I found the original message, and I got a couple of his goals mixed up. He planned to have a stable emergency fund and financial security in 5 years, and the math works out so that he can actually have this by the end of one year. By the time he told me this, he already had 6 months worth of money in his emergency fund, no consumer debt, and was working on getting up to 5 figures in assets completely under his control. His new years resolution was to finish the emergency fund and start investing in mutual funds by the end of the year, which seems pretty well accomplished already.
He also resigned from a general manager position for a shift job when he found out about the difference in pay, something which his older brother (a successful nurse) took as a sign of failure in spite of the fact that he’s now making more than his bosses at a more satisfying job. Presumably, the advantage to staying at a lower-paying, higher-status higher-frustration job would be the opportunity for promotion (and the status benefits—except the status of the job actually interfered in him taking on another job, which he wanted to do to boost his short term earnings; considering that this would make it easier for him to make longer term investments sooner, I tend to think he made the better decision).
I don’t know when he plans on attaining millionaire status and retiring, but he did say he wants to retire with dignity, which I assume means before serious senescence. Incidentally, my father set those same goals when he was younger, and failed at them horribly, which I mostly attribute to him talking about investments all the time and never actually investing and instead dumping all his money into new vehicles/electronics/vacations/construction projects/that one time my parents tried to start a retail chain and probably have yet to recover from the ensuing debt. I’ve gotten so burned out on Disney World at this point that you’d need to pay me before I felt like going back (I started skipping Disney trips nearly ten years ago, and don’t plan on stopping soon). Well, and he aimed for higher status jobs—he worked for Delta at one point, then for an insurance company, etc—but the only job that wound up paying enough to support the lifestyle (and the ever-growing family) proved to be electrical work, and he recently took up occasional truck-driving to help pay off credit card debt. I think my dad did work in a factory and at restaurants even earlier, which I assume he left because he didn’t like them/wanted to move up. Today, he talks about stocks all the time, but doesn’t actually make any money with them (and plays the lottery and slot machines and talks about the Roulette wheel as low-status gambling). All of which is to say that I think he optimized for a high status lifestyle rather than financial success, and never quite managed to disentangle the two.
So I conclude that its difficult to optimize for both money and status. Successful software engineers might have an advantage on that front.
I found the original message, and I got a couple of his goals mixed up. He planned to have a stable emergency fund and financial security in 5 years, and the math works out so that he can actually have this by the end of one year. By the time he told me this, he already had 6 months worth of money in his emergency fund, no consumer debt, and was working on getting up to 5 figures in assets completely under his control. His new years resolution was to finish the emergency fund and start investing in mutual funds by the end of the year, which seems pretty well accomplished already.
He also resigned from a general manager position for a shift job when he found out about the difference in pay, something which his older brother (a successful nurse) took as a sign of failure in spite of the fact that he’s now making more than his bosses at a more satisfying job. Presumably, the advantage to staying at a lower-paying, higher-status higher-frustration job would be the opportunity for promotion (and the status benefits—except the status of the job actually interfered in him taking on another job, which he wanted to do to boost his short term earnings; considering that this would make it easier for him to make longer term investments sooner, I tend to think he made the better decision).
I don’t know when he plans on attaining millionaire status and retiring, but he did say he wants to retire with dignity, which I assume means before serious senescence. Incidentally, my father set those same goals when he was younger, and failed at them horribly, which I mostly attribute to him talking about investments all the time and never actually investing and instead dumping all his money into new vehicles/electronics/vacations/construction projects/that one time my parents tried to start a retail chain and probably have yet to recover from the ensuing debt. I’ve gotten so burned out on Disney World at this point that you’d need to pay me before I felt like going back (I started skipping Disney trips nearly ten years ago, and don’t plan on stopping soon). Well, and he aimed for higher status jobs—he worked for Delta at one point, then for an insurance company, etc—but the only job that wound up paying enough to support the lifestyle (and the ever-growing family) proved to be electrical work, and he recently took up occasional truck-driving to help pay off credit card debt. I think my dad did work in a factory and at restaurants even earlier, which I assume he left because he didn’t like them/wanted to move up. Today, he talks about stocks all the time, but doesn’t actually make any money with them (and plays the lottery and slot machines and talks about the Roulette wheel as low-status gambling). All of which is to say that I think he optimized for a high status lifestyle rather than financial success, and never quite managed to disentangle the two.
So I conclude that its difficult to optimize for both money and status. Successful software engineers might have an advantage on that front.