I know you're looking for attention or validation, but I have a feeling you'll probably get more negative attention than positive when you seem to be equating having $1M in liquid assets to "starting with no income, no product, no business".

$20k a year in interest after taxes if he’s not a complete moron. I could survive on around $45k a year (including health insurance) so I could putter for a long time before I had to deliver something.

But domain knowledge and contacts will probably be the biggest assets OP turns out to possess. Don’t undersell those.

~$100k/year if returns are based on 10%. Aka, what some people use for expected S&P returns to beat

I have 80%+ in short term US treasuries and CDs (the rest in some stocks that I've held for a long time). I have no interest in the upside of the stock market right now. I'm already doing something speculative myself.

If you're working out a budget to allow you to quit your day job you'd better have all of the numbers in post-tax dollars or you're gonna have a bad time.

We're taking about a pre-tax salary at 500k. Capital gains means no payroll taxes and discounted long term taxes too.

And 80k is still well over the average household income

That's mostly capital gains. He won't earn that in steady dividends to live off of.

These are fungible. (We're already averaging out volatility)

> "starting with no income, no product, no business".

Getting a sustainable business is not easy. Lots of groups don’t get there with $10’s of millions in venture capital. So from a business prospective he is starting with nothing but does have a personal safety cushion.

One small loan of a million dollars!

Those two things are not equivalent to me. Yes I have savings, but I also have no income right now.

You are correct! But the way you phrased it makes it sound like you are experiencing a hardship, which I think most would disagree with. Don't get me wrong, I think you should be proud, you clearly did a lot to earn your savings, but you're trying to make it sound like retiring young with $1M in liquid assets part is the difficult part when its probably the easy part. You don't have to work for a very long time, or at all!

Not at all. I live a very comfortable life and I don't expect it to change. Wasn't my intention to make it sound like hardship. But I don't have infinite runway, so I do have to make something.

Unless that $1M is stuffed under your mattress, you likely have some income from is. Even sitting in a CD at 2% you'll be pulling in $20k/year - that's not "no income".

What I think you mean is you don't have steady W2 income from an employer.

True. I've put most of it in short-term US treasuries at ~2.5%, so making about that much after taxes.

I would much prefer reading a post about quitting to do something off your own, or just about setting up your own thing, without the money angle.

A different post would inspire me to try too. A post like this one makes me sad to be less privileged.

And I'm not saying that to make you feel bad or anything. People have different circumstances and make different choices for themselves, some biased by the circumstances and some not. I'm just saying it as a consumer of a text. Just throwing my opinion with no expectations of anyone catching it.

I mean, savings accts are paying 2.2 percent right now, and while it's a drop in the bucket compared to senior developer wages at AMZN, you're looking at 20k in interest accrued annually, which is basically what each of my parents live on in middle America.

Depending on where you live, who you support (or are supported by), and how capital intensive your independent business is, that could be plenty. Plus, you've already got a book deal worked into the business plan it seems.

I get your point, but if you’re not making any income from $1m in liquid assets you’re doing something wrong.

You can easily make in interest what many people make in salary. Please just drop the "starting with nothing" part of your story. No one ever has viewed $1M as "starting with nothing".

Good luck. Cautionary tale: I have a buddy that was in a similar situation (more than $1M actually). He started a business, was careful, and after a few years went bankrupt because the business never gained traction. He sure wishes he hadn’t gone down that path. He’ll probably never get back to where he was. Just a regular developer now. If you ask him if the experience was worth it, he’d tell you no. So be careful.

I did something similar 4 years ago. It was the best decision I have ever made. I did consultancy, sold myself cheap compared to the big consulting companies and helped several startups becoming real businesses. I loved it, every day was awesome!

Even though I sold myself cheap, I still made more money that the salary I would get if I had worked for the big consulting companies. The biggest challenge is selling yourself, and I am not very good at it. Still it worked out great for 2 years until I joined a startup as the first employee which has gone from 3 to 100 employees in just 2 years.

If I was employed at a regular company, I would never have gotten the chance to join that startup.

That’s awesome - congratulations! I’m glad it worked for you.

You don't need income with $1M. If you chuck that into an index tracker you can safely withdraw $40k a year...

Author here. My expenses are more like $150K a year, so my runway is only a few years. I have a family, two small kids (4 and 2), and live a comfortable life in Seattle. I could obviously adjust my standard of living, move somewhere cheaper, etc, but I didn't want my family to have to change anything from this experiment I'm doing with my life.

I hope you still have good health/life insurance. Maybe you are young but life changing events can happen to anyone as it did to me.

I do. Got a $5M life insurance, and disability insurance that pays $10K/month if I can't do my work anymore. Got a high deductible health insurance through the ACA exchange. Life and disability insurance were quite cheap actually: about $3K/year in total (age 35 and good health). Health insurance is obviously expensive. The cheapest is about $14K/year here in WA for a family of four (which is what I got). Deductible is about $7/$14K IIRC.

I understand you here. I just quit a financial startup. My runway is more than 10 years because I only have to take care my mother (Yeah, Single forever!). The real issue is mental health, that would lead to physical health if not aware!

hey man. just FYI i'd kill to be in your shoes.

- almost broke startup founder

I am also living in Seattle area with couple of kids and my expenses are in the same ballpark.

Someone used to spending ~500k a year is not going to want the quality of life change of moving to 40k a year income. Their family would also not appreciate it.

The best thing I ever did for the family budget is work out a plan ahead of time for windfall money. Odds are OP will never make this much money again. Spending like this is the new normal is how rock stars and athletes end up broke at 40. You have to get out ahead of it.

Since OP has a million saved I’m going to assume they had a similar plan in place. But. $150k a year with young kids (they haven’t begun to get expensive yet) in Seattle is pretty high. Getting that down is a good deal of effort that will distract from running the business.

>>Odds are OP will never make this much money again.

I hope these kind of things are taught to people early. Somewhere in school, or may be at a level of a social value system. The default every day mode for most people is to work very hard and fail. In fact you are lucky to achieve mediocre success even after working insanely hard.

>>The best thing I ever did for the family budget is work out a plan ahead of time for windfall money.

Yes the best thing to do in case of a windfall period is to take all the money and put it into some kind of an investment. So that when the gravy train stops, you have something to fall back on.

>>Spending like this is the new normal is how rock stars and athletes end up broke at 40. You have to get out ahead of it.

It isn't just rock stars and athletes, its your every day cousins and uncles, who have some career run, spend like no tomorrow, when the gravy train stops, they realize they have their best years behind them, all their money is gone, and nothing that they can do will help them even get by, let alone take them back to their past glory.

>>$150k a year with young kids (they haven’t begun to get expensive yet) in Seattle is pretty high. Getting that down is a good deal of effort that will distract from running the business.

A lot of people will be willing to show sympathy to you if you met with an accident and bad things happened to you beyond you control. But if you threw away a perfectly fine opportunity and asked them to settle for less, they would be asking why should they even be doing it at all.

True. It's hard to regress on the standard of living, especially with a family. I wasn't spending $500K/year though :) I still made sure I abundantly lived within my means.

Perhaps, he was earning 500k but not spending that much. 500k would give you around 300k after tax. Half of 300k can easily be spent in order to have normal life.

And have to live like a normal person, no high-rolling.

What kind of skill sets do you have to warrant Amazon paying you that much? What kind of skill sets do developers have at this level that differentiates them from everyone else?

Amazon’s stock has gone up a lot. Likely that has a lot to do with it but if this is all base salary that’s awesome.

Usually big stock grants go out to those who have shown themselves to be force multipliers. If you can make everyone around you more productive than you’re contributing in ways that make companies like to put golden handcuffs on you.

My base was $160K, and the rest stock. If the stock didn't increase so much since 2016 I would have made around $380K each year in the last 3 years.

Good for you! Honestly I don’t understand the criticism on one sentence of your post and it made sense to me.

“Now that I have some runway I’m going to build something from scratch”? Probably wouldn’t satisfy those that could only dream to make $500k and are frustrated you don’t appreciate it I guess.

I’m not making that much but your post makes sense and resonated with me.

The problem is the wording. Author makes it sound like they'll be pulling themselves up by their bootstraps when they're really just standing on a giant pile of money (which they earned rather than inherited, to be fair). People have a very negative reaction to this because they see it way too often in the rhetoric of certain political groups.

$1M is nothing when you could double it in a few years. Anyways good luck with your startup, and you can always go back, and take your quitting just as a vacation (many of my friends and I were doing the same thing, it's totally normal).

You probably don’t want to post this stuff so directly on net..

This is true. But how do you know he's not using a fake name / pseudonym?