Ask HN: What's a mundane sum of money for you? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's a mundane sum of money for you?

4 pointsdusted4 comments

I have a pet theory about wealth and the value of money that I'll write some article about later.

But, I'm interested in knowing: Your country and: What's a "mundane" sum of money for you? By that I mean, an amount where, if you got it, it'd surely be welcome, and you'd surely consider it substantial, you'd be willing to do some amount of extra work for it (but not so much that your life started falling apart).. But you'd not.. like.. Do anything with it in your current situation, like, there'd not be anything specific you'd want/need/have to use it for, in other words, it'd be a lot of money, but not enough to "change anything" ?

I'll be a sport and go first: I live in Denmark, the upper limit is about $50k, sure, it'd be nice, I'd also do some overtime for it, but, it wouldn't allow me to do anything I want to do, that I can't already do, and it'd not be an enabler for me to move on any particular project, so I'd probably just invest it.

How about you?

(To elaborate: $50k is a lot for me, of course! I'd be thrilled if I got it, but, it wouldn't be life-changing, it'd not be an enabler into another strata of possibilities for me, it's the amount of money I'd be extremely happy to get, but that wouldn't change any of my current behaviors. In contrast, if I had $200k, I have a on-going project that I could move on, and I'd know exactly how to use that money. (to elaborate further, because I know people will misinterpret this: I'm of course saving, and will eventually reach that amount, it's not that I'm saying any lesser amount means nothing to me, only that I'd have the status as "being put towards saving" rather than enable me to do something right away)).

Well it depends.

For example, even €100 to €200 matters for me quite a bit when I am trying to exchange €5000 even though it is “only” 2% to 4% of the whole amount. It actually upsets me quite a bit.

But I would not be motivated to do something for €100 or €200. Exactly because I regularly lose amounts like that to fees and fluctuations in exchange rates. Although of course it depends on what “something” is. I mean I would not want to put a lot of effort in for €200. But if someone handed me a couple hundred euros in exchange for something simple or silly then of course I would be happy and grateful!

And then let’s say on the other hand someone was gonna pay me a whole month wage for some work. Well firstly, I lose about 50% of any additional income to taxes and similar fees to my country. Next, the question is what kind of time frame are we talking about for the work?

I do not own a house. I really want to own a house. I don’t want to take a bank loan to buy a house. I want to buy and own a house, in which I can live with my girlfriend and where we can raise kids.

A house of comfortable size and location will cost somewhere around €250k to €500k. So I need about €500k to €1MM because of taxes. That would be an actual life changing amount of money.

But of course, if someone came and offered me €50k like in your example, well that’s still money I can put towards saving for a house.

And that also brings me to something else. Is this a one time thing, or something that will be possible to do multiple times. If someone paid me €50k for a month of work, and I could work for them for several months well that’s bringing me ever closer to my goal of buying a house.

This is so context-sensitive. I have a large family and I've had some rough employment years. Our basic expenses are high. We took a huge loss on a house. My retirement savings are in terrible shape. I've had to cash out three different 401K accounts over the years to pay the mortgages. That's of course a terrible thing to do, you lose a lot, but it's also sometimes the only realistic option. If I had been able to leave those accounts untouched, I'm not saying I'd be all set for retirement, returns have been very uneven for decades, but I'd have 2-3x the retirement savings I actually have today.

For a while I was working for a self-driving car startup; I had an equity arrangement that, if everything went _just right_, would supposedly be worth about 700K after 4 years of employment. I knew this was a long shot, but I was working hard for that, harder than I might have otherwise been willing to work. What actually happened is I hit the one year mark, 1/4 vested, and shortly after that the company shut down, so that extra work and stress only ultimately harm, not help me, although I did learn a bit, though not as much as I was hoping to.

So, a windfall of enough money to pay off my mortgage or significantly improve my positioning for retirement. $700K had my attention. I know that's just a theoretical number and I'd have to sell the equity and take various hits on that, but I could fantasize about retiring early, shifting to part-time, etc.

A smaller amount like $100K would allow me to make a huge payment on our house, which would drastically reduce the interest I have to pay over the life of the loan, so that also could be life-changing, but not as dramatically.

$50K would bring back most of what I blew from savings after having to cash out the last 401K. I think $75K would about make up for everything I lost because of that last job loss.

$10K would probably immediately go into projects, like repairing bathroom ceiling, replacing a dishwasher, getting some more shelving, a couple more desks for my kids, upgrading some ancient laptops, etc. Or, we might be able to repair a car that's been sitting around for months waiting on money to repair it. Not really life-changing but life-improving.

$600 is about week's food expenses for our family of nine and I wouldn't say no to that - it would allow me to increase our savings a little bit.

$100 is pizza and wings for the family.

Was out to dinner with a best friend. We were talking about what to get as a bottle of wine...) (San Francisco, CA ~2015), (High end restaurant)

(for context my GF was the cellar Somm to The French Laundry, some of those bottles cost ~$35,000++ (Wont go into details))

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My buddy who ran a successful tech company was kvetching over the cost of a watch we wanted to buy which was just a couple thousand...

And he was bitching about the cost of the watch.

So I had to hold up the bottle of wine he had in front of him that we were to consume that seating....

and pointed out the wine cost more than the watch, though the watch was going to last a heck-of-a-lot more time than the wine...

Invest in that which lasts. Eschew the ephemeral.

There is no such thing. I would not sacrifice any more of my precious free time for anything less than a life-changing fortune (and even that I would only do temporarily; not that anyone would offer such a sum, of course).

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