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Comment by bkirkby | Hacker News Reader

15 years ago a young engineer i worked with overheard me say "getting rich is a pretty easy formula if you are patient."

he came to me later and asked me to expound. i told him "the formula is: spend less than you make and invest the left over. you do that long enough and you'll become wealthy."

i also told him "from what i can tell, it will happen so gradually that you'll barely notice a difference in your lifestyle. you will just realize one day that you are part of the maligned upper-crust but noone around you will know that."

he called me 2 years ago to let me know that he took my observation to heart and he's now in the millionaire club. he also said "the books say i'm a millionaire, but i certainly don't feel like it."

his next million will be much easier to get now and he just turned 40.

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I have followed this and am on track to having a nice sum when I decide to retire. I look at that pile. Divide it by what I make now per year. That number is the number I could coast and not have to 'worry' about money with 0 change in lifestyle. I then add that to my current age and figure out where I should run out when I am old. That number is currently not far enough along for my liking. I am also doing ridiculously better than many of my peers on this. As many do not even understand that many companies give you money to put money into a 401k.

Realistically though back when being a millionaire meant 'retire immediately' things were much cheaper. You could get a car for 3-4k. Now a similar car would be 30-40k. You could say 'oh but that car is so much better'. That is true, but this 10x is mostly true across most goods I have found. I think many do not realize what a number inflation did on everyone in the late 70s and very early 80s. So many of these 'sayings' are still around but their numbers off by a factor of 10.

A car that you could buy for a few thousand today is much more capable than the cars people bought for a few thousand in the past.

New cars are status symbols or toys. I never understood how people could trade a human's full time salary for a car. People take old cars to work every day for a small fraction of the cost.

American lifestyles have inflated much more than the price of comparable goods. Average home size is way up over time, people prepare less of their own food, people buy fancy big cars with lots of horsepower and unnecessary capability.

I would complain about iphones and big TVs but in reality- the only things relevant to most of our budgets are our insistence to compete for the hottest real estate and new cars

I was hesitant to use the car example exactly because of this argument. My point was if you wanted a new car you paid 3-4k. Now a similar new car would be 30-40k. Oh sure it is all around a better car. You can however see the same approximate scale in many goods. Such as food and big ticket items (like refrigerators, lawn mowers, etc). What made cars much better is better manufacturing allowed by the use of computers (both in the manufacture and in the car). Adding a few dozen controller nodes does not add nearly 30k to the value of a car. Most of that is inflation. Before the inflation hit in the 70s my parents bought a home for about 14k. Last time I looked if they wanted to sell it was around 120-140k. I have not looked but I would take a guess that a 'used car' price would scale depending on model and usage with current used car prices and age of the car.

Conspicuous consumption of goods is a interesting argument and probably worth talking about. But my point was scale and inflation.

> New cars are status symbols or toys. I never understood how people could trade a human's full time salary for a car. People take old cars to work every day for a small fraction of the cost.

It's not that simple. If nobody bought new cars, where would the used cars come from? :D

And their prices would go comparatively up.

So basically, they are just like everything else that you can get cheaper (which is, really, everything). Eg. you can get a comparable laptop for 1/2 the price most likely (maybe not with new M1 macs, but in a few years). Or the phone.

I’m not a Mustachian by any means, but this post resonated pretty strongly with me when it first came out: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...

Brian! Long time no see my man. HN is a small world ;-)

What is the point of this story? This will objectively never happen for anyone with a ”regular” job, I.e. anywhere within 1 standard deviation or less of the median income.

Also, counting a home’s net worth in assets does not make sense to me unless you can afford to greatly downsize at anytime and the market is liquid.

If you invest $500 per month for 40 years and get 6% interest, you'll end up with almost a million dollars.

$6,000 per year is a significant portion of your take-home income if you're making the median income in the US, but it's possible.

Having $1M (or even $2M or $3M) 40 years in the future is not FU money. Not to mention that if you are unemployable anyway due to old age, you do not need to say FU to anyone in the first place.

There is no set amount you need to make or save. The goal is to learn what you don't need. One of the things you don't need is to say FU.

The thread stems from onion2k’s claim that a regular job will never get you to “FU money”.

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