Right? My blog post on the same subject would be more on the lines of "freak out about how to have a roof over my head next month and not have my family's health insurance cancelled..."
I'm guessing you don't have any savings or investments?
You might want to plan ahead more than your next pay check.
Investigate financial independence / retire early (FIRE.)
Yes I guess that works as long as a sudden bout of cancer or some other chronic illness doesn't turn your world around. Suddenly all the "plan to retire in X years" come into question. Will I be still living in X years? Will I be able to continue working and investing till then? Or will I have burn through all my savings? True financial independence doesn't come till you can weather such a storm and most people are not is such a position.
>Yes I guess that works as long as a sudden bout of cancer or some other chronic illness doesn't turn your world around.
What does this have to do with it? Insurance would cover it just the same as if you hadn't quit your job.
I also took a hiatus from working and meeting expenses has never even been a concern for me, despite dealing with some quite serious medical issues. During my hiatus, I am constantly dumbfounded by people's lack of understanding of how I'm not totally broke without a job. If you have even the most basic budgeting skills and have decent enough job that you aren't living paycheck-to-paycheck, saving up enough money to live off of for 6-12 months is pretty easy. I only had a moderate salary, live in a medium-to-high CoL area, and wasn't particularly thrifty (I still engaged in normal spending like taking international trips places, buying new things, had a decent apartment, etc), and over the course of a 3 years I easily was able to save up enough to be jobless for multiple years living off of those savings alone. And that includes maintaining my savings for retirement, too.
Those things are obviously unfortunate, but relatively rare. It is also rare to win the lottery, or actually make a profit on startup stock options. I am not talking about these cases.
The average person in this industry makes good money, and should have the ability to save and invest some of their income.
I would urge us all to not associate the odds of becoming genetically broken with the odds of winning the lottery.
Being a mammal more or less assures that if we live long enough (4x to 5x reproductive age) we will accumulate enough damage to have adverse events. This is multiple orders of magnitude more like than a life altering lottery win in the same time span.
There aren't many good investment options available these days.
Real estate is too expensive, interest rates on cash are too low and VCs have a monopoly on the startup space and the media.
The most rational option seems to be to invest in stocks... To fuel corporations which inflate real estate prices by forcing their employees to relocate to major urban centers. The same corporations which are responsible for the low interest rate environment (through their lobbying and corruption of government agencies). The same corporations which are responsible for monopolizing the startup space by only funding and acquiring incubator and VC-backed startups.
So yeah there aren't many ethical options. That's why I invest in cryptocurrency. I'd rather risk losing all the money than fund my own (and everyone else's) enslavement.
That's good news. Since they're not paying their bills, they actually have more money to invest instead. ;)
You know what they say about lies and statistics... In all seriousness, even if this dubious statistic is true, most of those are not due to terminal or debilitating illnesses. "Unable to pay medical bills" can be for a variety of reasons, ranging from the obvious (not having the money), to confusion, to billing errors or insurance problems.
There are all sorts of small chance disasters that can happen. You can be killed tomorrow in an auto accident. Don't live your life worrying about things unlikely to happen.
And no, I don't mean ignore the common-sense stuff like having life insurance if you have a family, etc.
Not everyone earns Valley salaries. Especially not those outside the US in third-world countries.
And some, like myself had their life savings wiped out when life got cute.
Anyway, glad OP has the opportunity to do what he's doing. Didn't mean to sidetrack the conversation. Just always find it amazing how we all live in vastly different worlds.
I'm living off savings from Google and jobs prior to Google.
Google had really high comp and I don't spend very much money outside of the fact that I live in Manhattan, so I have about 2-3 years of runway from that stockpile of savings.
My health insurance is $470 for a basic high deductible plan.
I assume you are being sarcastic. How do you put off $1M in assets with a $200k median salary in four years? $200k x 4 x 65% is just $520k without even any expenses paid such as the ~$72k you would have paid for a room in a shared apartment.
Well, in addition to salary, he would have also gotten a bonus and stock. The bonus might be $50K/year, and then maybe another $100K/year in stock. The number of shares in the stock grant would have been computed at the date he started -- 5 years ago, GOOG was around $440/share, so at today's price, the shares would be worth $245K/year, assuming he held onto them as they vested.
So, that adds up to around $495K/year, or maybe $300K after tax. With $50K/year in expenses, you're left with $250K/year, or $1M over 4 years.
You lose your unvested RSUs when you leave (so divide your RSU calculations by 2 to start with), and the later grants would be at higher prices and thus have experienced less growth, so your envelope math is off by enough to not be good envelope math.
On the other hand, $100k is by no means the largest RSU grant you can get, so, basically, we have no damn idea. Overall it’s pretty silly to speculate about someone’s net worth unless they’re excited to talk about it.
But the larger point that high performing senior engineers at megacorps can make way more than people outside the megacorp world imagine is true and surprisingly contoversial on HN.
those numbers are on the high side, but yes indeed.
Also all those calculations are completely forgetting that money is a time-sensitive value. If invested wisely, the first $ from 4 years ago would be 1.7$ today if invested into a typical low cost SP500
350k isn't uncommon for a senior SWE at Google. In a state with no income tax (such as WA), it's not unreasonable to estimate he takes home 250k (71%). Suppose he spends $60k a year, leaving him $190k/year to bank. Given the performance of the S&P 500 in the last four years, that could be a million today.
I don't know where these numbers come from. I made a gross salary of $140k the year I worked at Google as a senior engineer, and I made some extra money via 401k matching too. $190k would definitely have been more than my entire income, that's for sure. It's hard to imagine that salaries have more than doubled in the six years since then. And... spending only $60k a year, living in Seattle? Yeah, maybe if you live like a monk, or you really enjoy commuting in from distant suburbs.
$5000/month in Seattle is well more than doable. I live off <$4k in regular expenses, live alone in the bay area, and still drive a luxury car. When I was in Seattle, I lived off of $1000/month, lived on my own, and had my own car. That was about 4 years ago.
Google compensation is also incredibly high. $140k is less total comp than what many new grads get at Google.
I was a senior swe in Seattle myself. The total comp range is enormous.
Despite my handle, I didn't exactly live like a monk. 2k a luxury high rise and 3k for everything else felt positively princely (though the city has become more expensive since I left).
Did you forget that you have RSUs? $60K is plenty for a single person. Working for more than 1 years helps, too, if you sold your stock before it appreciated, since 4-year vest forces you to not sell for 1-3 more years.
if you have non-poverty-level income, you can buy a policy for about $300-500 a month through most state exchanges
if you have poverty-level income (no stock dividends, no capital gains, havent worked w2 job in years), then you can qualify for Medicaid
another option is to open a 1-2 employee LLC or LLP and buy small group health insurance. typically these plans are about $5-7k a year and have somewhat reasonable deductibles and somewhat reasonable out of pocket maxes. at the very least, a $100,000 appendix surgery will only cost you $7,000 max, and then you are covered for all other medical expenses for the rest of the year
This is a fundamental problem with Health Insurance being primarily tied to employment. Many older devs, with families to take care of, would experiment this way with health insurance better than what is currently available outside of employer-provided versions.