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Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

To have 1 MM USD/EUR at the end of your thirties given an average 4 % yearly return on investment, you need to save around 4.000 USD/EUR per month starting at age 25. In Europe, if you earn around 100k EUR per year your free income will be around 5.000-6.000 EUR per month. Saving 4.000 EUR / month is doable with that but you'll have to live very frugally, not traveling much and you better not start a family unless you have a partner who will supplement your income.

And regarding the authors' experience: Yeah, if you happen to be employed in the area that ranks in the top 0.05 % quantile for engineering salaries worldwide you will easily become wealthy, especially if you're lucky enough to be paid in company stock during a stock market bubble.

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European countries usually don't pay 100k for 15 year olds, also after tax it is (well depending on country) 4.5k in Germany. If you live frugally you can save 3k.

Assuming you meant 25 rather than 15

25 year old, I meant.

Not to mention some places (Ireland) kneecap your gains by taxing even unrealized gains via a rule called deemed disposal. Nevermind 52% income tax that kicks in extremely low.

That's a big if, at least in Germany the pay seems to be capped below 100k for software engineers at least.

And you’ll still lose nearly half your income to taxes and other deductions.

Basically road to financial independence seems to be get paid half a million a year and live in a country with relatively low tax rate…

Seconded. Earning 600k a year should automatically disqualify you from talking about living frugally.

Yeah I don’t get how their outgoings are so low given where they must live… rent or buy it simply doesn’t fit even if they are renting a room and living of cup noodles based on rent in the Bay Area some of their outgoings are suspiciously low.

So I think getting a house gifted by your parents is also a requirement for their path.

Their outgoings aren't particularly low. I guess early on they were, but that's "living with roommates". Their current col is very much in the "rents a two bedroom apartment and spends whatever they want on food" category, but they probably don't own a car.

My personal expenses are a tad lower than theirs, and I rent an apartment in San Francisco that I live in alone.

Not really. An appartment alone is $2000 a month according to the post. That's 24% of your income at $100k, and not even 4% at $620k. I don't know how much people in the US usually spend on rent/housing, but anything under 30% of your income seems low to me.

30-33% of income is the rule of the thumb as the maximum a landlord would accept a tenant to rent in the US.

Even before the covid bubble the expected return was more like 8-10% per year. 22 years of 1500 a month at 8% is over 1M

I'd say the HN crowd is more likely to be in that top quintile than not

I'm not sure how true that is.

Poor people tend to hide or downplay their poverty online in an environment like this one.

I remember when I didn't even have $5/day to spend on coffee to skip for even one subscription pitched that way.

(this is kind of pedantic)

Maybe HN is more likely to be in that quantile than the general population of developers; “more likely than not” implies that most people on HN are in that quantile which I kind of doubt but I don’t have data to support either way.

Some maybe but definitely not the majority

More likely than the general population, sure, but I’m not sure about “more likely than not”.

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