Show HN: How long do I need to work at my salary before I can coast, or retire?

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.

"Only"? I think that's quite a lot.

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.

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.

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

> 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.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

Don't forget the unbounded liability that is the human condition!

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

You mean retire at all. I think this would cause a civil war if govt pulled this.

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.

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.

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.

The idea here is you get to work, but you don't have to work.

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.

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...

You can use Pyodide for that, no need to stoop to JS.

I have been in the lucky situation where very little work was more than enough.

You start to do things just because you can. I did wood work, house renovation, gardening, rebuild a motorcycle, a caravan and later a car. Started to DJ, music production got into 3d printing and engineering, ...

Not working on the car after work for months or years. But turning my life upside down and do nothing else for 1 month.

I love doing things in weekdays instead of weekends.

At this point I can't even start to comprehend how people can do anything for them next to a 40 hour week job.

I don't think I'll ever retire, but I'll take jobs knowing that the salary won't matter for me which unlocks a lot of options for me again

Retiring is to stop doing what other people tell you to do for money.

There is plenty of room for intellectual and social engagement outside of paid work.

It's boring in the same way as a fridge that works flawlessly for 100 years is boring. Sometimes that's all you really want. Remember, stress is the worst thing you can do to your body. Also remember, being able to retire doesn't mean you have to.