maybe it safer strategy not to think of retirement at all and try to find what really motivates/fulfills you. If you get good at it whatever it is, there will always be a way to make money with it.
Rethinking 'Fuck You' money
31–40 of 172 posts
Re: Rethinking 'Fuck You' money
#32What about dividend paying stocks? Good companies are usually very reluctant to cut dividends even in bad times and with stock prices suppressed, this should lead to higher dividend yields. Probably not a total solution but should be looked at.
Dividends fell by about 30% in the recession:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=SPY&a=00&b=29&c=...
But yeah, I do think that would be the generally best bet with $5 million. I would most of it in a dividend paying ETF or mutual fund, like DVY or Vanguard Utilties. These funs will pay 4% in dividends, plus, the dividend payout will generally rise at nearly the same rate as income inflation. That's a much, much better deal than CD's which pay 2% a year with no inflation increase.
Re: Rethinking 'Fuck You' money
#33I think after you get fuck you money, your goal should be to create a lifestyle business. Something that can more or less run on autopilot and generate money for you to live on. If you are a web guy, you can create some software product(or pay someone to build one for you). Then charge $50 a month...and you only need to make 6 sales a day(via adwords) to make $100K/yr. If you are not...you can buy a franchise...i.e.…
And you as an owner don't need to do anything...just hire a good manager...and it'll more or less run on autopilot(from your perspective)
This is probably true for many fast-food franchises but not McDonald's. Franchise owners a called "Owner/Operators" they are expected to work in their restaurants. McDonald's does not sell franchises to "Owner/Investors".
As an Owner/Operator you will go through "Hamburger University" in Oak Brook and learn how to make every product the restaurant sells. You will learn how to project sales, schedule employees and order product. You will learn how to manage labor and food cost, and how to manage your management team. You will spend some time working ordinary crew jobs and shift manager jobs at a restaurant.
Then, once you get your restaurant, you will have to be an active "chief executive" of the management team. You will have to recruit and hire trustworthy store managers... they are the ones who will be running your restaurant day to day and if they are not good at it you will not make any money or worse they will be stealing from you.
It is definitely NOT a passive investment.
Re: Rethinking 'Fuck You' money
#34What about dividend paying stocks? Good companies are usually very reluctant to cut dividends even in bad times and with stock prices suppressed, this should lead to higher dividend yields. Probably not a total solution but should be looked at.
In theory, shouldn't all stocks be dividend paying? If your stock doesn't pay dividends, what makes it any different from baseball cards as an investment?
In theory yes, that's essentially the dividend discount model of stock value.
Re: Rethinking 'Fuck You' money
#35Re: Rethinking 'Fuck You' money
#36A very easy solution to this: Go live in a cheaper country. Go now, before the heavily debted countries lock down money transfers (In which case, buy gold/silver)
Off-topic but don't you think that the owners of that debt have a slightly vested interest in avoiding complete collapse/keeping the system going, even if it is barely functional to get some of their ongoing interest payments? Or will the environment rapidly devolve to: http://ferfal.blogspot.com/
I agree, but just like a bubble crash, when one major party loses confidence and sells his stake, all the other parties panic and sells as well.
Re: Rethinking 'Fuck You' money
#37Re: Rethinking 'Fuck You' money
#38Re: Rethinking 'Fuck You' money
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lol. I'd upload my passport but that's silly. Europe is not exactly cheap.
Europe includes such countries as Iceland, Ukraine and Romania
Meta: I say something else. You retort something unrelated to your absurd initial declaration about the soon to disappear money order (I assume that wire transfers will have to go to).
This level: I'm done.
Re: Rethinking 'Fuck You' money
#408% ROI is unrealistic, but a 2-4% is certainly possible especially with municipal bonds and insurance annuities. The former are also exempt from federal taxes, state taxes (if you live in the same state) and even local taxes (if you live in the same city). Both have guarantees against inflation (at the cost of lower yield) .
Nonetheless, I do think the is somewhat overrated. If I had fuck you money, I'd... write code, read books and papers. I'd have more freedom on how I write my code during working hours (and it's important not to understate importance of that, but the more senior you get, the more choice you have in what you work on what tools you use), but I'd also not have the focus that comes from working on systems that solve actual problems that individuals and organizations have; nor would I be solving these problems at scale that makes them much more interesting.
On the other hand, I'm pretty confident that if I were to spend my time chasing a big payoff I'd be working on problems that are far less interesting and more frustrating (which is almost axiomatically why these problems have the payoff). There's very few early-stage startups doing systems programming (and I'm speaking loosely here i.e., beyond just operating system kernels and file systems). For web companies systems programming only becomes needed as a scalability becomes a problem (in most cases it never does). The idea that may be I'll be able to go back to doing what I enjoy most of the time if the business succeeds won't be enough to drive me: I already do that (perhaps that's why so few "home run" startups have come out of Google?)
Keep in mind that while stock options after product/market fit (pre-IPO startups, public companies) account for only a tiny percentage, the chance of a payoff is much higher (which, again, is why it's a tiny percentage: you're no longer taking a risk). That payoff is certainly no fuck you money (except in rare cases e.g., Google in early 2000s), but it's often sufficient in terms of giving you more freedom e.g., to go back to school for a Ph.D.
Were I to have a vision for a business (rather than a science project, which most of my ideas have been) based upon interesting technology (i.e., not a website) I'd certainly consider pursuing it, but even then I'd have no illusions: I suspect, I'd spend more of my time doing what I don't like (general business operations) than what I do (coding); it would be the vision of bringing forth new technologies that solves real problems that would let me pull through that (as opposed to pure research or solving business problems with well known existing technologies) .