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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

#101

Post by dstein »

thailandstartup wrote: post #72
wallflower wrote: post #6

I think I could get by on $30,000 a year and working on my own ISV in a nice Latin American country. Is anyone doing that here?

About $35000 here in Thailand gives me a lifestyle that I think of as lavish and decadent, but I guess the OP would consider frugal and cautious. 120sqm condo beside the sea, eat out every night, tennis and language lessons. I could probably cut the budget down to around $20000 in a pinch and still live comfortably. The major downside is that there aren't many hackers about.

May I ask how you received a visa to stay there? I looked into Thailand but axed the idea when I could only get a 30-day visitor visa.

Whereas Costa Rica lets you stay for 3 months before you need to cross the border to extend your visitor visa. And apparently obtaining a permanent residency isn't difficult if you can prove income from foreign sources.

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

#102

Post by petercooper »

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 (…

Whoa, that 40->50k over 40 years stat seemed ridiculous to me so I looked it up and you're right. This strikes me as bizarre because in the UK, both prices and wages have blown through the roof over the same period. I wonder what the deal is here (though the USD-GBP rate was significantly different decades ago).

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

#103

Post by steveklabnik »

rick888 wrote: post #97
jacquesm wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case anybody wonders if that's for real, yes, Patrick has made all his expenses/profits/turnover figures public.

he has. He makes ~$30,000/year (before taxes). Not only is this not "rich", most people couldn't survive on it. It's even worse if you have a family.

The person I was replying to said

> I think I could get by on $30,000 a year

Also, most people couldn't survive? Seriously? I live on two thirds of this, and I'm putting money in the bank every month.

It is worse if you have a family, but then you have two incomes to play with.

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

#104

Post by itsalive »

thailandstartup wrote: post #72
wallflower wrote: post #6

I think I could get by on $30,000 a year and working on my own ISV in a nice Latin American country. Is anyone doing that here?

About $35000 here in Thailand gives me a lifestyle that I think of as lavish and decadent, but I guess the OP would consider frugal and cautious. 120sqm condo beside the sea, eat out every night, tennis and language lessons. I could probably cut the budget down to around $20000 in a pinch and still live comfortably. The major downside is that there aren't many hackers about.

how much does the condo rent cost you?

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

#105

Post by illumin8 »

The main problem with the premise of this article is that someone with $4 million is just going to stick it in a money market fund and live off of the pitiful interest. The interest rate in a money market fund is below inflation, so of course your money is going to dwindle.

If you took the same $4 million and invested it wisely, in something like the Permanent Portfolio, which has averaged 9.3% annual returns over the last 40 years and avoids all market timing, you'd probably be fine for the rest of your life.

http://crawlingroad.com/blog/2008/12/22/permanent-portfolio-...

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

#106

Post by jacquesm »

steveklabnik wrote: post #103
rick888 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he has. He makes ~$30,000/year (before taxes). Not only is this not "rich", most people couldn't survive on it. It's even worse if you have a family.

The person I was replying to said > I think I could get by on $30,000 a year Also, most people couldn't survive? Seriously? I live on two thirds of this, and I'm putting money in the bank every month. It is worse if you have a family, but then you have two incomes to play with.

> It is worse if you have a family, but then you have two incomes to play with.

Unless of course you have one or more young children in the house, in which case a good bit of time that you could spend on work goes towards taking care of the kids. Effectively that works out to about one full timer.

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

#107

Post by thailandstartup »

dstein wrote: post #101
thailandstartup wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About $35000 here in Thailand gives me a lifestyle that I think of as lavish and decadent, but I guess the OP would consider frugal and cautious. 120sqm condo beside the sea, eat out every night, tennis and language lessons. I could probably cut the budget down to around $20000 in a pinch and still live comfortably. The major downside is that there aren't many hackers about.

May I ask how you received a visa to stay there? I looked into Thailand but axed the idea when I could only get a 30-day visitor visa. Whereas Costa Rica lets you stay for 3 months before you need to cross the border to extend your visitor visa. And apparently obtaining a permanent residency isn't difficult if you can prove income from foreign sources.

Thailand has an education visa program - you need to be learning something for a minimum of 4 hours/week to qualify. Technically, it can be pretty much anything, but languages are popular. People do the visa run thing too - every sixty days I think.

Costa Rica sounds like a good destination - I may check that out one day.

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

#108

Post by alister »

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 (…

Can we conclude that this is the wistful daydream equivalent of the "Maserati Problem"

I'll go out on a limb and say that even normal retirement planning (50 years into the future) is a Maserati Problem.

Everybody that makes very long-term projections about money -- whether it's the gloomy "interest on $4m won't last 40 years" variety to the rosy "save $300 a month and the compound interest will make you a millionaire in 50 years" -- commits the same error: They neglect the fact that wars, revolutions, devaluations, confiscations, and other economic disasters have wiped out all savings at frequent points throughout history.

There should be some trillionaires walking around whose ancestors started saving in the Renaissance when modern banking began -- but there aren't.

So if you're talking time scales of 50 years, there is significant probability that your carefully calculated spending or savings plan is self deceit.

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

#109

Post by wallflower »

drusenko wrote: post #98
kscaldef wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was more of a rhetorical device. It's not that I can't imagine how to blow through tens of thousands of dollars a month. It's that that lifestyle just isn't appealing to me.

Spending 10's of thousands a month is getting up there, but "blowing through" more than $4k per month isn't necessarily an extravagant lifestyle. My guess would be that you don't live an as expensive a metro area as the author is basing his calculations on. In a place like San Francisco, a few non-frivolous expenses can add up quickly: - Your residence. A decent 2 bedroom place in a desirable part of San Francisco wi…

Exactly!

Tom Wolfe's "Bonfire of the Vanities" (Going broke on a million a year), p.137 "One breath of scandal, and not only would the Giscard scheme collapse but his very career would be finished! And what would he do then? I’m already going broke on a million a year! The appalling figures came popping up into his brain. Last year his income had been $980,000. But he had to pay out $21,000 a month for the $1.8 million loan he had to take out to buy the apartment... Of the $560,000 remaining of his income last year, $44,400 was required for the apartment’s monthly maintenance fee… $18,000 for heat, utilities, insurance and repairs, $6,000 for lawn and hedge cutting, $8,000 for taxes. Entertaining at home and in restaurants had come to $37,000. This was a modest sum compared to what other people spent."

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

#110

Post by yummyfajitas »

Deezul wrote: post #92
yummyfajitas wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please tell me which point I'm wrong on. Do most people not live in larger houses, enjoy greater automation of housework, enjoy larger and better entertainment technologies, and benefit from medical procedures which did not exist in 1967?

There is a big difference between that and going from poverty to upper middle class. By your logic those stuck in poverty in 1967 will now have graduated to upper middle class by 2010. Even if that is how you define middle class I don't see very great strides. I rent because the housing market is a mess ( http://seekingalpha.com/article/115464-new-home-prices-vs-me... ), I wash dishes by hand and don't care for an iR…

No, by my logic those living in poverty in 2010 will be living a life that the 1970's would describe as middle class.

Fun fact: the bottom 11% in 1970 didn't have flush toilets.

http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cf...

In 2001, the bottom 7-8% don't have dishwashers, which were generally considered a luxury item in the 1970's. Go read this article, describing the material conditions of the poor (circa 2001):

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2004/01/understandi...

Tell me, what items did the middle class of 1970 have that the poor of 2001 lack?

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