[walletdrainer]

> but I really struggle to imagine any pair of pants being worth that much money unless they are lined with gold or something.

It depends on how much you earn. I don’t mind spending tens of thousands on Loro Piana cashmere because it’s really nice, but at my income level the price difference between that and Zara is pretty much immaterial.

Keep in mind that HN is packed with people with salaries above $1M/yr and entrepreneurs with way higher income levels.

A few years ago I too would’ve considered $500 for pants to be absurd, at this point I just go to a tailor and pay slightly more than that but save tons of time in the long term and always have perfect fitting pants. The time savings alone are tremendous, after getting a pair fitted properly I can just order new ones whenever I need without having to spend hours going through shops looking for the right pair of pants.

[tavavex]

> Keep in mind that HN is packed with people with salaries above $1M/yr and entrepreneurs with way higher income levels.

Is it really packed with those people? I know there's some, but I imagined that the average user here is probably some senior engineer in his 40s making six figures - not an executive or some industry-leading employee, and not the top <1% entrepreneur who manages to walk away with multimillion dollar profits. If that really is the common audience here, then I'm living in a whole different universe from what the average would work out to.

[SoftTalker]

Not that those people aren't here, but I don't think they are the average. I think the average person here is an un/under-employed tech enthusiast who dreams of startups but spends his time here instead of actually working to make it happen. I'm not in that group by the way, I stopped dreaming about startups 10 years ago.

Bored developers are probably another large fraction.

[walletdrainer]

You don’t have to be “industry leading” to reach that kind of comp working for big tech.

I could be totally wrong, but in a world where plumbers and the likes can walk away with multimillion dollar profits you probably don’t have to be top <1% to pull that off either. Not taking shots at plumbers, but the point is that even something boring can and will pay off if you work hard at it.

My own work couldn’t be more boring, I’m not particularly smart or talented. I just grind out many little varyingly useful websites with card payment forms.

[astrange]

$1M/year in big tech is like director level? That's not "industry leading" but there aren't that many of them.

[bradlys]

Senior manager can hit $1m depending on division and/or a little bit of stock appreciation.

[pseudalopex]

Most people don't work for big tech. Most people who work for big tech don't make so much. And not most plumbers.

Many people under estimate their skills and luck.

[brailsafe]

> My own work couldn’t be more boring, I’m not particularly smart or talented. I just grind out many little varyingly useful websites with card payment forms.

Are you talking like one-off niche utilities/services that another busy person would happily pay a small amount to solve an immediate problem with and don't necessarily require a ton of backend scaling/maintenance, or subscription type stuff? When you say "many", is that >100?

[walletdrainer]

100+ sites, most took less than a day to build.

So far the most profitable category has been sites which simplify some government processes, e.g. helping you fill a form or even just basically selling a PDF version of a form that a government only provides on paper (with a nice web UI to help you easily fill it).

Little scaling or maintenance, I can host everything on a single dedicated server but have a few so I don’t have to worry about things breaking.

Most of the work is just locating these niches, but honestly it’s easy to find at least one a week even if I’m being lazy. If I was really trying very hard I’d probably be at 1000+ sites right now.

One simple example would be helping people change their name in the UK with a deed poll, which basically amounts to a pdf saying “hey my name is now [enter name here]”. I didn’t do this particular one even though I probably should, I found out about it pretty early on and I was (wrongly!) dissuaded by the competition.

Edit: I specifically should not have been dissuaded by the competition because it’d take an hour or two to build a decent website with the necessary information, and despite the competition there’s a decent chance my page would start ranking pretty well within a couple of years. I’ll probably do this one tomorrow.

[brailsafe]

Heh, this is a nearly identical idea to what I've been considering trying in the past week, since I have some experience with the PDF spec and Acroforms from my time working on a commercial PDF SDK, and I personally have both struggled and watched people struggle with certain forms. Also seems like a straightforward value prop.

It's nice to hear that it's a viable niche and you're doing well with it! Thanks for sharing

[walletdrainer]

Do it! The best part here is that the work you do will be super reusable and you can easily crank out a new website every day if you feel like it.

It’s important to be patient though, I’ve had websites not earn a cent for the first year and grow to tens of thousands a year with zero intervention from me.

[frmersdog]

In this job market, in this political environment, with Luigi Mangione a Bonnie-and-Clyde-tier folk hero, the bit you quoted was perhaps a clue to the lack of wisdom in humblebragging that you spend a family's annual food budget on 5 pounds of spun sheep keratin.

I imagine that I will be the bad guy for pointing this out. (Perhaps even to myself, considering that there's certainly utility in rich people yapping incautiously about the reasons others might want to turn on an Enes Yilmazer video and figure out where the panic room is.)

[awakeasleep]

I don’t make nearly that kind of money, but I don’t think people who do should keep it a secret like you’re trying to enforce some norm of secrecy on him

[Teever]

I agree.

It's interesting how in Norway, Sweden, and Finland people's tax returns are public information and it seems to work out just fine.

[tavavex]

> you spend a family's annual food budget on 5 pounds of spun sheep keratin

Maybe they're obscenely rich, or perhaps they're just living up to their username?

[walletdrainer]

Thankfully this username was related to a post I created this account to comment on, not me personally :)

[jazzyjackson]

Luigi wouldn't have been famous if he offed a guy for wearing tailored pants and a rolex, he's famous because the CEO was a scapegoat of everything wrong with health insurance.

[basisword]

>> there's certainly utility in rich people yapping incautiously about the reasons others might want to turn on an Enes Yilmazer video and figure out where the panic room is.

Can you explain what you mean by this? I hope I'm misunderstanding it.

[walletdrainer]

This feels like Reddit leaking over a little bit.

Let me remind you that this is a forum operated by a VC fund looking for people to give lots of money to so they can build billion dollar businesses. Those who succeed are routinely celebrated here, but actually discussing that money being spent rapidly becomes judgmental.

Hard to reconcile it being super cool to build an unicorn (a cute term we’ve come up with to describe billion dollar startups which have made their founders tremendously wealthy), but somewhat disgusting to actually have or spend that money.

News.ycombinator.com seems like the wrong place to complain about capitalism.

FWIW I don’t even get a Silicon Valley salary, am not in any way extraordinary, but have spent 10+ years building 100+ small online businesses out of which none have been particularly successful (but in total the little streams add up)

[botanrice]

Sorry for jumping on this off-topic but I'm a junior engineer hoping to build out some of those small online businesses but I've been a bit unsure of how to go about it. When you say small online businesses do you mean like micro-SaaS kind of things? Or like tangible items? Sorry, just curious :)

[walletdrainer]

Micro-SaaS and digital products. Just figure out a good stack to work with for billing and try to crank out one little thing a week that will be useful to someone.

One of my best projects just sells some pdf files you can submit to the government to achieve a thing you would usually unnecessarily hire a lawyer for.

Another in a similar vein simply offers an easy-to-fill PDF version of a government form that does not exist online, and a nice HTML interface that will help you mostly automatically fill it.

Most of these took less than a day to build and take next to no maintenance. Both of the above earn more than $100k annually.

Just make sure your customers can get in touch with you very easily so you don’t end up with broken websites running on autopilot charging customers for broken stuff, I made that mistake once and ended up having to call a bunch of people to apologise when I discovered what had been happening.

[ok_dad]

It's not reddit leaking, it's normal people leaking into your weird millionaire world. I say weird because 99.9% of people in the world would consider it on a range of weird all the way to unethical that you spend tens of thousands on pants. I'm not going to sit here and preach and make you bored, but consider what good you could do with that money, if only your ass and thighs were slightly more uncomfortable than they are today. Especially now when people around the world are dealing with 2x the food costs of a year or a few ago.

Also, HN is a fine place to complain about capitalism, maybe a few of you capitalists will have it click in your brains that other people are struggling and you can do something about it other than sitting on a cloud.

[walletdrainer]

I donate approximately 47.5% of everything I earn to the French government, is that not enough? (And yes, taxes are a voluntary donation in my case. I could move less than a mile across the border to Monaco and incorporate elsewhere if I wanted to pay ~0%)

Of course, when I spend 10000 euros in the Loro Piana boutique or anywhere really, 20% of that goes to the government too.

Could I afford give more? Sure! To whom? How much? Figuring that out seems like another full time job, and the track record of the effective altruism folks doesn’t seem all that great.

[derektank]

>the track record of the effective altruism folks doesn’t seem all that great.

I've been donating 5-10% of my income to GiveWell[1] and their top charities like GiveDirectly[2] and the Against Malaria Foundation[3] for nearly a decade at this point and I think their track record has been fantastic. Effect altruism only gets shady when longtermists get involved and start speculating on the moral worth of lives in some distant future. If you focus on human beings alive today, effective altruists (and development economists) have done a great job identifying how to make your charitable donations go the farthest in reducing suffering.

[1] https://www.givewell.org/

[2] https://www.givedirectly.org/

[3] https://www.againstmalaria.com/

[astrange]

> I donate approximately 47.5% of everything I earn to the French government, is that not enough?

It's better to think of pretax money as just not existing. The effect of /everyone/ paying taxes is different from the effect of only you paying taxes, since your buying power is somewhat determined by how much you have relative to everyone else.

[walletdrainer]

Well not really, I do my grocery shopping a few minutes away in Monaco where nobody pays taxes. I could move less than a kilometre and save loads of money, despite the outrageous real estate costs.

I just kind of like where I am now so don’t care enough to do that, and at least try to assume that the government does a relatively good job of directing my donation to good causes.

[robocat]

Everybody seems to have an opinion on what someone more wealthy than they are should spend their money on.

Unfortunately we don't get to look at what the commenter earns or spend...

A normal car weekly payment in the US is ridiculously wasteful. If you live in the US its almost a given that you are ridiculously wealthy in comparison to many in the world.

A normal overseas trip is ridiculously wasteful.

It's hard to consider what an average person in the world would think is wasteful, because with our common developed country expenses we don't feel like millionaires.

We couldn't even ask a person with an average world income to comment, since do they even have the free time to waste? (edits)

[ok_dad]

Whataboutism isn’t going to solve the problem of inequality. Compare me to many others and you can say the same things as I said to GP, however there’s a clear difference that isn’t very subtle between me buying a compact car and GP buying a few pairs of those pants for the same cost.

There’s this argument that people make that goes something like, “the wealthy give their fair share why sour they pay more than a lot income person and get called out for not giving more?” I don’t believe that’s their fair share, is why I ask them to give way more. Do you think a person who starts 100 businesses is working harder than a single mom with a few kids? Why did they deserve the lions share of the profits over their employees? These are some of the questions I have they could be relevant.

Like I said, I don’t want to bore anyone, it’s not like the wealthy have ever been in touch with the common man, for millennia. I’m certainly not going to convince anyone, I’m no good at arguing and my arguments tend to be rough and full of holes, but at least I’m not a millionaire claiming I couldn’t or shouldn’t do more because I’m a special hard worker who deserves every penny.

[ok_dad]

A good start might be taking 9500 euros a next time you need pants and donate to a local food bank, then buy 500 euro pants instead!

Maybe you could even retire and open a food bank or a childcare facility locally, which might not be possible for you but who knows.

If I were wealthy i would open a childcare facility that was free for anyone who lives in my town for emergency care 24/7.

[mapontosevenths]

This is such a broken take. Jealousy is so ugly. It's like you expect those doing better than you to Harrison Bergeron themselves for your sake.

I'm sorry you're unhappy with your lot in life. Maybe work hard and do better, rather than expecting others to pretend like they're not doing well to appease your feelings.

[ok_dad]

I’m doing fine, others aren’t doing as well, I guess you see it as jealousy and in fact I’m just disgusted by my fellow man that they can hoard while others starve.

[mapontosevenths]

> I’m just disgusted by my fellow man that they can hoard while others starve.

Despite popular belief the economy is not a zero sum game where every dollar someone makes comes at anothers expense. In reality, every dollar a wealthy person spends becomes some other person's livelihood.

It is only unproductive idle capital that should be considered "hoarding", and that IS a bit of a sin in my book. As is wealth invested in rent seeking rather than productive activity.

[marknutter]

I'm sitting here trying to figure out why you haven't sent 90% of your income to the poor people in Sudan.

[ok_dad]

I will when I can afford pants that cost ten grand, for now I just try to do what I can in my local community.

[marknutter]

Sure you will, bud. I believe you.

[bchasknga]

> I say weird because 99.9% of people in the world would consider it on a range of weird all the way to unethical that you spend tens of thousands on pants.

TIL it's unethical to spend a lot of money on clothes. It's not like the sub-thread's OP was spending $10k on a pair of <Insert crazy designer brand name> pants that actually have more form than function. It's a $500 pair of pants. God forbid people spend money on their own preference for their own comfort.

Pragmatically, capitalism brought in more good than bad. Are we arguing that we would've been better off if the world had gone the way of the soviet/pre-80s China way of life?

[basisword]

He wasn't 'humblebragging'. He was answering a question on an anonymous forum honestly.

[burningChrome]

The irony is the majority of people on here are the ones screaming "tax the rich" at Mamdani's acceptance speech, but then are the same ones upvoting this guy, his 10M net worth and defending him being rich.

The world is a very confusing place these days.

[walletdrainer]

To make it even more confusing I’m a rich guy cheering for people like Mamdani.

I pay lots of taxes, probably in top 0.1% of the world on a % basis. I don’t have to, I’m not a US or French citizen so I could easily just choose to relocate a couple of minutes away and pay essentially no taxes.

If I did choose to stop paying taxes, I’d do so in order to donate a similar amount of my income to some charity. I’m just not sold on that being so much more efficient to be worth the hassle. OTOH, it’d definitely greatly improve my philanthropy credentials which would very much be worth it to some for purely selfish personal reasons.

[boston_clone]

> at my income level the price difference between that and Zara is pretty much immaterial

this is probably just regular bragging, right?

now, discussing how donating $100 versus $10k to a cause or community being negligible to their economic security would at least front-load some humility, but capitalists gon' capitalist. oops!

thank god this is Hacker News though, and not some safe-haven for boring rich people!

[RandomBacon]

I'm just a lowly peon and don't make anywhere near that kind of money, but I do NOT consider that bragging in this context.

[alistairSH]

"I buy more $10,000 cardigans than you buy Hanes undershirts" is kinda the definition of bragging. What a weird ass corner of the internet where it's just assumed everybody earns $millions. Like, lol, no outside SV, London, and NYC, that's truly exceptional. Like, the average CEO in the US doesn't even clear $1 million (according to Google's AI search results).

[RandomBacon]

> "I buy more $10,000 cardigans than you buy Hanes undershirts" is kinda the definition of bragging.

Except that's not what they wrote / how they framed it.

Perhaps that's just how you perceived it. I think that speaks more about you, than it does about them.

[walletdrainer]

Can you describe a way of communicating that same point without it being bragging in your eyes? I guess I could’ve engaged in the gymnastics of saying SWIM like they used to do on some drug forums :)

[vouwfietsman]

"I have spent more than $500 dollars on pants before, because I'm lucky to be in a position where for me these things are a matter of taste and whim, rather than budget, and don't really affect my finances too much whether I do or don't buy them."

I don't think I have to explain to you how the gap between what you said, and what I wrote above, is what is causing offense here. You likely deserve 100% of your success, but its just common sense to obscure the specifics of it if you are way out of band in relative terms.

Its like saying: "You know, I never really get ill" at the cancer ward. Sure, its true, but read the room.

[walletdrainer]

Well, after all it’s HN and this is the kind of content that attracts much of the users. I’d certainly be more careful with that wording on a website that caters to a very different audience, but it’s not long ago when indiehackers posts of people “bragging” about their successes were consistently at the top of the front page.

Not convinced I misread the room, especially considering the upvotes.

[jazzyjackson]

> don't really affect my finances too much whether I do or don't buy them

Isn't this the same brag as before?

I can't tell how this is different than throwing some numbers in the mix, the person relating their personal experience expresses they have fuck-it-bucks either way

[alistairSH]

You could have omitted "but at my income level the price difference between that and Zara is pretty much immaterial." and come across more matter-of-fact than brag. IMO.

[boston_clone]

Sure, you could just omit that entire sentence, no? Retains readability but avoids unnecessary specifics.

[walletdrainer]

I think without that sentence it fails to communicate the absurdity of trying to figure out a generic answer to whether or not something is worth it.

With a total rewrite I could certainly have communicated that point in a much more clinical manner. I just don’t see the point.

[marknutter]

No it doesn't. He's establishing the fact that he can afford very expensive clothes and why, from personal experience, he believes them to be worth it if you can afford it. If you omit the entire sentence the whole meaning of the post changes. I think you may just be upset because he's wealthier than you.

[basisword]

Nope, he's stating how he feels about something.

[gr4vityWall]

> Keep in mind that HN is packed with people with salaries above $1M/yr and entrepreneurs with way higher income levels.

Are you sure about that?

I would be surprised if it was much above the US salary average, considering the global audience of HN.

[walletdrainer]

I could be totally wrong!

However, at the very least I think we can agree that it’s a site chock-full of aspiring multimillionaires.

[zipy124]

In the UK for intance there's only about 20,000 people who earn over a million yearly, and I'd bet a decent amount of those are C-suite or purely through capital gains...

[freddie_mercury]

There's some weird online effect where people assume everyone they talk to on the internet makes essentially the same exact amount of money they do.

I've noticed this most in a forum for a country I used to live in where foreigners would come in and post "What's an affordable hotel/restaurant/bar/travel experience".

Uh, I have no idea what "affordable" means to you!?

[walletdrainer]

Occasionally I read the local subreddit /r/monaco, and see posts like “how much should my weekly food budget be?” with no further information included.

In a place where “normal” genuinely ranges between a couple of euros at McDonald’s and 500+ euros a day in fancy restaurants (easily 1000+ if you drink wine) it always feels like a particularly outrageous question.

There are many places in the world where that’s not a very unreasonable question, but this certainly isn’t it.

[carabiner]

What is your NW?

[walletdrainer]

Less than $10M with the mortgage, my income will hit $5M this year pre-tax for the first time (almost half of that goes to the government)

Valuing my vast and eclectic empire of small websites earning between $1k and $300k per year is tricky because it’d presumably be tremendously hard to sell them all at once. Of course some reasonable multiple would arrive at some much higher number than my bank account+physical assets.