Go to law/medical/dental school and in about 10 years open your own practice. Anything else is a lottery and you should be playing for the fun of it, not to make money.
Ask HN: How do I turn 100K into 1 million?
21–30 of 138 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do I turn 100K into 1 million?
#22Go to law/medical/dental school and in about 10 years open your own practice. Anything else is a lottery and you should be playing for the fun of it, not to make money.
And school isn't a lotto? You know many happily employed recent law school grads these days? Or many young doctors who are confident they'll retire rich?
Re: Ask HN: How do I turn 100K into 1 million?
#23Buy stock in SecondMarket for companies that are likely to IPO: LinkedIn, Zynga, etc
Re: Ask HN: How do I turn 100K into 1 million?
#24Timescales: How long do you have to turn your 100k into 1mm? (I'm assuming here we're not considering inflation. ) If you need it in 10 years, you're going to need an annualized 25% or so rate of return. That's unlikely. If you need it in 25 years, you can get by with 10%. That's definitely possible, if you follow good principles. On the other hand, if you can put in an extra 50k a year, You should have close to $1mm…
Thanks! I don't hate people, I just get tired of lots of people around me and need the solitude of my office.
My timeline is 10 years or less and I could, likely, add 50K a year.
I don't have a penchant for gambling, I traded twice in ... ugh... 15 years or so. I stopped because I figured I didn't know enough and wasn't capitalized well.
Real estate is great long-term. There are some awesome deals to be had in Tenerife as a lot of people are giving up their speculatively bought houses. You can buy a 1-bedroom apartment in a well-travelled tourist area near the beach. This will cost less than 100K in foreclosure.
Buying one apartment a year and renting it out to tourists is a great option, so long as the market has hit bottom, more or less. I don't think the Spanish real estate market has hit bottom, though.
Re: Ask HN: How do I turn 100K into 1 million?
#25I'd agree with your friend. You obviously have some skills, or you wouldn't have been able to earn the 100K. So, given the recent windfall, there ought to be a way to use the 100K to magnify your income. What's the bottleneck in your regular business? What is it that is keeping you from having a blockbuster year each year? Or, even better, having a double-the-blockbuster year? Once you've identified the constraint, t…
The bottleneck is that I sell a service and I can only offer so much of it. Also, my base rate is 100 EUR/hr, about $125, although I always quote a fixed price. I found a niche in writing Mac device drivers for a big company this year. I had to buy a hardware USB analyzer and IDA Pro to reverse-engineer a good chunk of LabVIEW so I was able to charge a good price for that project. I could raise my base rate and charg…
There's a trick a lot of contractors/consultants use if they work in the same industry for a while. They create a "platform" (which honestly is just a few libraries of code), and then charge clients more to use their "platform" (which comes with nice-looking sales materials). You still do the same amount of programming, and charge the same for that, but charge extra for use of the "platform".
You sell the client on the fact that they'll save heaps of money using your platform because a lot of code is already written. This isn't actually true, code re-use doesn't save that much money, but it sounds good and they tend to buy it. I've seen it happen over the years again and again and again.
It's a bit tricky but loads of people do it. It used to be cms platforms, now it's social networking platforms or mobile app platforms. Same trick.
It's a little dirty though but one of the only ways to actually "scale" consulting. The other way is to have high-powered sales people, and hire superjunior beginner who do all the work. I think that's even dirtier.
Re: Ask HN: How do I turn 100K into 1 million?
#26Timescales: How long do you have to turn your 100k into 1mm? (I'm assuming here we're not considering inflation. ) If you need it in 10 years, you're going to need an annualized 25% or so rate of return. That's unlikely. If you need it in 25 years, you can get by with 10%. That's definitely possible, if you follow good principles. On the other hand, if you can put in an extra 50k a year, You should have close to $1mm…
p.s. Flipping real estate -- eventually, you're going to want income. Transaction costs for real estate are high, man. I guess my major advice is "Slow down. Value stability and income. Keep socking away the money, and invest it in areas unlinked to your primary earning potential (programming)."
Buying to rent should result in income uncorrelated to programing.
Re: Ask HN: How do I turn 100K into 1 million?
#27Ahoy! Sailing is great, I've got a personal goal to do the SHTP in 2014. You have a terrible investment track record and a good programming track record. Go with your strength. Since you have a short attention span, you should focus on short projects that you can ship quickly. Bring maritime weather / charts to the iphone, I'd buy that :-)
Some of that already exists, check out the App Store. I'm thinking an iPad would make a decent chart plotter, though :-). Now, if I could only find a weather-proof enclosure!
I have TideApp, but I haven't seen anything like weatherfax on the iphone :-)
You're right that chart plotter on the ipad would be pretty tops. As waterproofing.. you'd have to use a material that lets the capacitance of your finger through.
Re: Ask HN: How do I turn 100K into 1 million?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bottleneck is that I sell a service and I can only offer so much of it. Also, my base rate is 100 EUR/hr, about $125, although I always quote a fixed price. I found a niche in writing Mac device drivers for a big company this year. I had to buy a hardware USB analyzer and IDA Pro to reverse-engineer a good chunk of LabVIEW so I was able to charge a good price for that project. I could raise my base rate and charg…
There's a trick a lot of contractors/consultants use if they work in the same industry for a while. They create a "platform" (which honestly is just a few libraries of code), and then charge clients more to use their "platform" (which comes with nice-looking sales materials). You still do the same amount of programming, and charge the same for that, but charge extra for use of the "platform". You sell the client on t…
I don't think it needs to be dirty. I think a "platform" is a good idea.
Re: Ask HN: How do I turn 100K into 1 million?
#29Why do you want a million euro? Are you going to spend one million euro on something?
I bet the answer is that you aren't going to spend $1M on anything. You intend to put the $1M in some very safe investment and live off the interest, correct?
So you don't really need $1M, what you need is $100K per year passive income. It's the same thing.
If you look at your problem that way, things seem more doable. Instead of spending 10 years making $1M, you can spend the same 10 years growing your passive income from $1K to $10K to $100K.
As somebody who has made a lot of money in real estate and in stocks ... and who has also lost much of it, I believe a business is a better investment for you than stocks or real estate. A business is a machine that produces money. Making your money in stocks or real estate is like hunting. Every time you go hunting, you may be lucky, but you may be unlucky. It's not conducive to a stress free state of mind.
Since your current business can't ever be passive, you'll need to start a new one that can be. Your sailboat electronics passion seems like a good one. Electronic products can be passive income and sailboat owners have money.
Good luck.
Re: Ask HN: How do I turn 100K into 1 million?
#30Learn to play poker and enter the world series, which is getting under way in a week. Analytical minds do well in poker, especially since most poker players are degenerate gamblers.
This is a true statement, but don't enter the world series unless you are already a top notch player. Just play in the 150$ nightly tournaments on pokerstars and you could expect a 120-150% ROI as a solid player.