Ask HN: Getting depressed about money. How do I make a meaningful amount “fast”?

At this point, I'm at the stage where I'm just trying to start as many projects as possible in my free time and just see what sticks, because frankly, I now believe that people's success is entirely driven by being in the right market at the right time, so you might as well maximize your chances.

The people you see getting insanely rich often have decades of context (and a lot of luck) behind whatever made them insanely rich. I encourage you to not look at just the event that makes someone wealthy but look at the story that got them to that event. The acquired podcast does a great job of this when they cover company and founder history.

Nobody gets insanely wealthy selling their labor. Equity is what creates the massive payoffs.

Are there things you can do where you could own 100% equity? For example, are you an expert in systems administration? Can you write a book or Udemy course on it? Maybe it only makes you 1 grand in revenue but you may learn a lot about sales and marketing and promotion and other important business skills in the process. Those softer skills are just as important as engineering ability and there’s no better way to learn them than jumping into the deep end

EDIT: like others have said here, money is a side effect of a passion. It is not an end in itself, unless you take up business and finance careers.

[Edit: Here's a quote I like. "Money is like gasoline on a road trip. You don't want to run out of gas on your trip, but you're not doing a tour of gas stations. You have to pay attention to money, but it shouldn't be about the money." - Tim O'Reilly]

i've said this before on HN.

i chased that BS idea of being rich would make me happy and in the process, got a divorce, lost my pom, became an alcoholic and lost my career. i was making a very decent living, was married to the love of my life and had an absolute jerk for a dog... what more should a man want in his life.

life isn't about what you can get, it's about what you can keep. if you can keep a marriage for 50 years, you are richer than jeff bezos.

i really hope you take a step back, realize that no amount of money in the world is going to make you happy, start being thankful for what you have and enjoy your life. years comes quick and there is no reason wasting them.

a wise man once said that no amount of money can buy you happiness... well it can buy you a pomeranian so i guess it can buy you some sort happiness LOL.

Some valuable pieces of advice I've heard:

1) Owning your work is important.

2) Because few people succeed the very first time, waiting for The Good Idea (TM) to come to you before getting started is foolish. The more effective strategy is to keep trying different things that play to your strengths and learn as much as you can from repeated failure.

3) Try to develop an internal motivation to complete projects and avoid talking to others about your projects for validation. The very act of mentioning your next Thing to your friends can have a powerful demotivating effect, because it tricks your brain into a dopamine response as if you actually already did the Thing [1]

[1] https://berkeleysciencereview.com/2013/04/when-telling-other...

Creating a winning startup is like the lottery. Lots of things have to go in your favor. It might be best, given the pressure you are feeling, to stay with the slow and steady market gains you are experiencing, as when we are under pressure we make bad stock market gambles.

I would also take a solid look at your budget/spending and see if you can cut anything at all. You'd be surprised with what you can cut out of your life.

Again, I am sympathetic to your pain and feel it myself.

I was blessed to be in a position where I was able to spend nearly the entirety of my quarantine free time practicing Leetcode. Last week I signed an offer with an American FAANG level company and more than doubled my final TC. I realize this is a highly anecdotal, unusual scenario, but the possibility is there. Note that part of this was due to the weak $CAD, but regardless, the level of potential TC gains going from small startup or dev shop to FAANG level truly cannot be understated.

If you're interested in joining the rat race, Blind is a pretty good place to start.

You need to start a business where you own total upside and total downside. It's high risk and high reward game, if you get lucky - you'll be in the names like Bezos.

Having worked with software developers, they hesitate from charging too much as they don't understand the value of the work they are providing and are generally happy making stable amount of money over lifetime.

This is not bad if you value stability. But if you want more, you need to play with fire. Highly likely you'll get burnt but that's what it takes.

I quit my job to produce 3d printing filament and I am making 7000 euros a month as the business grows, I'll probably make more but see it's a limited scope process to make filament so it's very scalable. I expect upside to increase steadily over few years before I plateau and then I plan to move on to another opportunity.

Here's my project: https://medium.com/endless-filament/make-your-filament-at-ho...

Just like me, pick a problem where people have money to pay and start finding how how to reduce costs and increase sales.

In business/sales/marketing you need to display confidence which often software developers lack (because they know of so many ways things can go wrong). Customer doesn't like this, customer wants to feel that your solution is flawless without any holes! That's where clever sales person come and sell the software solution for several multiples of what it costs to make it.

When you've enough money, you don't need to struggle - you need to do things that are fun for you and have upside.

1) Cut expenses significantly. (Conservative approach.) 2) Boost income, via new job search? (Riskier.) 3. Put the rest of the family to work somehow.

Either way, a lot of it has to do with luck or connections, they can't be discounted. If there were a formulaic way to do it other than grinding it out, folks would be doing it already.

Whatever direction you go, try to find balance. Good luck.

But:

1. Learn whatever it takes to work in the high-stakes financial world

2. Buy an existing blog, product, plugin, and grow it fast

3. Spend less

Investing gradually you would have enough money to not worry. Saving with compounding is the best way for the general public.

Otherwise, as a rule of thumb, everyone who starts out poor and ends up rich does it in real estate. (That's not the same as saying everyone who invests in real estate gets rich.) There's a fundamental tenet of profitable investing that makes this so but you don't have to understand that in order to profit from a real estate investment.

It's not stupid to both rent the home you live in while at the same time buying a home to rent to others. This maximizes flexibility but with some extra effort.

If you want to make it to become a billionaire, then the only way is to not work for someone else, to become the boss (owner). Which means, taking a huge risk in starting your own company and working until it becomes big. You can try to become huge quickly, as a startup unicorn (which then will take many tries till you succeed) or go for a more traditional business and continuously build it over a long period of time.

If you want to go somewhere in the middle and make tens of millions, maybe hundreds, then you can switch from the software developer track to the CEO track (note that i didn't say middle-manager track). In that case, you essentially prove that you can basically be a mini-CEO, but within the confines of a very large company, by heading up a department. Then you keep on doing this with larger and larger departments, until at the end you're the CEO of the company. And then from there you leap frog from company to company, being CEO of larger and larger companies. Of course, it's often very difficult to get to those chances within a company, so succeeding as the CEO of a startup and then getting acquired (and becoming the mini-CEO of your newly formed department) is kind a way to jump onto that track from the outside.

Or, you could try switching tracks and going into finance. There, starting as an employee, there's a more clear path to make your way up the chain to partner. And since your salary is more along the lines of a percentage of revenue, as opposed to a flat salary, there's an order of magnitude more potential than as an engineer employee.

Your answer might simply be "a humongous bank balance" - and if so that's perfectly fine; money is (one way) that people "keep score" in life, and some people are motivated simply by trying to bag that high score. We've all heard of people who spend all their time accumulating enormous sums while living frugally, and die without apparently ever really getting to enjoy the fruits of their labor -- in many such cases I would argue that this is simply because it's the labor itself they enjoyed most, the chase after wealth, rather than what the wealth could buy them.

But let's be honest: many, if not most people who wish they were richer aren't looking at that bank balance as an end in itself. They want certain things from life, and those things vary a great deal from person to person. You might want to buy a big house. You might want to be able to indulge your expensive hobbies. You might want to travel the world. You might simply want to quit working and go lie on the beach and drink Mai Tais all day. Or perhaps it's the exact opposite: you have a big idea that you desperately want to work on you need the money to invest in that. Or you might actually not care so much about buying stuff: maybe you long for the feeling of having other people perceive you as rich, for example, or you want to exert power over other people in your environment.

I think it might be helpful to try to challenge yourself to identify what you would like to achieve, without reference to money. (Assuming you aren't one of those rare people for whom the bank balance in itself is the only goal - if so, ignore this exercise entirely.) Make a list, prioritizing it to the extent possible. Be honest with yourself (you're the only person who has to see this list): if, for example, the status of having other people perceive you as wealthy is important to you, write it down.

Then, go down your list and try to estimate how much money, realistically, you would need to attain each item.

Finally, go down the list again and, for each item, think about whether there are ways you could achieve it without getting rich. Write down all your ideas, even if they seem ridiculous or impractical. For example, you might want to travel the world, and being rich would certainly make that possible in a straightforward way, but plenty of people throughout history have "gone nomad" on little or no money. It might seem unthinkable given your current situation, family, etc. - or it might be that your idea of traveling the world is first-class airfare, not hitchhiking. That's fine. You should still write it down as a theoretical alternative, along with the objections. If (sticking with the example) world travel is is high on your list, it's helpful to clarify to yourself exactly what is keeping you from "just doing it," that is -- in the extreme case of not being able to afford it -- wandering the world with nothing more to your name than a backpack and a willingness to do odd jobs and see where life takes you. Is it because that's not what you mean when you say world travel, or is it because you have obligations you feel you can't throw over, or is it something else?

You may find that there are alternative, no- or little-money solutions to many of your goals, at least some of which may not be entirely impractical. Lots of times, befriending the right people can get you access to resources and experiences you might otherwise have to spend a huge amount of money. Are there things on your list that you could attain this way?

Other times, you might find something that isn't within your personal reach achievable if you join forces with others. For example, you might really, really want a plane. That can be pretty expensive of course (not so much the purchase, but everything else that goes around it), but lots of pilots pool their resources and own planes jointly with others, or simply join a flying club. You mentioned woodworking; let's assume for the sake of argument that you yearn for a really well-equipped woodshop. That can be expensive (especially if you need to buy a bigger house so you have room for it!) But -- be creative. Is there a makerspace near you? If not -- what if you founded one? (Aside from the "joining forces" aspect, makerspaces can often attract valuable equipment and space donations.) Go beyond the obvious if you can: could you, say, wangle yourself into a part-time job teaching woodworking to students at a school with a well-equipped shop but no one to use it?

Even if one of your goals is "have others perceive me as being rich" -- throughout the ages, lots and lots of people have been very successful at presenting themselves as much wealthier than they actually are. It's a skill you may be able develop, if that's actually what you want, what makes you happy.

At the end of the exercise, try to come up with a plan. You may have certain goals that you realize you can potentially attain via alternative methods. If they're important enough to you, you might even realize in the course of examining things that your best road is to disrupt your current life in a way that you previously thought unthinkable. You might have other goals that you decide aren't so important after all, that perhaps you're willing to abandon for the time being. And undoubtedly there will be some goals that are both very important to you and that you feel, realistically, are only attainable by amassing enough money - the amount that you estimated in your first pass over the list.

Arrange those goals in the order you want to achieve them - some things, after all, you might be able to delay for a significant time (e.g. tuition to college of choice for currently school-age kids), whereas others you might be unwilling to delay any longer. Try to assign approximate timelines for each.

If you plot these on a graph, you arrive at a very rough estimate of future expenditures. You now have a concrete target -- not just a single number, but a time series -- for the wealth that you want to accumulate. If you're lucky, this isn't overly front-loaded. If you need a million dollars for something you feel you just have to have tomorrow, you might just be out of luck. (Although, depending on what it is, you might be able to use appropriate leverage. Starting a business is your goal? What sources of credit could you potentially scare up?)

Best case scenario, your graph starts relatively low and trends up over time (that is, you can delay progressively larger expenditures for longer). Then, draw a curve based on your current wealth and investable income, projecting growth forward at a reasonable rate of return, and taking into account your projected future expenditures. If you're really lucky, then that curve stays above the expenditure timeline the whole way. Then you're done -- no need to worry any more about getting rich, because by your definition of being rich (being able to afford all the things you want, when you want them) you already are. :-)

One project I'd suggest you checking is Chainlink. Check out these reading and video:

https://blog.goodaudience.com/chainlink-the-missing-piece-to...

https://medium.com/@smartcontentpublication/accessing-all-bl...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufVyX7JDCgg

Cheers to financial freedom :)