How To Get Rich!*
Friday, November 5th, 2010Here it is, 10 tips for hitting it big, passed along by the Belgian (Flemish) paper Het Nieuwsblad from a piece apparently originating from the Belgian job-listing site (bilingual) Jobat.
- Be attractive: Of course! Handsome men supposedly earn 9% more on average, hot women 4%.
- Have an above-average IQ: I guess they start with the obvious ones. Naturally, a disclaimer is added here – from some econ prof, Jay Zagorsky – that “not all geniuses end up rich.”
- Be popular in school: Really popular people earn on average 10% more.
- Be tall: Damn, men earn 4% to 10% more for every centimeter they are above “the average,” women 5% to 8%. But what can you do about this if you are disadvantaged? Wear high heels?
- Get married, and stay that way: Married couples allegedly see their net worth rise by 16% for every year of matrimony.
- Drink up!: This one might be a bit counter-intuitive. But if you drink, that means you socialize and thereby build up that all-important “social capital,” i.e. your business network. But all in moderation, of course . . .
- Be thin: Employers prefer to pay those with “ideal dimensions.” Every Body Mass Index point you carry above average lowers your net worth by 8%.
- Be blonde: Here the affect is apparently more indirect: the men whom blonde women marry earn 6% more than average.
- Don’t smoke: Good advice in any context, but non-smokers supposedly have on average 50% more money in the bank than smokers – and yes, the effect here is direct, it’s because cigarettes are so expensive.
- Buy property young: That way you show that you’re confident you’re going somewhere in life, and that prophecy then self-fulfills.
If we were ready just yesterday to accept advice on browser quality from a French newspaper, surely we’ll be interested in this path to riches as laid out from Belgium – because Belgium is so well-known for all its billionaires! (Actually, it’s true that the country does have a number of rather wealthy people, but they tend to live in the extreme northeast – they like to be on the Dutch border because they are tax-exiles from the Netherlands!)
*Official SEO-enabled blogpost headline! To go along with the official blog-tabloid-style entry! Is it all worthy of being #1001? We post – you decide!
