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How I got wealthy without working too hard

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Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#131

Post by rootusrootus »

soperj wrote: post #119
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #14

> Take a $ 500-1000 / day, full-remote job > Take 2 months for holidays in-between contracts > Do this for 7 years while investing most of your salary in a diversified portfolio. Working $1000/day contracts for 5 days per week, 10 months per year is equivalent to $217K of contractor income per year. But contractor income is not comparable to normal career income because you have to handle additional taxes and health…

They live in the UK. Health insurance is literally a non factor in the developed world other than the US.

For tech people in the US it is also a non-factor. The much greater income allows for buying great insurance coverage.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#132

Post by TAForObvReasons »

mpmpmpmp wrote: post #114
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What ? I've never heard of a scenario where you get less money after tax as a contractor vs employee It’s called self-employment tax: https://smartasset.com/taxes/self-employment-tax It’s not actually a separate tax. Normally your employer pays these taxes but you don’t see it. When you are a contractor you are self-employed, so as an employer of yourself you have to pay these taxes like any other employer. Some pe…

I think the point is if you're a contractor and you're not getting the same rates as an equivalent company would for that contract/position you're under-selling yourself. As for the "tax trick" you still don't get out of paying income taxes on the entire revenue you generate. You just pay employment taxes on the portion that is salary. Whether that's "fair" or not is open to debate of course.

When contracting, in addition to self-employment tax, you have to consider risk of not having paid work for a time and other lost benefits like health care. The rule of thumb I've heard is $1 as an employee ~ $1.50 as a contractor.

The trick discussed by the parent pertains to S-corporations, which allow you to take distributions as long as you pay yourself a reasonable salary

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#133

Post by nop_slide »

lawkwok wrote: post #108
hsn915 wrote: post #88

As far as I can tell, the suggested way of working would be incredibly stressful for someone like me. First, I have to learn stuff I hate just because the market currently demands it. I can't really bring myself to do that. With everyone jumping on AWS and the latest JS frameworks, I stick to programming in Go and deploying static binaries to a single/cheap VPS. I basically only have one library in my 'npm' depdenden…

This is what I think whenever someone tells me to sell something on Amazon or create an NFT. “Technically” I could figure it out and have the time to do it, but I wouldn’t because of the soul sucking nature or the pursuit.

This sums up my feelings towards NFTs succinctly. I feel like the vast majority of people are interested in them for the potential financial gainz and not the tech.

Just yesterday I got texted by a non technical friend asking if I knew how to build a minting site. Yes, I'm sure I could figure it out over a weekend but I have absolutely 0 interest in doing that.

Fortunately I feel comfortable enough with my current income and position where I don't feel an urge to waste the brain cycles learning about them.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#134

Post by brighton36 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #106
softfalcon wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, even the author agrees with you. They start their story with this: > Preamble: I'm extremely lucky. If we live in a Simulation and life is just a Video Game, mine was started on difficulty level “Very Easy”: I was born in a developed country in the 80s (Italy), with access to fresh water, very good carbohydrates and a decent education system. So what you're going to read is 99% luck and 1% planets alignment.…

That’s quite a cop-out for a blog post that contains a lot of specific, actionable steps.

Because proclaiming oneself 'self made' is immoral. There's no roi on that story anymore. Imo, that's kinda dumb. But, such is the fashion .

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#135

Post by wonderwonder »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #81
wonderwonder wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100k invested a year at 8% return is $963k, essentially a millionaire and very wealthy in most of the world. Nothing fancy required just get standard stock market returns. Even going slightly less aggressively, if you are self employed you can put ~52k a year into a an i401k pre-tax and then 6k into an IRA. So 58k a year makes you a millionaire after 11 years. Run it for 20 years and you have 2.8 million and can reti…

An 8% return is far from guaranteed over a 7 year interval. There are plenty of inertvals where you would be in the negative. A lot of people are forgetting that we have been riding a gigantic stock market bubble over the last 12 years. This won’t last.

Sure, but its done on average 9% the last 10 years and if you just invested in an S&p 500 etf you would have made a little over 13%. There are definitely down times but even if you started investing in January 2007 to ensure you caught the worst of the 2008 recession and just kept investing monthly for 7 years, your returns would be on average 12%. Of course all things end but historically and including now it works. Its a safer bet that you will get to a million in the stock market than putting your money in a bank where you are guaranteed to lose money each year with inflation.

Serious question, what's the alternative for a safer investment and having a real retirement? Everything booms and busts and then booms again (mostly).

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#136

Post by throwaway143256 »

hsn915 wrote: post #88

As far as I can tell, the suggested way of working would be incredibly stressful for someone like me. First, I have to learn stuff I hate just because the market currently demands it. I can't really bring myself to do that. With everyone jumping on AWS and the latest JS frameworks, I stick to programming in Go and deploying static binaries to a single/cheap VPS. I basically only have one library in my 'npm' depdenden…

About getting 500+ rates, in my experience, it is bubbles.

You’re in bubble A, totally by coincidence, where you and other contractors are doing say 300 a day rates. Hard to change because that’s going to be the expectancy within that bubble. Higher rates will stand out and descisionmakers will think lower is normal.

Bubble B happens to have 800 a day, work will be equal, not harder, not easier, just in this bubble, it’s that rate.. same psychology for outliers applies.

Started in 400 a day bubbles, currently working in 900 a day bubble, worked for a couple of years in 1800 a day bubble..

Psychology of normal expectancy bubbles all the way down..

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#138

Post by Mikeb85 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #14

> Take a $ 500-1000 / day, full-remote job > Take 2 months for holidays in-between contracts > Do this for 7 years while investing most of your salary in a diversified portfolio. Working $1000/day contracts for 5 days per week, 10 months per year is equivalent to $217K of contractor income per year. But contractor income is not comparable to normal career income because you have to handle additional taxes and health…

> Working a $150K job for 7 years isn’t really a recipe for getting “wealthy”

It definitely is if you live in a LCOL area of an EU country. The author mentions he's Italian. So he gets health care and shit for free while being based in a country where it's very easy to live cheaply if you stay out of the big cities.

Definitely possible to save a ton of money while living well in those conditions.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#140

Post by FpUser »

Grustaf wrote: post #120
FpUser wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could get up to 10% on 1M investment annually (that is what my friend has). Sure he does not have private yacht but one can live quite comfy on 100K without lifting a finger and that is what he does.

If your friend can reliably generate 10% (not just in the current insane bull market) he should open a hedge fund.

He had it for about 4 years I think. Also he does not manage the money. Somebody else does it for him.
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