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Comment by m1n1 | Hacker News Reader

how does he pay the bills? and how about health insurance?

Right? My blog post on the same subject would be more on the lines of "freak out about how to have a roof over my head next month and not have my family's health insurance cancelled..."

I'm guessing you don't have any savings or investments? You might want to plan ahead more than your next pay check. Investigate financial independence / retire early (FIRE.)

Yes I guess that works as long as a sudden bout of cancer or some other chronic illness doesn't turn your world around. Suddenly all the "plan to retire in X years" come into question. Will I be still living in X years? Will I be able to continue working and investing till then? Or will I have burn through all my savings? True financial independence doesn't come till you can weather such a storm and most people are not is such a position.

>Yes I guess that works as long as a sudden bout of cancer or some other chronic illness doesn't turn your world around.

What does this have to do with it? Insurance would cover it just the same as if you hadn't quit your job.

I also took a hiatus from working and meeting expenses has never even been a concern for me, despite dealing with some quite serious medical issues. During my hiatus, I am constantly dumbfounded by people's lack of understanding of how I'm not totally broke without a job. If you have even the most basic budgeting skills and have decent enough job that you aren't living paycheck-to-paycheck, saving up enough money to live off of for 6-12 months is pretty easy. I only had a moderate salary, live in a medium-to-high CoL area, and wasn't particularly thrifty (I still engaged in normal spending like taking international trips places, buying new things, had a decent apartment, etc), and over the course of a 3 years I easily was able to save up enough to be jobless for multiple years living off of those savings alone. And that includes maintaining my savings for retirement, too.

If you expect to be dead at 40, you might not think your life was best spent working your tail off until 39 to "retire early".

What does that have to do with anything? I'm 27 and (f)unemployed.

Oh, I think I misread it. In this case I think the comment is actually saying that a plan to retire at 40 might be derailed by spending a couple years out of work in hospital at 28, thus losing your income at least temporarily and possibly spending your savings. A lot of this can be mitigated by having the right insurance, but once you aren't working it can be harder to afford insurance that will cover really good care.

What I was thinking of was that many people don't want to work very hard now to gain rewards later when there is a risk they won't live until later to enjoy it. So they do things like take a few years off at 27 and then go back to work until, say, 38, instead of working straight through until 34 and retiring permanently then.

Those things are obviously unfortunate, but relatively rare. It is also rare to win the lottery, or actually make a profit on startup stock options. I am not talking about these cases.

The average person in this industry makes good money, and should have the ability to save and invest some of their income.

I would urge us all to not associate the odds of becoming genetically broken with the odds of winning the lottery. Being a mammal more or less assures that if we live long enough (4x to 5x reproductive age) we will accumulate enough damage to have adverse events. This is multiple orders of magnitude more like than a life altering lottery win in the same time span.

There aren't many good investment options available these days.

Real estate is too expensive, interest rates on cash are too low and VCs have a monopoly on the startup space and the media.

The most rational option seems to be to invest in stocks... To fuel corporations which inflate real estate prices by forcing their employees to relocate to major urban centers. The same corporations which are responsible for the low interest rate environment (through their lobbying and corruption of government agencies). The same corporations which are responsible for monopolizing the startup space by only funding and acquiring incubator and VC-backed startups.

So yeah there aren't many ethical options. That's why I invest in cryptocurrency. I'd rather risk losing all the money than fund my own (and everyone else's) enslavement.

I can't decide whether this is noble or simply pragmatic. Kudos, either way.

I wonder if there will be a trend towards bootstrapping?

> Those things are obviously unfortunate, but relatively rare

Not rare at all, 1 in 5 Americans is being pursued by collection agencies for being unable to pay medical bills.

That's good news. Since they're not paying their bills, they actually have more money to invest instead. ;)

You know what they say about lies and statistics... In all seriousness, even if this dubious statistic is true, most of those are not due to terminal or debilitating illnesses. "Unable to pay medical bills" can be for a variety of reasons, ranging from the obvious (not having the money), to confusion, to billing errors or insurance problems.

In the US, it needn't be terminal nor debilitating to bankrupt you.

Bankruptcy is not the end of the world. It's an inconvenience for a few years.

It's certainly the end of the "hey I have so much money I don't even need to work" feeling of financial independence, though.

I can tell you’ve never been bankrupt.

wow, do you have a citation for that ?

Its not as rare as you think. Maybe 10% of cancer by your 40s. Much more likely than winning a lottery or making a ton in stock options.

There are all sorts of small chance disasters that can happen. You can be killed tomorrow in an auto accident. Don't live your life worrying about things unlikely to happen.

And no, I don't mean ignore the common-sense stuff like having life insurance if you have a family, etc.

lol easy to say for those with cash

It's real tough getting cash in this industry, isn't it? Start investing now. In 10 years you'll have a small fortune.

Not everyone earns Valley salaries. Especially not those outside the US in third-world countries.

And some, like myself had their life savings wiped out when life got cute.

Anyway, glad OP has the opportunity to do what he's doing. Didn't mean to sidetrack the conversation. Just always find it amazing how we all live in vastly different worlds.

I'm living off savings from Google and jobs prior to Google.

Google had really high comp and I don't spend very much money outside of the fact that I live in Manhattan, so I have about 2-3 years of runway from that stockpile of savings.

My health insurance is $470 for a basic high deductible plan.

He worked at Google for four years.

This is the correct answer.

Yeah, I bet he has at least $1MM in liquid assets banked on top of what income he earns through his projects.

I assume you are being sarcastic. How do you put off $1M in assets with a $200k median salary in four years? $200k x 4 x 65% is just $520k without even any expenses paid such as the ~$72k you would have paid for a room in a shared apartment.

Well, in addition to salary, he would have also gotten a bonus and stock. The bonus might be $50K/year, and then maybe another $100K/year in stock. The number of shares in the stock grant would have been computed at the date he started -- 5 years ago, GOOG was around $440/share, so at today's price, the shares would be worth $245K/year, assuming he held onto them as they vested.

So, that adds up to around $495K/year, or maybe $300K after tax. With $50K/year in expenses, you're left with $250K/year, or $1M over 4 years.

You lose your unvested RSUs when you leave (so divide your RSU calculations by 2 to start with), and the later grants would be at higher prices and thus have experienced less growth, so your envelope math is off by enough to not be good envelope math.

On the other hand, $100k is by no means the largest RSU grant you can get, so, basically, we have no damn idea. Overall it’s pretty silly to speculate about someone’s net worth unless they’re excited to talk about it.

But the larger point that high performing senior engineers at megacorps can make way more than people outside the megacorp world imagine is true and surprisingly contoversial on HN.

The grant is normally over 4 years, so it would all have vested. And there's only one grant in question, so no higher prices to account for.

those numbers are on the high side, but yes indeed.

Also all those calculations are completely forgetting that money is a time-sensitive value. If invested wisely, the first $ from 4 years ago would be 1.7$ today if invested into a typical low cost SP500

350k isn't uncommon for a senior SWE at Google. In a state with no income tax (such as WA), it's not unreasonable to estimate he takes home 250k (71%). Suppose he spends $60k a year, leaving him $190k/year to bank. Given the performance of the S&P 500 in the last four years, that could be a million today.

I don't know where these numbers come from. I made a gross salary of $140k the year I worked at Google as a senior engineer, and I made some extra money via 401k matching too. $190k would definitely have been more than my entire income, that's for sure. It's hard to imagine that salaries have more than doubled in the six years since then. And... spending only $60k a year, living in Seattle? Yeah, maybe if you live like a monk, or you really enjoy commuting in from distant suburbs.

$5000/month in Seattle is well more than doable. I live off <$4k in regular expenses, live alone in the bay area, and still drive a luxury car. When I was in Seattle, I lived off of $1000/month, lived on my own, and had my own car. That was about 4 years ago.

Google compensation is also incredibly high. $140k is less total comp than what many new grads get at Google.

I was a senior swe in Seattle myself. The total comp range is enormous.

Despite my handle, I didn't exactly live like a monk. 2k a luxury high rise and 3k for everything else felt positively princely (though the city has become more expensive since I left).

Did you forget that you have RSUs? $60K is plenty for a single person. Working for more than 1 years helps, too, if you sold your stock before it appreciated, since 4-year vest forces you to not sell for 1-3 more years.

I made as much money on Google RSUs as I've made on every other form of equity offered as part of a "total comp" package over the course of my career, which is to say, nada. Total comp is bullshit, no matter how enthusiastically the recruiters try to convince you otherwise; salary is all that matters.

Stupid question, but since Google is a public company couldn't you lock in a certain profit on your RSUs with options in a private account? Or are you talking about the restrictions on vesting are meant to make them worthless for most employees because they'll be forfeited on some draconian technicality before exercising?

I remember on Bogleheads people talking about how to reduce the risk of investing in something like an ESPP to avoid an Enron scenario, and the consensus was using options in a private account so that you get a definite payoff.

I don't know what a "private account" is; I was referring to vesting restrictions.

Ah makes sense now. I thought you were referring to losing money on poor performance of the underlying stock between offer and exercise. "Private account" just meant buying put options in an account you control versus something like employer payroll deductions in an ESPP.

Why did you make nada? For many engineers senior and above, the RSU value is even greater than the salary.

disclaimer: i'm a health insurance broker

if you have non-poverty-level income, you can buy a policy for about $300-500 a month through most state exchanges

if you have poverty-level income (no stock dividends, no capital gains, havent worked w2 job in years), then you can qualify for Medicaid

another option is to open a 1-2 employee LLC or LLP and buy small group health insurance. typically these plans are about $5-7k a year and have somewhat reasonable deductibles and somewhat reasonable out of pocket maxes. at the very least, a $100,000 appendix surgery will only cost you $7,000 max, and then you are covered for all other medical expenses for the rest of the year

This is a fundamental problem with Health Insurance being primarily tied to employment. Many older devs, with families to take care of, would experiment this way with health insurance better than what is currently available outside of employer-provided versions.

money

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