It is much easier to make a lot of money than to learn to invest money for a lifetime

Let's say you are an amateur singer on one of these types of talent shows you see all around the planet. You get a record contract and you make 1 million dollars.

Hold it right there a moment. Will this money be gone in 1 to 3 to 5 years? Likely this is between 50% and 90% true depending upon the person.

But, if someone gets 1 million dollars and then pays the taxes on it it is theirs free and clear.

So, if you don't create debts you cannot service then theoretically this money (if you found a way to make 5% interest on it, could earn that person 50,000 dollars a year for life if they kept the million dollars in the bank and just lived on the Interest every single month.

But, remember this is only theoretical because look at bank savings rates the last years since the Great Depression. In some ways you would have had to learn how to invest in the stock market or something like that to make this kind of money for the rest of your life likely by investing in blue chip interest bearing stocks. But then, what about stock downturns when stocks drop a lot like they did in 2009 to about 6900?

Then you might have had to buy Non Taxable  Municipal Bonds in the state where you already live in to mitagate the stock market drops.

But, if you could actually put 1 million dollars in the bank and just leave it there and live on it and you collected 5% interest for the next century or two on it, not only you but also the next generations (given that you only have one child each) could all live on this and never work another day in your lives if you didn't want to.

So, there is theory and then there is actuality and most people are not disciplined nor in a financial reality in their country to actually pull this off. But, you are getting the general idea of how people get rich and stay rich.

They learn how to invest.

All the rest spend their principal and then they are eventually broke once again.

So, if you and the next generation were disciplined enough to live on 50,000 dollars a year?

But then remember inflation of the value of a dollar is also a factor here as well.

But, you just had a lesson in long term investing of what may be possible to do given the right circumstance with people self disciplined enough to maintain their principal in this way ongoing and not spending it and only spending the 50,000 dollars interest every year. So, they keep the 1,000,000 dollars as long as they keep doing this for 100 years or more, Theoretically.

But, real life has many many more variables than this but this would be an ideal situation if one could get 50,000 a year and 5% interest into perpetuity and money didn't inflate like it tends to (or deflate).