Yes I guess that works as long as a sudden bout of cancer or some other chronic illness doesn't turn your world around. Suddenly all the "plan to retire in X years" come into question. Will I be still living in X years? Will I be able to continue working and investing till then? Or will I have burn through all my savings? True financial independence doesn't come till you can weather such a storm and most people are not is such a position.

>Yes I guess that works as long as a sudden bout of cancer or some other chronic illness doesn't turn your world around.

What does this have to do with it? Insurance would cover it just the same as if you hadn't quit your job.

I also took a hiatus from working and meeting expenses has never even been a concern for me, despite dealing with some quite serious medical issues. During my hiatus, I am constantly dumbfounded by people's lack of understanding of how I'm not totally broke without a job. If you have even the most basic budgeting skills and have decent enough job that you aren't living paycheck-to-paycheck, saving up enough money to live off of for 6-12 months is pretty easy. I only had a moderate salary, live in a medium-to-high CoL area, and wasn't particularly thrifty (I still engaged in normal spending like taking international trips places, buying new things, had a decent apartment, etc), and over the course of a 3 years I easily was able to save up enough to be jobless for multiple years living off of those savings alone. And that includes maintaining my savings for retirement, too.

If you expect to be dead at 40, you might not think your life was best spent working your tail off until 39 to "retire early".

What does that have to do with anything? I'm 27 and (f)unemployed.

Oh, I think I misread it. In this case I think the comment is actually saying that a plan to retire at 40 might be derailed by spending a couple years out of work in hospital at 28, thus losing your income at least temporarily and possibly spending your savings. A lot of this can be mitigated by having the right insurance, but once you aren't working it can be harder to afford insurance that will cover really good care.

What I was thinking of was that many people don't want to work very hard now to gain rewards later when there is a risk they won't live until later to enjoy it. So they do things like take a few years off at 27 and then go back to work until, say, 38, instead of working straight through until 34 and retiring permanently then.

Those things are obviously unfortunate, but relatively rare. It is also rare to win the lottery, or actually make a profit on startup stock options. I am not talking about these cases.

The average person in this industry makes good money, and should have the ability to save and invest some of their income.

I would urge us all to not associate the odds of becoming genetically broken with the odds of winning the lottery. Being a mammal more or less assures that if we live long enough (4x to 5x reproductive age) we will accumulate enough damage to have adverse events. This is multiple orders of magnitude more like than a life altering lottery win in the same time span.

There aren't many good investment options available these days.

Real estate is too expensive, interest rates on cash are too low and VCs have a monopoly on the startup space and the media.

The most rational option seems to be to invest in stocks... To fuel corporations which inflate real estate prices by forcing their employees to relocate to major urban centers. The same corporations which are responsible for the low interest rate environment (through their lobbying and corruption of government agencies). The same corporations which are responsible for monopolizing the startup space by only funding and acquiring incubator and VC-backed startups.

So yeah there aren't many ethical options. That's why I invest in cryptocurrency. I'd rather risk losing all the money than fund my own (and everyone else's) enslavement.

I can't decide whether this is noble or simply pragmatic. Kudos, either way.

I wonder if there will be a trend towards bootstrapping?

> Those things are obviously unfortunate, but relatively rare

Not rare at all, 1 in 5 Americans is being pursued by collection agencies for being unable to pay medical bills.

That's good news. Since they're not paying their bills, they actually have more money to invest instead. ;)

You know what they say about lies and statistics... In all seriousness, even if this dubious statistic is true, most of those are not due to terminal or debilitating illnesses. "Unable to pay medical bills" can be for a variety of reasons, ranging from the obvious (not having the money), to confusion, to billing errors or insurance problems.

In the US, it needn't be terminal nor debilitating to bankrupt you.

Bankruptcy is not the end of the world. It's an inconvenience for a few years.

It's certainly the end of the "hey I have so much money I don't even need to work" feeling of financial independence, though.

wow, do you have a citation for that ?

Its not as rare as you think. Maybe 10% of cancer by your 40s. Much more likely than winning a lottery or making a ton in stock options.

There are all sorts of small chance disasters that can happen. You can be killed tomorrow in an auto accident. Don't live your life worrying about things unlikely to happen.

And no, I don't mean ignore the common-sense stuff like having life insurance if you have a family, etc.

lol easy to say for those with cash

Not everyone earns Valley salaries. Especially not those outside the US in third-world countries.

And some, like myself had their life savings wiped out when life got cute.

Anyway, glad OP has the opportunity to do what he's doing. Didn't mean to sidetrack the conversation. Just always find it amazing how we all live in vastly different worlds.