alt Hacker NewsOkay, assuming you could invest 100k out of your 170k per year into companies you know were doing well on tech from 2015, how much would you have ?
(say: AMD, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Facebook)
The answer is about 10M, which is not that far from what I estimated, even without including Nvidia. Now add in house price appreciation.
There are plenty of people who have managed to do this, from fairly normal tech jobs.
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$170K a year after taxes is $9900 a month net if you are living in GA - with fairly low state taxes. I calculated this on paycheckcity.com. That’s without taking into account health insurance cost.
So to invest $100K a year let’s say some pretax and some post tax, they would have to live off of $1700 a month. They are not going to be buying a house with that.
As far as wealth through equity in a house, that’s not liquid. What are you going to do borrow against it?
And actually I can speak for one of the best case scenarios for buying a house. I had a house built in 2016 in the most affluent county in GA for $335K - a 5 bedroom, 3.5 bath - and sold it in 2024 for $670K and moved to state taxe free Florida and bought a condo in 2022 for half the cost (we kept both for awhile)
Even then, we could only do that because my (step)kids were both grown and I pivoted to customer facing cloud consulting in 2020. A niche that hasn’t suffered from the return to office mandates - ironically enough except for AWS ProServe (former employee) and Google’s equivalent internal department (who has been trying to recruit me for years).
Most people won’t and shouldn’t be picking individual stocks. Of course it’s easy to be a genuis saying what would have happened if you picked stocks that went up.
170k after taxes leaves you with about 130k net, maybe 140k; if you live in a big city and have a family, it's almost impossible to save 100 grand of that 140k. More realistic you would save about 50k and still come out ok, but lets be realistic noone is saving 100k from 170k gross salary
> There are plenty of people who have managed to do this, from fairly normal tech jobs.
Yeah, but there also isn’t enough wealth in the system for everyone to do this.
Like suppose that a) we’re now at a reasonably correct valuation for Nvidia b) assume a hypothetical where everyone in the US had plowed all of their savings into Nvidia in 2015. Result: The market cap of Nvidia is still $6 trillion, and the median American owns less than $10k in Nvidia stock.
In GA, after taxes your take home would be ~125k. So you think someone can live in a big city like ATL for 25k/year? What if they have a family? Ok, are you assuming their spouse is also in tech and making at least similar? The 125k also doesn't have healthcare deducted yet.
Some of the comments on this thread highlight just how disconnected many people were/are from everything outside of the FAANG bubble.
Sure, just save 100k out of your 170k comp, that's totally how normal people operate. And not only that, also pick the right stocks rather than just sticking everything in an index!
Just magically turn 10x 100k into 10M!