191–200 of 214 posts
Stay away from Vegas. If you're hooked on the dopamine hit of money hitting the bank then you should probably avoid gambling in all forms. Real life (interesting) cautionary tale if you need one: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-54546427
I felt like that until I got to around $2.5 million liquid net worth. Now I still like money, but each additional dollar is starting to show diminishing marginal utility. Though of course I'm still trying to grow my net worth, it's no longer the main focus of my life, especially now that I'm "retired" from my main career at least. I split my time between gaming, running, reading, socializing and working on my trading…
how is it possible to save 2.5 mil from salary? I am from upper 5% in germany in terms of salary, and I can only manage to save ~10kEur/year, while maintaining decent lifestyle. An order of magnitude lower than you'd need to retire with such a sum after 20 years or so. How do you do that? Genuine question
Well there's your problem. Extremely few well paying (say $150k+) jobs and crazy taxes don't exactly encourage wealth accumulation.
Try Bay Area - with tech salaries there and stocks growth being what they were this past decade, the real question is how is it not possible (if only you wanted) to have made $2M+ working for a FAANG for a decade there.
Or at least go for Switzerland, although market is much smaller there, beware. But I know multiple multimillionares in person who made it all on Google Zurich payroll.
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> I think while you don't have "FU money" it's important for money to be the main focus of your life. You don't have freedom if you don't have a lot of money and you can't be 100% happy without freedom, at least in my experience, though I know opinions vary here. The thing is that not everyone can or will achieve that. If we know that, what's the main drive for others to do that? We don't live in a system where this…
I think that the amount of money is more of a secondary point here. You're shackled to somebody else's schedule, whims, priorities, etc. until you have the money to not do that anymore. That doesn't necessarily mean 2.5m liquid though. How much would you need to work if you bought a small-ish house, lived on a very strict budget, and generally kept expenditure to a minimum? There are places in the US where you can bu…
I would need a lot because I like the city life, for example. I do found idyllic to go to the countryside here in Sweden and spend quite a few weeks there for summer and winter but that's not the life I'd like to be living for years.
I enjoy being in a city for my hobbies, such as music, it's easy to find good concerts, people to mingle and chat about those hobbies. I like the human connections of cities, I enjoy meeting my friends to do something, to see an art exhibition, to make music together.
Nothing of that is possible with little money, I'd need to save a lot through decades to keep this lifestyle work-free.
I don't want a family life so that leaves me tied to having friends and spending time with them, moving to the countryside would be worse for my needs than having to work.
Not everybody dreams of owning a house and settling down in peace in the middle of nowhere, with all the free time to look at trees and write about them. I love going to a secluded cabin, bringing all my music gear and staying there for weeks but it's not something to live on for years.
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I think you need to start a family! Relationships are what will make you content.
> I think you need to start a family! What an irresponsible advise, given that you factored out the importance of the relationship with the significant other. "Just find the love of your life!" "Just live happily ever after!" I mean, you don't even care if someone's personality and mental state allows for that. A family is not a retinue waiting on you to fullfil your every need, is it? If starting a family was a silv…
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> I think you need to start a family! What an irresponsible advise, given that you factored out the importance of the relationship with the significant other. "Just find the love of your life!" "Just live happily ever after!" I mean, you don't even care if someone's personality and mental state allows for that. A family is not a retinue waiting on you to fullfil your every need, is it? If starting a family was a silv…
Wow! You sound miserable
I mean, the assumption alone that people never thought of something like starting a family is mind-boggingly idiotic and presumptuous, as it assumed everyone around is just a mindless NPC.
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To anyone confused by the explanation (as $220x10 Given the market of the last decade, investing everything above the 30-40k expenses and income tax in the S&P500 and re-investing the dividends would have brought GP there. Not really sure about how one can make it with 30-40k including rent in the Bay Area, but this sounds like the most reasonable takeaway for most readers.
Apartment $5k/m ($2.5k your half). Prior to covid, find apartment within 30 biking to work, get two bedroom, split with roommate. Going out $150/month Limit yourself to going out with coworkers once a week, social gatherings once a week and a rule of only buying one drink while out. Groceries & clothes $400/m Make all your meals at home unless your work offered fully subsided meals and or on specific days subsided me…
Free beer, pizza and get to meet interesting people.
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That would be an extremely sad thing for me at least. Knowing that I would have no way to become truly free. Free as in I don't owe anyone my time. Maybe others can accept it or are forced to accept it. I just can't. But people of course are different. Currently I just can't wait to reach that state. Sometimes I'm counting days even. I could never be happy/relaxed as long as I am forced to work, or forced to work und…
You already don't owe anyone your time. You contract with an organization to trade your time for money, which you can then trade for other stuff. Most such employment contracts can be ended easily by either party if they don't like it. I've spent a significant amount of my career working on problems of my own choice, both in someone else's employment, with a co-founder, or on my own. The limiting factor turned out no…
That's an important observation. There isn't really that much interesting technical work left that a single programmer can do, as the field has been thoroughly mined for such work for decades now.
Interestingly, it's very different in art world - in technology, the new solution has to be an improvement upon state of the art, whereas in creative pursuits it merely has to be different and interesting. Hence, there's basically infinite work left for writers, painters, solo musicians etc.
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To anyone confused by the explanation (as $220x10 Given the market of the last decade, investing everything above the 30-40k expenses and income tax in the S&P500 and re-investing the dividends would have brought GP there. Not really sure about how one can make it with 30-40k including rent in the Bay Area, but this sounds like the most reasonable takeaway for most readers.
Live like a hobbit while never marrying and being in the top .5% of all tech salaries for a decade. You might as well get the advice "marry rich" - it's probably more likely.
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Germany is not set up to have people get rich from a salary. Everyone has a comfortable life, but it's very hard to get "rich." That's one of the reasons I left Germany
Honestly that sounds like a pretty good trade-off. The percentage of people who are ridiculously wealthy goes from tiny to tinier, and in exchange everybody else gets a good shot at a comfortable life.
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how is it possible to save 2.5 mil from salary? I am from upper 5% in germany in terms of salary, and I can only manage to save ~10kEur/year, while maintaining decent lifestyle. An order of magnitude lower than you'd need to retire with such a sum after 20 years or so. How do you do that? Genuine question
I've struggled with the same issue. The keys, as I've learned them, is to a) get to a place where you can invest up front in reducing your cost of living in the medium-long term, b) run like hell from the hedonic treadmill of trying to keep up with your peers' poor financial decisions, c) look carefully at what parts of your "decent lifestyle" make you truly happier, which parts are performative, and for which parts…
Also, eating out takes a lot of time... driving to a place, sitting there waiting for waiters to return a credit card, etc. The alcohol is super marked-up. You don't know the ingredients of the food well, it's usually loaded with sugar and fats. I don't mean never do it, but living that way is miserable.
And especially in the pandemic, eating out means tons of containers to deal with. Even if you push just push everything in the trash, it's still like a half a bag's worth. And if are a good doobie and wash the containers, recycle, save the leftovers, etc., it's nearly as much time as if you made it yourself. Again, not that you never should, but save it for special occasions if you wanna have a long, above-average healthspan.