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How do YOU survive during tough times?
11–20 of 28 posts
Re: How do YOU survive during tough times?
#12Easy answer: leave SF and get to a lower rent situation if you truly cannot afford rent. When I wanted to cut down costs, I built some software to take advantage of referral programs from startups and used that to get free food for a few months. But if I found myself in a situation where I truly feared my ability to pay rent, I'd start contracting and look into moving elsewhere.
Curious what you meant by:
>I built some software to take advantage of referral programs from startups and used that to get free food for a few months.
Re: How do YOU survive during tough times?
#13Mods, please add the "Ask HN" prefix for this one. It's not a link to another site/article.
Re: How do YOU survive during tough times?
#14Join a company that pays good salary. Save up enough to have a cushion for the startup's tough time.
Startup is high risk business.
Re: How do YOU survive during tough times?
#15Easy answer: leave SF and get to a lower rent situation if you truly cannot afford rent. When I wanted to cut down costs, I built some software to take advantage of referral programs from startups and used that to get free food for a few months. But if I found myself in a situation where I truly feared my ability to pay rent, I'd start contracting and look into moving elsewhere.
Curious what you meant by: >I built some software to take advantage of referral programs from startups and used that to get free food for a few months.
A bunch of food delivery startups have referral programs for first time users. There are some ways to get lots of referrals using software :-).
Re: How do YOU survive during tough times?
#16Not joking: Get your spouse to sponsor your startup. Give them some ownership of the company.
Re: How do YOU survive during tough times?
#17Get a job at a lame startup with lots of processes and code reviews - things that leave you with a lot of free time waiting for others to approve the minutiae. The more designers they have the better - especially if they work remote. That company will fail horribly but, you will have the time and funds to work on your project.
Re: How do YOU survive during tough times?
#18If you're building a company in SF without OPM (Other People's Money), you are making a big mistake.
Why use an acronym if you need to explain it anyway? You've essentially just added an extra word.
Re: How do YOU survive during tough times?
#19This is the wrong question. A better question is "would 'tough times' affect you at all?"
Never couple spending to income. That's a recipe for always feeling poor. Instead, find a baseline where you can live and make sure that it lies at such a tiny fraction of your normal income that you never need to think about thinks like "budgeting" or "saving".
So if you're fresh out of school with your first $50k/year job, make sure you can fit your entire life into $20k/year.
When you take that $120k/year job a few years later, live on $20k/year.
When you crack the $300k/year barrier with your RSUs from Google, live on $20k/year.
That is how I've always approached things, and it makes life a lot less stressful (since it removes the number one worry that everybody else has from the equation). There were several years when I was traveling and consulting where I'd only take one little $10k gig a year (or nothing at all), and there was never a question of running out of money because it naturally went out the door so slowly.
If you do what everybody else does and ramp your lifestyle up to meet your income, you're just ensuring that you'll be in trouble if things go south. But once you have a dozen years of accidentally saving (n-20) per year, you can survive for years at a time with no income at all, so bumps in the road don't feel bumpy at all.
Fix that and you'll stop needing to ask questions like this one.
Re: How do YOU survive during tough times?
#20This is the wrong question. A better question is "would 'tough times' affect you at all?" Never couple spending to income. That's a recipe for always feeling poor. Instead, find a baseline where you can live and make sure that it lies at such a tiny fraction of your normal income that you never need to think about thinks like "budgeting" or "saving". So if you're fresh out of school with your first $50k/year job, mak…
The problem with that argument is that not everyone is OK with living a bare minimum cost of living life style. Also rewarding yourself for earning more can give you motivation to progress further.
I recommend fixing your spending at a %-age of your post tax income at a maximum. For me it is 50%, but that is on the conservative side for most people. I don't always spend 50%, but that is the max. I feel it is a good compromise between preparing for the future and rewarding yourself in the present