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No, You can't retire rich at 30 if you sell your startup

tonywright.com

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Re: No, You can't retire rich at 30 if you sell your startup

#61

Post by vaksel »

jacquesm wrote: post #43
mechanical_fish wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got the dichotomy disease. There is no need to go to either extreme. You can belong to a country club and still live within your means. You can certainly drive a fast car and live within your means. Fast cars can be bought for well under $10k, especially in California where a fast car can last for thirty years and more without rusting. Most of the stuff on more expensive cars is just bling, or comfort features…

Anybody can buy a fast car, but few can actually afford to maintain it. A $10K fast car you buy might cost you a good bit of money per year to drive and keep in shape. Especially when it's thirty years old. That's mostly the reason it's only $10K to begin with (and the fact that the market for impractical cars is not too large).

well the car doesn't really need to be 30 years old.

sure if you buy some unreliable piece of crap...but there are plenty of fast cars that only require regular oil changes to keep in shape.

granted there are different definitions of fast, some people are fine with 14 second cars, others need 12s...and others don't consider anything fast that doesn't run 10s.

But overall, $10K is plenty to get yourself a reliable 6-7 year old car that's quick/fast.

Re: No, You can't retire rich at 30 if you sell your startup

#62

Post by Daniel_Newby »

jacquesm wrote: post #43
mechanical_fish wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've got the dichotomy disease. There is no need to go to either extreme. You can belong to a country club and still live within your means. You can certainly drive a fast car and live within your means. Fast cars can be bought for well under $10k, especially in California where a fast car can last for thirty years and more without rusting. Most of the stuff on more expensive cars is just bling, or comfort features…

Anybody can buy a fast car, but few can actually afford to maintain it. A $10K fast car you buy might cost you a good bit of money per year to drive and keep in shape. Especially when it's thirty years old. That's mostly the reason it's only $10K to begin with (and the fact that the market for impractical cars is not too large).

Fast, fun cars are emphatically middle class these days. The Subaru Impreza WRX is $25k new, for example. A millionaire who started collecting fast bargainmobiles would be killed by garaging and insurance, not maintenance.

Re: No, You can't retire rich at 30 if you sell your startup

#63

Post by gaius »

maxawaytoolong wrote: post #53
gaius wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years ago, at the first company I worked for that IPO'd, I think I was something like employee number 30. Employee number 1 was a good friend of mine, and after the event we and a few others decided "I'll show you mine if you show me yours". Jewel was big at the time, total honesty was all the rage. Now I had made "a bit" of money on my stock options, not an amount to be sniffed at, but far from a life-changing…

Yeah. I've worked at a company where I was middling employee 250 but had the same number of options as important employee 8 simply because I was bros with the founder. I think hackers think the non-technical side of the business is going to be merit based and "fair" but that's generally not the case in my experience.

The difference here was 5-figures for the technical types who'd been there for years vs 7-figures or more for business types who'd been there for months. If nothing else it was a real eye opener into how the world really worked. Not that I'd had any illusions that I was going to retire there and then, mind. But still.

I believe they were "bros" with the VCs rather than the founders, tho'. The founders didn't do too badly but today, they aren't retired either...

Re: No, You can't retire rich at 30 if you sell your startup

#64

Post by cageface »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #36
muhfuhkuh wrote: post #11

Can we conclude that this is the wistful daydream equivalent of the "Maserati Problem"[1]? I can definitely say that if 30 years we're looking at half a million dollars as a "cost of living adjustment", that world will for the people who don't make that kind of money be Thunderdome. I mean wages have barely kept up with inflation. In the last 40 years (between 1967 and 2007), median wages have only gone up US$10000 (…

How the hell are all of our parents going to fare when you need 500,000 to maintain an upper-middle class lifestyle? If the past 40 years are a guide to the future, then the lifestyle we currently define as "upper-middle class" will be redefined as "poverty" and will be available to virtually everyone, including people who can't even be bothered to find a job. People will continue to complain about the declining midd…

If the past is a guide to the future, then the lifestyle we currently define as "upper-middle class" will be redefined as "poverty" and will be available to virtually everyone, including people who can't even be bothered to find a job.

For many reasons I doubt that the last few hundred years are going to tell us much about the next hundred. So many critical trends are following exponential curves that can't continue on indefinitely.

Re: No, You can't retire rich at 30 if you sell your startup

#65

Post by jackowayed »

To play with the numbers yourself, File->Make a Copy.

My personal numbers: I upped cap gains to 30% since apparently that's coming. If I get a $4M check when I'm 20, I get $2.8M after taxes. At a $100k burn rate (leaving the investment yield and inflation at 5% and 3% respectively), I'm set 'til I'm 68.

I'm pretty happy with that. That gives me 48 years to angel invest, do another startup, marry someone who works and cuts my burn rate, etc.

Re: No, You can't retire rich at 30 if you sell your startup

#66

Post by pg »

There's little that's specific to startups here. What he's arguing is that being independently wealthy doesn't work the way one might naively think. But few things do work the way one might naively think.

Certainly his title is false though. Obviously it depends how much you clear.

Re: No, You can't retire rich at 30 if you sell your startup

#67

Post by yummyfajitas »

cageface wrote: post #64
yummyfajitas wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How the hell are all of our parents going to fare when you need 500,000 to maintain an upper-middle class lifestyle? If the past 40 years are a guide to the future, then the lifestyle we currently define as "upper-middle class" will be redefined as "poverty" and will be available to virtually everyone, including people who can't even be bothered to find a job. People will continue to complain about the declining midd…

If the past is a guide to the future, then the lifestyle we currently define as "upper-middle class" will be redefined as "poverty" and will be available to virtually everyone, including people who can't even be bothered to find a job. For many reasons I doubt that the last few hundred years are going to tell us much about the next hundred. So many critical trends are following exponential curves that can't continue…

I was only looking at the past 40 years, much like the original poster. My edit clarifies this point.

Re: No, You can't retire rich at 30 if you sell your startup

#69

Post by RK »

maxawaytoolong wrote: post #33
mechanical_fish wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like it's time to recommend The Millionaire Next Door : http://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Thomas-Stanley/d... Don't bother to buy it: Get it out of the library and skim it. It's not a difficult read and it belabors its own point a bit. My own summary: The secret to retaining a high net worth is the same as the secret to accumulating it: Control spending. Don't waste money. Most of the people you know…

The millionaire next door makes too much of a deal about stuff like clothing and cars. You have to control your bleed, sure. I've found that if you have half a brain and live somewhere with a lot of money flowing around like NYC you can buy fancy shirts, go out to dinner, AND save 6-10 grand a month, which is the best of all worlds. Millionaire next door is more for people running a landscaping business in the suburb…

Hmmm...

I hang around with two distinct groups of people a lot: grad student types with essentially no money and young professionals (doctors, lawyers, etc) with nice, solid salaries. From my experience, it's much easier to not spend money when I hang out with the first group, because they have no expectation of spending a lot of money. On the other hand, you'd feel out of place with the other group if you don't spend some higher base level for doing "normal" things like going out to eat, trip to Vegas, whatever.

I assume this scales if you are just the millionaire and you hang out with multimillionaires.

Re: No, You can't retire rich at 30 if you sell your startup

#70

Post by jshen »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #36
muhfuhkuh wrote: post #11

Can we conclude that this is the wistful daydream equivalent of the "Maserati Problem"[1]? I can definitely say that if 30 years we're looking at half a million dollars as a "cost of living adjustment", that world will for the people who don't make that kind of money be Thunderdome. I mean wages have barely kept up with inflation. In the last 40 years (between 1967 and 2007), median wages have only gone up US$10000 (…

How the hell are all of our parents going to fare when you need 500,000 to maintain an upper-middle class lifestyle? If the past 40 years are a guide to the future, then the lifestyle we currently define as "upper-middle class" will be redefined as "poverty" and will be available to virtually everyone, including people who can't even be bothered to find a job. People will continue to complain about the declining midd…

this is a libertarian fantasy and nothing more. Wages for most people have been stagnant or declining while energy prices are steadily rising. This is a huge problem
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