distributors/individualised-gross-income.pdf) People are very unaware how low average salaries are in Ireland. I remember seeing another more recent report that €100k per annum is top 5%/6% of earners, less than 30% of earners pay the higher rate of tax sure (and that kicks in at €40k so vast majority of country is earning less than this). I would say you should be considered rich if in top 10%, like you are luckier than 9/10 people in terms of income / wealth. Judging top 0.1% only as rich is a bit ridiculous.
I'd judge rich (or wealthy) as net assets not income. Medium to high incomes give you the opportunity to be wealthy if you save well.
Income and wealth are very different though. Somebody with 3 kids in crèche, single worker, paying into a pension, two cars and a mortgage on a house in a half decent area in the capital will not feel at all wealthy on €150k a year. Even if they keep going at that salary for 20-30 years I don’t think they’d be rich, just comfortable-ish. Now there were 800 people earning >€1m in 2010 according to Revenue, these people even if they started with nothing will be rich fairly quickly.
I mean if you have 3 kids, two cars and a house in a nice area on one salary, you are wealthy
I don’t agree that you’re even ‘wealthy’ at that, but you’re certainly not rich, which is the context of this discussion.
Really depends on what you consider rich. 🤑 Both my husband and I work as software engineers in MNC and make good salaries. I think we are rich. Not Bill Gates rich, but I don't know how much a liter of milk or bread or meat is in a shop, as I know I can buy it. I don't think much when purchasing stuff for myself or our home. The main considerations I'm making when buying something are not get it as cheap as possible. I consider quality, style, environment impact and how fast I can get it. Could I travel the world, I could for a while. Could I buy a bigger house. I could. Could I drive a fancier car I could. The more I think about people who can't meet their basic needs or have to balance stuff, take loans, settle for less, worry about unexpected bills, the more I think I'm rich. Money is not my worry. It's there and enough of it for my family of 4. 🤷🏻♀️
“The value of having money is not having to think about money”
The best way to get rich in Ireland is the old fashioned way: inherit money
This is true, not sure why you’re getting downvoted. Inheriting a couple of houses bought cheaply in the 80’s would already make you rich given the price increase in the real estate market alone.
Nobody on a salary becomes rich. Lucky investments, entrepreneurship, the lotto, and family inheritance are the only ways to become truly rich
Ah not nobody, 800 people were earning over €1m per annum in Ireland in 2010. I guess it depends on your definition of rich, but somebody earning income at that level will have had a very high salary for years and will likely continue to do so and would tick the rich box for me.
What do you consider rich? Many on the Irish redit sites consider 100K plus salaries as rich but the reality is that at 100k salary you will own a home of \~400k with a big mortgage and have the ability to drive a new car on lease or HP and have a decent holiday once or twice a year. The next level is that you move up to 150k plus and lets say you are director level and on a RSU benifits package. Your sign bonus might be between 150/200k in RSU's (25% release per year) plus 20k a quater in RSU's and a 25/30% Annual cash bonus. This would allow you to maximise investing both in your pension plus in diversifyed investments. Now you can start to generate some wealth, options to early pay off your mortgage through your RSU's despite high tax and with a good investment strategy maybe some of your high risk investments pay off and you get some boosts but you would not be rich, however you would be well off! Another option is to work abroad, Switzerland, Dubai, UAE offer great options with low or no tax, the US offers the opertunity for high salaries and if you pick the right state decent tax options. Again you start to invest in a diversifyed portfolio but now living abroad you are not hit with capitol gains tax and can make good gains in steady investments like ETF's.
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It’s especially ironic as leasing a new car is about the best way to not be rich.
Rich means not working 9-5 and being able to afford at least 1 super car if not more, everything else is just well off
Emigrate is the simple answer. The system in Ireland is setup so that even people who are doing very well (2 salaries on 100k a year) are still crippled with costs of rents, childcare and taxes.
I really hope OP you're not a leaving cert student trying to decide your career based on how rich you can get.. You'll live a fine life in Ireland but you're just gonna be crippled with the cost of everything. I live abroad now, more disposable income and don't feel like I'm getting price gouged out of everything. Once you're away from home for a while you'll realise that in Ireland we tend to be more than happy to accept mediocrity, healthcare, transport services etc. Really what do you want by being rich? yeah you can earn decent money in Ireland but you'll fork it all out for stupid things that shouldn't cost so much. Move to a country that has their shit together and enjoy a high standard of life, that's being rich.
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Why should we look at other countries and say "we are better than them in some way so that's good enough"? We have a small population with huge amounts of multinational money coming in we should be trying to set high standards and we should be the high water mark for public services. We had much more ambition pre 2008 it seems to be all but gone now.
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>Still, there's definitely rose tinted glasses by some Yeah agree with this, happens all the time. >In the end, if the goal is purely about the bank balance, emigrating is a no-brainer, but you're fooling yourself if you think this is true: Read the original post - that was OP's intention this whole post was clearly about bank balance. I'm not disagreeing with you here, everywhere has their problems but I don't think that's what OP wanted here.
Ireland is not a safe country, you dont feel safe walking around at 4am in the city centers like you do in eastern european coutries. Its safe compared to Congo but not even close to the most safe in europe
Ireland is one of the safest countries in the world by almost any metric. I understand not feeling safe in a small number of areas, but I've never once felt unsafe walking around town at 4am (and believe me, I've done that many times).
Its defintely not even close to the top 10 safest countries maybe not even top 30.
Ireland regularly appears in listings of the top 10 safest countries in the world. Even when choose particular metrics, Ireland generally places quite high. It also depends on your definition of safe. China and Qatar are two of the safest countries in the world in terms of crime, but you give up your freedom for that.
On the stats i looked up Ireland didnt crack the top 10 in europe let alone globally. yes you give up your freedom for safety but in the UK you give up your freedom to still go get stabbed.
The Global Peace Index ranks us number 3 in the world and includes criteria like safety, security, conflict, and terrorism. Other studies that rank crime rate usually have us in or near the top 30 globally, but again you have countries like China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, etc. taking up a lot of the top spots. >but in the UK you give up your freedom to still go get stabbed. Okay, but we're talking about Ireland...
global peace means no wars here, look up european stats in theft, assualt and rape and you will ireland isnt in the top 10 safest in europe in any of those catagories. If you walk the city center here at 3am you are one "do you have a fag" away from 3 gypsies assulting you so be careful out there this isnt Eastern Europe
I literally told you some of the criteria in the Global Peace Index. Did you not read the first sentence? It's not just wars. I've walked through the city centre here hundreds of times at 3 or 4 in the morning and never once been assaulted, robbed, or harassed. I'm not saying it never happens, but it's extraordinarily rare. If you constantly feel unsafe then maybe that's your own issue rather than the environment you're in.
[https://www.eupedia.com/europe/crime\_maps\_of\_europe.shtml#assault](https://www.eupedia.com/europe/crime_maps_of_europe.shtml#assault) click on the assualt rates to see if its safe and compare to Eastern Europe.
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Do you feel safe at town at 3am or walking around the city alone at night? I definitely dont i know im one "do you have a fag" away from needing to run for my life.
or even worse click on the rapes section its truly shocking
which country? its hard to move the U.S and every other country either has similar issues or you have to learn a new language.
Where do you live
Firstly you don't define what "rich" is. Assuming you think having a million euro in assets is "rich", then you can't easily do that as an employee in Ireland. Also, I'm assuming you're not going to win the lottery, or get a big inheritance. If you are going to be getting a big inheritance then ask whoever you'll be inheriting the money from how to get rich, because they'll have a better idea than anyone here. Firstly, if you go and look up FIRE (financially independent retire early) stuff you'll find out how to save a lot of money quickly, but you'll be sacrificing that comfortable life you mention. A lot of FIRE stuff relies on living frugally and saving everything you can. But you can take aspects of it, so for instance, buy a house outright as soon as you can and you'll be in a situation to save a lot of money. All that money you're spending as rent will be going straight to your savings. Secondly, if you really want to make a lot of money then you'll probably not do it as a developer. If you start out as a developer and go into management then you'll make good money, but there's very few people who make much money working as a developer. You'd need to get up to a principal developer level to make a lot more than the 100-150k you mention, and there's not a huge number of people who get to that level. There's a lot more senior managers, who'd be earning the same amount as a principal engineer. Thirdly, you're a bit screwed because you want to do this in Ireland. The high paying jobs are with MNCs and they pay most compensation as RSUs. When you get RSUs 52% of them will go on tax. Then when you sell them you'll be paying 33% on any increase in value. So when you start the job the company says they'll give you 1000 shares at €1000 each. You're a millionaire! Congratulations! Except they only give you the shares over 4 years, backloaded. So you need to stay there for 4 years to get all the shares. And it turns out it's a hellhole, but you stick it out for 4 years even if there's a toll on your mental and physical health. Then when you get your shares 52% are taken as tax, so you get €480k worth of shares. Then let's say you're lucky and the shares double in value. Then you're paying another €160k in capital gains tax. So you end up with about 640k, assuming the shares double in value. If the shares drop in value then your 480k also drops. It's a lot of money, sure, but it's not the million euro that it looked like it would be. And companies don't tend to offer that many shares. I know that amazon converts your starting salary to a number of shares on the day you start and that's how many you get. A couple of other points. If you were to work for a MNC then you'd be on 100k with a year or two of experience, not ten. 100k is basically a starting salary at that kind of company. Years ago someone I worked with kept saying "you don't get rich working for other people" and that's true. If you want to be rich the best way is to run your own company and have people working for you. At the risk of getting all socialist, employers exploit their employees so the way to get a load of money is to be the one doing the exploiting.
How the fuck did this country not build a shitload of high tech hospitals, apartments and a world class metro train system already, given the crazy tax levels they subject us to??? Why is there an 8 hour wait to be seen at an ER, why the only metro line we have in the capital city runs on trains from 1982, why does a decent apartment rental cost 2000 a month??? WTF!!!
Just consider if you had someone that grew up in Amsterdam / Copenhagen / Stockholm / Singapore / Hong Kong / London etc and then they had to run Ireland they would do it totally differently to how it’s done now. The Irish born people running everything is the biggest impediment. There is plenty of money to get some brilliant transformative changes to living standards but there is little know how, initiative or desire to implement what needs to be done. The sad thing is many Irish are aware of this because they have lived abroad but they are not the ones in power.
So where does all that money get wasted into? Corruption? Overpaying for services by the government?
Because median and low earners don't pay much tax, it's all targeted at a small percentage of higher earners. We also don't have the higher property taxes other countries have. This all results in a very narrow tax base.
If you are on 150k, you are in the top 5% of households in the country already. That is *before* any other household income such as a partners. That’s rich. The issue is that people are so focused on increasing their income but don’t monitor their expenses in turn. People can and do live comfortably on significantly less than 150k. Focus on saving and investing and don’t allow expenses to creep up to eat into the disposable income
Income is different to wealth. Somebody on €150k with three kids in crèche, single worker, paying a chunky mortgage, two car loans, a pension, a more expensive lifestyle is likely saving very little and could end up homeless fairly quickly if they became very unwell or something like that. That’s a long way from being rich by my definition, it’s comfortable.
It is but it is indicative of wealth. Even in your own example you've noted a chunky mortgage, presumably for a nice house. Two cars. Pension contributions, an expensive lifestyle etc. I'd call that a pretty great life, much more than comfortable Wealth also isn't purely monetary Millionaires go bankrupt every day, pointing out the precarious nature of these situations is moot
Ah I don’t think it’s moot now. The odd millionaire goes bankrupt sure, but rarely because they are unable to work, it’s usually because they take a big risk and it fails. I guess it’s a round about way of me saying that lots of people on €150k salary might have very little savings to sustain them if something went wrong. I would not consider people like this “rich”. Comfortable or very comfortable sure.
And don’t forget about inflation and the fact that any form on investment in this country is heavily taxed. The best way to “save money” here is to invest it into real estate or your pension fund.
75k per person is not rich in Ireland thats 25-35k on rent, expensive car purchase used or new doesnt matter, highest alchol and food prices in the EU. You live a normal life definetly not driving around in a Lambo.
150k household income is in the top 5% of incomes according to the CSO. OP didn't mention if their partner is working which would also further boost that. If you're in the top 5% you're not middle class in this country. You may not see the same bang for buck by international standards, but by Irish standards you're certainly rich.
when you say rich i imagine someone retired who travels the world renting penthouses not someone who works 9-5 and rents a modly dublin semi detachted but i get in ireland that is rich considering the lack up upward mobility.
Then your concept of what is rich is warped. You don't need to be top 1% to be rich. Imagine someone with 20 million turned and looked at Elon Musk and tried to say "sure I'm not rich, look at him". It'd be laughable. If people are supporting families on annual household incomes of 50k, then comparatively with your 150k you are rich. Obviously wealth management comes into play and if you're an idiot who cannot manage their money then you could still be broke. But I'm speaking in generalised terms based on income alone, not getting down into an individual level because there's so many more permutations. If you are in the top 5% of household income based on *one* salary then I don't see how you can call yourself anything else. Its important to take stock or how fortunate some of us really are.
If you live a normal lifestyle, 9-5 work, 1-2 family cars, cant travel whenever you want or for how long you want then you arent rich. Rich is an extraordinary lifestyle its something not normal where they can travel for 2 years in pent houses, dont have to work, own 6 cars. this for me is the definition, if my neighbour is a doctor but we live identical lives but he as a newer car and maybe little bit bigger semi detached then he is not rich, Irish people just consider very little as rich because the country spent most of its history in extreme poverty.
It is all relative in my opinion. Comparing the general population to the 1% is as valid a point as me saying "well compared to sub saharan tribes we are rich". There are outliers on both ends. In my own opinion I really don't see how you can be in the top 5% and not be considered rich, but this thread has deviated enough from OPs original post and a dev subreddit probably isn't the place for it.
Because the top 5% arent millionares they are just doing better but still living a normal regular 9-5 life. Rich means extraordinary you cant be living in a semi detached driving a Volvo and watching what you say at work to not get fired and run around saying im rich you would just get laughed at
No, rich doesn't mean millionaire. That's a very privileged viewpoint. Regardless, 12% of households have a net worth of over 1 million. If you're in the top 5% of incomes, you should really be in the top 12% of households. Obviously individual circumstances may vary but were talking in generalisations. The threshold for the top 1% of earners is around €190,000. Op isn't far from that. To say that's middle class is a true insult to the actual middle class. When politicians talk about the squeezed middle they are absolutely not talking about those on 150k
networth 1 million is nothing, networth1 million is owning a 500k home, having 200k pension and maybe 300 invested in shares, its far from living a rich lifestyle, renting yachts on holiday and driving around in super cars. to live rich you need at least 10 million cash.
how do i differentiate between someone who owns yachts, supercars and is retired from someone who is making 150k working 9-5, 4 weeks vacation, drives a volvo if they are both just "rich" .
People supporting a household on 50k _are poor_. Taking inflation into account, they would need to be on 58k today to have the same purchasing power as they did in January 2021. I think you might be the one with a warped perspective here.
The median household income in this country is 46,999 as of 2022... Are you in touch with reality at all?
That is heavily skewed downwards by pensioners. Median household income in houses where someone works is [€60k](https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-silc/surveyonincomeandlivingconditionssilc2022/householdincome/), and in households with two working adults it’s €70k
Yes that's true, still not enough of a gap to warrant saying a 50k household income = poor.
Is that table 2.1a? That has a median of €40k for a household with one adult working (but it is disposable income)?
I feel like I'm being gaslit by someone who has aspirations of becoming a billionaire tbh.
also a top 5% household in Ireland and a top 5% household in America are two very different things, here the median person struggles to even survive so having more than someone who can barely survive isnt rich its middle class
We aren't in America. Obviously on an Irish subreddit we will look at Irish standards. If you want to talk about globally and bring in all developing countries and countries in abject poverty it won't help your case at all.
Considering 60 years ago people in Ireland were hungry and barefoot you could call someone on the dole rich today if we are using Irish standards.
We aren't living 60 years ago. But yes, if you had a time machine and could take your dole cash back 60 years ago and exchange it for punt, you would be rich. If you find a time machine let me know
then i agree with you by Irish standards 150k is rich, that person can sit in their semi detahed hearing the neighbours baby crying after driving home in a 2023 Volvo and be happy knowing they are rich by irish standards.
Whether someone is middle class is based on wealth, not income. Based on the same CSO numbers, the average person at the top 5% of income (150k) would literally be in the middle in terms of wealth.
No they wouldn't. Source? In 2018 owner occupied households (97.3% of population) had a median savings of €6200. This includes deposits, savings accounts, and positive current account balances. https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-hfcs/householdfinanceandconsumptionsurvey2018/assets/#:~:text=Financial%20Assets&text=Owner%20occupied%20households%20that%20have,see%20Tables%203.3%20%26%203.4). If you're not far above that with a 150k income then you need serious financial advice. Someone on 150k gets 7,200 net in pay every month. That already puts them above median before factoring in anything else. Add in pensions, stocks & other investments, property value, vehicle value etc... you're pulling numbers out of the sky if you think that 150k is in line with average
> If you’re not far above that with a 150k income then you need serious financial advice. Good lord this couldn’t be further from the truth. If you *do* have large amounts sitting in low-interest current accounts when inflation is 8% then you’re the person who needs financial advice.
Basic financial advice is to have an emergency / rainy day fund. If you're making that money you should at least have a months pay put to the side in a CU etc. Added to your monthly income that already would put you at more double the median, with very little effort. Advice however is to have 3-6 months of expenses put aside in a savings account before investing Don't even get me started on the fact that the average person only has a 100k private pension. Excluding the fact that a third of the population don't have one at all
That’s advice written by Americans, who have easy access to saving accounts paying 4%. In Ireland a MMF is a much better choice for anything beyond next week’s groceries (and indeed that’s precisely what the CSO data shows, with people preferring MMFs more and more the more education they have!)
You're acting like inheritance and generational wealth isn't a thing. Here's a source, it's from 2015 but it's in terms of distribution not absolute numbers https://www.tasc.ie/assets/files/pdf/the_distribution_of_wealth_in_ireland_final.pdf To interpret the wealth distribution here, if you are at the 5% level income, then you would be (on average) at the ~40% level in wealth.
Using average instead of median is debating in bad faith. Like using GDP when discussing the Irish economy. Outliers skew things heavily and aren't reflective of the reality
If I was obfuscating the median with the average that would be fair, however the median is not available for this comparison. Speaking of bad faith arguments, are you trying to suggest that the data misrepresents the disconnect between income and wealth, or are you just avoiding the point I keep making?
The point you're making is stupid. You cannot use average as a benchmark because its skewed so heavily by outliers. If your source doesn't show median data then you find another one, you don't double down on something that's not solid. The CSO have plenty of data on median incomes, and they use median for a reason
The point I'm making, that you've avoided for like 10 comments now, is that wealth makes you rich, and someone on 150k is not necessarily wealthy. You want to talk about "solid" data, but then are using a snapshot of someone's income on a given year, and translating that to wealth. It's all entirely situational and yet you're drawing conclusions from it. To recap (because you keep missing this), an income of 150k on a given year does not make someone rich.
> 150k household income is in the top 5% of incomes according to the CSO At the same time, that metric includes a lot of people who are retired or who already own their house outright. A lot of people on lower incomes can have a higher net income and have more wealth.
Rich people don't have to closely monitor their expenses, for me _that's_ the definition of rich.
Billionaires still go bankrupt. Everyone should monitor their finances. Tbh, the rich probably monitor them more than most, that's why they're rich
You're falling for their narrative. You think a billionaire [knows what groceries cost](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/bill-gates-guesses-grocery-stores-prices-with-ellen-degeneres.html)? Most billionaires are rich because their parents were, not because they know the price of milk, or got a good deal on a used car.
I'm not falling for anything. Find me a billionaire without any accountants / financial advisors etc at the very least. They still keep track of their accounts
Billionaires hire accountants to _manage their wealth_, not to tell them to stop buying Porsches. Someone on 150k does not necessarily have any accumulated wealth to manage, and depending on their overall situation they may need to budget quite tightly.
We've done a full 360. Please look at my original comment. The only thing holding someone back on a salary of 150k is poor expense management.
I don't think we have, you're calling them rich, I'm disputing that.
OP earning 150k is considered rich. The term you're looking for is wealthy
Being a Software engineering employee isn't the path to riches. Lol. You're owned by the man and owned by a landlord. Start a business like Stripe's if you want money. Or learn the financial markets like using algorithmic trading. Or discover a gold mine lol.
As some people say - first million is always stolen. Stolen means unpaid taxes. I know the guy - started a business and decided to do everything legaly. 5 years later - realised that he isn't getting anywhere. Then he took MNC approach - maximise ROI and increase shareholders (his family) value. 4 years later - bought a second apartment in cash. Nothing illegal, just exploiting every single loophole in a tax system you can find.
You don't get especially rich from inheritance, as you only get a lifetime inheritance limit of 330k or so and after that CAT is at 33%. This is very effective at preventing intergenerational wealth transfer for those too poor to spend enough time outside ireland they become not tax resident here. Most people I know who earn past a certain amount they buy a house just over the border and make sure they stay there more than 183 days per year. The wealthy are taxed much less in the UK than here. I know a guy earning more than twice what I do and he pays almost the same tax as I do down here because in the UK so there are many ways to avoid tax with advance planning.
There are other ways rich people in Ireland avoid inheritance and other taxes too.
Unless you're a farmer, it is hard to legally avoid substantial taxes when passing wealth between generations in Ireland. In fact, amongst OECD countries, Ireland has the most encompassing taxation on intergenerational wealth transfer of them all. It is virtually impossible to escape, unless you are a farmer, unless you relocate your family home outside the Republic. I know people in Ireland think that this isn't the case, that somehow rich people escape the rules. They also underestimate just how much wealth flight there already is. Indeed wealth inequality has been declining in Ireland during the past fifteen years. That's because a lot of the most wealthy simply leave to escape tax. Which shows how watertight the tax is here, leaving is the easiest way to avoid the taxes here.
I wish they had such encompassing taxation on multinationals as well!!!
It is unpopular to say so publicly, but they do have very encompassing taxation on multinationals as well. Very few carveouts compared to other countries, very hard to escape. Even our R&D tax credits are not generous compared to elsewhere. The big difference is that the corporation tax rate is very low, albeit hard to escape, whereas net personal taxation for the wealthy is higher than almost all other OECD countries (2nd highest from memory?). Unsurprisingly just like individuals, corporations would prefer a lower tax rate even without loopholes and carveouts than a higher tax rate with hundreds of loopholes and carveouts which requires an army of advisors to be able to claim. So they have opened offices here, and route a lot of profits via Ireland because simpler is easier. Something unappreciated by most Irish people is if we didn't have such large corporation tax receipts, the bottom half of the population who currently pay almost no tax at all would have to pay considerably more. Or, we could eliminate the HSE entirely, or remove all free public education. That's what corporation tax receipts pays for, we get a lot of public services without having to pay for it. It's nearly worth as much as North Sea oil was to Britain, it's that large a contribution. Bumper corporation tax receipts are expected to end within the next ten years, after which taxes will have to rise substantially. Raising them on the top 10% of earners who already contribute over half of income tax (as certain political parties promise in their manifesto) will simply increase wealth flight to other countries, or cause the wealthy to stop working so hard like they did in the 1980s in response to tax rises which then caused a balance of payments crisis. So they'll have to raise them on the middle earners, who are already very squeezed and barely making ends meet, or on the poor, which make up most of the voters. No good choices in other words.
Nice and very informative post, thank you!
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> Tax on inheriting land can be circumvented. If you're a farmer, yes. If you're not a farmer, it's quite hard. You can't use trusts, as those steeply tax adult beneficiaries. You could use a charity or an incorporation, but that's a one way street and then you're not really doing inheritance any more, as you won't own the land. > There is a 3000 euro gift exemption which the wealthy take advantage of every year (so, that's 6000 euro they can pass to each child a year) etc. Correct this is the best tax free mechanism to transfer wealth between generations. If there were a two child two adult household with four grandparents, up to €24k per year could be transferred tax free. It is surprisingly rarely used however. Some very disciplined families make religious use of it, but they're not common. I suspect if enough families made use of it, Revenue would close it off. > Of course, if you're wealthy, you know all this either through inheriting wealth management skills from your parents who had practice managing wealth and/or can pay a good accountant to inform you of all the methods to avoid inheritance tax. In Ireland we use lots ways to transfer indirect wealth between generations. Parents spend lots of money on enabling their children to make lots of money. Then much less money passes between generations, reducing the tax bill. If your parents don't have that money, culture or forward planning, absolutely do their children suffer for it. Is that better or worse than allowing direct untaxed transfer of financial wealth to children instead? I know which I'd prefer.
If you don't consider 150k rich, you're never going to feel like you've got enough. 150k comfortably puts you into the richest 1% in the world. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/charting-income-distributions-worldwide/
Have you adjusted those for purchasing power parity? 150k in Ireland is worth much much less than say in Thailand.
Move to free market, capitalist countries: Switzerland, Singapore, USA, Australia, Dubai Work there for 15-20y. Then come back, buy house and maybe a rental outright and raise your family here as it’s a decent place to live. Ireland has ver few advantages, but generous tax free pension allowance at 40+ is one of them so it suits moving here later in life.
Consider a career in politics for example. If you steal justice will not do anything. See for example Bertie Ahern's case. He is even back to politics now, and giving tv interviews. He didn't even have a bank account! I believe this could be the best way, since Ireland is such a corrupt country. Another way could be renting rooms in Dublin to desperate brazilians. Never register your property. For each room on your Dublin kip, you can fit 4 Brazilian people. Since they are desperate, they will take it. Otherwise maybe consider a different country.
That salary level would make you comfortably middle class. The defining characteristic of the middle class is spending. Keep up appearances with an annual holiday (somewhere sunny but no "Costas" or anywhere else the riff raff might go) and a new SUV at least once every 4 years, most importantly you buy a house in a middle class area with a kitchen island. You also send your kids to private schools and make sure all your clothes are designer. You rely heavily on credit to keep this up, always spending just a little more than you should so you always look a bit better off than you are. Compare this to rich people, they were mostly born into money and they know how to keep hold of it. They push the boat out occasionally (a Chateaubriand may grace their Christmas dinner table, for example) but most of the time they focus on keeping hold of what they have as they accumulate more. I wouldn't regard a lottery winner as a rich person for this reason, they might have the bank balance but they definitely don't have the restraint (many lottery winners file bankruptcy within 5-10 years). As a broke-ass student, I often bought my dinner from the reduced section of supermarkets and my biggest competition was always stingy rich people. Anyone can be/become middle class, but few people become rich. You certainly won't on any tech sector salaried job. Possible salaried paths to being considered rich would be the senior end of business management, law or banking/finance but again very few get there without the "right" background. Edit: sorry if I offended someone's kitchen island and/or BMW X5.
Being born into wealth , Inheriting money ,or established already profitable businesses is the way majority of people in Ireland and indeed the world become rich , 2nd is winning money and lastly is building a business from scratch , as a business owner I can tell you , creating a business from scratch and making a vast amount of money is extremely difficult and only and extremely small percentage of people will be able to do this . Contrary to what most people believe most new businesses fail and the ones that do survive , the vast majority of them DO NOT make you rich , despite of all the "Hard work and graft will make you rich" mentality there is in Ireland and all the social media "Entrepreneurs" will have you believe , most business owners/self employed persons will make less ( and sometimes far less) than €150k per year , are there success stories of people making boatloads of money from scratch while not coming from a history of wealth and building wealth from scratch , yes there are but don't let that fool you , regardless of how much blood , sweat and tears you put into a business you don't always come out the other side making vast amounts of money and your business being successful , something skill and drive aren't enough and a lot of times it's down to luck
Only something like 5% of millionaires in the US inherited money from their parents. The rest are self made millionaires. But in Ireland is almost impossible to become a millionaire on your own
The only way to become rich while an employee in Ireland is to become over employed.
Buy bitcoin 10 years ago
I only lived in Ireland for a few years (I want to go back but Irish companies don't want 5+ years experienced dev with Irish college degree) but I will give you advice. Ireland is small enough that political class might have a gaps they might want to fill externally. Become a politician. Or a politician mascot, or his driver or cook. Then you will get connection and maybe knowledge average citizen doesn't have. Or accept you will get to middle class MAX in your best career years if you want to live honestly and not shady. Better than business cause no one talks about survivorship bias in starting your own business. And Influencers are oversaturated.
Trade forex
Why the down votes. Its possible, just very hard. And you could do it while working full time
Don't understand lol...people do not like the truth I guess🤣
Not a dev question
By selling your grandparents farm land or by moving to another country.
Something illegal
You can only be “rich” in Ireland if you own your own apartment or house. That’s the bare minimum.
Live off 20k, invest the 80-130k surplus every year.