Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnJamesRambo | Hacker News Reader

I think the best article would have said simply invest as hard as possible in a low expense ratio ETF instead of the vending machine etc. It involves zero mental effort and I'd be amazed if you can beat 10% returns year after year. I'm reminded of our previous trust fund baby president that would have had infinitely more of his inherited wealth if he had just invested in the SP500 instead of his "business ventures."

The light speed of these hypothetical doctors' accumulation would come from living as simply as possible and even using debt to invest more heavily in low expense ratio funds early in their careers.

View on HN

The problem with buying cashflow through ETF investment is you have to make so much money to get to any real level of cashflow.

Buying $30k of index funds will set you back ~$50k pre tax, which is 25% of our doctors income. If you subscribe to the 4% rule, you've "bought" a perpetual cashflow of $1200 annually.

To get a passive income of $200k annually, you need $5m in index funds which is going to take either ~30 years with compounding interest at 10% (assuming you are investing a continuous $30k after tax) every year.

Realistically, to make any sort of actual money (I'm defining this as $200k + annually in passive/semi-passive income), you need an ownership stake in a business or in another asset (likely property).

The vending machine example is stupid for a doctor to do, because it's the sort of opportunity that rewards someone with a lot of hustle and low opportunity cost - good luck competing with an entrepreneurial college student who has a lot more free time. Same thing with the website.

The most money is to be made by selling assets to a greater fool (or sage?) in the biggest asset bubble of humanity. Anyone throwing rocks at Dogecoin for being a bubble is living in overpriced glass houses.

I’m not saying there will be a crash. It will be interesting to see how this money experiment turns out.

You identified that you need a lot of money or a lot of time, but ignored for most people it's a combination of these two. It wont be $30,000 once, it will be more like $5-10,000 per year and the money out will be a combination of the higher investment spread over many years plus the compounding interest.

> simply invest as hard as possible in a low expense ratio ETF

Yes, that works if you're already a millionaire. Otherwise that's still good advice but you won't get a decent wage from it.

If you had just invested all your earnings into Bitcoin since 2010, you'd be a billionaire. Why does everyone think that retrospective advice is useful? Are there universes where the S&P500 tanked while real estate market held its value? Of course, and for varying decades this is true. But to say that no one should ever invest in anything except S&P is to argue that nothing ever new should ever be created.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com