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For what it's worth, turk73's attitude regarding work only being a means to earn money is just as misguided and narrow-minded.
Sitting on a beach forever is okay, if you like that sort of thing. It's also okay to write a novel that no one will ever read, or to crash remote controlled helicopters and then repair them. It's also okay to plant a hummingbird, butterfly, and honeybee garden, and buy a big macro lens. Or maybe ride a motorcycle all over the continent. Or move to Florida and do Florida things. Or move to Wyoming and manage a herd of 15 cattle on a plot that the real ranchers call "Flyspeck Ranch". Or open an ice cream shop that turns a profit only 20 days per year.
Retirement is as varied as the people who are no longer bound to conform to a work standard.
Try this thought exercise: if you suddenly became a billionaire, and didn't need to work for a paycheck any more, would you continue to write software (I'm assuming you're a developer like most on here)? Personally, I would. I probably wouldn't do it 8 hours a day, but I'd find some fun project to work on, and spend some time on that. It'd be my hobby, when I'm not doing something else I enjoy like traveling or skiing or whatever. I didn't get into this field just for the money, I did it because I like computers.
Buffet likes investing. What else is he going to do with his spare time?
But the job market doesn't seem to support that, so it's full time or no work for me (unless I put in the huge effort to build up a freelancing portfolio, which doesn't seem to be as much of a job market in ML yet?). Given the choice, I'd choose no work, and make my own work for fun.
Personally, I could easily work on some kind of OSS project if I suddenly found myself with lots of free time. I can do C, C++, Python, etc., so it wouldn't be hard for me to find an existing project to contribute to, or make my own.
And depending what you're doing, it can require ridiculous computational resources (like hundreds of thousands of dollars to train a model), but that's far from the norm. If you aren't trying to advance a couple particular states of the art, you can get by with a fancy computer and patience, or a pretty reasonable AWS/GCP bill, probably comparable to any other fairly expensive hobby.
I agree about the part-time thing too; considering how much of a skills shortage the industry is constantly crying about, and how well-paid developers are (which means that, if they live frugally and don't have kids, they don't really need to work to retirement age if they don't want to), it really should be possible to have part-time positions for people who want to stay current and work on interesting problems but not have to dedicate themselves to it full-time, and not be stuck only doing OSS stuff (which is great, of course, but not really doable with some fields).
And people will also necessarily have different preferences on how to spend their time and energy, and different amounts of time and energy as well.
Would also like to point out that "sitting on a beach forever" is not the negation of spending all your time an energy on solving the problems that the capitalist economy rewards.
There's plenty of people out there who have a passion for things that aren't expected to earn money, but for whom the best option for actually making money is something that's quite boring.
I am in the same boat but that’s why we (and a lot of other people) will never make that money. These guys seem to really enjoy business and it’s their favorite thing to do. They have the freedom to do whatever they want but they choose business. Looking at my CEO’s published salary I would retire within one or two months of making that much money. But I will never get there because I am not willing to put that much energy into work.
> But I will never get there because I am not willing to put that much energy into work.
...either or, I wouldn't put too much stock into thinking this way. Energy output does not always equal monetary success.
It’s not guaranteed but hard work is a necessary ingredient in most cases. And then other factors like luck also need to align.
This gets repeated fairly often and intuitively it makes sense. I'd love to hear a counterexample though - of a naturally lazy person that motivated themselves hard enough, for long enough, purely to make enough money to enable themselves to be stylishly lazy forever.
A few years after retiring, his personal finance blog has at times made an income in the mid-six figures, assuming he was telling the truth in a forum comment somewhere.
I've read stories of early retirees saying that they've made more money than ever after retiring, because the independence freed them from the downside of risky business decisions.
That said, someone like Bill Gates is probably closest to what you are describing. After making billions didn't retire, but moved from making the money to making the money work for humanity
Imho the Netflix documentation "Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates" is worth watching for a variety of reasons.
This is what makes him feel alive and purposeful.
If you're suggesting he sit on a beach and sip margarita, people like him can't do that for a long time without feeling the opposite of alive.
I can't attest personally but can relate on some level, work wise I spent lots of times in hotels and the novelty and indeed fun of staying at a hotel, completely pailled and at the stage that I just wanted to cook myself some beans on toast and that compared to hitting a 5* restaurant was more of a calling in the end and shows that variety is the spice of life and you can have too much of a good thing. At least for me and I'm sure others have had there own comparable situations.
But do talk to people who have retired for a while and many will miss work.
Heck, school at the time seemed boring and many couldn't wait to reach adulthood and yet after a decade of work, you appreciate how much more fun school days actually was.
So whilst working, easy to aspire towards retirement, but retirement is what you make it and totally up to you, so many retired people do work, or volunteer work - because they enjoy it.
Work is fulfilling if you self-identify with what you do. If you don't, it's an act of self-denial, and retirement is more likely.
I enjoyed college more than school because I specialized in more things that I was better at, whereas school moved way too slowly in the things that interested me (I was the kind of guy who bunked off school and did math problems from the textbook in the woods) and forced me to attend things I deeply disliked, to this day. And besides all that, the degree to which I "fitted in" was mediocre; it was no social picnic.
My 30s were much better than my 20s, and 20s better than my teens; though some of my fondest memories are of the ages 10~14, outside school not in it, reading books and following my programming interests divorced of curriculum. I'm hoping the rest of my 40s are a similar step up from my 30s; and we've got a baby boy on the way in a couple of weeks. We'll see.
5x median is enough to not worry about money, ever, yet also not so much that one can afford to waste any of it. It lets you have nice things, but not stupidly decadent things. It's still conceivable to spend all that in one year, just on ordinary consumer purchases, services, and travel.
Measuring in terms of median incomes is also a good proxy for how many full-time servants one can afford to hire and employ indefinitely without disgruntlement. At 5x, that's enough for a 2.5x lifestyle, plus a 1.1x personal assistant, and a 1.4x property manager. That kind of enough is "enough".
So no, he should not have given up after his first million. He should have stopped at around $12M instead. It's fine if he keeps working, but really, after that, it's more of a benefit to others if he spends the excess rather than investing it.
Everything he put into philanthropy could have been spent into the economy by other means. Such as higher employee wages.
I take it as axiomatic that a person with a plethora of money cannot understand the problems of a person with a dearth of money well enough to implement effective solutions.
> I take it as axiomatic that a person with a plethora of money cannot understand the problems of a person with a dearth of money well enough to implement effective solutions.
Maybe. First of all, not everyone who has money now has always had money. Secondly, not every problem in the world requires an understanding of poverty in order to solve it.
2. He enjoys what he does.
3. The more wealth he generates, the better off the world is.
The reason why trickle down doesn't work is because there is no accountability. There are good and bad ways to make money but trickle down doesn't make that distinction.
You're 100% right of course that most billionaires makes the world a worse place, but I'd argue he's one of the exceptions.
wat?
Is this some "Make the World a better place™" Silicon Valley techo-religious bullshit?
Wealth can be good or bad and good and bad at the same time, it's not automatic.
Things are valuable because people value them.
So... I struggle to think of why people would value bad things?
A ton of people are getting wealthy providing American taxpayers the "valuable" service of for profit prisons and border detention facilities, Russian taxpayers the "valuable" service of foreign election interference, British taxpayers the "valuable" service of EU trade negotiations, Chinese taxpayers the "valuable" service of total surveillance ..
And of course in the private sector there's client change denial, GHG emissions ("clean coal"), the opioid crisis, medical bankruptcies, data breaches, propaganda, lobbyists, ...
It's in fact incredibly easy to see why "people" value "bad" things - because many people don't see the same things as bad.
We agree that people can acquire wealth in ways that hurt others. I think that's different from saying the wealth itself is bad, but that's perhaps splitting hairs.
Crimes and externalities are real, but they're also very manageable with good legislation, and I think all experience is that the enormous accumulation of wealth since the Industrial Revolution has been the best thing that ever happened.
I don't let the minor imperfections distract from the awesome big picture!
Does this make sense? In short, a lot of billionaires benefit much more than they deserve at the expense of others who get less than they deserve.
Actively investing and giving people your money is giving others a chance. Retiring and keeping the money in an account and living off of it is a lot less so.
So far, I've found it to be true (as long as the work can be rewarding).