9 ms·

So how many lambos are you buying? More seriously, will you keep it in the bank and extract $100k a year the rest of your life? What are you going to do?

saurik 5y ago
I do not expect to make any major expensive lifestyle changes as a result of having more money (and to the extent to which I have already been being paid better recently due to working on Orchid, I have only barely done so and usually only quite temporarily), which I realize disappoints some people who had wanted me to post a concrete picture of something expensive I purchase to help motivate others to reach for bug bounties ;P. (FWIW, I maybe should at some point buy a car--as I currently waste money on renting one; pre-pandemic I was using a combination of ZipCar and Lyft, but both services suck now--but I can't imagine myself buying a pointlessly extravagant car; and, sadly, now is a bad time to buy a car anyway... which I think is related to the ZipCar issue: I imagine they might have sold their fleet? Maybe ZipCar will return in force when prices rebalance.)
- csdvrx 5y ago
  > I can't imagine myself buying a pointlessly extravagant car; and, sadly, now is a bad time to buy a car anyway Get a fun car that can be a hacking project :) I was suggested a police car by a friend. They are cheap at auctions, more or less well maintained (tax payer money) and have interesting internals (check sites like https://www.dippy.org/upgrade/dipcop.html https://www.dippy.org/upgrade/dipcop.html) especially for electrical circuits where a police-taxi-module lets you hook up to other functions. And the laptop mount is a geek dream: your laptop right by you, charging, which doubles as a make-do coffee table at the drive through :)
  - jimmaswell 5y ago
    I want to convert an 80s-style car to powerful electric someday, cyberpunk style. Z31 300ZX probably. If I had a lot of money like that I'd build a big garage and do things like that.
    - worldmerge 5y ago
      That sounds like such a fun project!
  - dralley 5y ago
    > I was suggested a police car by a friend. They are cheap at auctions, more or less well maintained (tax payer money) Except that 1) a lot of them are Dodge Chargers which are terribly unreliable 2) they spend incredible amounts of time idling, which isn't good for the engine of a sports car
    - csdvrx 5y ago
      So what? If it's to have fun and hack, does it matter?
- heliodor 5y ago
  Please read this thread to see the pitfalls that might potentially lie ahead: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/comment/chb4v05/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/comment/c... It's about winning the lottery but still applicable to some extent, and shows how people's lives go horribly wrong.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    Funny. This exemplifies the HN community and its distaste for startups. It’s because everyone here performs total population averages. Perhaps it’s likely that most HN members do behave as a total population average. I am grateful for this insight.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Not sure it's actually applicable. That Reddit comment is about poor people winning lots of money by chance, not smart people earning lots of money by working. The risks are very different, not to say that the scale between 2 million and 170 million is way bigger than you seem to think.
    - eli 5y ago
      Poor people aren’t stupid
      - capableweb 5y ago
        That's not what I said either. Again, the Reddit thread is about people with a small amount of money winning a large amount of money. A person like Saurik working for a bug bounty and getting paid for it is not nearly the same scenario.
      - toolz 5y ago
        If you're poor and gambling, then you're making a stupid financial decision. So the odds of you being financially stupid seem likely to be high.
- rubicon33 5y ago
  For what it’s worth - I love that you have this perspective. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with just saving the money.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
- gumby 5y ago
  Unless you live in the sticks, you probably aren’t “wasting” your money by using rentals and Lyft. The problem with a car is for most people it’s their most expensive or second most expensive capital asset, yet has a very low utilization rate (often less than 5%). If interest rates rise their op ex in servicing it (fuel, insurance, loan interest) will exceed that! A few years ago I sold all my cars. I found I only drove at all a few times a week at most (walk/bike instead). Like you I switched to ridershare/rent and it was fine. My motivation wasn’t really to save money but just eliminate the hassle of having all those cars.
- kristofferR 5y ago
  This wiki contains tons of good information about how to best handle the windfall: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Managing_a_windfall https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Managing_a_windfall Make sure to read it.
- rdiddly 5y ago
  I would tend to look at your use of car services more like spending money you can now afford, to deal with cars only temporarily and reap only the benefits, rather than being stricken with the albatross of ownership. That said, I do concur that Zipcar sucks now, compared to what it was. I've still never used Lyft or Uber, so can't comment on those. Oh wait hold on, I did try once to gift some Lyft rides to someone via the website and was literally unable to successfully give Lyft money. Still, I would say it makes less sense now to buy a car (even electric) than at any other point in history.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jack_pp 5y ago
  You can buy a very nice car that might even appreciate in value so you get to have your cake and eat it too, I recommend you do research on this.
  - paulpauper 5y ago
    maybe you can even download one too. I would do even more research into this.
toyg 5y ago
5% yoy risk-free is optimistic, realistically he can count on 50-60k. Close to fuck-you money but, for a lot of people, not there yet.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Rich people of HN, is this true? I’d always heard each million is worth about $50k a year. Was that just during boom times, or simply mistaken?
  - toyg 5y ago
    I'm not rich but I talk to a lot of finance people for work. It all depends on the degree of risk you're willing to accept, and it has less to do with booming than with central bank rates.
  - zeven7 5y ago
    It sounds about right to me. The person replying to you is assuming you don't want to spend any of the $2 mil and only live on interest and being very conservative. 5% a year historically makes sense. Years where you don't get that return, you can spend some of the bank to make up the difference. Other years you should get a little extra to add to the bank. During a drought maybe you reduce expenses. But you should still be able to target 100k most years, unless you get really unlucky. (We currently happen to be living in a time where I think you could get really unlucky, 7.5% inflation and all that.)
  - fortran77 5y ago
    Not even close. There's no reliable way to get a fixed income, and inflation is very high.
    - mymllnthaccount 5y ago
      >no reliable way to get a fixed income You could buy an annuity from an insurance company. A quick Google search shows that $2mil should buy a 40 year old about $70k/year for the rest of their life.
csdvrx 5y ago
Hopefully, he will just keep creating interesting things, or even maybe use that as a seed to make his next idea come true, so we can all benefit from his cool hacks! Yesterday I was reading "how to drop out", to me it seemed like a bad plan overall: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30318285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30318285 Some people want to learn to live on the cheap to drop out, or to fatFIRE (which is another way to do the same). Personally, I love working and doing interesting things, and being with other people and society itself! So my personal plan is the opposite of fatFIRE: work until I die regardless of what happens on the side, because I enjoy what I do, so stopping what I do just because something happened on the side would be like punishing myself, then waiting to die out of boredom? Doesn't seem like such a bright idea to me. Maybe it's different (if you don't like modern society, or maybe other people, or the idea of work itself?
- alisonkisk 5y ago
stepanhruda 5y ago
Don’t forget about taxes. Most of it is getting taxed at least 37%
- flatiron 5y ago
  Not on capital gains. At least in the US that’s only taxed at 15% with no tiering. The deck is stacked for the investment class
  - mentat 5y ago
    I don't think big bounties are capital gains.
  - NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
    Capital gains for higher earners are taxed at 20%, and also subject to the Net Investment Income Tax at 3.8%.
  - harikb 5y ago
    Even long term capital gain for “the investment class” is more like 20%. This is not even a capital gain - this is straight income at 35+
    - SilasX 5y ago
      LTCG tax for the rich is more like 23.8%, when you include the net investment income tax of 3.8% (which I had two financial advisors miss). Plus state income taxes. https://www.schwab.com/taxes/net-investment-income-taxes https://www.schwab.com/taxes/net-investment-income-taxes
  - TomVDB 5y ago
    You’re wrong in many different ways: - Long term vs short term - different rates - state capital gains taxes In this case, with the receiver being a CA resident, he pays almost certainly more than 50% in taxes on this bounty.
  - offmycloud 5y ago
bushbaba 5y ago
You forget taxes. It’s roughly 1M post income tax.
- mushbino 5y ago
  Closer to $1,260,000
  - TomVDB 5y ago
    13% CA income tax included?
    - mushbino 5y ago
      The highest in CA is 12.3% for anything over $625,370. Most here would be paying 9.3% which would bring the total to a little over a million, so yeah, about a million is right. Damn, we don't even get healthcare for all that and the billionaires in the state have ways to pay $0.
fortran77 5y ago
Assuming his Government will get half, are you assuming he will only live 10 more years?
fortran77 5y ago
He can buy half a house in Sunnyvale, California. (And after he pays his income tax, 1/3 or 1/4 of a house.) https://www.zillow.com/sunnyvale-ca-94087/luxury-homes/?searchQueryState=%7B%22pagination%22%3A%7B%7D%2C%22usersSearchTerm%22%3A%2294087%22%2C%22mapBounds%22%3A%7B%22west%22%3A-122.08150592895507%2C%22east%22%3A-121.97953907104491%2C%22south%22%3A37.30782137200966%2C%22north%22%3A37.39692772529623%7D%2C%22regionSelection%22%3A%5B%7B%22regionId%22%3A97549%2C%22regionType%22%3A7%7D%5D%2C%22isMapVisible%22%3Atrue%2C%22filterState%22%3A%7B%22sort%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3A%22priced%22%7D%2C%22ah%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Atrue%7D%7D%2C%22isListVisible%22%3Atrue%2C%22mapZoom%22%3A13%7D https://www.zillow.com/sunnyvale-ca-94087/luxury-homes/?sear...
- hedora 5y ago
  Don't forget the property tax. Also, some of those are fix-er-uppers, and basic remodels are $100k's out here. Edit: Don't want to sound too negative. This is a great windfall. Simply sticking it into an investment account should pull in financial independence/retirement by 5-20 years, depending on his age.
  - fortran77 5y ago
    > basic remodels are $100k's out here My _kitchen_ remodel in 94087 cost over $100k

saurik 5y ago

I do not expect to make any major expensive lifestyle changes as a result of having more money (and to the extent to which I have already been being paid better recently due to working on Orchid, I have only barely done so and usually only quite temporarily), which I realize disappoints some people who had wanted me to post a concrete picture of something expensive I purchase to help motivate others to reach for bug bounties ;P. (FWIW, I maybe should at some point buy a car--as I currently waste money on renting one; pre-pandemic I was using a combination of ZipCar and Lyft, but both services suck now--but I can't imagine myself buying a pointlessly extravagant car; and, sadly, now is a bad time to buy a car anyway... which I think is related to the ZipCar issue: I imagine they might have sold their fleet? Maybe ZipCar will return in force when prices rebalance.)

csdvrx 5y ago
> I can't imagine myself buying a pointlessly extravagant car; and, sadly, now is a bad time to buy a car anyway Get a fun car that can be a hacking project :) I was suggested a police car by a friend. They are cheap at auctions, more or less well maintained (tax payer money) and have interesting internals (check sites like https://www.dippy.org/upgrade/dipcop.html https://www.dippy.org/upgrade/dipcop.html) especially for electrical circuits where a police-taxi-module lets you hook up to other functions. And the laptop mount is a geek dream: your laptop right by you, charging, which doubles as a make-do coffee table at the drive through :)
- jimmaswell 5y ago
  I want to convert an 80s-style car to powerful electric someday, cyberpunk style. Z31 300ZX probably. If I had a lot of money like that I'd build a big garage and do things like that.
  - worldmerge 5y ago
    That sounds like such a fun project!
- dralley 5y ago
  > I was suggested a police car by a friend. They are cheap at auctions, more or less well maintained (tax payer money) Except that 1) a lot of them are Dodge Chargers which are terribly unreliable 2) they spend incredible amounts of time idling, which isn't good for the engine of a sports car
  - csdvrx 5y ago
    So what? If it's to have fun and hack, does it matter?
heliodor 5y ago
Please read this thread to see the pitfalls that might potentially lie ahead: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/comment/chb4v05/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/24vo34/comment/c... It's about winning the lottery but still applicable to some extent, and shows how people's lives go horribly wrong.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Funny. This exemplifies the HN community and its distaste for startups. It’s because everyone here performs total population averages. Perhaps it’s likely that most HN members do behave as a total population average. I am grateful for this insight.
- capableweb 5y ago
  Not sure it's actually applicable. That Reddit comment is about poor people winning lots of money by chance, not smart people earning lots of money by working. The risks are very different, not to say that the scale between 2 million and 170 million is way bigger than you seem to think.
  - eli 5y ago
    Poor people aren’t stupid
    - capableweb 5y ago
      That's not what I said either. Again, the Reddit thread is about people with a small amount of money winning a large amount of money. A person like Saurik working for a bug bounty and getting paid for it is not nearly the same scenario.
    - toolz 5y ago
      If you're poor and gambling, then you're making a stupid financial decision. So the odds of you being financially stupid seem likely to be high.
rubicon33 5y ago
For what it’s worth - I love that you have this perspective. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with just saving the money.
alisonkisk 5y ago
gumby 5y ago
Unless you live in the sticks, you probably aren’t “wasting” your money by using rentals and Lyft. The problem with a car is for most people it’s their most expensive or second most expensive capital asset, yet has a very low utilization rate (often less than 5%). If interest rates rise their op ex in servicing it (fuel, insurance, loan interest) will exceed that! A few years ago I sold all my cars. I found I only drove at all a few times a week at most (walk/bike instead). Like you I switched to ridershare/rent and it was fine. My motivation wasn’t really to save money but just eliminate the hassle of having all those cars.
kristofferR 5y ago
This wiki contains tons of good information about how to best handle the windfall: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Managing_a_windfall https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Managing_a_windfall Make sure to read it.
rdiddly 5y ago
I would tend to look at your use of car services more like spending money you can now afford, to deal with cars only temporarily and reap only the benefits, rather than being stricken with the albatross of ownership. That said, I do concur that Zipcar sucks now, compared to what it was. I've still never used Lyft or Uber, so can't comment on those. Oh wait hold on, I did try once to gift some Lyft rides to someone via the website and was literally unable to successfully give Lyft money. Still, I would say it makes less sense now to buy a car (even electric) than at any other point in history.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jack_pp 5y ago
You can buy a very nice car that might even appreciate in value so you get to have your cake and eat it too, I recommend you do research on this.
- paulpauper 5y ago
  maybe you can even download one too. I would do even more research into this.

toyg 5y ago

5% yoy risk-free is optimistic, realistically he can count on 50-60k. Close to fuck-you money but, for a lot of people, not there yet.

sillysaurusx 5y ago
Rich people of HN, is this true? I’d always heard each million is worth about $50k a year. Was that just during boom times, or simply mistaken?
- toyg 5y ago
  I'm not rich but I talk to a lot of finance people for work. It all depends on the degree of risk you're willing to accept, and it has less to do with booming than with central bank rates.
- zeven7 5y ago
  It sounds about right to me. The person replying to you is assuming you don't want to spend any of the $2 mil and only live on interest and being very conservative. 5% a year historically makes sense. Years where you don't get that return, you can spend some of the bank to make up the difference. Other years you should get a little extra to add to the bank. During a drought maybe you reduce expenses. But you should still be able to target 100k most years, unless you get really unlucky. (We currently happen to be living in a time where I think you could get really unlucky, 7.5% inflation and all that.)
- fortran77 5y ago
  Not even close. There's no reliable way to get a fixed income, and inflation is very high.
  - mymllnthaccount 5y ago
    >no reliable way to get a fixed income You could buy an annuity from an insurance company. A quick Google search shows that $2mil should buy a 40 year old about $70k/year for the rest of their life.

csdvrx 5y ago

Hopefully, he will just keep creating interesting things, or even maybe use that as a seed to make his next idea come true, so we can all benefit from his cool hacks! Yesterday I was reading "how to drop out", to me it seemed like a bad plan overall: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30318285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30318285 Some people want to learn to live on the cheap to drop out, or to fatFIRE (which is another way to do the same). Personally, I love working and doing interesting things, and being with other people and society itself! So my personal plan is the opposite of fatFIRE: work until I die regardless of what happens on the side, because I enjoy what I do, so stopping what I do just because something happened on the side would be like punishing myself, then waiting to die out of boredom? Doesn't seem like such a bright idea to me. Maybe it's different (if you don't like modern society, or maybe other people, or the idea of work itself?

alisonkisk 5y ago

stepanhruda 5y ago

Don’t forget about taxes. Most of it is getting taxed at least 37%

flatiron 5y ago
Not on capital gains. At least in the US that’s only taxed at 15% with no tiering. The deck is stacked for the investment class
- mentat 5y ago
  I don't think big bounties are capital gains.
- NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
  Capital gains for higher earners are taxed at 20%, and also subject to the Net Investment Income Tax at 3.8%.
- harikb 5y ago
  Even long term capital gain for “the investment class” is more like 20%. This is not even a capital gain - this is straight income at 35+
  - SilasX 5y ago
    LTCG tax for the rich is more like 23.8%, when you include the net investment income tax of 3.8% (which I had two financial advisors miss). Plus state income taxes. https://www.schwab.com/taxes/net-investment-income-taxes https://www.schwab.com/taxes/net-investment-income-taxes
- TomVDB 5y ago
  You’re wrong in many different ways: - Long term vs short term - different rates - state capital gains taxes In this case, with the receiver being a CA resident, he pays almost certainly more than 50% in taxes on this bounty.
- offmycloud 5y ago

bushbaba 5y ago

You forget taxes. It’s roughly 1M post income tax.

mushbino 5y ago
Closer to $1,260,000
- TomVDB 5y ago
  13% CA income tax included?
  - mushbino 5y ago
    The highest in CA is 12.3% for anything over $625,370. Most here would be paying 9.3% which would bring the total to a little over a million, so yeah, about a million is right. Damn, we don't even get healthcare for all that and the billionaires in the state have ways to pay $0.

fortran77 5y ago

Assuming his Government will get half, are you assuming he will only live 10 more years?

fortran77 5y ago

He can buy half a house in Sunnyvale, California. (And after he pays his income tax, 1/3 or 1/4 of a house.) https://www.zillow.com/sunnyvale-ca-94087/luxury-homes/?searchQueryState=%7B%22pagination%22%3A%7B%7D%2C%22usersSearchTerm%22%3A%2294087%22%2C%22mapBounds%22%3A%7B%22west%22%3A-122.08150592895507%2C%22east%22%3A-121.97953907104491%2C%22south%22%3A37.30782137200966%2C%22north%22%3A37.39692772529623%7D%2C%22regionSelection%22%3A%5B%7B%22regionId%22%3A97549%2C%22regionType%22%3A7%7D%5D%2C%22isMapVisible%22%3Atrue%2C%22filterState%22%3A%7B%22sort%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3A%22priced%22%7D%2C%22ah%22%3A%7B%22value%22%3Atrue%7D%7D%2C%22isListVisible%22%3Atrue%2C%22mapZoom%22%3A13%7D https://www.zillow.com/sunnyvale-ca-94087/luxury-homes/?sear...

hedora 5y ago
Don't forget the property tax. Also, some of those are fix-er-uppers, and basic remodels are $100k's out here. Edit: Don't want to sound too negative. This is a great windfall. Simply sticking it into an investment account should pull in financial independence/retirement by 5-20 years, depending on his age.
- fortran77 5y ago
  > basic remodels are $100k's out here My _kitchen_ remodel in 94087 cost over $100k