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Ask HN: 27, accidentally became wealthy, lost drive. What should I do?

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Re: Ask HN: 27, accidentally became wealthy, lost drive. What should I do?

#111

7.5M euro is not a lot of money. It's a decent amount of money to have to start doing something useful with it...or burn it all away.

It's more money than most Europeans will make in their life, especially after taxes.

I doubt anyone here compares themselves to "most europeans". I am a european and it's a lot of money for me but I dont see it to be a life changing amount of money (as in I would be comfortable just spending it).

You can easily spend half of this money on on real estate.

Re: Ask HN: 27, accidentally became wealthy, lost drive. What should I do?

#112
I have not talked to anyone about it

And do not, yet. Please read on “worst mistakes people make after winning a lottery”, “lottery winners go broke” and “what to do and not do if you win a lottery”. It’s not as simple as going to Vegas and spending it there. Even if you’re self-aware, this may ruin yours and your relatives life in very surprising ways.

Re: Ask HN: 27, accidentally became wealthy, lost drive. What should I do?

#113
It is a slippery slope. I've never had such resources available but having said that, at this point in time I'm the wealthiest I've ever been by a considerable margin. Through a 8/h day jobs and no investing but that's somewhat irrelevant. I admit I have lost drive in the past on multiple occasions: whether that's been due to personal problems, shit jobs and a million and one other reasons. But the one thing that has always kept me on my feet(or helped me get back up) was new technology. At some point I started getting outside my comfort zone(that is the areas where I know I'm strong) and this has been my main motivation ever since. I still rely on my 9 to 6 job but there are so many things I am getting involved with in my personal time that even if I had millions in my pocket and could focus on them entirely, I still would struggle to fit them into the 24 available hours. Leave all the NFT and web3 bullshit aside - that's just another ponzi scheme to get masses of people pour their own money(hard or easy earned) into a bottomless pit. Personally - setting GPU prices aside, electronics are dirt cheap in general - sensors, communication systems, embedded systems, single board computers which have become insanely powerful and efficient - there is a huge void that hasn't been filled yet and keeps me up at night constantly. I'm not talking about alexa-enabled light bulbs. Just scroll through the mouser catalog and you'll see so many things that should exist but for one reason or another still don't. This is what my spare time has been revolving around lately and for what it's worth I've started working on an insanely ambitious project and if successful, I'll most certainly open source. My take is don't focus on what others are doing - there is no point in building yet another facebook, another netflix, amazon or blockchain - we have an abundance of those and no one really cares about them anymore. You are in the perfect position to try something that no one has ever done before. My advice - save some of your wealth as a pension fund, keep some of it as it is, invest some and set aside a fixed amount for experimenting and building things. Keep your eyes open, go outside your comfort zone often and you most certainly will keep your drive at high levels.

Re: Ask HN: 27, accidentally became wealthy, lost drive. What should I do?

#116
I would look at it as a great thing, it seems your only drive was making money before which is pretty sad by itself.

I'd first secure your money against inflation by investing 80% of it in safe assets (Real-estate, ETF's, investment contracts with reasonable target yield,...)

That should shield your wealth from inflation while making highly diversified returns in not very risky assets. Any private banker will be able to set those up for you. There's also Liqid.de if you don't like bankers but private banks provide super cheap loans which can is helpful to leverage.

After that you should find out what you genuinely like and what you don't like by listening to your feelings and eliminate what you don't like and do more of what you really like. At some point that will roll into a new passion and new career.

For me, I just realized that I can't live without being an entrepreneur because all other career choices have too much certainty and boredom.

Happy to chat if you need some pointers

Re: Ask HN: 27, accidentally became wealthy, lost drive. What should I do?

#117

7.5M euro is not a lot of money. It's a decent amount of money to have to start doing something useful with it...or burn it all away.

I'm always surprised how HN is disconnected from the reality sometimes.

It's basically 197 k$ a year until he "retires" at 65 in 38 years. And that's if he's keeping the money without investing it.

Re: Ask HN: 27, accidentally became wealthy, lost drive. What should I do?

#118
post #42

Same thing happened to me. My ARR went from 0 to $2m with a profit margin of about 60%. You need a spiritual angle. Don’t do drugs. Don’t do a “religion”. Find a way to help humanity through technology, and make that your mission. Ever since you were a kid making money was the goal, but that is small drop compared to the actual work that needs to be done in your life. As you serve others, you will discover your life’…

Religion is actually highly underrated in this circumstance.

Right, I was about to say something along these lines. You're bumping into questions that philosophy and religion have been attempting to answer for as long as humans have had the time and energy to devote to such things. I'm not telling you to "get religion", just to engage their perspectives (which probably have more to offer in this regard than successful tech founders which have a far more narrow set of life experiences to draw from).

Re: Ask HN: 27, accidentally became wealthy, lost drive. What should I do?

#120
> I have not talked to anyone about it

I would keep it that way until you get sorted, which I say based on my experience that people knowing you're wealthy introduces a whole new set of issues, such as your circle of friends and family treating you differently. In my case, I wasn't prepared for this at all for this and it damn near ruined me.

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