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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

What technology worker spends all day worrying about survival? It's not hard to save up a couple years living expenses on a software engineer salary, and it's not hard to find another job (or even found a successful company) if you have a couple years to do it.

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Many people with wage-based jobs adjust their lifestyle so that they're always living, roughly, paycheck to paycheck. Also, I tried to get across that I mean survival in the sense of "What do I need to do in the short and long term to make sure I can get by?"

I have found my spending has decreased as my salary has increased. Granted, I have not gotten any major pay bumps in the last few years, but having bought a lot of the things I wanted to buy and I don't need to keep spending money getting a better version of the same thing. But, it's more than just stuff, spending 60$ at a restaurant is fun the first few times, but after a while there is little novelty in it. You also build up equity, I went from an 18 year old car 100$ trade in value to buy a new one and now that my new car is almost paid off I don't see a reason to replace it anytime soon or get an upgrade with my car “equity”.

PS: IMO, unless you have children there is little stopping the average developer from retiring at 45.

With or without kids + family? I don't worry about those things, but 'it's not hard to save up a couple years living expenses' depends a lot on your ... dependents.

My experience is without kids, but it applies with kids as well. Half of American families manage to get by on $50K/year or less. If you make $100K/year and live like that, then for every year you work, you've saved up a year of security. That even assumes that your spouse doesn't work.

Whether you will do this depends a lot on your priorities. Some people want to get their kids the best toys, clothes, and vacations that money will buy. Others would rather give them the gift of parents that are not totally stressed out and have time to make it to their soccer games. There's not a right answer to this, but as someone whose family's household income hovered around the $50K mark for most of my childhood, I can say that you don't really suffer from not being able to afford a trip to Europe every summer.

$50k a year in salary doesnt sound like enough to send your kids to college with their tuition paid for. Being able to do that enables them to not have to worry about student loans and decades of debt after they graduate. IMHO, that is something to strive for.

It's not - I had virtually no college savings when I went to college, my parents borrowed almost the full amount (mostly in their names, so that my sister and I would be mostly debt-free when we graduated). Five years after graduation, it's paid off in full.

$50K/year is, however, low enough that you can get some really generous financial aid if you manage to get into an elite college. Nowadays it'll give you a full ride at Stanford/MIT/Amherst; in my time it was more like a 2/3-ride. Or a full-ride merit scholarship at a state school, if you could otherwise get into an elite college.

Also, weren't we talking about making $100K/year and spending like you have $50K/year? If you do that, in 4 years you've got your kid's college education fund.

Keep in mind that taxes and such scale non-linearly with income: if you make $100k a year, you'll take home less than 2x what you'd take home making $50k a year. It doesn't invalidate your argument by any means, but it's something worth mentioning.

You'd be amazed at how fast everything can change.

I was always someone who made more money than I could figure out how to spend. Even when I was a starving grad student. Then my wife and I grew up, we had kids, and she got injured.

Do you have any idea how much it costs for full-time childcare when you're working and your wife is unable to take care of the kids? (Luckily most of the medical bills were taken care of by worker's comp, and now medical insurance. Not all, but most.)

Family could be a great help in a situation like mine, but you can't choose your family, and in our case that hasn't worked out.

Yeah, I know how fast things can change.

My father got sick and died last fall. For that whole time period, my bank account (which had been monotonically increasing since I got my job) just stayed flat and even decreased a bit. Airline tickets are remarkably expensive when you're flying between coasts every couple of weeks and often don't know the days when you'll need to jet out. Plus I wasn't working for much of that period; I'm lucky that my employer has a generous family leave policy that continues to pay, though at a reduced salary.

The point of this thread, though, is that what could've been a financial disaster was merely a financial inconvenience. I was set back by roughly a quarter financially; big whoop. If I'd been living paycheck-to-paycheck, I'd have to dig myself out of debt for a while afterwards, or worse, wouldn't have been able to go home when my family needed me.

That's the type of security I'm talking about here. For many people in America, a family medical emergency means that they're screwed. Their life completely comes apart, and if they ever manage to dig their way out, it can take decades. That's not the case - or shouldn't be the case - for most people working in technology, where most jobs come with health insurance and salaries are well above the median. You can cover the vast majority of emergencies with a few tens of thousands in the bank, and knowing that you have the security of being able to do so is often worth a lot more than other uses for those few tens of thousands.

For a short time, yeah. But when you have a long-lasting change in life circumstance, as I did, your savings cushion suddenly changes dramatically for the worse. A cutback in the 2008 financial crisis cost me a few months of paychecks.

The result? A decade ago I had your attitude. I now have a very different view of the world.

There are insurance policies that cover a lot of these situations. Depending on your coverage they can go from reasonable to ridiculously expensive but it's really a question of how much risk are you willing to take?

Edit: This assumes you will find work while capable of working. But, 6 months of savings does not have to be a ridiculously large number and six months of savings + low paying job can last you for a long time.

How large a number 6 months of savings is depends greatly on your expenses.

But, 6 months of savings does not have to be a ridiculously large number and six months of savings + low paying job can last you for a long time.

How large a number it is depends on expenses.

What would have been 6 months of savings back for my wife and I when we were in our 20s might last us 2 months now. Adding a low paying job would not help much since I'd be paying more in child care than I am earning. Getting rid of the child care I have would make finding new good child care very difficult - been through that already, don't want to do it again.

At this point we have several months of savings and are slowly saving again. But what used to be a good cash surplus fund now isn't.

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