Quote Originally Posted by Nerd-o-rama View Post
His pay for the first job was "triple his current annual salary" - given that he was comfortably if miserably supporting his wife and three dependents on his "current annual salary", this means his pay for his first job was probably somewhere between $250,000 and $300,000 in 2012 dollars (significantly less if the movie does in fact take place in the early 70's or whatever, but an equivalent accounting for inflation and cost of living increases). And this is all untaxed, since it was an under-the-table job; even if you actually are the government, you don't tell the IRS about who you paid to do your black ops (and this is fiction, so Bob doesn't need to worry about an audit even if he's the kind of person who would). In other words, just the pay from the first job would leave Bob Parr well flush with cash for a long time, even after buying a fancy sports car.
2010 median pay of insurance sales agents was $46,770 in the U.S. Given that Bob is male we can assume that his pay is higher than that, but that puts us closer to the $150,000 to $200,000 range than the $250,000 to 300,000 range.