Ask HN: How to earn over $250K a year?

For example, if you are living in a small town and making $155K/year, your standard of living is likely significantly higher than someone making $250K/year but living in Manhattan or Soma.

You can double your salary by finding a second job. You'll make $310K/year, work 80+ hours a week. Would you be willing to do that? I imagine probably not.

Finally, what sort of time frame are you on? Specifically, do you want to make more $$ to pay for kids next year? More vacations? Retirement?

Investing $25K/year in an index fund will increase your long term net worth / assets, but it won't feel like you've increased your salary, especially in a market where you might lose money one or two years in a row. This might also make it impossible to pay for daycare, cribs, and nannies if you're ultimately doing this to pay for kids.

So ask yourself (or tell us): (1) what are your goals / why do you need the money, (2) how much are you willing to sacrifice to get it, and (3) what is your risk profile?

If you want some reading material, this is a good blog: http://www.freedomthirtyfiveblog.com/

However, I remember reading in The Economist that the majority of millionaires (you can debate if that's real wealth or not) become that way through PROFESSIONAL jobs: law, management consulting, investment banking rather than entrepreneurship. Arguably, being a partner at a law firm does tie your success to revenue of the firm, but not sure if that's what you meant.

That's not even as easy as you mention it though, is it? If it's a regular office job, that implies you won't be in the office at the same time everyone else is. Which means you won't be getting the job (or will be fired).

1. Earning potential is higher in management, if you can make it to a director-level or vp-level position at a major public tech company; take a look at the relevant comp figures for Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. on Glassdoor.

2. Being a sales rep at an enterprise software company with an aggressive comp plan is another option, if you can do the work. As @kasey_junk noted, this is because sales is compensated on a percent of revenue basis.

You might also look at technical consultancies, or try to become a technical expert for pe/vc firms.

Gaining wealth through investing your own money is hard; even at a market-beating 12% a year, it would take you more than 20 years to turn $100k into $1M. You can make money this way, but you need to manage a fund. The entry point is an analyst role at a hf/pe/vc firm.

I think @kasey_junk is 100% right; ultimately, you need to tie your work to some kind of economic value. We as humans are bad at assessing indirect value creation, so the roles that tend to achieve this tied-to-economic-value comp in practice are [1] sales, [2] investment professionals, [3] substantial equity owners.

To make over $250k, the more common path is to make (roughly) what you're making now and get the rest in the form of stock. Real, liquidable, publicly traded stock. So go to places like Facebook, Google, Apple, etc, and they'll be able to pay that much (if you convince them to!).

Even if they don't, a year or three of good performance will put you in that ballpark.