If people didn't already realize that most of people hanging around on HN have the top 10% of the world's wealth, this made things clearer than ever (the phone in question costs around 1000 EUR)
Makes all the conversations around finance here make so much more sense.
Gross definitely, but net (after taxes, healthcare, housing and other fixed costs)... not so sure. High CoL - seriously even as someone who lives in Munich, US housing prices are utterly incomprehensible, just how the fuck do y'all even manage to survive?! -, high costs for transportation, the utter madness that is US healthcare, hundreds of dollars for cable TV, having to save for your pension or student loans.
I'd wager that even after accounting for taxes, most Europeans have more money in their pocket than Americans working in the same field.
(And obviously, all of us have it vastly better than 99% of people in Africa)
I am fortunate enough that my spouse has her own very good medical coverage and we do not have kids, so our monthly outlays are somewhat less.
If you consider that $800 to be equivalent to a tax, the person's take home net income was actually less than if they were an equivalent-of-a-W2 employee in Canada or another place with a social healthcare system.
Not that housing costs in many big cities in CA aren't also ridiculous - but BC seems to be setting new records in unaffordability.
Actually, EU individual tax rates are on average similar to those of US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_rates
And yes, we also pay for healthcare one way or another.
I imagine it's easy to have high disposable income today, if not allowing for the cancer treatment you may pay for tomorrow.
As said, this is a question. I understand only some people in the USA have full health insurance.
For the average person though there isn't much risk of having to pay tens of thousands of dollars for cancer treatment. The vast majority of Americans have health insurance, and your costs are limited by the out of pocket maximum.
“Limited”, ha, ha, ha, to $8k for an individual/$16k for a family. (Very generous of them to assume a family has two wage earners making equally as much.)
Better hope your cancer treatment doesn’t span two calendar years.
Having worked in SF and Berlin... SF was definitely better paid overall and I made enough money to buy a nice apartment in Berlin, something which seems unachievable by working in Berlin all your life.
Regardless, kudos to them for persevering. As another user said, many people would assume the device to be inoperable, even if findable, so not try.
> In 2018, the median earnings for full-time, year-round cashiers were $22,109, compared with $35,301 for retail salespersons and $42,421 for first-line supervisors of retail salespersons. > In contrast, the median earnings for all full-time, year-round workers was $48,565 in 2018.
I've spent ten years working retail here in California, and I'll offer my anecdata: a great number of even those cashiers own iPhones! Ten million people work retail in the US making no more than ~$40k, and that's a population that demonstrably owns iPhones but is hard-pressed to replace them on short notice.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2020/09/profile-of-th...
And for a properly demoralising angle, that level of wealth is still a far cry from being fully financially independent.
Really? I feel like if you had 900k in cash, and no debts, you could easily live freely. Maybe not the ultimate lifestyle, but pretty comfortably, even in the US. That's around 50k a year in investments. Even with a partner and maybe even a kid or two, you could get by and have the time to build up your own independent income sources, unless I'm wildly overestimated how much the average person wants to spend to live decently.
It's still cutting it very close. 900k in cash will go by faster than expected due to inflation. A single person in a rural or low COL area for under $2k/month between rent/food/utilities. This isn't really leaving much room for hobbies/enjoyment. I would say that's a bit above subsistence level. Rounding up, that might be $30k/year in basic living, which, in theory would last 30 years. Inflation's going to eat in to that - I can't say how much for sure, but I have a hard time seeing most people make $900k in cash last more than 10-15 years. There will be too many temptations to spend chunks, and there will be legitimate emergencies (thinking primarily of unexpected health stuff).
"50k year in investments" - that 900k would have to be invested moderately aggressively to ensure 50k/year coming off while maintaining most of the principal.
What may be more interesting is seeing what other people might view as "low bar" COL numbers. My mental model for much of the low COL areas of the US would be around $2k/month for a single person to live without being at 'rock bottom', basing mostly on what I see around me as lowish rent, food and utility numbers. I've no doubt some people stretch that number lower, and two people sharing a space would cut the number lower as well. I'd think 2 adults could get by on $3k at 'above subsistence levels' in many areas for a long time. Rounding up a tag, that might put you closer to $40k/year, but you'd still not make that $900k last a long time, between inflation and emergencies.
EDIT: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-much-money-you-need-t_b_9... - from a few years ago, there were a lot of numbers in the $40k-$60k range for various spots in the US.
On the other hand, 900k will let you comfortably retire and live like a king if you move to a lower cost of living country.
agreed, except... you can basically never come back.
> I guess that's what I meant by financial freedom, not necessarily not having any other income forever
Yeah, the phrase can mean different things to different people.
It's definitely a 'comfy runway' for a lot of folks in a lot of places, even if it's not a "never have to work again" number.
To start with, when I say "financially fully independent", I'm not talking about a fixed amount. Instead I'm eyeing a figure that allows you to live comfortably (but not lavishly) with a family, in the place of your choosing, and not have to ever touch the principal. Even in the face of a devastating decade-long recession.
Let's work backwards from that. In case of a massive global downturn, looking down the barrel of a universal lost decade, it is still possible to invest your money so that you can get a reliable 1.8% above inflation from dividends alone. That's pre-tax. Assume capital gains are taxed at 35%, and we're talking about ~1.2% annual real return on investment.
If you expect your family's annual, comfortable living expenses (with assorted housing maintenance costs factored in) to be about 110k net, then you'll need 110/0.012 = 9.16M to invest. Let's round that up to 9.2M.
In case you want to retire to a relatively lavish lifestyle, so you can get a large estate and enough liquid cash to pay for helping staff even under the most drastic but still realistic scenarios, we're talking about post-tax net income of >200k a year, and a principal of at least 17M.
Feel free to plug your own numbers in.
Thus if this is going to take more than 10 hours, it is not worth your time.
If I spend enough days on annoying wastes of time, I don't want to lose all my free time, so I'm going to need to reduce how many days I go to work. And since that means doing less work, I can only push that so far before I have to start taking those days unpaid.
("It's more important to get the money than to have those days off" would mean I should have just negotiated more pay and less vacation from the start, so that's incompatible with the premise.)
Maybe I could have taken this one day in stride and ignored it. But maybe I was already on the edge of needing a break, and this pushes me to take a multi-week sabbatical. On average, in a situation like this, 1 day wasted on annoying tasks gets traded for about 1 day of labor.
And this idea doesn't require you to be able to control your hours as much as you want, just a few percent is enough to make the logic work.
For what it’s worth, I think the GP makes a pretty common opinion. For example people on lower incomes will do more household jobs themselves because it saves them money, whereas people on higher incomes will pay people to do things because it saves them time. The opinion might be dressed up differently when I state that but it’s still the simple act of a person putting a value on their free time. It’s why we have house cleaners, windows cleaners, gardeners, car washers, and so on and so forth. The only different is people don’t usually casually post precise numeric values against their time. But it’s still a sentiment shared by many.
There is going to be a line drawn somewhere that equates to “yes this is worthwhile expense” and “no, I’m better off doing that myself”. While I acknowledge that line is going to be variable depending on how much one likes or loaves a particular activity, equating the cost of outsourcing to your own rate of pay isn’t an unreasonable approximation for where that line should reside.
By what meassure? To me it is by definition part of every living metabolism.
Also over half? of people wake up to pee at least once. That'd be nice to make unnecessary.
And then there is the hazzle of breathing. And walking. And moving around!
Oh boy, if only someone could do living for me.
The guys in the article had fun, doing what they did.
You're not going to miss out on much of life that way.