I "retired" at 33 after working in tech for 12 years and saving a ton of money. With my free time I run a fun hobby business teaching kayaking which is way more fun and brings me way more happiness than anything I did in 2019 or before.
I enjoy spending time doing work on the house and since we moved to [redacted] in 2018 I do a few small volunteer jobs such as teaching IT, programming, and helping people improve their conversational English at coffee meet-ups or picnics in the park. Nothing special as I’m not properly trained but it keeps me active and social.
I should probably look at making some money from it but I also don’t really care and like how it’s something I want to do rather than have to do because money is involved.
When they’re newborns you are focused totally on providing: they can’t feed themselves, change their diapers, or bathe themselves.
When they get older they can do those things but then start having questions about the world and girls and faith. That’s when it really gets fun because you strengthen the bond.
So you’re always providing for the kid. Being there is the tougher part.
You can't be running a code review and chasing a two year old around the house.
I gave up my nice car and doing track days. Many of my time consuming hobbies that involved going somewhere have been greatly reduced or eliminated. I tried replacing them with smaller hobbies at home while I can watch the kid - like small batch beer brewing or learning bass guitar.
Career-wise I have accepted that I will not be promoted and will remain an average midlevel dev for the foreseeable future, mostly due to the cultural expectation that you have to put in more hours to be higher level (and some past decisions still dragging me down). I also acknowledge that I can't afford to changes jobs, eventhough I hate my current job. I need the money to support my family.
The responsibilities that come with marriage and kids is vastly understated - it can be absolutely crushing. If it weren't for these responsibilities, I would have changed jobs, been a senior dev or tech lead, made and saved more money, and likely would have been able to move to a lower cost area to retire early.
But why in the world can’t you afford to change jobs? Plenty of places need mid level devs and it doesn’t cost anything to change jobs.. in fact they usually pay you more.
That system ended up being outsourced and I had to get a new position at the same company. The tech was obscure (FileNet) and thevonky other position I could get was in equally obscure tech (Neoxam). There I became the ASC for the system across 6 teams and two departments - a role typically reserved for senior devs and above. Then they cut the budget in half and did some stuff that I didnt agree with and wouldn't want to be responsible for the security of. So now I'm on a team with modern tech (AWS). It still feels like extra hours are required and they also expect me to be an expert in multiple stacks/systems simultaneously, which is tough. I also feel like, what's the point? The company keeps breaking their own policies and my expertise is just throwaway in their eyes.
Once I become an expert in AWS (which will take a long time the way the work is structured) then I can maybe switch companies. It's still a risk since I have a family to support and I'm responsible for basically all the bills.
There is no secret. I go without some things I would like but are not as important to me, such as an expensive car and expensive holidays.
Basically if it qualifies as "expensive" I usually forgo it. Not for everything but I try to balance if spending more on something is worth it.
Financially we have a comfortable life. We have no debts at all. My wife has a good income and a "safe" job. We have a decent amount in savings. And so we just live a simple life.
Is there anything specific you would like to know? I am happy to share.
My reason for doing what I did is that a good friend and former manager died in his early 50s and I realised that could easily be me in twenty years.
It breaks my heart that he worked so damn hard only to die alone in the middle of the night in his home office with a fucking P&L still open on his screen. His wife and kids found him as they were getting ready for school :(
He gave up so much time with his kids as he always said he was working hard to provide the best for them in the future but you want to know the worst thing? His family are now financially struggling. He had two teenager kids and while his wife worked they lived beyond their means so when he passed their whole world collapsed.
All that time working, all the missed time with his kids and still he left so little. It crushed me if I am honest and I swore I would do whatever I had to do to minimise the chance of it happening to me.
His plan was to make a lot of money, build a huge house for the family, and then probably to switch to some less stressful work and enjoy a calm family life.
But right after buying the land for the house, he died of heart attack. His money disappeared (he always handled the finances himself, my mother had no idea where any of it was, some things most likely got stolen), we struggled financially, had to sell the land, so at the end nothing remained, except for memories of a few great vacations spent together. Even there, he often brought the family to the vacation, but disappeared in the middle of it to handle some business, so I have more memories of the places than I have of him.
There was even this Swiss recruiter that scours HN, but after he finds out you’re a recent college grad he vanishes. At least, in my case. Maybe not in other cases.
It may mean not going out to eat all the time, not buying a fancy new car all the time, not having a fancy house in the most prestigious neighborhood, etc. I'm not saying it's bad to buy or want these things, but they are luxuries you pay for with hours in the office.
Early retirement is even easier if retire doesn't mean, "never work for money again", and instead means, "I don't have to take salary into consideration when deciding when/where to work". I'm an engineer living in the SF Bay area who doesn't make tech money and I'll still be able to retire after 15-20 years, easily, while still having waaaay more than my parents did when I was growing up.
I feel like this isn't true at all for retiring prior to age 50.
You have to adjust for cost of living and the area's median income. The median income in my state is $60k-65k and my salary is about $85k. I'm a midlevel dev in the industry for 9 years (no way could I retire at 15-20 years, even for a lower paying job). I also have a family to support. I do live within my means, but that doesn't mean much with the moderately high cost of living in this area.
There are some bonuses and profit sharing that might bump it $5k-15k. The housing market here has been hot for years now. Even with a long commute a builder grade house in the 1500-1800 sf range on less than an acre is over $250k with about $4-5k in taxes. It's about double that price if the commute is half as long. As an idea of cost of living, labor charge for stuff like a mechanic or plumber is about $100/hr.
In Seattle with a short commute you'd pay $900k-1M on a 1500-1800 sf house on 1600-3000 sf of land depending on if it's a townhouse or 1930s construction. $100k is a starting salary for new grads here. And plumbers/mechanics still charge about $100/hr, I think. (I have never had need of a professional plumber -- I do it myself -- and haven't had to do any auto work beyond oil in a few years.)
Do not be very hard on you (or him). Every job opening I interview candidates for we receive piles and piles of academia refugees, mostly postgrads fleeing their postdocs. They tend to know very little about software (or domain knowledge of our field) but they will try anything: junior, senior and even managerial roles. Signal to noise tends to be very low, so any competitive places ignore most of them. It is a problem for competent people in this life situation, because they get ignored too.
It's much harder to get a job as a non-Swiss/non-EU.