I'm more-or-less doing this now too, here's a few problems I've run into:

- Visa renewals. Leaving the country every 90 days to renew your tourist visa gets old fast.

- Finding a country that is both stable and has a low cost of living. I was in Bangkok during the last revolution when the current military junta took over. The airport shut down and I had to take a bus past a lot of guys with machine guns to get out of there.

- Starting a family changes things. Poor countries have poor education systems. I enjoyed my visit to Pattaya, but wouldn't want my kids passing by "walking street" on their way to school.

- You lose some small niceties like Amazon Prime and Hulu :)

I've been through this whole thing. Where I am now is I'm older and living in Thailand with a wife and kid.

When I was younger I had the same big ideas about traveling while earning a living as a single guy; current fashion is to call it being a "nomad". There are more and nicer coworking spaces now but it's still just working during your vacation.

I ended up grinding at a big tech company, saving/investing a lot more than other people who were living it up, and then retired (very) early. I also grew up a little during the process and wanted more than just an ocean view and party life. That happens to most people, although not all as you can see with a trip down Walking Street.

Life in Thailand works for me and my family. No visa runs if you have a spouse or retirement visa. Most modern conveniences are available. Speaking the language with a good accent helps a lot.

But costs are surprisingly high if you want a "normal" life. Cars are way overpriced due to high tarrifs. Electronics are pricey as are many western foods. My kid goes to an international school, which is really the only viable option for education, and that costs about US$10,000 per year. Real estate in the US varies greatly in price, which means someone like me who wants to live away from a city could get a ranch in the southwest US quite cheaply. But in Thailand land prices are kind of high almost everywhere. We have land near Khao Yai National Park about two hours from Bangkok; it's very nice up here.

Long story shorter, life changes a lot as you get older; you want different things. The advice in the article worked for me. If was to do it over again I would be tempted to try the "nomad" life as a freelancer. But knowing what I do now I would probably repeat what I did - work for 20 years at big tech co, take nice annual vacations, save a lot, retire early.

I've been through this thought process myself & my conclusion was that a lot of the eastern side of the EU (including eastern Germany) is not a bad compromise between fairly low cost of living & decent infrastructure/public services.

What countries do you have in mind?

I currently live in Berlin which is getting borderline expensive (still much cheaper than almost any major western city - more so now with the weak euro). I've heard good things about the Czech republic and Bulgaria. Seems like Croatia isn't bad either.

Don't forget Romania :-)

Yes but a beer and a sausage for lunch will really cut into the afternoon productivity. :)

> Visa renewals. Leaving the country every 90 days to renew your tourist visa gets old fast.

You can go to, say, Poland. It's just slightly more expensive than Thailand. No Visa renewals.

> - Finding a country that is both stable and has a low cost of living. I was in Bangkok during the last revolution when the current military junta took over. The airport shut down and I had to take a bus past a lot of guys with machine guns to get out of there.

EU countries are more stable.

> Starting a family changes things. Poor countries have poor education systems.

Poland scores very high in terms of education. No district schools BS.

> You lose some small niceties like Amazon Prime and Hulu :)

VPN :D

>You can go to, say, Poland. It's just slightly more expensive than Thailand. No Visa renewals.

Is that meant literally? And for how long can one stay there as a foreigner? How about working remotely from there for companies outside Poland - allowed?

> Is that meant literally? And for how long can one stay there as a foreigner?

As an EU citizen, forever. For everyone else, the same rules apply as always. Working for companies outside Poland shouldn’t be an issue either way, you just still have to tax your income correctly?

> VPN :D

I've tried but Hulu even blocks VPNS :(

Despite beeing more expensive (think double or triple the 500$ figure for a comfortable life, depending on the particular country you choose), south european countries might be a good alternative. You get more stability and much better education and health systems, while keeping the good weather and lower cost of living.

You could do the same thing working at google, but instead of making $108k USD/yr, you would make +$250k/yr USD. Your time to target savings number would be greatly reduced. Then you can leverage that into a remote work position as you work from home in some cheap country.

You can also buy a condo in las vegas for $50k USD too. You still have a developed country where you can speak the language and the bay area is a cheap one hour flight when you need to get more work.

>You could do the same thing working at google, but instead of making $108k USD/yr, you would make +$250k/yr USD.

Not everyone can just waltz into Google. For starters, there are tens of millions of developers worldwide and only tens of thousands of total Google jobs across all roles.

Google, Amazon, etc. all have a well known high false positive rejection rate, so even for developers who are qualified and would do well at these companies getting in still requires a good bit of luck. Their interviews are not bias free either, so a subset of good developers are facing a process biased against them. Those with families, for instance, probably have little time for hackathons that I'm sure help with in person or phone screen coding exercises.

Project Euler / TopCoder help far more with the interviews than Hackathons. Hackathons are 100% useless for training for $BIGCORP interviews.

As OP said it's one thing to be financially rich, but there are other forms of wealth. The idea of working 10+ hours a day, 5 days a week (if I'm lucky), 50 weeks a year for the next 40 years just doesn't appeal to me. You are right you could earn more at Megatechcorp, but by freelancing I can work on stuff I find interesting and still live life on my terms.

Also getting into a company like Google isn't something that everyone can do, where as it's pretty easy to start freelancing (especially if you are European, hence don't need to worry about healthcare).

But I said nothing about working 40 years. I just said you could do the same thing faster working at google than being a 100k freelancer. Most freelancers I know live a pretty variable life where you get feast & famine cycles. And when it's feast time, it's long hours time. It can be more stressful than being an employee too.

You can also work pretty interesting projects at a place like google. If you want to do platform library type work, the only kinds of places your likely to get that kind of work is from a place like google or other larger companies.

I think most software engineers could get into to google if they put the effort into it. If you can make it as a $100k/yr software freelancer, you could probably study 'cracking the coding interview' and make it into google.

Also realize that google hires in europe too.

The hours isn't what you think it is. There are many 9-5ers that do good work at places like apple and google. And there are other teams that work a lot. It all depends on the team. People also get more than 2 weeks vacation too. For example, the entire engineering org at apple at least gets 3 weeks of 'mandatory' vacation. One week for thanksgiving, 2 weeks for christmas. Then you have your normal vacation on top of that.

> The idea of working 10+ hours a day, 5 days a week (if I'm lucky), 50 weeks a year for the next 40 years just doesn't appeal to me.

I used to think like that when I was 20. One thing I've learned (will be 40 soon) is that the time passes anyway.

If you're lucky, you'll get to be 60. You don't want to be poor when you're 60. Of course, you don't want to delay gratification unduly, but beware of doing the opposite.

I don't get why people (who haven't worked at these companies) think everyone works 10+ hours at these companies. I have worked at one of the big tech companies before. I probably got 6 hours of real work done per day (including meetings), the other 2 being spent eating, snacking, or dicking around.

I think what is often overlooked is that you can live in the US in a nice place and it will be cheap, at least by European standards. Assuming you can sort out visa issues.

> I don't think this is great advise. Not everyone is able to join a company like Google due to either luck or their capabilities.

The original posts which prompted this one was centering around the super-engineer who can control their own destiny and work for any company they want. Nothing in this post applies to the average engineer.

The old fixed vs growth mindset at work. There is nothing to stop you becoming an exceptional engineer, except your beliefs of course.

Of course there is. First, there is your biology. You might simply not be intelligent enough to become a great engineer. If you set the cut-off for greatness at "published a widely influential paper" or "designed a large distributed system from ground up" this becomes even more the case. You might not have the health and the endurance to work on demanding high-end projects long enough to get really good at those kinds of projects.

Then, there are the social factors. Your other obligations, like raising children, can get in the way, though you might say they are more manageable than intelligence and health.

Growth mindset, beyond the "bloody obvious" [1] interpretation of it, is not something you can state as self-evident, and evidence to support the stronger interpretations is quite scarce.

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/10/i-will-never-have-the-a...

> First, there is your biology. You might simply not be intelligent enough to become a great engineer.

Biology is overrated. From "You and Your Research"[1] by R.W. Hamming:

"You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, 'How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, 'You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.' I simply slunk out of the office!"

Other anecdotes lead me to believe the primary difference between those that are and those that might have been is hard work.

> You might not have the health and the endurance to work on demanding high-end projects long enough to get really good at those kinds of projects.

Bad health is a rough deal for anyone. But it is possible to succeed in the face of it. Look at Goddard[2]. There's a good argument that he didn't reach his full potential because of his health, but he still did some truly great rocket science.

> Your other obligations, like raising children, can get in the way

Rather than get in the way, I think they are often essential. I imagine it must be hard to do great things if you're personal life isn't in good shape.

There are real obstacles to "greatness", I think. Things like access to education and financial security. But I find it hard to believe that biology, health, and domestic life are enough to stop a dedicated person from performing great feats.

[1]: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard

Geniuses have a greater ability to work hard productively and efficiently.

If you actually read the grand parent I was talking about an average engineer becoming amazing. It's 100% possible.

You have added a whole load of random obstacles to our average engineer, like making him in poverty, setting him the goal of greatness and suggesting he's sick.

I'd agree that he probably need to find a job that pays better, get well and have smaller goals before he succeeds.

Tell that to a chimpanzee. Then tell that to someone with down's syndrome. Then tell that to someone who was malnourished as a child and whose brain just plain doesn't work as well as yours. It would astound me to find that there were no inter-person variations that significantly affected ability-to-engineer-exceptionally. I'm not going to claim that there are people who fundamentally cannot become exceptional engineers, but I will claim that there exist people who start off so disadvantaged that the life circumstances necessary for them to achieve that goal are so unusual as to never occur - pseudo-illegal nootropics, adopted by best family on earth, elementary school teacher is burned-out tenured physicist, etc.

Obviously my comment here missed the mark! I thought we were talking about an average human engineer getting a well paying job at Google?

Sorry! It's possible that I missed some context, yes. I kind of skimmed this thread and fixated on your post because it seemed like it was making a rather extreme claim.

If you're already a good engineer, then it's much more likely that you can become a great engineer. I'm still not convinced that every good engineer can become a great engineer. Maybe most? I know that I have a memory-related lack of attention to detail that I've never been able to get rid of entirely, regardless of adherence to lists and standards and specs and so on. I basically can't maintain an event-driven workflow and it causes problems. I've gotten around it by going into mathematics and programming, which are relatively stateless, but I can easily see myself reaching "good" engineer status but not "great" engineer status.

What are the areas you need to focus on to be good? Mine are definitely tests, specifically mocking actual write events happening (or rather stopping them from happening) in an API I have built. It'd be boring if I wasn't learning new things though right?

Testing is an issue, yes. Making sure my tests are comprehensive, making sure my environment is set up in a way that makes the tests valid (that is, that I'm going through the right code paths) and verifying such, remembering where all the appropriate checklists are ("oh, right, that was testing a Y, I need to do checklist t_Y"). I occasionally have to make an extra commit because I forgot to stage a line or a comment. Stuff like that.

I've largely dealt with it by moving into CS theory and AI (which have less of that) and by using Google's reminders system (inbox, now, keep) to deal with the remainder. Just, whenever I have to do engineering, it's always going to be more difficult for me, and since I'm damn good at math there's no real reason for me to focus on engineering beyond the level where the other things I'm doing don't take hits from it. And unless I manage some kind of transformative pivot or redefinition, it'd be pretty stupid for me to focus on being a great engineer, and I'm not sure I'd be able to. I certainly am never going to be as good an engineer as I could be a computer scientist.

'Nothing'? Well, except a fuckload of experience, probably. Either spend 4 hard years at a top university or 10 years of consistent, hard work doing it all by your lonesome, maybe with and maybe without the benefit of being able to 'practice' at work. I don't think all it take is 'belief'. There is some actual hard work to be done.

Except that startups won't hire you once you get that experience. Look at their team pages, and struggle to find the one person over thirty-five.

Being born in the right place helps a lot.

> I also find being rich around 60 years pointless, since you've wasted too much of your life working for "the man" at that point.

Most people in the US will die having never been rich by any measure and having never done any better than living paycheck to paycheck, at best. 25+ years of wealth at the end of your life puts you solidly near the top of the pile.

And financial independence anywhere in the world is a whole different ballgame than living "rich" in a developed country (particularly the US).

Once you are rich at 60 there is some small chance that there will be life extension products available. (for some serious dough of course)

At the moment, lifestyle (nutrition/fitness) & social connections seems to be the key to living to 100.

interest on 100K won't cover visiting your family, having children, or any safety net if you get sick, unfortunately. Also a conservative fund return is more like (a volatile) 4%, and subject to the whims of 'previous performance doesn't predict future performance' (e.g. even that 4% can't really be relied upon).

I understand, but those numbers were from my perspective. I don't have a girlfriend or kids. And one should be able to overcome minor sickness, though I do realise there's a risk. I believe when you're still young and healthy you should occasionally take a little risk to (hopefully) achieve your dreams.

My dream is to be financially independent and work on my own software projects full time.

Do you consider yourself a machine or a human? Became from outside it sure looks one way.

I'm guessing you're relatively young. What I wished I'd learned earlier is the future comes faster than you think, and the earlier you start planning and saving for it (partner, children, ill health) the easier it is.

I dunno why, but I've trouble connecting with women and even if I do connect, at some point I'm afraid I'll get bored. And I've never seen much reason to get kids myself. So perhaps in that aspect, I'm more of a machine.

I'm 34 now. I've dealt with some heavy stuff. Lost my parents and a sister in a car accident when I was ~20 years old.

I agree that the future comes faster than one might think, which is why I'm in such a hurry to achieve my dream future before I'm 40 years old, so I got still plenty of time to enjoy it. My little sister certainly didn't get the chance to live her dream future.

GP was being obnoxious. To be human is to follow your personal calling, which might include building a family, or might not.

The trick is that your calling may change -- many children young folka grow to desire children, many lonefolk grow to desire a partner or would be happier with one -- so it helps to prepare for potential changes in your motivations and desires. Saving money is a great way to prepare to change. As is investing in a marketable skill.

I am also 34 and have much the same plan as you, just I had to revise the figures a few times as I had kids :) The increase in required house size + university = loads more cash required to be financially independent. If you know for sure those things won't happen then maybe you can go for 100K. Still, old age could become expensive, we won't be young and healthy forever. You basically need more than 100K so that you have an upward trend continuously to old age. You can't just cover your costs on the interest (and 6% is dangerously optimistic). Good luck to you though.

Hey, how are you going with the problems you talked about here? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10169937

Hey, thanks for asking! The thread was encouraging that it wasn't time to change fields; I'd say I'm making quiet progress.

Since then I've spent a lot more time thinking about what I want to be doing: work has been slack so I've had fewer chances to see how I now am decomposing software. But I've started to enjoy programming again :)

>100.000 EUR invested in indexfunds should net me on average around 6% a year after taxes, i.e. 6000 EUR a year or 500 EUR a month (7% historic average minus ~1% tax).

Really? That's a better return than I'm seeing averaged over 10 years.

He also doesn't take inflation into consideration.

Or market volatility.

.... or much of anything, really.

Expecting above-average returns on a small amount of money for several decades as sole income while ignoring inflation and market volatility. What could possibly go wrong?

I hoped to make clear this wasn't the sole income for decades. It's meant as a starting point to dedicate myself full-time on my own projects and hopefully make extra money from this work. Since I'm a developer with focus on mobile, I'd try to make several apps a year in this way which would hopefully generate substantial extra income over time.

Or those pesky 0% interest rates we've had for 7 years.

0% interest rates are not a concept that applies to index funds

Market crashes are though.

  - 100.000 EUR invested in indexfunds should net me on average around 6% a year after taxes, i.e. 6000 EUR a year or 500 EUR a month (7% historic average minus ~1% tax).

  - With no monthly rent to pay, I'm should be able to live a bit more comfortably compared to my Russian co-workers here :)

How are you going to pay the rent when the market inevitably doesn't return?

And what are you going to live on in 20 years time when inflation has halved the value of the 100.000 EURs?

The historic numbers I mentioned with regards to profit from investments take into account historic inflation numbers. The numbers are based on the Dutch book 'De Schitterende Eenvoud van Indexbeleggen'[0].

Inflation should not be an issue.

Still the bigger plan is to make extra money by working full-time on my own projects. So the goal is to increase investments every year and also the profit from investments.

@onion2k: The book isn't saying you can live forever for that amount. It's a calculation I made for myself based on the historic average profits of the stock market in the long term (based on ~100 years of data). I'm living for 2 months in Thailand and I can have a basic living here for 500 EUR a month, especially if I have a fully paid for apartment. That's a basic living without much luxury, but a good starting point to full-time commit myself to my own projects. And hopefully build more income that way. I also don't have wife, kids, etc…

---

[0]: http://www.bol.com/nl/p/de-schitterende-eenvoud-van-indexbel...

I don't read Dutch, but I can assure you that if it's saying you can invest 100.000 EUR and live off the interest forever without reinvesting it then it is wrong.

Well it depends entirely on how much you need to live, how long you're going to live and what kind of dividends you're receiving.

English article about the 7% stock market returns average: http://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/mutual-funds/...

Since economics shows that if everyone believes in 7% return , and capital is so efficient to move as it is now with digital systems, that grown would be already priced in. Hence the absurd 50-100x P/E ratios we see. It is unsustainable.

It's only unsustainable if the underlying assets don't allow for 7% return in the long run. It's possible capital is scarce relative to the opportunities for investment such that 7% real returns are the norm. In that case, it doesn't matter if everyone believes in the 7% rate, there will be no crash.

I can live in Germany for that much, and it includes health insurance. Are you sure that's the lowest you can go?

In fact, 670€ is the average that students live on in Germany.

> I also find being rich around 60 years pointless, since you've wasted too much of your life working for "the man" at that point.

Lolwut? Sure it's better to be young and rich but don't discount the comfort of being old(er) and rich.

That said, your plan sounds pretty good. How does your plan change if you want to raise kids?

> That said, your plan sounds pretty good. How does your plan change if you want to raise kids?

If I'd have kids (and wife) I'd need way more money of course. But I don't want kids of my own. This opinion of me hasn't changed in the last 10 years and I don't think it'll change in the future. I believe there are already plenty enough people on earth and more people wouldn't make the world necessarily a better place.

> I believe there are already plenty enough people on earth and more people wouldn't make the world necessarily a better place.

Not contradicting your decision, but I have to argue this point. There are not enough creative, educated, tolerant, empathetic people in the world. Every educated tolerant person with empathy is a little win for civilization. So, if you think you can make or train one, then there's an argument for having or mentoring kids.

Great plan if you have no extended or close family (our you simply don't care about them), nor do you care about living in the country you were born in.