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by nootropicat 1278 days ago
Relying on constant insane returns isn't financial independence. Considering how many people are working to extract money from equities it's most likely luck.

Insane returns is one way to get to financial independence, because even if the edge exists, it's going to eventually disappear. You can boast about financial independence once you make enough to live the rest of your life from safe passive yield, after inflation, which in the current very low real rates environment requires a lot - maybe $3M as the bare minimum.
2 comments
paulpauper 1278 days ago
Considering how many people are working to extract money from equities it's most likely luck.

renaissance tech. has been doing it for 3 decades and with vasty more capital. maybe it is skill, too.

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rqtwteye 1278 days ago
My guess is that they also have a lot of connections that make deals and information accessible to them the little guy doesn’t get.
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altdataseller 1278 days ago
How much is reasonable for a family with 2 kids living in a medium expensive city in the US?
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acapybara 1278 days ago
It's not so much about family size as it is burn rate.

Check out something like FIRE calc: https://firecalc.com/

What you need to do is figure out the burn rate to sustain your family, figure out your safe withdrawal rate (e.g. 3.5%), then you can easily get amount of capital required.

A Mormon friend of mine, with 5 kids, spends less on food for his family than we do (family of 4) --he/his wife are just much better at spending on it. There are also factors like, it's possible to get a 3-4K sqft house for a very reasonable price & low taxes, vs. living in a tiny box in San Fransisco for 2x more.

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nootropicat 1277 days ago
Those historical returns are ridiculously optimistic. In fact stocks aren't great once you look globally. Imagine investing starting from 1900 Germany or Russia. In both cases you would be zeroed out. It's a form of survivorship bias to look at American stock markets only.

I think a 0% after-inflation return for a normal investor (ie. no specialized domain knowledge, no insider info) over the next several decades is already mildly optimistic.

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P5fRxh5kUvp2th 1276 days ago
no one who was investing in 1900 is alive today, your point doesn't matter.
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