[debatem1]

I would be very surprised if you could live worry-free with the investment proceeds of $100,000. You would have to earn 18% a year on that on average just to hit the poverty line in the US, and a more likely result would be living on 1/3rd of that. At just 6k/yr you would have food covered if you ate practically, or perhaps rent covered if you lived very modestly, but not both.

Assuming that you meant something closer to $1M than $100k I would start to agree. At that rate an initial investment into a home becomes realistic and more advantageous investment options open up. You are still not living high on the hog (60k/yr, ish), but you will probably only have significant problems if you are struck by disaster, illness takes you, or you have children.

At a further 10x that (roughly what the OP describes) you must really screw up to ever be one of the poor again. Many inefficient ways of living (eating out regularly, nice homes, expensive hobbies) open up. These are what most people consider comforts, and so I generally agree with the sense that this is the band where permanent comfortable living becomes possible.

[10122018]

> I would be very surprised if you could live worry-free with the investment proceeds of $100,000.

I think you have made the assumption that I would stop working. That might be the goal of many people, but it's not mine, and it's not how I would define being comfortable.

Aside from that, yes, I was using a fairly arbitrary number to make a point. I hadn't done the math. Which, here on HN, was probably a mistake. But for somebody who has never had more than $3K to their name, $100K in the bank still seems like a very comfortable safety net.

[keithwhor]

$100k wouldn’t be a reliable safety net for long. A good network of people who trust you to execute reliably is worth way more than $100k — see: business owners who have repeatedly survived bankruptcy.

I understand how ridiculous this may sound. There’s a presupposition of access to capital / employment. A large chunk of the world doesn’t have access to that, to no fault of their own. But don’t discount yourself that quickly — a non-trivial amount of people have created and captured an insane amount of value. It doesn’t seem entirely fair, and to be honest, sometimes it isn’t.

Re: $100k, completely sane and reasonable expenses add up quickly. You’ll be surprised what costs rear their heads as you have more liquidity. You’re better off being broke while you’re in University and, once you’ve finished, learning the ropes and demanding compensation for your productive hours. You can calibrate your income against researched market rates / cohorts of friends if you’d like to optimize, and nobody will fault you for it — in fact, it’s expected.

You’ll figure this all out but for now it doesn’t matter: everybody here is giving you sound advice (based on pre-assumption of: University-educated individual), you just can’t see past the iron wall of academia yet. It’s a much bigger world than you can imagine, with a lot of opportunity to generate wealth if that’s what you’re interested in. (It doesn’t have to be, but some sort of optimization in this direction is helpful for general contentment given your pre-supposed opportunities: not everybody gets to attend college.)

[10122018]

I appreciate your comment. I know that having more than $100K in the bank would be a better safety net. Hell, having $5K would feel fantastic right about now. My point is merely that many people feel happy and comfortable with so much less than $10M, and it's absurd to believe otherwise. Most interlocutors here seem to have latched on to my pretty arbitrary figure of $100K and forgotten or ignored that original point.

[keithwhor]

$10M is a pretty standard “set for life” goal based on a 3% annualized rate of return.

It’s obscenely difficult to get there, but an entirely reasonable and well-defined goal for people who are willing to compete (and, with high likelihood, fail) in the market to get there.

It’s up to you to decide if you’d like to pursue that path. There are plenty of paths to stability without setting that goal; you’ll just find yourself arguing with a self-selected subset of people targeting it when you post on a place like HN.

You shouldn’t wish ill upon them, and they shouldn’t wish ill upon you. We’re all just figuring life out on our own, but if you’re in a professional career in your ~30s you’ll hear “$10M” (USD, or in North America) as a pretty standard target for a “dream amount.”

[tejohnso]

So the standard point of view is that you can't stop worrying about money until you have passive income of roughly USD $300,000 per year? Why would you need five times the average annual gross household income to be comfortable? That sound like the symptom of a serious problem.

Why not take your current annual spend, multiply it by 1.2 for a nice cushion, and then figure out what you need at 3% to gain that annual return? This should come out to be roughly an order of magnitude less than $10M.

[ThrowawayR2]

That passive income does have to carry you through bad economic times as well. What if the rate of return is only 1% or the value of your portfolio drops drastically because of a full-blown economic depression?

[10122018]

> you’ll just find yourself arguing with a self-selected subset of people targeting it when you post on a place like HN

Very true, and thanks for my first chuckle of the day.

I certainly don't wish ill on anyone. I've suffered a lot, in various ways, but that has made me more compassionate, and I think therefore there has been value in that suffering. I have learned how to make do with very little.

Again, I appreciate your comments.

[keithwhor]

No worries. Thanks for the appreciation.

Ten years ago I was a broke college student doing lab grunt work. I couldn’t really afford coffee in the morning. I know what it’s like. He might not like me sharing this, but I watched my father who didn’t have a whole lot to begin with lose everything to his name just as I was preparing to enter the working world. That wasn’t even the worst of it for me personally, shit just happens.

I am very fortunate now to be able to work alongside some absolutely mind-blowingly talented people. Hit me up in ten years and see if I’m in a a cohort of people who have reached their dream amounts, but I’m not sure how much absolute numbers matter anymore. I’m happy. There’s a really big world out there. Don’t discount yourself and don’t sweat being broke in college. It’s part of the experience, humbles you, and grows something special that will allow you to relate to others more freely in the future.

I bring this up because: keep it up, keep asking questions, and when people tell you “$100k isn’t much,” work on figuring out what they know that you don’t yet. If you know it’s possible there’s a chance you’ll get there sooner than they did. Stay humble, but be hungry. Good luck in the future.

[mruts]

Have you considered that you think 100k is comfortable because you don’t have it?

[debatem1]

Part of being worry-free is knowing that even if you became unable to work you would not go hungry. 100k would do that for a while (unless you had medical expenses) but not forever. As a result, at some point you would need to worry.

My point in saying all of this isn't to depress you or wave money in your face or anything-- just to be clear, I don't have that kind of cash. It's just that the math says somewhere in the $1M to $10M range is what you need to be legitimately isolated from personal financial stress.