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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

I used to think that too, but realized it’s very naive later in life. At some point people are good at what they do, but get tired, start a family, want to settle down. Money helps quite a bit to have those folks motivated.

If you want innovators, motivate them with rewards. Money is a great reward since you can turn it into mostly anything you’d like. Want to buy a mansion? Fine. Want to travel around the world? Feel free. Want to give it away to charity? Great!

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Maybe I should have been more explicit. There's a difference between "money" and "a lot of money". People are in this thread talking about the likelihood of getting $100 million. If someone does a thing because they want to start a family and settle down, great. You don't need $100 million to do that. You don't even need $10 million. What I'm saying is you don't want to attract people who are aiming at making vastly more than what is needed to handle the "settle down and live a comfortable life" situation that you described. But right now our society does incentivize and glamorize that, and I think we're worse off for it.

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>>You absolutely need $10 million if you want to retire to any city in the US.

And...people accept that as a natural state of being? New York has over 8M residents, do all of them have $10M saved for retirement?

Or is your idea of retirement completely out of sync with what retirement really is for most people?

You surely want to retire comfortably. You want to do what you want - and spend money along, not some arbitrary amounts but just without thinking too much.

$10M sounds very much like an arbitrary amount for a very extravagant retired lifestyle.

My numbers are like this:

    $10M over 50 years - $200k/yr or $16k/mo
    House in a rather expensive place - $5k/mo
    Food, travel, other things and especially projects can eat the rest $11k/mo

Which number is wildly off?

Well, for starters I don't think most people's retirement lasts 50 years. Even if you retire fairly early at, say, 50, that's taking you to 100 years old.

Also, your numbers assume you earn nothing in retirement, which is unnecessarily pessimistic.

Also, $11k a month for "food travel and other things" seems like quite a lot to me. I mean sure someone can spend $11k a month on "projects" but that doesn't mean that's something we as a society necessarily need to support.

50 at least is not "wildly" off. Somebody could retire at 50, at it would be strange to have money run out by 100 - what if the person would live longer?

We can have something earned from the money, but pension money have to be conservative, so the upside could be limited.

$11k a month for "food travel and other things" - healthy food isn't unfortunately cheap, neither is good travel - but those other things could be even more expensive. You might want to start an enterprise, and you'll need seed money. You might support a cause, or run a non-profit, or do other things which are noble but not easily rewarding in monetary sense.

Yes, we as a society probably can't - not don't need, but can't currently - support this. But it doesn't mean people shouldn't aim for this.

Frankly, I don't see strong evidence against so far.

>>50 at least is not "wildly" off. Somebody could retire at 50, at it would be strange to have money run out by 100

Who retires at 50? But even ignoring that, I had to check the numbers - in the UK at least, only 0.02% of people live to 100, the chances are "wildly" against all of us in that regard. Sure it might happen - I wouldn't plan for it.

>>$11k a month for "food travel and other things" - healthy food isn't unfortunately cheap, neither is good travel - but those other things could be even more expensive. You might want to start an enterprise, and you'll need seed money. You might support a cause, or run a non-profit, or do other things which are noble but not easily rewarding in monetary sense.

Your assertion was that you need 10M to retire in a big city, the need part is what I'm challenging. If you want to lead a rockefeller lifestyle in retirement - sure. But that won't apply to 99.9999% of population who just want to live out their life in peace and comfort. Let me put it this way - I don't know anyone who makes $11k/month in their regular working life, the idea that you'd have that during retirement is almost....absurd? Who outside of rich elites has "seed money" during retirement? I think we're thinking of completely different social groups.

So no, unless you're part of the 0.00001% you don't need 10M to retire in a big city.

The 50 years is wildly off. Even taking the average male/female lifespan most people don't enjoy more than 20 years of retirement. And sadly in my family I think the average is much closer to 10 years.

If you mean the lucky few of us who can "retire" at 30-40 and enjoy 50 years of retirement - that's such a statistical anomaly that it might as well not exist.

>>Food, travel, other things and especially projects can eat the rest $11k/mo

And also yeah, that is wildly wildly off. Again, if you want to have such an absolutely extravagant lifestyle to spend $11k a month on food and travel then sure - you probably do need $10M. But it's nonsense to say "you need $10M to retire in a big city". Clearly millions of people don't.

If the goal is financial security to the extent that you could not work (if you still need to work you're not really secure since you could lose that job) then I think you actually would need about $10M. By the time you buy a house, pay for your kids school (elementary through college) and medical insurance for the rest of your life theres not a lot of change left. That to me has always been the goal, I've never truly felt financially secure my entire life and even on a good tech salary I still dont cause I'm one layoff in a bad market away from being in a pretty dire situation, with a family to support too.

> I've never truly felt financially secure my entire life and even on a good tech salary I still dont cause I'm one layoff in a bad market away from being in a pretty dire situation, with a family to support too.

That's a very good point: You really do need a lot of money in the US to feel reasonably secure for the long term. This might be good for employers, entrepreneurs, investors etc., but since most people in society aren't that, I'd argue that the average quality of life is worse for it.

> If the goal is financial security to the extent that you could not work

This actually seems like an anti-goal to me, societally. Why would we want to disincentivize the people that arguably have the best track record of contributing to progress from continuing to do so?

If you are trying to say that society forces us to feel insecure in order to drive us to never stop working then yeah I agree and it sucks - doubly so because it may even be true that if we all felt financially secure, society would grind to a halt.

Crabs in a bucket.

There's certainly some truth in what you say. I see it as a societal problem that the only way to ensure you don't wind up with less than $X to live on per year is to amass some large multiple of $X. What would be better is a more robust social safety net program that ensure if that one layoff happens and you're out of work, your situation isn't that dire. Like maybe you tighten your belt a bit and maybe if you had stretched for a big house you have to move to a smaller one, but you don't wind up on the street. And in exchange for knowing that we will never wind up on the street, everyone accepts that no one will ever get to own a $100 million mansion or a superyacht or a company worth $100 billion. It seems like a fine trade to me.

$10M invested nets you (comfortably) $400K/year forever.

From that:

- 60k for capital gains tax

- 100k for (exorbitant) education for children

- 40k for healthcare (the most expensive plan on my expensive state's marketplace for a family of 4 is $36K).

That leaves $200k for living expenses. If you can't find a place to live comfortably (anywhere, since you aren't restricted by work) on $200k/year, we have very different expectations from life.

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