> Sometimes you don't make enough money to retire early from a combination of bad luck and poor financial decisions.
This feels a bit wrong to me. I don't think it takes bad luck or poor decisions to not be able to retire early for most people. I think it's quite to opposite. I think it's pretty rare and you need a serious stroke of good luck to be able to retire significantly early.
Maybe it's different in the valley, (I'm not even US based at all), but where I am, very very few people are financially independent enough to retire early.
Obviously, it depends a bit on your definition of 'early'. My dad worked average jobs and never got any big lucky breaks (apart from being part of the generation that was buying property at the right time to get in cheap and be downsizing at the peak), but has saved well and is retiring something like 5 years ahead of the standard age. That's do able with just good decisions and no bad luck. But I think what's being talked about here is retiring more like 30 years early when you are in you mid 30s. That requires some serious good luck and is fairly rare.
You may lament the fact you had some options that you didn't sell at the right time. Well the average person has never had options that were worth selling at all. I've worked in tech my whole career, including some funded startups of the 40-60 people sort of size, but never had stocks or options even offered.
Did you read the article? It's not about most people. The article is about jobs in the Silicon Valley software/tech industry not just jobs in general. Everybody at startups and software companies gets options, and a small but not insignificant percentage of them get rich. The article is about the attitude that if you didn't get rich you must not be any good at your job.
I did. I was replying to the parents comment about not being able to retire early specifically because of bad luck. Not the article directly.
And even based on your comment, I still think that statement sounds wrong to me.
> a small but not insignificant percentage of them get rich.
It happening to a small percentage means it require good luck for it to happen to you, not just the absence of bad luck (which implies it happens to most people unless they have bad luck).
This feels a bit wrong to me. I don't think it takes bad luck or poor decisions to not be able to retire early for most people. I think it's quite to opposite. I think it's pretty rare and you need a serious stroke of good luck to be able to retire significantly early.
Maybe it's different in the valley, (I'm not even US based at all), but where I am, very very few people are financially independent enough to retire early.
Obviously, it depends a bit on your definition of 'early'. My dad worked average jobs and never got any big lucky breaks (apart from being part of the generation that was buying property at the right time to get in cheap and be downsizing at the peak), but has saved well and is retiring something like 5 years ahead of the standard age. That's do able with just good decisions and no bad luck. But I think what's being talked about here is retiring more like 30 years early when you are in you mid 30s. That requires some serious good luck and is fairly rare.
You may lament the fact you had some options that you didn't sell at the right time. Well the average person has never had options that were worth selling at all. I've worked in tech my whole career, including some funded startups of the 40-60 people sort of size, but never had stocks or options even offered.