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Comment by morkalork | Hacker News Reader

I'd settle for early retirement and lake house scale.

I mean this can be achieved with a high salary job and good savings (in a lower COL area of course).

And a lifetime(thus not really an early retirement).

Depends really on how high the salary is. I think you have to work out what is important to you, and what in one's life is just gratuitious consumption and can thus be eliminated.

Retiring by 35 is very possible on programmer salaries assuming you start young with minimal debt, and avoid major financial disasters.

It comes down to questions like, am I willing to forgo ever eating out, buying expensive toys, down to AC etc. The issue for most people is extremely early retirement isn’t actually worth major sacrifices when another X years can raise your standard of living significantly.

Unfortunately, retirement isn’t that great when you don’t have money or friends to enjoy it with. The trick IMO isn’t about early retirement it’s avoiding the traps that force you into working a job you dislike.

Depends on how much you save. I'm aiming for the option of retirement at 50. For most of the world, that's a very early retirement age. Anything before 65 can essentially be considered early retirement. You don't need to be 35 to call it early retirement.

I'd settle for being able to live in my community long-term scale

I'd settle for being able to live not in a tent or van short-term.

> I'd settle for early retirement and lake house scale.

You can get that as a tech employee with much less risk.

Get into tech in your 20’s, do good enough work, invest the money you aren’t using, and you can retire by 45 or so with a very low degree of variance.

Lake houses are pretty cheap too. Plenty of cute lakes in unpopular hard to reach areas.

> Lake houses are pretty cheap too.

Anything that you'd colloquially call a "lake house" is going to be $1m+, even in frigid remote areas.

But, IDK with inflation maybe in 2023 a $1,000,000 purchase does count as "cheap."

I live in SF so a 1mil lake house feels pretty cheap compared to a 1mil 1.5-bedroom apartMent.

Also there are many countries outside USA with way cheaper lake houses. Prettier lakes too.

850k Montana - https://redf.in/tica6H

865k Texas - https://redf.in/ubeUye

590k California - https://redf.in/bYUSU3

I could do this all day, I enjoy it.

First one is explicitly listed as a fixer-upper.

Last one is <1500 sq ft.

I gotta hand it to you, the second one is fantastic deal, I wonder why. Maybe bad schools or something. But still.

Initially my search had an acre as the minimum lot size. There are probably much better deals in Montana than what I saw. Same for Texas.

The issue in Texas is it takes forever to get anywhere from those river front and lake communities. Not a problem if you're remote, bit of a drag if you work in Austin.

how can you claim this with a straight face (in terms of low variance)?

> how can you claim this with a straight face (in terms of low variance)?

Because I’ve been following tech salaries for 10+ years. If you can’t retire early (before 65) after making 150k+/year for 20+ years, you’re rather living way beyond your means or have very high expectations for what a normal person retirement looks like.

edit: or I guess in America it means you had a medical scare or two that burned all your money. But that’s not a problem anywhere else and has little to do with the maths behind savings. Tech incomes come with decent insurance at least

Though what you say is technically true, most people I know don't have the mindset to save and invest for the long term. Many people making six figures live paycheck to paycheck. They spend every dollar they make, and then some.

If we had better financial education in America, early retirement would be much more common.

isn't thi assuming sustained, averaged growth of some portfolio over decades will continue?

isn't this literally past results guarantee future returns?

People's whose goals are retirement and a lake house rarely have the drive or passion to run a small business.

Who do you think owns most of the lake houses?

Lawyers, doctors, engineers, and professional MBAs. They far outnumber entrepreneurs, even in the ~$10 million net worth stratum.

They might own them, but it doesn't mean they use them.

I fault Elon Musk for many things, but it's never drive or passion. I assure you he isn't spending the weekend relaxing at his lake house.

And people whose goals are to become rich rarely have the intrinsic motivation to ever create anything worthy of market success. Money isn't everything; it's a pretty weak motivator in the grand scheme of things. Yes, the uber-wealthy use money to keep score, but make no mistake, all self-made billionaires have deeper motivations that drove them to success.

Totally agree. I've known startup owners who were all-in on their companies. All-in to a degree that they sacrificed time with their family and friends regularly just to grow the business. I always wonder what the end goal is there. Okay, you have a successful business, woohoo! But your kids hate you, your wife divorced you, and the "friends" you have left are trying to get to your money. Money beyond a certain amount simply does not buy happiness.

Of course, that's not all startup founders, but so many of them (especially the ones that are obsessed with money for the sake of money) do end up that way.

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