8 ms·

I’m going all in on independence, and I’m going to try to make a living with my own bare hands starting from nothing. 500k/year in your last year is "nothing",

• drugme 8y ago
  Yeah - if anything it's another indication of the huge bubble many of us in the tech community live in.
  • max_ 8y ago
    Sounds very "American" if you ask me
• DVassallo 8y ago
  Yes, I saved a lot. About $1M in liquid assets. But I meant that I'll start with no income, no product, no business. I'll write another post about how I set up my safety net.
  • Dayshine 8y ago
    You don't need income with $1M. If you chuck that into an index tracker you can safely withdraw $40k a year...
    • ataturk 8y ago
      Which isn't enough for a family of four, especially with health insurance. Ask me how I know. I'm hoping $2M will do it for me.
    • cm2012 8y ago
      Someone used to spending ~500k a year is not going to want the quality of life change of moving to 40k a year income. Their family would also not appreciate it.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      • hinkley 8y ago
        The best thing I ever did for the family budget is work out a plan ahead of time for windfall money. Odds are OP will never make this much money again. Spending like this is the new normal is how rock stars and athletes end up broke at 40. You have to get out ahead of it. Since OP has a million saved I’m going to assume they had a similar plan in place. But. $150k a year with young kids (they haven’t begun to get expensive yet) in Seattle is pretty high. Getting that down is a good deal of effort that will distract from running the business.
        • kamaal 8y ago
          >>Odds are OP will never make this much money again. I hope these kind of things are taught to people early. Somewhere in school, or may be at a level of a social value system. The default every day mode for most people is to work very hard and fail. In fact you are lucky to achieve mediocre success even after working insanely hard. >>The best thing I ever did for the family budget is work out a plan ahead of time for windfall money. Yes the best thing to do in case of a windfall period is to take all the money and put it into some kind of an investment. So that when the gravy train stops, you have something to fall back on. >>Spending like this is the new normal is how rock stars and athletes end up broke at 40. You have to get out ahead of it. It isn't just rock stars and athletes, its your every day cousins and uncles, who have some career run, spend like no tomorrow, when the gravy train stops, they realize they have their best years behind them, all their money is gone, and nothing that they can do will help them even get by, let alone take them back to their past glory. >>$150k a year with young kids (they haven’t begun to get expensive yet) in Seattle is pretty high. Getting that down is a good deal of effort that will distract from running the business. A lot of people will be willing to show sympathy to you if you met with an accident and bad things happened to you beyond you control. But if you threw away a perfectly fine opportunity and asked them to settle for less, they would be asking why should they even be doing it at all.
      • DVassallo 8y ago
        True. It's hard to regress on the standard of living, especially with a family. I wasn't spending $500K/year though :) I still made sure I abundantly lived within my means.
    • mixmastamyk 8y ago
      And have to live like a normal person, no high-rolling.
    • DVassallo 8y ago
      Author here. My expenses are more like $150K a year, so my runway is only a few years. I have a family, two small kids (4 and 2), and live a comfortable life in Seattle. I could obviously adjust my standard of living, move somewhere cheaper, etc, but I didn't want my family to have to change anything from this experiment I'm doing with my life.
      • Existenceblinks 8y ago
        I understand you here. I just quit a financial startup. My runway is more than 10 years because I only have to take care my mother (Yeah, Single forever!). The real issue is mental health, that would lead to physical health if not aware!
      • pkaye 8y ago
        I hope you still have good health/life insurance. Maybe you are young but life changing events can happen to anyone as it did to me.
        • DVassallo 8y ago
          I do. Got a $5M life insurance, and disability insurance that pays $10K/month if I can't do my work anymore. Got a high deductible health insurance through the ACA exchange. Life and disability insurance were quite cheap actually: about $3K/year in total (age 35 and good health). Health insurance is obviously expensive. The cheapest is about $14K/year here in WA for a family of four (which is what I got). Deductible is about $7/$14K IIRC.
          • j4kp07 8y ago
            > The cheapest is about $14K/year here in WA for a family of four (which is what I got). Deductible is about $7/$14K IIRC. Just think, you need to have $21k in medical receipts before you can even break even. ACA is such a joke and yet many people in our society believe MORE "free" healthcare will drive prices (ie. taxes) lower.
      • pxue 8y ago
  • tyler- 8y ago
    What kind of skill sets do you have to warrant Amazon paying you that much? What kind of skill sets do developers have at this level that differentiates them from everyone else?
    • todd3834 8y ago
      Amazon’s stock has gone up a lot. Likely that has a lot to do with it but if this is all base salary that’s awesome. Usually big stock grants go out to those who have shown themselves to be force multipliers. If you can make everyone around you more productive than you’re contributing in ways that make companies like to put golden handcuffs on you.
      • DVassallo 8y ago
        My base was $160K, and the rest stock. If the stock didn't increase so much since 2016 I would have made around $380K each year in the last 3 years.
  • todd3834 8y ago
    Good for you! Honestly I don’t understand the criticism on one sentence of your post and it made sense to me. “Now that I have some runway I’m going to build something from scratch”? Probably wouldn’t satisfy those that could only dream to make $500k and are frustrated you don’t appreciate it I guess. I’m not making that much but your post makes sense and resonated with me.
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      The problem is the wording. Author makes it sound like they'll be pulling themselves up by their bootstraps when they're really just standing on a giant pile of money (which they earned rather than inherited, to be fair). People have a very negative reaction to this because they see it way too often in the rhetoric of certain political groups.
  • DSingularity 8y ago
    You probably don’t want to post this stuff so directly on net..
    • icedchai 8y ago
      This is true. But how do you know he's not using a fake name / pseudonym?
  • TheShrug 8y ago
    I know you're looking for attention or validation, but I have a feeling you'll probably get more negative attention than positive when you seem to be equating having $1M in liquid assets to "starting with no income, no product, no business".
    • AimForTheBushes 8y ago
      One small loan of a million dollars!
    • DVassallo 8y ago
      Those two things are not equivalent to me. Yes I have savings, but I also have no income right now.
      • TheShrug 8y ago
        You are correct! But the way you phrased it makes it sound like you are experiencing a hardship, which I think most would disagree with. Don't get me wrong, I think you should be proud, you clearly did a lot to earn your savings, but you're trying to make it sound like retiring young with $1M in liquid assets part is the difficult part when its probably the easy part. You don't have to work for a very long time, or at all!
        • DVassallo 8y ago
          Not at all. I live a very comfortable life and I don't expect it to change. Wasn't my intention to make it sound like hardship. But I don't have infinite runway, so I do have to make something.
      • lowercased 8y ago
        Unless that $1M is stuffed under your mattress, you likely have some income from is. Even sitting in a CD at 2% you'll be pulling in $20k/year - that's not "no income". What I think you mean is you don't have steady W2 income from an employer.
  • DougN7 8y ago
    Good luck. Cautionary tale: I have a buddy that was in a similar situation (more than $1M actually). He started a business, was careful, and after a few years went bankrupt because the business never gained traction. He sure wishes he hadn’t gone down that path. He’ll probably never get back to where he was. Just a regular developer now. If you ask him if the experience was worth it, he’d tell you no. So be careful.
    • olavgg 8y ago
      I did something similar 4 years ago. It was the best decision I have ever made. I did consultancy, sold myself cheap compared to the big consulting companies and helped several startups becoming real businesses. I loved it, every day was awesome! Even though I sold myself cheap, I still made more money that the salary I would get if I had worked for the big consulting companies. The biggest challenge is selling yourself, and I am not very good at it. Still it worked out great for 2 years until I joined a startup as the first employee which has gone from 3 to 100 employees in just 2 years. If I was employed at a regular company, I would never have gotten the chance to join that startup.
      • DougN7 8y ago
        That’s awesome - congratulations! I’m glad it worked for you.
  • xiphias2 8y ago
    $1M is nothing when you could double it in a few years. Anyways good luck with your startup, and you can always go back, and take your quitting just as a vacation (many of my friends and I were doing the same thing, it's totally normal).
• spyspy 8y ago
  I've seen the same attitude a lot of times. "I was an investment banker for 10 years but then I moved to Colorado and became a ski bum and I couldn't be happier!" Like alright man live your life but stop acting like you discovered some dark secret that anyone can reproduce. You know you ain't out here paying student loans.
  • crushcrashcrush 8y ago
    100% - all my arty, bohemian friends have trust funds.
    • RandallBrown 8y ago
      Most of my ski/hiker/climber bum friends are broke.
    • cafard 8y ago
      They are fortunate, then. I have known some pretty fair painters over the years--good enough to be shown in a local gallery--and they have not had trust funds. Some taught, some worked in printing production.
  • eertami 8y ago
    I guess "Millionaire decides to stop working" wasn't an enticing headline for the author.
• blunte 8y ago
  Most people would happily struggle for independence on half of "nothing". Now, as warped as this all seems, this pales in comparison to what some tech people make in finance.
• wnevets 8y ago
  "All I got was a small loan of a million dollars"
  • chipperyman573 8y ago
    This was the exact thought I had when I read the article. It's not even that far away from it, his yearly salary is half a million.
• duxup 8y ago
  You see a lot of that in some odd lifestyle bloggers and media folks. They have a bunch of money, move upstate, talk about all these crafty / cosey things they do and how great a life choice they made and contrast it with a lot of bad things .... that are the only reason they can make the choices they can now.
  • hinkley 8y ago
    I’m about to downshift myself. I have no illusions how much lower my cost of living will be due to selling my big city house and needing a comparatively tiny loan for the next one. I’m reminded regularly about a line from the Dalai Lama. When we are young we sell our health for money and when we are old we will pay anything to get it back. My original life plan was to do this maybe 8-10 years earlier. But the startups I picked didn’t go big (I chose for impact not cash out potential), two recessions and a divorce. And I can only do this now because I have simpler tastes (except for tools).
    • duxup 8y ago
      Yeah I think that quote is a lot more apt than some of the descriptions we see otherwise. I'd like to do it, maybe try my hand at woodworking.
      • hinkley 8y ago
        One thing I left out that your other comment brought to mind is that I don't think the lifestyle bloggers are accomplishing anything. I do feel we're shorting ourselves by hyperfocusing on a narrow field, since innovation is quite frequently the art of applying knowledge from other domains. But I don't say it often because I've seen that proselytizing about taking a breath and engaging with your surroundings just makes people double down. It's a thing I think you have to feel to understand and lecturing people about it works against your aims. I come at it sideways by trying to encourage people to have more hobbies or at least see the sights/local events.
• Existenceblinks 8y ago
  I'd guesstimate he has 3m saving optimistically right now. In my developing country, this is definitely a retirement. EDIT: oh he just said $1M saving there.
• notjustanymike 8y ago
  It's really hard to have exactly nothing. You can have much less than nothing, through student debt, and slightly more through and savings. Even then, a college education has worth (excluding philosophy) so no money might not mean no things. In the the end, nothing is as complicated as nothing.
• sergiotapia 8y ago
  Gentlemen, when I first started Reynholm Industries I just had two things in my possession. A dream, and six million pounds.
• graeme 8y ago
  I think they meant the business has no base. Capital helps. It won't make you profitable though.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• startupdiscuss 8y ago
  You're looking at it the wrong way (i think). The point is not that he is starving, or that he is desperate. The point of that number is what he gave up! The point is he gave up a job of 0.5 million, potentially 1 million in a few years. To top it off the job had reasonable hours, great people and he was getting positive feedback. You would not expect people to give that up. The question is why? Instead, you're pointing out how lucky he was. Well, that is his point! He was so lucky and is giving it up! Aren't you curious why?
  • antisthenes 8y ago
    > You would not expect people to give that up. The question is why? I would absolutely expect people to give that up, as well as any senior economist student would tell you, the labor preference curve is backward-bending after you start making a certain amount of money. > He was so lucky and is giving it up! Aren't you curious why? Not in the slightest. There are multiple studies saying that happiness plateaus after a certain amount of income. It's his life and he probably found his own plateau.
    • startupdiscuss 8y ago
      > I would absolutely expect people to give that up, as well as any senior economist student would tell you, the labor preference curve is backward-bending after you start making a certain amount of money. Are you sure this is a good student? The bend in the curve demonstrates the preference for incremental wealth. So you might forego $500k to $600k. Going down to $0 takes you through the steepest part of the curve. (I guess with interest on savings, the person is going down to something like $25k-$40k.) > There are multiple studies saying that happiness plateaus after a certain amount of income. It's his life and he probably found his own plateau. I am not sure what you mean by "probably found his own plateau". Do you mean he found he didn't need as much money to live?
      • antisthenes 8y ago
        > I am not sure what you mean by "probably found his own plateau". Do you mean he found he didn't need as much money to live? He figured out that living on $150k (stated elsewhere) and doing his own thing 24/7 gives him more utility and satisfaction than earning $500k and working at Amazon full time. Neither one is particularly interesting, because it's already in dream territory for most people and if you gave them a choice of living on $150k and working on their own business (an enormous safety net), most people would be happy with those options.
• mindcrime 8y ago
  500k/year in your last year is "nothing", Please. It was perfectly obvious from context that the "nothing" he was referring to was his "new thing". No product, no customers, no brand, no marketing, no customer discovery, etc... that's pretty much "nothing" in terms of starting a business. It's not like he claimed to be broke, or a destitute, homeless, bum. If anything, I kinda feel like we should give the OP credit for being transparent in a way that most people aren't.