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Why I quit a $500K job at Amazon to work for myself

danielvassallo.com

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Re: Why I quit a $500K job at Amazon to work for myself

#171

Post by burger_moon »

Someone1234 wrote: post #35
Dayshine wrote: post #6

> 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…

> you'd have $275k net. If you remove generous expenses, you have $200k a year in savings. In Seattle Washington? You'd have an extremely hard time making ends meet on $75K, it certainly isn't "generous." For example median home value in Seattle is $725K.

I live in Seattle, none of my friends work in tech, none of them make anywhere near 75k, try cutting that number in half. They aren't living in condos in cap hill with the other high earning tech folks but believe it or not they aren't struggling to eat at night either and live comfortable fulfilling lives.

Re: Why I quit a $500K job at Amazon to work for myself

#172

Post by hinkley »

duxup wrote: post #142
hinkley wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m about to downshift myself. I have no illusions how much lower my cost of living will be due to selling my big city house and needing a comparatively tiny loan for the next one. I’m reminded regularly about a line from the Dalai Lama. When we are young we sell our health for money and when we are old we will pay anything to get it back. My original life plan was to do this maybe 8-10 years earlier. But the startup…

Yeah I think that quote is a lot more apt than some of the descriptions we see otherwise. I'd like to do it, maybe try my hand at woodworking.

One thing I left out that your other comment brought to mind is that I don't think the lifestyle bloggers are accomplishing anything. I do feel we're shorting ourselves by hyperfocusing on a narrow field, since innovation is quite frequently the art of applying knowledge from other domains. But I don't say it often because I've seen that proselytizing about taking a breath and engaging with your surroundings just makes people double down. It's a thing I think you have to feel to understand and lecturing people about it works against your aims.

I come at it sideways by trying to encourage people to have more hobbies or at least see the sights/local events.

Re: Why I quit a $500K job at Amazon to work for myself

#173

Post by DVassallo »

smileysteve wrote: post #170
hinkley wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$20k a year in interest after taxes if he’s not a complete moron. I could survive on around $45k a year (including health insurance) so I could putter for a long time before I had to deliver something. But domain knowledge and contacts will probably be the biggest assets OP turns out to possess. Don’t undersell those.

~$100k/year if returns are based on 10%. Aka, what some people use for expected S&P returns to beat

I have 80%+ in short term US treasuries and CDs (the rest in some stocks that I've held for a long time). I have no interest in the upside of the stock market right now. I'm already doing something speculative myself.

Re: Why I quit a $500K job at Amazon to work for myself

#174

Post by hinkley »

smileysteve wrote: post #170
hinkley wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$20k a year in interest after taxes if he’s not a complete moron. I could survive on around $45k a year (including health insurance) so I could putter for a long time before I had to deliver something. But domain knowledge and contacts will probably be the biggest assets OP turns out to possess. Don’t undersell those.

~$100k/year if returns are based on 10%. Aka, what some people use for expected S&P returns to beat

If you're working out a budget to allow you to quit your day job you'd better have all of the numbers in post-tax dollars or you're gonna have a bad time.

Re: Why I quit a $500K job at Amazon to work for myself

#175

Post by spyspy »

smileysteve wrote: post #170
hinkley wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$20k a year in interest after taxes if he’s not a complete moron. I could survive on around $45k a year (including health insurance) so I could putter for a long time before I had to deliver something. But domain knowledge and contacts will probably be the biggest assets OP turns out to possess. Don’t undersell those.

~$100k/year if returns are based on 10%. Aka, what some people use for expected S&P returns to beat

That's mostly capital gains. He won't earn that in steady dividends to live off of.

Re: Why I quit a $500K job at Amazon to work for myself

#176

Post by DVassallo »

antongribok wrote: post #168
DVassallo wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$5K includes property taxes, HOA, and home insurance. The total was $4K originally when I bought a $850K townhouse in 2015. But I refinanced recently to get some cash out and that got it to $5K.

As someone trying to do something similar in 5 years (not nearly in the same situation), I'm having a hard time imagining why you would refinance and take money out (and not the opposite, refinance and pay things down or pay off your mortgage completely). A lot of the things in your post resonated with me, but seeing this in the comments really got me curious about your math. Good luck with your endeavor!

I didn't need the cash out, but it adds a bit of a safety margin. Liquid cash gives you optionality. For example, if things don't work out as I hope, I could use that cash to try to buy another small business, or something like that. It would have been harder (or impossible) to refinance without a steady paycheck, so I planned for that while I still had the job.

My mortgage interest rate is 4% and I've put the cash I've withdrawn in short term US treasures at 2.5%, so that cash is only costing me 1.5%.

Another reason I did a refinance was that when I bought my house I had only been in the US for 2.5 years and my credit score wasn't great (in the 600s IIRC). I could only get an 5/1 ARM loan that was about to start becoming variable at a higher interest rate.

Re: Why I quit a $500K job at Amazon to work for myself

#177

Post by DVassallo »

pantaloons wrote: post #71
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #16

> I made $75K in my first year and that gradually grew to $511K by my last year. Wow, I'm envious of this rate of internal raises. Is this consistent within Amazon's culture, or other SV companies? I've found (in the small-town Midwestern shops I frequent, not in the FAANG bubble) that I have to change employers to do better than a token 3-5% annual raise, even if my value to the company is increasing much more quick…

This is largely due to Amazon stock appreciation. Amazon does not pay senior engineers $400K, let alone $500K. In FAANG, a typical non-promotion raise is 5-8%. The author could probably have been a bit more specific and noted that his income was actually quite likely to go down for the next several years, but it wouldn't have made for such a compelling post.

Amazon adjusted my comp to ~$380K in 2016 after I got a similar competing offer. It's true that I would have made a bit less if I stayed, but it was still going to be around $500K assuming the stock price remained the same.

Re: Why I quit a $500K job at Amazon to work for myself

#179

Post by DVassallo »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #55

I shouldn't have to run JS from both your site and a 3rd party just to view a text blog post.

I agree. Just started with Wordpress and I'm still figuring out how to get rid of all the unnecessary stuff. I made sure I didn't have any creepy analytics though. The third-party JS is just fonts from Adobe.

Re: Why I quit a $500K job at Amazon to work for myself

#180

Post by anaolykarpov »

I love these kind of articles where people are transparent about their salaries. I don't quite understand the envy and the backlash the author receives. With such a negative reaction, I doubt we'll see too many articles like this in the future (who needs all the negativity?).

I'm a software developer myself for +10 years and haven't made $500k in my whole career and for some reason I don't feel any envy for him. On the contrary, I am glad that we're in an industry where people can earn this big.

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