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Comment by Kiro | Hacker News Reader

If I had the money I would probably stay at home all the time as well. I have no problem socializing and doing stuff. It's just that I prefer being home.

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You may be surprised by how cheap it is to do. You could retire forever on even just $100,000.

Care to elaborate? I presume this figure does not assume you have a spouse or children to support.

Correct. It does not account for spouse or children.

Please do elaborate though - that figure seems about 10-20x too low.

Maybe it assumes you already have housing, and that you live in a country with socialized medicine.

I can see myself retiring with maybe U$ 500.000, though I'd like to have more to afford better healthcare than my country's default (which is MUCH better than the U.S. average, but much worse than what you can buy with money).

What my grandparents did was to rent 3 or 4 properties, and live off that. They did so for about 20 years.

What does 'already having housing' mean? It's state provided? Even in a country without property taxes a property you own outright will require maintenance.

500k still seems low but might do it if you don't have rent to pay. I'd still love to hear the original commenter explain his or her reasoning - there might be some useful tips to learn from.

> 500k still seems low but might do it if you don't have rent to pay.

As I answered in the sibling thread, it very much depends on where you live; $500k is, as a back-of-the-envelope calculation, about a total amount of money an average denizen of my country will earn during lifetime, so it definitely is more than enough to live there.

I guess that assumes your country doesn't develop rapidly and experience the accompanying inflation of the cost of living.

Inheriting apartment to live in. Houses are extremely wasteful. You have to maintain by yourself huge area that has direct contact with outside. If ou own a flat in block of flats cost of fighting of nature is split between all flat owners. Also taxes are extremely low because you own just few square meters of the land that the building is standing on.

Taxes are usually linked to property value, not land area.

If you own 1/1000 of property the tax is low.

@embolism: Apartment costs more than a house in the same spot?

If 1000 people share ownership of multistorey building also the land the building stands on, also the land tax, also roof, walls, infrastructure, it's bound to be far cheaper than 5 houses with 20 people at most occupying same space.

The price of an apartment is determined by supply and demand for housing units, not by dividing the price of a house occupying similar land area by the number of units.

Taxes are typically levied on the value of each housing unit.

Don't you at least agree that if you'd replace a block of flats for thousand people with houses for 10 you'd seriously reduce supply of housing in this spot without affecting the demand much and so you'd increase the value and tax on each housing unit in this spot?

I'm no sure how land tax works in the US but in my country it is calculated by multiplying tax rate for given region by area of the plot and then divided between people who own the plot. Share is usually proportional to the area of the buildings or parts of them they own on this plot.

No - an apartment usually costs more per sq metre than a house.

I guess the price depends on the place you want to retire to. I.e. in my country $500k is about what I'd expect for average person to earn through their lifetime having a dayjob. So almost by definition $500k is enough there to live the rest of one's life.

Indeed, at my current salary, it would be 25 years of my life...

By sending them to your Nigerian bank account, right?

OR -- dispose of all possessions, live in homeless shelters and off ramens for 50 years -- no travels, no "little luxuries" etc?

OR -- living the high life for 6 months, then suicide?

Not that I disagree with "It's just that I prefer being home.", but in my own experience, thinking what are the things that every human being should do, I get to a few points :

* reproduce in a healthy manner ( have healthy and well supported children )

* socialize with real people ( we got facial emotions and beautiful speaking capabilities that mammals use for this )

* sport ( the other way around is unhealthy, since your muscles can become useless and you can have big healthy issues if you don't do that )

Of course that's not a complete list.

If you are afraid of doing some of those things ( not that I don't feel that I prefer to stay at home sometimes ), I think that you should consider reading some motivational books about that or change stuff in your life that suits you and make you happy. You don't solve your problems without a fight, that's just the way we live in this e-society.

I'm sorry if my comment sounds harsh.

I don't know about harsh, and I hope you don't meant to come across like this, but the idea that I should have children, and that if I don't want to that there's a problem; that there's something wrong with me; is deeply threatening. It's an ideology with real world consequences too - When I was 20 doctors refused to give me an IUD using very similar reasoning, despite hormonal contraceptives turning me into a totally crazy bitch.

I know other women with very similar stories too. Being the potential fixee for someone's idea that people need fixing, especially when society puts you in a position where you're vulnerable, is not fun.

This sounds almost like I'm having a go at you, which isn't how I want it to come across. I'm reasonably sure that it was well meant advice. But when you start prescribing life choices to people, rather than just talking about things that might happen, it can result in a vastly more aggressive tone than you might have meant there to be.

I would disagree with items 1, 2, and 3 on your list. Here's my list of things everyone should do:

- Pursue your personal goals with strength and conviction

- Find out what social environment makes you happy (It's ok if it's none) and find a way to build it

- Stay healthy in body and mind in a way that is enjoyable or at least tolerable for you

Jerry Seinfeld in an interview a week or two ago described the process of finding an adult life as a process of finding a torture that you're comfortable with. You find a level of health that keeps the pains down to a tolerable level, and you suffer through the amount of exercise and refuse to eat things that you want to eat enough times that you need to keep you at that level of chronic pain. You make these calculations with all opposing tortures in your life.

Eventually you're living in a finely tuned pain minimizing environment, and if you have any energy left, you can get things done.

> Eventually you're living in a finely tuned pain minimizing environment, and if you have any energy left, you can get things done.

That, sadly, sounds just about right in my case.

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