I know a guy that bills at least 5000 eur/day (this is before taxes, so personally he doesn't see that much) for fixing Cobol stuff for financial institutions.

I know a guy that bills at least 5000 eur/day (this is before taxes, so personally he doesn't see that much) for fixing Cobol stuff for financial institutions. And depending on the urgency, his rate goes up. He's retired, and works at most 2 or 3 months/year and lives a pretty normal life and lives in a very small house. His neighbors were pretty stunned when he bought himself a Tesla, his previous car was a Nissan Note... He told me he was usually called in for projects where they needed specific expertise when writing Java to interface with existing COBOL, or rewriting COBOL parts with Java and adapt other COBOL code to inter-operate with that. Apparently most COBOL stuff now runs in the JVM - which tought me: in 30 years, Java will be the new COBOL.