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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

#281

Post by silicon2401 »

ghaff wrote: post #233
bambax wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are those expensive hobbies and luxuries? My hobbies cost about zero (making music, doing the occasional woodworking, reading, walking). Travel can be expensive but it can also be quite cheap and is very dispensable. Luxuries outside of travel (expensive hotels), I don't even know what they are. I'm sure it's not hard to spend as much money as you want on many different things; but you make it sound as if it was…

There are many moderately expensive hobbies that are pretty mainstream: downhill skiing, scuba diving, even "cheap" activities like hiking that involve travel to many places where you can do those activities. And many others buy equipment for their hobbies that they don't strictly need but they get pleasure from. Eating at decent restaurants on a regular basis adds up as do theater tickets. Even just having work done…

Not saying this as a personal attack but your comment comes off as incredibly out of touch. Downhill skiing and scuba diving may be somewhat mainstream compared to something like lounging on a private island, but they're not that common. Most Americans probably go their whole lives without ever skiing or scuba diving. And to posit these as regular, everyday activities is also unrealistic. Scuba diving or skiing are things that require travel and buying or renting gear, if not paying for training as well. That's not a 'hobby' for most people, it's equivalent to a big luxury like going on vacation.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#282

Post by lowercased »

handrous wrote: post #241
ixacto wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still get ACA subsidies if you fall within the income level it's not means tested, they absolutely designed it this way to be gamed. Also qualified distributions from a ROTH IRA are not considered part of modified adjusted gross income. So do your mega-backdoor ROTH conversion and take out of that and it doesn't count against the insurance-company subsidy.

The subsidies don't help with copays, deductibles, and co-insurance, right? Those can run into the five figures even on a "silver" plan, in a bad year. If someone on the plan gets cancer, congrats, now every year is a bad year.

that's partially true, but... 'retiring' on $100k year is still potentially disastrous if you have a major health issue.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#283

Post by ornornor »

dbrueck wrote: post #269
wilkommen wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some examples of the right skill sets? I think I could get pretty good at anything I put my mind to, but I don't have knowledge of what kinds of things businesses consider important enough to spend that kind of money on to know what I should study.

Couple of areas to consider: - emerging tech - it was lucrative being a mobile app developer when iOS first released its native app SDKs because everybody wanted an app but companies generally didn't have the skills for it internally yet. - niche/specialized tech - deep knowledge and expertise with things companies often stumble on. For a long term, being an RDBMS expert a "DBA" gave you the ability to print money. -…

> - dregs tech - it's no longer the new shiny thing, but there's still a lot of demand to keep systems running. So a COBOL master or an enterprise Java guy (especially someone with the ability to come in and fix large systems without taking them offline).

I’ve read and heard this over and over. So much so that I actually looked into it before committing to learning COBOL.

I have never found any actual evidence of this. It seemed like there were very few COBOL roles, they didn’t pay that much more or less than any other language, and a lot of it was outsourced to Indian sweatshops with which we can’t really compete in the west because it’s a race to the bottom where only price matters.

That is to say, be wary of what you read on the internet. A lot of it is apocryphal rather than actual. Some of it (like this blog post) is good for getting your imagination running and thinking out of the box but don’t take it as gospel.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#284

Post by joshlemer »

hsn915 wrote: post #215
tspduck wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why? Isn't that exactly what Go was designed for?

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#285

Post by hintymad »

I don't get the suggestion of not going to startups. I can't predict the future, but how many people got financially free by joining the right startups/blow-out small companies in the past 10 years? There are tens of thousands of opportunities there, and one can further maximize their chance by decisively leaving bad startups. A bonus to one's career is they get to build cool technologies in the successful startups too. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, AWS, Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Pinterest, Databricks, Snowflake, Arista, a slew of PLG SaaS companies. That's just the companies that are on top of my mind. Think about the first 500 - 1000 engineers of each company, or hundreds of those who joined the company when the stock price was low. A simple math: say the chance of failing at a top startup is 80% (top companies have lower chance of failures than the average startups), and one stays at a startup for an average of 2 years before landing on a successful one. The chance of failing everyone of them in a 20-year career is 0.8^10 = 10%! And you don't want to take a risk of 10% of failure to be financially free?

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#286

Post by ghaff »

silicon2401 wrote: post #281
ghaff wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many moderately expensive hobbies that are pretty mainstream: downhill skiing, scuba diving, even "cheap" activities like hiking that involve travel to many places where you can do those activities. And many others buy equipment for their hobbies that they don't strictly need but they get pleasure from. Eating at decent restaurants on a regular basis adds up as do theater tickets. Even just having work done…

Not saying this as a personal attack but your comment comes off as incredibly out of touch. Downhill skiing and scuba diving may be somewhat mainstream compared to something like lounging on a private island, but they're not that common. Most Americans probably go their whole lives without ever skiing or scuba diving. And to posit these as regular, everyday activities is also unrealistic. Scuba diving or skiing are t…

Those were just 2 things I do/did at various times that popped into my head (and they're probably not the best examples). Or pick hunting, fishing, golf, tennis, or even driving somewhere regularly on weekends to camp or hike.

None of these are necessities but quite a few people do them semi-regularly and while some of these activities can be cheaper than others, they have costs--and, to the point I was perhaps poorly making, they're activities that a lot of people would hate to give up in the interest of frugality.

Of course, many things can also be done on a relative shoestring so long as they don't involve long distance travel/hotels. On the other hand, a lot of people like spending money on their hobbies, even if not strictly required.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#287

Post by jandrewrogers »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #274
lkbm wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not guaranteed, but based on historical average returns for the stock market we frequently assume ~7% growth - ~3% inflation = 4% as the amount you can take out each year indefinitely while your inflation-adjusted principle stays constant. Looking around, a lot of places[0][1][2] are using 10% growth - 3% inflation, so I guess the 4% is the more conservative estimate. [0] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/inves…

If you're planning to live on your investments' income generation, and nothing else, putting them all (and arguably any ) in the stock market could be catastrophic. One minor downturn for that last just a few months, and you have zero income. IMO, "US$1M nest egg, live on proceeds" requires guaranteed income, and more or less excludes speculative investment. I appreciate that others opinions on this may vary.

Under what set of assumptions does a "minor downturn" lead to zero income?

I've lived through multiple major crashes that lasted a lot longer than a few months and it had no catastrophic impact on my (theoretical) ability to safely generate an income from public equities. I am having a hard time coming up with a realistic scenario where a responsible person would become insolvent investing in public equities with an expected return of 4% (inflation adjusted). And in practice, most people doing this have a hedge of some type against a protracted downturn -- the cost of the hedge is already baked into the 4% expected return.

There is no such thing as guaranteed income no matter how much money you have. The only return that can be guaranteed is a total loss since the value of all assets can go to zero. Picking a different selection of assets, including cash, is just rearranging the set of ways you can lose everything.

Most of the retirement risk is a byproduct of having inelastic expenses that run right up against the reasonably sustainable withdrawal rate. That might happen more often with only $1M in the US, but even then it depends on your lifestyle.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#289

Post by borroka »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #167

Do people here like working? That's a thing that often seems missing from these wealth optimization conversations. I love working. I don't love working all day. But I got into programming because I love programming and then I found that I also love what I can build through programming and what people do with the things I build. I spent a lot of my career leveling up my situation so that it was more of doing those thi…

I don't like working. I don't hate it, but if I had the opportunity to stop working forever (say 1/3 of my annual current tech salary, but with no work), I will take it immediately.

Now, it does not mean I would stare at the ceiling all day, but "work", which entails some kind of responsibility I don't want to have, negotiations I don't want to deal with, meeting I would skip even if the alternative would be selling parking lot tickets, is of very little interest for me outside of dollars.

Years ago, I was chatting with a fellow academic and he told me he would still work even after retirement. "I'd like to work a bit", he said, "some new research here and there, a paper written in 3 years instead of 3 months". Lovely perspective, but that is not "work, that's a hobby.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#290

Post by mNovak »

wonderwonder wrote: post #73
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…

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…

>> self-employed >> you got there through low stress

My experiences differ

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