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Comment by kephra | Hacker News Reader

"Building something interesting requires a surplus of time and money. Salaried jobs provide neither."

The trap is not the salary job promotion, but the raise of middle class lifestyle. You wont leave middle class, as long as you raise your lifestyle with every income increase, and stay in dept.

The solution is to keep a frugal lifestyle. e.g. my lifestyle is around Euro1000/month, even including my sailing boat. A typical good payed coders job leaves Euro2000 surplus every month. So working for salary for one year means, that I have two year runway to work for myself.

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This. I live like a student still. Class wars is a zero winners game. Expensive toys and things buy me nothing. My entire worth is about 600GBP. I shop at the cheapest places and grow some of my own food.

I have no intention of using the extra time I'm gaining doing anything other than having fun. I can afford to take 7 years out now which is good for 10 years work.

I too have a boat (a widebeam canal boat) which is being slowly refurbed in my spare time. When it's done, I'm living on it with my family.

Families are expensive. Tough to convince the wife that we should live like students.

Depends who your wife is. All we need is each other (I've been married for 12 years have 3 children and have lived like this since day one).

If this lifestyle is important to you, it seems natural that you'd want to find a lifelong partner that has similar feelings. One of the most common reasons for divorce is disagreements about money.

My expenses didn't go up when I began my relationship with my wife, and went up about 15% when my daughter was born. From $1400/mo to $1600/mo for the whole family.

Exactly this!

People get into mortgages, in new car payments, etc, and into a deeper debt trap every time

"The solution is to keep a frugal lifestyle. e.g. my lifestyle is around Euro1000/month, even including my sailing boat. A typical good payed coders job leaves Euro2000 surplus every month. So working for salary for one year means, that I have two year runway to work for myself."

My situation is similar (including € but no sailing boat), I try not to live beyond my means but not only that, to save some money, and not "try to fill my salary with expenses"

> People get into mortgages, in new car payments, etc, and into a deeper debt trap every time

Only if they choose to.

I haven't got caught up in upsizing (lifestyle, houses or even having a car). My aim is to pay off my mortgage as soon as possible, and that's made easier in a few years when our childcare costs will drop dramatically (nursery is frighteningly expensive!). Our lifestyle isn't completely frugal, but we keep most of our holidays in the UK visiting friends/family, rather than splurging on worldwide travel. Most of the money from bonuses, share options (those were the days) and pay rises go towards paying off chunks of the mortgage rather than upgrading lifestyle.

Good public transport (London, UK) means that owning a car isn't a necessity; buses/trains/tube/taxis will do most of it and there's Zipcar or other rental cars to fill in the gaps.

Where in Europe is EU3000/mo. the norm? I've got 25 years of experience as a developer, and I'm finding it hard to get 2/3rds of that ..

Where do you live in Europe? In western Europe (France, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, etc.), 30-35k+ is a common starting salary for an engineer with a MSc.

I'm in Austria, a C/C++ developer (Java, Android variant too, but I'd rather not work in it) with systems programming experience, and now 4 years of mobile work. The salaries around these parts are close to the GP scale, but not quite there ..

As a developer? Most of northern Europe would have salaries way past that, assuming your skills are in demand.

If you'd be willing to work near London in the UK and use Java, drop me an e-mail - address is in my profile.

Nice offer, I'll pass it on to some of the British Java guys I know. ;)

Before or after tax? In The Netherlands a good developer can earn between 3000 and 6000 per month before tax.

Tax is high, mainly thanks to the massive subsidies given to house owners - mortgage interest payments are subtracted from pre-tax wage before the tax is calculated. As you can guess, it's normal here for people to max their loans and go for interest-only repayments..

"it's normal here for people to max their loans and go for interest-only repayments.."

And then end up with an unpayable principal?

That's how governments create housing bubbles.

The principal never increases.

You're basically just renting the house from the bank. And this is common (not good, but common) in every country where interest is tax deductible, because you can multiply your 'renting' power by your top marginal tax rate.

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