from Hacker News

Ask HN: What's the easiest way to make a living with $600k in cash?

by dizzydiz on 12/16/21, 11:16 PM with 83 comments

• by rexreed on 12/17/21, 12:46 AM

  Step 1: Don't take advice from people on HackerNews

  Step 2: Why are you still listening to me?

  But seriously, there's a million ways to lose money and not as many ways to make it. Find the thing that gives you joy and that you're good at and that the world is willing to pay something for and if you can find that magic connection, you'll be doing more than making a living, you'll be truly living.

• by franciscop on 12/17/21, 12:16 AM

  The first thing to do IMHO is learning at least the basics on investing. You can afford to lose a few months in inflation to avoid following some rando's advice that doesn't fit you at all. The following is not even my advice, just what I think I'd do in that situation.

  There's many communities around these topics, I particularly like Reddit's /r/financialindependence. If I had $600k in cash right now, I'd treat it as a windfall and start reading around here:

  https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/windfall

  There's a logic to maximizing your money/safety, which is very generic advice to a very generic question, and it goes something like:

  1. Make sure to keep an emergency deposit, in cash, that would cover all your expenses for 3-6 months. Adjust for fun factor and culture.

  2. Pay off high interest debt.

  3. Pay off mid-interest debt.

  4. Learn about investing. Investing can be from getting a degree/masters in a higher paying field if you are young and underpaid, to day trading with all its intricacies. Of course the general blanket response is ETFs, Bonds, etc.

  Learn about your risk tolerance. Higher risk normally implies higher profits. E.g. if you have most of your disposable income tied into good debt, you'll probably have quite a lot of profit. But get sick for a month with lower pay, lose your job, etc. and you might lose it all.

• by randomhodler84 on 12/17/21, 12:58 AM

  Not financial advice, 600k isn’t enough unless you live in a low cost of living region.

  Lazy: Send it to Gemini, buy 600k worth of GUSD, loan it on their Lend program and collect 8%pa compounded monthly. Collect 48k GUSD a year. Convert that back to bank dollars every month. Live your life.

  Risky: Send it to Gemini, buy 600k DAI. Send it to ethereum chain. Buy $200 of ether that you will spend on gas. Swap half the DAI for USDC using a DEX. Deposit 300k/300k in a liquidity pool DAI/USDC and collect 18-20%pa in trade fees. Withdraw collateral every month by redeeming the liquidity provider tokens. If you wish to save gas fees, use something like polygon bridge to move it to the Polygon chain. Do LP deposits there instead.

  Crazy: buy 12 Bitcoin on Gemini. Store it on a hardware wallet. Sell A fraction every few months to live. Never sell it all in one shot.

• by Jtsummers on 12/17/21, 1:09 AM

  Semi-serious: If you're in the US and a US citizen, get a gov't job. They need programmers, especially mid-to-senior career folks. Put into the 401k-alike (TSP) and max it out. At age 62 you'd be worth several million dollars and would be getting a pension (before other retirement income) of around 30-40k/year in today's dollars. Many gov't jobs are in lower cost of living areas letting the money go even further. You can also (depending of course on how policies change over the next 30 years) carry your health insurance into retirement, with the government paying their share just like when you were employed and you paying the rest out of your pension (this will be a significant portion of your retirement spending past age 50 or 60 anyways).

• by whateveracct on 12/16/21, 11:48 PM

  With $600k, you could just not touch it and then be free to do whatever job you want to just cover living expenses with no thought of retirement I'm pretty sure. "Coast FIRE" achieved.

  EDIT: By "not touch it" I meant invest it in something safe and easy and then you'll have full retirement money in 30y

• by fsckboy on 12/17/21, 1:07 AM

  smh, nobody here seems to have read what you wrote

  I have 30 more years until retirement... have software dev skills

  do you get that everybody? he wants and plans to work, not retire.

  have trading/investing skills

  he is not asking for investment advice. So, subtracting all the stuff he didn't ask from what everybody wrote, anybody have any useful suggestions for him?

• by WheelsAtLarge on 12/17/21, 5:09 AM

  600k seems like a lot of cash but it's not enough to quit working. Tough it out a bit more, save more money and switch to a career you like when you have enough money saved up to make up the difference in income between the two.

• by gentleman11 on 12/17/21, 1:20 AM

  If you put it in an index mutual fund and ignore it for 10 years, you can possibly retire on it. Leave it in for 20 years and you can retire comfortably. In the meantime, you really only need to worry about not spending it. Even if there is a big recession, over the 20+ year time frame you’ll still be fine

  Isn’t it great? If you grow up extremely poor, you have to work your whole life, especially since you can’t afford school at first. But if you just have money, you just need to not spend it and you’ll be a multi millionaire. Capitalism at work

• by walrus01 on 12/17/21, 12:52 AM

  I second the many comments here that say don't take financial advice on HN, you need a professional.

  The guy who said put it into REITs earning 9% a year is somewhat close to what I've done.

  By no means are past results an indicator of future success, but in 2017 I purchased a number of technology/internet/telecom industry heavy ETFs that have more than doubled in value. The mix of the different ETFs and the stocks they contain is sufficiently diverse for my risk tolerance.

• by saturn5k on 12/17/21, 1:01 AM

  Buy a few apartments in capital cities in Europe. Live off from rent.

• by axegon_ on 12/17/21, 1:07 AM

  A lot of variables at play here. Personally, given that I live in an inexpensive country, I'll pay of my mortgage and take a year of in pursuit of some personal projects which have plenty of potential but I don't have the time I truly need to focus on either of them. A year and 1-200 k would be sufficient to live off and spare over half of that on those projects. If it goes sideways, keep the rest of the money as a retirement fund and go back to a developer job.

• by excitednumber on 12/17/21, 12:19 AM

  Hi - go talk to a financial advisor

• by codecutter on 12/17/21, 1:45 AM

  You asked for easiest way, so I would suggest moving to a country with low cost of living. You can always use your software development skills for remote work.

• by my50cents on 12/17/21, 1:20 AM

  Buy a portfolio of dividend-paying stocks with highly secure underlying businesses such as public utilities.

  Hold on to a stock as long as the underlying business is still secure.

  Trade out of a stock only if there is a more secure one with more dividends to trade into.

  If market prices allow the dividends from your $600K portfolio to exceed your living expenses, then no more work for money.

• by paxys on 12/17/21, 1:04 AM

  Get a job where you don’t have to face clients then?

  I doubt it is realistic to survive 30-60 years on just $600K savings.

• by barelysapient on 12/16/21, 11:48 PM

  Can you live on 55k a year? If so, American REITs yield 9% a year. For for example: $NRZ, $OHI, $DX.

• by thrill on 12/17/21, 1:19 AM

  I'd buy 6000 Avax with anticipation of steady price appreciation and delegate them for about 10% annually. With your software skills you could also without undue effort run a validator instead and gain a trivial amount more but also capture the occasional airdrop.

• by gota on 12/17/21, 12:48 AM

  You can buy assets that pay dividends and move to a much, much lower cost-of-living place.

  I'm talking some city in a country where the currency exchange rate values your dollars immensely wrt. groceries, etc.

  You can even buy property very,very "cheap" so as to never pay rent.

• by anm89 on 12/17/21, 12:36 AM

  Im in almost the exact same boat as you, both monetarily and in terms of goals.

  My email is in my profile. If you are interested, message me if you want to talk and see if there is anything we could collaborate on.

  My biggest interest lies in building a lifestyle business around coliving.

• by kwere on 12/17/21, 12:19 AM

  see what you want to do: be an employee, be selfemployed as freelance, trader or "business owner" on whatever skills you have / can acquire. You have to invest your time in what you see profitable / risk tolerable and put the majority of your capital in investiments and let compounding work for you. Capital preservation and growth is a must for anybody in the "capital race", a "day job/activity" is what help you achieve those 2 in the long term as your real goal

• by motohagiography on 12/17/21, 12:33 AM

  First quesiton is: is it savings or windfall? This determines your risk profile. Savings, you can make over again because you've already made $600k once the hardest way possible. Windfall, thank lucky stars and secure that shit.

  I'd wonder why leveraging it to buy or build a duplex or triplex in a city on the obvious list? The key thing is to tie it up so that it doesn't make you lazy. My wealthy friends are getting the F out of cash because of its rapidly diminishing purchasing power. There's no way out of what's going on at a macro level without inflation and high interest rates, so anything that returns better than -8% yoy is going to be better.

  Having that net worth also means you can be super aggressive with hunting for gigs because you can afford to say 'no' to anything less than $200k+ if you are in US/CAN market. Even though it's not a lot of money from a wealth perspective, (you're on the second bottom rung of a very tall ladder) from a job hunting perspective, you have FU money so long as you don't spend it. You can take a passion project for a non-profit and moonlight with another contract part time and if either of them don't like it you can walk.

  You also have accredited investor status, so you can take flyers of as little as 20-30k participating in seed rounds, which pops you out of being just another dev and now you're an investor with depth on the tech, which is a whole new game. If you're contracting and your triplex mortgage is covered by your tenants, you can afford do a couple of these seed rounds a year.

  The only way anyone makes real money is with leverage, and the duplex is low risk secured leverage. At the other end of the spectrum, you could just put it into a robinhood account and buy stonks and hang out on WSB, but post-pandemic govts with their own currencies don't need good markets or economies to stay in power anymore, and inflationary policies are about impoverishing people, so they benefit from destroying the markets. This is handwavy, but I take insight over advice any day.

  If you understand the difference between the real and the represented, you can live like an actual king for very little money. Suffice it to say that nothing makes you poorer than trying to be middle class, as by definition, poverty is when you don't value what you have. Frugality is bargaining with a universe that doesn't care, and the thing about the greatest pleasures is they are always worth it by a significant multiple. This is to say, don't spend a penny on yourself until you know the person you are spending it on will appreciate it, and you have read the stoics, imo.

• by stevenhuang on 12/17/21, 1:49 AM

  600k into QYLD is around ~5.5k in monthly dividends. Can't get easier than that.

• by sys_64738 on 12/17/21, 1:03 AM

  QYLD.

• by moneywoes on 12/17/21, 1:12 AM

  Buy LEAPs on Reddit when it IPOs edit this is not serious advice

• by pipeline_peak on 12/17/21, 12:38 AM

  Some form of passive income. Why not just become a landlord?

• by sesuximo on 12/17/21, 1:03 AM

  Hire 6 ppl worth 100k per year but only pay them 50k per year.

• by danlugo92 on 12/16/21, 11:53 PM

  Half in cash half in investments

  Of the 2nd half: half in regular investments the other half in crypto

  of the regular investments half, put it all on an index fund.

  Of the crypto half, put half of it in bitcoin and half of it in some crypto index etf

  When the next crash happens take half of cash which is now more valuable and invest as above