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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

#121

Post by yummyfajitas »

jshen wrote: post #116
yummyfajitas wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A quick google search finds many links suggesting house sizes have gone way up. This one says 1500ft^2 in 1973, 2500ft^2 in 2006. http://www.realtor.org/RMODaily.nsf/pages/News2007032701?Ope... In spite of the purported declining income and increasing energy prices, people in 2007 have more and better material goods and services than in 1967, far more than the mere $10k increase in real incomes would predict. You cou…

"I'll leave predicting the future to you and Ray Kurzweil." Except that you did try to predict the future earlier. Energy prices haven't risen much yet. You have an odd pattern of dodging my main point, and picking at tangential details. Btw, I put a caveat on the house thing, I live in a major city and I'm sure it's different in most parts of the country. I'll bet this changes when driving long distances to work bec…

I didn't try to predict the future - I explicitly qualified that everything I wrote applied only under certain circumstances: "If the past 40 years are a guide to the future..." You even quoted my qualification.

As for dodging your main point, let me address it more carefully now. You seem to believe that incomes (by which I assume you mean income adjusted for CPI) is decreasing. And yet, over a period in which CPI adjusted incomes remained flat, quality of life dramatically increased. So why do you believe that decreasing CPI-adjusted incomes are worth worrying about?

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

#122

Post by [deleted] »

jshen wrote: post #81
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?

I'm disputing the prediction that the future, if we remain on our current course, will be more of the same. Here's what you said, "If the past 40 years are a guide to the future". I'm disputing the idea that income inequality doesn't mean anything because the "poor" will have a higher standard of living that the middle class does today. Again, incomes are on the decline for most americans, and energy prices are risin…

[deleted]

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

#123

Post by nostrademons »

jshen wrote: post #112
pchristensen wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"most people I know live in smaller houses than their parents" But do they live in smaller houses than their parents lived when they were your friends' age?

yes, but I live in L.A. and I'm sure it's different in most parts of the country. I make way more money than my parents or grandparents, even when adjusted for inflation, but I live in a much smaller place than they did.

I'm curious - do you live in a way smaller space than your parents did when you grew up, or when they were your age?

When I compare my current living space with the house I grew up in, it's significantly smaller. However, my parents were over 40 years old by the time I have my first memories. They'd been saving for close to 20 years to afford that place, while I've been saving for maybe 5 years.

When my mom was my age, she lived in a 4th floor walk-up with one of her friends from college. And yes, it was smaller than my current apartment. If you compare my mom's childhood with my childhood, she lived in a small apartment almost her whole life, until about 3 years before I was born, while I grew up in a house in the suburbs.

I wonder if this is behind a lot of the 20-something angst. We compare our current living standards to our living standards as children, and realize (correctly) that it's not as good. However, that childhood living standard is based on parents that were already at the peak of their careers, and had scrimped for years to get there. Of course we're not going to live as well.

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

#124

Post by pchristensen »

jshen wrote: post #112
pchristensen wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"most people I know live in smaller houses than their parents" But do they live in smaller houses than their parents lived when they were your friends' age?

yes, but I live in L.A. and I'm sure it's different in most parts of the country. I make way more money than my parents or grandparents, even when adjusted for inflation, but I live in a much smaller place than they did.

Touche. In order to get an accurate comparison, you'd have to compare to someone your age living in a city as large and dense as LA at the time they were your age. That probably means NYC, London, or Tokyo for your parents or grandparents since there weren't many megacities 30 or 60 years ago.

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

#125

Post by kscaldef »

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…

> Your residence. A decent 2 bedroom place in a desirable part of San Francisco will run $3,000 per month in rent, a mortgage will be much higher. We're not talking anything extravagant here, just 600-900 sq ft.

As I said, "I'm also assuming that the first thing I would do is to pay off my mortgage, so what remains is basically entirely discretionary spending." Now, I've chosen not to live in one of those 3 or 4 ridiculously expensive cities. You might not consider spending $3K for > Kids. It doesn't even have to be private school we're talking about, but I imagine that clothing/feeding/entertaining more than one person adds up quickly.

You imagine, but I actually live it. Kids don't actually eat that much, and amuse themselves much more easily than people seem to give them credit for. Their clothing is fairly cheap, and since they usually grow out of things faster than they wear them out, you can pick up a lot of stuff even cheaper at second-hand shops.

I certainly enjoy travel, and it's a non-trivial portion of my discretionary spending. My point is not that you need to live live a pauper, just that you don't need as much money as you think to have an enjoyable life. There was a time in my life when I blew through twice what I spend today. And I use that phrase because I literally couldn't tell you how I did it. An attitude of "we've got money; might as well spend it" caused money to seemingly evaporate with nothing to show for it. I don't feel any less well off today. Honestly I feel better and richer knowing that I'm not spending every cent I make.

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

#126

Post by pchristensen »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #110
Deezul wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"what items did the middle class of 1970 have that the poor of 2001 lack?"

They're not items, but I'd say hope, stability, confidence, status, etc.

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

#127

Post by joe_the_user »

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…

Hmm,

Biking through Oakland the other night, I saw a guy pushing a shopping cart with one hand and talking on his cellphone with the other.

A good deal of your lifestyles of the no-longer-needed description might true except ... the 4000 sq ft house.

For the now-permanently-unemployed, it would be a 40 sq ft "home" or perhaps a car or suped-up shopping cart. But still with lots of gadgets.

Space (at the least) isn't going to be made cheaper by mass production even if everything else will.

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

#128

Post by nostrademons »

alister wrote: post #108
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 millionair…

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

Carlisle Cullen. ;-)

Anyway - this is a really good point, but I'll point out something else. Most of the wealthy would-be trillionaires whose fortunes got wiped out passed down another inheritance: their genes. Those same disasters that wipe out the savings of the rich tend to kill the poor, who simply can't afford transportation away from disaster areas, bribes for border guards and security forces, political connections to ensure safety for their children, or information savvy to know when a crisis is coming.

Most of today's middle class is descended from the kings and nobility of the high middle ages. The peasantry just mostly died out, leaving no descendants.

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

#129

Post by GFischer »

wyclif wrote: post #46
GFischer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a fan of Buenos Aires personally, but you can visit there for cheap :) . (I live in Montevideo, Uruguay which is quite close to Buenos Aires)

Why not BA? Curious why you say that.

If you're into Tango, or more bohemian, or from the US, you probably will like Buenos Aires.

But I see it much like I expect Canadians see the US: something like my home city (Montevideo), with both the good and (especially) the bad things magnified.

There are beautiful parts of Buenos Aires (I recommend Recoleta and Palermo), and lively parts of Buenos Aires (not my speciality :) ), and they're both nice.

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

#130

Post by kscaldef »

brianobush wrote: post #80
kscaldef wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe I do have a child and have figured out that you don't actually have to send them to private school, pay for their college (my parents didn't for me), buy them a new car for their 16th birthday, etc.

Kids are expensive w/o doing all that rich kid stuff. With three kids I have Tae Kwon Do, Abacus, piano, Kumon and they go to public schools. Add on school supplies, clothing, shoes, good will bikes, etc and it gets expensive fast w/o even looking expensive.

For my daughter, I spend about $100/mo on extracurricular activites, $25/mo (averaged over the year) on clothes, $50 once a year on school supplies, a $100 bike will last her for a couple years.

Yeah, how do those plebes manage to raise kids with their pathetic 5-figure salaries...

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