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I take slight issue with the fact that he made the lion's share of his savings riding the tech bubble of the late 90's. > He got a computer-engineering degree
by mattlutze 11y ago
I take slight issue with the fact that he made the lion's share of his savings riding the tech bubble of the late 90's.
> He got a computer-engineering degree in 1997, and skipped the graduation ceremony to begin working at a company near Ottawa called Newbridge Networks. This was the early upslope of the dot-com boom. He started at forty-one thousand dollars a year, with no savings or possessions except “a bike, a backpack, and a diploma.” He made the rookie mistake (“what a clueless young man!!!”) of buying a sports car with a loan from his sister. He got his first raise soon afterward, to fifty-seven thousand and six hundred dollars. By the end of year one, he’d saved five thousand dollars. A year later, he had twenty-three thousand. By year five, a quarter of a million.
It's quite apparent that yes, Adeney has done a ton of work to be rigorous enough to have built and to maintain the endowment.
However... it feels like he built this retirement nest egg on a rare period in the markets' history. I'd question how repeatable it is.
- miseg 11y agoIs it repeatable, who knows? But it's a mindset thing too. Do you "give up" and take out the biggest mortgage and car loan you can, or do you act against it and take your destiny into your own hands a bit more.
- mattlutze 11y agoThis guy makes most of his money from a dot-com nest egg and the community of people he's built around him that subscribe to his brand of asceticism. If it brings a person a person emotional comfort to live as the willful anti-consumer, then that's the value in it. But I think it's unkind or deceptive to suggest most people can ride a bike instead of drive a car and suddenly save most of a semi-retirement nest egg in 6-7 years.