Comment by JumpCrisscross
20 days ago
> wish I had fuck-you money and could spend my day engrossed in whatever I find interesting
A good mental exercise is to calculate how much you'd need to survive indefinitely in a pocket of rural America or the third world. No international travel. No bells and whistles. Limited cuisine. But survival and leisure unlimited.
When I've run the numbers for a comforable living, they've come to $300k (Vietnam, $12k/y) to $500k (West Virginia or Portugal $18k/y). But one could halve (or more) those figures by accepting standards of living our grandparents would have found adequate.
Then you make a choice. That world. Or the one you have. (Or something in between.)
Two-fifths of American households have a net worth over $300,000; more than half over $150,000 [1]. That means somewhere between a lot of and potentially most Americans have, on a global scale, fuck-you money. Just not fuck-you money to retain their status at the centre of the first world.
Coll idea. One thing: This numbers exclude healthcare costs as you get older this gets more expensive.
For countries with free healthcare, it is usually limited to people working there or citizens and ( in the German case ) recognised refugees.
In Taiwan you can be on NHI within 6 months of arrival on certain visas. Once you get permanent residency, you're always eligible so long as you keep making monthly payments, which cap out at around 45$usd/month. NHI makes an MRI cost less than 100$ usd. If you don't have NHI you can pay iirc 300$ for an MRI, 100$ for an emergency room visit with blood draw and IV, maybe ~30$/month for buproprion over the counter.
For Portugal the "free" healthcare is extremely generous to anyone staying there, regardless if citizens or not. It does lose money, but then again Germany always pays the bill.
> Germany always pays the bill
I dont think many people realise just how much European infrastructure Germany actually bankrolls. It is a lot.
Back of the envelop calculation: Portugal gets about 33 “Kampfpanzer Leopard 2” worth of money from Germany via the EU.
If this truly finances universal healthcare in Portugal for everyone, the Portuguese should run the world.
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My health insurance (self employed, high CoL area USA, healthy/not old) is 6k$/yr. Kind of blows up that $18k/yr idea. I don't think it gets that much better if you live in a low CoL area.
> One thing: This numbers exclude healthcare costs as you get older this gets more expensive
For the U.S., yes, I'm assuming Medicare/Medicaid. For overseas: Vietnam and Portugal have affordable systems you can pay into, with private insurance options above that at $1,200 and $5,000 a year.
I thought fuck-you money also included the ability to explore whatever you want in a way that included e.g. hiring a team to explore projects for you as startups?
Also everyone I know with fuck you money already lives in Asia for cost of living reasons, but spends half the year jet setting to various raves and rich people shenanigans in random places like Croatia.
American software engineers maybe. But I heard somewhere that most Americans live paycheck to paycheck or at most have a few thousand dollars in savings.
> I heard somewhere that most Americans live paycheck to paycheck or at most have a few thousand dollars in savings
Wealth versus liquidity. I'm saying you sell everything you own, pay off your debts, and then take what's left to retire on. Someone with $10mm in home equity may still be strapped for cash on account of the mortgage.
> I heard somewhere that most Americans live paycheck to paycheck or at most have a few thousand dollars in savings
If you dont inherently know this fact then you should be grateful for a very lucky and priviliged life.
I don't live in America.
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I've never seriously considered this, but that's a sobering realisation that most of these numbers are more achievable than most think.
Thanks for the inspiration, I should run my numbers as well.
WV is probably heavily underrated. Such a beautiful part of the US.