How much money is enough?

[LordLatch]

What is your magic number where you say, "I have enough."

Answer if you can as it is but if you need a scenario to go on, answer the question as it pertains how long you would do a job you hate that paid a lot.

I know @Light Leak's job doesn't pay a lot but it's inspired by her situation. At what dollar amount do you stop tolerating all the crap? When do you have 'FU!' money?

[NedLudd]

I've never really though in those terms, since it's never going to happen. But theoretically I guess as much as it takes to live the rest of my life without *needing* to work. I'd be happy with an apartment in a decent city, good food, and enough money to go out and have classes. So I guess however much money that costs.

[stuck]

The problem with finding a max on suffering/money is that the relationship between the variables isn't linear over time.

[ACow]

Roughly:

House-cost + (annual-living-expense * years-of-life).

So assuming I live 40 years more and live in the country I'm in now: 600,000 + (30,000 * 40) = 1,800,000 AUD.

If i live 50 years thats about $2.1 mil.

Of course, in practice annual living expenses vary depending on what your age is. Housing is expensive here. That's a very back of the envelope calculation.

There's a difference between FU money and "enough money" though. I can't live the rest of my life without working right now. But the wife and I have saved up enough money for house deposits, but it isn't in a house at the moment, so if things get bad I can theoretically walk away and not be in any immediate danger.

That $2.1 mil also assumes i literally won't do anything that generates money above inflation for the next 50 years, which is unlikely.

More realistically, if i owned accomodation, and had a little nest egg of 30k-60k, i'd probably feel perfectly happy giving everyone the finger when they mistreated me, because I would be perfectly comfortable knowing I could at least find some $30k job in the next year or two from then on out. I wouldn't be free, per se, but my quality of life would receive a strong lock-in effect...

[Madrigal]

What is your magic number where you say, "I have enough."

We have a 40% inflation rate. There's no such thing as a number, lol.

Whatever pays my bills at any given time. If I really need more for something else, I'll improvise. The reason I don't have more money is because I don't devote my life to making it.

[starla]

If I had to guess, I'd say I hated my job about as much as LL hates hers. I had about five years of living expenses when I quit my job, maybe eight if I had tapped retirement accounts. That increased significantly when I sold my house, both because I didn't have a mortgage payment and because I had equity in the house (note that this is different from profit -- I about broke even but I had done significant upgrades and had paid down my mortgage, plus put a decent down payment when I bought the place). I think the number would depend a lot on how easy it would be to sell my house (or break my lease and find cheaper accommodations if I were renting). You can stretch your money by cutting back on discretionary spending, moving someplace with a lower cost of living, and/or taking a temp or menial job. My five year calculation was based on not changing anything -- spending money like when I had a job, basically. I think doing it on less money than three years of living expenses would have resulted in more stress from not having income than I would have had staying in my shitty job. It was still a little nerve wracking to have no income and no idea when you'd get some again, especially when rhinosaur was also out of work with no prospects. I often had to have the logical part of my brain talk down the lizard part.

If we're talking about never working again, around $3.5M. I'm not even close right now, but I know what we need to do to get there.

[Noir]

I think you'd have to wait for your investments to reach some kind of "tipping point," whereafter you could work or not work as it suited you. I don't have an exact figure though. Probably 1-2 mill.

[Spartan26]

I remember when a sports hero of my youth got a contract for $800K a year and it was a jaw dropping deal. A little secret goal of mine has been to eclipse that. In a way I don't know if I'd be able to make enough. It wouldn't be for me. Like, as long as I'm paying my bills, putting a little away, able to go out to eat or concerts or sporting events without worry or concern, I'm good. I don't know if I'd ever be too comfortable not doing something positive with my money. I thought it was really cool when Dikembe Mutombo said part of the reason he signed such a huge deal w/the Hawks and left the team he loved was because it would allow him to build hospitals in his native Congo because he saw a lot of needless death due to lack of adequate care. I don't have anything as inspired but if I could make sure more of the world's pop had access to clean water, even through better local wells, I'd be all for it. I think it's like $2500-$5K to put in one well. If I could put in one well a month for the next 40 years, I'd feel comfortable indeed. So tack on $2.4M, let's just double that. $4.4M.

Actually, I'd like to have enough money to buy a sports franchise. I realize for me to make such an outlandish purchase, (yeah, I know it could make a planet sized pile of money), I would've had to have invest at least that much in community service and well being. So, lemme revise my number to $2.2B. Not even drug lords have that kind of capital. Excuse me while I run to the kitchen and come up with a cure for osteoporosis.

[Perdix]

$2-$10 mil.

[Resonance]

No amount is 'enough'. In a perfect world, I just want to live comfortably while doing whatever I feel like. But the world is far from perfect, and the ways to impose your own will on it all take absurd amounts of $$$.

Well, maybe not. Maybe with enough free time I could just mingle with the movers and the shakers and push for them to take the plunge on good ideas. I can be pretty convincing, I'm told. In the context it probably meant something more like 'pushy'. Well, yeah. There's always some subset of people who resist change and will do their utmost to be unhappy about the smallest inconveniences regardless of how much more successful the new system is.

If I give up on idealism and just subsist on my usual hobbies for the rest of my life, I'm not high-maintenance. I spend at most a few hundred dollars a year on clothes - designer labels mean nothing to me. A few hundred a month on food - I like to eat out, although I'm getting better at motivating myself to cook for people, and do grocery shopping. And I don't mind living in 'affordable' housing, although I really wish we had a dishwashing machine. I live in Canada, so health care is mostly free, but dental, optical, and pharmaceutical still need insurance - so that'll be another $50ish/month from Blue Cross I believe, if my partner isn't working and getting family benefits.

So, living by myself, that would add up to probably $15k/year. Maybe $21k if I want a nice buffer for travel, health, etc. At a conservative $30/hr estimate after taxes (tech wages), that's 700 hours of work per year, or about 4 months.

Let's talk about investing. CIBC has a savings account that gives 1.05%. That's pretty high for a savings account, and apparently American banks don't have rates that high. Sorry, folks. But then again, at 1.05%, for my $21k/year living expenses, that would require a nest egg of $2million. That'll take 50 years at $30/hr. 30 years at $50/hr. Not good enough.

Let's look at dividend stocks instead. There are a lot of stocks that give over 10% yields, though I'm not sure how reliable they are. If 10% is reliable, then I would only need $210k to invest. That's less than the cost of a house here and I could achieve it in 3-5 years. Achieve a little more and I could actually grow my wealth while living how I want. Even if I can only rely on a figure like 5%, I could still accumulate $400k in 10 years. Perfect.

And that's not taking into account pension, RRSPs, etc.

Come onnnn brain. You can hold up for 10 years. Promise...