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

How I got wealthy without working too hard

amaca.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 349 posts

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#211

Post by antisthenes »

Glyptodon wrote: post #185
antisthenes wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I once shared this outlook, but when one considers their own ideas about the lifestyle "wealthy" entails, and run some numbers, specifically determine the annual spend for that lifestyle, one will quickly realize the truth. In other words, at some point you underwent lifestyle inflation and didn't realize it. And now you're unwilling to give it up. > Of course this depends on location and cost of living. I am refer…

I think poster is saying $40k a year is fine in LCOL but not wealthy. And it's the yield of $1 mil.

$40k a year during retirement. That was the original argument.

With mortgage paid off and grown kids and social security supplement, $40k is plenty of money.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#212

Post by LegitShady »

nostrademons wrote: post #196
jlos wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck retiring in most major Canadian cities if you don't already own real estate there.

Article said "don't live in a major city". Besides, my understanding is that prices are still reasonable in smaller cities like Quebec City, Kingston, Halifax, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, etc.

Prices in all of these cities have gone up. Halifax average sale went from $330k to $370k from 2019 to 2020.

People see if they don't buy in now, they may never be able to buy in, and are buying in, driving prices up further, causing more people to panic buy, etc.

It also leads speculators to buy houses because they see property giving incredible returns. Pay in many of these cities, or employment opportunities that pay well, are limited.

If they're relatively reasonable now at this pace they won't be for much longer.

Alberta is perhaps a little different because they seem to build new housing much faster than many other provinces.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#213

Post by icedchai »

gab007 wrote: post #35

> "Meetings are the mind-killer" Could not agree more. They're big-corp specific and if you can avoid them - that would be a big plus for you. I can't. They lack value while being a complete waste of time. You may think it's no biggie - "but I'm getting paid for the meetig time". True, however - they can wear you down in time, if three-four times a day... and you are still expected to deliver, regardless the time spe…

There are also hidden costs to meetings in terms of lost time / productivity. If I have a half hour meeting at 1:30 then another one at 2:30, I can't do much with that half hour in between (except surf HN, of course.) If this happens a few times a day, most of the day is gone.

"Agile" and its "rituals" makes this even worse: standups, sprint planning, retros, on top of miscellaneous team status meetings. It's sickening how much time is wasted with this garbage.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#215

Post by hsn915 »

tspduck wrote: post #127
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…

You do not have to learn stuff 'you hate' to be a contractor. And Go is very much in demand. Surely you could be a contractor using Go? I do not see why you have live in a small town either? You could just a well just live 20-40 min outside city center or in a smaller flat.

Most people use Go to write microservices which is ridiculous for me.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#216

Post by nano81 »

lemax wrote: post #200
nostrademons wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that the author lives in Europe (Italy), where there is a robust social safety net and typical programmer salaries are about $45-60K/year. It doesn't take nearly as much to be "wealthy" relative to those conditions. Author is basically engaging in a form of geographic arbitrage by working remote from Europe. They get to enjoy wages comparable to U.S. programmers, but get the European social safety net, and since…

Canada allows citizens a step up in capital gains basis upon moving back to Canada Could you elaborate on this or provide a source? Curious because I'm in the US in tech with a canadian citizenship.

https://kpu.pressbooks.pub/cdntax/chapter/__unknown__-10/

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#218

Post by Mikeb85 »

nickpp wrote: post #203
Mikeb85 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> he gets health care and shit for free Not free - he's (probably) paying taxes on that remote income, and the maximal rate is rather high in those "shit for free" countries.

In his income bracket the tax rate in Italy is only 7% higher. And you can find pretty nice places to live in Italy with a COL similar to the rural US.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#219

Post by ixacto »

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…

$12000 saved per month for seven years in the stock market S&P500 FZROX or VTSAX will give you ballpark 1-1.5MM inflation-adjusted (10% return yoy - 2% inflation) this is average tho, results could be much higher/lower...

This of course isn't going to be enough anymore due to the US housing market in big cities, but could be enough if you work remote and live in a smaller town or something. We could also have inflation problems, 6% cpi hike is a lot.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#220

Post by ixacto »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #129
stagger87 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So there’s a lot missing from this blog post. I suspect maybe the author got lucky with some outlier investments, but that’s not something that can be conveyed in a “how to” blog post. Why do you think that? All the numbers work out. Even in your hypothetical scenario, investing 100k for 7 years, especially in the last 7 years, would easily bring you 1M total investments. > FIRE type wealth trajectories are possibl…

> Why do you think that? All the numbers work out. Even in your hypothetical scenario, investing 100k for 7 years, especially in the last 7 years, would easily bring you 1M total investments. My point was that to show that the only way to get this to work out was to make everything work out perfectly, from getting the authors highest quoted day rate of $1000/day on every single day of every single contract from the s…

Get done with college at 22, work 7 years and retire at the age of 29. This is not impossible. Just most people don't want to do it, but it's totally available.
Post reply on HN