Can someone help me lay out a career path so I can afford a $30 million penthouse in NYC in my lifetime?

Lets say you just graduated from Harvard and now work Investment Banking at Goldman Sachs. Your end goal in life is owning a $30 million penthouse apartment but if you calculate the inflation and interest on loans, it would probably cost $50 million all-in during the course of a life time.

So can someone map me a career path (including job title and after-tax all-in salary and minus living expenses.

For example: 

Year 1: Investment Banking at GS| Salary: <$200k minus taxes/living expenses| Final Net Worth: $50k 

Year 2: Investment Banking at GS| Salary: <$200k minus taxes/living expenses| Final Net Worth: $100k

Year 3: Columbia MBA or Associate or Private Equity, ETC... 

Year 4:

Year 5:

...

..

...

Year 40: Owning a $50 million penthouse apartment in Manhattan - Debt Free| Final Net Worth: $55 million

Year 41: Retirement

Can someone knowledgeable fill-in the company job titles/salary/final end-of-year net worth for Years-3 to Years-39? 

8 Comments
 

You probably won’t get there working in banking. You’re best bets are:

1. Marry rich. Your best bet would be someone you meet at Harvard. Probably the easiest time to have multiple options that all will have a big enough trust fund.

2. Get super lucky joining a company pre-ipo and stock takes off.

3. Start a highly successful company.

Other options that probably won’t work considering you’re at Harvard considering going into banking

1. Work in the entertainment industry as an artist, actor, etc

2. professional athlete

 
Most Helpful

I’m not sure this is entirely true. Forget inflation for a moment. Assume you’re an MD today. You make 7 figures in a reasonable year, perhaps mid-7 figures (we’ll assume you’re not a rockstar rainmaker doing better than that).

You lose half of that to taxes. Let’s assume you take home ~1m/year and spend half of it. So $500k saved. Over 10 years that’s $5m, or 17% of the price

Of the $30m penthouse. Can he do it debt free? No way. With a mortgage? Maybe.

Now when you factor in the likelihood of making it to MD and having a reasonable 10 year run? Yeah you’re probably right. IB isn’t his best bet.

 

It isn’t that realistic, you are not doing the math here. Even with the down payment (that you scraped by to get), you realize a mortgage is $100k a month on the remainder? Then add about $15-30k/mo of HOA fees and taxes. So $120k conservatively (some places have $40-50k of monthly fees), or $1.44mm in mortgage and taxes, so about $2.8mm gross income just to clear the mortgage.

As someone in that income range you are stretching it around $6-8mm. 

 

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