Left Wall Street career in early 30s to build an independent consulting/advisory/venture practice and spend some years in Europe @thejunteau @thegoodsletter
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Joined December 2020
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Very cool but only because of the instantaneous of the code ideation and creation… all things a human can do and has done. Just 10000x faster.
I think $1-3MM is no man’s land.. a tighter band.
Level 4 (1M–10M) really is the no-man's-land of wealth.
For example, going from $100k to $300k can change your life. You can quit a job, move somewhere else, or take a chance on something of your own.
Going from $5M to $5.2M? You're richer, but you don't notice the increase anymore in the same way. This is where the diminishing returns start to show.
Back in 2021, when I went from $500k to $1m, I felt like on top of the world. It was a big change for me. A little backstory: in Feb 2021, I quit my 9-5 job with $500k NW, and it felt like a huge achievement. I knew it wasn’t enough to live off forever, but it was enough to dare to bet on myself.
During the years after 21’ there have been periods where my NW has increased a lot, and periods where it went a bit down or barely went up at all.
So I can very much relate to what Nick says: at some point, you could “work” twice as hard and barely notice the difference in your life. Your portfolio grows. But the extra money buys you less, while the time it costs you stays the same.
This is where I think a lot of people in crypto get stuck. You know how to make money. But unless you increase the risk, your NW will only go up linearly.
Because you might have to risk money you no longer want to lose. So you end up in the middle, the 7-figure hell (no man's land).
Imagine spending another year glued to crypto to make an extra $200k on a $5M portfolio (4% increase).
Don’t misunderstand me, that’s a lot of money, but many people don’t want to risk the big gains they’ve already earned, and since they don’t, their NW will barely move, and they’re forever trapped in the 7-fig hell.
I have a friend who’s worked at a sort of IT consulting company for almost 10 years.
Makes almost $300K/year now.
But he doesn’t really do anything. Says he “manages clients” and “puts out fires” and is exceptionally good at it… that he’ll never be replaced by AI… that management just leaves him alone.
Gets 5-10% pay bump every year and works maybe 1-2 hours a day top. He’ll take vacation with his family and not even tell anyone at work… all remote now. Says he can handle any issue from his phone.
I fear the future of W2 / white collar employment is just going to be putting bodies in seats based on some combination of social currency or popularity, corporate inertia, and “culture”… basically a mass UBI scheme disguised as meritocracy.
Might be cooked. Not sure!
Looking at houses for sale back in the states... NJ/NY/PA suburbs... and it's fascinating that homes are selling at all at these $1,000,000+ prices when they were $500-600K pre-COVID.
One one hand, you can just suck it up and pay 6-7% rates on a massive mortgage.
On the other hand, some folks seem resigned to the idea of just buying all-cash... being extremely house poor as a result... and betting/hoping that two things happen in their favor.... that the stock market stays sideways for longer (i.e. that they don't miss out on equity upside deploying all their liquidity into a house) and that rates will eventually fall back down to the 3-4% range and they'll quickly refinance.
Both strategies are painful.
Who is buying these properties? and which strategy?
Why not just rent instead until conditions improve? Because they won't?
VEO retweeted
Very hard to see how even 50% of today’s 18 year olds create an independent economic existence for themselves by the time they are 25.
I'll be 39 imminently.
It's just a number, for sure, but then again... it's the last year you can ever do something "in your 30s."
Like telling someone.. "In my 30s I did XYZ."
If you're 40+... is there anything you wish you did in your 30s rather than in your 40s, 50s, 60s, etc?
I still have a LinkedIn. On my desktop. Because people message me there. It's frustrating but necessary, sadly. But literally every single time I open it lately, the feed shows me people dying. Like a spouse sharing how his/her other half had a great career cut short and now has a terminal illness. Often there's a link to a gofundme page. Or someone's child who is sick. Or a friend posting on behalf of someone who has died. It's purely the algorithm because I have no idea who these people are.
Pure macabre.
Why is this happening?
I find it interesting that nobody ever models their own financials as they would a business. At least I never hear about this.
You Inc.
You have your topline "gross" revenue, then "net sales" after income tax.
Then your COGS... the expenses required for you to generate those sales... like your commute, your clothes, maintaining your social and professional networks (i.e. memberships, dues), etc.
Then your fixed overhead costs.. your house, personal vehicles, insurance, property tax, etc.
Then you have your actual real "earnings."
One of the most gravitas-filled moments I remember working on Wall Street was... one morning years ago we had a top well-known economist in the room and someone was peppering him with questions about his past views/analyses and how they square with the latest data releases... seemingly trying to put him on the spot.
He calmly looked up and said the following 6 words.
"When the facts change, I change."
Such beautiful, simple elegance in it.
I think about this moment all the time.
What's cool/creepy about Claude lately is...
You'll be working on something and Claude will tell you that it's having trouble pulling certain data from the web... and you'll move on and go about it a different way...
... then you'll notice that Claude is suddenly now grabbing the data it said earlier that it couldn't access...
... as if it was never a problem... it's as if it launched an agent in the background to brute force attack the problem, solved it, and just never told you it solved it...
My parents want us to come back to the US, as you'd imagine.
What's funny about it, though, is they complained about "how far away" we lived even when we all lived in NJ.
My parents live in North Jersey and we were living in the central NJ area... they'd complain about the 45-60 minute drive and how they can't "just swing by."
I guess the lesson is that unless your kids live next door to their grandparents... they'll always complain about where you live!