There’s an amount of fortune on top of working hard. Depending on where someone lives, markets are different and the ceiling for pay may not exist to both have a child and save money. In those cases, the cost to move to a better location may be prohibitively expensive.

Hard work does go a long way and can be enough to overcome some of those roadblocks, but some people and demographics are at a distinct disadvantage for financial success. Further, if someone is raised in poverty and by the time they hit adulthood, they may not possess the skills or even know of the skills they need to break through the glass ceiling.

I’m 37 and my wife and I have successful careers and are better off than the vast majority of Americans. Part of that is my wife graduated and got a decent job right out of school. It took me longer, and part of my recent success is because one of my best friends got my foot in the door at my current company, which pushed my career forward quite a bit. We were also able to buy our first house about 15 years ago for around $80k. It wasn’t the biggest or best house, but it allowed us to stop paying twice as much in rent while also building equity. We rolled that into our next house making it more affordable. We then bought our recent house at the perfect time where we sold our last one for about 30k more than we bought it, bought our new house before the the value jumped 50%, and our interest rate is sub 4%.

We’ve worked for everything we got, but we definitely got lucky along the way as well.