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Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

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Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#81

Post by Mauricebranagh »

atwebb wrote: post #40
bawolff wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A million in bank is like $35,000 a year in interest. Not an extravagant lifestyle, but certainly possible to live comfortably on that in a low cost of living area if you have low expenses.

Where are you getting low risk 3.5% interest these days?

In the UK My ISA portfolio is yielding at 3.2 from when I last did the sums - this is ignoring any capital gains.

Its a mix of some big Investment Trusts some wealth protection like Personal Assets RIT and Capital Gearing and a few more speculative bets

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#83

Post by watermelon59 »

kingnothing wrote: post #74
offtop5 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Move to a country where I can live off the 40k -> 60k a year an interest or whatnot. This basically means either Southeast Asia, or some parts of Latin America. Asian languages tend to be extremely hard, and it might be a lot easier to sort of blend in with the populace in Latin America. The last thing I want to do in my retirement is draw needless attention to myself.

You can also live just fine off that amount in most American cities. $40k is basically $2,500 / mo after tax. In the Atlanta area for example, there are plenty of nice 2-3 bedroom houses for $200,000 or even less, which puts your mortgage at $1,000 / mo. That leaves $1,500 / mo for a car, utilities, and food, which is plenty doable. Rent out a room if you want to for more income.

Health and dental insurance can be a huge cost though.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#84

Post by edoceo »

groby_b wrote: post #73
offtop5 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Move to a country where I can live off the 40k -> 60k a year an interest or whatnot. This basically means either Southeast Asia, or some parts of Latin America. Asian languages tend to be extremely hard, and it might be a lot easier to sort of blend in with the populace in Latin America. The last thing I want to do in my retirement is draw needless attention to myself.

You assume that a million generates $40k to $60k, inflation-adjusted, for the next 40 years? I suppose that's one assumption to make. You know that the last time the US GDP grew more than 4% was back in 2000, right? And 2010 worldwide? Both with a continued downward trend since at least the 60's? (This obviously doesn't preclude >4% ROI, but that in turn means increasing income inequality, and at some point, there's…

It's not about GDP, it's about Equities - eg: SPX which averages like 10% growth over last 30 years or something. Getting 4% off $1M isn't that hard at all. And with $1M you may be able to get some portion to work higher yields.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#85

Post by gnicholas »

kingnothing wrote: post #74
offtop5 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Move to a country where I can live off the 40k -> 60k a year an interest or whatnot. This basically means either Southeast Asia, or some parts of Latin America. Asian languages tend to be extremely hard, and it might be a lot easier to sort of blend in with the populace in Latin America. The last thing I want to do in my retirement is draw needless attention to myself.

You can also live just fine off that amount in most American cities. $40k is basically $2,500 / mo after tax. In the Atlanta area for example, there are plenty of nice 2-3 bedroom houses for $200,000 or even less, which puts your mortgage at $1,000 / mo. That leaves $1,500 / mo for a car, utilities, and food, which is plenty doable. Rent out a room if you want to for more income.

How does this work if you have kids that will be going to college when you’re ~50? That is, how do you know at 40 how much you’ll want to spend on your children’s college education?

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#86

Post by joemanaco »

I run my company in a similar way. It's myself, three employees and a bunch of contractors. ( https://asylumsquare.com/team )

We have an office, but everyone can work from where-ever he wants to (actually the freelancers are from all around the world). Since Covid hit we're operating 100% remote before most of the time we worked with 2 people in the office the rest of us remotely.

Everyone works as much or less as he wants, can take days off whenever he feels like.

We do have voice calls from time to time when it's appropriate, but in 99.9% only two people are involved and it usually happens when we have the feeling it would clarify faster as by asynchronous chat (for example when screen share is involved to demonstrate something). Actually I wouldn't even call it meetings because we mostly don't even setup a schedule, it just naturally happens (for example chatting about a specific topic, then deciding a call would be easier / faster).

It works well for us, but I think it would be a lot harder if we were more people as we don't have anyone who organizes or manages the project and the people.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#87

Post by MaxLeiter »

switz wrote: post #47

My company is ran similarly; though I never raised VC and bootstrapped my way to profitability over 5 years as a solo founder. I provide a simple platform for people to play their friends on high quality CS:GO servers, while keeping track of their stats/wins/losses. https://popflash.site If you have played a lot of Counterstrike, have real-world technical skills, and are interested in a flexible autonomous environmen…

Just wanted to say my friends and I had a fantastic time using Popflash 4-5 years ago to organize our ten mans. Thank you!

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#88

Post by atwebb »

ptmcc wrote: post #70
atwebb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you getting low risk 3.5% interest these days?

It's an average inflation-adjusted expected rate of return over time of a balanced portfolio, not a guaranteed rate every year. Some years might be 10%, some years might be -10%. Historically, about 4% is the safe drawdown rate. FIRE folks tend to be a little more conservative than that, though, because of the even longer time horizon involved with retiring earlier. Check out a tool like https://www.firecalc.com/ tha…

That's fair, I'm pretty familiar with FireCalc and the withdraw rates, I wasn't in the right frame of mind (are any of us?) but that makes sense.

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#89

Post by sparkling »

Varqu wrote: post #80

Chipping in as the co-founder of a job board startup - https://swissdevjobs.ch We are: - 2 co-founders - 2 up to 4 people part-time as contractors - full remote, almost zero offline retreats - growing the user base around 10% MoM - all communication happens on our Discord server - bootstrapped, no founding It's not clear if this model will scale easily, but I can see us growing to at least 10-15 people this way.

How do you make money? Only from companies posting jobs?

Re: Ask HN: Which companies work like Gumroad?

#90

Post by offtop5 »

gnicholas wrote: post #85
kingnothing wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also live just fine off that amount in most American cities. $40k is basically $2,500 / mo after tax. In the Atlanta area for example, there are plenty of nice 2-3 bedroom houses for $200,000 or even less, which puts your mortgage at $1,000 / mo. That leaves $1,500 / mo for a car, utilities, and food, which is plenty doable. Rent out a room if you want to for more income.

How does this work if you have kids that will be going to college when you’re ~50? That is, how do you know at 40 how much you’ll want to spend on your children’s college education?

At least my plan assumes I won't have a family. Kids make this nearly impossible. While I can up and move to Costa Rica tomorrow( assuming their wasn't a pandemic ) , you can't exactly just tell your wife and kids to pack it up( and expect to remained married).
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