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Comment by he_is_legend | Hacker News Reader

Not hard as a rule, but it has one fairly difficult (for many) yet deciding factor: getting that high earning job when you are young, in a FAANG (or comparable company). Working for these type companies is a luxury limited to a very low percentage of people indeed (I have interviewed for them).

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"It's simple. If you don't want to be poor, earn more money".

God I'm such an IDIOT. Why had I never thought of that...

Seriously though, I love reading the comments section of HN, a subsection of a subsection in a high-growth, high-value industry talking about how easy/simple it is to make a ton of money and use that money to do things they want.

Where my Eastern European hackers at? Where my Indian code-factory guys? Anyone want to chime in on your experiences?

I make ~100,000 euro yearly in eastern europe and invest maybe 90%. I can already retire, but think I'll do this for a few more years (job good, coworkers good)

Suppose that wasn't the experience you were looking for?:)

Of course this is the feedback I’m looking for. Confirmation that I’m wrong is always welcome. That said…

We have a burner account providing a sample size of 1 here, guess I’ll shut it down.

FWIW, I'm in indentical position as EEREPRESENT. I've even already "retired", but will probably come back to the contracting market for a year or three more, just to earn extra cash.

FWIW, the original point I was trying to make seems to have gotten lost which is that tech workers (a high earning cohort relative to the rest of the population) extolling financial advice that amounts to “make more money than you need to survive and save the excess” isn’t helpful to the vast majority of the population.

As someone in a less financially prosperous section of world than the US, do you think that advice is particularly helpful to your countrymen? Is the problem that people are wasteful and unwilling to make obvious choices, or that those opportunities aren’t as widely available as HN’s commenters might make them out to be?

You really need an income considerably above average to be able to think about FIRE in Poland (whereas in US you could probably retire early on an average salary). In that regard, it's less applicable.

I think this really gets to the crux of my original point: What is "average" (average for our industry, average for the country as a whole?) and retire "where" (I assure you, if you make an average US salary and want to retire early in the US, you have to have front-loaded a lot of financial sacrifices and been extremely lucky)

Congratulations!

We know one couple who makes FAANG level income. They have a very nice apartment, but otherwise are as reasonable with their spending (from what we’ve seen) as everyone else.

The rest of our social circle is decidedly middle income. We also live in a very high cost of living location that isn’t California or NYC.

Guess what guys, you can have a good life in all but a small handful of places while saving towards retirement and making median wages.

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