No, You can't retire rich at 30 if you sell your startup • Hacker News Board

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

#141

Post by nostrademons » Mon, Aug 23, 2010, 10:45 PM UTC

cynicalkane wrote: post #132

nostrademons wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

My Google-fu is failing me at the moment. It was from an absolutely fascinating article that suggested that the middle-class arose because of downward social mobility in post-Plague Europe. With the serfs mostly killed off by Black Death, the 3rds and 4th sons of the nobility typically couldn't support a feudal household, and so they had to take jobs as merchants or artisans in the emerging market economies. Along the way, they brought with them some of the values of the nobility (most notably, not having kids until they could support the lifestyle they were accustomed to as children), which allowed Europe to escape the Malthusian trap of the Dark Ages.

IIRC, the genealogical records (of most present-day Europeans and Americans being descended from the nobility) was presented as fact, but the causal link with the rise of the middle class was more tenuous.

I'll look again after I've gotten some actual work for $realjob done.

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

#142

Post by joe_the_user » Mon, Aug 23, 2010, 10:50 PM UTC

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…

Exponential curves indeed can't continue indefinitely.

At the same, most of the reasoning about the future by even intelligent people still tends to involve linear extrapolation rather than exponential extrapolation - that's what makes sense to us. Thus it's more likely for a standard prediction is go wrong in the direction of the exponential trends continuing rather than in the direction of the trends stopping.

Moreover, one or another exponential trends might stop but the overall mine that Moore's Law comes out of, miniaturization, is not going to be exhausted at least until human construction reaches the nano scale.

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

#143

Post by nl » Mon, Aug 23, 2010, 10:52 PM UTC

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.

That's simply untrue. For example, the majority of people of European decent in the US, Canada & Australia are from the "peasantry" classes (ok, by the time mass emigration was happing the "peasantry" class had mostly migrated to the factory cities in Europe, but they were still the poor people).

In Australia's case the early white population was mostly prisoners who were almost entirely poor, unprivileged and most certainly not nobility.

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

#144

Post by michaelkeenan » Mon, Aug 23, 2010, 11:00 PM UTC

jshen wrote: post #70

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…

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

> Wages for most people have been stagnant or declining

Wage growth has been slower than you'd expect because healthcare is getting much more expensive, so the increase is hidden in a worker's benefits, rather than being revealed in higher wages. Overall compensation is increasing: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/10...

Unfortunately, most workers don't realize that their healthcare costs have a zero-sum relationship to their wages. This graph shows that point very well: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/10/will_low...)

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

#145

Post by revorad » Mon, Aug 23, 2010, 11:03 PM UTC

GFischer wrote: post #28

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 live on U$ 12,000 a year* in a Latin American country (Uruguay), but it isn't a good enough amount to retire on. U$ 30,000 is doable, but not millionaire-ish. You could live quite comfortably and with housemaids and eating out often, but forget about a (good) car or high-end electronic toys (unless you bring them with you from abroad). There are some nice places to retire, but I'm not sure if you wouldn't find it b…

wow you pay 50% taxes on $24k in Uruguay?

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

#146

Post by blacksmythe » Mon, Aug 23, 2010, 11:04 PM UTC

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

This ignores that people born to wealth do not have the same sense of frugality of the people who build the wealth.

""From shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.": moneycentral.msn.com/content/retirementandwills/planyourestate/p147046.asp

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

#147

Post by cageface » Mon, Aug 23, 2010, 11:08 PM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #142

cageface wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Exponential curves indeed can't continue indefinitely. At the same, most of the reasoning about the future by even intelligent people still tends to involve linear extrapolation rather than exponential extrapolation - that's what makes sense to us. Thus it's more likely for a standard prediction is go wrong in the direction of the exponential trends continuing rather than in the direction of the trends stopping. More…

That's exactly why I think trying to predict what the world is going to be like in 40 years is just about impossible. The only thing you can say with much confidence is that it's likely to be very different from the way it is today.

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

#148

Post by brianobush » Mon, Aug 23, 2010, 11:09 PM UTC

kscaldef wrote: post #130

brianobush wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Well, I wasn't saying it was impossible, just expensive. Also, I don't know where you live, but one child's extracurricular activities for me is ~400 (100 piano+100 TKD+100 kumon+100 math) and during the summer it is higher since they have camps to attend (since there are no crops to harvest). Once your daughter gets older, I guarantee your clothing costs will increase.

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

#149

Post by patio11 » Mon, Aug 23, 2010, 11:09 PM UTC

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.

30k is the prefectural median income for a household w/o dependents. I assure you, this is survivable in Gifu.

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

#150

Post by olalonde » Mon, Aug 23, 2010, 11:12 PM UTC

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.

Doing the same in Shenzhen, China.

In my opinion, with a 25,000$ salary here, you can live more comfortably than you can in the US on a 50,000+$ salary. For instance, at 500$/month, you can get a spacious 2br apartment that comes with a nice inner courtyard, tennis courts and a swimming pool. You can go to nice restaurants for under 6$ and take the taxi for ridiculously cheap (less than 5$ for a 15 minutes ride).

And don't worry about getting bored. There are tons of bars, amusement parks, movie theaters, not to mention that most commerces close very late (11pm+). And if you're not into Asian girls, a lot of female foreigners are models from Russia/Eastern Europe that haven't seen westerners in a long time. :)