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Ask HN: What's the easiest way to make a living with $600k in cash?
I have 30 more years until retirement.
I don't like working with clients but do have software dev skills and trading/investing skills.
- whateveracct 5y agoWith $600k, you could just not touch it and then be free to do whatever job you want to just cover living expenses with no thought of retirement I'm pretty sure. "Coast FIRE" achieved. EDIT: By "not touch it" I meant invest it in something safe and easy and then you'll have full retirement money in 30y
- cobaltoxide 5y agoSuppose you retire at 65 and live to 90. That's 25 years. $600k is $24k/year for 25 years. Of course your investment may grow in the meantime; but there will also be inflation. I would suggest that $600k is insufficient savings for a retirement that would support the lifestyle you are accustomed to.
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- kelnos 5y agoKinda hard to make that call given you don't know what kind of lifestyle OP is accustomed to, or where they even live. At any rate, it's not $600k, because OP is going to retire in 30 years. Reasonably invested, I think you could get that up to $2.5M or so by then. And presumably OP won't be spending every cent of income over the next 30 years and will continue contributing to that nest egg, even if modestly. A 4% withdrawal rate is probably safe if the retirement horizon is only 25 years. On $2.5M that's $100k/yr, which is plenty for most places in the world. Yes, inflation complicates things somewhat, but I think OP will still be fine.
- cobaltoxide 5y ago> Kinda hard to make that call given you don't know what kind of lifestyle OP is accustomed to, or where they even live. Well, they are 35 years old and have $600k, which says something.
- nodesocket 5y agoAgreed, I think you need over $1m these days to retire safely with that much time left. Even with $1m you'd have to watch your spending a bit and invest wisely.
- whateveracct 5y agoTrue - the $600k will be well over $1m in 30yrs (when retirement would begin) tho
- jasonpeacock 5y agoDon't forget that as you get older you need more medical support, so your cost of living will actually be increasing while inflation is eating away at the buying power of your savings. You need an investment that at least matches inflation, and is large enough to cover fixed living + increasing medical costs.
- barelysapient 5y agoCan you live on 55k a year? If so, American REITs yield 9% a year. For for example: $NRZ, $OHI, $DX.
- jsiaajdsdaa 5y agoIt literally can't go tits up!
- throwawaymanbot 5y agoREITs… no wonder rents and house prices are through the roof!
- danlugo92 5y agoHalf in cash half in investments Of the 2nd half: half in regular investments the other half in crypto of the regular investments half, put it all on an index fund. Of the crypto half, put half of it in bitcoin and half of it in some crypto index etf When the next crash happens take half of cash which is now more valuable and invest as above
- bluedevil2k 5y agoPlease do not put 25% of your money into crypto, that’ll be a quick way to lose tens of thousands of dollars in a short time. Crypto is risky with wild swings, you shouldn’t put more than 5% into crypto.
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- sxg 5y agoAs with most investment advice, it totally depends on your risk tolerance, age, and other life circumstances. If you’re 25 with a solid job and some surplus money to invest, a high risk strategy may be worthwhile. The upside can be immense while the downside (losing nearly all your invested money) may not actually be all that life changing.
- bluedevil2k 5y agoThis same advice would apply to lottery tickets. It’s the opposite that’s actually true, if you lose 25% of your assets right away, that will compound to become millions of dollars in the future. I’m not saying to invest conservatively, it should be aggressive. But investing in a crypto ETF, where most people agree 90% of the coins will and should go to $0…that’s just reckless.
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- franciscop 5y agoThe first thing to do IMHO is learning at least the basics on investing. You can afford to lose a few months in inflation to avoid following some rando's advice that doesn't fit you at all. The following is not even my advice, just what I think I'd do in that situation. There's many communities around these topics, I particularly like Reddit's /r/financialindependence. If I had $600k in cash right now, I'd treat it as a windfall and start reading around here: https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/windfall https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/windfall There's a logic to maximizing your money/safety, which is very generic advice to a very generic question, and it goes something like: 1. Make sure to keep an emergency deposit, in cash, that would cover all your expenses for 3-6 months. Adjust for fun factor and culture. 2. Pay off high interest debt. 3. Pay off mid-interest debt. 4. Learn about investing. Investing can be from getting a degree/masters in a higher paying field if you are young and underpaid, to day trading with all its intricacies. Of course the general blanket response is ETFs, Bonds, etc. Learn about your risk tolerance. Higher risk normally implies higher profits. E.g. if you have most of your disposable income tied into good debt, you'll probably have quite a lot of profit. But get sick for a month with lower pay, lose your job, etc. and you might lose it all.
- excitednumber 5y agoHi - go talk to a financial advisor
- kwere 5y agosee what you want to do: be an employee, be selfemployed as freelance, trader or "business owner" on whatever skills you have / can acquire. You have to invest your time in what you see profitable / risk tolerable and put the majority of your capital in investiments and let compounding work for you. Capital preservation and growth is a must for anybody in the "capital race", a "day job/activity" is what help you achieve those 2 in the long term as your real goal
- motohagiography 5y agoFirst quesiton is: is it savings or windfall? This determines your risk profile. Savings, you can make over again because you've already made $600k once the hardest way possible. Windfall, thank lucky stars and secure that shit. I'd wonder why leveraging it to buy or build a duplex or triplex in a city on the obvious list? The key thing is to tie it up so that it doesn't make you lazy. My wealthy friends are getting the F out of cash because of its rapidly diminishing purchasing power. There's no way out of what's going on at a macro level without inflation and high interest rates, so anything that returns better than -8% yoy is going to be better. Having that net worth also means you can be super aggressive with hunting for gigs because you can afford to say 'no' to anything less than $200k+ if you are in US/CAN market. Even though it's not a lot of money from a wealth perspective, (you're on the second bottom rung of a very tall ladder) from a job hunting perspective, you have FU money so long as you don't spend it. You can take a passion project for a non-profit and moonlight with another contract part time and if either of them don't like it you can walk. You also have accredited investor status, so you can take flyers of as little as 20-30k participating in seed rounds, which pops you out of being just another dev and now you're an investor with depth on the tech, which is a whole new game. If you're contracting and your triplex mortgage is covered by your tenants, you can afford do a couple of these seed rounds a year. The only way anyone makes real money is with leverage, and the duplex is low risk secured leverage. At the other end of the spectrum, you could just put it into a robinhood account and buy stonks and hang out on WSB, but post-pandemic govts with their own currencies don't need good markets or economies to stay in power anymore, and inflationary policies are about impoverishing people, so they benefit from destroying the markets. This is handwavy, but I take insight over advice any day. If you understand the difference between the real and the represented, you can live like an actual king for very little money. Suffice it to say that nothing makes you poorer than trying to be middle class, as by definition, poverty is when you don't value what you have. Frugality is bargaining with a universe that doesn't care, and the thing about the greatest pleasures is they are always worth it by a significant multiple. This is to say, don't spend a penny on yourself until you know the person you are spending it on will appreciate it, and you have read the stoics, imo.
- pedrosorio 5y ago> it's not a lot of money from a wealth perspective, (you're on the second bottom rung of a very tall ladder) What is this referencing?
- anm89 5y agoIm in almost the exact same boat as you, both monetarily and in terms of goals. My email is in my profile. If you are interested, message me if you want to talk and see if there is anything we could collaborate on. My biggest interest lies in building a lifestyle business around coliving.
- pipeline_peak 5y agoSome form of passive income. Why not just become a landlord?
- rexreed 5y agoStep 1: Don't take advice from people on HackerNews Step 2: Why are you still listening to me? But seriously, there's a million ways to lose money and not as many ways to make it. Find the thing that gives you joy and that you're good at and that the world is willing to pay something for and if you can find that magic connection, you'll be doing more than making a living, you'll be truly living.
- gota 5y agoYou can buy assets that pay dividends and move to a much, much lower cost-of-living place. I'm talking some city in a country where the currency exchange rate values your dollars immensely wrt. groceries, etc. You can even buy property very,very "cheap" so as to never pay rent.
- marianov 5y agoArgentina
- Jtsummers 5y agoIf you can reliably convert USD to ARS then this can work, but you would not want to keep your money in ARS. The inflation rate has been killer for a while now. You will also need to use the black market for good exchange rates, the official ones aren't really that good, which could become a challenge depending on where you choose to live. Across the border in Uruguay would be a better bet with a somewhat more stable economy but still benefiting someone with USD. Or go to a country like Belize where you can use the USD without needing to convert to local currency, but still can have more purchasing power in the US.
- walrus01 5y agoI second the many comments here that say don't take financial advice on HN, you need a professional. The guy who said put it into REITs earning 9% a year is somewhat close to what I've done. By no means are past results an indicator of future success, but in 2017 I purchased a number of technology/internet/telecom industry heavy ETFs that have more than doubled in value. The mix of the different ETFs and the stocks they contain is sufficiently diverse for my risk tolerance.
- perl4ever 5y agoMy view is if you look at a chart of interest rates over the last 40 years, you should be able to see that the next 40 years cannot possibly be a repetition. "Interest rates go down" is the entire story of investment returns during the lifetimes of most non-retired people. It cannot be the story of the next few decades. Famous saying "if something can't go on forever, it won't".
- fsckboy 5y ago> technology/internet/telecom industry heavy ETFs ... mix of the different ETFs and the stocks they contain is sufficiently diverse for my risk tolerance in this case it doesn't matter your risk tolerance, diversifiable risk is not rewarded by the market, which means NOT that you face higher risk, but actually, lower returns at any given level of risk. that is standard finance theory
- walrus01 5y agoWhat I meant by that is that the risk of one company that is a component of one of the ETFs taking a major nosedive (let's say, Facebook) is somewhat mitigated by the existence of many other companies in the same ETF, and that the portfolio is divided between a number of different ETFs. PNQI ETF holdings: https://www.invesco.com/us/financial-products/etfs/holdings?audienceType=Investor&ticker=PNQI https://www.invesco.com/us/financial-products/etfs/holdings?... As compared to what I was originally looking at doing by putting the bulk of the money into individual stocks, rather than ETFs, though I did also do some of that, with Netflix.
- randomhodler84 5y agoNot financial advice, 600k isn’t enough unless you live in a low cost of living region. Lazy: Send it to Gemini, buy 600k worth of GUSD, loan it on their Lend program and collect 8%pa compounded monthly. Collect 48k GUSD a year. Convert that back to bank dollars every month. Live your life. Risky: Send it to Gemini, buy 600k DAI. Send it to ethereum chain. Buy $200 of ether that you will spend on gas. Swap half the DAI for USDC using a DEX. Deposit 300k/300k in a liquidity pool DAI/USDC and collect 18-20%pa in trade fees. Withdraw collateral every month by redeeming the liquidity provider tokens. If you wish to save gas fees, use something like polygon bridge to move it to the Polygon chain. Do LP deposits there instead. Crazy: buy 12 Bitcoin on Gemini. Store it on a hardware wallet. Sell A fraction every few months to live. Never sell it all in one shot.
- murderfs 5y ago> Lazy: Send it to Gemini, buy 600k worth of GUSD, loan it on their Lend program and collect 8%pa compounded monthly. Why would you bother with this when TIPS bonds are paying out 7.12%?
- randomhodler84 5y agoYeah. A lot of folks are talking about inflation bonds (not TIPS). I dunno man. I trust the winklevoss, 2 of the richest men on the planet (in Bitcoin, which is the only money that matters ;-)). Why? Because a inflation protected security is denominated in the currency that is inflating. It’s kinda nonsensical really. How to achieve those returns? It’s money printing isn’t it. In the 20% extreme high yield example above, providing liquidity is a service, extremely meaningful in globalized digital economies. I strongly recommend the crazy option. But that’s just me cos I’m crazy. :-)
- beervirus 5y agoBitcoin isn’t money. It’s a gambling token.
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- saturn5k 5y agoBuy a few apartments in capital cities in Europe. Live off from rent.
- artdigital 5y ago$600,000 doesn't get you "a few apartments in capital cities in Europe"
- creepy00 5y agoIt does in Eastern Europe (Budapest, Belgrade, Prague, Warsaw,...)
- rspoerri 5y agoDont forget the work involved when renting out flats. You will find out that its at least a part time job doing that.
- sesuximo 5y agoHire 6 ppl worth 100k per year but only pay them 50k per year.
- sys_64738 5y agoQYLD.
- paxys 5y agoGet a job where you don’t have to face clients then? I doubt it is realistic to survive 30-60 years on just $600K savings.
- axegon_ 5y agoA lot of variables at play here. Personally, given that I live in an inexpensive country, I'll pay of my mortgage and take a year of in pursuit of some personal projects which have plenty of potential but I don't have the time I truly need to focus on either of them. A year and 1-200 k would be sufficient to live off and spare over half of that on those projects. If it goes sideways, keep the rest of the money as a retirement fund and go back to a developer job.
- fsckboy 5y agosmh, nobody here seems to have read what you wrote I have 30 more years until retirement... have software dev skills do you get that everybody? he wants and plans to work, not retire. have trading/investing skills he is not asking for investment advice. So, subtracting all the stuff he didn't ask from what everybody wrote, anybody have any useful suggestions for him?
- crossroadsguy 5y agoFor a vague and sparse post such as this I’d rather do that smh thing at OP and not the commenters.
- Jtsummers 5y agoSemi-serious: If you're in the US and a US citizen, get a gov't job. They need programmers, especially mid-to-senior career folks. Put into the 401k-alike (TSP) and max it out. At age 62 you'd be worth several million dollars and would be getting a pension (before other retirement income) of around 30-40k/year in today's dollars. Many gov't jobs are in lower cost of living areas letting the money go even further. You can also (depending of course on how policies change over the next 30 years) carry your health insurance into retirement, with the government paying their share just like when you were employed and you paying the rest out of your pension (this will be a significant portion of your retirement spending past age 50 or 60 anyways).
- moneywoes 5y agoBuy LEAPs on Reddit when it IPOs edit this is not serious advice
- thrill 5y agoI'd buy 6000 Avax with anticipation of steady price appreciation and delegate them for about 10% annually. With your software skills you could also without undue effort run a validator instead and gain a trivial amount more but also capture the occasional airdrop.
- randomhodler84 5y agoWhy avax over Solana, Dot, Luna or Polygon? Personally, I am bullish on Polygon right now as they are merging with other projects very fast at some very high valuations — I would say analogous to the holding company that is acquiring lots of smaller ecosystem projects to focus and force multiply vs a “whole new paradigm in consensus algorithms”.
- artdigital 5y agoOn the other hand, avax had a negative balance bug a couple months ago that tanked the price That's the risk you get when investing large sums into newer cryptos, one significant network problem to break trust and your investment is gone
- my50cents 5y agoBuy a portfolio of dividend-paying stocks with highly secure underlying businesses such as public utilities. Hold on to a stock as long as the underlying business is still secure. Trade out of a stock only if there is a more secure one with more dividends to trade into. If market prices allow the dividends from your $600K portfolio to exceed your living expenses, then no more work for money.
- gentleman11 5y agoIf you put it in an index mutual fund and ignore it for 10 years, you can possibly retire on it. Leave it in for 20 years and you can retire comfortably. In the meantime, you really only need to worry about not spending it. Even if there is a big recession, over the 20+ year time frame you’ll still be fine Isn’t it great? If you grow up extremely poor, you have to work your whole life, especially since you can’t afford school at first. But if you just have money, you just need to not spend it and you’ll be a multi millionaire. Capitalism at work
- artdigital 5y agoAssuming an average APR of 6% on S&P ETFs (600000*6/100)*10 = an extra $360000 before tax. Probably not enough to retire on. 20 years is an extra $720000, let's say half goes away for tax that leaves $360000 + initial $600000 isn't even a million yet. $1m might be enough to live off on, assuming a APR of 6% ppa, so $60,000 money influx just in interest, but it depends on your standard of living. If you're used to a $100k+ engineering salary, it's a downgrade.*
- gentleman11 5y agoLike I said with the comment about poor people vs people with money, different people have vastly different expected retirements
- codecutter 5y agoYou asked for easiest way, so I would suggest moving to a country with low cost of living. You can always use your software development skills for remote work.
- stevenhuang 5y ago600k into QYLD is around ~5.5k in monthly dividends. Can't get easier than that.
- WheelsAtLarge 5y ago600k seems like a lot of cash but it's not enough to quit working. Tough it out a bit more, save more money and switch to a career you like when you have enough money saved up to make up the difference in income between the two.