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I am in my mid 20s. I have about $200k saved and I think about quitting everyday, even though it would probably be disastrous for my career. I look up and I se

I am in my mid 20s. I have about $200k saved and I think about quitting everyday, even though it would probably be disastrous for my career. I look up and I see colleagues in their 40s-50s. 20-30 years of experience in the industry, with the performance of their RSUs they probably easily have $2m+ net worth. I really don't understand why they don't quit. Just a naive example: Buy a cheap house ($250k) and live off of $40k/year for the next 40 years ($1.6m). You can always freelance or do extra work on the side if you want to splurge on a vacation or major purchase. And I "enjoy" my job. It is comfy and interesting most days. But it is just such a massive time sink, after accounting for the chores of life and the "ramp up" and "ramp down" time before work, it honestly feels like I have maybe 2-3 hours a day on the weekdays of time that I can honestly say is my own. I can't imagine doing this tradeoff for another 15 years, but we'll see. Props to the OP for having the courage to do this. I hope I can muster up some of the same courage soon.

LoveMortuus 4y ago
I'm about 30 and have only ~4.5k€... Not because I didn't save more, but because I wasn't able to save more. I do look brightly towards the future and hope I'll turn for the better.
notch656c 4y ago
If you have kids and quit while your family is used to the standard of living there is a good chance a divorce is in the cards. You will then owe 20% (pretax, 30% post tax) of your "imputed" salary for the kid, as well as possible alimony. If you don't come up with 20% of your generous salary you git tossed in a cage, even if the kid only needs a tiny fraction of that for a decent life. For many it's impossible to step down their career without being tossed into prison, as the judge uses "imputed income" to calculate what you owe based on what you can potentially earn. That is if say you go from engineer to carpenter, you may now owe over 100% of your salary for support.
- hi41 4y ago
  I don’t understand the logic behind this. A man can lose his job then how can he make court ordered payments for kids and wife? And then putting the man behind bars is detrimental to society because a divorced man would be experience depression and likely lose his job. Punishing such a man is not good for society.
- BizarreByte 4y ago
  Tl;dr If you value your freedom to choose your own path don’t get married or have children.
  - notch656c 4y ago
    In the US you owe child support even if you're raped. So it's not necessarily even a decision.
    - fsckboy 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - ryanmentor 4y ago
        Bravely coming out against... rape victims?
        fsckboy 4y ago
        >Bravely coming out against... rape victims? your sarcasm is completely misplaced, 1) coming out against rape victims would actually be quite brave, you'd get downvoted to hell, but 2) I didn't do that. "Rape victims" who have children (women) don't pay child support, men do. OP is against all child support, in which he's wrong, but with regard to rape, a child born from a rape is entitled to child support from which men? that part of his comment actually made no sense at all
        barry-cotter 4y ago
        > When Male Rape Victims Are Accountable for Child Support > When Shane Seyer was 12, he was sexually exploited by his 16-year-old babysitter Colleen Hermesmann. She became pregnant with Seyer’s child in 1989 and was charged with statutory rape shortly afterward. Instead of being convicted of rape, Hermesmann was declared a juvenile offender under the non-sexual offense of “contributing to child misconduct.” Seyer was subsequently court-ordered to pay child support. > In 1993, at the age of 15, Seyer appealed this decision to the Kansas Supreme Court, arguing he should not be liable for these payments. He maintained that his babysitter (Hermesmann) took advantage of him sexually when he was too young to give consent. > The Kansas Supreme Court ruled against him. The judgment stated that because Seyer initially consented to the sexual encounters and never told his parents what was happening, he was responsible for supporting the child. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-about-trauma/201902/when-male-rape-victims-are-accountable-child-support https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-about-trauma...
- dwiel 4y ago
  Or you know, talk to your spouse about it first. I dropped down to $0 income for 2 years with two kids and a wife. My family is as strong as ever. Obviously just one data point and divorce rates are high. Do you have any data on this specific case: depressed about job, quits job to be happier, results in divorce. It seems quiet possible that given the circumstances, quitting the job might decrease the chance of divorce by helping remove so much stress from work.
  - millirem 4y ago
    Thanks for sharing that data point. I'm planning to take 6-12 months off of work with 2 kids and a wife. I'm scared about the impact this could have on the relationship. But I've talked to my wife and she is supportive. Reading your comment reminded me that I'm doing this to feel better not just for myself but for the family.
  - ciphol 4y ago
    If you're no longer going to be contributing income, what will you contribute instead to the family? Nobody respects or appreciates a freeloader as a partner. But if something other than money is contributed, it's more likely to work.
    - defterGoose 4y ago
      Holy God it's not like being mentally present, raising kids, or just doing chores around the house is valuable to your family. /s Such a toxic, capitalistic, misandronistic mindset.
      - bradlys 4y ago
        It’s just a realistic mindset. If you’re a man and quit working - you’re in the fast track to being broken up with. I don’t know why we act like gender norms don’t exist.
        cpsns 4y ago
        > I don’t know why we act like gender norms don’t exist. They’re inconvenient, uncomfortable, and people want to pretend they don’t exist because there’s a one in a million exception. In the real world a man who can’t provide is going to find out almost no woman will tolerate that, even if they claim otherwise.
- csomar 4y ago
  I’m sorry but in this case you have a much bigger problem than “being a cog in the machine” and an “unfulfilling job”. You should never get in such a relation, or stay in one.
  - busterarm 4y ago
    The stories of couples who FIRE'd together and the wife moved on from the relationship in anger/disgust 2-3 years down the road are copious...
    - throwaway4aday 4y ago
      Probably the best thing for both of them, obviously a mismatch.
jyu 4y ago
Inflation is a bitch, and the current status quo cost of living will be exponentially more in the future. What I thought was an unfathomable amount of money in the 90's ($100k / yr, and $1m net worth) is not good now in 2020's. Healthcare in the 90's was $500 / yr and is $1.5k / mo with $5k deductible. Property taxes, utilities, continue to increase. Basic child daycare is $2k / mo after tax. $300k / yr is the new $100k / yr, and I'd hate to project what it'll be 20 years from now ($2m / yr?)
- nxm 4y ago
  Yet tons of families make it work in the mid-west where the costs are not what you state them them to be.
  - mancerayder 4y ago
    And are there an abundance of tech jobs there like there are in the HCOL areas? Remote work is shrinking, and while it'll be here to stay, there will be far fewer opportunities as companies rein it in. If we look at the housing market alone, it looks like there's a big crash in these 'low cost of living' cities people flocked to from SF and NYC as they move back.
- bbarn 4y ago
  Salary alone is an irrelevant number. 200K in some places won't let you have a nice apartment in a safe place, 100k in some places and you can live in a king with your own private kingdom.
turkeygizzard 4y ago
As a late 20s, recently laid off, I'm wondering why you think it would be disastrous for your career? I'm not necessarily disagreeing, I've been in a very similar headspace before, but now that it's actually happened - without my choice - it feels a lot less bad than I expected. Maybe I'm in denial, but I'm not super worried about getting another job right now. I'm enjoying the time off and reevaluating my priorities. There's even a work-related benefit: the extra time / lack of stress has allowed me to read up on tools etc that I haven't been using (although lately I've been tuning out of career stuff entirely).
serjester 4y ago
In my mid 20’s I had an order of magnitude less savings and quit my job to backpack Europe. My career wasn’t remotely impacted in the process and I genuinely think this is one of the best decisions I ever made. The 4 hour work week has a far better treatise on this than I could ever write and I highly recommend reading it. You’re incredibly resilient in your 20’s. I’d rather be coming out of prison as a 20 something than be a millionaire in retirement.
jedberg 4y ago
> I look up and I see colleagues in their 40s-50s. 20-30 years of experience in the industry, with the performance of their RSUs they probably easily have $2m+ net worth. I really don't understand why they don't quit. I was/am that person. I actually did quit and retire for a while. But then I went back. Mostly out of guilt. I felt guilty not working and building up my kid's trust fund during my peak earning years. It felt like I was betraying my family by not continuing to bring in income while I could.
- pickledish 4y ago
  (just wanted to say thanks for writing this —- I think it is sometimes hard to be honest in this way, about a hard decision, out loud, and while I’m not in the same situation as you right now, there are others who are, and in those cases it can be nice to read something like this and know you’re not alone at least!)
boring_twenties 4y ago
It's not going to be disastrous for your career. It will have an impact, but one you can recover from -- if you're lucky, even fully recover. I quit at 33, didn't work for 3 years, had the best time of my life. Then I got a fun, flexible job that paid below market, but more than paid the bills, and didn't take up all my time and still allowed me to do what I wanted with a decent-sized chunk of every day. After a couple of years of that, I ended up with an adult job, and my hours are no longer flexible, but it is fully remote and pays about market for a HCOL area, while I can live anywhere I want in the USA.
- wnolens 4y ago
  Virtually same life! Quit around 30, didn't work for a full year. Then worked 20h/week for about 2y while I invested the rest of my productive time into hobbies or pet ideas. Then I went back to similar job different company. Took me about 2y to get career back to where I left it, but remote and live somewhere I've always dreamed of.
paxys 4y ago
Simple answer – lifestyle creep. Over the years as you get older and keep moving up in your career you get accustomed to increasingly finer things in life. It's perfectly normal to drive a beater in your 20s, but you don't want to take your kids to soccer practice in one. It's normal to couch surf with friends when traveling in your 20s, but not when you are on a family vacation to Disneyland. Add in a hundred more of these and suddenly that $40K/yr that seemed like a king's ransom a couple decades ago isn't quite enough to make ends meet.
threadweaver34 4y ago
Mid 30s, $1.5m net worth, no major obligations. I don't want to live in self inflected poverty in Tulsa, and I enjoy my work enough that I'd rather find something else to work on that I find interesting. Good luck keeping up a resume for freelancing. Also, I have nothing better to do than work.
- 4m1rk 4y ago
  Building a resume to get freelance job or building a resume using freelance jobs?
mercutio2 4y ago
My family has no willingness to live in a LCOL location, or I probably would do that! But I’ll note that $40k/year isn’t nearly enough to live on for people in their 50s unless you’re unusually healthy or someone is subsidizing your healthcare. Healthcare gets much, much more expensive with age. My employer spends $20k towards my family’s overall healthcare consumption, and we still spend $10k out of pocket. Regarding taking a break: what have you got to lose? No programmer I know whose resume says “I took a year or two off to travel the world” has had any trouble getting a new job when they come back. Hiring managers will be jealous, perhaps, but not upset by your choices.
- zshrdlu 4y ago
  I'm curious: Is "health tourism" a thing for Americans? Healthcare is extremely cheap where I live by comparison.
  - caskstrength 4y ago
    > I'm curious: Is "health tourism" a thing for Americans? Healthcare is extremely cheap where I live by comparison. Depends on what kind of healthcare is required. I'm from a country with "extremely cheap" healthcare (Ukraine), but if you are diagnosed with something nasty you either shell out hundreds of thousands to go to a place with expensive healthcare to get that CAR T-cell therapy or you die.
eddsh1994 4y ago
> I am in my mid 20s. I have about $200k saved and I think about quitting everyday, even though it would probably be disastrous for my career. It really wouldn't. I had to take a year off waiting for a work visa, it was great and I got my highest paying job role straight after.
qwerpy 4y ago
> I look up and I see colleagues in their 40s-50s. 20-30 years of experience in the industry, with the performance of their RSUs they probably easily have $2m+ net worth. I really don't understand why they don't quit. I'm at the very young end of that range. My answer is, when you have a couple of young kids and you live through the past year of inflation and stock/real estate devaluation, you scale up the retirement number by a pretty large multiplier to feel safe. My early retirement target is now around 10M (HCOL, want optionality to send kids to private school, got accustomed to nice things) and I'm not there yet. Fortunately the trajectory is looking good, so I'm starting to ratchet down the time and effort I spend on work. As I do so, the stress is starting to melt away and I find myself able to better tolerate and sometimes even enjoy my job now. I don't need the job so I can take a risk here or there, drop a few balls on the floor, take some random days off to spend with the kids or get through some yardwork, etc.
alexgrover 4y ago
I took 18 months off of work to travel when I was 25/26 (2018-19) and had a job within 2 weeks of starting to look again. If there’s any line of work where it wouldn’t be disastrous it’s probably being a software engineer.
angarg12 4y ago
I'm a senior eng at FAANG nearing my 40s, so according to your napkin math I should be a millionaire. Of course is not that simple. I won't bore you with my life history, but I spent most of my career living paycheck to paycheck, and only got a high paying job recently. With the double wammy of moving to the US and stock plummeting, my life savings are paltry. I'm still renting and I project it'll take me 2-3 years to save for a down payment. In fact I'm confident that if you graduated 3 years ago and have been working in tech in the US, you'll likely have more wealth than me.
- kirso 4y ago
  I would say this is pretty normal. Everyone thinks about life and salary and a linear path to wealth, but its not true. Not everyone stick in a company for 10 years. Some take sabbaticals, some have medical bills, some go travel for 2 years. I was earning peanuts up until my early 30s. Also if you are not in US and not in Tech which is lets face it, majority of people - you are nowhere near these numbers. Survivorship bias at its finest.
whiplash451 4y ago
A few things: - a lot of the people who are in their 40-50s today never saw the packages we are seeing today (well, until two years ago) - some of them carry a family with kids. You will only understand the math behind it until you’re in it. - life does not work like an xls spreadsheet. It’s not like you « decide » to live of $40k/year. You meet people, things happen and the next thing you know, your « basic » needs require 50% of a significant salary. - people need a purpose in life. I have seen plenty of people with FU money keep going with their job if they like it. Not everyone dreams of creating a company or living in the countryside.

LoveMortuus 4y ago

I'm about 30 and have only ~4.5k€... Not because I didn't save more, but because I wasn't able to save more. I do look brightly towards the future and hope I'll turn for the better.

notch656c 4y ago

If you have kids and quit while your family is used to the standard of living there is a good chance a divorce is in the cards. You will then owe 20% (pretax, 30% post tax) of your "imputed" salary for the kid, as well as possible alimony. If you don't come up with 20% of your generous salary you git tossed in a cage, even if the kid only needs a tiny fraction of that for a decent life. For many it's impossible to step down their career without being tossed into prison, as the judge uses "imputed income" to calculate what you owe based on what you can potentially earn. That is if say you go from engineer to carpenter, you may now owe over 100% of your salary for support.

hi41 4y ago
I don’t understand the logic behind this. A man can lose his job then how can he make court ordered payments for kids and wife? And then putting the man behind bars is detrimental to society because a divorced man would be experience depression and likely lose his job. Punishing such a man is not good for society.
BizarreByte 4y ago
Tl;dr If you value your freedom to choose your own path don’t get married or have children.
- notch656c 4y ago
  In the US you owe child support even if you're raped. So it's not necessarily even a decision.
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - ryanmentor 4y ago
      Bravely coming out against... rape victims?
      - fsckboy 4y ago
        >Bravely coming out against... rape victims? your sarcasm is completely misplaced, 1) coming out against rape victims would actually be quite brave, you'd get downvoted to hell, but 2) I didn't do that. "Rape victims" who have children (women) don't pay child support, men do. OP is against all child support, in which he's wrong, but with regard to rape, a child born from a rape is entitled to child support from which men? that part of his comment actually made no sense at all
        barry-cotter 4y ago
        > When Male Rape Victims Are Accountable for Child Support > When Shane Seyer was 12, he was sexually exploited by his 16-year-old babysitter Colleen Hermesmann. She became pregnant with Seyer’s child in 1989 and was charged with statutory rape shortly afterward. Instead of being convicted of rape, Hermesmann was declared a juvenile offender under the non-sexual offense of “contributing to child misconduct.” Seyer was subsequently court-ordered to pay child support. > In 1993, at the age of 15, Seyer appealed this decision to the Kansas Supreme Court, arguing he should not be liable for these payments. He maintained that his babysitter (Hermesmann) took advantage of him sexually when he was too young to give consent. > The Kansas Supreme Court ruled against him. The judgment stated that because Seyer initially consented to the sexual encounters and never told his parents what was happening, he was responsible for supporting the child. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-about-trauma/201902/when-male-rape-victims-are-accountable-child-support https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/talking-about-trauma...
dwiel 4y ago
Or you know, talk to your spouse about it first. I dropped down to $0 income for 2 years with two kids and a wife. My family is as strong as ever. Obviously just one data point and divorce rates are high. Do you have any data on this specific case: depressed about job, quits job to be happier, results in divorce. It seems quiet possible that given the circumstances, quitting the job might decrease the chance of divorce by helping remove so much stress from work.
- millirem 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing that data point. I'm planning to take 6-12 months off of work with 2 kids and a wife. I'm scared about the impact this could have on the relationship. But I've talked to my wife and she is supportive. Reading your comment reminded me that I'm doing this to feel better not just for myself but for the family.
- ciphol 4y ago
  If you're no longer going to be contributing income, what will you contribute instead to the family? Nobody respects or appreciates a freeloader as a partner. But if something other than money is contributed, it's more likely to work.
  - defterGoose 4y ago
    Holy God it's not like being mentally present, raising kids, or just doing chores around the house is valuable to your family. /s Such a toxic, capitalistic, misandronistic mindset.
    - bradlys 4y ago
      It’s just a realistic mindset. If you’re a man and quit working - you’re in the fast track to being broken up with. I don’t know why we act like gender norms don’t exist.
      - cpsns 4y ago
        > I don’t know why we act like gender norms don’t exist. They’re inconvenient, uncomfortable, and people want to pretend they don’t exist because there’s a one in a million exception. In the real world a man who can’t provide is going to find out almost no woman will tolerate that, even if they claim otherwise.
csomar 4y ago
I’m sorry but in this case you have a much bigger problem than “being a cog in the machine” and an “unfulfilling job”. You should never get in such a relation, or stay in one.
- busterarm 4y ago
  The stories of couples who FIRE'd together and the wife moved on from the relationship in anger/disgust 2-3 years down the road are copious...
  - throwaway4aday 4y ago
    Probably the best thing for both of them, obviously a mismatch.

jyu 4y ago

Inflation is a bitch, and the current status quo cost of living will be exponentially more in the future. What I thought was an unfathomable amount of money in the 90's ($100k / yr, and $1m net worth) is not good now in 2020's. Healthcare in the 90's was $500 / yr and is $1.5k / mo with $5k deductible. Property taxes, utilities, continue to increase. Basic child daycare is $2k / mo after tax. $300k / yr is the new $100k / yr, and I'd hate to project what it'll be 20 years from now ($2m / yr?)

nxm 4y ago
Yet tons of families make it work in the mid-west where the costs are not what you state them them to be.
- mancerayder 4y ago
  And are there an abundance of tech jobs there like there are in the HCOL areas? Remote work is shrinking, and while it'll be here to stay, there will be far fewer opportunities as companies rein it in. If we look at the housing market alone, it looks like there's a big crash in these 'low cost of living' cities people flocked to from SF and NYC as they move back.
bbarn 4y ago
Salary alone is an irrelevant number. 200K in some places won't let you have a nice apartment in a safe place, 100k in some places and you can live in a king with your own private kingdom.

turkeygizzard 4y ago

As a late 20s, recently laid off, I'm wondering why you think it would be disastrous for your career? I'm not necessarily disagreeing, I've been in a very similar headspace before, but now that it's actually happened - without my choice - it feels a lot less bad than I expected. Maybe I'm in denial, but I'm not super worried about getting another job right now. I'm enjoying the time off and reevaluating my priorities. There's even a work-related benefit: the extra time / lack of stress has allowed me to read up on tools etc that I haven't been using (although lately I've been tuning out of career stuff entirely).

serjester 4y ago

In my mid 20’s I had an order of magnitude less savings and quit my job to backpack Europe. My career wasn’t remotely impacted in the process and I genuinely think this is one of the best decisions I ever made. The 4 hour work week has a far better treatise on this than I could ever write and I highly recommend reading it. You’re incredibly resilient in your 20’s. I’d rather be coming out of prison as a 20 something than be a millionaire in retirement.

jedberg 4y ago

> I look up and I see colleagues in their 40s-50s. 20-30 years of experience in the industry, with the performance of their RSUs they probably easily have $2m+ net worth. I really don't understand why they don't quit. I was/am that person. I actually did quit and retire for a while. But then I went back. Mostly out of guilt. I felt guilty not working and building up my kid's trust fund during my peak earning years. It felt like I was betraying my family by not continuing to bring in income while I could.

pickledish 4y ago
(just wanted to say thanks for writing this —- I think it is sometimes hard to be honest in this way, about a hard decision, out loud, and while I’m not in the same situation as you right now, there are others who are, and in those cases it can be nice to read something like this and know you’re not alone at least!)

boring_twenties 4y ago

It's not going to be disastrous for your career. It will have an impact, but one you can recover from -- if you're lucky, even fully recover. I quit at 33, didn't work for 3 years, had the best time of my life. Then I got a fun, flexible job that paid below market, but more than paid the bills, and didn't take up all my time and still allowed me to do what I wanted with a decent-sized chunk of every day. After a couple of years of that, I ended up with an adult job, and my hours are no longer flexible, but it is fully remote and pays about market for a HCOL area, while I can live anywhere I want in the USA.

wnolens 4y ago
Virtually same life! Quit around 30, didn't work for a full year. Then worked 20h/week for about 2y while I invested the rest of my productive time into hobbies or pet ideas. Then I went back to similar job different company. Took me about 2y to get career back to where I left it, but remote and live somewhere I've always dreamed of.

paxys 4y ago

Simple answer – lifestyle creep. Over the years as you get older and keep moving up in your career you get accustomed to increasingly finer things in life. It's perfectly normal to drive a beater in your 20s, but you don't want to take your kids to soccer practice in one. It's normal to couch surf with friends when traveling in your 20s, but not when you are on a family vacation to Disneyland. Add in a hundred more of these and suddenly that $40K/yr that seemed like a king's ransom a couple decades ago isn't quite enough to make ends meet.

threadweaver34 4y ago

Mid 30s, $1.5m net worth, no major obligations. I don't want to live in self inflected poverty in Tulsa, and I enjoy my work enough that I'd rather find something else to work on that I find interesting. Good luck keeping up a resume for freelancing. Also, I have nothing better to do than work.

4m1rk 4y ago
Building a resume to get freelance job or building a resume using freelance jobs?

mercutio2 4y ago

My family has no willingness to live in a LCOL location, or I probably would do that! But I’ll note that $40k/year isn’t nearly enough to live on for people in their 50s unless you’re unusually healthy or someone is subsidizing your healthcare. Healthcare gets much, much more expensive with age. My employer spends $20k towards my family’s overall healthcare consumption, and we still spend $10k out of pocket. Regarding taking a break: what have you got to lose? No programmer I know whose resume says “I took a year or two off to travel the world” has had any trouble getting a new job when they come back. Hiring managers will be jealous, perhaps, but not upset by your choices.

zshrdlu 4y ago
I'm curious: Is "health tourism" a thing for Americans? Healthcare is extremely cheap where I live by comparison.
- caskstrength 4y ago
  > I'm curious: Is "health tourism" a thing for Americans? Healthcare is extremely cheap where I live by comparison. Depends on what kind of healthcare is required. I'm from a country with "extremely cheap" healthcare (Ukraine), but if you are diagnosed with something nasty you either shell out hundreds of thousands to go to a place with expensive healthcare to get that CAR T-cell therapy or you die.

eddsh1994 4y ago

> I am in my mid 20s. I have about $200k saved and I think about quitting everyday, even though it would probably be disastrous for my career. It really wouldn't. I had to take a year off waiting for a work visa, it was great and I got my highest paying job role straight after.

qwerpy 4y ago

> I look up and I see colleagues in their 40s-50s. 20-30 years of experience in the industry, with the performance of their RSUs they probably easily have $2m+ net worth. I really don't understand why they don't quit. I'm at the very young end of that range. My answer is, when you have a couple of young kids and you live through the past year of inflation and stock/real estate devaluation, you scale up the retirement number by a pretty large multiplier to feel safe. My early retirement target is now around 10M (HCOL, want optionality to send kids to private school, got accustomed to nice things) and I'm not there yet. Fortunately the trajectory is looking good, so I'm starting to ratchet down the time and effort I spend on work. As I do so, the stress is starting to melt away and I find myself able to better tolerate and sometimes even enjoy my job now. I don't need the job so I can take a risk here or there, drop a few balls on the floor, take some random days off to spend with the kids or get through some yardwork, etc.

alexgrover 4y ago

I took 18 months off of work to travel when I was 25/26 (2018-19) and had a job within 2 weeks of starting to look again. If there’s any line of work where it wouldn’t be disastrous it’s probably being a software engineer.

angarg12 4y ago

I'm a senior eng at FAANG nearing my 40s, so according to your napkin math I should be a millionaire. Of course is not that simple. I won't bore you with my life history, but I spent most of my career living paycheck to paycheck, and only got a high paying job recently. With the double wammy of moving to the US and stock plummeting, my life savings are paltry. I'm still renting and I project it'll take me 2-3 years to save for a down payment. In fact I'm confident that if you graduated 3 years ago and have been working in tech in the US, you'll likely have more wealth than me.

kirso 4y ago
I would say this is pretty normal. Everyone thinks about life and salary and a linear path to wealth, but its not true. Not everyone stick in a company for 10 years. Some take sabbaticals, some have medical bills, some go travel for 2 years. I was earning peanuts up until my early 30s. Also if you are not in US and not in Tech which is lets face it, majority of people - you are nowhere near these numbers. Survivorship bias at its finest.

whiplash451 4y ago

A few things: - a lot of the people who are in their 40-50s today never saw the packages we are seeing today (well, until two years ago) - some of them carry a family with kids. You will only understand the math behind it until you’re in it. - life does not work like an xls spreadsheet. It’s not like you « decide » to live of $40k/year. You meet people, things happen and the next thing you know, your « basic » needs require 50% of a significant salary. - people need a purpose in life. I have seen plenty of people with FU money keep going with their job if they like it. Not everyone dreams of creating a company or living in the countryside.