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Comment by ForHackernews | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I read things like this, my immediate reaction is "How do these people have so much money to travel around the world doing nothing-in-particular for two years?"

Are there just a lot of really rich people out there? Or am I over-cautious and they're operating without a safety net?

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From the article:

To make things a little more surreal: a few weeks after I turned 30 this past October, Twitter went public, confirming that I never need to work again. (I’m still getting my head around that.)

API lead and one of the first employees at Twitter. CTO for Bank Simple. Both of these jobs should've left a bit of a financial cushion. (In fact, he mentions that Twitter paid off so he doesn't ever need to work again)

I'm travelling India right now. For now I'm in reasonably nice hotels (if you go too downmarket you get no wifi). My living costs are less than half what I'd pay for an apt in NY, London or SF.

All I did was work as a developer and live below my means.

Depending on where you travel, your expenses can end up being less than when you lived at the last place you called home.

Being rich isn't necessary. Living below your means is a great way to build a cushion for emergencies... or for when you burn out and need an extended vacation. The only people who really have an excuse to be unable to do that are people making less than the poverty line. Anything more than that, and you can save.

Of course in this case the author is rich, having been able to cash out his early Twitter stock after their IPO, but being rich isn't the only path.

He probably is wealthy from the Twitter IPO, but regardless of that travel is not that expensive if you stay away from beachfront suites and luxury events like the Olympics. My roommate spent two months this summer in Europe, and I think he spent something like $6k in total. He just stayed in hostels and traveled by train whenever possible. That's maybe not dirt cheap, but consider that a lot of people in America blow $10k on a one week trip.

The problem for most people on this forum is probably not money--it's time. I'm sure many readers here have $6k to spend on a vacation. How many have two full months off work a year, on top of all the other normal days off and sick time? I'd wager only a very, very small minority, especially among those in the US.

Cost of travel is directly proportional to how fast you want to go. You can get by very cheaply if you have no deadlines. Hitch hiking and teaching English classes leisurely can pay your way.

Having deadlines and taking flights, being picky about lodging - this is what costs money while traveling.

I won't call you over-cautious, but I submit that it's much much cheaper to travel around the world for an extended period of time that you might imagine depending on where you go (i.e. Thailand = cheap, Iceland = not cheap) and how comfortable you are working odd jobs and/or staying at strangers' houses. I traveled literally around the world a couple of years ago (albeit for months, not years) and spent far less than I do living as I do now in the Bay Area, plane tickets included.

Are there just a lot of really rich people out there? Or am I over-cautious and they're operating without a safety net?

The Internet also has a lot of 25-year-olds dying of stomach cancer.

The likelihood that an individual person will have that happen is very low, but those 1-in-10,000 events are magnified by reporting bias (in favor of the unusual) when you're on the Internet.

Couple this with the positive reporting bias of social media, and it looks like there are even more very rich people than there are.

However, the answer is that there are still a fair number of rich people out there. Self-made tech rich people are extremely rare-- you're about as likely to win the startup lottery, if you weren't born into VC connections that take you directly to founderdom, as you are to win the lottery-- but there are plenty of people making money the old-fashioned way: inheriting it.

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