Ask HN: What's the easiest way to make a living with $600k in cash? I have 30 more years until retirement. I don't like working with clients but do have software dev skills and trading/investing skills. |
Ask HN: What's the easiest way to make a living with $600k in cash? I have 30 more years until retirement. I don't like working with clients but do have software dev skills and trading/investing skills. |
Of the 2nd half: half in regular investments the other half in crypto
of the regular investments half, put it all on an index fund.
Of the crypto half, put half of it in bitcoin and half of it in some crypto index etf
When the next crash happens take half of cash which is now more valuable and invest as above
In fact if you put half now (not expecting a crash) and hold half (expecting a crash), you are basically bidding against yourself. Diversify in different asset types, not in different horse numbers in a race.
Step 2: Why are you still listening to me?
But seriously, there's a million ways to lose money and not as many ways to make it. Find the thing that gives you joy and that you're good at and that the world is willing to pay something for and if you can find that magic connection, you'll be doing more than making a living, you'll be truly living.
There's many communities around these topics, I particularly like Reddit's /r/financialindependence. If I had $600k in cash right now, I'd treat it as a windfall and start reading around here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/windfall
There's a logic to maximizing your money/safety, which is very generic advice to a very generic question, and it goes something like:
1. Make sure to keep an emergency deposit, in cash, that would cover all your expenses for 3-6 months. Adjust for fun factor and culture.
2. Pay off high interest debt.
3. Pay off mid-interest debt.
4. Learn about investing. Investing can be from getting a degree/masters in a higher paying field if you are young and underpaid, to day trading with all its intricacies. Of course the general blanket response is ETFs, Bonds, etc.
Learn about your risk tolerance. Higher risk normally implies higher profits. E.g. if you have most of your disposable income tied into good debt, you'll probably have quite a lot of profit. But get sick for a month with lower pay, lose your job, etc. and you might lose it all.
Lazy: Send it to Gemini, buy 600k worth of GUSD, loan it on their Lend program and collect 8%pa compounded monthly. Collect 48k GUSD a year. Convert that back to bank dollars every month. Live your life.
Risky: Send it to Gemini, buy 600k DAI. Send it to ethereum chain. Buy $200 of ether that you will spend on gas. Swap half the DAI for USDC using a DEX. Deposit 300k/300k in a liquidity pool DAI/USDC and collect 18-20%pa in trade fees. Withdraw collateral every month by redeeming the liquidity provider tokens. If you wish to save gas fees, use something like polygon bridge to move it to the Polygon chain. Do LP deposits there instead.
Crazy: buy 12 Bitcoin on Gemini. Store it on a hardware wallet. Sell A fraction every few months to live. Never sell it all in one shot.
Why would you bother with this when TIPS bonds are paying out 7.12%?
Why? Because a inflation protected security is denominated in the currency that is inflating. It’s kinda nonsensical really. How to achieve those returns? It’s money printing isn’t it. In the 20% extreme high yield example above, providing liquidity is a service, extremely meaningful in globalized digital economies. I strongly recommend the crazy option. But that’s just me cos I’m crazy. :-)
EDIT: By "not touch it" I meant invest it in something safe and easy and then you'll have full retirement money in 30y
At any rate, it's not $600k, because OP is going to retire in 30 years. Reasonably invested, I think you could get that up to $2.5M or so by then. And presumably OP won't be spending every cent of income over the next 30 years and will continue contributing to that nest egg, even if modestly.
A 4% withdrawal rate is probably safe if the retirement horizon is only 25 years. On $2.5M that's $100k/yr, which is plenty for most places in the world. Yes, inflation complicates things somewhat, but I think OP will still be fine.
You need an investment that at least matches inflation, and is large enough to cover fixed living + increasing medical costs.
I have 30 more years until retirement... have software dev skills
do you get that everybody? he wants and plans to work, not retire.
have trading/investing skills
he is not asking for investment advice. So, subtracting all the stuff he didn't ask from what everybody wrote, anybody have any useful suggestions for him?
Isn’t it great? If you grow up extremely poor, you have to work your whole life, especially since you can’t afford school at first. But if you just have money, you just need to not spend it and you’ll be a multi millionaire. Capitalism at work
(600000*6/100)*10 = an extra $360000 before tax. Probably not enough to retire on.
20 years is an extra $720000, let's say half goes away for tax that leaves $360000 + initial $600000 isn't even a million yet.
$1m might be enough to live off on, assuming a APR of 6% ppa, so $60,000 money influx just in interest, but it depends on your standard of living. If you're used to a $100k+ engineering salary, it's a downgrade.*
The guy who said put it into REITs earning 9% a year is somewhat close to what I've done.
By no means are past results an indicator of future success, but in 2017 I purchased a number of technology/internet/telecom industry heavy ETFs that have more than doubled in value. The mix of the different ETFs and the stocks they contain is sufficiently diverse for my risk tolerance.
"Interest rates go down" is the entire story of investment returns during the lifetimes of most non-retired people.
It cannot be the story of the next few decades. Famous saying "if something can't go on forever, it won't".
in this case it doesn't matter your risk tolerance, diversifiable risk is not rewarded by the market, which means NOT that you face higher risk, but actually, lower returns at any given level of risk.
that is standard finance theory
PNQI ETF holdings: https://www.invesco.com/us/financial-products/etfs/holdings?...
As compared to what I was originally looking at doing by putting the bulk of the money into individual stocks, rather than ETFs, though I did also do some of that, with Netflix.
Hold on to a stock as long as the underlying business is still secure.
Trade out of a stock only if there is a more secure one with more dividends to trade into.
If market prices allow the dividends from your $600K portfolio to exceed your living expenses, then no more work for money.
I doubt it is realistic to survive 30-60 years on just $600K savings.
That's the risk you get when investing large sums into newer cryptos, one significant network problem to break trust and your investment is gone
I'm talking some city in a country where the currency exchange rate values your dollars immensely wrt. groceries, etc.
You can even buy property very,very "cheap" so as to never pay rent.
Across the border in Uruguay would be a better bet with a somewhat more stable economy but still benefiting someone with USD. Or go to a country like Belize where you can use the USD without needing to convert to local currency, but still can have more purchasing power in the US.
My email is in my profile. If you are interested, message me if you want to talk and see if there is anything we could collaborate on.
My biggest interest lies in building a lifestyle business around coliving.
I'd wonder why leveraging it to buy or build a duplex or triplex in a city on the obvious list? The key thing is to tie it up so that it doesn't make you lazy. My wealthy friends are getting the F out of cash because of its rapidly diminishing purchasing power. There's no way out of what's going on at a macro level without inflation and high interest rates, so anything that returns better than -8% yoy is going to be better.
Having that net worth also means you can be super aggressive with hunting for gigs because you can afford to say 'no' to anything less than $200k+ if you are in US/CAN market. Even though it's not a lot of money from a wealth perspective, (you're on the second bottom rung of a very tall ladder) from a job hunting perspective, you have FU money so long as you don't spend it. You can take a passion project for a non-profit and moonlight with another contract part time and if either of them don't like it you can walk.
You also have accredited investor status, so you can take flyers of as little as 20-30k participating in seed rounds, which pops you out of being just another dev and now you're an investor with depth on the tech, which is a whole new game. If you're contracting and your triplex mortgage is covered by your tenants, you can afford do a couple of these seed rounds a year.
The only way anyone makes real money is with leverage, and the duplex is low risk secured leverage. At the other end of the spectrum, you could just put it into a robinhood account and buy stonks and hang out on WSB, but post-pandemic govts with their own currencies don't need good markets or economies to stay in power anymore, and inflationary policies are about impoverishing people, so they benefit from destroying the markets. This is handwavy, but I take insight over advice any day.
If you understand the difference between the real and the represented, you can live like an actual king for very little money. Suffice it to say that nothing makes you poorer than trying to be middle class, as by definition, poverty is when you don't value what you have. Frugality is bargaining with a universe that doesn't care, and the thing about the greatest pleasures is they are always worth it by a significant multiple. This is to say, don't spend a penny on yourself until you know the person you are spending it on will appreciate it, and you have read the stoics, imo.
What is this referencing?
Well, they are 35 years old and have $600k, which says something.
> A Pareto distribution
I'm not following. Pareto distributions don't have "rungs". Who defines the rungs of the ladder? Why is $600k the second bottom rung?
For concrete thinkers: people who live off investments usually need more than $600k, so the question is how to use that money to grow it into an amount similar to what said people live off.
They provide the violence to back up the value of the currency. A currency is only as valuable as the courts and ultimately the army that backs it.
https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/help/TDHelp/faq.htm#Ope...
> In order to open a TreasuryDirect account, an individual or entity account manager must have a valid Social Security Number (SSN), be 18 years of age or over, and be legally competent. An entity must have a valid SSN or Employer Identification Number (EIN). The account owner must also have a United States address of record and have an account at a U.S. depository financial institution that will accept debits and credits using the Automated Clearing House method of payment.
AFAIUI, getting an SSN from abroad as a non-US citizen/resident is not realistic.
>Who may own an I bond?
>Individuals
>Yes, if you have a Social Security Number and meet any one of these three conditions:
> United States citizen, whether you live in the U.S. or abroad
> United States resident
> Civilian employee of the United States, no matter where you live
>To buy and own an electronic I bond, you must first establish a TreasuryDirect account.
https://www.treasurydirect.gov/indiv/research/indepth/ibonds...
Source: https://support.gemini.com/hc/en-us/articles/360056367771-Ar...
>Not minutes
So… it can’t?
Regarding the wild scary world of decentralized stores or value, cryptocurrency tokens, Bitcoin. Ethereum. It is scary to see your savings fluctuate wildly. It does however grant some perspective on the system. Money is the shared delusion that some token is worth some goods or services to other humans, or systems. The systems part is where it gets interesting, down the rabbit hole. Sometimes we want to trust the math, rather than trust the man or trust the gun. The smartest people on earth seem pretty ok with the math; but they don’t always have the confidence of the man or the gun. It is a fairly new concept to apply planetary value structures to decentralized peer to peer networks.
What if, in the future, we implemented protocols that enabled the same meta patterns we see emerge in existing systems, like the global equity and capital markets, commodities and financial instruments and implemented them on permission-less systems, with no gatekeepers, no old guard to enforce arbitrary discriminatory and rules, only math. Would that not empower humanity? Could it not break down existing long lived biases and systems of oppression? Freedom through mathematics.