> wish I had fuck-you money and could spend my day engrossed in whatever I find interesting
A good mental exercise is to calculate how much you'd need to survive indefinitely in a pocket of rural America or the third world. No international travel. No bells and whistles. Limited cuisine. But survival and leisure unlimited.
When I've run the numbers for a comforable living, they've come to $300k (Vietnam, $12k/y) to $500k (West Virginia or Portugal $18k/y). But one could halve (or more) those figures by accepting standards of living our grandparents would have found adequate.
Then you make a choice. That world. Or the one you have. (Or something in between.)
Two-fifths of American households have a net worth over $300,000; more than half over $150,000 [1]. That means somewhere between a lot of and potentially most Americans have, on a global scale, fuck-you money. Just not fuck-you money to retain their status at the centre of the first world.
In Taiwan you can be on NHI within 6 months of arrival on certain visas. Once you get permanent residency, you're always eligible so long as you keep making monthly payments, which cap out at around 45$usd/month. NHI makes an MRI cost less than 100$ usd. If you don't have NHI you can pay iirc 300$ for an MRI, 100$ for an emergency room visit with blood draw and IV, maybe ~30$/month for buproprion over the counter.
For Portugal the "free" healthcare is extremely generous to anyone staying there, regardless if citizens or not. It does lose money, but then again Germany always pays the bill.
Salaries are low and equipment/infrastructure is top notch so the overall deficit per year is about a billion EUR, which is the extra they deduct from our taxes and Germoney. Quality and efficiency of "bang per buck" is decent albeit citizens always complain.
Portuguese did run half the world for a couple of centuries, the most spoken language by natives on the southern part of this planet but quite tiresome to deal with all that, now is more like Italy and prefers quality of life.
My health insurance (self employed, high CoL area USA, healthy/not old) is 6k$/yr. Kind of blows up that $18k/yr idea. I don't think it gets that much better if you live in a low CoL area.
> One thing: This numbers exclude healthcare costs as you get older this gets more expensive
For the U.S., yes, I'm assuming Medicare/Medicaid. For overseas: Vietnam and Portugal have affordable systems you can pay into, with private insurance options above that at $1,200 and $5,000 a year.
I thought fuck-you money also included the ability to explore whatever you want in a way that included e.g. hiring a team to explore projects for you as startups?
Also everyone I know with fuck you money already lives in Asia for cost of living reasons, but spends half the year jet setting to various raves and rich people shenanigans in random places like Croatia.
American software engineers maybe. But I heard somewhere that most Americans live paycheck to paycheck or at most have a few thousand dollars in savings.
> I heard somewhere that most Americans live paycheck to paycheck or at most have a few thousand dollars in savings
Wealth versus liquidity. I'm saying you sell everything you own, pay off your debts, and then take what's left to retire on. Someone with $10mm in home equity may still be strapped for cash on account of the mortgage.
A good mental exercise is to calculate how much you'd need to survive indefinitely in a pocket of rural America or the third world. No international travel. No bells and whistles. Limited cuisine. But survival and leisure unlimited.
When I've run the numbers for a comforable living, they've come to $300k (Vietnam, $12k/y) to $500k (West Virginia or Portugal $18k/y). But one could halve (or more) those figures by accepting standards of living our grandparents would have found adequate.
Then you make a choice. That world. Or the one you have. (Or something in between.)
Two-fifths of American households have a net worth over $300,000; more than half over $150,000 [1]. That means somewhere between a lot of and potentially most Americans have, on a global scale, fuck-you money. Just not fuck-you money to retain their status at the centre of the first world.
[1] https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentiles/