If you were to choose 1 of these 2 lifestyles witch one would you choose?
 

If you were to choose 1 of these 2 lifestyles witch one would you choose? They both involve work obviously because you need to make money to stay alive.

Option 1: Work a normal 40 hours a week making say ($20 an hour). Saving ALOT of money and spending it how you wish. I could easily afford a $20,000 road bike and I could buy all the latest cycling stuff and go cycling for the rest of my life.




Option 2: Work very hard for 15 years minimum to 35 years maximum, But make atleast $300,000 a year or more.



So.... What option would you choose and why?



Please mods do not move this post to another section, because my computer will not allow me to see it after its moved.

I literally went from #1 to #2 this past year after having finished all my endless medical training and starting practice.

Ok, I worked a lot more than 40 hours per week for most of my time in #1, but for the final 2 years at stage #1, was definitely at or even under 40hrs / week for about that amount of pay.

I think you're overestimating how much money you'll have available as option #1. $20/hr doesn't get you far at all, even as a single person. With a typical 8hr ish workday, that works out to about $32000-$36000 / year. If you're living at your parents' house, it becomes much more doable, but if not, you'll shell out at probably $10k+ in rent if you don't have a roommate.




IN addition, The two major costs you might be overlooking if you think this earning level is saving a LOT of money is:

- Retirement savings. Do you have a plan for retirement and an idea of how much money you will need, including health care? It's all fine and good as a 20 something living super frugally, but how do you plan on living when you get old enough that you have limited mobility, and ever increasing health care and medical costs which are unlikely to be readily covered by the gov't?
- Do you plan on having kids? Lots of 20somethings say hell no, never! but change their mind once their older. Life is very different with a family - $36k/year is really scraping rock bottom for a family of 3, and as 4, nearly qualifies for food stamps.
- Planning on buying a house? Be prepared to save for a LONG time at that income level to make the downpayment. You'll also be priced out of nearly all communities with a good public school district (these tend to start minimum $200k, even in the cheapest communities like Rochester, NY.)

I can be as frugal as one gets, having lived at very low income levels for 15 years, or nearly all of my adult life thus far. I managed to save money, but I wouldn't say it was easy - I had to watch costs on everything I did, and price usually was the determining factor for nearly everything I did or chose. Spending even $20 to go out for a dinner+movie alone was a serious cost, and if I doubled it for a date, it mentally hurt me.




Now that I've spent 1.5 years at #2, for me at least, I would absolutely choose #2. Mainly for the long-term security sake. Yes, you'll likely burn out if it's a 80hr-wk high pressure job, but you would make so much in 2 years that it makes #1 look like a joke. As well, if you have the skills to actually get hired anywhere even for a short period of time at #2, you'll have a skillset that will be marketable enough to find a job at less money, somewhere in the world. Whereas the skillset of #1 is usually low-level enough that if you lose your job, you'll be out of ANY work for quite awhile.

I'll be honest - I could definitely make #1 work if it was just me, and all about me, and be totally happy with my simple, frugal life. However, I got married and just had a kid 2 years ago, and if anything, wow I'm glad I make good money now. I knew this before going to #2, but I can't even imagine bringing up my child on a family income of <$60k/yr, and that's excluding all luxuries and pricey options. Once the family is involved, all of a sudden you can't just live in a shack in the crappy part of town - the houses that are family-friendly are usually pretty expensive, and if you're in a urban or nice area, think insanely expensive.

No contest for me, having done both. #2 all the way. Even if #2's income level was $100k, it would still be a no-brainer #2. (I'd set my #2 pay limit at $60k, or roughly 2x the pay of #1 for me to start even to seriously reconsider doing#1, even as a single person.)

(Of note, even with my current income level which actually gives a significant amount of 'disposable', I have to play catch-up for the last 10 years of lost wages due to training, so all that disposable goes right to catch up retirement savings and emergency fund. So at least for the next decade, it's not really disposable. I still ride an entry level $650 road bike, and don't plan on upgrading it even though I ride pretty seriously.)

#2

You have foo-blocker installed ?

1.

I teach.

Where do you live? $20 an hour goes a lot further where I live (WV) than it will in Southern Cali.

1.

I work for the state government. :o

Also, OP, if you are going to spell the word which "w i t c h" you may not really have to worry about which one you end up doing. ;)

None of the above.

They both suck.

Making $20.00/hr means you live paycheck to paycheck.

Making 300k (by working mega hours) means you don't live at all.

+1

The answer is usually somewhere in the middle....

Option 1 would be living in the poorhouse in Chicago or New York or living in a 1 bedroom with multiple roommates. If I could have made more at an early age to get out of the rat race at a younger age, I would have. But having lived through it once, I can tell you that it never works out according to plan. Life happens: you have kids, college tuition for said kids is triple what you planned for, the company has a few rough years, layoffs, the economy goes up and down, the stock market tumbles, etc., etc. Make what you can, save as much as you can for retirement and live your life each day like it counts. And it will count a lot more if you enjoy it by doing things you love (like cycling).

Or you could go my route and marry a Doctor.

neither....

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/
http://earlyretirementextreme.com/

The questions are the ones that you ask yourself before you go to college, when you're still living at home, at least I did when I was either in high school or going through (cheap) college fully supported by the parents.

$20/hour is about the upper average income for a person I think (avg income is $30-35k/year?). In other words this is not a low end job, it's actually a mid-range job.

$300k/year is an extremely high end job, at least right now. Very few people will see this number.

Reality is, as mentioned before, in the middle. If you want to think low end job, think $10-12/hr while living at home (no rent etc; still a kid so parents don't expect rent). When I lived like this (but my pay was much lower, more like $5-7/hr, a long time ago), I was spending $5-8k a summer on bike stuff, literally every penny I made and most of what I received. I saved $500? over four years or some such nonsense, and it was probably a gift check my mom put in the bank for me.

(To give you an idea of the time, the 2? year CD at the time made 17.9% interest - the prior week it was 18.1%. Interest. For a CD! What I wouldn't give to have a FDIC insured 18% return on my money.)

A high end job, and I think most people would agree, gives you about $10-15k/month, or $120-180k/year. That's a realistic number for a 40s-50s year old person. I don't make it, never did (although I made that rate for a while, never a full year). Hopefully I'll make that much one day. When I made my higher salaries (in the last 10 years) I was commuting about 3 hours a day, working 8-12 hour days, 5 or 6 days a week. It was a non-life.

For an ideal job?

This is the one job I walked away from for more money. I worked closely with the CTO and one of 16 Directors of a large company, so it was nice, no stupid paperwork, no dumb policies, just good straightforward work. You got what you asked for, you didn't ask for stupid stuff. Everyone worked well together.

I worked 3 days, 12 hours a day (7a-7p). I worked one Sunday a month, 12 hours also. My three days were either M-Tu-W or Th-Fr-Sa. We had to swap work cycles every month.

So say Jan I worked M-W.
Feb I work Th-Sa.
Think about the transition week.

Every two months I'd have to work 6 out of 7 days. Every other two months I'd be off M-Sa (because I was working Th-Sa, skip M-W, skip the new month's off cycle Th-Sa), and, if you were a good performer (best of 4) you got the Sunday off as well.

I never worked a Sunday in the off cycle so I had Th-Fr-Sa-Su-M-Tu-W off every two months without a vacation day taken. (We got 2 weeks initially I think, 4 weeks later, per year).

I usually volunteered to work the Sunday in my 3+3 week so I worked 7 days straight. I didn't mind as long as no race on Sunday.

I was paid as if I were working 40 hours/week. The office had a nice gym, showers, and tons of security so I could leave my bike anywhere I wanted. The office was a 35 min ride away from the house, 18 min drive, so I was away from the house say 6:30a-8p on my work days.

On my off days I helped out (for free and for exchange for help on my car) at a friend's garage, working on cool old cars. I trained. I did stuff around the house. etc.

One day my old employers called me, wanted me to come back.

"That's crazy. I work 3 days a week, and I'm away from 6:30-8, less hours than if I worked in the city. If I were to work 2 more days that's 66% more (i.e. 5 days is 1 2/3 times 3 days). I wouldn't move for a less than a 20% raise. The train ticket costs $5k pretax. There's more income tax for NYC and NY. I'd need 66% plus another 20% over that plus $5k, and I got a 20+% raise from my old salary there when I moved to this company."

Guy named a crazy high number. It was $1k below my best scenario dollar amount.

I quit my job and went back to the grind, making . It totally sucked.

#3: Paperback Writer. Make a million every couple of years, live in seclusion with your dog, and work when you have to, ride when you want. Also, everybody in town pretends to be your friend. What could be better than that?

Paul

I kinda like that option choice.

There's a surgeon here in our pretty small community. He does surgeries 2 days a week, takes home $20,000 every week. He probably works some the other days as well, and he'll work some weekends at the hospital. But still, not too shabby. I wouldn't personally want to do that, but it sounds fabulous on the income side.

Me...? I fall much closer to option 1, but wish I'd finished college and headed in the direction of option 2. I still value free time more than income, though.

I stay under this delusion: while biking, I'll find $500K of abandoned drug money on the side of the road, surreptitiously stuff it into my jersey pockets, live off the (current) 6-8% interest, and piddle the rest of the time. ;)

Since you can't view it if we move it I will close it and ask that you repost it in foo. I will leave this thread here so you can see the replies up until now.