Ask HN: How to become a millionaire in 3 years? (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to become a millionaire in 3 years? (2022)

20 pointsJamesAdir34 comments

More than 10 years ago, @babyboy808 asked this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1447428

Wonder what would you suggest now to do in 2022 to become a millionaire in the next three years.

What odd answers. Statistically, most millionaire families in America are due to dual earning couples. Which means if you want to be a millionaire, the logical way is to find a partner who makes just as much as you, and then save as much as possible.

It’s likely to be a lot more pleasant than most of the other options here.

I became a multi millionaire this past decade, and I think it's now become even easier to become one. Here are the steps I took:

  1. Work remotely
  2. Live in a low cost of living area
  3. Work multiple remote jobs (I currently work 4 full time SWE roles)
  4. Invest that money (Equities, real estate, side hustles)
  5. Rinse and repeat

This pattern has lead me to an 8 figure net worth (primarily in real estate rentals and retirement accounts) and a 7 figure income that doesn't even include passive income such as rentals and dividends in the mid 6 figures.

It took me a decade to achieve that but with remote work growing and inflation increasing it should be achievable in 5-6 now. Will 1 million be worth what it was? Probably not, but you'll never be poor.

Would love to do something like this. I am currently working like 10 hours a week at my remote FAANG job and to be honest I'm mostly bored during the day. Were you concerned about any legal liability or anything?

> I currently work 4 full time SWE roles

How many hours per week is that?

I work around 40-50 hours per week. Most of the teams that I work on are pretty low performing and the actual work involved isn't too bad. I try not to submit anything early when I'm finished.

Depending on your ethics, blockchain/crypto/DeFi (or ReFi, whatever that means, just saw the term today) and "web3" could be an option. It's not sustainable as ultimately it's either solving a problem that doesn't exist or poorly solving a problem that can be solved much more efficiently without crypto/blockchains, but there's a lot of capital and clueless investors/idiots going around that'll be happy to throw money your way if you can drum up some marketing & PR.

In terms of actual, sustainable businesses, looking beyond tech is an option. Outside of tech there's a lot of industries that still operate very inefficiently and a modern software solution combined with IoT could help - here's an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26240581 and I'm sure there are plenty more. I'm watching the YT channel of an HVAC technician and he's still working on a lot of equipment that's 10-15 years old and clients are cheap and want to run it into the ground - no preventative maintenance and as a result a lot of his calls are "reactive maintenance" aka emergency calls when the equipment is already down. Seems like a low-cost box with a few sensors and IO lines can easily be retrofitted and would allow remote monitoring & proactive failure detection (a vibration sensor alone would probably help) and if cheap enough could be interesting to clients (or even the technician himself, if it helps him get more business or better schedule jobs around predicted failures rather than everything being an emergency job).

Assuming you mean starting with no capital and with minimum luck, it's very tricky! If you have capital, developing an empty lot into valuable real-estate (i.e. condo tower) in a big city is surefire, assuming you have the capability. If you have luck, put $30,000 on any specific number at the roulette wheel or sell Wordle to the NYTimes! ;)

If you have deep domain expertise and a reputation, it would be very feasible to make average $333k/yr consulting if you really hustle and invest your profits. That seems like the most straightforward solution. This guy on LinkedIn did it over 4 years, but the strategy seems sound: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/christian-l%C3%BCdemann-07565...

"If you want to be a Millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline."

Richard Branson

Reminds me of Warren Buffetts line -

“if a far-sighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.”

Earn an average of (1000000-current net worth)/3 for the next 3 years.

Start with 10 million and do a startup.

If you get accepted to YC, you instantly own 93% of a $1.7m worth company, so you’ll be an illiquid millionaire (on paper)

I wonder if this has any practical effect for people. Does it change their financial status in any meaningful way?

I doubt it. It’s extremely illiquid and won’t help as collateral for any type of loan for liquidity needs. It’s just a 60-100k salary for 1-4 years.

Grind Leetcode and get a job at FAANG. Live minimally and invest all earnings. If you land the first job at FAANG and stay for 1-2 years you can likely 2x your income by getting a job at a different FAANG afterwards. If would be a close call on becoming a millionaire, but you would certainly be close.

I don't think it would be close at all, unless you were already a senior engineer (and even then would require amazing stock appreciation). Also, the jump between levels at top companies/FAANG is around 50%, not 100%.

• Junior engineer at FAANG, yr 1 = 180k ~113k take home - 42k living expenses (based off of 3.5k per month) = 71k to invest

• Yr 2 = 71k to invest

• Midlevel engineer, yr 3 = 270k ~160k take home - 42k living expenses = 118k to invest

With 10% stock appreciation per year that's roughly 78k end of 1st year, 164k 2nd year, and 310k by 3rd year.

You can earn $400k at Amazon and Meta today at L5/E4 today and you can certainly live cheaper than $3.5k per month.

At the current inflation rate, every individual will be a millionaire in 2025...And poor.

Steal/scam/extort a million dollars worth of cryptocurrency.

I recommend not doing that however.

I wonder how many of the crypto hacks/scams/etc we hear about actually translate to real-world, fiat money. Cashing that money out would be very difficult in the best of scenarios, let alone when you need to conceal your identity.

Trade options.

Disclaimer: you might be a millionaire in 3 years, but you’ll probably just be broke

working on highly convex position. Trading options, working on startup, creating new startup, buying lotto tickets, or in general if you are already expert in some tech FAANG will give you 500k offer.

I have a corollary question. Is million dollars a lot these days?

It depends what you mean by a lot.

It's a lot, but is it rich (in the US)? No.

According to several surveys held in the US, around $2.5M was what most considered enough to be considered wealthy. However, with recent inflation, that figure has probably increased.

Btw the minimum amount needed to be included in the top 1% of household net worth in the US is $11,099,166.

Yes. At least in Europe you can retire with that amount of money and never work again

Where in Europe?

East and the Balkan. Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece etc

Spain, Portugal.

Real estate development

Ask daddy/mommy for $1m/3 every year for next 3 years.

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? You've unfortunately been doing that repeatedly lately. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

My apologies for this one frivolous comment; but I am at a loss to understand which of my other comments could be considered as flamebait.

You have two recently flagged/dead comments (one with the f-word, another with "lol"). My guess is that the mods probably have a number that appears next to every usename with statistics like that, so they don't have to dig through every user's posts every single time they want to evaluate something.

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