Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cheat Codes for Life I Know at 36 That I Wish I Knew at 26

timdenning.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 81 posts

Re: Cheat Codes for Life I Know at 36 That I Wish I Knew at 26

#31

Post by noelwelsh »

apetresc wrote: post #14

> When you work for yourself there’s flexibility with how much tax you pay, and most importantly, when it must be paid. > > That means you can earn half the salary from a job and still take home more money. Genius. Either this guy doesn't understand how income tax works, or I don't. (Or he's just lowkey recommending tax fraud)

If you run your own company you have many opportunities to turn your normal purchases into business expenses.

At least in the UK:

* Dividends pay less tax than income.

* Any work related equipment is a deductible expense. Includes computer, mobile phone, etc.

* A company car, particularly an electric one, is much cheaper than buying a car as a private individual.

Those are just the basics.

Re: Cheat Codes for Life I Know at 36 That I Wish I Knew at 26

#32

Post by spywaregorilla »

basicoperation wrote: post #26
this_user wrote: post #11

Most of this reads like the pseudo-inspirational BS that people post on LinkedIn. Things that seem deep, but are so blindingly obvious and/or incredibly broad that they are of absolutely no value to the reader.

Indeed. In particular, I’ve seen variations of “Watch how people treat service workers” in this kind of content again and again. It really makes me wonder who needs telling “If the person you’re with is rude to people, they might not be a nice person”.

> It really makes me wonder who needs telling “If the person you’re with is rude to people, they might not be a nice person”.

People who generally don't think of service people as people, perhaps

Re: Cheat Codes for Life I Know at 36 That I Wish I Knew at 26

#33

Post by giantg2 »

neodymiumphish wrote: post #19
giantg2 wrote: post #6

For number 4, what should one do other than work? Number 6 seems to be their answer, but that's still "work" just not at a salaried job. For number 6, any details on avoiding taxes? Are they in a different jurisdiction? My experience is that self employment taxes (FICA), and the need for benefits makes it so you cannot earn half as much and still take home more.

If you're self-employed, the income can go into the business and you can pay yourself based on what you actually need, while the rest of the income gets put back into the work/business. Even when taxed, those taxes that aren't individual income are taxed much lower than income taxes, so you can "avoid" paying taxes directly until you actually reach a point of profitability where you want to extract that wealth from t…

Yeah, there's distributions and draws. But you still can't make 50% and take home more than before.

Re: Cheat Codes for Life I Know at 36 That I Wish I Knew at 26

#35

Post by the-printer »

Comevius wrote: post #8

I started fuming about the cliches, but then I kept reading and there were many great points, but then I started fuming again because the author wrote a self-help book and they are the worst, but I still kind of want to read it.

Resist. Resist. Just copy and paste the relevant points into a text file like I may do, and move on. A broken watch can be right twice a day, Patek Phillipes are no exception.

Edit: Don’t even waste your disk space.

Re: Cheat Codes for Life I Know at 36 That I Wish I Knew at 26

#36

Post by d23 »

this_user wrote: post #11

Most of this reads like the pseudo-inspirational BS that people post on LinkedIn. Things that seem deep, but are so blindingly obvious and/or incredibly broad that they are of absolutely no value to the reader.

Yeah, I was interested in this one and hoping to find more substance on the tax mechanisms that make this possible:

> Working for yourself means you can earn less income than a normal salary and still make more due to tax reasons.

When I clicked through to his "money" link, it was a category for his blog where he posts multiple posts per day on making money online. All with clickbaity headlines. Hard to take this seriously.

Edit: Ah yeah, he's selling money making courses and ebooks. This is complete spam.

Re: Cheat Codes for Life I Know at 36 That I Wish I Knew at 26

#38

Post by dfdz »

> "Busyness is a sign of poverty that will eventually lead to personal bankruptcy"

"People who like pseudo-profound quotes are not so smart, science says" [1,2]

[1] https://qz.com/566050/people-who-like-pseudo-profound-quotes...

[2] https://journal.sjdm.org/15/15923a/jdm15923a.pdf

Re: Cheat Codes for Life I Know at 36 That I Wish I Knew at 26

#39

Post by goldenCeasar »

basicoperation wrote: post #26
this_user wrote: post #11

Most of this reads like the pseudo-inspirational BS that people post on LinkedIn. Things that seem deep, but are so blindingly obvious and/or incredibly broad that they are of absolutely no value to the reader.

Indeed. In particular, I’ve seen variations of “Watch how people treat service workers” in this kind of content again and again. It really makes me wonder who needs telling “If the person you’re with is rude to people, they might not be a nice person”.

This one seems quite obvious but many times in life we tend to look the other way, specially if we have some affection with the person in question.

Re: Cheat Codes for Life I Know at 36 That I Wish I Knew at 26

#40

Post by doix »

randomcarbloke wrote: post #16
this_user wrote: post #11

Most of this reads like the pseudo-inspirational BS that people post on LinkedIn. Things that seem deep, but are so blindingly obvious and/or incredibly broad that they are of absolutely no value to the reader.

Some of it is self evident from a young age, the rest seems silly or plain wrong (earn less but take home more...that's not normally how tax works). Any links for actual useful and rarely shared cheatcodes/heuristics for a positive life?

> earn less but take home more...that's not normally how tax works)

It shouldn't be the way it works, but unfortunately it is in many places. In the UK it's definitely significantly better to have your own company than be a PAYE employee.

Even without being creative at all, instead of working, paying tax and then using your post tax earnings to give your kids money, just hire them. Instantly you get another 12k tax free (or whatever the tax free allowance is). Not to mention all the stuff you can expense, being more creative with how you pay yourself (dividends have a different tax rate) etc.

He's definitely right that being self employed gives you more flexibility about how you pay taxes.

It definitely shouldn't be this way though. Just another way for the rich to keep the poor down.

Post reply on HN