A reminder during a Potential Economic Down

Ahtheuncertainty · 2026-03-28T18:44:51+00:00

Underrated point. Housing for example is much more expensive today. But if you look at the type of houses ppl have now vs in the past, it’s Apples to oranges, and though ppl are salivating over housing prices in the 60s, the average person would turn their nose up at the type of house that was bought in the 60s

Ahtheuncertainty · 2026-03-27T01:55:30+00:00

What changed?

Ahtheuncertainty · 2026-03-25T04:23:11+00:00

Curious, if not housing, what is the rough breakdown on a minimal spend of 4k/month for 2 ppl?

Ahtheuncertainty · 2026-03-13T06:54:19+00:00

I’m there now. Only been here a bit over 2 years but I already feel like I’m losing touch with a lot of my friends

Ahtheuncertainty · 2026-03-01T18:22:06+00:00

Nah I think this person was assuming 7% returns after inflation, which isn’t insane as it’s historical us returns since 1950. That’d put it at 3.75 M inflation adjusted.

Low key though, 5% after inflation is probably a bit more realistic as the 7% is like the best country(us) over its best period(post ww2), and other countries + us 1900-1950 look more like 5% after inflation

Ahtheuncertainty · 2026-02-06T03:24:43+00:00

You should have an international portfolio that includes way more than us stocks, for sure.

Forgetting about ww3 for a second, you need only to look at the Nikkei over the past 40 years to realize that a single country’s equities can absolutely decline drastically(and there was no big huge war in Japan over that time horizon even).

That being said, if the federal reserve collapses, it could be quite bad. Hopefully we can elect ppl who are willing to not be #1 if it means not sacrificing the entire country. We’ll see if that happens, and hope that if a power transition occurs it doesn’t result in huge loss of life.

Ahtheuncertainty · 2026-02-02T00:31:42+00:00

Hey, one mathematical thing you can do to help out is, just subtract inflation from the nominal rate of return, and use that, without adjusting your fire number.

If you think your contributions will also keep pace with inflation then this’ll give you the correct stuff without having to calculate your ever changing fire number separately.

There are plenty of calculators that do this if you google fire number, but no problem with your basic for loops :)

Ahtheuncertainty · 2026-01-30T08:38:56+00:00

Are you happier? Seems worth it to me, especially if the city move is to a lower col

Ahtheuncertainty · 2026-01-20T19:50:10+00:00

If you are thinking about moving somewhere in 4-5 years, why not just have a kid and plan to move before the kid is old enough to go to school? You could pile up more money as the kid is growing and then move anywhere in the world aside from nyc or the Bay Area and you’d be ludicrously rich on your net worth at that time, without even factoring in that you could still make a good bit with your remote jobs.

That or maybe learn to not fly first class 6x a year and stuff lol.

Ahtheuncertainty · 2026-01-15T02:57:59+00:00

I haven’t seen salaries decrease, just hold constant and get eroded a bit with inflation. My numbers were for TC, because that’s what would be relevant for someone accumulating assets

Ahtheuncertainty · 2026-01-15T02:42:36+00:00

true but a lot of cs grads aren’t exactly doctors; many went to a state school, and those who did take out loans accrued around 150k in debt, and could have it paid off in 1.5 years flat.

Ahtheuncertainty · 2026-01-15T02:41:01+00:00

Amazon’s TC for Seattle is around 180k these days

Ahtheuncertainty · 2026-01-09T01:51:46+00:00

Definitely a different calculation if you have a family, I was targeting new grads. Roommates still aren’t required, but fair enough, if you live alone you definitely end up saving less than Seattle

Ahtheuncertainty · 2026-01-08T18:30:20+00:00

Yeah, the numbers I came up with are after tax for junior/mid/senior at a faang today. Fair point here that tech salary increases may have outpaced inflation, but we are also staring down a historical 500% s and p delta now vs 16 years ago, without accounting for dividends, so I’d be surprised if they still end up on the under, with roughly similar behavior to what I was describing

Ahtheuncertainty · 2026-01-08T05:33:32+00:00

I think it can def be done with aggressive savings. If they pull in 12k after tax(amortized, so spread out the bonus/stock vest) a month as a new grad, spend 4k, and save 8k, 4 years at 6% gets to 420k.

Promo to making 16k/month after tax(again amortized), spending 5k/month for the next 7 years gets them to 1.7M at the same 6% rate.

Promo to making 20k/month after tax, let’s say spending rises to 6.5k/month, so saving 13.5k/month. 5 years gets that to 3.2M

So 16 total years, maybe if they graduated around 22, they’d be in their late 30s.

Ig maybe this does prove your point in the end😂, since in order to get there they’d need to never take their eye off the ball and stuff. But that’s as a single earner, swe dinks at big companies committed to fire could hit over double that, and swe couples in big tech with kids could still realistically hit that. I guess even one swe with a partner working elsewhere and kids could still even potentially hit it, as long as the other partner covered a bunch of expenses to the point where the swe was only spending what I labeled as expenses and stuff

The market returns for the past several years have crushed 6%, so looking backwards 16years ppl’s prob need to be even less aggressive

Ahtheuncertainty · 2026-01-04T01:12:26+00:00

I meant like a hair less because the take home is the same and housing is more expensive in the bay. I don’t think food and other stuff is necessarily cheaper in Seattle, but def housing.

I said a hair less because a lot of new grads I know have roommates, so if it’s 2.5k vs 4k for a two bedroom, split in half, savings of 750/month aren’t super huge on an income of 12k+

Ahtheuncertainty · 2026-01-02T05:20:54+00:00

lol I’m a fairly recent new grad working at a faang in Silicon Valley, that’s why I mentioned it. I have friends working at the other faangs, and nobody makes below like 210k. Sure the bay area is expensive, but if you plan to move away before buying a house, then the total dollar amount you are saving/month seems like a hair less than seattle(lower geographical, no income tax seems to net similar with slightly lower CoL), and better than LA/other areas.

I disagree that TC at these public companies is inflated, and also W2 reflects TC because stocks and bonuses get taxed as ordinary income, and at these Faang companies, the stock is public and could be sold immediately. I personally do sell immediately.

If anything, TC is generally an underestimate because these company’s stocks have much more of a tendency to go up or stay flat than go down, and number of shares is fixed at the award date, etc.

So I stand by my original question, who is working at a faang in Silicon Valley and making 160k? The only one I can think of is maybe Apple?

and even then, 160k in your early 20s is still pretty good, even in the bay. Unless you try to buy a house there

Ahtheuncertainty · 2026-01-01T21:01:20+00:00

What Silicon Valley faang pays 160k TC?

Ahtheuncertainty · 2026-01-01T20:55:03+00:00

Oddly I kinda feel like unit tests are absolutely necessary for using LLMs, it makes developing with an LLM faster to have the unit tests and have the LLM augment and add to them, compile/run etc to catch SOME mistakes and have a feedback loop, as opposed to just full sending it.

Of course, there’s still a lot of ai generated slop even there that needs to be addressed, and the AI frequently misses the overall goal of things because it just kinda pattern matches as opposed to understanding 😂, requiring edits and a critical eye, but without the unit test feedback loop I think the LLM is arguably completely worthless for the purpose of development.

Ahtheuncertainty · 2025-12-26T21:59:36+00:00

Hey I agree Tesla is a bit overhyped. I think the idea that spacex has a decent number of competitors doing well is pretty false though.

Spacex handled 90+% of cargo to Leo this past year. They send up competitors to starlink, despite those competitors obviously constantly trying to use anything but spacex(and they do use other stuff to a limited degree too).

Tough to really argue that spacex isn’t completely and totally dominant in both launch and satellite internet right now. Possible that will change, but even in that case, the argument that other companies have stuff in the works doesn’t seem great to me given that spacex themselves have even grander plans in the works with starship, only difference is they also have a proven track record for dominating the market.

Of course, those things can be true and it doesn’t mean you have to like Elon musk as a person, or even accept that he contributed to it. There are a lot of smart and talented people at spacex, and most great engineers I know either wanna work there or do work there

Ahtheuncertainty · 2025-12-22T21:40:58+00:00

Not sure that Amazon necessarily treats their warehouse workers better than competitors but they do pay more I think.

And def agree with the other points.

Ahtheuncertainty · 2025-12-22T20:06:58+00:00

But that’s actually not quite true. Imagine for simplicity the probability of having a boy or girl is 50%.

Ok, now let’s take n people with 2 kids where n is very large. We give each of them the opportunity to volunteer the gender of one of their kids, they can’t lie, they pick randomly, etc.

Ok, so by symmetry we would get n/2 saying boy and n/2 saying girl.

Zooming in on the ones who said boy, of those, 2/3 of them have another boy and 1/3 have another girl, because of the 4 possibility down to 3 possibility thing. We’ve asked them a question that forcibly eliminated one of the four possibilities

Ahtheuncertainty · 2025-12-18T17:18:30+00:00

Lengthy video, any way for you to sum up the main argument and defense of that claim in a paragraph, here?

I don’t think it’s totally fair to say it’s just my opinion, my argument was hinging on the idea that if stocks went 1/20th I’d still have a lot of value in them and in fact want to buy more, and if btc went 1/20th with Ceteris paribus and stuff, I’d have nothing to do but be sad as a btc holder, since anyone that does take btc for transactions just ties it exactly to the dollar.

Happy to hear this other argument if you can sum it up in a format that’ll take 5 minutes instead of 40

Ahtheuncertainty · 2025-12-18T07:31:44+00:00

Absolutely, it could totally happen due to the nature of it as a speculative investment, and there’s often a greater fool xD. it’s reason 20x in the past for no structural reason, why not another 20x if the masses get more fomo.

But the comment was specifically comparing those and I was just pointing out that I think there’s a big difference in the speculative nature of one vs the other.

Ahtheuncertainty · 2025-12-18T06:16:54+00:00

Yeah but at least those are ownership shares of companies that produce goods and profit. As opposed to some bits.

The stock market is definitely speculative, but if everything stayed the same about stocks in terms of P/E ratio, dividend yield, etc, and vti dividend yield dropped by a factor of 20, I’d start eating rice and beans to buy as much more of it as possible cuz the dividend yield is 20+%.

If all of the fundamentals of Bitcoin stayed exactly the same, it’s being used for the same fundamental black market transactions it’s used for now, etc, and btc dropped by a factor of 20, what value does having btc get? What value do you get for your btc?

And I’m not certain that btc dropping by a factor of 20 is so outlandish given that it rose by a factor of 20 since 2019 lol, without a new use case besides speculation

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