Adam, Andrew and I were having a discussion about Fuck You money on twitter. The idea is:
I have enough money to say "fuck you" to anyone I would normally have to work for, as I can live off the interest.
Adam worked it out to be about 4.5 million NZD, or about £1.9 million. Quite a bit of money, tho not a massive amount, really. This would net an income of around 200K/year, which in New Zealand is a very nice amount to live on.
I/we have a few questions:
First, how many people do you know who have hit this before normal retirement age? What percentage of the population would hit it before retirement age? And what about after/on retirement?
I'd say very few. Maybe <1% of the NZ population (or the UK one for that matter) before retirement, and 1% or so after. Thats not a lot.
But how much do you have to have to live if you take away your biggest expense: your house? If you are not paying a mortgage or rent (or credit cards for that matter), your required income is a lot, LOT lower. That 200K a year could easily become 100K without effecting lifestyle if you dont have to pay rent or the bank. To get that you could do it with 3 million NZD, easily, maybe less. And living somewhere cheap - small house in NZ, outside a main city (or even close to one?) - or in Andrew's case Sri Lanka - could make a lot of difference to the amount needed to get rid of that huge payment every month.
So, how to get to the FU money amount?
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Build and sell a business?
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Shares?
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Property?
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iPhone app? (hrmm, yeah, right...)
Anyone notice that "working for someone else" isn't in that list?
Maybe something to think about for all the people with large mortgages on large houses they maybe don't need....
