alt Hacker News> wish I had fuck-you money and could spend my day engrossed in whatever I find interesting
A good mental exercise is to calculate how much you'd need to survive indefinitely in a pocket of rural America or the third world. No international travel. No bells and whistles. Limited cuisine. But survival and leisure unlimited.
When I've run the numbers for a comforable living, they've come to $300k (Vietnam, $12k/y) to $500k (West Virginia or Portugal $18k/y). But one could halve (or more) those figures by accepting standards of living our grandparents would have found adequate.
Then you make a choice. That world. Or the one you have. (Or something in between.)
Two-fifths of American households have a net worth over $300,000; more than half over $150,000 [1]. That means somewhere between a lot of and potentially most Americans have, on a global scale, fuck-you money. Just not fuck-you money to retain their status at the centre of the first world.
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American software engineers maybe. But I heard somewhere that most Americans live paycheck to paycheck or at most have a few thousand dollars in savings.
WV is probably heavily underrated. Such a beautiful part of the US.
Coll idea. One thing: This numbers exclude healthcare costs as you get older this gets more expensive.
For countries with free healthcare, it is usually limited to people working there or citizens and ( in the German case ) recognised refugees.