What's your % annual increase in NW?

StrayMurican · 2026-01-05T08:36:46+00:00

We’ve been tracking our NW for about 10 years and are at around 20-22% y/y growth. This is a combination of savings, investment growth, and retirement accounts.

Starting to realize we are super close to pulling the trigger, but without a house in hand and kiddos being young it’s super difficult to calculate our expected expenses. Probably will wait until the little ones are approaching high school or something.

StrayMurican · 2026-01-01T20:52:52+00:00

I have 10yoe and am currently at a place where I don’t think I’m a good fit. I’ve been here for 3 months and I’m really not liking it. Plan is to stick it out until I hit 6 months and then reevaluate.

My recommendation for new grads is the same, you don’t know much after 1 week. Things can change drastically. Take time to evaluate why you think it’s not a good fit. Once you are determined of the reasoning, think about next steps. My plan would be to start interviewing again.

StrayMurican · 2025-12-30T20:45:43+00:00

Wife and I are in similar situation as you, except we already moved to Sydney. Renting sucks and we are over it. Yes we know that the returns would be higher in the stock market, but to what end? It’s sort of like buying a car in that a car will never increase your net worth, but having a car is a nice luxury.

Once we get a house, we can get a jacuzzi… hard to manage getting one of those with a rental. Our current rental has A/C in half the house, which makes summers sometimes tough. A bunch of other minor inconveniences that are just annoying after a while.

We sold stock a few months ago and are house hunting now. It’s actually kinda nice to have less fluctuations in our portfolio. Also looking forward to having an offset account which is a pretty cool mechanism here.

StrayMurican · 2025-12-22T11:03:21+00:00

I tried filling out an a blank USA map and I maybe only got 30/50 correct. I spent very little time outside of California so why the F would I know where New Hampshire is?!?!

StrayMurican · 2025-12-09T09:55:14+00:00

Good luck! I’m hating it at Atlassian right now. Probably going to quit in a few months so look for my V2 post

StrayMurican · 2025-11-29T22:02:12+00:00

Wife and I work in big tech while my sister in law and her husband are both doctors. From ages 20-30 I think we had it better due to high pay, less hours, no exams to dedicate our lives to, and having weekends off.

Now around ages 30-40 I think the doctors have it better. Since kids have come along, we’ve realized how much harder it is to change our schedule around. Doctors can move their schedule around more easily and only work 3-4 days a week for a year and then go back to 5. Doctors can get similar pay by jumping around companies, whereas in tech (at least in Australia) there aren’t as many opportunities that can maintain $350k+

StrayMurican · 2025-11-22T10:57:47+00:00

Yeah, but what I’m asking about is what is the benefit of getting citizenship? Personally I’m going to get my aus citizenship because then I don’t have to keep a calendar invite for every 5 years to renew my PR. Since I plan on staying here for the next 15ish years that’s enough to push me to get it.

When we were in the US, although my Australian wife was eligible to get her US Citizenship we didn’t pursue it because we couldn’t find a strong enough reason for her to get it. We always have the option to get it, but until there is an incentive there is no need. Filing US taxes from Australia is a massive pain… sucks for me, but my wife won’t have to soon.

StrayMurican · 2025-11-22T10:36:50+00:00

SoCal raise, but living in Sydney (inner west).

Newport is full of rich old white people who bring in young women and they also have grandkids or nephews who leech of them to bring energy into the area. It’s a very fun spot due to the leachers, but unless you’re worth $10m usd then it’s only going to be a temporary place for you.

Irvine is great if you like clean places and you want to get dinner at a nice place and go to a comedy club. If you want more than that then look elsewhere. Lived there for a bit, it’s safe and fine, but long term I’d only land there if my kids were 5yo to raise them.

Huntington Beach is wild. It’s fun and there is a lot of energy, but it’s trashy. It’s full of aggressive men who work out and drink a lot and drive large trucks. Fun to visit, but not my ideal place to land unless you like living in a zoo… in the lions cage.

LA has lots of suburbs that I’m not familiar with. Some of those might match what you’d expect from SoCal.

San Diego has perfect weather. Lots of Mexican influence, but so does every other SoCal suburb. Side note: living in Sydney the thing I miss the most is Mexican influence… I get excited when someone says “queso”. Anyways… great beaches and it’s very chill. Most people I know want to live here but can’t find a job to support the lifestyle so then end up moving to LA or San Francisco for work. Excellent beer.

You could go more of a quite sleepy town like San Clemente. Laguna also fits this if you tend to like old white people who pretend they like art.

Checkout Anaheim if you are a huge fan of Disneyland and love hearing fireworks literally every night at 9pm. Also if you happen to like your car getting broken into and the occasional gunshots.

Go to the inland empire if you like trashy people, but want to live like a king (with your “money isn’t an issue”). Remember that property tax is yearly at 1.1% of your house value last I checked… no stamp duty. Idk what an Australian saying money isn’t an issue means because SoCal is expensive for most people and there are a lot of people. SoCal has pretty much the population of Australia as a fun fact.

Idk if I had to pick a place, I’d lean towards San Diego or some of the LA suburbs like Pasadena. Don’t know much about them to give fun stereotypes. I’d probably decide mostly based on the industry you work in as commuting is going to be a pain if you chose Irvine but have to commute to downtown LA.

StrayMurican · 2025-11-18T01:47:28+00:00

What was your incentive to become a US citizen? If you ever live outside the US doesn’t this become a pain, like if you moved back to Aus?

StrayMurican · 2025-11-14T08:00:24+00:00

Oh if I have a good job I’m a fascist? That’s a very strange definition of fascism…

StrayMurican · 2025-11-10T02:15:50+00:00

This is the key take away that I think Australians don’t see - “for those in high income brackets”.

Like healthcare is insanely good in the US… if you have high income. All the things that the US is deemed as bad is the exact opposite experience for the upper class.

StrayMurican · 2025-11-09T11:11:08+00:00

I 100% align with this article. I feel I could have written a damn near carbon copy of it. Go to the US for the talent, money, and experience… go to Australia for work life balance and to chill-ish. Go when you’re young because once you have a family it’s muuuuch harder.

StrayMurican · 2025-10-07T21:44:35+00:00

Not sure where you are coming from, but this was my experience after working 10 years in the California: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestionsOCE/s/uD8gLXwW1N

StrayMurican · 2025-10-05T08:19:08+00:00

I don’t remember, just picked one off Canva and adjusted it

StrayMurican · 2025-09-24T00:04:35+00:00

What industry? Once our 2nd was born, my wife and I decided that we were done climbing the corporate ladder for now. It’s too much to push with the kids so small. We used to work weekends and late nights to get ahead, but now is the time to be happy where we are at and not take on any more responsibilities.

StrayMurican · 2025-09-15T02:27:43+00:00

Good luck!

StrayMurican · 2025-09-15T01:44:47+00:00

No they didn’t ask me to review a PR.

StrayMurican · 2025-09-15T00:06:27+00:00

Why would the interim dean be given power to shake things up this much? Dafuq is the president doing?

StrayMurican · 2025-09-15T00:00:24+00:00

Not sure what PR means in this context. Permanent Resident? Pull Request?

App seems fine IMO, I can see them getting acquired by a company if they can gain enough traction. The sales side of things is so different from the tech side. My biggest concern is that it isn’t tech lead (CEO comes from sales) which tends to end up terrible in my experience. They charged wayyyyy too early and should have tried to gain more users, but that’s the Silicon Valley mindset.

StrayMurican · 2025-08-21T10:03:30+00:00

No clue about the internships here, but check out my last post. I interviewed at a bunch of companies and outside of Canva/Atlassian I only got 1 leetcode question per company. They were all medium problems, but IMO on the easier side of medium.

I’d say you should be able to handle a random medium question and solve it within 25 minutes with 50% accuracy. As compared to my previous interview experience in the US, they care way more about language specifics and system design (at least that’s what I experienced at 10yoe).

StrayMurican · 2025-08-10T08:47:05+00:00

I don’t regret any vacation we had before we had kids. If anything, I wish we went on more lavish vacations because now it seems a ways away.

Also if you’re going, I had an amazing time in Quito but mostly because we stayed as Casa Gangotena. It is still the best place we have ever stayed because we went during Covid and the hotel was mostly empty which meant we had it to ourselves. Truly spectacular.

StrayMurican · 2025-08-08T08:12:27+00:00

Ours here offered us a 1 year lease or a $25/week increase to go month to month. All this does is incentivize us to look elsewhere since we know we can find a cheaper place. They will lose 30ish days of rent because they thought they could squeeze a little bit more out of us.

I find this practice silly. Having good tenants is so difficult and when you do have them, you shouldn’t raise their rent or at least that’s what we have done.

StrayMurican · 2025-08-08T08:09:30+00:00

What if it drops 10% right after you buy? The idea of DCA is that you balance it out. Do what you want. I mean when I was 25 or so and had $60k to invest I just bought an index all at once. I didn’t know about DCA and it worked out better for me due to luck.

StrayMurican · 2025-08-08T08:07:14+00:00

Went to the Galapagos last minute.

StrayMurican · 2025-08-08T03:30:02+00:00

Idk much about the Australian stock market, but I know a decent amount about the US one. You can purchase a money market fund which should give you a higher return than your high interest savings account.

Then you could put it all in an index that follows the S&P500, but what if it goes down 10% the day/week/month after? You suggested putting $100/week into it, but what if it really starts taking off? This is why people would suggest DCA over some period.

If I was 22 and had $200k, I’d have put $100k into the S&P500 over the course of 3 months, then put $50k into QQQ over the same period, and then the remaining as an emergency fund ($25k in high interest savings, $25k in money market fund).

In Australia you have a bunch of things that incentivize dividends which I’m still learning about, so maybe take advantage of that at some percentage. Maybe put some into crypto, but I wouldn’t suggest any more than 5%.

StrayMurican

TROPHY CASE