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

Early-Retirement Update

livingafi.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 443 posts

Re: Early-Retirement Update

#191

Post by geswit2x »

dominotw wrote: post #27
boplicity wrote: post #22

In my early twenties, I had a business mostly on autopilot that let me work maybe an hour a day. I mostly spent my time writing poetry, hiking, making friends, etc. It was great. It was not sustainable, but it was perfect for a twenty something exploring the joys and freedoms of youth. Now, I work much harder, have kids, and responsibilities. That being said, I know the work I do is meaningful, and serves many people…

> A happy life is not a life of retirement, its a life of meaning. What was meaningful once (aiming for retirement), loses its meaning once it has been attained. You have to keep moving forward. you figured out the meaning of life for everyone? maybe you are rationalizing your own lack of freedom from work and responsibility as "serving others" and secret to happiness. Which is fine but its a bit weird to say that ap…

I think you are not FIRE, and you want to be, lmao

Re: Early-Retirement Update

#192

Post by lostmsu »

mathgladiator wrote: post #95
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #68

I had to quit reading any FIRE (financial independence, early retirement) blogs because they were full of people headed down this same path: Extreme frugality, bare minimum savings, assuming their lifestyle would never change and nothing would ever go wrong. Retiring at 30 sounds great, but no one's life goes exactly to plan for next the 30-40 years until traditional retirement age. People change, expectations evolve…

I'm going to start blogging about FIRE from the other extreme end. I'm a principal engineer making serious dollars, and I'm writing down my playbook. I intend to "Fat-FIRE", and the only reason I don't retire now is to see how much I can leverage my position to do crazy shit at massive scale. Paradoxically, this sets me up for larger windfalls because I can take risks that my peers do not take.

You should do that.

I am an early retiree, who sometimes thinks it would be nice to get back into the industry just to steer or at least nudge the projects I still care about very much into the direction I'd like to seem them to go. And because they are corporate-driven (hello, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google!) it is just too hard to do from the outside.

Re: Early-Retirement Update

#193

Post by koonsolo »

Here is some relationship advice to all the young guys here. It is not only some theory, this is painful experience of real life.

If there would be no women, we would all still be hunter gatherers. Hunting for a small bit of the day, and for the rest doing nothing and sitting in the tree.

If you put women into the equation, they want a roof over their head. So they pick a partner who can provide that. So now we all work a bit extra to get the roof. But now the most wanted woman is most interested in the guy with the biggest roof. So now there is a competition. Women picking the most capable guys. Now the race is on.

If you think the modern women think differently now, you are very wrong.

Now, after this story, you might think I am a very sexist person. But you think wrong. I took care of my 3 kids during my fulltime job, while my wife was constantly on business trips. I love taking care of my kids, I help out in the household, etc. I am what they call a "new/modern man".

But don't think that any women has any respect for a guy that is not a "real man", getting ahead of all the others. If she thinks you are a lazy loser, she will make the jump.

Re: Early-Retirement Update

#194

Post by sokoloff »

hogFeast wrote: post #185
sokoloff wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a reasonable question of whether a Monte-Carlo simulation is better or worse than applying actual sequential returns from all 100+ starting years (which is what cFIREsim does and the data of which is available to all). For me, I'd rather backtest against all the actuals than to look to a Monte-Carlo sim with a distribution which is the same as the per-year returns, because I don't believe that sequenc…

I am not sure what you mean. Using sequential returns from every starting year in your database is, if I have understood you correctly, the same as using block bootstrap (at the limit, sequential returns from every starting year is the same as block bootstraps of lifespan length taken an infinite number of times). You don't look at yearly returns. There are many reasons for not doing this but the basic one is volatil…

> You don't look like at pear returns

I don't understand what you mean here, but I'd like to. Could you explain?

I'm using cFIREsim to simulate 100+ different retirement trajectories based on historical results and ensure that 98% of them exceed my desired spending in all years.

Re: Early-Retirement Update

#196

Post by paisawalla »

adkadskhj wrote: post #155
GordonS wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not just FIRE people, but 99% of all retirees at any age end up doing nothing of note with their time. If you spend some years just chilling and and are actually happy, then sure, why not. But there are so many retired people who do nothing, and are not happy. For example, my mother, my mother and father in law, my other father in law, my grandmother - all retired, and all do absolutely nothing but watch TV and moa…

I think it depends on who you are. I can't fathom not doing something. I want to retire, asap, though not FIRE-levels, but i know what i want to do. I want to do exactly what i do in my current off hours, which looks a lot like work. Because it is work. I want to work, when i retire. I just want to work on whatever i want to work on. Which is the rub. Passionate people will be busy, all the time. Without it.. well, i…

This isn't an isolated view, but in my view, it does miss a lot.

Most people have an idea of what they would ideally do if given unlimited amounts of time. The reality is, in my experience, that most people cannot put the same level of work, focus, and dedication into their own projects that they can into the projects an employer pays them to work on.

For whatever reason, most people need the structure, constraint, judgment, or whatever that an external authority imposes on them. Having the skill and motivation is not enough to bring your highest work to your own purposes. There is a second discipline that involves self-accountability, which runs orthogonal to capacity for the work.

Re: Early-Retirement Update

#197

Post by alexashka »

GordonS wrote: post #137
eagsalazar2 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just FIRE people, but 99% of all retirees at any age end up doing nothing of note with their time. But, and I think you aren't saying otherwise, this is also true of everyone who still has to work, while they are working. Your job is just the thing you have to do (if you are lucky you actually enjoy it). Bottom line, most people don't actually have a purpose or strong passions in their lives. Being retired young…

> Not just FIRE people, but 99% of all retirees at any age end up doing nothing of note with their time. If you spend some years just chilling and and are actually happy, then sure, why not. But there are so many retired people who do nothing, and are not happy. For example, my mother, my mother and father in law, my other father in law, my grandmother - all retired, and all do absolutely nothing but watch TV and moa…

I get it.

It's all explained by one simple fact: the average IQ is 100. In today's society, how many activities are there for 100 IQ people to engage in?

Are there animals to take care of? Is there land? Is there community to partake in? Are there things that need to be done by 100 IQ people?

When you build society optimizing for young people to work 8 hour days or giant factories and supply chains doing everything else, what is there for somebody at 65 to do but watch tv and wait until they die?

Young people barely even have children anymore and when they do, chances are their parents are still working, so by the time they retire, the children are 5-10 years old and playing on their own.

It's easy to blame the individuals for not joining a knitting club or whatever, but people are not built to do pointless activities, they are built to do activities that have purpose and those are not available in modern society unless you have high IQ or a talent in a specific domain.

Also one last point: moaning about other people is what people have always done, especially when you're older and you're almost certainly experiencing chronic pain of some sort. Younger people moan just as much, they just have youth and belief that things will be looking up on their side - old people have neither.

Re: Early-Retirement Update

#198

Post by gh-throw »

samvher wrote: post #62
corry wrote: post #55

Kudos to people who go FIRE without state-provided healthcare - from a "typical brainwashed Canadian" POV you're one health mishap / one ambulance-ride's worth of unexpected medical costs to kill the entire dream. Also - no kids - huge variable for FIRE obviously, but perhaps less obviously ALSO a huge variable for life's purpose. Something I've seen in my friend and family group is that a lot of couples hit a point…

As someone who is about to get a first child - what kind of low lows should I brace myself for?

- Any health problems for anyone concerned in the first couple months (which is when it's most likely, for the mother and baby in particular, obviously) will be really, really bad, as far as making those weeks much worse than they'd otherwise be.

- If you get very unlucky (sometimes) or suck at sleep training (way, way more often) get ready for years of bad sleep, yourself. If you're good at this the dreaded "sleep zombie" stage of parenting is only ~2-3 months long, though, so no big deal in the scheme of things, and even better if you've got a spouse who isn't the kind of person to "punish" their partner any time they have to be awake by making them also be awake (lots of people truly are like this, and I think it's nuts, if you do some good trading-off with one another, then the first couple months are actually really easy and you'll only be sleep-deprived like half the time, at worst)

- If your kid is sick, at all, then sleep in those early weeks will be exceptionally terrible, as kid illnesses tend to manifest in frequent waking & crying that can't always be assuaged with milk or rocking or whatever. Even a mild illness can make those early nights damn dark, and you may have trouble figuring out what's wrong (may take shopping for a doctor to find one who won't just rudely brush you off as a newbie parent with a "colicky" baby and actually listen to you and try to figure it out)

- They can be incredibly expensive, for all kinds of reasons, including but not limited to healthcare expenses (in the US), damage (ours have done over a thousand dollars of damage to stuff around our house in some years, more if we counted the rate of wear on e.g. flooring or the cost to pay for repairs on all kinds of things that we were able to do ourselves very cheaply), education (paid directly or, more commonly, in much higher housing expenses than you'd otherwise have). Oh and as they get older, food. (clothes and toys are negligible expenses compared to the rest, unless you don't want them to be)

Basically if no-one gets sick and you take sleep training seriously, they're just expensive and everything else is barely a problem... until they get old enough to start going places on their own, and then you get a whole new set of worries :-)

Re: Early-Retirement Update

#199

Post by ryandrake »

joshuaissac wrote: post #173
ssully wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He mulls over and comes to the conclusion later in his post that he probably could have done more to save his relationship. Just based off of the sentence you quoted and other things he said, I wouldn't be surprised if he was very dismissive of his ex-wifes struggle to find meaning, or desire to go back to work. Cheating is terrible, but having a partner who doesn't try to see your struggles can be crippling.

> I wouldn't be surprised if he was very dismissive of his ex-wifes struggle to find meaning, or desire to go back to work. What you are saying is in direct contradiction with what he says in the article: > I encouraged her to explore her own life and find activities and goals that would help her feel better. I suggested therapy and offered to go with her. I was clear that if she wanted to go back to work I was eager…

Yea it sounds like he just didn't really beta test his FI ideas with his wife before launching, and then found out later that they have an irreconcilably different view of what life should be all about. She wanted to keep up with mythical Joneses and he didn't. Things were fine while their interests were aligned (accumulating wealth), but went south when the appearance of "falling behind" started in. I don't think anyone was wrong here (besides the infidelity)--just different world views that ended up being incompatible.

If I wasn't married with a kid, I'd be retired right now. I'd be perfectly content buying a $25K plot of land in the desert, parking a mobile home on it, and living out the rest of my life on $10-20K/year, but there's just no way on earth they'd stick around for that! Your FIRE plan needs to work with your whole family.

Re: Early-Retirement Update

#200

Post by dimmke »

cableshaft wrote: post #167
dimmke wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had friends with trust funds, who just seem to dither around in life. "Making music" they never release. Picking up little "pass the time" jobs. And these are people that aren't living "leanFIRE" It seems like such a nihilistic way to live. You're just floating along the stream of life. Things worked out for you, but you have no further passion or inclination to improve the world? No problems you could set yours…

I didn't know you could post fiction on Substack, also never heard of Royal Road. Could you recommend anything to get started with those? Specifically with writing serialized fiction. Or some example authors that have used it with success that I can check out?

Substack is just a place to post writing and let people subscribe for money so it can be used to post chapters of fiction just as well as an article. I only know of one person who was posting a novel on there, and not sure if they were making a lot of money from it.

There's also tons of subreddits like r/WritingPrompts to practice or r/NoSleep to post short horror fiction. There are huge audiences on both of those. A post from NoSleep is getting made into a Steven Speilberg movie: https://variety.com/2019/film/news/spire-in-the-woods-steven...

RoyalRoad is huge though. Here's the top story from it: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/21220/mother-of-learning authors usually get a following on RoyalRoad and then they can start a Patreon where people who donate get early chapters. Other authors go the Kindle Unlimited route where they self publish their novel on Kindle Unlimited after they've got a fanbase and plenty of people make a decent living from it.

This is all the modern version of how older authors got started: by submitting short stories to be published in anthology magazines. You have to love writing and be willing to do it for a long time before you pop off though. The way he was describing it didn't resemble that to me.

Post reply on HN