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Posted by karmanyaahm 1 day ago

Show HN: How long do I need to work at my salary before I can coast, or retire?(github.com)
I made a financial planning tool in a couple hours that can model various stages of life and potentially guide job searching and work timelines.
51 points | 70 comments
sschueller 23 hours ago|
> Based on the available data, the percentage of the U.S. population that can realistically achieve FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) is very small, likely less than 1% to 3%. This figure represents those who can both meet the strict financial criteria and successfully execute the plan to retire decades before the traditional age.

According to Gallup polling, only 1% of Americans in their early 40s are retired, and just 6% of those in their early 50s have left the workforce. [1]

Nice if you can do it. Most of us will never be able to.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/what-percentage-of-people-achie...

bulbar 22 hours ago||
"Only"? I think that's quite a lot.
vincnetas 21 hours ago|||
in the US, local governments (counties, cities, school districts) rely heavily on property taxes because they have limited other revenue-raising powers. In the EU, the picture is almost the opposite: property taxes are a minor funding source, and national governments raise most of the money through labour, consumption, and income taxes. This makes quite difficult to grow old in USA in a sense that you cant just reduce your consumption and live of the savings. You need to move to cheaper area leaving all your life behind. Most important thing that you have at the end of your life. Your memories your friends and places that you are used to. So you need to keep working to be able to stay where you are.
goalieca 16 hours ago|||
You can look to Canada for high income taxes, high property taxes, and high sales tax. We also have high usage fees and parking fees.
QuiEgo 14 hours ago|||
Also, heath care costs if you don’t have insurance through an employer are a huge drag on FIRE, especially since you’ll likely need more medical care going into your 40s and 50s before you can get Medicare.
sublinear 21 hours ago||
I honestly don't even understand why someone would want to retire early. You're just leaving money on the table and setting yourself up for mental health problems.

If you think working is worse for your mental health than not working, you need to pick something else to do.

sschueller 21 hours ago|||
Because the thing you may want to do doesn't pay the bills. Anything from playing music, making art or even building cool electronic things doesn't pay bills most of the time.

I have built many exciting things, many open source, none have brought in enough to cover my day to day.

tasuki 21 hours ago|||
> You're just leaving money on the table

LOL. Of course you're leaving money on the table: that is the whole point! Many people have hobbies they'd rather be doing than working. It's ok to leave money on the table. Especially so if you don't see anything meaningful to buy with the extra money.

fishtoaster 23 hours ago||
If you like this, I highly recommend https://projectionlab.com/ for scenario-modeling your future income and retirement.

It's been discussed here a number of times and I've been a happy customer for years.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36849502 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26969173

Espressosaurus 23 hours ago|
I'll second that. I tried the trial for a few months then started paying money for it. At $100/year I've found it useful for modeling and gaming out different scenarios for retirement thresholds.

Nothing's certain, but if you like to play with data and you don't want to build the whole damn thing yourself, it's useful.

Still waiting for them to get support for options.

vincnetas 22 hours ago||
"How long do i have to work, until i can force others to work for me"

or alternative "... until i have saved up enough to last me till death"

But most of the time usually its the first option because no one wants to downgrade their ways of live when getting old.

And the problem with the first one is that as more and more people want to do that, who is going to work for them? the opressed youth :)

hnfong 22 hours ago||
> And the problem with the first one is that as more and more people want to do that, who is going to work for them? the opressed youth :)

If only youth unemployment isn't a serious issue in modern societies.

In reality, maybe AI robots.

tonyedgecombe 22 hours ago||
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
snemvalts 23 hours ago||
For those who don't want to run random python scripts locally https://engaging-data.com/fire-calculator/
krupan 23 hours ago|
Is this the same project, or a different project that does the same thing. I took a quick glance at both and the descriptions are very similar
siliconc0w 23 hours ago||
Don't forget the unbounded liability that is the US healthcare system!
dyzone 23 hours ago|
Don't forget the unbounded liability that is the human condition!
ceasesurthinko 23 hours ago|||
Don’t forget the unbounded liability of AGI: your job disappears before you can accumulate the capital you need. On the bright side, you’re retired. Really simplifies the spreadsheet.
kuerbel 22 hours ago|||
Don't forget the unbounded liability of apocalypse: society implodes and your money is worthless. On the bright side, you might have invested in Nuka Cola.
chii 22 hours ago|||
but the upsides of AGI could counter the unbounded liability - you will need to actively utilize the AGI to help you retire.
bulbar 22 hours ago|||
Which is identical everywhere in the modern world, while only in the US it's easy to become bankrupt from having to rely on the health care system.
bariumbitmap 23 hours ago||
I swear I saw a version of this years ago on one of the popular tech blags like Coding Horror or Joel On Software. I briefly looked for it the other day and couldn't find it. Anyone happen to remember it? I think it was mainly about salaries and when stock options would vest.
Joel_Mckay 23 hours ago|
If you live in New York, life will get complex without building supplementary passive income from a young age.

If people live a slow-burn lifestyle, buy revenue property one can later demolish as needed, park unused cash in index funds, and split 7% between bullion & high-risk. Most folks will be fine when things eventually go sideways.

Some people like to gamble, but they usually don't talk about their mistakes. =3

hdgvhicv 23 hours ago|||
> Some people like to gamble, but they usually don't talk about their mistakes

I just saw a cnn headline in the lobby about people who are looking to sell their family home to buy ai stock

They sure talk about mistakes before they happen

tasuki 20 hours ago|||
> people who are looking to sell their family home to buy ai stock

How nice of them. I'll have cheap tokens for a little longer.

hdgvhicv 20 hours ago||
Inference is pretty cheap, and easy to deploy while open models exist.
Joel_Mckay 22 hours ago|||
I am not Bullish on LLM firms given the -$2.50 profit per $1 revenue, or several trillion USD debt buried on page 60 of their reports. They can go be awesome without my cash, and I will cheer them on.

Note, whomever floated that home-equity loan will be happy with their won profits. They win-win even if the loan defaults. Not everyone is so lucky... =3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE75WvOtcu8

bariumbitmap 16 hours ago|||
Uh... What? I don't live in New York and this doesn't respond to anything in my comment.
Joel_Mckay 12 hours ago||
Joel Spolsky lived and worked in New York, so opinions were heavily influenced by the reality of east-coast economics.

My comment was advice that most people will learn the hard way, and hopefully inspire a moment of pause about their own risk exposure tolerance.

The subject is about young workers that acknowledged the very real churn part of the ephemeral tech sector, and position themselves for an early exit strategy into adjacent careers or retirement. This is not a new idea, given vertical movement in software careers has been stagnant for decades. =3

miltondts 18 hours ago||
I used to think about this and used https://ficalc.app/ but given all the updated models and this report https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p...

It doesn't seem strategies like this will work in the future. Even the least extreme predictions point to world economy contraction.

walrus01 23 hours ago||
I think this would highly depend on figures for real estate and overall COL in the specific location where you intend to retire? And also major life choice possibilities like maybe selling your house and moving or choosing something smaller when theoretical children are fully grown and have moved out.
vasco 23 hours ago||
How much money do you need to allow yourself to be happy and start experiencing life?

How can people not see FIRE is just a way to make you postpone what you want to do? Who cares what you can do when you're old and full of pains?

skybrian 22 hours ago||
Why not both? Depending on what you make, it’s often possible to enjoy life and also spend less than you earn. You are enjoying life like someone with a lower salary would.
globular-toast 20 hours ago|||
Yeah, but money is a hell of a drug and the advertising industry is doing everything it can to tell you how unhappy you are and keep you as a wage slave.

The actual list of things you need is quite small: water, food, shelter, clothes, company. But if you talk to your average wage slave the list of things is huge: massive house, smart dishwasher, new car, all-inclusive holidays, dog etc. And this is before you even get to things you want!

It's very hard to resist the hedonic treadmill. Ad blocking is a key, and that includes any media with subtle advertising in it like car and tech channels etc. If you can avoid this stuff, you can definitely be happy with a fraction of what a lot of people think they can't live without.

vasco 18 hours ago|||
Yeah but that's just what most people do. FIRE extends into visions of grandeur and too much focus on the money. The hobby becomes getting to FIRE. And then what?
skybrian 14 hours ago||
There are people who don’t save money at all and people who save a lot more than average, which is a whole lot easier with a high income. With the right mindset, it’s not much of a hardship.
globular-toast 22 hours ago||
Well, FIRE is about retiring before you're old. But really this is an idea for people with insanely high salaries that you commonly see in the US. It's for when you're earning several multiples more than you need to "be happy". All it's really saying is if you resist lifestyle inflation and the hedonic treadmill you can still be happy your whole life but be financially independent much earlier. It's not really about people earning close to median and living in poverty their whole life so they can retire.
tigerlily 23 hours ago|
This is cool, but I for one hope to be able to continue to work until my last dying day.
jasonkester 22 hours ago||
Personally, programming computers is one of my favorite things to do, so I'm with you on wanting to keep doing it.

It's just the part where you have to do 2000 hours of it each year for somebody else that I never got along with, so I spent the first 20 years of my career making sure I didn't need to do that.

I "retired" in my 30s from fulltime jobs, and focused on building SaaS products and contracting. That left me not really needing to work at all anymore somewhere in my 40s, though I kept at it a while after that since the companies I was working with were full of fun people.

Now, I dip in and out as I like, picking up the odd contract but mostly doing my own thing. I've been proper, capital R, Retired for the last few years, building a game to keep the brain fed and the skills up.

With luck, I'll also write some code on my dying day. But it'll be on my terms.

RickJWagner 15 hours ago||
I retired at 59 about 2 years ago. My career was coding and product development, I put together some ideas about what I’d code after I left the workplace.

To my surprise, I haven’t missed it at all. Playing music, reading for pleasure and language studies ( to help with a part time volunteer gig ) have totally met my needs. You never know.

krupan 23 hours ago|||
The idea here is you get to work, but you don't have to work.
Chinjut 23 hours ago|||
Retirement doesn't mean you can't work. It means you don't have to. It means you can work for yourself on your own interests instead of for some other boss who tells you what to do.
0web 23 hours ago|||
Why not find a career and job that's enjoyable now without even having to defer all of this for later? Not just in software, but you could be flying planes, be in a travelling circus, learn to be a chef, etc. If the answer is you have too many commitments keeping you tied to your current job, then I'd argue that we should be optimising for that optionality rather than some arbitrary day to end the nightmare 40 years from now
Chinjut 22 hours ago|||
I don't want to fly planes, be in a traveling circus, or be a chef. There are things I want to do, but the money spigots of our society aren't lining up to pay me to do them. I'm all for obtaining optionality through universal income. But optionality means also the optionality to retire (today, not decades from now).
qwertyhjkl 17 hours ago||||
The point being a pilot or chef pays back enough to e.g. raise kids and pay for all your debt getting there is years out. You may need to FIRE first to get to do alternative careers.

If you have no dependents then yeah do anything even just travel the world and do but of work here and there to keep going.

S_Bear 13 hours ago||||
Honestly, I can't pick a better job for myself than the one I have now; my bills get paid, I help my community, the day-to-day is interesting and rewarding. But I'd rather have 100% of my time to myself. I can claim my pension from the state at 55, and I fully intend to.
globular-toast 22 hours ago|||
That worked out great for those of us who found software enjoyable...
sevenzero 23 hours ago|||
Used to think the same when joining the field and now I despise every minute I have to work on software I don't care about. AI even made it worse as I joined the field due to liking the coding part, not the results. Well, there isn't really an alternative for me either as there are basically no jobs I could learn that pay equally well...
SA9G 23 hours ago|||
Hopefully you can retire early and then work on software you do like!! All those glorious ideas you had... but didn't have the time for. But be careful on the retirement part, the numbers go out the window (Andersen not Microsoft) when inflation bites :-(
techcode 23 hours ago|||
Do numbers go completely out the window due to inflation?

While the price of gas, real-estate, groceries doubled or tripled over the last 10-15 years (here in NL).

It also seems that Stocks/ETFs also did the same, right?

Some of the Tech/IT/AI (and hence to some extent also S&P500 that's heavy on those) increased even more. But even if we consider it an artificial bubble - loads of other more traditional industries/ETFs also grew similarly to inflation, didn't they?

hdgvhicv 23 hours ago|||
Gas as in petrol?

It’s up 48% in 15 years, and until the Us-Iran war it was only up 14%

https://fuelwide.com/fuel-prices/netherlands/history

Grocery inflation is 45% over the same period but I suspect you’ll claim CPI figures are nonsense.

Gas for heating has indeed about doubled, unsurprising with both Ukraine and Iran.

SA9G 23 hours ago|||
You are right of course.... but one's risk tolerance diminishes with waning work income. So retired folks have less of their money in stocks/ETFs and are more exposed to the ravages of inflation.

So with hindsight, one can easily weather inflation... only hindsight is hard to come by (says the guy who cancelled his NVIDIA buy order a few years back)!

sevenzero 23 hours ago|||
I wont be able to retire early with a measly 2.5k net wage in Germany. Still, job market is dead here. Its all Java and basically zero interesting projects. I appreciate the kind words though!
__MatrixMan__ 22 hours ago||||
Then get a job that doesn't pay equally well. It'll probably be an upgrade.
sevenzero 20 hours ago||
I am constantly thinking about it, trust me. The issue is I already earn below median wage, but just enough to live comfortably. Other jobs would likely make me go back into poverty or make me hate my life even more.
paul7986 23 hours ago||||
How much coding are you doing nowadays vs. AI doing it for you and you reviewing/pushing it into the repo?
sevenzero 21 hours ago||
Id say 90% AI, I just review it now
carlosjobim 23 hours ago|||
Then your life is completely meaningless. You've rationalized yourself into wasting the one and only life you have.
kipper8 23 hours ago||
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