> "enough to retire on" Solutions: > - having kids

Whoa, no. I've had 3 over the last five years. Total expense of well over a quarter million so far, and we live in a fairly cheap city in flyover country.

[EDIT] small expenses that nevertheless add up to several thousands over the first 5 years: clothes, diapers, food, formula (YMMV), toys, furniture (cribs, beds, dressers); large expenses: housing (need more space and in decent school district, both = $$$), cars (3 kids basically = at least one van required, no getting by with only tiny, cheap cars), medical, lost wages of wife staying home for ~1.5yrs, daycare/school after that.

The annoying thing about startup jobs in particular, though, is that "having a job that makes 'enough' money" this month doesn't guarantee the business (and thus your job) will still be in existence next month.

And so, if you care about eating (by being paid, by having a job), and you work for startups, you have to think about a bunch of things like improving your resume, paying attention to the company's ups and downs, etc. ...because you need to be able to recover from your money-source disappearing out from under you. You can't really just join a startup and "drift along" doing your job, the way an employee of a bigcorp can.