The day I got signed on for 120k was the day all my financial anxieties went away. I’m not rich by any means. My rent is still stupid high. My bills never stop coming in. But I can finally afford furniture. I can finally afford to visit my family when I want to. I don’t worry about min-maxing at the grocery store. I’m not “happy” but it’s the closest I’ve ever been
Congratulations! I’m surviving but without furniture lol.
I’ve got a little bit of disposable income, but just had to go out of network for a surgery because my insurance is weak.
I don’t really have financial worries either though. What’s weird is I make just under $50k now, but the most I ever made was $110k, and at that time I had financial stress. Now is the first time I’ve ever gotten off the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle.
But my financial success currently stops at furniture, so I know exactly what you’re saying. I’ve got a futon, a 5x7 rug, a table, a dining chair, and an armchair. The futon and the rug are the only ones I paid for; the rest was free from craigslist. I carried that damn furniture for miles. Well I had a vehicle for the armchair.
Next thing, after my savings recovers from the surgery, is a 7x9 rug to fill the other half of my main living space, so I can cut down on the creaking boards. Then padding for under the rugs. Then finally another dining chair so I can invite someone over for dinner.
Being able to walk into a store and drop 50 dollars on something on rare occasion without having to have a panic attack and spend the day before doing in depth financial analysis and math, I cant imagine how much healthier my life would be without that stress.
The inflation isn’t “fake” and it’s not a result of greed. The greed has always been there, during periods of hyperinflation and during periods of stability.
The thing that changed is the competition, which naturally counterbalances the greed, has been reduced during the pandemic.
Enough that I’m not completely broke before my next paycheck.
Seriously, that’s all it would take for me to be happy, a little bit of disposable income.
Money alone isn’t going to make me happy. Yeah, it removes a lot of one type of stress. But it can also be a trap. Like, I’m doing solidly okay in my job, but it’s enough that I can’t easily quit and start over in a different career, even though I stopped caring about this one a decade ago. And a high-paying job can come with a lot of other stressors, things that keep you working harder and longer hours than you otherwise would.
$100k would probably seem pretty good for a long time, given where I currently live. If I had to live in NYC, I’d probably say more like $500k.
Oh I travel a lot, we get 30 days of paid leave. I’ve also changed countries for work 9 times over the last 22 years already, so you could say traveling is part of my work, in a sense. Travel doesn’t really make a noticeable dent in my savings though.
I’ve always tried to be more of a generalist than a specialist and wanted an international career. So I started with a vocational training as a banker, thinking that finance works pretty much the same all over the world. In Germany where I’m from originally you learn banking as a trade, not at university, so you basically work full time in a bank and attend classes at a vocational school for about 2.5 years and then graduate with a diploma in banking.
I’ve then started a bachelor’s in business administration (again very generalist on purpose) in evening & weekend classes while continuing to work in the bank, and then by chance the university I attended opened a campus in Luxembourg. Since that’s full of banks I just thought I’ll try my luck and was eventually hired by a wealth management office there and could continue my degree more or less seamlessly (had to take one semester break for the local students to catch up).
In the job I did all kinds of stuff from back office, trade support, some customer facing roles, a bit of compliance and KYC, and eventually they asked me to support with a major IT implementation project since I had working knowledge of 2/3 of the inhouse departments, so that was my first stint into project work. Took about 2 years and was big fun.
By the time I was about to graduate I was however fed up with all the rich people and decided to try my luck at the opposite end of the spectrum, reached out to a ton of NGO’s, development agencies etc., and eventually got a job as a project consultant for a microfinance holding operating local microfinance banks in Africa and Central Asia. They basically brought me on as domestic staff in the respective countries (Liberia, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar and Georgia) to implement projects locally. I’d take on operational roles during this period (head of finance, deputy COO, head of IT security…) to have the required local authority, and would after project implementation phase myself out and hand the project over to daily operations there. Typically I’d be 6 months - 2 years in country, depending on the complexity. At that time I also started to work on a part-time MBA, since in many countries it’s getting harder and harder to receive a residence permit with only a bachelor’s. Didn’t aim for the stars here, I wanted a cheap and easy degree, and managed that in about 3 years.
Afterwards I joined the holding’s head office and actually devised the projects and coordinate with other consultants in the target country to help them implement it, but that got boring soon. In my spare time I ventured into the medical field as I had seen a lot of crap down in Africa, got certified in medical entrepreneurship and ISO 13485 auditing (medical device quality management systems), and ultimately a German startup wanted to open a factory in China and approached me if I wanted to help set it up. They were basically looking for someone with entrepreneurial spirit and track record of succeeding in foreign countries, not really an industry expert as they had enough of those in-house.
So we’ve embarked on a fact finding mission in late 2017, and ever since early 2018 I’ve been living in China now, first as local CEO of the factory, and then doing what I always did - hiring teams, setting up facilities, and making myself redundant. I basically stepped down through the ranks from CEO over CTO and COO to regulatory director, then procurement manager and will soon leave China as a supply chain auditor. Which is ideal since I will only interact with suppliers, making me location independent. I’ll essentially work from home or at the supplier’s site from now on, and have chosen Malaysia as my new home starting April/May. Just waiting for the paperwork to be out.
I’ll be a grossly overpaid auditor, basically… But they wouldn’t dare cutting back after I was fundamental in setting things up to begin with :-)
I make 120k in a medium sized city where the median income is about 75k. I’m pretty content, tbh. I also don’t buy shit i don’t need. Most of my expenses are my hobbies. I do have a lot of hobbies. But I still make enough every two weeks where I’m able to stash it away in a savings account.
Now if I only knew how to and had the balls to invest beyond retirement accounts.
Investing tip #1: don’t take advise from strangers on the Internet
Investing tip #2: get a zero commission trading app, like Fidelity or TD Ameritrade, and just squirrel away a bit of each paycheck/monthly/whatever into a low expense ratio, broad market ETF, like VOO (etfdb.com/etf/VOO/#etf-ticker-profile)
Start slow, but contribute regularly. Keep enough cash in the bank for emergencies, and don’t bother even thinking about trying to “time the market” - just set it and forget it.
Criteria for that one: low expense ratio, so you aren’t losing (much) money to the fund manager, large market cap, so you are less succeptible to shock, and the ETF probably isn’t going anywhere, and as a S&P 500 ETF, it holds stocks from all 500 businesses in the S&P 500 (weighted by the respective market cap of said businesses), so it’s not tied to any single sector, making it more resilient for long-term investment.
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