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How did you survive if you didn’t make any money last year?
by gortok 8y ago
How did you survive if you didn’t make any money last year?
- mtlynch 8y agoThanks for reading! I had a healthy stockpile of savings from working 10 years at various software jobs that paid well. I was at Google for the last 4 years, did consulting before that, and worked at Microsoft before that.
- akhilcacharya 8y agoI'd like to do this (or at least take a sabbatical) like this in a decade - unfortunately saving as much as you seems difficult to impossible at my current trajectory. Did you ever write up how you managed your prior savings?
- mtlynch 8y agoI haven't written about it, but my strategy was very simple I just put all of my money into the Vanguard 500. For about 18 months before I quit, I started moving my money into less volatile savings like treasury bond funds.
- chosenbreed37 8y ago> How did you survive if you didn’t make any money last year? The author made a reference to the "The 4 hour work" week. If I remember correctly one of the points there was about being able to operate from a low cost center. e.g. I imagine modest savings accumulated in the US would support you if you relocate to say "Thailand" and work from there for 6 months.
- montenegrohugo 8y agoM Lynch also says that 2k expenses/month is more or less covered by interests in assets, which means he probably has around 600.000-ish in stocks (at a 4% safe withdrawal rate)
- godot 8y agoThat's after he bought the house too. A zillow search shows that a 2-bed house in South Hadley, MA is around $150-200k. If bought in cash, his total savings was probably 750-800k. It may be a good reminder for readers of this to realize that if they want to do something similar to the author, having roughly that order of magnitude of savings is a good start -- and even then, having the expenses of living in a big city (Manhattan, SF) is still unsustainable.