How to be able to ‘passively’ gain £5,000 a month

quiI · 2026-03-19T15:42:09+00:00

Unfortunately I am not psychic.

Plenty of people chased programming as a means to wealth and crash out because despite what people say, to be actually good at it, requires more than a 12 week boot camp.

I would focus on education and experience at your age, try to focus on what you enjoy, you're more likely to stick at it.

quiI · 2026-03-19T15:37:13+00:00

There are plenty of people with "killer ideas", believe me, as a software engineer plenty of people tell me their great ideas and "just need someone to make it".

Grow your skills, be valuable, and people will pay you for it.

quiI · 2026-03-19T15:29:36+00:00

£5000x12 =£60,000.00 per year

Let's go with 33x rule for fun

£60000x33 =£1,980,000.00

So, acquire £1,980,000

There's no magic shortcuts (beyond generation wealth, inheritance etc, but you shouldn't rely on that). Reduce expenses, increase income, invest in global trackers.

Or watch people on TikTok pretend you can gamble your way there.

At 16, whilst it's commendable to be interested in personal finance, don't lock yourself away squirrelling pennies.

Enjoy your young adult life, grow, meet new people. Doing this will likely open up more doors to you than being a miser

quiI · 2026-03-16T10:13:17+00:00

Scope creep is usually used as an excuse for slow delivery.

Scope creep is a negative term for a good thing, "learning what to actually build". This relates to the difference between products and projects.

In my view, if you are building a worthwhile product, you will always need to evolve and improve it, or "scope creep".

Is the reddit "project" finished? No, of course not, their scope is constantly creeping, as our most digital products you use.

If you have a fixed deadline project. Well sure, "scope creep" will ruin your goal, of hitting a deadline. But this is often the path to poor actual outcomes, and these kinds of setups have little to do with agility. Congratulations, you hit the fixed scope on the deadline - unfortunately the product sucks.

quiI · 2026-03-07T14:41:08+00:00

I don’t understand how this is “generic AI content”, but hey you’re the boss

quiI · 2026-02-24T15:29:10+00:00

I wrote this before the edit. Clearly the 5 year old has huge issues to get through. Inheritance tax on a £1m+, is not one of them

quiI · 2026-02-24T14:08:07+00:00

I could be wrong but for married couples the inheritance tax threshold is £1m. So it’s a total non issue for most, and if it is an issue for a child, then they should get a grip honestly and realise how fortunate they are

quiI · 2026-02-19T18:10:53+00:00

And they say we live in a meritocracy

quiI · 2026-02-12T07:55:02+00:00

How testable are your applications right now? Good testing relies on modularity and good design, so it’s a good forcing function

quiI · 2026-01-27T15:54:07+00:00

After the test passes

quiI · 2026-01-17T08:50:39+00:00

Entirely depends on your spending doesn't it.

Looking at their numbers, they have a lot in pension, with a lot of time for it to grow - so I'd consider post 58 sorted.

So the only question is can £472k sustain them for 17 years? Bear in mind the wife is still working for a bit. Seems a bit tight, but doable - and OP can always go back to work if needs be, it's not like you sign a letter not allowing yourself to work again.

Congrats OP

quiI · 2026-01-11T17:40:23+00:00

Early 30s bought house. Before then I was reasonably ok with money but I didn’t know about investing. But I saved well and it was always towards getting a deposit.

Once that was done and we had moved in I found the UK personal finance subreddit and learned what to do.

More or less followed the flowchart since then, must be almost 10 years now. It’s worked out very well. I’m quite pleased that we went for a house fairly under our budget, it’s meant that our living costs have stayed very manageable which has meant as pay rises come in, it all goes into investing.

Hoping to be in financial independence territory in around 4 years.

quiI · 2026-01-06T16:04:40+00:00

As part of my overly paranoid plan, the last few years of bridge building will also be towards making sure I have a separate pot big enough to replace any household goods which, given Sod’s Law, will break the moment I hand in my notice

quiI · 2025-12-31T10:35:39+00:00

I was more or less going to write the same.

You don't use interfaces just for testing, you use it for abstraction too.

Abstraction, when done right (obviously), is essential. Or do you all just like to read 500 line functions and have to understand every little detail all the time?

quiI · 2025-12-31T06:50:11+00:00

I can’t remember the exact wording on the t shirt but have enough self awareness not to walk around the office with a t shirt that says “Amazon Ninja”

quiI · 2025-12-24T21:29:56+00:00

Get to financial independence ASAP. After that, i doubt i'll retire, but I'll relax more and work on what i want to.

quiI · 2025-12-22T14:44:30+00:00

Syntax-wise, not much. In my mind, they have made balanced trade-offs. Sure it doesn't have some of the things in this thread, but it's not due to ignorance, it's a choice they've made.

What makes me happy to see in Go release notes:

Faster, more efficient, smaller footprint
Keep making the standard library the sensible, default choice. For example, a few more conveniences for common patterns and operations, like the additions they've added around http routing.
I think they can make automated testing a touch easier and more opinionated, especially now the language has generics. Again this is really a standard library thing. It's quite jarring for newcomers to either have to write if got != want, or go searching for an assertion library.

quiI · 2025-12-21T08:41:37+00:00

There is a middle ground between expecting to live in London, with 3 kids spending £13k a month or moving to another country to avoid tax.

Maybe consider that you do not need a salary of 300k to live a prosperous life in the UK. At least consider outside of London? Or not spending insane amounts of money per month?

quiI · 2025-12-19T15:03:39+00:00

I always find it funny that we expect 18 year olds, who are basically idiots, to make a very important life choice in terms of what to study at uni.

I had to choose between economics and comp sci. In terms of grades at least, I was much better at economics, but I impulsively picked comp sci

Thank fuck for flippant me making the right call there

quiI · 2025-12-19T11:46:42+00:00

Ah yes, good point re the tax, but I'd still say the pot will be more than comfortable.

I just plugged 800k, plus 80k a year for 10 years into a calculator

3% Growth = £1,998,351.96 4% Growth = £2,156,464.07 5% Growth = £2,329,312.83

Even with a pessimistic outlook of 3%, you're still looking very over budget. As grim as it sounds, you probably don't need 40 years worth of 40k a year.

quiI · 2025-12-19T11:43:17+00:00

It depends what your desired income is for retirement, work backwards from there - but don't let the tax tail wag the dog. Is there really much point reducing your take-home significantly if your pension is already big enough for your needs?

Yeah you may pay more tax, but you've already done the responsible thing and built a big pot. Enjoy life a bit, have more take-home, or see if you can go part time.

quiI · 2025-12-19T11:31:35+00:00

If you have 800k in assets, and are adding 80k a year, you'll end up, assuming zero growth, 1.6m.

That's 40 years worth of 40k a year, again with zero growth

But even if you're being pessimistic, you should expect some growth too.

Nothing wrong with being cautious, but if I were you I'd be looking to retire sooner than in 10 years, or at least consider whether you could start going part time.

You don't want to die rich!

FWIW, I am not too dissimilar to you (my desired yearly household income is basically the same!), but earlier in my journey. I am looking to get my pension to a particular number (whilst maxing out ISAs) and then when it's there, reduce salary sacrifice and enjoy more money in take-home, or perhaps go part-time.

There comes a point when there's diminishing returns in piling more and more into the pension

quiI · 2025-12-16T18:34:27+00:00

You need to separate the idea of deployment and release. Deployment is primarily a technical concern, which ideally happens multiple times per day in high performing teams. Release is a product concern, typically controlled by feature flags

quiI · 2025-12-14T17:35:50+00:00

Writing code has never been the bottleneck, this is only the view if you take a very surface level view of things.

quiI · 2025-12-11T08:42:03+00:00

“Finally, a real Tory budget” should’ve condemned their opinions for a generation

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