The over-30 people who can spend a week skiing in Beaver Creek, Aspen, or Jackson have generally achieved success in three dimensions: (a) wealth, (b) leisure time, and (c) health. Transportation, lodging, and lift tickets are expensive. Most people who ski at these big mountains are people who have been skiing for years and therefore who have been successful for years. For a young person who wants to succeed in at least these three dimensions, why not spend a season working in a customer-facing job in a luxury ski resort in order to learn the kinds of careers that lead to success?
[During my week in Beaver Creek it seemed that the dominant careers were in health care (especially anesthesiology and radiology), real estate ownership/investment (especially of properties that could be used for health care, e.g., addiction clinics), financial services, and collecting money from divorce/alimony/child support. Health care seemed like the surest path to having enough money and free time in 2016. Nurses, doctors, technicians, administrators, et al. were all over the mountain, despite health care being only about 20 percent of the economy. (Note that these folks, when not trashing Bernie Sanders, said that being a doctor per se was less lucrative than it had been. “A partner in our radiology practice used to make at least $750,000 per year,” said a nurse from a low-cost Southern town, “but now $600,000 is probably more realistic.”)]
Readers: What do you think about this idea for a college student who (a) likes to ski, and (b) wants to figure out which corners of the economy lead to the good life?
It’s not just observing which careers look promising, you get to make contacts too.
My advice for recent college grads is to become an air traffic controller. Good pay right away, can work anywhere, retire after 20 years or so, etc. You just need to have the temperament to deal with it.
My impression is that a majority of people who ski began as children. Which means, their parents also had above average incomes and all the implications that go along with that: better education, nicer neighborhoods, etc. It’s an example of the tremendous benefit and advantage access to money provides in this country.
Maybe we should narrow the search criteria slightly. I wonder what industry is best for producing wealthy and leisurely careers for people under 40/50. All the successful doctors I encounter somehow all seem quite old after working for a long time. Due to the length of schooling, one doesn’t really begin a medical career until 30. There has got to be a value in the timing of cash flow. What use is money and free time when you are about to die.
Nurses and health care technicians aren’t especially highly paid. How could they afford expensive ski vacations?
philg: …why not spend a season working in a customer-facing job in a luxury ski resort in order to learn the kinds of careers that lead to success?
A family friend did just that at 22 years old after graduating from Northeastern University and spending one unsatisfying year working in a bank outside of Boston. She and five girlfriends drove to CO, and immediately found living arrangements and entry-level front desk jobs in the hospitality industry. Before the first year was out, four out of the five moved back to MA. Twenty years later, the family friend is still out there – a successful and well-off self-made restaurateur and small business owner, living in her slope side townhouse and married with a similarly adventurous hardworking spouse.
Smartest Woman: How did health care providers other than doctors afford to travel to and ski at Beaver Creek?
One nurse was actually a nurse-anesthetist. http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes291151.htm says that we should expect her wage to be $158,900/year. Maybe not enough for the Ritz-Carlton, but certainly plenty to share a condo with friends and then buy a lift ticket. Anyway, that’s just the mean salary. Nothing stops Beaver Creek from attracting folks on the right side of the bell curve.
Some of the other nurses worked as “traveling nurses” and hence not only made good money most of the year but also had their day-to-day living expenses covered by their hospital-employers.
The radiology tech was there with her boyfriend… a radiologist (and black diamond skier, but he joined our class of lamers for lunch).
One of the administrators ran a good-sized enterprise sending nurses to patients’ homes.
Beaver Creek does skew rich but if you don’t insist on sleeping right next to the lift it would be an affordable luxury for most Americans in the health care industry.
I have socialized with several sick care (can’t really agree it’s health care) professionals and philg saw a pretty good cross section. The higher-credentialed nurses have quite comfortable incomes doing things carved away from the MD’s over the years.
I live in a ski town. Some of the best jobs in town are health care workers. Doctors, nurses, pharmacists, physical therapists, etc.. Those people all seem to do well here as there is steady line of people with ski and outdoor exercise related issues. Plus it takes a ton of local workers to run the ski area and the hotels, etc.. So all the locals need health care as well.
As far as taking a year to ski I know maybe 40-50 ski area workers who came to this ski town for a year and have stayed for a lifetime. They all have lived a great life much different than city folks. They live to play and enjoy life and do outdoor stuff all the time. They don’t think or talk about money or work at all.
Probably the best example is Martin. He is 95. He skis most every day for exercise. He got married last summer to his second wife. He immigrated to the US in 1950ish. He worked in NY and LA as a glove maker. He hated the big city crowds. He came to the Sierras for a weekend to ski and went home and quit his job and moved to Tahoe. He got a job working at the ski area that first winter. He helped clear trees and brush. He designed ski trails. He worked on the Winter Olympics. He learned to be a ski patrol medic. He became the ski patrol director. He did other mountain stuff and retired at 70+ from the ski area. He owns a house 2 blocks from the ski area. He has two wonderful kids and several grand kids and great grand kids.
Ski areas have their own life styles. It is a way of life, Not a job.
Why not sleep with one of the successful rich bastards in Beaver Creek and then sue for child support. I’ll have to check your book about how Colorado fares in that department
Steve: A one-night encounter in Colorado is not a great way for an American to make money. See http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Colorado for how revenue may be capped at roughly $547,560. That’s tax-free so the $30,420 per year exceeds the median hourly wage of $18.28 times 2000 working hours. (i.e., a Coloradan could get paid more for having sex than for working, depending on education/skill level).
If a Ritz-Carlton guest in Beaver Creek could be identified as a target it would be much more lucrative to persuade that guest to travel to Santa Monica or Boston for a weekend of fun. If the resulting baby is born in California or Massachusetts and the lawsuit filed in one of those states, child support profits are unlimited by formula (California) and by custom/law (Massachusetts). Bringing the dermatologist back to Boston to have sex could easily be worth $4 million, giving the child 7.3X the cash value compared to the Colorado base case.
Colorado is also problematic from a plaintiff’s point of view due to its tendency toward 50/50 custody awards. Free child care 50 percent of the time might be nice, from a plaintiff’s point of view, but the winner parent’s freedom to move while retaining the cashflow will be restricted.
There did seem to be a lot of foreigners working in Beaver Creek for the season. It could make sense for one of those foreigners to get pregnant with an American visitor, return home to Brazil, for example, and give birth in Brazil then make a phone call to the Colorado child support enforcement bureaucrats (see http://www.realworlddivorce.com/ChildSupportLitigationWithoutMarriage ). Now she is collecting $30,500/year in a country where the after after-tax income is about $11,664 (http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/brazil/ ).
(One of my MIT classmates saw this article and asked if I had met anyone who had a career in the much-recommended-by-politicians “STEM” fields. The answer is “no”.)
I thought that the M in STEM stands for medicine, but certainly engineering/science no longer seems like a path to prosperity.
@SuperMike: I thought that the M in STEM stands for medicine
The M stands for Mathematics. However, there is some debate whether medical and health care jobs fall into STEM. I tend to think not. I’d say “health care practitioners” is large enough to be its own category – health care.
“Why not sleep with one of the successful rich bastards in Beaver Creek and then sue for child support?” – Steve.
Happens every weekend in Heavenly and Mammoth.
I have an old friend who actually wrote a book about his experiences working various jobs around Park City, Utah. Not a cake walk…
But then his goal was very different, to support a lifestyle living off the grid, not scope out a lucrative career.