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> Take a $ 500-1000 / day, full-remote job > Take 2 months for holidays in-between contracts > Do this for 7 years while investing most of your salary in a di

> Take a $ 500-1000 / day, full-remote job > Take 2 months for holidays in-between contracts > Do this for 7 years while investing most of your salary in a diversified portfolio. Working $1000/day contracts for 5 days per week, 10 months per year is equivalent to $217K of contractor income per year. But contractor income is not comparable to normal career income because you have to handle additional taxes and health insurance, so this is more like a $150K (plus or minus) full time job once you subtract self-employment taxes and pay for health insurance. But that’s also assuming that the author stated out making $1000/day, always made $1000/day, and always had availability of these easy, low-effort, $1000/day contracts whenever they wanted. Most people don’t start out contracting with an unlimited supply of contracts that pay exactly what they want. Working a $150K job for 7 years isn’t really a recipe for getting “wealthy”. Even if you could reduce your expenses to below $25K per year (eg $1K/month rent, $1K/month for everything else) you might be able to save $100K of that annually after taxes. But that’s best case and you really have to compromise a lot to get there unless you really enjoy living in the middle of nowhere, never traveling, and none of your hobbies or interests cost any money. So there’s a lot missing from this blog post. I suspect maybe the author got lucky with some outlier investments, but that’s not something that can be conveyed in a “how to” blog post. FIRE type wealth trajectories are possible, but this isn’t what it looks like. Working normally-paid jobs for 7 years and just living your normal life doesn’t get you there (unless you luck into some 1000X investment somewhere or get a huge inheritance boost, but those are rarely mentioned).

rootsudo 5y ago
So, the idea is that you save and invest, you don't have free standing cash - you put a majority of your liquidity into investment vehicles.
yig 5y ago
This is essentially Mr. Money Mustache's formula: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/02/22/getting-rich-from-zero-to-hero-in-one-blog-post/ https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/02/22/getting-rich-from...
- AutumnCurtain 5y ago
  Important to note than a seven year timeline with his calculations would take extreme penny pinching and would yield a fairly low sustainable annual income compared to your previous salary, but it's certainly possible.
eloisant 5y ago
Yes, when you dig a bit these kind of posts they usually got extremely lucky by being at the right company at the right time (enter when it's a startup then make $$$ with stock options or RSU when the company IPO or gets acquired) or at some point worked at a big tech with a total comp between 300k or 400k. There is no "secret" like saving or investing the right way.
- icedchai 5y ago
  The "secret" is doing it consistently, through good times and bad. You need to consistently save and invest, month after month, year after year, at least 30% of your income. When your account drops 10 - 20%, you need to suck it up and invest more. A friend of mine is on the FIRE path. The first million took him 15 years (this covered the dot-com boom, bust, great recession, and the recovery that followed.) The 2nd, 6 years. The third, less than 2 years (thanks QE / money printing.)
stepbeek 5y ago
This sounds like it's specific to a particular market (and that market is the USA). My experience has been that being an employee (in the UK) resulted in significantly more taxes than being self-employed. Europeans almost never have comparable healthcare costs to the USA, so that part isn't universally true either.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  > being an employee (in the UK) resulted in significantly more taxes than being self-employed Why would this be the case? I'm not challenging your claim, I'm just curious. Is the idea that the UK wants to give tax breaks to small businesses? > Europeans almost never have comparable healthcare costs to the USA, so that part isn't universally true either. Not sure about self-employment, but American professionals take home (i.e., after taxes, healthcare, and retirement/pension) considerably more than their European counterparts. To the parent's point, it's quite a lot more difficult for an ordinary (i.e., not-self-employed) American professional to get wealthy by following the approach outlined in this article, but it's quite a lot harder still for our ordinary European professional.
  - stepbeek 5y ago
    The UK has a progressive income tax system (iirc up to 10k is tax-free, then 20% from 10-50k, then 40% from 50-150k and 45% for everything beyond that). This means that spreading tax liability between capital gains and income tax leads to a lower total tax bill. You also get to write off business expenses and reclaim VAT (sales tax) as a business, which a normal consumer cannot do. Your point about remuneration is spot on. But remote work for US clients is possible and I’ve found that they’re happy to pay close to US rates for UK remote.
germinalphrase 5y ago
Which is, of course, still very good money for a single earner in most of the country.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Especially in early career.
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    I’ve been in my current career for seven years and make 44k (52 with benefits accounted), so I am very much an outside observer here.
- yosito 5y ago
  > still very good money for a single earner in most of the country Not to mention the world, since we're not all in the same country.
unpolloloco 5y ago
Still great $$ if you live in a reasonable location. Where you can buy a reasonable house for $200k instead of $2M
anm89 5y ago
Working 1099 should be preferable from a tax perspective (if through an s corp) and from a liquidity standpoint (money is cash, not 401k contorbutions), not worse, I would think. You do have to pay health insurance monthly but for a young single person I'm at 250 a month so nothing that really changes things.
- wonderwonder 5y ago
  Even better, if you are married, your spouse can have a job that provides health insurance and you work as a contractor.
- cactus2093 5y ago
  Exactly what I was thinking, sure you have to pay health insurance and self-employment taxes but you can write off so many other expenses. You can write off computer purchases, even part of your rent or mortgage if you use an extra bedroom as an office. And then there are all kinds of ways you can re-invest earnings in your business instead of taking it as salary if your monthly costs are only $25k a month.
Chris2048 5y ago
> Take a $ 500-1000 / day, full-remote job How common is this as contractor pay outside the US? I'd find it hard to hit the lower end of that (i.e. 440 eur per day) in fully-remote jobs, despite the pandemic making remote jobs more common. For context, I'm a Python dev, in finance. I used to do Java, which I note still seems to offer higher salaries, but I wouldn't be tempted to return. Maybe the AWS route could work?
- throwaway143256 5y ago
  Very common, worked Netherlands, Belgium and Germany for ~10 years, doing 200k eur annually on average, contracting, Python, Java, senior dev, devops, etc. My immediate contracting colleagues, about 20 guys and gals are doing comparatively (I.e., ~90 to 120 eur rates, ~2000 hours a year). Edit: apparently very common for my bubble at least, no idea if this is “normal” In Netherlands, Belgium and Germany..
  - tw20212021 5y ago
    120/hr? Rates are lower now, at least the ones on the open market. And 2000 hours a year is a stretch, you need to take some holidays. But all in all, still better than..
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- hobofan 5y ago
  Fully-remote I couldn't say (I feel it'd be much harder for client acquisition to build the same level of trust), but pre-pandemic, and shortly after its start I was able to consistently make ~800EUR/day (100EUR/hr) on gigs where I was in the office 1 day/week in Berlin. ~75% of clients accepted that rate on the spot, so with a lot of inbound requests, you could probably even push for more. That was mostly for full-stack (Node)JS jobs.
- DeathArrow 5y ago
  >For context, I'm a Python dev, in finance. I used to do Java, which I note still seems to offer higher salaries, but I wouldn't be tempted to return. Maybe the AWS route could work? According to SO surveys Python programmers are better payed than Java programmers: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#work-salary https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#work-salary
moonchrome 5y ago
> But contractor income is not comparable to normal career income because you have to handle additional taxes and health insurance, so this is more like a $150K (plus or minus) full time job once you subtract self-employment taxes and pay for health insurance. What ? I've never heard of a scenario where you get less money after tax as a contractor vs employee, even without doing things like claiming a bunch of everyday expenses on your business (like a car, home office rent, equipment, etc.)
- tdeck 5y ago
  IIUC in the U.S. you have to pay the employer payroll taxes if you're self employed. https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/self-employment-tax-social-security-and-medicare-taxes https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
- pkrotich 5y ago
  I guess you cheat your taxes then - 1099 sucks, you don't get employer matches on taxes.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > What ? I've never heard of a scenario where you get less money after tax as a contractor vs employee It’s called self-employment tax: https://smartasset.com/taxes/self-employment-tax https://smartasset.com/taxes/self-employment-tax It’s not actually a separate tax. Normally your employer pays these taxes but you don’t see it. When you are a contractor you are self-employed, so as an employer of yourself you have to pay these taxes like any other employer. Some people play games with certain corporate structures where they pretend they’re only worth a fraction of what they’re getting paid and then they extract the rest as dividends. It’s one of those tax tricks that works as long as nobody ever looks to closely at your tax returns, but if you’re caught you have to pay it back plus penalties.
  - mpmpmpmp 5y ago
    I think the point is if you're a contractor and you're not getting the same rates as an equivalent company would for that contract/position you're under-selling yourself. As for the "tax trick" you still don't get out of paying income taxes on the entire revenue you generate. You just pay employment taxes on the portion that is salary. Whether that's "fair" or not is open to debate of course.
stagger87 5y ago
> So there’s a lot missing from this blog post. I suspect maybe the author got lucky with some outlier investments, but that’s not something that can be conveyed in a “how to” blog post. Why do you think that? All the numbers work out. Even in your hypothetical scenario, investing 100k for 7 years, especially in the last 7 years, would easily bring you 1M total investments. > FIRE type wealth trajectories are possible, but this isn’t what it looks like. Working normally-paid jobs for 7 years and just living your normal life doesn’t get you there. This is exactly what FIRE is, and again, using numbers from your own post, which I think are reasonable, this is exactly what it looks like. 1M invested, 25k/yr expenses = 40 years with no gains in investments, people into FIRE usually assume 4% growth, so he would be even better off. If that isn't FIRE, I don't know what is.
- marktangotango 5y ago
  > would easily bring you 1M total investments. I think this is the disconnect with GP, $1M isn't what anyone can really call "wealthy" nowadays. Yes, it's a lot of money, but does not allow one to live what most people consider to be a rich lifestyle.
  - jacobmischka 5y ago
    I absolutely can and will call $1M wealthy. Anyone who thinks it isn't is absolutely living in a bubble.
    - marktangotango 5y ago
      I once shared this outlook, but when one considers their own ideas about the lifestyle "wealthy" entails, and run some numbers, specifically determine the annual spend for that lifestyle, one will quickly realize the truth. A million can be blown in a year, or SWR'd (safe withdrawal rate) at $40k a year indefinitely. Can you retire on $40k a year? Would you want that level of income and lifestyle? Of course this depends on location and cost of living. I am referring to someone in the US. Edit: Specifically, does anyone (in the US) consider a $40k year income to qualify as "Wealthy"? Since that's what's being discussed here.
chefandy 5y ago
a) His definition of wealthy isn't entirely financial: "My personal mantra is: 'try to get 80% of the reward with 20% of the work'. I’m not interested in giving 100% to get 100%: that is an overcrowded game." b) It says that he reduced his living expenses and invested most of it in a diversified portfolio without too much in crypto. c) the real missing ingredient is to do this all during a period of explosive growth in both the stock market and your chosen sector, which involves a lot of luck.
- uncomputation 5y ago
  Yeah, was gonna add this too. This swaggering “jump ship” attitude and taking 2 month holidays is only possible during the unprecedented economic stimulus we’ve seen with Covid. In a tighter job market, even luck would be hard pressed to make this advisable.
wonderwonder 5y ago
100k invested a year at 8% return is $963k, essentially a millionaire and very wealthy in most of the world. Nothing fancy required just get standard stock market returns. Even going slightly less aggressively, if you are self employed you can put ~52k a year into a an i401k pre-tax and then 6k into an IRA. So 58k a year makes you a millionaire after 11 years. Run it for 20 years and you have 2.8 million and can retire relatively young. Its not driving a Rolls Royce retirement but its comfortable and you got there through low stress and got to enjoy the journey.
- mNovak 5y ago
  >> self-employed >> you got there through low stress My experiences differ
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  An 8% return is far from guaranteed over a 7 year interval. There are plenty of inertvals where you would be in the negative. A lot of people are forgetting that we have been riding a gigantic stock market bubble over the last 12 years. This won’t last.
  - wonderwonder 5y ago
    Sure, but its done on average 9% the last 10 years and if you just invested in an S&p 500 etf you would have made a little over 13%. There are definitely down times but even if you started investing in January 2007 to ensure you caught the worst of the 2008 recession and just kept investing monthly for 7 years, your returns would be on average 12%. Of course all things end but historically and including now it works. Its a safer bet that you will get to a million in the stock market than putting your money in a bank where you are guaranteed to lose money each year with inflation. Serious question, what's the alternative for a safer investment and having a real retirement? Everything booms and busts and then booms again (mostly).
    - papito 5y ago
      The alternative is winning the birth lottery and sitting on so much real estate that the market doesn't really matter - it's just another source of more risky income.
disruptthelaw 5y ago
I’m not sure I agree with the narrative that 1$ earned as a contractor is worth less than 1$ earned as an employee. Seems to me that the opposite is true. A contractor can get much more creative with taxes, off setting loads of expenses against his income thus having a significantly lower effective tax rate than the employee with equivalent gross income.
softfalcon 5y ago
I mean, even the author agrees with you. They start their story with this: > Preamble: I'm extremely lucky. If we live in a Simulation and life is just a Video Game, mine was started on difficulty level “Very Easy”: I was born in a developed country in the 80s (Italy), with access to fresh water, very good carbohydrates and a decent education system. So what you're going to read is 99% luck and 1% planets alignment. Please, correct success stories for selection bias.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  That’s quite a cop-out for a blog post that contains a lot of specific, actionable steps.
  - gcheong 5y ago
    I think the qualification is necessary. Even Warren Buffet admits that he got rich in a very specific way using skills that would be all but useless in any other context but him winning the "ovarian lottery". https://www.sloww.co/ovarian-lottery/ https://www.sloww.co/ovarian-lottery/
    - demygale 5y ago
      From the link: Buffett says, "I didn’t get money from my parents, and I really didn’t want it." Which kind of elides the fact that his father was a sitting US Congressman. Investors were willing to give large sums of money to a man in his early twenties so he could flip manufacturing firms. Ovarian lottery doesn't quite cover it.
  - brighton36 5y ago
    Because proclaiming oneself 'self made' is immoral. There's no roi on that story anymore. Imo, that's kinda dumb. But, such is the fashion .
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    Most people reading this paragraph start with the same luck coefficient. (Not all, so no need to add your personal story here. But most.)
soperj 5y ago
They live in the UK. Health insurance is literally a non factor in the developed world other than the US.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  For tech people in the US it is also a non-factor. The much greater income allows for buying great insurance coverage.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  The UK is one of the countries with the lowest social insurance taxes in rich Europe. NHS is also one of the worst experiences of healthcare I've ever had and good companies in the UK routinely offer private healthcare (eg. BUPA).
- jdminhbg 5y ago
  In Germany, the public option for health insurance runs you 14.6% of your income[0]. That is not a non factor. [0]: https://welcome-center-germany.com/health-insurance-for-self-employed-and-freelancers-in-germany/#Public-Health-Insurance-in-Germany https://welcome-center-germany.com/health-insurance-for-self...
  - pillefitz 5y ago
    But it's capped at roughly 400€/month for each employer/employee
- TMWNN 5y ago
  You're almost certainly an American, who thinks that a) healthcare throughout the developed world other than the US is just like the NHS, and b) the taxes that go to pay for the NHS are inconsequential. jdminhbg gave Germany as an example of a country that doesn't follow the NHS example. The German model of insurance based on public and private sickness funds, separate from hospitals and doctors, is a) closer to the "average" among developed countries than the monolithic NHS model of unified ownership of payer and delivery, and b) more or less what the US has post-Obamacare; the main difference is that it is harder (not impossible) to evade the mandate in Germany than in the US.
Mikeb85 5y ago
> Working a $150K job for 7 years isn’t really a recipe for getting “wealthy” It definitely is if you live in a LCOL area of an EU country. The author mentions he's Italian. So he gets health care and shit for free while being based in a country where it's very easy to live cheaply if you stay out of the big cities. Definitely possible to save a ton of money while living well in those conditions.
- nickpp 5y ago
  > he gets health care and shit for free Not free - he's (probably) paying taxes on that remote income, and the maximal rate is rather high in those "shit for free" countries.
  - Mikeb85 5y ago
    In his income bracket the tax rate in Italy is only 7% higher. And you can find pretty nice places to live in Italy with a COL similar to the rural US.
  - jokethrowaway 5y ago
    Taxes in Italy are absolutely insane. You'd be better off moving to some other country with lower taxes, shitty public healthcare and then pay for a good private healthcare. The cost will be a fraction of a good US private healthcare (the high cost is the main problem of US healthcare, not who's financing it).
    - etergri 5y ago
      Finally some good sense. Do you live in Italy by any chance? You didn't write the usual bullsh1t like "italy has a good social security net / good and free healthcare / you live well with few money" so I'd be surprised if you were a foreigner.
lowercased 5y ago
You could also spend a bit of time learning about structuring a business to reduce taxes. In a moderate US state, and a bit of up-front planning, on $200k in gross receipts you can likely pay 10-15% in combined taxes (state/federal income, fica, etc). It would still mean you should not spend more than you earn, be moderately frugal, and sock away and invest what you can. But being able to put away $50k-$100k for a few years in a row is a gigantic leg up for most people in most areas.
Glyptodon 5y ago
Getting to a bare million with that level of saving seems possible over the last 7 years mostly because returns on stock and crypto have been quite high.
nostrademons 5y ago
Note that the author lives in Europe (Italy), where there is a robust social safety net and typical programmer salaries are about $45-60K/year. It doesn't take nearly as much to be "wealthy" relative to those conditions. Author is basically engaging in a form of geographic arbitrage by working remote from Europe. They get to enjoy wages comparable to U.S. programmers, but get the European social safety net, and since they're not living in a big city, rural cost of living. It's not unlike U.S. tech workers who choose to live in a remote rural village, or Californians who retire to Boise at age 30, or Canadians who come to Silicon Valley to work for a FANG and found a startup and then retire to Canada after doing that for 7-10 years. (The latter is my favorite, because Canada allows citizens a step up in capital gains basis upon moving back to Canada, so you can make literally millions in Silicon Valley stock over a few years and pay zero tax on it, then enjoy the Canadian social safety net for retirement.)
- jlos 5y ago
  Good luck retiring in most major Canadian cities if you don't already own real estate there.
  - nostrademons 5y ago
    Article said "don't live in a major city". Besides, my understanding is that prices are still reasonable in smaller cities like Quebec City, Kingston, Halifax, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, etc.
    - LegitShady 5y ago
      Prices in all of these cities have gone up. Halifax average sale went from $330k to $370k from 2019 to 2020. People see if they don't buy in now, they may never be able to buy in, and are buying in, driving prices up further, causing more people to panic buy, etc. It also leads speculators to buy houses because they see property giving incredible returns. Pay in many of these cities, or employment opportunities that pay well, are limited. If they're relatively reasonable now at this pace they won't be for much longer. Alberta is perhaps a little different because they seem to build new housing much faster than many other provinces.
ixacto 5y ago
$12000 saved per month for seven years in the stock market S&P500 FZROX or VTSAX will give you ballpark 1-1.5MM inflation-adjusted (10% return yoy - 2% inflation) this is average tho, results could be much higher/lower... This of course isn't going to be enough anymore due to the US housing market in big cities, but could be enough if you work remote and live in a smaller town or something. We could also have inflation problems, 6% cpi hike is a lot.
lhorie 5y ago
Yeah, I have some questions too. Even at a rate of 150k/yr, while today that seems within the reach of many north american senior level devs, 7 years ago that was tippity top percentile pay, so it's not exactly something that anyone could've done, literally by definition. One other thing that isn't mentioned either is market ups and downs. If your nest egg started at the bottom of the subprime crisis, that's a very very different timing prospect than if you had significant equity that lost value in the late aughts. And lastly, is 1M in liquid assets even considered "wealthy" these days? "Well-off", maybe, perhaps even "rich", but "wealthy" in my mind means "bentleys and yatches are pocket change".
compsciphd 5y ago
eh. my highest salary in the past 10 years has been $170K and that was living in some of the most expensive cities in the world (NYC, Bay Area and Tel Aviv). Now, I'm single, so I'm able to compromise a bit by having roommates, but I was still paying over $1K a month in rent in all the places. With that said, by being single and earning that amount of money AND living in one of the longest stock market bull markets ever (and yes, those of us who started working in 2009-2010 are very very lucky) I would expect someone like that to have been able to build a net worth close to $2mil without much effort. the bull market and "normal savings" (say $50-$100K as you mention) did most of the work. but, as they say, past performance isn't indicative of future results.

rootsudo 5y ago

So, the idea is that you save and invest, you don't have free standing cash - you put a majority of your liquidity into investment vehicles.

yig 5y ago

This is essentially Mr. Money Mustache's formula: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/02/22/getting-rich-from-zero-to-hero-in-one-blog-post/ https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/02/22/getting-rich-from...

AutumnCurtain 5y ago
Important to note than a seven year timeline with his calculations would take extreme penny pinching and would yield a fairly low sustainable annual income compared to your previous salary, but it's certainly possible.

eloisant 5y ago

Yes, when you dig a bit these kind of posts they usually got extremely lucky by being at the right company at the right time (enter when it's a startup then make $$$ with stock options or RSU when the company IPO or gets acquired) or at some point worked at a big tech with a total comp between 300k or 400k. There is no "secret" like saving or investing the right way.

icedchai 5y ago
The "secret" is doing it consistently, through good times and bad. You need to consistently save and invest, month after month, year after year, at least 30% of your income. When your account drops 10 - 20%, you need to suck it up and invest more. A friend of mine is on the FIRE path. The first million took him 15 years (this covered the dot-com boom, bust, great recession, and the recovery that followed.) The 2nd, 6 years. The third, less than 2 years (thanks QE / money printing.)

stepbeek 5y ago

This sounds like it's specific to a particular market (and that market is the USA). My experience has been that being an employee (in the UK) resulted in significantly more taxes than being self-employed. Europeans almost never have comparable healthcare costs to the USA, so that part isn't universally true either.

throwaway894345 5y ago
> being an employee (in the UK) resulted in significantly more taxes than being self-employed Why would this be the case? I'm not challenging your claim, I'm just curious. Is the idea that the UK wants to give tax breaks to small businesses? > Europeans almost never have comparable healthcare costs to the USA, so that part isn't universally true either. Not sure about self-employment, but American professionals take home (i.e., after taxes, healthcare, and retirement/pension) considerably more than their European counterparts. To the parent's point, it's quite a lot more difficult for an ordinary (i.e., not-self-employed) American professional to get wealthy by following the approach outlined in this article, but it's quite a lot harder still for our ordinary European professional.
- stepbeek 5y ago
  The UK has a progressive income tax system (iirc up to 10k is tax-free, then 20% from 10-50k, then 40% from 50-150k and 45% for everything beyond that). This means that spreading tax liability between capital gains and income tax leads to a lower total tax bill. You also get to write off business expenses and reclaim VAT (sales tax) as a business, which a normal consumer cannot do. Your point about remuneration is spot on. But remote work for US clients is possible and I’ve found that they’re happy to pay close to US rates for UK remote.

germinalphrase 5y ago

Which is, of course, still very good money for a single earner in most of the country.

ghaff 5y ago
Especially in early career.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  I’ve been in my current career for seven years and make 44k (52 with benefits accounted), so I am very much an outside observer here.
yosito 5y ago
> still very good money for a single earner in most of the country Not to mention the world, since we're not all in the same country.

unpolloloco 5y ago

Still great $$ if you live in a reasonable location. Where you can buy a reasonable house for $200k instead of $2M

anm89 5y ago

Working 1099 should be preferable from a tax perspective (if through an s corp) and from a liquidity standpoint (money is cash, not 401k contorbutions), not worse, I would think. You do have to pay health insurance monthly but for a young single person I'm at 250 a month so nothing that really changes things.

wonderwonder 5y ago
Even better, if you are married, your spouse can have a job that provides health insurance and you work as a contractor.
cactus2093 5y ago
Exactly what I was thinking, sure you have to pay health insurance and self-employment taxes but you can write off so many other expenses. You can write off computer purchases, even part of your rent or mortgage if you use an extra bedroom as an office. And then there are all kinds of ways you can re-invest earnings in your business instead of taking it as salary if your monthly costs are only $25k a month.

Chris2048 5y ago

> Take a $ 500-1000 / day, full-remote job How common is this as contractor pay outside the US? I'd find it hard to hit the lower end of that (i.e. 440 eur per day) in fully-remote jobs, despite the pandemic making remote jobs more common. For context, I'm a Python dev, in finance. I used to do Java, which I note still seems to offer higher salaries, but I wouldn't be tempted to return. Maybe the AWS route could work?

throwaway143256 5y ago
Very common, worked Netherlands, Belgium and Germany for ~10 years, doing 200k eur annually on average, contracting, Python, Java, senior dev, devops, etc. My immediate contracting colleagues, about 20 guys and gals are doing comparatively (I.e., ~90 to 120 eur rates, ~2000 hours a year). Edit: apparently very common for my bubble at least, no idea if this is “normal” In Netherlands, Belgium and Germany..
- tw20212021 5y ago
  120/hr? Rates are lower now, at least the ones on the open market. And 2000 hours a year is a stretch, you need to take some holidays. But all in all, still better than..
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
hobofan 5y ago
Fully-remote I couldn't say (I feel it'd be much harder for client acquisition to build the same level of trust), but pre-pandemic, and shortly after its start I was able to consistently make ~800EUR/day (100EUR/hr) on gigs where I was in the office 1 day/week in Berlin. ~75% of clients accepted that rate on the spot, so with a lot of inbound requests, you could probably even push for more. That was mostly for full-stack (Node)JS jobs.
DeathArrow 5y ago
>For context, I'm a Python dev, in finance. I used to do Java, which I note still seems to offer higher salaries, but I wouldn't be tempted to return. Maybe the AWS route could work? According to SO surveys Python programmers are better payed than Java programmers: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#work-salary https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#work-salary

moonchrome 5y ago

> But contractor income is not comparable to normal career income because you have to handle additional taxes and health insurance, so this is more like a $150K (plus or minus) full time job once you subtract self-employment taxes and pay for health insurance. What ? I've never heard of a scenario where you get less money after tax as a contractor vs employee, even without doing things like claiming a bunch of everyday expenses on your business (like a car, home office rent, equipment, etc.)

tdeck 5y ago
IIUC in the U.S. you have to pay the employer payroll taxes if you're self employed. https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/self-employment-tax-social-security-and-medicare-taxes https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
pkrotich 5y ago
I guess you cheat your taxes then - 1099 sucks, you don't get employer matches on taxes.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> What ? I've never heard of a scenario where you get less money after tax as a contractor vs employee It’s called self-employment tax: https://smartasset.com/taxes/self-employment-tax https://smartasset.com/taxes/self-employment-tax It’s not actually a separate tax. Normally your employer pays these taxes but you don’t see it. When you are a contractor you are self-employed, so as an employer of yourself you have to pay these taxes like any other employer. Some people play games with certain corporate structures where they pretend they’re only worth a fraction of what they’re getting paid and then they extract the rest as dividends. It’s one of those tax tricks that works as long as nobody ever looks to closely at your tax returns, but if you’re caught you have to pay it back plus penalties.
- mpmpmpmp 5y ago
  I think the point is if you're a contractor and you're not getting the same rates as an equivalent company would for that contract/position you're under-selling yourself. As for the "tax trick" you still don't get out of paying income taxes on the entire revenue you generate. You just pay employment taxes on the portion that is salary. Whether that's "fair" or not is open to debate of course.

stagger87 5y ago

> So there’s a lot missing from this blog post. I suspect maybe the author got lucky with some outlier investments, but that’s not something that can be conveyed in a “how to” blog post. Why do you think that? All the numbers work out. Even in your hypothetical scenario, investing 100k for 7 years, especially in the last 7 years, would easily bring you 1M total investments. > FIRE type wealth trajectories are possible, but this isn’t what it looks like. Working normally-paid jobs for 7 years and just living your normal life doesn’t get you there. This is exactly what FIRE is, and again, using numbers from your own post, which I think are reasonable, this is exactly what it looks like. 1M invested, 25k/yr expenses = 40 years with no gains in investments, people into FIRE usually assume 4% growth, so he would be even better off. If that isn't FIRE, I don't know what is.

marktangotango 5y ago
> would easily bring you 1M total investments. I think this is the disconnect with GP, $1M isn't what anyone can really call "wealthy" nowadays. Yes, it's a lot of money, but does not allow one to live what most people consider to be a rich lifestyle.
- jacobmischka 5y ago
  I absolutely can and will call $1M wealthy. Anyone who thinks it isn't is absolutely living in a bubble.
  - marktangotango 5y ago
    I once shared this outlook, but when one considers their own ideas about the lifestyle "wealthy" entails, and run some numbers, specifically determine the annual spend for that lifestyle, one will quickly realize the truth. A million can be blown in a year, or SWR'd (safe withdrawal rate) at $40k a year indefinitely. Can you retire on $40k a year? Would you want that level of income and lifestyle? Of course this depends on location and cost of living. I am referring to someone in the US. Edit: Specifically, does anyone (in the US) consider a $40k year income to qualify as "Wealthy"? Since that's what's being discussed here.

chefandy 5y ago

a) His definition of wealthy isn't entirely financial: "My personal mantra is: 'try to get 80% of the reward with 20% of the work'. I’m not interested in giving 100% to get 100%: that is an overcrowded game." b) It says that he reduced his living expenses and invested most of it in a diversified portfolio without too much in crypto. c) the real missing ingredient is to do this all during a period of explosive growth in both the stock market and your chosen sector, which involves a lot of luck.

uncomputation 5y ago
Yeah, was gonna add this too. This swaggering “jump ship” attitude and taking 2 month holidays is only possible during the unprecedented economic stimulus we’ve seen with Covid. In a tighter job market, even luck would be hard pressed to make this advisable.

wonderwonder 5y ago

100k invested a year at 8% return is $963k, essentially a millionaire and very wealthy in most of the world. Nothing fancy required just get standard stock market returns. Even going slightly less aggressively, if you are self employed you can put ~52k a year into a an i401k pre-tax and then 6k into an IRA. So 58k a year makes you a millionaire after 11 years. Run it for 20 years and you have 2.8 million and can retire relatively young. Its not driving a Rolls Royce retirement but its comfortable and you got there through low stress and got to enjoy the journey.

mNovak 5y ago
>> self-employed >> you got there through low stress My experiences differ
spaetzleesser 5y ago
An 8% return is far from guaranteed over a 7 year interval. There are plenty of inertvals where you would be in the negative. A lot of people are forgetting that we have been riding a gigantic stock market bubble over the last 12 years. This won’t last.
- wonderwonder 5y ago
  Sure, but its done on average 9% the last 10 years and if you just invested in an S&p 500 etf you would have made a little over 13%. There are definitely down times but even if you started investing in January 2007 to ensure you caught the worst of the 2008 recession and just kept investing monthly for 7 years, your returns would be on average 12%. Of course all things end but historically and including now it works. Its a safer bet that you will get to a million in the stock market than putting your money in a bank where you are guaranteed to lose money each year with inflation. Serious question, what's the alternative for a safer investment and having a real retirement? Everything booms and busts and then booms again (mostly).
  - papito 5y ago
    The alternative is winning the birth lottery and sitting on so much real estate that the market doesn't really matter - it's just another source of more risky income.

disruptthelaw 5y ago

I’m not sure I agree with the narrative that 1$ earned as a contractor is worth less than 1$ earned as an employee. Seems to me that the opposite is true. A contractor can get much more creative with taxes, off setting loads of expenses against his income thus having a significantly lower effective tax rate than the employee with equivalent gross income.

softfalcon 5y ago

I mean, even the author agrees with you. They start their story with this: > Preamble: I'm extremely lucky. If we live in a Simulation and life is just a Video Game, mine was started on difficulty level “Very Easy”: I was born in a developed country in the 80s (Italy), with access to fresh water, very good carbohydrates and a decent education system. So what you're going to read is 99% luck and 1% planets alignment. Please, correct success stories for selection bias.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
That’s quite a cop-out for a blog post that contains a lot of specific, actionable steps.
- gcheong 5y ago
  I think the qualification is necessary. Even Warren Buffet admits that he got rich in a very specific way using skills that would be all but useless in any other context but him winning the "ovarian lottery". https://www.sloww.co/ovarian-lottery/ https://www.sloww.co/ovarian-lottery/
  - demygale 5y ago
    From the link: Buffett says, "I didn’t get money from my parents, and I really didn’t want it." Which kind of elides the fact that his father was a sitting US Congressman. Investors were willing to give large sums of money to a man in his early twenties so he could flip manufacturing firms. Ovarian lottery doesn't quite cover it.
- brighton36 5y ago
  Because proclaiming oneself 'self made' is immoral. There's no roi on that story anymore. Imo, that's kinda dumb. But, such is the fashion .
- stickfigure 5y ago
  Most people reading this paragraph start with the same luck coefficient. (Not all, so no need to add your personal story here. But most.)

soperj 5y ago

They live in the UK. Health insurance is literally a non factor in the developed world other than the US.

rootusrootus 5y ago
For tech people in the US it is also a non-factor. The much greater income allows for buying great insurance coverage.
jokethrowaway 5y ago
The UK is one of the countries with the lowest social insurance taxes in rich Europe. NHS is also one of the worst experiences of healthcare I've ever had and good companies in the UK routinely offer private healthcare (eg. BUPA).
jdminhbg 5y ago
In Germany, the public option for health insurance runs you 14.6% of your income[0]. That is not a non factor. [0]: https://welcome-center-germany.com/health-insurance-for-self-employed-and-freelancers-in-germany/#Public-Health-Insurance-in-Germany https://welcome-center-germany.com/health-insurance-for-self...
- pillefitz 5y ago
  But it's capped at roughly 400€/month for each employer/employee
TMWNN 5y ago
You're almost certainly an American, who thinks that a) healthcare throughout the developed world other than the US is just like the NHS, and b) the taxes that go to pay for the NHS are inconsequential. jdminhbg gave Germany as an example of a country that doesn't follow the NHS example. The German model of insurance based on public and private sickness funds, separate from hospitals and doctors, is a) closer to the "average" among developed countries than the monolithic NHS model of unified ownership of payer and delivery, and b) more or less what the US has post-Obamacare; the main difference is that it is harder (not impossible) to evade the mandate in Germany than in the US.

Mikeb85 5y ago

> Working a $150K job for 7 years isn’t really a recipe for getting “wealthy” It definitely is if you live in a LCOL area of an EU country. The author mentions he's Italian. So he gets health care and shit for free while being based in a country where it's very easy to live cheaply if you stay out of the big cities. Definitely possible to save a ton of money while living well in those conditions.

nickpp 5y ago
> he gets health care and shit for free Not free - he's (probably) paying taxes on that remote income, and the maximal rate is rather high in those "shit for free" countries.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  In his income bracket the tax rate in Italy is only 7% higher. And you can find pretty nice places to live in Italy with a COL similar to the rural US.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  Taxes in Italy are absolutely insane. You'd be better off moving to some other country with lower taxes, shitty public healthcare and then pay for a good private healthcare. The cost will be a fraction of a good US private healthcare (the high cost is the main problem of US healthcare, not who's financing it).
  - etergri 5y ago
    Finally some good sense. Do you live in Italy by any chance? You didn't write the usual bullsh1t like "italy has a good social security net / good and free healthcare / you live well with few money" so I'd be surprised if you were a foreigner.

lowercased 5y ago

You could also spend a bit of time learning about structuring a business to reduce taxes. In a moderate US state, and a bit of up-front planning, on $200k in gross receipts you can likely pay 10-15% in combined taxes (state/federal income, fica, etc). It would still mean you should not spend more than you earn, be moderately frugal, and sock away and invest what you can. But being able to put away $50k-$100k for a few years in a row is a gigantic leg up for most people in most areas.

Glyptodon 5y ago

Getting to a bare million with that level of saving seems possible over the last 7 years mostly because returns on stock and crypto have been quite high.

nostrademons 5y ago

Note that the author lives in Europe (Italy), where there is a robust social safety net and typical programmer salaries are about $45-60K/year. It doesn't take nearly as much to be "wealthy" relative to those conditions. Author is basically engaging in a form of geographic arbitrage by working remote from Europe. They get to enjoy wages comparable to U.S. programmers, but get the European social safety net, and since they're not living in a big city, rural cost of living. It's not unlike U.S. tech workers who choose to live in a remote rural village, or Californians who retire to Boise at age 30, or Canadians who come to Silicon Valley to work for a FANG and found a startup and then retire to Canada after doing that for 7-10 years. (The latter is my favorite, because Canada allows citizens a step up in capital gains basis upon moving back to Canada, so you can make literally millions in Silicon Valley stock over a few years and pay zero tax on it, then enjoy the Canadian social safety net for retirement.)

jlos 5y ago
Good luck retiring in most major Canadian cities if you don't already own real estate there.
- nostrademons 5y ago
  Article said "don't live in a major city". Besides, my understanding is that prices are still reasonable in smaller cities like Quebec City, Kingston, Halifax, Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, etc.
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    Prices in all of these cities have gone up. Halifax average sale went from $330k to $370k from 2019 to 2020. People see if they don't buy in now, they may never be able to buy in, and are buying in, driving prices up further, causing more people to panic buy, etc. It also leads speculators to buy houses because they see property giving incredible returns. Pay in many of these cities, or employment opportunities that pay well, are limited. If they're relatively reasonable now at this pace they won't be for much longer. Alberta is perhaps a little different because they seem to build new housing much faster than many other provinces.

ixacto 5y ago

$12000 saved per month for seven years in the stock market S&P500 FZROX or VTSAX will give you ballpark 1-1.5MM inflation-adjusted (10% return yoy - 2% inflation) this is average tho, results could be much higher/lower... This of course isn't going to be enough anymore due to the US housing market in big cities, but could be enough if you work remote and live in a smaller town or something. We could also have inflation problems, 6% cpi hike is a lot.

lhorie 5y ago

Yeah, I have some questions too. Even at a rate of 150k/yr, while today that seems within the reach of many north american senior level devs, 7 years ago that was tippity top percentile pay, so it's not exactly something that anyone could've done, literally by definition. One other thing that isn't mentioned either is market ups and downs. If your nest egg started at the bottom of the subprime crisis, that's a very very different timing prospect than if you had significant equity that lost value in the late aughts. And lastly, is 1M in liquid assets even considered "wealthy" these days? "Well-off", maybe, perhaps even "rich", but "wealthy" in my mind means "bentleys and yatches are pocket change".

compsciphd 5y ago

eh. my highest salary in the past 10 years has been $170K and that was living in some of the most expensive cities in the world (NYC, Bay Area and Tel Aviv). Now, I'm single, so I'm able to compromise a bit by having roommates, but I was still paying over $1K a month in rent in all the places. With that said, by being single and earning that amount of money AND living in one of the longest stock market bull markets ever (and yes, those of us who started working in 2009-2010 are very very lucky) I would expect someone like that to have been able to build a net worth close to $2mil without much effort. the bull market and "normal savings" (say $50-$100K as you mention) did most of the work. but, as they say, past performance isn't indicative of future results.