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I've seen the same attitude a lot of times. "I was an investment banker for 10 years but then I moved to Colorado and became a ski bum and I couldn't be happier!" Like alright man live your life but stop acting like you discovered some dark secret that anyone can reproduce. You know you ain't out here paying student loans.
100% - all my arty, bohemian friends have trust funds.
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Author here. I got a big bump from $230K to $396K in 2016 when I got a competing offer and Amazon matched it so that I wouldn't leave. From then on, the growth from $400K to $500K happened because the AMZN stock nearly tripled in that time frame.
Well, this just illustrated why a company shouldn't play the matching game. What did Amazon get for matching the offer? They got to keep you for a couple more years at a premium. I'm sure you did some good things in those two years, but the accounting side would probably have a difficult time assessing the real value of those two years.
> When I first hit $100K income, I would take a peek at my W2 for a few days admiring the six digits, but then it wore off. When I hit $200K, $300K, $400K, and $500K, it was the same thing. I would be delusional to think that earning $1M, or $10M would suddenly make it different. >What is out there that I could do that would make me excited waking up every day for the next 45 years that could also earn me enough mone…
I get that everyone's priorities are different, but I'm always amazed that ultra high income earners don't do this (this being live well below means, invest the rest in index funds then go work on passion projects, hobbies, focus on family). Lifestyle inflation and projecting status is a pricey hedonistic treadmill that is ultimately unrewarding.
The problem there is you’re just responding to whims, and everything will start to feel the same.
I’m going all in on independence, and I’m going to try to make a living with my own bare hands starting from nothing. 500k/year in your last year is "nothing", huh? It really undercuts the entire thrust of the post, because you're starting with a nice big war chest and a hell of a safety net, not "nothing".
Capital helps. It won't make you profitable though.
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You don't need income with $1M. If you chuck that into an index tracker you can safely withdraw $40k a year...
Someone used to spending ~500k a year is not going to want the quality of life change of moving to 40k a year income. Their family would also not appreciate it.
Since OP has a million saved I’m going to assume they had a similar plan in place. But. $150k a year with young kids (they haven’t begun to get expensive yet) in Seattle is pretty high. Getting that down is a good deal of effort that will distract from running the business.
It's interesting timing to quit now. If you have 45 years to work, why not work a few more years to have a much longer runway?
Safe withdrawal rate now is $40k...if you did 3 more years to and saved $2 mill, that's a double of your safe withdrawal rate to $80k. You're doing 40 hours a week on a good team...
Also I saw you put your health insurance is $1.2k per month...Amazon's health insurance../sucks?
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Those two things are not equivalent to me. Yes I have savings, but I also have no income right now.
You are correct! But the way you phrased it makes it sound like you are experiencing a hardship, which I think most would disagree with. Don't get me wrong, I think you should be proud, you clearly did a lot to earn your savings, but you're trying to make it sound like retiring young with $1M in liquid assets part is the difficult part when its probably the easy part. You don't have to work for a very long time, or a…
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$1m is not enough for most people in the US to never work again, unless they are quite frugal. It's barely enough to retire with.
What bubble/ivory tower part of the country are you in? $1m is enough. Especially with a paid-off mortgage. Most people get by for way, way less than that.
I've heard of Amazon paying between $200 and $300K for software engineers, but this is the first time I've heard of them paying $500K! Goodness, I don't have any work/life balance now, so it really makes me wonder if I shouldn't start applying at Amazon.
Amazon has very few L7+ SDEs (~1% of SDEs). So when you read that salary, you have to remember the author is relatively rare even within Amazon.