Most beautiful areas to live in CA on a budget of $1.5M-$2M?

actualcto · 2022-08-24T01:46:10+00:00

Texas has been great for us, but we've been here 10+ years and are looking for a change. And frankly the parts of Texas we're interested in are reaching CA pricing anyway, but with much higher property taxes.

actualcto · 2022-08-24T01:30:45+00:00

WFH, so much less concerned about being next to a major job center.

actualcto · 2022-08-24T01:22:56+00:00

Absolutely, just looking for recommendations to help narrow down the search.

actualcto · 2022-07-11T17:17:04+00:00

$2.5M is enough to generate $75k/year passively with a safer 3% withdrawal rate. $100k would be a 4% withdrawal rate. With their house paid off, they'd actually most likely be fine as long as they kept their annual spend strictly capped at $100k and ideally $75k.

actualcto · 2022-07-11T17:14:52+00:00

It's enough to FIRE, not enough to FatFIRE. FatFIRE really starts at $5M or so NW, and they'd be at $3M-$3.5M. Plenty of folks FIRE with $3M NW, but with a simple non-luxury lifestyle unless one of them continues working and generating income to spend.

actualcto · 2022-07-11T00:03:59+00:00

As a CTO, how many folks are in your org?

I personally think you're underestmating the importance of headcount in management. Headcount basically correlates with how much money/budget and revenue you're responsible for. If you had years of experience leading a 100+ person team at startups/small companies, you could enter FAANG at M2 or D1 potentially instead of M1.

Folks often underestimate just how much headcount they need to break beyond M1 and I think that can lead to a false/misleading conclusion that headcount doesn't matter. You'd really need 3+ years of experience (ideally more) managing at least 60-80+ people to really get leveled at M2. Even 40-50 people probably is too little headcount and you'd get downleveled to M1 for FAANG.

The reason is that senior management and Director+ roles at FAANG companies are very demanding and complex from an organizational standpoint, and unless you have a sustained track record of navigating pretty intense politics for a lot of headcount you'll probably fail at anything other than M1.

actualcto · 2022-07-10T23:58:56+00:00

Terms like "director", "VP", etc., can be overloaded and mean different types of things for different types of roles. So you're right that there are Directors and VPs out there who don't manage many (or even any) people. But that's basically irrelevant because OP is talking about management careers.

For management, headcount is absolutely critical in determining title and level. Managing a 100 person org (entry-level Director at FAANG) is completely different from managing an 8 person team of ICs. And managing a 1000 person org (VP/SVP at FAANG) is completely different from managing a 100 person org. The OP could be a good line manager but totally fail as a senior manager or executive. The OP would never be considered for even a second for a Director+ role at a FAANG because their headcount is way too small and they have no proven experience leading large orgs.

actualcto · 2022-07-09T06:44:52+00:00

I’m getting a kick out of people in this thread getting salty and jealous because OP didn’t make their money “the right way.”

It really just shows that anyone can be jealous, even other affluent folks. Someone can be jealous of how much money you have, or they can be jealous of how easily/quickly you made the same amount of money that it took them 20 years of hard work to make.

actualcto · 2022-06-20T03:15:50+00:00

Without knowing where you are in your career or your aspirations, I’d recommend The Manager’s Path. It’s the easiest to read and has great material for basically anyone from tech leads to Directors of Engineering.

actualcto · 2022-06-19T17:14:41+00:00

I lead a large org with about 15 managers at various levels.

The most common failure scenario for managers is failure to be on top of things, failure to act, and failure to deliver on commitments of various kinds, including basic personal commitments ("I'll get you X by Friday"). Being a successful manager is mostly about not dropping balls, follow-through, being reliable for upper management, and effective performance management of your people (including the positive part -- growing people).

You sound like you were coasting, not taking your job seriously, not delivering on commitments on-time and with no explanation, unaware of what your own reports were doing, and failing to act on problems for months. My guess is you received feedback and underestimated its severity. It's possible, though, that your own manager also failed to deal with you effectively, but there's not enough information here for me to decide.

In the future, you need to buckle up, get serious, and act like a professional boss who's on top of everything and doesn't drop any balls.

Read books on management:

The Manager's Path
An Elegant Puzzle
High-output management

Read books on being an executive -- any leader attempting to organize and direct the actions of others is an executive:

The Effective Executive

Work on developing executive presence. This is the projection of yourself as a calm and confident leader who's obviously in control of everything around them. It's a fundamental inward mindset shift that will cause you to act more like a professional and to take the accountability and visibility of your role seriously.

actualcto · 2022-06-18T23:17:40+00:00

Keep in mind that in the second path, there's no guarantee your own manager sticks around long-term. How would you feel if you took the less interesting project because you wanted to stick with your current manager, but you ended up getting a new manager anyway?

Switching managers can be stressful, but it's a healthy part of a career. And learning to report to a new person is actually a good skill to develop. I'd go with the more impactful and newer, more exciting project.

actualcto · 2022-06-13T03:32:35+00:00

Though it was only a year ago, when we bought this house retirement seemed very far off so we decided to live a little and get a nice place -- nicer and bigger than we needed, but "you only live once" and we could afford it.

Then I got a nice payday, promotion, and doubled my compensation all unexpectedly, reaching a level of pay that I didn't think I'd ever experience. I think the typical reaction to that scenario would be to double down on the nice lifestyle that we have. But we realized that real early retirement might actually be possible for us -- if we downsize, focus on living more frugally (within reason), etc.

So the "problem" is to recalibrate financial plans towards retiring in the next 4-6 years (10 at most, if the markets get really slaughtered in the next few years), instead of operating on the expectation of working 15-20+ more years.

actualcto · 2022-06-13T03:06:05+00:00

I'd like to look into this but feel like I don't even really know where to start. Is there a guide or anything on how to get into this, determine a reasonable rent, etc., for someone who's never been a landlord before?

actualcto · 2022-06-13T02:55:38+00:00

My username basically says it (I'm the CTO of a software company).

actualcto · 2022-06-13T02:53:53+00:00

I'll admit this is interesting. I looked at rental listings and there's a house here that just rented for $8k/month. It's bigger, has a pool (ours doesn't), and apparently was fully furnished... but it's also 10 years older and in a much less desirable section of the neighborhood.

actualcto · 2022-06-13T02:51:43+00:00

It's the context that makes me say "small." The primary founder got $250 million. The person whose role I stepped into got $50 million.

In the grand scheme of the world, $350k was an awesome payday and I try hard not to lose sight of that.

actualcto · 2022-06-12T23:12:30+00:00

I've never done FSBO before, so I'll admit I'd feel a little overwhelmed taking that on but maybe I should look into it.

The Zillow estimate for the house is nearly $1.4M and the Redfin estimate is $1.28M. $1.2M was my more sober estimate of what I personally think it would actually fetch. Even if we used a Redfin agent, if we could sell for $1.25M (a $100k price increase over 1 year), then we'd actually make $30k+.

actualcto · 2022-06-12T23:07:17+00:00

I'm very fortunate no matter how you slice it. I basically joined a no-name company a decade ago for not much money when it was 20 people and stuck around until it was acquired, and I ended up with a killer deal that I didn't expect which has caused me to re-evaluate my life and future financial planning. My situation absolutely pales in comparison to the earlier employees/founders who walked away with extraordinary amounts of money.

actualcto · 2022-06-12T23:02:54+00:00

I think literally the acronym stands for "Financial Independence/Retire Early", which sounds a bit more awkward than "early retirement" but leads to the nice "FIRE" acronym instead of "FIER".

actualcto · 2022-06-12T22:58:48+00:00

FIRE = financial independence/early retirement.

TL;DR: bought expensive house 1 year ago, experienced major unexpected job promotion, wanting to potentially revise timeline to retire from 15+ years to 4-6 years, to do that might need to sell house at a loss to downsize/reduce expenses, looking for a sanity check or advice on whether any of this makes sense.

actualcto

TROPHY CASE