True security is a lie, but "relatively comfortably secure for the foreseeable future" is not.

These days, it takes a lot of assets to be confident you won't be homeless in old age assuming no major surprises or threats from society and the environment changing.

I would say most younger people don't earn enough or have enough assets to reach that level of basic confidence. After all, if you've rented all your life so far due to inability to buy a place to live, you probably know, in the back of your mind, that when you retire, you can't see any way to pay the rent unless something changes between now and then.

No need for any catastrophic surprises. That's foreseeable.

"These days, it takes a lot of assets to be confident you won't be homeless in old age assuming no major surprises or threats from society and the environment changing."

Uh, that is quite a pessimistic take from someone debating on HN, which is a forum of IT-related professionals. Maybe your level of required confidence is too high.

Vast majority of old people in the developed world do not end up homeless and IT professionals are even better off than an average Western employee. So "assuming no major surprises or threats..." and assuming you are not at risk of becoming alcoholic or drug dependent, you do not really need to fear homelessness.

Here on HN, you might be surprised at the range of backgrounds people come from. There are people from all over the world. It's a startup forum, so it attracts "indie hacker" types, entrepreneurs and bootstrappers of all kinds vaguely tech related, and people whose IT interest is primarily open source, not just well-paid salarymen.

By "a lot of assets" I mostly mean "a house", but a decent size pension would count instead. Both are out of reach for many people now.

I agree that most old people in the developed world don't end up homeless.

On the other hand, there's a growing economic housing crisis affecting a lot of people in almost every developed country. Mostly affecting (current) younger people, and most (current) older people are almost oblivious to it. It's working its way up the age range. This is new.

You cannot assume what worked will always work, when there are factors that appear to be changing across generations.

Many people are paying >50% of their income in rent, and rents are still rising in most places faster than incomes. Most renters cannot find a way to get on the house buying ladder. If things carry on as they are, many people currently young will retire while renting. If you're paying 50% income on rent now, what are you going to do at pension time, as pensions are typically 1/3 or less of the income prior to retirement. You'll have to carry on working, but that gets harder with age, faster for some people than others.

I agree with you most will probably not end up homeless, but the point is, for that to work out, something will have to change.

I personally know an IT person who reached retirement age and is dependent on state benefits to pay their ongoing rent, and found those state benefits enough for almost zero properties in the area they lived for decades prior, making it hard to find a place from which to continue looking after their own older parents. They struggle, and have to work on the side.

And another, skilled and knowledgable software engineer, currently paid well, who for a period last year was unable to pay for rent or food due to running out of money and access to credit. They needed help from local volunteers just to eat. How can that happen, you may think? This is HN, where not everyone is working for a company. Like many HN readers who are entrepreneurial (it's notionally a startup forum), they were a business bootstrapper, and it's easy for that to become financially precarious when things don't go so well. Add a badly timed pandemic into the mix, government support for everyone except small business owners, and a time where jobs were not proving easy to get, and you have a recipe where homelessness really was realistic for a skilled IT person and, unfortunately, their family. I'm sure they're not the only one around here who's had to seriously face it last year.

My own pension is projected to be less than my current rent, which is already low for the area, so I think it's rational to be thinking about that.

If you do not own the place where you live, your rent-to-income ratio will likely go up when retiring and you will have to move somewhere cheaper. That is not outright homelessness, though. Many people, including people in developed welfare states such as Germany, cannot sustain their previous lifestyle when they retire.

Thats looking it through the last generations lens where stability = a geographical location to live with a house on it.

Ironically, as climate change effects become more and more prominent, going with a RV route is looking more like the best possible option for the future, cause you can just pick up and leave when bad weather comes.

> going with a RV route is looking more like the best possible option for the future, cause you can just pick up and leave when bad weather comes.

That's fine when young and healthy, but when you're older, have several recurring doctor appointments and some mild impairments, a home is a lot better.

Not saying it can't be done, after all there are nomad populations with elderly people who live on the road. But they usually have a support system that travels along, too.

Indeed a recent family experience revealed that if you're in a town where you don't have a primary care doctor and you get sick, you're SOL. We ended up having to fly my relative back to his home town so he could be treated.

>going with a RV route is looking more like the best possible option for the future, cause you can just pick up and leave when bad weather comes

what's the plan when fuel shortages start happening and your RV can't be kept rolling?

The U.S. would sooner stop fuel exports than let that happen. We produce more than we use.

The country is already at the point where a single natural disaster can cause regional short-term fuel shortages and price spikes because refineries are located in geographies susceptible to natural disasters.

It is not unreasonable to work under the assumption that temporary petrol shortages become a annual or semi-annual event in a future where the gulf coast is hammered with ever more frequent and powerful hurricanes.

Harvey was parked over Houston for several days, and I don't really remember fuel prices being affected that much. The bigger thing to worry about is something like the pipeline hack (which will assuredly happen again).

Prices didn't move all that much, but you literally couldn't get gas in Austin for a week or so, and gas stations would frequently run out for another few weeks after that.

This is an area where small, distributed solar panel arrays and batteries (like on your house) can be much more robust. It's a lot harder to destroy thousands of small solar power systems than it is to take out a pipeline feeding an entire city.

I wonder what the EV RV industry is looking like..

Near nonexistent. Battery size requirements and battery charging rates make EV RVS either really expensive and really impractical for distance travel. You would need to put a huge battery (say, 300 KwH, which would cost $60,000 just for the battery), to get a reasonable range of 200-300 miles between charges, depending upon the efficiency of your RV. And then, even at a level 3 DCFC Charging station (providing 50 KW) you're looking at 6 hrs of charging to fully charge the battery.

You know how much new RVs cost right? 200-400k is not unusual for a 'big' RV.

Also, with a bigger battery comes higher limits on how fast you can charge. If you have a 300kWh battery you should be able to charge it at 300kW all day long.

That said, it doesn't really exist since there is no market for it at the moment. RV sales aren't exactly high, so the niche for EV RVs is even smaller. Plus there's no real infrastructure out for it now.

I suspect once EV Semis become more mainstream we'll see that trickle down to RV users. They can charge at the same place a semi would charge at.

The thing about RVs is that generally, you won't have to drive them often. Average solar panel produces about 15 watts per square foot, so over a course of a month with about 7 hours of sun a day, that is 3 kwh/square foot. So 50 square feet of panels, which is the total area of a large bed, will get you half the range over a month.

Also, there will undoubtably be hybrid options where you can have a multi fuel generator charging your batteries.

In this post-apocalyptic scenario I think the range would be secondary to using the battery for day-to-day living. The RV could have solar and keep the battery topped off all the time.

The Ford F150 Lightning has a number of features made for pulling a trailer.

https://www.ford.com/trucks/f150/f150-lightning/2022/#towing...

That and a truck camper[0] is probably the way I would go.

[0]https://www.lancecamper.com/truck-campers/

Then you basically are in the same situation functionally as having a house, no different from other people. Maybe even better considering that you spent less money.

But realistically, hybrid powertrains, or even simple multi-fuel generator charging will make this a non issue.

> Then you basically are in the same situation functionally as having a house...

Provided you're lucky enough to run out of gas in a location that your RV won't be a nuisance. And if you're in hurricane territory, an RV is not functionally equivalent to a house.

If you have freedom of movement over a large area, if you don't have breakdown of law and order, if people don't start lynching others when they come into their area.

RV is the perfect vehicle then for making your way to safety at the nearest operating military base.

Why would the military let some rando in a RV into their base?

Historically the U.S. military provides aid to refugees rather than shoot them at the gate so I'm banking on that when I roll up to camp pendelton in 2050

Because Will Smith has a dead alien in the back

I appreciate the angle but I think it's oversimplified.

I work almost just as much as I used to before but my life gets easier and better the more money I make. It's incredible to me the difference money makes. Compound interest is real and determining when it's enough is about determining the rate of growth in absolute terms relative to the cost of living you'd be happy with.

ok

I used to be rather poor so the difference is more pronounced. I've enjoyed a high salary for some time now but I'm still reeling from the change.

Being Canadian, I have access to public health, but if I get sick with even minor things, it'll take up my whole day. Now, if I get sick, I'll just pay the ~$200 fee to see a private doctor for 15 minutes, get what I need and get out.

Dental is not covered by public health, so there were at times I delayed treatment because I couldn't afford it.

I used to live in Vancouver where people will tell you they have good public transport but it's a lie. It's really only if you live along the skytrain corridors because the busses are always late and it's always raining. So if you don't have a car, you're wet, cold, late, and miserable. Now I just pay for Uber. Better yet, I just live downtown and I can walk wherever.

Going to the grocery store when I was poor was also difficult. Thinking about what I can afford means spending time comparing prices or even stores, and compromising on the meals I wanted to make. Now I just throw everything I want into the cart and I don't even look at the price tag.

Being poor sucks and there are countless more examples.

I also used to live in Vancouver and took transit all the time. I never needed to own a car while I lived there. Could the bus system have been better? Almost certainly, but it's still far better than other places I've lived since. How many similarly sized cities in North America can you name with better public transit?

You have reached a solid threshold where your basic needs are met and you have various luxuries that make life comfortable. From here on out you’ll have diminishing returns on the money/life improvement axis.

That’s because you’re already above where money would constrain you. The vast majority of people are not. I suspect you know this.

I assume the person posting that is already there by the sounds of it.

I read the comment to be working hard is what brings satisfaction. Some people really enjoy hard work and aren't doing it just as a means to afford leisure.

I read the comment to say that a hobby might make him “truly happy” but because of the uncertainty of the future he’s working hard and getting some level of satisfaction from that. He’s maximizing for security not for happiness.

When everyone is doing that you have a recession.

http://www.pkarchive.org/theory/baby.html

I don’t understand the relevance of that link with your point, although I mostly agree with your point I’m hoping you can provide more information on how your evidence is relevant.

The link is mostly about what happens when there is too little currency. Someone deciding to work 40 hours a week instead of 70 would, if anything, reduce the amount of currency in circulation because more wealthy people tend to have larger savings and a person working 70 hours a week is probably making more money than if they were working 40.

People say money can't buy happiness, but it can buy a jet ski. Have you ever seen an unhappy person on a jet ski?

Only once, and it was very very depressing to witness.

Please do elaborate :-)

They died

I had mentioned it previously on HN. If money doesn't buy you happiness, you're probably spending it in suboptimal places.

Exactly. If society were to fall apart, the number in your bank account will matter very little, if it even exists anymore...

There are a massive amount of things between "society collapsing" and "nothing bad ever happens" where the number in your bank account matters greatly.

You have unexpected huge medical expenses. You are no longer able to work. You're fired and can't find a job. Tech salaries collapse. Your town in burned down/destroyed in a hurricane/etc.

etc etc etc

If I look at various social collapses that people around me have seen in the last century and a half (and there have been many!), then it's clear that while the number in your bank account was not always useful, it did often provide options to protect you from the worst of society falling apart. Other things being equal (of course, often they were not equal) having resources during collapse did matter - sure, it might turn out that some class of your resources became worthless overnight, but generally it wasn't all resources at once; in collapses where land was confiscated by a invading nation, having some gold watches to trade for a way out on a ship were life-saving; in economic collapses where money and stock became near-worthless, having a spare farmhouse was a great benefit, etc.

You do need to diversify to something more than a number at a single institution, but in general, I'd say that it's the other way around - when everything is fine in society, then life is okay even if you're a bit lacking, but when things become hard and not everyone is going to make it, then the have-nots will suffer even more due to lack of options caused by lack of resources. For a crude example, think about the difference between 1930s European Jews who could or could not afford to travel overseas (which was a much more serious expense than now) when things started to become threatening.

That is highly unlikely - thankfully there is a much more reasonable way to read how important it is to live for today. Nobody intends to be hit by a bus but some people are - make sure you're getting what you want out of life before you get hit by a bus.

Unlikely but not highly unlikely. If you expect to live for another 50 years, there is a nontrivial chance that you will face a crisis that happens once every 500 or 1000 years on the average. Dying prematurely is one kind of risk, outliving your society is another.

Definitely. Planning and saving for the future also has to be weighed against the risk of (you) not making it to that future.

If money doesn't matter anymore then it's beans, bullets, and bandages.

Indeed. Money is a bit of a lie in its own right.

Me, I go for functionality. The catch there is, if I've acquired plenty of functionality for something I consider desirable but then I don't DO that thing, does it still exist?

Functionality typically decreases in value over time while money (in various forms) increase in value.

Properties are the exception, being both functional and an investment.

Thing is, you can say that is the lie. That, over sufficient time, any form of money will collapse to worthlessness. Then it's just a question of when you bought in and when you cashed out. It's rather arbitrary. That it increases in value, is the lie. Nothing says it does… but repeating the lie.

It's a very popular lie.

Now tell me about how crypto is money :)

If society doesn't fall apart, that number could mean an awful lot.

OP seems like they like their job. If you're doing what you like, whatever that may be, then you're not wasting anything.

Let’s not deal in absolutes. Money can’t absolutely fix everything, but in case I need money I would rather have it then don’t.

I have never had a time in my life where having less money would have produced a better outcome than having more.

Never gotten mugged, then?

I've never met a mugger who got less violent when you didn't have money to give them.

Seems like you're replying to a different post? Why would someone who enjoys work regret "wasting" their life? They did what they enjoyed!!