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

81–90 of 349 posts

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#81

Post by spaetzleesser »

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…

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.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#82

Post by wonderwonder »

jjulius wrote: post #8

>Preamble: I'm extremely lucky. ... So what you're going to read is 99% luck and 1% planets alignment. I mean, that's pretty much it and he states it up front. If that's the crux, then why write about this other than to brag?

If you read further, his luck is based on being born in a first world country. Something that most of the people on this board can claim. Everything else he accomplished was part of his plan that a good percentage of the people on this board could likely follow.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#83

Post by throwaway894345 »

stepbeek wrote: post #37
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…

This sounds like it's specific to a particular market (and that market is the USA). My experience has been that being an employee (in the UK) resulted in significantly more taxes than being self-employed. Europeans almost never have comparable healthcare costs to the USA, so that part isn't universally true either.

> being an employee (in the UK) resulted in significantly more taxes than being self-employed

Why would this be the case? I'm not challenging your claim, I'm just curious. Is the idea that the UK wants to give tax breaks to small businesses?

> Europeans almost never have comparable healthcare costs to the USA, so that part isn't universally true either.

Not sure about self-employment, but American professionals take home (i.e., after taxes, healthcare, and retirement/pension) considerably more than their European counterparts. To the parent's point, it's quite a lot more difficult for an ordinary (i.e., not-self-employed) American professional to get wealthy by following the approach outlined in this article, but it's quite a lot harder still for our ordinary European professional.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#84

Post by jacobmischka »

marktangotango wrote: post #78
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…

> would easily bring you 1M total investments. I think this is the disconnect with GP, $1M isn't what anyone can really call "wealthy" nowadays. Yes, it's a lot of money, but does not allow one to live what most people consider to be a rich lifestyle.

I absolutely can and will call $1M wealthy. Anyone who thinks it isn't is absolutely living in a bubble.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#85

Post by nzach »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #23

I've done most of this. 10+ years ago I started working for a company in a city with good salaries (for Europe, not so much for the US), London. After a while I decided to go back to my home country, and the company offered me to work remotely. I've lived in my hometown for most of the past 9 years or so, a small town in southern Europe, much cheaper than London and any other big city, including the ones in my countr…

>if you stick long enough so that your knowledge is very valuable, the raises will keep coming

AKA golden handcuffs.

I don't think this is something inherently bad but we should always be aware of it.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#86

Post by disruptthelaw »

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…

I’m not sure I agree with the narrative that 1$ earned as a contractor is worth less than 1$ earned as an employee. Seems to me that the opposite is true. A contractor can get much more creative with taxes, off setting loads of expenses against his income thus having a significantly lower effective tax rate than the employee with equivalent gross income.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#87

Post by spaetzleesser »

Xenoamorphous wrote: post #23

I've done most of this. 10+ years ago I started working for a company in a city with good salaries (for Europe, not so much for the US), London. After a while I decided to go back to my home country, and the company offered me to work remotely. I've lived in my hometown for most of the past 9 years or so, a small town in southern Europe, much cheaper than London and any other big city, including the ones in my countr…

“Word of warning though: unless the company is remote-first you can forget about promotions, at least in my experience. It kinda hurts seeing how you've worked your ass off for a long time and despite making good money other people get promoted while you stick to the same role as when you joined.”

Agreed. This is often a bargain you have to accept. I went remote only after I had reached a point where future promotions were very unlikely anyway.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#88

Post by hsn915 »

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' depdendencies (a virtual dom library).

Second, You have to keep advertising yourself online to keep getting more contracts. I don't really know how to do that. I tried it in the past and didn't really get anywhere. I don't know how people get contracts with > $500/day rates. But still, even if I knew how to do it, it would probably still be stressful to some degree.

Third, You have to be content living in a small town. It's great if that kind of life suits you, but it doesn't really suit me. Now, being at the center of a big city is not for me either, but I like to be close to the center. I want to live in a place with lots of amenities and shopping nearby. Where a car is an optional luxary, not a necessity.

The point of money is to enjoy life. If you live in the middle of no where, what does it matter that you have a million dollars in the bank? Or even that you have a house?

I think for someone like me, going the independent product development route seems much saner/healthier.

Anyway, here's a side remark as well:

> We are all going to die, and Earth will explode in the Sun in a few billion years: please, enjoy some now.

What's up with people bothering with what will happen in a million years from now? And then concluding since it all goes away then only right now is important?

Like, why not, you know: now is important, but a 1000 years from now is important too.

Re: How I got wealthy without working too hard

#90

Post by revskill »

Meeting is not bad, there's only bad meeting and good meeting.

In case you don't mind, daily meeting actually help you in the long run, as it forced what you're procastinating into habit without your notice.

And building a good habit is hard, good daily meeting/standup could help.

Post reply on HN