FWIW, I suspect that folks like you are the whole point of civilization. It's like you "won" history. :) Congratulations.

(Just to be really really clear, I'm being sincere. I'm glad that somebody out there is okay in a deep and meaningful way, as contrasted with the horror show that nearly everybody has had to put up with since... 40,000 A.D.? 1,000,000 A.D.? Fuck yeah dude!)

In terms of evolution, they are losing if they do not pass on their genetic code to offspring so there's that....

Ah, but evolution has no goals, it's a chemical tautology.

I think you could contribute just by sharing your projects and designs online. I love reading about projects like this.

Bonus if you pick a bad accent and use a lot of nonsense swear words.

You are contributing to society. You've shown your value to the economy and got rewarded capital for it, which you now move in an efficient (?) way.

Unlike those essential workers, pfft. I think this juxtaposition highlights a problem with our current economies. He built a business he didn't like and made bank on it and now he can extract wealth from the economy indefinitely, meanwhile people are essentially forced into subjecting themselves to potential death for "peanuts" and no real financial security. How "essential" was his business, and how "essential" are the current grunts on the front line? Why the disparity in compensation? The economy has a weird way of justifying who is worthy of rewards.

I agree entirely. The system stinks to high hell, and I’d much rather see wealth more evenly distributed - it would make a better world for all. What we have now is little better than indentured servitude - actually, it’s worse, as it’s dressed up as “freedom”.

My business started out as trying to solve precisely this - we wanted to democratise ecommerce, and make it accessible for anyone, even with no capital, to become bourgeoisie.

Unfortunately, I learned the hard way that the lure of lucre is too strong for most to resist, and my partner, and our investors, dragged me kicking and screaming down the road of helping the rich get richer. There’s a reason (well, among many) that I cashed in my chips and left.

This way, I’m at least not actively making the world worse, and don’t feel the crushing guilt that came to characterise my existence.

Thanks for the agreement, and obviously the problem isn't directly your fault, or one person's job to tackle alone. Also a tinkerers paradise is probably what I'd also do if I had the capital to cash out.

What would you think happens in a system where capital is evenly distributed? Think of it from a game perspective, how would that play out if you search for an equilibrium?

I don't think he means exactly even, but ideally there is less reliance on desperation being the motivating factor for people working.

Well people paid him to do it, so it seemed essential to someone.

And it's not like the right will continue indefinitely - if they fail in their skill they will start losing returns and losing that right (capital).

People pay for junk all the time. Capital being spent is not an endorsement of the quality of the item it was spent on, nor evidence that it was "essential", especially given the definition of "essential" in the era of Covid-19.

There are plenty of examples of highly paid execs making poor choices, and getting rewarded well for it. Even more reason spent capital is poor evidence of quality.

Thanks! I also was about 33. And it did become like a prison, at the end (I think because I gradually shifted focus from value, to money).

Your adventure sounds like trememdous fun too. I think you retired with much more money than me (I stopped at the absolute minimum, when it was really taking off).

Learning etc is creating value, and could well be valuable to society long-term - just lacking that immediate feedback. Your consulting gives that. (I did some consulting too, but can quit if non-tech issues make it unpleasant. That's the point of wealth, isn't it?... but it also meant I didn't have work to out how to solve/overcome/deal with it).

> I think you retired with much more money than me (I stopped at the absolute minimum, when it was really taking off).

Maybe, maybe not - I know many, many people far wealthier than me who are still deep in the rat race, and can’t see a way out. I had enough to blow a chunk on travel (highlight was a month in Antarctica, and I’m toying with applying to do a season or two with the BAS once things are a bit more settled on the homestead), to buy two apartments (well, unused basements with scope for conversion in a world heritage city), and two rural houses (one with half a roof, one with no roof), and to renovate them, which we did on a shoestring by doing everything we could do ourselves. My wife has become an accomplished conservation mason in the process, and I learned how to roof, plaster (lime, never worked with gypsum), pour concrete, plumb, wire, and all the rest - got offered jobs by the people I asked to come inspect and sign off on my work, which was really flattering.

The remaining cash I stuck in stocks I believed in, and continue to believe in.

I’m 36 now - it took three more years of hard graft (but enjoyable graft) to turn a lump of cash (oh, screw it - £400k) into earning assets that we can comfortably live off in a country with a low cost of living. Going off grid was part of the formula, as after the capital outlay for power and water, our cost here comprises food, and diesel for the truck - although I plan to do a TEC this summer and dispense with fossil fuels entirely, and their cost, and I’m hopeful that we’ll have two decent harvests this year. Good thing I like beans and potatoes and fruit.

I’ve got mortgages on the rentals, so do have exposure on interest rates, but this is why I went for mid term furnished rentals - allows me flexibility with rents, and means my tenants are usually businesspeople deployed elsewhere, with a corporation paying their rent, so I can command a premium, and not feel like I’m exploiting workers who can’t get out of the rent trap.

I’m toying with the idea of starting a YouTube channel to share the adventure, but I’m held back by the prospect of haters - I dealt with enough venom in the business to just not want to expose myself to it again, and I don’t want to accidentally turn my “quiet” life into a business.

Thanks! That is much more. Also, although your hard graft was enjoyable (working autonomously etc), your full amount would be far higher still.

Re youtube channel: I think you're right on both counts, people will love it, people will hate it. Ironically, charging for it would be one filter. FWIW I think you're right to not risk it! (maybe a book would be safer?)

Thanks for sharing. Sounds like a dream.

You retired on £400K?

"in a country with a low cost of living"

In a country with a low cost of living, one can live like a king for £1k a month. With £400k that's yearly withdrawal rate of 3%, which seems safe enough.

Yup, this wouldn't really work in the UK. In Portugal, however, it goes a long way. It helps that the properties are yielding about 20%, as I went for the corporate rental market, and the portfolio has grown about 450% since '17. It's all gone better than hoped for, and I am earning more screwing about in the woods than I did working 16 hour days. My net worth has increased fairly substantially since I threw it all in.

If the world doesn't go to hell, I will keep farming the excess back into working assets - most likely property, following the same formula of buying shitholes in nice areas and turning them into miniature palaces and renting them to banks and tech firms.

If the world does fall apart, we have everything we need here to be entirely self-sufficient. Land to grow food on, a river for power and water.

We're actually spending less than €500/mo on living expenses - more on hardware, tools, materials - which we do in Spain (as does everyone else in this neck of the woods), as it's a lot cheaper than Portugal for that kind of stuff, and the border is only 10km away. For the really esoteric stuff, there's Alibaba, if you don't mind waiting for the slow boat from China.

Very cool story! Given that the exciting part of your retirement is learning and making things, I'm curious to hear why you decided not to try starting another business that would allow you to develop your skills in a similar way and also create money as a bonus.

It sounds like your first business was particularly soul-crushing, but do you view this as an inevitable quality in any for-profit activity? Or is it more that with any business there will always be lots of annoying tasks to do that you'd rather not spend time on, whereas your retirement is characterized by total freedom in what you learn and make?

That sounds awesome - enjoy!!

Please have you got more info on your lifestyle?

Just buy land to deprive society of assets, charge people to live there, and spend the stolen labor on whatever nonsense you like.

- I'm not sure how buying land means depriving society of assets, even in shared economies every person would have access to a share of said assets.

- Moreover, is it stolen labor if you provide goods (land) in exchange of money (rent)?

Renting isn't the biggest evil out there, all things considered, but it's not the most moral thing either. You are by definition (for what this guy is doing) profiting off of a limited resource, because you have better financial leverage than the end user. You are making interest money. I'm no muslim but I see merit in calling making interest money a sin.

But then so is making money from index funds so I suppose we're all going to hell!

This is insane. There are plenty of reasons to rent besides financial leverage, chief among them flexibility. Providing housing that you don’t have to commit to for thirty years is a valuable service and that’s why people pay for it.

It depend on rent/mortgage ratio in where you look, and they do vary a lot. Alas if the market and the banks are prepared to sell a mortgaged house the deal is not much less flexible than rent, the transaction costs are not zero but often less than cost of moving your stuff.

I suppose this depends on what kind of landlord you are. At the end of the day, a lot of people don't want to deal with home ownership and want to think about providing society with other things. Is that evil?

Bravo!

If you continue to post flamewar comments to HN we will ban you. I'm sure you can make your substantive points thoughtfully, so please do that instead.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The user posited the question "am I contributing to society - Not really". He himself knows he is contributing nothing, and drawing an income. It's a fact that he is a rentier, this is an economic term used by Adam Smith and Keynes.

Hence, I wrote:

> You are taking from society through rentier activity

There is nothing personal about this, I'm not talking about the guy's hair or his dress sense. There are no insults there, which is what "flame war" implies. Only the use of an economic term which has been in active use for over 100 years. It's an economic term.

I can make this point no more succinctly than I did.

Your problem is the fact, not the delivery.

They are providing capital for others to use and contribute to society. Plus I'm sure doing all that stuff they will have a chance to teach someone else or provide feedback online.

The land already exists. The land gets the rent. Just playing a rigged system as a rentier, as defined by Adam Smith.

https://www.prosper.org.au/geoists-in-history/adam-smith-on-...

“Ground rents are a species of revenue which the owner, in many cases, enjoys without any care or attention of his own. Ground rents are, therefore, perhaps a species of revenue which best bear to have a particular tax imposed upon them.”

“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.”

---

my reply to the above as hacker news censors all rentier debate with their fake "you're submitting too fast", which they only do for anti landlord comments:

Wrong. The majority of the rent is ground rent. Try renting a facsimile of an apartment in the middle of nowhere and in a city. Did he create the value? No.

The parent doesn’t seem like they’re renting land though. It seem like they are renting houses which doesn’t suffer from the problems of ground rent because there’s actual service being provided.

I don't think anybody will mind if the rent was say 1$. The concern is really about the size of the rent, astronomically increased by limiting supply.

We should increase supply. Oh, and wealth tax for rising inequality too.

Correct, I rent out furnished residential properties on medium term lets. Nice ones. I’m not a dickhead landlord, I had enough of them when I rented.

For what it’s worth, I took abandoned or ruined houses in desirable areas, bought them cheap, and spent my own (and my wife’s) time and labour renovating and furnishing them. I created housing stock from mouldy rubble.

Also, please note, I did not invent capitalism. I would much rather everybody could live like this.

I would be happier about capitalism if the government was not actively trying to increase profits and socialize the losses.

"Stop restricting the housing supply, and don't prop up house prices by buying mortgage bonds" I shout to noone in particular.

If you have a single dollar in your pocket right now, you're a rentier too. We're all modern franctional slave owners. So, you might as well enjoy it.