Now wait a second... didn't the author just finish talking about diminishing utility? This sounds like the mindset of someone who really doesn't understand just how little it takes to work and/or retire comfortably. The vast majority of people don't need to travel the world in a private jet to enjoy retiring luxuriously in their 50's (or in most cases even earlier).
Rent a 35' boat for a weekend and it's a fun experience, own a 35' boat and it's a long term hassle.
Not that status is useless. Being able to afford a high status area has plenty of knock on benefits. But, where the benefits of a middle class vs poor are might be huge past that there are significant diminishing returns.
So, IMO it's really a question of how much you care about status vs. any thing else. 50 year old with 90 million in the bank are a dime a dozen in some circles, where a CFO at Google get's a long list of people paid to do what they say.
This sounds like something a young person would say. It's certainly not what most successful "professionals" would say. Most professionals feel like they're on a work treadmill same as everyone else, except they're doing it to support a more expensive house, more expensive cars, more expensive clothes, more expensive food, more expensive education for their kids, more expensive frills than people who make less money.
The consumer society we live in encourages/creates spending patterns that almost unavoidably rise right along with our salaries. These patterns of high spending then feel like they're "necessary" and they raise the bar for what feels like a safe retirement nest egg. It is possible to avoid this consumer-society treadmill, but it's not easy -- it requires swimming against the stream -- and a relatively small percentage of people do it. Avoiding it is basically what the Mr. Money Mustache website (referred to in other posts in this thread) is about, and it's interesting to note that the people who seem to gravitate to that plan often retire with a fraction of what "professionals" would consider a safe retirement nest egg.
Another factor that comes into play is your mental balance. A man with a $50k watch is a lot more worried about what his wrist bumps into than a man with a $50 one.
First time I ever heard about this, actually.
Look, I generally support your point, but even the gap between a 25k and a 75k one is big. Having a 100k, 1 million or 10 million are vastly different.
There are people who feel financially insecure even with tens of millions in their accounts, and then there is a friend of mine who walked away with $1.2M after selling his house during the dot com run-up and moved to Boise, IA. He's been there ever since and really loves it.
In my experience the people who "can never get enough" are the unusual cases, not the folks who just happen to like what they are doing and it pays well, but people who focus all of their energy on increasing that number at the bottom of their portfolio account.
There are a whole lot of people who are "retiring" than you read about in the funny papers. They don't call it retiring of course, because retiring carries a stigma of sitting on a porch sipping mint julips and telling stories about the 'good old days', but they feel bad about calling it 'full time vacation mode' which is really what it is.
[1] Generally technology people of course, and generally through stock they owned in a company they worked at as an employee.
a funny related t-shirt from Raygun: Ohio, the great potato state (above an outline of Iowa).
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/2f/ea/93/2fea932c7...
As it turned out, I got bored in retirement and in the last 15 years I have written a bunch of books, consulted for some great companies like Google, but the difference is that I have had a lot of freedom now, and probably averaged less than 10 hours per week, not including writing, in the last 15 years.
I have to admit to a lot of curiousity about how Google's CFO will do after a few years of leasure - I hope he enjoys his travels!
I disagree. NFL players on average retire for very different reasons than Google execs. It may not be the case for the recent retirees but even if you are fully healthy it's really risky to keep playing in the NFL (concussions alone, check health premiums of NFL players etc.). Many players should probably retire earlier. It's a lot better to enjoy less money than to have more money and Alzheimers or the like at age 50.
+it's more likely that NFL players that retire early kind of have a good feeling for how many more high level seasons they could have played. At least I'd think it's easier to judge the capabilities of your body than the capabilities of your mind. (QB's are the exception, I guess Locker could have stayed around as a journeyman for a couple of years and made relatively safe money holding a clipboard). I don't have any evidence but I also suspect some of the surprise early retirements may be ralted to PED use and/or uncertainty if that can be kept up "undetected". At least it's reasonable to think this is the case for a higher %age than in other fields.
tl;dr: apples, oranges. NFL retirement is extremly different from most other forms of retirement. The high level abstraction of "retired but didn't have to" is at least somewhat questionable.
I have a company and have rich friends, this is completely normal, people do what they always wanted to do when they get money. It is called "financial independence".
I read and write on HN(for other people a waste of time) because I like it, and because I can. I travel just because I can. I work on projects that probably will not make money(and end making the most money of all because nobody risks doing it) just because I can.
What is really a Paradox is that when you start doing what you really want to do,instead of what others tells you to do, you could start making more money than ever.
You are not a slave of money. It is a common belief of people living in NY. People earning a million dollars a year but spending half of that in a condo.
Money lets you purchase other peoples time, it's boosts your productivity, and if you can hire someone to build you something you can do ever greater things.
Although this is just my motivation, I am sure most of the highly productive or motivated people feel the same way. They want to do something great, and they know they have to work to get there.
Put it this way - if someone asked me if I wanted to be making $250K/yr at CorpTech or $250K/yr hitting baseballs, the choice is pretty clear (at least for me, you may hate baseball). When a job is fun or emotionally rewarding, it changes the way you perceive "work."
I bring this up in response to your comment because owning and running your own company is an emotionally gratifying experience. Granted, there are moments that tear your heart out, moments that leave you awake at night, but if you're wired for this kind stimulus, you enjoy it. It stops being about (just) the money.
Well, of course. But that doesn't make the choice unclear ;)
Are we talking about the executives most talented at increasing shareholder profits, or executives most talented at improving people's lives? To put it another way, there's a lot of good reasons we put term limits on politicians, why are business executives different?
Companies, on the other hand, exist in the ecosystem of the market (so a single CEO can not rearrange the playing field). If the company is doing poorly, its shares will drop and forces will gather to remove the CEO (note how Balmer or recent CSFB CEO were removed).
I don't necessarily disagree with the author, but another reasonable explanation is that successful people like their jobs, and in the absence of larger pursuits, like religion, they see no reason to move on. Retirement in and of itself isn't the "prize" for every single person.
Getting to the spirit of the article though, a good chunk of the people that I know who don't "have to work" anymore, don't, or do so infrequently. I think it is rare indeed for someone to become a billionaire or hundred-millionaire without the manic drive that this article speaks of, but I do know plenty of millionaires who either don't work or take it very easy.
It actually would make sense that a lot of millionaires wouldn't work anymore. Presumably they make most of their money in a one-time deal (i.e. their company gets sold), if they were a solid software engineer, etc at said company it might not seem worth it to go back and work another company doing CRUD. Maybe the right opportunity comes along, maybe it doesn't, but why pressure yourself if you don't "have to work".
Saying "anyone with half a brain can find a job they love" is really dismissing quite a lot of people that are not in the same privileged situation as you.
This is a mediocre article, at best.
That's different from being ambitious in general. I probably wouldn't stop working if I made $20 million, but I'd work differently. I'd take more risks, play less politics, and be able to focus more due to fearlessness. I, however, don't view work for work's sake as being valuable. When I'm 55, I might decide that it's time to do more traveling and less working.
There are, however, a lot of people who see money as "life's scorecard" and that leads them astray, because ultimately optimizing for that one factor is (beyond a certain point) astronomically stupid. If you enjoy your work, keep at it. But a lot of these people don't. When you look at why they keep going, though, it turns out that they're not really into the work or the money themselves but the status that come with them. A surprising percentage of people don't really care what it is they do, so long as they can use a private jet to do it.
