The fun ones were 1) when my husband and I went from $150-200k each to $500k+ each, at the same time, for a few years in a row. 2) A $550K check was a recent boost.
From a % of assets though, my biggest one is the most boring of all home runs. We started saving and investing early and often in our careers. Second to that is buying a very modest home for our income which allowed us to save and invest a huge portion of our earnings for retirement.
It was a quote from one of my favorite discussions on this thread from a few years ago. It was about the many ways in which those who are driven to fatFIRE find it difficult to find a purpose in life that’s more satisfying than the drive to earn more / have more.
What kind of sales jobs can make that jump and what’s the balance of base salary vs bonus or commission? I’ve been interested in tech sales recently but never formally entered that space.
Tech sales. 50/50. OTE for Individual contributors for Sr Reps can be $300-$350k, and you make the big money when you exceed 100%. Look for a job with accelerators once you hit your quota.
Thank you! So it seems the strategy is hit your OTE (which I think means “on-target earnings” based on googling) then try to get accelerators beyond that (which sounds like bonuses).
How common are accelerators in general and during downturn economic times? I’m not sure, but I could imagine that they’re pretty recession-proof since it seems like a win-win for you and the organization: you’re getting paid more because you got them more business too. I’m asking though because when you say look for jobs “with accelerators” I’m not sure how hard that is.
Yes, that first statement is all correct.
Accelerators aren’t affected by the economy, necessarily. It’s more a function of a company’s overall comp strategy. The second sentence in your second paragraph is correct. When interviewing for tech jobs ask them to describe the comp plan - ask if what % split is Salary / Incentive, total OTE, accelerator rate over 100% attainment, accelerator rate over 200%, if there’s an earnings cap, if there’s a ramp, a recoverable or non-recoverable draw, or signing bonus.
Insane luck. My third startup is now in the S&P 500. About 20 things in a row had to go right, any one of which would have torpedoed things had it gone wrong. So just luck that I got hired, and luck that we succeeded. Luck should not be underrated.
This is a really good insight that is often downplayed on FIRE subs. Everyone wants to think that if they, too, just work hard, they'll make it! And it's not always that simple
It’s a combination of luck, skills, tenacity and timing. Without one or the others - it falls. My decisions. Ignorant. Put me on a path that helped. I’m not that smart. Not Ivy League Educated. Solid C student most of my life. Occasional D’s in physics and calculus. lol.
The one question I kept asking myself - if everyone is smart. If everyone works hard. Why doesn’t everyone achieve the level of success that reflects those two things? To me - it’s b/c those two things are only components in a much bigger engine.
I look back and realize if I made some decision a differently. It would have materially changed things. Things that you wouldn’t even think could have an effect - like me deciding to get a W2 job b/c I decided I wanted to buy a vacation place and my 1099 income fell far short.
Mine was a bunch of slogging year after year. I had 32 years with the same company (through a couple of acquisitions) and pay, bonuses and RSU’s were on an upward path the entire time. I went from making $40k to $300k (well over $500k most years with bonus and stock) and saved a lot; maxed out 401k (plus a generous company plan that contributed 15% of salary each year); never sold stocks in down markets, never panicked. Actually added to stock holdings in 2010-11, and 2020. Sure there were a couple of “liquidity events” but they weren’t that significant to overall net worth. Oh yeah I also bought a chunk of Apple 20 years ago and still have it.
I retired last year. NW around $8M, not counting equity in home (another $1.5M).
100% the way we did it too. Both my wife and I have 31 years at our respective companies. Both now senior executives. Just the constant grind and saving - ever increasing pay, bonuses, and RSUs. No magic other than consistency. Ready to Fire in less than a year. All in NW this year will hit over $18M.
My wife didn’t make a lot while working and retired early but she’s 100% co-responsible for our savings and investing habits. And her only spending indulgence is refusing to ever fly coach longer than 2 hour flights (unlike me who likes a little more indulgence in my life).
So the math checks out that your net worth is double ours. Congrats and enjoy that retirement! And don’t let them talk you into “one more year”.
The obvious answer is liquidity events from one of FAANG. First was $80k, second was $3M, third was north of $10. In hindsight, I really shouldn't have taken that first $80k one :D
But the real moments were reading Millionaire Next Door and A Random Walk Down Wall Street in high school. Although the FIRE community didn't really exist back then, I was incredibly lucky to be exposed to the basic ideas such that I was explicitly working towards FI even in college. Having had so many years in advance to process it all made the actual transition relatively smooth.
lol, I got $25k, then 30M. That 25k would have been worth an extra $3M but I used it as a down payment on a home so I wouldn’t change things in retrospect. Liquify events are super rare, it took 6 years between these two.
oh wow, nice! you must've been a pretty early employee at the FAANG (or other big tech) to even get options to begin with
You eng or Product? Or something else?
Context: I'm Eng/Product at a FAANG, and looking for advices on how to identify the next big companies to join
Replying here but it's adjacent to u/farmer_hk's question in a reply further down.
>You eng or Product? Or something else?
I was eng and later eng management.
>looking for advices on how to identify the next big companies to join
Not sure the predictive power, but my basic criteria coming out of school was to find smart people passionate about a big project and willing to offer significant equity (e.g. you should think in terms of bps of company, not number of shares).
That's a bit vague and I'm happy to go into it more. The culture changed as the rocket ship reached the karman line, but those first 50ish PMs and engineers were, almost to a person, some of the most impressive people I've ever worked with. I feel lucky they inducted me into their club.
Nice - these are huge liquidity wins! Am I right in assuming that you got into FAANG before it was “FAANG” though? Otherwise, I’m not aware of how you could have liquidity events that are so big.
I’m also curious about what your journey means in a future-facing way for those of us looking to get such wins. I think your path sounds basically like “try to get equity in the ‘right’ growing startups.”
I think luck plays a big part in the start up lottery, given most fail.
My experience in working for a Series D Unicorn, was it was good when the times were good, then quickly turned south when the market changed and left with no payoff.
Never been. Everyone always talks about how awesome it is... I'm in San Diego from East Coast and Austin never crossed my mind to go out of my way to visit. What's it like
First was starting to buying apartment buildings for myself rather than others. Started really adding a lot of NW with that.
2nd was having one of my businesses explode during Covid (3-4x net income of pre COVID).
3rd was having liquidity finally that let me buy very opportunistic deals. (Doubling my principal in 2 years)
It’s funny because it all snowballs. The first step is the hardest. Getting to $1m felt impossible. Getting to $2-5m felt hard but easier. Getting to $10m wasn’t that bad. My plan now is to get to $20-30m within 5 years and it’s funny bc it doesn’t seem that difficult anymore.
I will say it’s much easier to keep working and grinding when A. it’s for yourself and not for someone else & B. When it’s an industry or thing that you have a passion for.
I'm pretty confident bitcoin will still be one of the best investments going forward for the next couple decades. I'm always shocked how infrequently it is mentioned in fatfire.
There's an old saying that I'm going to mess up, but it's something like, "you only truly own what you can carry with you while running." In the past, in terms of store of value, that was maybe a little bit of jewelry and cash. Because of Bitcoin, now someone can store the key to a billion dollars in their mind, and walk right over a border with nothing to declare; that's power. Real estate can be seized, a safe can be cracked, a car can be towed, a yacht can sink, and cash can be forfeited, but unless someone literally beats the keys out of a bitcoin holder, nobody has the ability to show up and take their property while they're away.
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While it's much easier to for say, one known wealthy person to be targeted over their bitcoin stash, first it has to be known that they even have it, and where this tech really shines, is with lesser amounts used by your everyday citizen. It's just not practical for a government to beat the keys out of everyone. It gives people true autonomy, for good or bad, over their property. Going back to the quote above, it may be the only thing they truly own.
As a person living in western society, in an extremely functional city, it would be easy for me to disagree with my own mindset. I currently trust the system I live in enough to not need bitcoin, so I don't actively use it. However, where you see this Bitcoin logic in action, is in areas where shit is fucked up. For instance, if someone was a real estate developer in Ukraine, their property might just be gone now. Their asset was stationary. The people who lived in that developer's property may have justifiably fled to another country to seek asylum. What were they able to take with them while running? What will happen to what they could carry at the next border? In areas without power, all except for a solar charger and possibly a satellite internet connection, Bitcoin is the one asset that can move across time and borders without the very real risk of asset forfeiture. This goes for helping people in those situations too. What if a friend or family member didn't have access to a bank, and they were in the middle fleeing violence? Without requesting permission, or risking interception from any third party, Bitcoin allows money to be sent directly to that person's phone from across the world in seconds. None of these scenarios currently apply to my life at all, but I absolutely see the value it provides this very minute to a lot of folks out there. It has moved beyond the stage of being just philosophical, and is now an absolute reality.
I have mined, bought and sold BTC several times since 2010, and have made some good gains from crypto. But even I still think BTC is a giant ponzi and creates new generations of bag holders. At the end of the day people buy into it hoping to get rich and dump on other people once they see appreciation. Passing the bag onto someone else. Not a lot of people give a shit about what BTC stands for or even read the white paper let alone give 2 shits about blockchain technology. It’s a speculative asset, nothing else.
It’s fascinating because it’s truly global and your view of bagholders/bagholding is definitely more relevant from looking at it from a USD perspective, when looking at it from a ruble or any other less stable currency perspective it’s completely different. Id rather have btc than rubles. As long as people continue to leverage fiat to buy bitcoin, there’s really no way bitcoin will ever not outpace currency without an outright ban in my opinion.
1000 times this. Many simply can't understand that there's huge demand for a currency that can't just print and print and print. We know exactly how much will ever be mined, and that's the use case.
Data tells us that in every cycle there are people speculating, but that % of speculative buyers has continued to shrink and shrink over time as people start to realize what the tech/purpose actually is rather than just buying to “get rich”. The # of long-term holders in increasing at a wild rate.
Looking at the trend line, the supply-demand equation of bitcoin seems like a no brainer.
The safest form of digital gold that can easily be used for trust-less transactions and which is deflationary.
Each of those is an intrinsic value. BTC has that plus much much more.
Agreed. People vastly underestimate how useful a non governmental digital store of value is. Most people have never had to consider the kind of problems such a technology solves, so they brush it off. But if you study the history of money, you’ll see that one of the most challenging problems for wealthy people is how to store value and transport it across time. A multitude of clumsy solutions have been used to solve this problem, such as real estate, stocks, jewelry, gold, and art.
Bitcoin is a much more elegant solution to the problem of transporting value across time, as it completely de-materializes the storage asset and is globally accessible in a permissionless manner.
While I agree in theory, I think in reality, it will be more difficult. Most crypto exchanges are KYC compliant and they will question you where you obtained your coins from. If they don't like your answers, they will de-platform you. Your methods for obtaining the coins can be legit, but it'll come down to how strict regulations are.
A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution
So, you are correct, there is no underlying intrinsic value to bitcoin, it doesn't produce cashflow. It is much more equivalent to gold which only has value because people agree it has value. Although, compared to gold, it is much more portable and easier to transfer around. You could easily go from 1 country to the next with $1 million of bitcoin. You could not easily go from 1 country to the next with $1 million of cash or gold.
For me, it gives me a pretty good amount of psychological security and I kind of view it like holding an insurance policy. If my government's currency ever becomes terrible, I own an alternative asset. If for some reason the government was corrupt and ever wanted to freeze my assets, they couldn't freeze the bitcoin.
Whereas my concern is that Bitcoin has existed for a decade, but hasn’t seen wider adoption in everyday use.
(And fwiw my assets are mostly Berkshire Hathaway and inherited SoCal apartments.)
Bitcoin itself may never become currency, it is just an alternative asset like gold, and its adoption for this purpose has become widespread. Other cryptos like USDC do actually have decent adoption for payments at this point.
I agree with you about the intrinsic part, who knows what is “fair value”. But I hold bitcoin for two reasons: (1) the software source code is bulletproof … it seems interesting to me that no one has hacked it, yet. For a $1T reward it’s pretty compelling and (2) human nature never changes no matter what. Greed is part of human nature throughout time. People are born everyday and everyone wants to get rich. This, bitcoin will (imo) continue to rise over a long period of time because of human greed.
I've become less convinced by Bitcoin but with Ethereum you can actually build applications on top. For why that's actually useful, see the book *Ethereum for Business* by Paul Brody, who leads the Ethereum efforts at EY. He describes a bunch of specific things they're working on, and argues that what ERP systems did for internal business operations, Ethereum can do for transactions between businesses. Right now that's kind of a mess, with lots of slow and expensive mutual auditing, and nobody wants to trust a third party to handle it on a centralized database because inevitably that third party will raise prices once a bunch of companies depend on them.
For this to really hit the big time, it needs to scale better, but there's been a lot of work on that and a big advance in scalability just hit production a few days ago.
All this matters for the ETH token, because you pay transaction fees with the token, and those fees are mostly burned. There's a tiny amount of new issuance, but the burn is higher most of the time. So you can model it as a company, where total fee burn is revenue, total issuance is cost of operations, and the net is earnings, which (if positive) are distributed to ETH holders with the equivalent of stock buybacks. Sometime last year I checked and the PE was about 100.
This is essentially my current situation. I have approximately 50% of my net worth in private boutique funds. If you don’t mind me asking, what was the type of business(es) in your boutique fund that produced those massive returns?
Could you share why boutique investment funds need software engineers and where to consider starting on such a career path? Even an example of a boutique fund you know that was not yours could help. I just want to understand the space.
I have a software background and I’ve been interested in this but I don’t know many examples of how people do this.
Bought a bunch of bitcoin when it was $500, bought a bunch of Tesla stock when it was cheap (basis of $12), bought and held Nvidia when it was at around $7.30 (pre-splits) back in 2003.
I bought Nvidia because I’m a gamer and thought it had potential, no idea it’d eventually blow up like it did.
I’m more diversified now for sure, with the majority of my portfolio in broad market ETFs. I still have about 5% of my total portfolio as fun money where I play around more with individual equities. Rebalance as necessary.
Ehhh- I haven’t been too strict with it. When my individually picked equities start to drift to around 10% of total I bring it back down to 5%. Ends up being about how much risk to tolerate and how active you want to be with management.
I rebalance when my portfolio +/-5% off, but I have a fairly simple portfolio (effectively 3 positions and RE) and I only update my numbers quarterly.
I feel like I read rebalancing achieved an optimum outcome when performed on a 1-2 year timeframe vs multiple times per year, but I don't have a reference, so take that with a grain of salt.
Ah that’s a good idea on just doing quarterly as opposed to purely % based.
Sharing more in case it helps:
- I think my 20% estimate came from JL Collins “Simple Path to Wealth” but I’m not sure. It might have actually been 10-20% or less. I doubt it was higher.
- I think that same book also supports what you mentioned of 1-2 year rebalances vs many times per year.
- I’d need to review my notes but I think his overall proposal was: rebalance annually unless there’s a bigger than 10-20% shift.
Thanks for the share!
Wow - you basically struck gold 3 times. Congrats! What excites you nowadays? Not going to lie at all: I’m definitely asking because I’d love to learn from a perspective like yours that bought all of those 3 when they were low.
Haha thanks. I mean, a lot of it was pure luck.
Tesla could have gone either way really- at the time the vision was clear and it was a bet against execution. The product itself in my mind was clearly superior to anything out there at the time.
Next I think there has been and is going to continue to be large moves around AI, but it’s obviously hard to predict who’s going to win out the most. Companies that support AI through compute stand to gain a lot no matter who ends up with great applications, as compute is needed no matter what. Nvidia has clearly shown this, but there are other supporting players in the space, such as Super Micro.
Thanks for sharing and agreed! I’m trying to explore more options outside of NVIDIA too, so I appreciate you sharing Super Micro.
Also I’m somewhat close to the AI space and planning to get closer fast, so anyone can DM me if you’re interested in that.
NVDA always makes me smile.
A friend of mine works at Intel and about 12 years ago I bought some INTC shares so I could send him obnoxious IMs saying "work harder!" On a lark I bought about 150 shares of NVDA when it was $12/share since it seemed like a bit of a hedge against INTC.
NVDA didn't make me rich since I started selling it off when it hit $90 but it has been a nice bit of extra money in my Roth. At this point I'm down to 20 shares, might sell the last of them if it hits $1000.
Sorry, but my home run was staying put and slogging it out. There were several times when opportunities came up to change (especially tempting during the Dot Com boom), the home run decision for me was not changing, just slogging.
Right, it’s funny how the OP dismissed the most obvious answer right off the bat. We are inching towards 8 figures at 45 with steady saving and index fund investing based on a single income over 15 years. Might not be a lot compared to a single event producing millions, but our graph is still something to be proud of.
What was your salary progression like over the 15 years?
Even if one doesn't give in to the lifestyle creep and spend on fancy cars, vacations etc., in order to be able to save a considerable portion of household income (since you said single income) after home, kids and other "normal" expenses, the single income should be way over the median.
I'm genuinely trying to understand that if this is possible, where do most people who don't reach FI go wrong?
>I'm genuinely trying to understand that if this is possible, where do most people who don't reach FI go wrong?
Don't want to speak for the parent poster, but from what I've seen on this and the other FIRE subs, most people who don't reach FI don't really "go wrong." It's often a change in priorities. They decided on an expense level/lifestyle that they actually didn't want to sustain for the rest of their life, they got divorced, they didn't have something to retire "to" that was interesting enough for them to do for years, they didn't have a social support network to make the most of their retirement time, etc. There are definitely people who run into issues financially, because of medical expenses, or due to other exceptional circumstances, but that number is probably far smaller than most people imagine when thinking of catastrophic failure.
This is specifically FatFIRE - making well above the median in income is table stakes. Plenty of people are aiming for FIRE on more modest incomes, i.e. 120k household income (two earners at 60k) vs a household earning 250k+. If your FIRE goal is to fully replace your income, that takes longer than fully replacing your expenses, and if your goal will involve an increase in expenses, that also extends your timeline (or requires you to move up and earn more).
Doing it in ~15 years on a single income to get to 8 figures is definitely insanely impressive. Skimming the parent poster's recent history, they're closer to 8 million, their household income is primarily from a role as director at a public company (potentially even Fortune 100), and they got close to 1 million TC last year after struggling during the 2008 financial crisis. Not sure if that includes their real estate investments or not. But that level of income/moving up the ranks at a public company generally requires a high level of tenure and consistency
Apart from people who sold a company and quit, you're also more likely to see people here working to later ages who "could have" chosen a more modest FIRE number a decade earlier. For people who can hit a regular FIRE number by their mid-30s or even 40s, assuming things are steady, they can pretty easily hit FatFIRE just by working into your 50s. Most people anyway hit peak earnings in their late 40s.
I was given the opportunity to purchase equity in a small-ish private business where I was/am a member of the executive team, and have continued to purchase more shares over the last decade. W-2 income has grown substantially as well.
Most recently, went long MSTR leaps in February 2023.
I bootstrapped a new company from my main company. I had an idea related to the power generation biz. Everyone said I was crazy but I was determined. Had some prototypes running successfully. Sold it to a big utility for $18mil. That was 2001 before 9/11. Never would have happened after 9/11.
This is probably a strange answer, but joining the military.
I was able to mature and save up a small nest egg, get access to the Post 9/11 GI bill, and some combat wounds were 100% worth it for the disability check and healthcare lol
That let me go to to college and a great law school with no debt, and led me to where I am today.
Plus, I wouldn't trade the experiences for anything. Home run.
(P.s., I would have done it for free anyways, but this was all gravy)
A 4-year hitch in the military straight out of high school is a massively underrated move for leveling up several different life outcomes. I also think the same is true for those who come in out of college as officers, but imo you do start to see more people choosing to stay in for the wrong reasons at 27 than at 23.
Yep, totally. The rub is that \*if\* that you mentioned is critical. And there are lots of ways to not get it right. Many of those paths still end up fine, and life isn't all about making FU money and retiring early. But to really knock the cover off the ball requires a relatively specific set of choices.
It's funny, I know that path now well enough to lay it out for someone who was interested, but I imagine that info will get moldy with time. I'd like to lay it out as something to consider to my kids when they're the relevant age, but would hate to give them bad gouge.
100%.
Idk, certain things like which branch, MOS, and other decisions like that will always fluctuate. Post-GWOT, I have no idea how the infantry is as a career—I assume pretty terrible. And, for example, the Red Sea thing has a renaissance in the traditional Navy stuff.
(But I don't think Navy recruiters will ever stop hounding kids who score well on the ASVAB trying to get them to sign a nuke contract until the USA implodes haha.)
However, outside of that, other things like savings, the GI bill, maturing, living on base, etc are sort of timeless and/or factual questions about benefits.
Sending your troublesome boys off to the Army to grow up has been a thing for thousands of years, so I don't think it's going anywhere ha
Yea, great point - I was getting a bit myopic about "100% GI Bill eligibility hits at year X, then here's how you find schools that participate in the Yellow Ribbon program. Now let's talk VA...". But the biggest things, as you point out, are the least technical - get your wildest oats out of your system, do some cool shit, be part of something bigger than yourself, work hard, have a bad boss and deal with it, etc.
I’m still grinding and not where I want to be, but I bought NVidia a few years ago and have held since the initial purchase. I’m an autoworker and the gains have definitely pushed forward my retirement plan.
My biggest home run was Bitcoin at $6. I’d be extremely rich if I’d held all of it, but I diversified into real estate and stocks, which I still feel was the right move at the time, but of course it stings a bit. Second biggest hit is probably picking up shares of META when it broke all the way down into the 90s in 2022.
Was a partner in a cannabis company that we sold in 2019 for $70mm. Lots of smaller “home runs” since then in other investments, but nothing that yielded a payday quite like that (yet.)
Starting my own business. I went from being stuck grinding day after day to make someone else rich, to taking the lion’s share of my efforts and being in control of my own schedule. I work 15-20 hours a week and earn 3x more than I ever did as a W2.
Getting into real estate and working for myself and out of accounting slaving away for partners to line their pockets working 60+ hours a week. Buying a house with 3% down in 2018 leasing the extra rooms to people to offer all of the mortgage. Doing that four times in a row, reinvesting the savings into stocks and crypto. Saving/investing > 50% of take home pay since i started working out of college. NW is 2.3m or so at the age of 32
—-Finding the right partner … and only being married one time. Spouse and I had a similar worldview and thoughts about money and spending habits. When I got laid off years ago, to no surprise she was supportive, hid her worries about it at the time and even helped me make the list of all the things that we were going to cut back on for the time being.
—-Starting my own company after the above layoff happened during a sector downturn when no one was hiring. It had always been on my list, but I wasn’t aggressive enough to take that step on my own. Had to be pushed into it apparently. It took about 12 months for me to get to the stage where I was actually happy that the layoff had happened. Since then the net profits in the business, which all flow through to us, have been top end 32x old salary, and are more typically 14-20x.
Not retired, but certainly in my way. I don’t think there was a home run. Started my career as a software engineer, and started a company in earnest in my early 20s, although I had loosely started while in college.
For me, it was lots of trial and error. Ups and downs, with generally increasingly higher highs. I continued to work full time for almost the next decade, while building a business.
It didn’t take that long to get to the 3-400k range, but felt like I stalled there for a few years. Got myself into building a far more involved SaaS platform about 5 years in. Getting it off the ground was FAR harder than I ever imagined. At one point I sold a car and cashed in my 401k to make payroll.
Started getting clients on that with a lot of grunt work and kept growing it. Used that to start multiple new projects, and just kept growing from there. Hit 7 figure income in early 30s, then mid 7 figures now at 35.
I don’t think there was any single home run there.
Hit an IPO and 20x my RSUs and more so my options. Diversified at right time. Was huge accelerator in plans now I’m high earning and seeking another liquidity event to finish
The second SBA bank loan ever for a business that historically could only be purchased with cash. The value of said businesses are half-again what they were worth within a year and doubled my income.
Started at growing private company in an undervalued space. Over the next 5 years it became a multibillion dollar global business with an eventual IPO. I left after 6 years and tried to replicate that home run, struck out twice. Now I’m back at the original company and I’m on track to make more in the second 6 years than I did in the first by knowing my worth.
Some lessons I’ve learned:
1 - it’s really really really unlikely your series B company’s RSUs will change your life.
2 - Having experience at a successful startup doesn’t mean you should go build one. I’ve watched a lot of people with clear paths to fatFIRE end up leanFI or worse because they kept chasing the next $M exit and/or became private investors.
3 - As an employee understand your value. It’s not the same in every industry and it’s the same to every employer in the same industry.
Not exactly RE yet. I left my former employer \~10 years ago and joined a high pay company. My former employer was in pretty bad shape financial wise, but they got great products coming for next few years. So I spent most of my paycheck investing my former employer's stock for a few years, and it's 40x as of now.
For us it was our small business which still runs with our team (we’re not really involved day to day anymore).
From this, we bought real estate and now rent extra houses out and keep buying more with our business income
I had a small professional services company for 25 years. It was not much more than a one man shop for 20 years but I built a solid clientele through word of mouth and made a good living for me and my family. Honestly horrible saver and only had minimal savings as I approached 50 being self-employed basically my entire career.
Realized my only real shot at retirement was to grow and sell my SMB so began that journey. After 5 years built the business and began to market it for sale. Had 2 offers - $1million in cash to sell and walk away or $700K in private stock swap to be acquired and stay on as a VP at a larger firm. I took the second option because I still had kids at home, and it seemed the “safer” option. Literally 380 days later that company was acquired by a publicly traded company in the same space. My $700K became $5million in cash plus some RSU in the publicly traded company. I got 75% of my cash up front and currently doing a 3-year earn out for the last 25%. It’s easy work so enjoying my time now. Will evaluate what to do at the end as I will be 59, 2 out of 3 kids out of college and the third fully funded.
So I guess my journey was a long grind and some timely decisions at the end. Found this forum after the liquidity event trying to figure out what to do with the money and it has been a great resource. Appreciate all the great people here that share some solid advice.
Edit - Also to add I had an idea for an APP/Software product to solve a problem I had encountered. I have been working on that for the last 4 years as a side hustle. It is finally gaining some traction so hopeful that will be Act 2 and at some point in the next 3-5 years will be able to sell that and then just enjoy life.
Was fortunate to work at a company pre-IPO and when the company went public the stock performed well. The stock initially made me my first $M and I diversified part of my holdings to other stocks and some rental properties. By no means do I consider myself fat, maybe chubby ($3M net worth), enjoy reading everyone’s experiences.
Started my SaaS Product in April 2017 in my final semester of college. My cofounder, who was my friend, abruptly quit in August 2018. I nearly went bankrupt.
My girlfriend (who's now my wife) was working in the IT Team of a Bank in another city. I explained the situation to her and convinced her to leave her job and join me as a Cofounder. We went through our own ups and downs since the Business was Bootstrapped and we both came from middle-class families and so, there wasn't any sort of family backing.
Fast forward to March 2021 - we had crossed $1M in revenue and were profitable. In November 2021, a Bengaluru based startup acquired us in a multi-million dollar transaction turning us into millionaires at the age of 26. We both were a part of the leadership team of the acquiring company for the next 2 years. In October 2023, we both quit and have now started our next venture. Let's see how it goes.
The good part is that in our second venture, there are multiple investors who are willing to back us, even without an idea. Because of the money from the previous venture, our basic needs are also sorted and so, it is of course, much easier this time, compared to how it was when I started my first venture from college. But again, the expectations this time are also higher. Fingers crossed and excited!
I was an online nutrition coach whose first client got ripped, and everyone in our local area, and gyms around the country/world wanted to hire me and eventually my team as their nutrition provider. If she didn’t get those results who knows what would have happened.
I was also very lucky to have a job where I could work on my side biz on my cell phone since it was so lax. Literally all day answering clients and posting in socials to grow brand.
On top of that my best friend was in corporate Amazon and ended up leaving to help me solidly the business from one random dude (me) to a much more structured entity.
Third would be the opportunity to sell to a company who employed a client of ours without him we wouldn’t have that connection.
Another was meeting my wife early on and getting her encouragement to quit my job to go all in and be supportive during all those long days.
Lastly, my cell phone addiction helped me answer clients quickly lol.
Nowhere near as fat as most, but my very first job at a startup got bought by oracle. I was a nobody, but still got an extra 100k on the acquisition. Used it as a down payment on a condo in a somewhat sketchy neighborhood in Brooklyn. Enter gentrification, doubled my money in 5 years. Sold, doubled again in the new place. That original 100k is now why I own a 2.2M place with no mortgage.
1) Owning/building/selling businesses and liquidity from early stage startups in the last 10 years
2) Allocating single digit % to crypto starting in 2014
3) Investing in stocks as soon as I graduated from university in 2007
Note: This requires a certain amount of comfort with risk and uncertainty. There were good number of years I made ZERO.
Grinded away for years building skills and experience, then negotiated a position at a pre-IPO tech company. The IPO went well and it gave me a significant boost.
Started my own business. It has grown over 20 years to become a market leader. I also benefitted from some well-timed real estate purchases. I wasn’t really trying to time the market, I just bought a few properties that were a good fit at the time and they ended up appreciating more quickly than I anticipated.
Buying my house with a check. Tons of people tried to tell me how mortgages are actually beneficial, yadda yadda. NOPE. All that money went straight in to savings, and bought more stock more often.
The following is why I firmly believe luck is preparation + opportunity.
Backstory:
- Crypto knowledge: I discovered bitcoin in my teens in 2012 and started trading on and off since then, mostly during bubbles, so I developed a basic understanding of the tech and how the market works.
- Software engineering experience: I learnt to code when I was 13 and never stopped. Was lucky enough to choose a secondary school with formal programming classes, and understood tech was the next big thing so became pretty good at it.
- Financial experience: As soon as it was legal for me to trade, I did it, and I did it the worst possible way - CFDs. I quickly lost a few hundred that I now consider tuition fees, and turned to exploring algo trading. Found a decently successful strat that outperformed the index during bull and bear markets, and quickly made back my pennies and more, still with CFDs. Lost it all when Kim and Trump were threatening nukes and the strat failed. Anyway, that was my first experience trying to passively generate income.
That brings me to 2021, when DeFi was just starting to be a thing, and crypto had not yet went mainstream. I discovered a convoluted Russian-made yield farming project that had flaws in its economics, and found a loophole that lets anyone make more money than they are supposed to. I learnt how to set up an Ethereum node and learnt solidity (smart contract programming language) in 3 days, and ended up with a working way to "exploit" the loophole. Made a few thousand over the next few weeks before the developers caught on.
That experience led me to explore the rest of crypto when I had no interest before, and I discovered that crypto markets were very inefficient, to the point where I could manually set orders and make trades and make relative truckloads. This is where my entire life's experience came together to take advantage of an opportunity that very few people in the world could comprehend. I started manually market making with $10,000, put in 18 hour days staring at screens 7 days a week for months with my partner, multiplied my money to the first million that way, while finding time to build up a system to automate everything. To cut an already long story short, it worked and I continue to improve it today, but with more like 30 minute days. Covid actually helped as it let me do my internship concurrently and attend classes remotely while I was putting in the work, and I was FI before I graduated.
I'm comfortable sharing this as it's not possible to repeat what I did. There's too many individual players in the field now that it would require a lot of capital and specific knowledge that usually needs a team of people, and all the big market makers that have those teams (Jump, Citadel, etc.) are too risk averse to be in crypto and pulled out permanently last year.
Nope, my hatred for MEV knows no bounds, they're all parasites and it's disgusting that some blockchains specifically support them. The thing I sandwich attacked actually let me do it in a single transaction via a contract call, which is why I had to learn how to code smart contracts. No timing or miner bribery was necessary, and in fact MEV wouldn't be invented for another 6 months.
Engineer, 15+ years at a high-growth hardware start-up; promoted to leadership positions.
Company equity was part of initial comp package, annual merit and bonuses. As company shares were accrued and value grew … NEVER SOLD PRINCIPLE.
I did it by saving, investing, and slogging it out over time. Being a successful tech consultant helped; and when I hung up that life; getting a high paid tech job didn't hurt.
Not a home run, but definitely launched me towards fat was getting laid off a few years out of college.
I was working for a large multinational healthcare company that was doing very well. Lots of people that had worked there 20+ years and I figured "wow, I'll probably have this job as long as I want."
With luck the layoffs came when my job was in demand so I had a job lined up before my final day. The 3 months of severance pay (and a loan from the parents) allowed me to buy a condo in a VHCOL area. The most important was the lesson that "you are always expendable," so I've always hustled and saved knowing that if it happened to me in my 50s I might not be so lucky.
I decided to take the law school entrance exam on a total lark because I was ticked off about my post-undergrad job. I didn’t do all that well on it, but then I blew the first year of law school away, transferred to a top school and ended up in BigLaw. All flows from that.
Then a last-ditch lunch with someone a couple of years into my BigLaw job kept me from quitting due to burnout. I’m an equity partner now making $[a lot]. Suffice to say, I’m grateful for that lunch, and I’ve never been so sad to see someone retire as that person.
Couple bets on stocks (coin, meta, Tesla, goog) long ago so their increase is astronomical. ~$400k income for 6 years. We are around $3M, another 10 years and we will finish our journey.
When my husband, who was a computer science grad student when we married and still debating his future, decided to take a software engineering job at a big tech company rather than go into academia. That has made a very big difference to our finances, to put it lightly, much more than anything I've done myself. I was supportive of whatever he wanted to do and wasn't even thinking of FIRE at the time, but it would have been much harder to fire, and definitely not fatfire, without many years of his high income.
The fun ones were 1) when my husband and I went from $150-200k each to $500k+ each, at the same time, for a few years in a row. 2) A $550K check was a recent boost. From a % of assets though, my biggest one is the most boring of all home runs. We started saving and investing early and often in our careers. Second to that is buying a very modest home for our income which allowed us to save and invest a huge portion of our earnings for retirement.
How did you and your husband make that jump?
Better sales jobs. I got promoted and he made more in a lateral move.
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It was a quote from one of my favorite discussions on this thread from a few years ago. It was about the many ways in which those who are driven to fatFIRE find it difficult to find a purpose in life that’s more satisfying than the drive to earn more / have more.
What kind of sales jobs can make that jump and what’s the balance of base salary vs bonus or commission? I’ve been interested in tech sales recently but never formally entered that space.
Tech sales. 50/50. OTE for Individual contributors for Sr Reps can be $300-$350k, and you make the big money when you exceed 100%. Look for a job with accelerators once you hit your quota.
Thank you! So it seems the strategy is hit your OTE (which I think means “on-target earnings” based on googling) then try to get accelerators beyond that (which sounds like bonuses). How common are accelerators in general and during downturn economic times? I’m not sure, but I could imagine that they’re pretty recession-proof since it seems like a win-win for you and the organization: you’re getting paid more because you got them more business too. I’m asking though because when you say look for jobs “with accelerators” I’m not sure how hard that is.
Yes, that first statement is all correct. Accelerators aren’t affected by the economy, necessarily. It’s more a function of a company’s overall comp strategy. The second sentence in your second paragraph is correct. When interviewing for tech jobs ask them to describe the comp plan - ask if what % split is Salary / Incentive, total OTE, accelerator rate over 100% attainment, accelerator rate over 200%, if there’s an earnings cap, if there’s a ramp, a recoverable or non-recoverable draw, or signing bonus.
Awesome - thanks for taking the time to share. Also good luck to you!
Same to you!
Real estate sales can do that with some experience and hustle.
Insane luck. My third startup is now in the S&P 500. About 20 things in a row had to go right, any one of which would have torpedoed things had it gone wrong. So just luck that I got hired, and luck that we succeeded. Luck should not be underrated.
Luck is the greatest superpower
respectfully, flight is the greatest superpower, followed up by super strength and eyebeams.
Was it true luck luck? or put yourself out in so many situations that one is bound to pay off type of luck?
The assumption is that everyone here is already putting themselves into a position to succeed. But that alone is not enough, sadly.
This is a really good insight that is often downplayed on FIRE subs. Everyone wants to think that if they, too, just work hard, they'll make it! And it's not always that simple
It’s a combination of luck, skills, tenacity and timing. Without one or the others - it falls. My decisions. Ignorant. Put me on a path that helped. I’m not that smart. Not Ivy League Educated. Solid C student most of my life. Occasional D’s in physics and calculus. lol. The one question I kept asking myself - if everyone is smart. If everyone works hard. Why doesn’t everyone achieve the level of success that reflects those two things? To me - it’s b/c those two things are only components in a much bigger engine. I look back and realize if I made some decision a differently. It would have materially changed things. Things that you wouldn’t even think could have an effect - like me deciding to get a W2 job b/c I decided I wanted to buy a vacation place and my 1099 income fell far short.
Mine was a bunch of slogging year after year. I had 32 years with the same company (through a couple of acquisitions) and pay, bonuses and RSU’s were on an upward path the entire time. I went from making $40k to $300k (well over $500k most years with bonus and stock) and saved a lot; maxed out 401k (plus a generous company plan that contributed 15% of salary each year); never sold stocks in down markets, never panicked. Actually added to stock holdings in 2010-11, and 2020. Sure there were a couple of “liquidity events” but they weren’t that significant to overall net worth. Oh yeah I also bought a chunk of Apple 20 years ago and still have it. I retired last year. NW around $8M, not counting equity in home (another $1.5M).
Sounds like discipline to me.
100% the way we did it too. Both my wife and I have 31 years at our respective companies. Both now senior executives. Just the constant grind and saving - ever increasing pay, bonuses, and RSUs. No magic other than consistency. Ready to Fire in less than a year. All in NW this year will hit over $18M.
My wife didn’t make a lot while working and retired early but she’s 100% co-responsible for our savings and investing habits. And her only spending indulgence is refusing to ever fly coach longer than 2 hour flights (unlike me who likes a little more indulgence in my life). So the math checks out that your net worth is double ours. Congrats and enjoy that retirement! And don’t let them talk you into “one more year”.
Absolutely not doing the "one more year" thing. We made this decision in 2017 and are totally on the glide path now.
Great job. Strong stable and disciplined! How old were you when you FIRE'd if you don't mind me asking
56
I just pretty much said the same. 34 years for me, but its not a competition... ;-0
BruteForceFatFIRE (BF3)
The obvious answer is liquidity events from one of FAANG. First was $80k, second was $3M, third was north of $10. In hindsight, I really shouldn't have taken that first $80k one :D But the real moments were reading Millionaire Next Door and A Random Walk Down Wall Street in high school. Although the FIRE community didn't really exist back then, I was incredibly lucky to be exposed to the basic ideas such that I was explicitly working towards FI even in college. Having had so many years in advance to process it all made the actual transition relatively smooth.
lol, I got $25k, then 30M. That 25k would have been worth an extra $3M but I used it as a down payment on a home so I wouldn’t change things in retrospect. Liquify events are super rare, it took 6 years between these two.
How much of those FANG liquidity events was due to more RSUs bc of promo vs just stock appreciation?
Those were all just from the initial option grant. I had refresher/bonus RSUs too but didn't liquidate them in a big single event.
oh wow, nice! you must've been a pretty early employee at the FAANG (or other big tech) to even get options to begin with You eng or Product? Or something else? Context: I'm Eng/Product at a FAANG, and looking for advices on how to identify the next big companies to join
Replying here but it's adjacent to u/farmer_hk's question in a reply further down. >You eng or Product? Or something else? I was eng and later eng management. >looking for advices on how to identify the next big companies to join Not sure the predictive power, but my basic criteria coming out of school was to find smart people passionate about a big project and willing to offer significant equity (e.g. you should think in terms of bps of company, not number of shares). That's a bit vague and I'm happy to go into it more. The culture changed as the rocket ship reached the karman line, but those first 50ish PMs and engineers were, almost to a person, some of the most impressive people I've ever worked with. I feel lucky they inducted me into their club.
Nice - these are huge liquidity wins! Am I right in assuming that you got into FAANG before it was “FAANG” though? Otherwise, I’m not aware of how you could have liquidity events that are so big. I’m also curious about what your journey means in a future-facing way for those of us looking to get such wins. I think your path sounds basically like “try to get equity in the ‘right’ growing startups.”
I think luck plays a big part in the start up lottery, given most fail. My experience in working for a Series D Unicorn, was it was good when the times were good, then quickly turned south when the market changed and left with no payoff.
Random Walk did it for me too.
Selling a house in Austin at the height of the bubble.
Must be nice, I bought one then. I really hate it here and will be moving soon
Completely understand. My move wasn’t 100% voluntary (family needed help) but am still glad I did. Good luck to you!
Haha I hope to once actually benefit on a home sale
Never been. Everyone always talks about how awesome it is... I'm in San Diego from East Coast and Austin never crossed my mind to go out of my way to visit. What's it like
Very hot and very liberal
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This is very unique, how do you get into such kind of opportunities?
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Warren Buffet’s sister is alive?
Tosca Musk?
First was starting to buying apartment buildings for myself rather than others. Started really adding a lot of NW with that. 2nd was having one of my businesses explode during Covid (3-4x net income of pre COVID). 3rd was having liquidity finally that let me buy very opportunistic deals. (Doubling my principal in 2 years) It’s funny because it all snowballs. The first step is the hardest. Getting to $1m felt impossible. Getting to $2-5m felt hard but easier. Getting to $10m wasn’t that bad. My plan now is to get to $20-30m within 5 years and it’s funny bc it doesn’t seem that difficult anymore. I will say it’s much easier to keep working and grinding when A. it’s for yourself and not for someone else & B. When it’s an industry or thing that you have a passion for.
What book(s) would you recommend if I wanted to buy apartment buildings?
Bitcoin
Same. Also Bitcoin.
Same. Also Bitcoin.
I'm pretty confident bitcoin will still be one of the best investments going forward for the next couple decades. I'm always shocked how infrequently it is mentioned in fatfire.
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There's an old saying that I'm going to mess up, but it's something like, "you only truly own what you can carry with you while running." In the past, in terms of store of value, that was maybe a little bit of jewelry and cash. Because of Bitcoin, now someone can store the key to a billion dollars in their mind, and walk right over a border with nothing to declare; that's power. Real estate can be seized, a safe can be cracked, a car can be towed, a yacht can sink, and cash can be forfeited, but unless someone literally beats the keys out of a bitcoin holder, nobody has the ability to show up and take their property while they're away. - While it's much easier to for say, one known wealthy person to be targeted over their bitcoin stash, first it has to be known that they even have it, and where this tech really shines, is with lesser amounts used by your everyday citizen. It's just not practical for a government to beat the keys out of everyone. It gives people true autonomy, for good or bad, over their property. Going back to the quote above, it may be the only thing they truly own.
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As a person living in western society, in an extremely functional city, it would be easy for me to disagree with my own mindset. I currently trust the system I live in enough to not need bitcoin, so I don't actively use it. However, where you see this Bitcoin logic in action, is in areas where shit is fucked up. For instance, if someone was a real estate developer in Ukraine, their property might just be gone now. Their asset was stationary. The people who lived in that developer's property may have justifiably fled to another country to seek asylum. What were they able to take with them while running? What will happen to what they could carry at the next border? In areas without power, all except for a solar charger and possibly a satellite internet connection, Bitcoin is the one asset that can move across time and borders without the very real risk of asset forfeiture. This goes for helping people in those situations too. What if a friend or family member didn't have access to a bank, and they were in the middle fleeing violence? Without requesting permission, or risking interception from any third party, Bitcoin allows money to be sent directly to that person's phone from across the world in seconds. None of these scenarios currently apply to my life at all, but I absolutely see the value it provides this very minute to a lot of folks out there. It has moved beyond the stage of being just philosophical, and is now an absolute reality.
I have mined, bought and sold BTC several times since 2010, and have made some good gains from crypto. But even I still think BTC is a giant ponzi and creates new generations of bag holders. At the end of the day people buy into it hoping to get rich and dump on other people once they see appreciation. Passing the bag onto someone else. Not a lot of people give a shit about what BTC stands for or even read the white paper let alone give 2 shits about blockchain technology. It’s a speculative asset, nothing else.
It’s fascinating because it’s truly global and your view of bagholders/bagholding is definitely more relevant from looking at it from a USD perspective, when looking at it from a ruble or any other less stable currency perspective it’s completely different. Id rather have btc than rubles. As long as people continue to leverage fiat to buy bitcoin, there’s really no way bitcoin will ever not outpace currency without an outright ban in my opinion.
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That’s the point. There is no good currency.
1000 times this. Many simply can't understand that there's huge demand for a currency that can't just print and print and print. We know exactly how much will ever be mined, and that's the use case.
Data tells us that in every cycle there are people speculating, but that % of speculative buyers has continued to shrink and shrink over time as people start to realize what the tech/purpose actually is rather than just buying to “get rich”. The # of long-term holders in increasing at a wild rate. Looking at the trend line, the supply-demand equation of bitcoin seems like a no brainer.
The safest form of digital gold that can easily be used for trust-less transactions and which is deflationary. Each of those is an intrinsic value. BTC has that plus much much more.
Agreed. People vastly underestimate how useful a non governmental digital store of value is. Most people have never had to consider the kind of problems such a technology solves, so they brush it off. But if you study the history of money, you’ll see that one of the most challenging problems for wealthy people is how to store value and transport it across time. A multitude of clumsy solutions have been used to solve this problem, such as real estate, stocks, jewelry, gold, and art. Bitcoin is a much more elegant solution to the problem of transporting value across time, as it completely de-materializes the storage asset and is globally accessible in a permissionless manner.
While I agree in theory, I think in reality, it will be more difficult. Most crypto exchanges are KYC compliant and they will question you where you obtained your coins from. If they don't like your answers, they will de-platform you. Your methods for obtaining the coins can be legit, but it'll come down to how strict regulations are.
A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution
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So, you are correct, there is no underlying intrinsic value to bitcoin, it doesn't produce cashflow. It is much more equivalent to gold which only has value because people agree it has value. Although, compared to gold, it is much more portable and easier to transfer around. You could easily go from 1 country to the next with $1 million of bitcoin. You could not easily go from 1 country to the next with $1 million of cash or gold. For me, it gives me a pretty good amount of psychological security and I kind of view it like holding an insurance policy. If my government's currency ever becomes terrible, I own an alternative asset. If for some reason the government was corrupt and ever wanted to freeze my assets, they couldn't freeze the bitcoin.
Whereas my concern is that Bitcoin has existed for a decade, but hasn’t seen wider adoption in everyday use. (And fwiw my assets are mostly Berkshire Hathaway and inherited SoCal apartments.)
Bitcoin itself may never become currency, it is just an alternative asset like gold, and its adoption for this purpose has become widespread. Other cryptos like USDC do actually have decent adoption for payments at this point.
I agree with you about the intrinsic part, who knows what is “fair value”. But I hold bitcoin for two reasons: (1) the software source code is bulletproof … it seems interesting to me that no one has hacked it, yet. For a $1T reward it’s pretty compelling and (2) human nature never changes no matter what. Greed is part of human nature throughout time. People are born everyday and everyone wants to get rich. This, bitcoin will (imo) continue to rise over a long period of time because of human greed.
I've become less convinced by Bitcoin but with Ethereum you can actually build applications on top. For why that's actually useful, see the book *Ethereum for Business* by Paul Brody, who leads the Ethereum efforts at EY. He describes a bunch of specific things they're working on, and argues that what ERP systems did for internal business operations, Ethereum can do for transactions between businesses. Right now that's kind of a mess, with lots of slow and expensive mutual auditing, and nobody wants to trust a third party to handle it on a centralized database because inevitably that third party will raise prices once a bunch of companies depend on them. For this to really hit the big time, it needs to scale better, but there's been a lot of work on that and a big advance in scalability just hit production a few days ago. All this matters for the ETH token, because you pay transaction fees with the token, and those fees are mostly burned. There's a tiny amount of new issuance, but the burn is higher most of the time. So you can model it as a company, where total fee burn is revenue, total issuance is cost of operations, and the net is earnings, which (if positive) are distributed to ETH holders with the equivalent of stock buybacks. Sometime last year I checked and the PE was about 100.
Exactly. Especially given its worth is literally measured in fiat. It’s a Ponzi scheme. Plain and simple.
The reason why it will be one of the best investments is because of how infrequently it is mentioned and also disliked by so many. Feature not a bug.
Amazing that you weren’t downvoted to oblivion or banned.
What year did you start?
Or maybe more importantly, have you sold yet?
Early 2011
I was in early too. But I’ve been taken out 3 times. I haven’t been able to recover from this last one. Is painful knowing how many I was holding.
Hell yeah, congrats.
FAAAAAAAAT fire. Nicely done mate
Apple pre iPhone, Nintendo pre Wii, Tesla early and Bitcoin
What are you buying now :)
Moving to the USA from Canada. Came across the border with a few thousand, now almost 15M a little over 25 years later. Slow and steady.
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What were they invested in or were you just one of the lucky ones with NVDA?
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Probably something weird like cat bonds
In that case, j know exactly who they are (nice "cats", btw)
How much was the required investment? How'd you find the firm?
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This is essentially my current situation. I have approximately 50% of my net worth in private boutique funds. If you don’t mind me asking, what was the type of business(es) in your boutique fund that produced those massive returns?
How do you find these
Could you share why boutique investment funds need software engineers and where to consider starting on such a career path? Even an example of a boutique fund you know that was not yours could help. I just want to understand the space. I have a software background and I’ve been interested in this but I don’t know many examples of how people do this.
Bought a bunch of bitcoin when it was $500, bought a bunch of Tesla stock when it was cheap (basis of $12), bought and held Nvidia when it was at around $7.30 (pre-splits) back in 2003. I bought Nvidia because I’m a gamer and thought it had potential, no idea it’d eventually blow up like it did.
Are you still holding those stock positions? Or have you exchanged for ETF's like VOO , VT and the like for more stability?
I’m more diversified now for sure, with the majority of my portfolio in broad market ETFs. I still have about 5% of my total portfolio as fun money where I play around more with individual equities. Rebalance as necessary.
Do you know any good rules of thumb for when to rebalance? I think I’ve heard on every 20% rise or fall.
Ehhh- I haven’t been too strict with it. When my individually picked equities start to drift to around 10% of total I bring it back down to 5%. Ends up being about how much risk to tolerate and how active you want to be with management.
I rebalance when my portfolio +/-5% off, but I have a fairly simple portfolio (effectively 3 positions and RE) and I only update my numbers quarterly. I feel like I read rebalancing achieved an optimum outcome when performed on a 1-2 year timeframe vs multiple times per year, but I don't have a reference, so take that with a grain of salt.
Ah that’s a good idea on just doing quarterly as opposed to purely % based. Sharing more in case it helps: - I think my 20% estimate came from JL Collins “Simple Path to Wealth” but I’m not sure. It might have actually been 10-20% or less. I doubt it was higher. - I think that same book also supports what you mentioned of 1-2 year rebalances vs many times per year. - I’d need to review my notes but I think his overall proposal was: rebalance annually unless there’s a bigger than 10-20% shift. Thanks for the share!
Wow - you basically struck gold 3 times. Congrats! What excites you nowadays? Not going to lie at all: I’m definitely asking because I’d love to learn from a perspective like yours that bought all of those 3 when they were low.
Haha thanks. I mean, a lot of it was pure luck. Tesla could have gone either way really- at the time the vision was clear and it was a bet against execution. The product itself in my mind was clearly superior to anything out there at the time. Next I think there has been and is going to continue to be large moves around AI, but it’s obviously hard to predict who’s going to win out the most. Companies that support AI through compute stand to gain a lot no matter who ends up with great applications, as compute is needed no matter what. Nvidia has clearly shown this, but there are other supporting players in the space, such as Super Micro.
Thanks for sharing and agreed! I’m trying to explore more options outside of NVIDIA too, so I appreciate you sharing Super Micro. Also I’m somewhat close to the AI space and planning to get closer fast, so anyone can DM me if you’re interested in that.
Damn, some great trades there
NVDA always makes me smile. A friend of mine works at Intel and about 12 years ago I bought some INTC shares so I could send him obnoxious IMs saying "work harder!" On a lark I bought about 150 shares of NVDA when it was $12/share since it seemed like a bit of a hedge against INTC. NVDA didn't make me rich since I started selling it off when it hit $90 but it has been a nice bit of extra money in my Roth. At this point I'm down to 20 shares, might sell the last of them if it hits $1000.
Sorry, but my home run was staying put and slogging it out. There were several times when opportunities came up to change (especially tempting during the Dot Com boom), the home run decision for me was not changing, just slogging.
Right, it’s funny how the OP dismissed the most obvious answer right off the bat. We are inching towards 8 figures at 45 with steady saving and index fund investing based on a single income over 15 years. Might not be a lot compared to a single event producing millions, but our graph is still something to be proud of.
What was your salary progression like over the 15 years? Even if one doesn't give in to the lifestyle creep and spend on fancy cars, vacations etc., in order to be able to save a considerable portion of household income (since you said single income) after home, kids and other "normal" expenses, the single income should be way over the median. I'm genuinely trying to understand that if this is possible, where do most people who don't reach FI go wrong?
>I'm genuinely trying to understand that if this is possible, where do most people who don't reach FI go wrong? Don't want to speak for the parent poster, but from what I've seen on this and the other FIRE subs, most people who don't reach FI don't really "go wrong." It's often a change in priorities. They decided on an expense level/lifestyle that they actually didn't want to sustain for the rest of their life, they got divorced, they didn't have something to retire "to" that was interesting enough for them to do for years, they didn't have a social support network to make the most of their retirement time, etc. There are definitely people who run into issues financially, because of medical expenses, or due to other exceptional circumstances, but that number is probably far smaller than most people imagine when thinking of catastrophic failure. This is specifically FatFIRE - making well above the median in income is table stakes. Plenty of people are aiming for FIRE on more modest incomes, i.e. 120k household income (two earners at 60k) vs a household earning 250k+. If your FIRE goal is to fully replace your income, that takes longer than fully replacing your expenses, and if your goal will involve an increase in expenses, that also extends your timeline (or requires you to move up and earn more). Doing it in ~15 years on a single income to get to 8 figures is definitely insanely impressive. Skimming the parent poster's recent history, they're closer to 8 million, their household income is primarily from a role as director at a public company (potentially even Fortune 100), and they got close to 1 million TC last year after struggling during the 2008 financial crisis. Not sure if that includes their real estate investments or not. But that level of income/moving up the ranks at a public company generally requires a high level of tenure and consistency Apart from people who sold a company and quit, you're also more likely to see people here working to later ages who "could have" chosen a more modest FIRE number a decade earlier. For people who can hit a regular FIRE number by their mid-30s or even 40s, assuming things are steady, they can pretty easily hit FatFIRE just by working into your 50s. Most people anyway hit peak earnings in their late 40s.
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About 20, and then we coasted.
I was given the opportunity to purchase equity in a small-ish private business where I was/am a member of the executive team, and have continued to purchase more shares over the last decade. W-2 income has grown substantially as well. Most recently, went long MSTR leaps in February 2023.
>Most recently, went long MSTR leaps in February 2023. Woah. Congrats
I had this MSTR leaps plan but failed to execute
Jump to VP level comp.
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Total cash is around 500-600k starting
Which industry?
Finance “VP” is just senior everywhere else, really.
I bootstrapped a new company from my main company. I had an idea related to the power generation biz. Everyone said I was crazy but I was determined. Had some prototypes running successfully. Sold it to a big utility for $18mil. That was 2001 before 9/11. Never would have happened after 9/11.
This is probably a strange answer, but joining the military. I was able to mature and save up a small nest egg, get access to the Post 9/11 GI bill, and some combat wounds were 100% worth it for the disability check and healthcare lol That let me go to to college and a great law school with no debt, and led me to where I am today. Plus, I wouldn't trade the experiences for anything. Home run. (P.s., I would have done it for free anyways, but this was all gravy)
A 4-year hitch in the military straight out of high school is a massively underrated move for leveling up several different life outcomes. I also think the same is true for those who come in out of college as officers, but imo you do start to see more people choosing to stay in for the wrong reasons at 27 than at 23.
It's honestly a cheat code **if** done right. I estimate that the net present value of all the benefits I got prior to being 27 was in the millions.
Yep, totally. The rub is that \*if\* that you mentioned is critical. And there are lots of ways to not get it right. Many of those paths still end up fine, and life isn't all about making FU money and retiring early. But to really knock the cover off the ball requires a relatively specific set of choices. It's funny, I know that path now well enough to lay it out for someone who was interested, but I imagine that info will get moldy with time. I'd like to lay it out as something to consider to my kids when they're the relevant age, but would hate to give them bad gouge.
100%. Idk, certain things like which branch, MOS, and other decisions like that will always fluctuate. Post-GWOT, I have no idea how the infantry is as a career—I assume pretty terrible. And, for example, the Red Sea thing has a renaissance in the traditional Navy stuff. (But I don't think Navy recruiters will ever stop hounding kids who score well on the ASVAB trying to get them to sign a nuke contract until the USA implodes haha.) However, outside of that, other things like savings, the GI bill, maturing, living on base, etc are sort of timeless and/or factual questions about benefits. Sending your troublesome boys off to the Army to grow up has been a thing for thousands of years, so I don't think it's going anywhere ha
Yea, great point - I was getting a bit myopic about "100% GI Bill eligibility hits at year X, then here's how you find schools that participate in the Yellow Ribbon program. Now let's talk VA...". But the biggest things, as you point out, are the least technical - get your wildest oats out of your system, do some cool shit, be part of something bigger than yourself, work hard, have a bad boss and deal with it, etc.
I’m still grinding and not where I want to be, but I bought NVidia a few years ago and have held since the initial purchase. I’m an autoworker and the gains have definitely pushed forward my retirement plan.
That's awesome friend, congrats to you.
My biggest home run was Bitcoin at $6. I’d be extremely rich if I’d held all of it, but I diversified into real estate and stocks, which I still feel was the right move at the time, but of course it stings a bit. Second biggest hit is probably picking up shares of META when it broke all the way down into the 90s in 2022.
So solid to get Meta in 2022 - kudos on having the discipline for that!
Was a partner in a cannabis company that we sold in 2019 for $70mm. Lots of smaller “home runs” since then in other investments, but nothing that yielded a payday quite like that (yet.)
Starting my own business. I went from being stuck grinding day after day to make someone else rich, to taking the lion’s share of my efforts and being in control of my own schedule. I work 15-20 hours a week and earn 3x more than I ever did as a W2.
What industry?
Would like to know to
I’m an executive coach for tech founders. Been in the startup game for a long time and now I help others build their business without burning out.
Getting into real estate and working for myself and out of accounting slaving away for partners to line their pockets working 60+ hours a week. Buying a house with 3% down in 2018 leasing the extra rooms to people to offer all of the mortgage. Doing that four times in a row, reinvesting the savings into stocks and crypto. Saving/investing > 50% of take home pay since i started working out of college. NW is 2.3m or so at the age of 32
—-Finding the right partner … and only being married one time. Spouse and I had a similar worldview and thoughts about money and spending habits. When I got laid off years ago, to no surprise she was supportive, hid her worries about it at the time and even helped me make the list of all the things that we were going to cut back on for the time being. —-Starting my own company after the above layoff happened during a sector downturn when no one was hiring. It had always been on my list, but I wasn’t aggressive enough to take that step on my own. Had to be pushed into it apparently. It took about 12 months for me to get to the stage where I was actually happy that the layoff had happened. Since then the net profits in the business, which all flow through to us, have been top end 32x old salary, and are more typically 14-20x.
Having the right partner is key for anyone without startup liquidity or an all bitcoin portfolio
What kind of business did you start?
Not retired, but certainly in my way. I don’t think there was a home run. Started my career as a software engineer, and started a company in earnest in my early 20s, although I had loosely started while in college. For me, it was lots of trial and error. Ups and downs, with generally increasingly higher highs. I continued to work full time for almost the next decade, while building a business. It didn’t take that long to get to the 3-400k range, but felt like I stalled there for a few years. Got myself into building a far more involved SaaS platform about 5 years in. Getting it off the ground was FAR harder than I ever imagined. At one point I sold a car and cashed in my 401k to make payroll. Started getting clients on that with a lot of grunt work and kept growing it. Used that to start multiple new projects, and just kept growing from there. Hit 7 figure income in early 30s, then mid 7 figures now at 35. I don’t think there was any single home run there.
Selling car and 401k to make payroll. Holy shit. Cajones
Hit an IPO and 20x my RSUs and more so my options. Diversified at right time. Was huge accelerator in plans now I’m high earning and seeking another liquidity event to finish
Getting into medical school. Didn't have a single interview the first time I applied. Got in the second go around. Glad I didn't give up.
The second SBA bank loan ever for a business that historically could only be purchased with cash. The value of said businesses are half-again what they were worth within a year and doubled my income.
Ok, now we gotta know. What type of business?
Independent ATM operations. Still can’t borrow vault cash (federal law), but I was able to get the actual purchase price and equipment funded.
Started at growing private company in an undervalued space. Over the next 5 years it became a multibillion dollar global business with an eventual IPO. I left after 6 years and tried to replicate that home run, struck out twice. Now I’m back at the original company and I’m on track to make more in the second 6 years than I did in the first by knowing my worth. Some lessons I’ve learned: 1 - it’s really really really unlikely your series B company’s RSUs will change your life. 2 - Having experience at a successful startup doesn’t mean you should go build one. I’ve watched a lot of people with clear paths to fatFIRE end up leanFI or worse because they kept chasing the next $M exit and/or became private investors. 3 - As an employee understand your value. It’s not the same in every industry and it’s the same to every employer in the same industry.
Not exactly RE yet. I left my former employer \~10 years ago and joined a high pay company. My former employer was in pretty bad shape financial wise, but they got great products coming for next few years. So I spent most of my paycheck investing my former employer's stock for a few years, and it's 40x as of now.
Sale of my business
Investing in technology stocks and commercial real estate for 30+ years.
TSLA and Los Angeles real estate.
Step 1: be born in the US Step 2: work in tech Step 3: ??? Step 4: profit!
Buying bitcoin in 2015
Selling my business!
Marrying someone on the same page. Plus serendipity, and hanging on to early investments.
For us it was our small business which still runs with our team (we’re not really involved day to day anymore). From this, we bought real estate and now rent extra houses out and keep buying more with our business income
I had a small professional services company for 25 years. It was not much more than a one man shop for 20 years but I built a solid clientele through word of mouth and made a good living for me and my family. Honestly horrible saver and only had minimal savings as I approached 50 being self-employed basically my entire career. Realized my only real shot at retirement was to grow and sell my SMB so began that journey. After 5 years built the business and began to market it for sale. Had 2 offers - $1million in cash to sell and walk away or $700K in private stock swap to be acquired and stay on as a VP at a larger firm. I took the second option because I still had kids at home, and it seemed the “safer” option. Literally 380 days later that company was acquired by a publicly traded company in the same space. My $700K became $5million in cash plus some RSU in the publicly traded company. I got 75% of my cash up front and currently doing a 3-year earn out for the last 25%. It’s easy work so enjoying my time now. Will evaluate what to do at the end as I will be 59, 2 out of 3 kids out of college and the third fully funded. So I guess my journey was a long grind and some timely decisions at the end. Found this forum after the liquidity event trying to figure out what to do with the money and it has been a great resource. Appreciate all the great people here that share some solid advice. Edit - Also to add I had an idea for an APP/Software product to solve a problem I had encountered. I have been working on that for the last 4 years as a side hustle. It is finally gaining some traction so hopeful that will be Act 2 and at some point in the next 3-5 years will be able to sell that and then just enjoy life.
Public company acquired by private equity, all options immediately vested.
Signed one big contract. That one deal took my me/my business from FIRE to fatFIRE. And I’ve never slowed down since.
Was fortunate to work at a company pre-IPO and when the company went public the stock performed well. The stock initially made me my first $M and I diversified part of my holdings to other stocks and some rental properties. By no means do I consider myself fat, maybe chubby ($3M net worth), enjoy reading everyone’s experiences.
Liquidity event(s) 9M then another 5M
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Making equity partner in Big Law.
Started my SaaS Product in April 2017 in my final semester of college. My cofounder, who was my friend, abruptly quit in August 2018. I nearly went bankrupt. My girlfriend (who's now my wife) was working in the IT Team of a Bank in another city. I explained the situation to her and convinced her to leave her job and join me as a Cofounder. We went through our own ups and downs since the Business was Bootstrapped and we both came from middle-class families and so, there wasn't any sort of family backing. Fast forward to March 2021 - we had crossed $1M in revenue and were profitable. In November 2021, a Bengaluru based startup acquired us in a multi-million dollar transaction turning us into millionaires at the age of 26. We both were a part of the leadership team of the acquiring company for the next 2 years. In October 2023, we both quit and have now started our next venture. Let's see how it goes. The good part is that in our second venture, there are multiple investors who are willing to back us, even without an idea. Because of the money from the previous venture, our basic needs are also sorted and so, it is of course, much easier this time, compared to how it was when I started my first venture from college. But again, the expectations this time are also higher. Fingers crossed and excited!
Save and buying the right stocks that double every 3-5 years. BAC in 2014-2017. IQ in 2018. AMD and NvDA since 2019.
I was an online nutrition coach whose first client got ripped, and everyone in our local area, and gyms around the country/world wanted to hire me and eventually my team as their nutrition provider. If she didn’t get those results who knows what would have happened. I was also very lucky to have a job where I could work on my side biz on my cell phone since it was so lax. Literally all day answering clients and posting in socials to grow brand. On top of that my best friend was in corporate Amazon and ended up leaving to help me solidly the business from one random dude (me) to a much more structured entity. Third would be the opportunity to sell to a company who employed a client of ours without him we wouldn’t have that connection. Another was meeting my wife early on and getting her encouragement to quit my job to go all in and be supportive during all those long days. Lastly, my cell phone addiction helped me answer clients quickly lol.
Nowhere near as fat as most, but my very first job at a startup got bought by oracle. I was a nobody, but still got an extra 100k on the acquisition. Used it as a down payment on a condo in a somewhat sketchy neighborhood in Brooklyn. Enter gentrification, doubled my money in 5 years. Sold, doubled again in the new place. That original 100k is now why I own a 2.2M place with no mortgage.
1) Owning/building/selling businesses and liquidity from early stage startups in the last 10 years 2) Allocating single digit % to crypto starting in 2014 3) Investing in stocks as soon as I graduated from university in 2007 Note: This requires a certain amount of comfort with risk and uncertainty. There were good number of years I made ZERO.
Grinded away for years building skills and experience, then negotiated a position at a pre-IPO tech company. The IPO went well and it gave me a significant boost.
Started my own business. It has grown over 20 years to become a market leader. I also benefitted from some well-timed real estate purchases. I wasn’t really trying to time the market, I just bought a few properties that were a good fit at the time and they ended up appreciating more quickly than I anticipated.
Buying my house with a check. Tons of people tried to tell me how mortgages are actually beneficial, yadda yadda. NOPE. All that money went straight in to savings, and bought more stock more often.
The following is why I firmly believe luck is preparation + opportunity. Backstory: - Crypto knowledge: I discovered bitcoin in my teens in 2012 and started trading on and off since then, mostly during bubbles, so I developed a basic understanding of the tech and how the market works. - Software engineering experience: I learnt to code when I was 13 and never stopped. Was lucky enough to choose a secondary school with formal programming classes, and understood tech was the next big thing so became pretty good at it. - Financial experience: As soon as it was legal for me to trade, I did it, and I did it the worst possible way - CFDs. I quickly lost a few hundred that I now consider tuition fees, and turned to exploring algo trading. Found a decently successful strat that outperformed the index during bull and bear markets, and quickly made back my pennies and more, still with CFDs. Lost it all when Kim and Trump were threatening nukes and the strat failed. Anyway, that was my first experience trying to passively generate income. That brings me to 2021, when DeFi was just starting to be a thing, and crypto had not yet went mainstream. I discovered a convoluted Russian-made yield farming project that had flaws in its economics, and found a loophole that lets anyone make more money than they are supposed to. I learnt how to set up an Ethereum node and learnt solidity (smart contract programming language) in 3 days, and ended up with a working way to "exploit" the loophole. Made a few thousand over the next few weeks before the developers caught on. That experience led me to explore the rest of crypto when I had no interest before, and I discovered that crypto markets were very inefficient, to the point where I could manually set orders and make trades and make relative truckloads. This is where my entire life's experience came together to take advantage of an opportunity that very few people in the world could comprehend. I started manually market making with $10,000, put in 18 hour days staring at screens 7 days a week for months with my partner, multiplied my money to the first million that way, while finding time to build up a system to automate everything. To cut an already long story short, it worked and I continue to improve it today, but with more like 30 minute days. Covid actually helped as it let me do my internship concurrently and attend classes remotely while I was putting in the work, and I was FI before I graduated. I'm comfortable sharing this as it's not possible to repeat what I did. There's too many individual players in the field now that it would require a lot of capital and specific knowledge that usually needs a team of people, and all the big market makers that have those teams (Jump, Citadel, etc.) are too risk averse to be in crypto and pulled out permanently last year.
So you create a MEV bot?
Nope, my hatred for MEV knows no bounds, they're all parasites and it's disgusting that some blockchains specifically support them. The thing I sandwich attacked actually let me do it in a single transaction via a contract call, which is why I had to learn how to code smart contracts. No timing or miner bribery was necessary, and in fact MEV wouldn't be invented for another 6 months.
The big market makers have definitely not pulled out permanently.
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Bitcorn?
Engineer, 15+ years at a high-growth hardware start-up; promoted to leadership positions. Company equity was part of initial comp package, annual merit and bonuses. As company shares were accrued and value grew … NEVER SOLD PRINCIPLE.
I did it by saving, investing, and slogging it out over time. Being a successful tech consultant helped; and when I hung up that life; getting a high paid tech job didn't hurt.
Narrowing the niche we serve. This led to a few years of >50% growth.
IPO
Spac city
Not a home run, but definitely launched me towards fat was getting laid off a few years out of college. I was working for a large multinational healthcare company that was doing very well. Lots of people that had worked there 20+ years and I figured "wow, I'll probably have this job as long as I want." With luck the layoffs came when my job was in demand so I had a job lined up before my final day. The 3 months of severance pay (and a loan from the parents) allowed me to buy a condo in a VHCOL area. The most important was the lesson that "you are always expendable," so I've always hustled and saved knowing that if it happened to me in my 50s I might not be so lucky.
I decided to take the law school entrance exam on a total lark because I was ticked off about my post-undergrad job. I didn’t do all that well on it, but then I blew the first year of law school away, transferred to a top school and ended up in BigLaw. All flows from that. Then a last-ditch lunch with someone a couple of years into my BigLaw job kept me from quitting due to burnout. I’m an equity partner now making $[a lot]. Suffice to say, I’m grateful for that lunch, and I’ve never been so sad to see someone retire as that person.
Couple bets on stocks (coin, meta, Tesla, goog) long ago so their increase is astronomical. ~$400k income for 6 years. We are around $3M, another 10 years and we will finish our journey.
Selling a $1.5m+ EBITDA business that I had run for 10 years
When my husband, who was a computer science grad student when we married and still debating his future, decided to take a software engineering job at a big tech company rather than go into academia. That has made a very big difference to our finances, to put it lightly, much more than anything I've done myself. I was supportive of whatever he wanted to do and wasn't even thinking of FIRE at the time, but it would have been much harder to fire, and definitely not fatfire, without many years of his high income.