That you could not work another day and still survive in our economy with reasonable comfort and safety. In an industry like this, that focuses on the new, this will become critical for everyone at some point, although the point where it becomes critical will vary for each person. Hopefully everyone will be employable and viable as long as they want, but shit happens.
@silverstorm, if you you do it purely from saving, it will be a hard slog, but if you look at typical salaries thrown around, you can save most of your salary and get to your 1.5 to 2 mil at 35, or 40, or 45 or 50.
If you invest aggressively and carefully, you might make it sooner.
If you change your mindset so that your real job is to use the resources that your day job gives you, to achieve the goals of your real job (farming your resources to become financially independent), you have a better chance.
If you don't work toward financial independence on purpose, it's not going to happen. Ever. But it could. If you would.
Disclaimer: I didn't figure this out until it's probably too late.
It is hard to believe anyone could get to $1 million from pure savings of income by the age of 35. If you work from 22 to 35 that is only 13 years. That would be saving an average of over $75,000 per year. Most developers won't even make $75k in take home pay for most of that 13 years.
I didn't have $1 million of gross income (according to the SS administration) until I was over 40. I worked for myself for a lot of those years as both an independent contractor and while starting companies. Most of my savings were eliminated over that time because of startup failures and just general economic bad times.
If you can get to $1 million of savings by the age of 40 by just income and investments, you are doing very well. Few will manage it. For me to have even half that saved would have required that I do nothing but work for BigCorp for 20 years. A fate that I would not wish on any entrepreneurial person.
Let me tell you I'm 27 and from India, I am a native Bangalore resident. I am sure similar options I'm going to tell you now exist in the US.
The first thing you must do when you get money in your hands is know how much you want to spend and how much want to save. In my case I see, I can spend around 40%. The remaining 60% goes in to my savings. Then you need to figure out a way to convert 60% of the saving to investments. Gold, endowment insurance, real estate etc. There are many options, the earlier you start the better.
Of course this requires discipline. To give you an example, I don't have credit card till today's date as a principle. If your routinely save and invest then over time you can save yourself a fortune.
I don't think that's even possible in US tech unless you start your own company or hit a startup jackpot. One medical crisis could wipe you out if you didn't have insurance, and getting insurance is more difficult and expensive as you age.
In other words, the average salary of a Bay Area engineer is something like $20k, if you consider the fact that you'll work for 10 years at $80-100k and then get laid off and will be unable to find a job for the next 50 years until you hit retirement age.
Good heavens. You need a good 1.5-2mil in capitol if we assume modest 3% returns on your money, if you want to live at $40k/year. How can everyone stockpile 1.5-2mil by the time they are 35?
More importantly, what will happen to our economy if everyone stops working at 35?
It's always been my goal. Well, I've tried various ways to get there that haven't worked, but I haven't given up, even at 53.
I'm a little surprised too at how much pushback you're getting on this. Isn't financial independence part of the point of all this entrepreneurship we talk about around here?
Yes, in fact, there are. There are any number of things that are more important/fulfilling/interesting to fill your head with and make life decisions based on.
what do you mean by survive? people want to keep growing and doing bigger and better things. You could save up some money, move to a 3rd world country and hole yourself in a shack for a couple bucks a day to live out the rest of your days if you really wanted to. I believe the question of financial independence is not as important as finding a path and being forced to pivot because of your age.
