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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

#131

Post by vaksel »

huherto wrote: post #89
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?

I believe you can. Some rough estimates: - 3 room house on nice neighborhood $150,000 USD - A 2010 Toyota corolla. $15,000 USD. - A maid visiting twice a week. $1,700 USD a year. (This is really nice!) - Private school for kids $3,000 USD a year for each kid. - Dinner for two twice a week. $3,100 USD a year. Edit:fixed number formatting

$3,000 USD per year for a kid? That seems low. I think the private middle school by my house costs something like $12K a year.

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

#132

Post by cynicalkane »

nostrademons wrote: post #128
alister wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Source?

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

#133

Post by jshen »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #121
jshen wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

" why do you believe that decreasing CPI-adjusted incomes are worth worrying about?"

I've said it at least three times already. Because it is highly probable that energy prices are going to increase significantly.

Btw, how do you measure quality of life. I always find it funny when people throw around that term relating to economics.

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

#134

Post by tocomment »

jerf wrote: post #50
StavrosK wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you'll either be a poor-ish young playboy or a rich old guy? Why does the first option sound more attractive? Of course, fast cars and country clubs are all superficial, but being a miser just so you can die with millions isn't that much better...

"Living frugally" isn't what it used to be in the pain department. I have a Netflix subscription for one DVD and unlimited streaming instead of a $70 cable subscription (or an expensive antenna for my area), and while I made this choice to be "frugal" in the end I've actually been happier than I was with the cable. Do you need a smartphone with unlimited Internet? I can't speak for you, but I'm almost always within r…

Any tips on finding a reliable, inexpensive car?

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

#135

Post by jshen »

pchristensen wrote: post #124
jshen wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your trying to make the population density a constant, my point is that it isn't a constant, but will likely increase going forward.

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

#136

Post by fragmede »

joe_the_user wrote: post #127
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…

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…

Any city that's learned to grow vertically would disagree with you. If you thought real-estate was expensive in New York now....

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

#137

Post by neild »

kscaldef wrote: post #25
jdc wrote: post #2

...where retiring rich is defined as spending $300,000 annually. I'd personally move somewhere cheaper once my income no longer depended on my location.

Yeah, I'm not getting where that number comes from. (And I love the suggestion that it's merely "upper middle class".) Personally, I can live a pretty nice lifestyle on "only" a couple thousand in disposable income a month. I really can't imagine what I would do with $20-25,000 / month to spend. With that in mind, I tried a few numbers in the spreadsheet. Just to be more "realistic" I dropped the payday back down to…

So, I'm going to say that, yes, I really could retire and not work again with a $5-10M payout.

I calculated some time ago that ~$4M would be enough for me to never think about money again. I could do anything that I wanted to do for the rest of my life. A key point, of course, is that I could do anything that I wanted to do--I don't want a Maserati or my own private jet or any of the other customary extravagances of the idle rich.

I'd say that most people who couldn't retire on $4M would not be able to retire on ten times that amount--you could give them $1M a year and they'd find a way to squander it. It's amazingly easy to spend money if you have expensive tastes.

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

#138

Post by aswanson »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #99
jshen wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

There was a ridiculous downgrade in credit quality to facilitate that build out of McMansions over the last 10 years . A better analysis of how much real income and how much purchasing power per sq foot of home would have to take in credit quality/debt into account over time to be anywhere near informative. Secondly, increasing energy prices are not purported, they are real: http://www.eia.doe.gov/EMEU/steo/realprices/index.cfm

Real income analysis would require more time than I'm willing to commit right now.

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

#140

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…

Sorry, one more note:

> 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

I don't believe I ever said it was. In fact, I called $4K/mo a "restrained budget". Meaning I would need to pay attention to my spending and not indulge in all the discretionary activities I might like.

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