Comment by handrous

From what I've seen, the smart ones with good business sense are the ones who make real money in the trades, and they're mostly doing sales, supervision, training, and maybe personally handling some limited amount of the trickier bits of the actual labor (or cases where they have to come back to fix things, if they really care about customer service), by some time in their 30s. They may acquire some minor, persistent aches and pains from the work in their 20s or early 30s, but are mostly out of the rougher side of the job before it seriously harms their QOL. Like a lot of business, the real money's in selling other people's labor at a markup, not in selling your own labor.