Ask HN: What has been your single best investment?
If you can, answer with a cost estimate and what the "return" of your investment is or will be.
I should have bought more hair clippers...
It's an investment in time and energy, compromises, sometimes career plans, etc., but it's worth it.
edit: estimated cost is somewhat tapered career goals and likely foregoing early retirement, and the "return" is higher quality of life.
If I had to do the same choice (i.e. early retirement vs having a family) I would choose having a family every single time.
Ironically, it slowed mostly because I tried to be a full time stock traded at some point, then realized that if I wanted active income, a job was the way to go.
EDIT: Getting an education, and having a job since I was 19, is probably also a good investment. :)
EDIT 2: Adjusted for inflation, that $600K sum is close to $800K now.
IT salaries in Spain are higher than most but not enough to buy anything. At the rate I'm saving money I'll be able to get a loan in around 8 to 10 years or more actually, because by then I'll need even more savings for that. But if I ever want to have kids and a family or I have any emergency I won't be able to save as much.
Sad.
Millennials are not buying anything. They can't. The very few I know who have bought a house is either because they had help from their parents or bought an old house in small towns far away from everything.
Only 30% of the people younger than 35 have their own house, down from almost 60% in 2004.
Sounds good, right? You see these all the time.
But the truth is this is one successful startup after 10-15 attempts, each of which cost me either cash or market-rate salary.
So if you factor in the opportunity cost, it's a lot more like:
$800k => 30% stake in bootstrapped $100M company
Still very good, but easily could have happened 10 years from now or not at all. Bootstrapping is definitely gambling.
For example, I've done some joint ventures with business people who were willing to give me 50% of market rate but then a big chunk of equity. I have never worked for $0 and no one should ever do that.
Eventually I became sought after enough that I can make market rate and still get equity.
Startups are like lottery tickets, and if you aren't just born rich, you have to find a way to get more lottery without going bankrupt or ruining your quality of life.
You'll get tasty (and often healthier) meals for a fraction of the cost of a restaurant or a take-out. You even get a meditative/relaxing effect if you cook out of pressure, only once a day and not just for yourself. Your family and friends may even appreciate you more...
That's such a close-minded view of things, and that's also assuming that translation is not a lossy process.
Of course, if you are talking about some sophisticated fiction, you are going to experience giant losses of content, usefullness of which may be not so high for such me then for you. And by the way, if it is needed to read something being translated from a language I do not know, I'd rather search for the one has been translated into my mother language.
> My reading goals are mostly whitepapers from few scientifical areas I am trying to follow, what can be more open-minded?
Considering that things can be both out of your reach and worth reading would be more open-minded than your current stance.
> Of course, if you are talking about some sophisticated fiction, you are going to experience giant losses of content, usefullness of which may be not so high for such me then for you.
This is not only about "some sophisticated fiction". An example from the tech world: "Le Langage Caml", a textbook on OCaml, doesn't have an English version. This leaves a hole for people interested in OCaml that can't read French, since this book is a great way to start with the language, and there aren't many book on the topic in the first place.
> And by the way, if it is needed to read something being translated from a language I do not know, I'd rather search for the one has been translated into my mother language.
That's fair, but as I've said, often some things are lost in translation. People from different countries will not always speak in ways that map perfectly well to English. Even with a relatively close culture and language here in France, translating the degrees of formality/informality that people have when talking together is hard. This is why sometimes people take entire movies and transpose them to another country: you can't just translate everything. This is even happening with the UK and the USA, two countries that mostly share a language. But just sharing that language isn't enough to understand how people live, how they think, how they express themselves, what they value.
Now, you may not be interested in all of that. That's fine. But don't dismiss it as "not worth".
The point you’re making about the access of English is very interesting, and has very little to do with this criticism.
> if it is not being translated into English, there are big chances it is not worth reading
English may be the language with the most written text (altough I'm not even sure of that), but that's still a fraction of what humanity produced. Dismissing the rest as "probably not worth reading" makes no sense to me. That doesn't prevent me for recognizing that for exemple knowing English is a big advantage in software, since there are more resources and they are often higher quality than what I can find in French. The keyword here being "often". Not "always". And that's taking a very "technical" and "easy to translate" domain. When taking into account culture and all of that, I know that people that can't understand French miss a lot of French culture. Just like I know that I miss lots of culture from languages I don't understand.
After failing to take care of mine the way I should, I needed weightloss surgery a couple years ago
Don't get to where I did - invest in quality food and activity
You'll thank me for it later
My montly mortgage payment for the whole house is ~67% of what I was previously paying to rent a single room. And of that 67%, only 4% is interest (and that 4% is going to go down with time)
So effectively I'm spending 3% of what I was spending previously.
I'll also say my house. It's at least doubled in value in the past 5 years.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results.