I fulfill all the above (except that I have a son, but he's young so the only big cost is daycare, around 13K/year), so where's my million!?
In order to develop a successful model, one should also have negative examples, i.e. people who could have had ~$1M in their mid 40s but do not. The greatest mistakes I made that I see with hindsight are (i) doing a PhD in EE where a MS was more than enough and then taking too long to finish that and (ii) taking too long to get acquainted with the concept of creating wealth, a la http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html; I'd say that, had I read Hackers and Painters 15 years ago (it wasn't printed at that time or course), my life would have been different (or maybe not, it's easy to get caught with might have beens). That's why I buy a copy of this book to many young people I know who are starting life.
Not having kids seems to be the first item in the list for that particular plan, so having a son disqualifies you!
Not to say that's a great plan. Having a life without kids wouldn't be a satisfying life for most people, and so if its a choice between kids and wealth, then most would choose kids.
I do think having kids early probably makes it much, much harder to become wealthy. My friends who had kids in their early 20's are generally poorer than my friends who waited until their 30's. I think a more realistic plan would be something that includes children, but waiting until you've had time to get some type of career started.
[9]This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you're trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you're even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what's the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.
Fantastic pull quote. I'm reading this on my iPhone and felt too lazy to bring up this page on my phone to copy/paste the text to send to a friend, so I just voice dictated it. (Which I guess is a reminder that there's also the possibility that sometimes the harder choice is also simply the less efficient.)
To add some value to this anecdote, I'll share that I've been using voice dictation more often, both for convenience (as here) and also as a tool to help improve my diction. I tend to swallow my words and speak unclearly, so by having a computer check me I'm slowly learning to enunciate a little better and specifically figuring out which areas I need the most work. I am not speaking to the phone robotically, the only change from my conversational tone is the speaking of punctuation. (As for the pain of to/too/two and similar homonyms, the iPhone helpfully underlines these in blue and makes it a snap to tap and pick the correct version, a trick it took me a while to learn so I thought I should share.)
Yes, I mistakenly left out "start working at 21" when I referenced the ages. Because even if you have a net-worth-neutral graduate education, you are not saving and investing money during those years.
In order to develop a successful model, one should also have negative examples, i.e. people who could have had ~$1M in their mid 40s but do not. The greatest mistakes I made that I see with hindsight are (i) doing a PhD in EE where a MS was more than enough and then taking too long to finish that and (ii) taking too long to get acquainted with the concept of creating wealth, a la http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html; I'd say that, had I read Hackers and Painters 15 years ago (it wasn't printed at that time or course), my life would have been different (or maybe not, it's easy to get caught with might have beens). That's why I buy a copy of this book to many young people I know who are starting life.