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Comment by esotericn | Hacker News Reader

It can give you the breathing room to actually _do_ something that can change your status and allow you to have a decent shot at "own the means of production", though.

I've probably had hundreds of conversations with people who will say "well, not everyone can afford to move town" or "not everyone can afford to take a week off work" or whatever else.

That's an enormous handicap - you're basically a slave to your current job, and if it tires you out enough that you can't train/learn/do other productive work outside of it, then you're stuck.

Personally I grew up with essentially zero, and pretty much self-enforced level 1 upon myself until this chart would have me at level 4.

People talk a lot about how certain startup founders aren't really risking anything because they start out with a safety net. You can create that safety net for yourself, with a little luck along the way, provided that you're sensible.

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"not everyone can afford to take a week off work"

even if you can, financially, it's often hard to do so mentally/emotionally. if you're taking time away from work, that means no income - whether you desperately need it or not may be immaterial to the mental state you've built for yourself.

I think that's the point of the article.

If you have 4 weeks' worth of spending saved then it's difficult.

If you have 40, then it's fairly easy.

If you have 400, it's trivial.

well.. I was getting at, it still can be mentally difficult to pry yourself away from it, even if you financially can 'afford' it.

Tell me about it. I have over 25 years worth of living expenses and still haven't gotten the nerve to just get out.

that's sort of what I'm getting at. what's holding you back? I'd like to think if I had 25 years... yeah, I'd just stop and do .. well, I'd probably do what I do now, but less of it, and be more picky, and travel more.

as it stands, I've got perhaps... ~5 years of living expenses saved up. Certainly enough to not worry about a few days of non-income, but it's.. certainly not FU money. 25 years of expenses lined up seems like it might give you more breathing room, but, I suspect your comfort level and goal posts move.

when I was in big debt, I thought "man, just having $1k in the bank will make all the difference, and I'll be fine". and when I got there, I was 'fine' for about 10 minutes. Then the goal was $2k. Then 5. Then 10. Then 30. And so on. For me, there's a realization that it's moderately hard to earn and keep that money, and that it can be reduced rather quickly, so.... keeping earning income is still top of mind, at least for another few years.

5 years is certainly FU money to me.

You really think you couldn't walk out of a job and find another one in a few months? Will you even notice that drop in savings aside from as a theoretical number on a spreadsheet?

It sounds to me like you have a complex about this rather than it being in any sense rational. (I don't mean that as an insult at all.)

5 years is less than the amount of time it took for me to go from a skint teenager in a dead end town, to a graduate with a full time job.

in my case, much of it is tied to equities (retirement account is a portion, taxable account is other). straight cash - probably ~12-14 months. Having lived through a couple of crashes, the idea that 30% of that could be gone (for a long time) still looms.

And yes, it's sort of a complex. I have to remind myself that yes, I can pay the extra 50c and get cheese on the burger if I feel like it. I'd lived 30+ years without being able to do that (meaning that adding cheese a few times would be noticeable at the end of a week), it's a hard mental state to break from. Not 'working' means ... a day where savings isn't going up, etc.

Replenishing the spent money is simultaneously both easier (larger savings tends to grow in larger chunks) and harder (takes longer to earn new money vs the compounding of earlier money, and takes more of the remaining time I have left, which is always depleting).

I'm not claiming it's entirely rational, by any means, and that's why I was saying earlier that it's hard to break out of.

EDIT: I've always taken FU money to mean... you never have to engage in any sort of 'work' ever again, not just for a short time. In some ways, I've been able to use this cushion to say "no" to some situations/jobs/projects that I would have agreed to before, but it's not the same as saying FU to people. :)

Fair enough. This is definitely a personal thing though.

I was like that for a while and went all in on FIRE type stuff.

The thing is that eventually, after I did take off that N months, I realised that it's unrealistic to assume I'd have no/almost no income for multiple decades.

I would go insane without having productive work, even if that were working for a non profit for a significant pay cut.

> Not 'working' means ... a day where savings isn't going up, etc.

This is true regardless of how much money you have. You're always going to be able to add some more income by performing labour, even if your investments outperform your labour after a point.

It's worth loosening the straps at some point, even if you just give someone else the money to spend (e.g. charity).

> "not everyone can afford to take a week off work"

Being in a country where vacation time is paid by the company (currently 7 weeks / year, even if I usually don't use up all of it), the idea that taking a day off work means less money at the end of the month is mind boggling.

I'm talking about taking a week _off_ off.

For example leaving one job and having a gap before another one, or getting sacked and having a few weeks without work, or moving town before you have something lined up, etc.

Basically, being able to function without income for a nonzero period.

I wouldn't want to use my holiday weeks looking for work more than a few times in my life even if I have quite a generous allowance (well, generous by 'normal people' standards, I find the idea of working >80% of the year quite odd)

Being in a country where I can negotiate with my employer as to vacation time in respect to my salary, the idea that someone has to have accept minimum of 7 weeks regardless of circumstances is mind boggling.

It's because, absent that protection, workers on the weaker end tend to get squeezed down to very low PTO whether they want that or not.

[EDIT] weaker end in terms of ability to negotiate—so, the vast majority of workers.

Unfortunately what often happens is that this law applies only to full time workers at some cutoff (e.g. 30+ hours a week). If the cost of full time is too high (e.g. 7 weeks paid vacation for a low skilled job), the employer would be more likely to hire more part time workers. And you would see people working multiple part time jobs rather that a full time job. Some of those workers would likely be willing to forgo a generous benefit like 7 week vacation for the opportunity to work one job.

There must be a lot more people who think the law's helping them than harming them, or it'd be changed. Might take time, but those sorts of laws have been common all over Europe for quite a while and I don't see any especially strong movements to repeal them, or even reduce the days off per year, despite incentives for businesses to attempt to drum up or encourage (at least, surely, not to oppose) such a movement, if possible, which one would expect to make such movements significantly easier to start and grow, if they had much popular support at all.

I agree that it's not a popular opinion, but with these sorts of things the unintended consequences are not very visible. The people working part time may not realize it may be due to this affect.

It's also interesting to look at percentage of workers that work part time by country. US is relatively low at 22% while countries with a more generous welfare state are higher (France 39%, Norway 48%)

But there are a million other things going on as well so I'm not sure if it's related to that or something else

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.PART.ZS?most_rec...

Well, the legal minimum is 5 weeks (congés payés), but I got also 2 more weeks, called RTT because the maximum number of weekly worked hours is 35h and it's expected that I work more than the 35h maximum per week, so the additional days off are to compensate for this (and since we're not paid by the hour, we can't just get overtime).

What has this offered to your country? Why doesn't it have it's Amazon or SpaceX? Why is the Linux Foundation here? Why are the salaries in the most unregulated or frontier markets the best in the US and not in Europe?

Mandating a week off for everyone doesn't seem to give the space needed for poorer people to become as wealthy as they might deserve. What can be done?

Agglomeration dynamics, a great higher education system, 300M+ people who share the same language, and a common market go a long way. Cheap finance and government support (defense spending) also help.

If you want to attribute America's economic advantage to hours worked or labor regulations (and yes, they do matter to an extent), you have to be ready to explain why Russia, Mexico, Greece, and Chile aren't also economic powerhouses.

Source: https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm

It's not obvious what can be done. Efforts to distribute the wealth (post WW2 style) will most likely lead to capital flight, and you guys have a gargantuan mass media machine devoted to making sure this kind of thing does not happen to begin with. America is experiencing advanced regulatory capture and the solutions were needed decades ago.

My personal conjecture is that you're in for a long period of degradation followed by something violent. Fascism most likely.

Sad, but likely true. It would appear as an observer that facist ideals are on the rise even in the youngest genrrations, but that may be simply me noticing it more.

Yes, unfortunately. It doesn't help that Americans are culturally unable to process the idea that we are not "the best" even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Those are ridiculous claims. Do you have any evidence do back up your claims that having no minimum number of legal days off is related in any way to prosperity? Proof from almost every other OECD country says no.

Even if you don't need it, you really probably do. A lot of people talking about entrepreneurship and whatnot have some kind of blindness to the idea that one can fail at these things, and once you've eaten up your savings you're back at square 0 and back to the soul-crushing reality of job. Objectively it is wiser to simply keep the job in the first place.

Or they're just talking about different ratios of saving/spending.

As I posted below - the situation in which you have 40 weeks of spending set aside is radically different to that of having 4.

From my perspective, and I recognise things are probably very different in the USA with your health insurance catastrophe, taking a few months off work to unwind, or check out the job market, or whatever else every now and then is a completely normal thing to do.

My first software job came about because I left a job and bounced around for a bit. I had enough mental space and time to physically visit interviews without the sort of typical "pretend to your boss you're ill" stuff. Without that time I'd be somewhere completely different now.

50% of small businesses fail. 20% fail in their first year.

The real cost of failure isn't just loss of savings. It's potential homelessness, bankruptcy or death through less of health cover, or bankrupcty through student loan payments.

In a functional culture the cost of entry for small businesses is much lower, as is the Total Cost of Failure.

For a country that claims to be business friendly, the US makes it unbelievably dangerous to start a small business without the backing of a significant financial safety net.

This is something I think about a lot as an American in Canada. I can afford to stick my neck out in a lot of ways because, worst case, I still have healthcare even if I'm out of a job for 4+ weeks.

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