121–130 of 460 posts
Save 25X your annual spending and you can retire. If you invest to earn 7%/yr (on avg), you can withdraw 4% forever. Read the book The Simple Path to Wealth, or the basics in this blog post. http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...
Save 25X your annual spending and you can retire. If you invest to earn 7%/yr (on avg), you can withdraw 4% forever. Read the book The Simple Path to Wealth, or the basics in this blog post. http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...
Could anyone explain this a little for me, please? Does this mean you save 93% of your income and only use 7%? From the website, there is a graph that shows how many years you supposedly have to save for retirement but it does not take into account the actual amount you make. As a "junior" dev, if you save 97% of X peanuts you still have peanuts.
There is a common rule of thumb in the investing world that you can safely remove 4% a year from your investments and they will continue to grow. (7% return minus 4% withdrawals means you have 3% more in the account each year)
It doesn't matter what your lifestyle is. If you are a junior developer who makes 80k a year and spends 50k a year, then you should save 25x50k=1.25mil and then you no longer have to work for a living. This process will take years or decades.
Learn to be useful to the organisation where you're working. Don't just be about upping your own skills and stuff. Being valuable to the person who's employing you is what makes your progress in your career. Learn to be a professional. Basic things like showing up on time, being a good communicator etc.
>Being valuable to the person who's employing you is what makes your progress in your career. More importantly learn how to be recognized as valuable. It's better to appear valuable without actually being valuable than being valuable but not recognized, and often you don't even have a good idea what's valuable in the bigger picture on your own so accepting others valuation can help you from being stuck in your bubble…
I’d like to chime in and second the sentiment in slightly different terms: value is not inherently visible. You can waste a lot of time contributing significant invisible value to a company with no recognition or reward. On the other hand, you can provide a small amount of value and receive significant recognition just by making that value as visible as possible.
If you’re looking to have your value recognized, you need to commit energy to making it visible. This means different things in different roles and organizations, but it’s a critical skill to develop.
And it doesn’t just apply in business relationships! Learn to make your value visible; it ensures the energy you put into anything is appropriately acknowledged.
Find a mentor. I was lucky enough to have a couple more experienced developers take me under their wing when I was new. I learned so much from them. This idea of mentorship has fallen out of favour, but I now understand "there is nothing new under the sun".
How does one actually do this? I have a hard enough time finding close friends of any kind. And mentorship is a pretty big thing to ask of someone.
Good enough is better than perfect. It is also way better than 'not yet done'. Always have targets in mind. Even green field explorative projects should have targets. Good engineers ship. Abstraction and encapsulation is overrated. Premature generalization is the root of all evil. Knowledge is no substitute for experience. You cannot google what you do not know it exists.
do not burnout I know you are young and you feel like you're invincible. I know you can pull an all-nighter and work the next day just fine. We have all been in that situation and believe me, it is gonna take a toll at your performance ... and it could even trigger or help you develop some health issues in your life that can sabotage you down the line. Realize there's only so much progress one can do in the day. Stop…
As someone working in technology, you are going to be learning new stuff continually (or your usefulness is going to diminish over time). By keeping up to date with tech news, you get a lot of context for what people are using, what's coming down the pipe etc. You may end up experimenting with stuff and then you'll be ahead of all your colleagues. It broadens your knowledge, and if you have to deal with clients it means you will usually know what they're talking about.
There's a few pitfalls to watch out for though. HN is great, but it is still an echochamber that can be focused on web and related tech. I was mostly an embedded software engineer for years and found comments like 'does anyone even use C anymore' hilarious (yes, see Linux kernel, device drivers, and your washing machine for details). It can also be very easy to end up wanting to push for the 'shiny new thing' too early. I tinkered with Rust from very early on, but it's only in the last 6 months or so that I'd suggest it is ready for use in most companies (depending on application area). Javascript frameworks suffer this problem particularly badly. Mature beats shiny 9 times out of 10 - running into a problem that 100 people have met before and posted about on StackOverflow and your tool caters for, is much better than being the first person to encounter said problem.
do not burnout I know you are young and you feel like you're invincible. I know you can pull an all-nighter and work the next day just fine. We have all been in that situation and believe me, it is gonna take a toll at your performance ... and it could even trigger or help you develop some health issues in your life that can sabotage you down the line. Realize there's only so much progress one can do in the day. Stop…
Save 25X your annual spending and you can retire. If you invest to earn 7%/yr (on avg), you can withdraw 4% forever. Read the book The Simple Path to Wealth, or the basics in this blog post. http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the math. Are you suggesting that you spend only 1/26 of your after tax income, and save the hypothetical remaining 25/26?
The key is to realize that it's not your earnings, but your spending, so it would behoove one to get that spending as small as possible to get to coasting more quickly.
The math works out in one of those "assuming a spherical cow" senses. It doesn't account for a market downtown for any length of time, nor a required change in spending habits (illness, emergency).
do not burnout I know you are young and you feel like you're invincible. I know you can pull an all-nighter and work the next day just fine. We have all been in that situation and believe me, it is gonna take a toll at your performance ... and it could even trigger or help you develop some health issues in your life that can sabotage you down the line. Realize there's only so much progress one can do in the day. Stop…
(Totally agree with the advice who have money and relationships though. But none of us start there.)