One should be simply amazed that amidst the AI hype most fail to realise that if it's too good to be true, it probably is! Just waiting for this bubble to pop.
>> Migrating away is obviously not an option in 2025 and onwards
Why so? Yes it may seem difficult with lesser immigration friendly sentiments; however that shouldn't deter you.
You haven't mentioned your current situation, your experience etc to give more tailored suggestions. However, if making a living is not a concern for you in Nepal, then that gives you the freedom to pursue contributing to open source projects in subjects/areas (graphics programming may be) of your choice.
Otherwise based on your experience, you can apply to companies in UK and Europe, many will sponsor if you have the right skills and experience. That takes a while but it's not impossible.
Have you explored India as an option as Nepal and India have free trade movement and Banglaore/Hyderabad/Pune are great options if you focus on product and FAANG companies there. This may in fact be an easier route to get valuable experience in a reputed company.
>> My age is 28...
And 28 is hardly the age really to worry about moving/not moving, unless there are compelling reasons like having to stay back for strong personal reasons.
>> Of course, exceptional circumstances exist where long hours are required
Sorry, but despite your best intentions, even those long hours are wrong and unnecessary. It's the leadership's planning skills and inability to take responsibility of the exceptional circumstances. In such a situation good leadership just cuts scope without flinching and reflects to avoid a repeat.
I’m really only talking about existential threats to the business and things of that ilk. 99% of the things people consider to be “exceptional” are not.
Start as early as possible in investing (in index funds) and otherwise being financially savvy. It is very beneficial to realise early on that growing your hard earned money and spending it wisely is way more important as it will in the future lead to some unexpected benefits. Freedom of thought and action!
holding a position generates no taxable income unless you fuck up and buy an etf
backed by section 1256 or something. make it sound complicated and sell products who cares
An investing prof at Chicago puts this on the whiteboard at the start of semester, saying this is really all most people need to know and this class is unlikely to learn anything in his or any class that will let them, personally, do better.
That’s good advice for a layman but most high earners can do much better if they care and are motivated. Most are neither though lol.
Mostly on the tax side. Some specific examples:
- after maxing out your 401k what should you do next? IRA? Mega backdoor roth? Something else?
- If you have kids, how to best save for future education expenses? Hint: consider 529 plan.
- HSA is technically the best tax advantaged account, most high earners don’t realize it and “waste” the HSA funds to reimburse typical medical bills. HSA has triple tax benefits: contributions are tax-free, growth is tax-free, and withdrawals are also tax-free after age 65 for any reason, not just medical expenses. So basically investing without any tax obligation. You can also withdraw tax free before 65, but for medical expenses only.
i could go on…investing is great, but reducing your tax obligation is an even more powerful technique if you want to grow your net worth.
What you have stated is almost the same as call Vanguard, all those options are the same in the sense that they all involve investing, leaving it alone for a long time. Its just the vehicle thats slightly different and tax advantages.
I wouldn’t consider those options needing much motivation or research. The key with all of them is investing early and leaving it alone.
If one is clueless with investing and taxes in general, and they call vanguard, their eyes will glaze over. It would be like me explaining software development to my 85 year old father.
I do agree people should call vanguard. But just blindly following steps they give you is unlikely to be productive if you don’t understand why you’re doing those steps. Furthermore, those people who don’t understand _why_ will freak out every time there’s a huge market correction. They get scared - because they don’t understand any of it.
I’m also curious, do they offer financial advice for your accounts outside vanguard? Genuinely curious since i’m unsure.
I’ve think the “call” part is a bit from the past, should be a setup account online with Vanguard, put it in VOO or VTSAX or the equivalent low fee market index fund and leave it alone.
Replace Vanguard with any other firm but the key is picking low fee ETFs and leaving them alone. Vanguard tends to have a reputation for the lowest fees.
Looked into HSA recently at work but legally you need a high deductible health care plan to be eligible. Looking at the options, just nothing looked good compared to my current $0 deductible/$0 co-pay plan. Hard to know for sure but just seemed like I would be paying a lot more out of pocket every year.
reading this sparked my interest as it is a great idea but from what I've read if you are covered by a non hdhp you can not do this per IRS publication 969. too bad because that would have been one hell of a loophole and I would have considered starting an astronomically high deductible with ultra low premium secondary insurance company to cater to this market
The HSA thing intrigued me and so I did some digging. It appears that post-65, you still have to pay income tax on non-medical withdrawals from an HSA? That is, besides the tax-free-for-medical-expenses part it reverts to a traditional IRA?
One additional trick though is that it looks like you can pay for any HSA-eligible medical expenses (incurred after you created the HSA) out-of-pocket now, and reimburse your bills at any point in the future? Thus you can still earn interest on the cash before withdrawing it at any point in the future (treating it as tax-free liquidity).
(I don't fully understand this so these are questions not statements, but hopefully I'm correct!)
> The HSA thing intrigued me and so I did some digging. It appears that post-65, you still have to pay income tax on non-medical withdrawals from an HSA?
That's what I understood too. That claim that you can completely skip taxes looks wrong.
One thing to note!!!! Make sure to also keep records on the HSA start date and any transfers you may engage in, e.g., after leaving an employer or just changing providers. It is worth having that on record in case 20, 30, 40 years later your claims are rejected because the original opening date was lost in some transfer at some point.
But does this mean I need to keep receipts around for decades? What if a claim gets denied and dr. is dead or no longer practicing?
Has anyone tested this HSA claim approval amd reimbursement of 30/40/50 year old medical work before? Is there a chance the rules could change and the medical care has to be recent?
The HSA is like a bank or investment account, not an insurance program; there's no claim process; you just withdraw the money whenever you want at your say-so. There is only an IRS audit process if they think you acted against the rules of the HSA.
For keeping receipts, we have a process where we dump our eligible receipts into a folder on the NAS and have the scanner/printer setup with a one-button "medical scan" that also dumps paper bills into that folder. You only need receipts to substantiate your position during an audit if they decide to do one, so a big pile of receipts and a spreadsheet with the annual amounts is enough for my taste.
For a reduction of taxes at our full federal tax bracket plus our state income rate, it's worth keeping a folder on the NAS and pushing a button on the scanner a couple handful of times per year.
> Is there a chance the rules could change and the medical care has to be recent?
There's always a theoretical chance, but any prior (or likely then-current year) medical bills would almost surely still remain eligible for reimbursement. The worst case that I can see as being likely is a rule change to require that a 2026 expense would have to be claimed by April 15, 2027. But I wouldn't expect that and think there's precedent that they couldn't change the reimbursement eligibility for expenses incurred prior to the law change. US v Carlton is one where specifically a one-year period of retroactive change was found to be "supported by a legitimate legislative purpose furthered by rational means" which suggests to me (IANAL) that longer periods of retroactive change would likely be found to violate due process.
i’m the parent. You are correct, my mistake! It’s too late to edit at this point. :(
What I should have said is that after 65 you can spend it on non medical stuff without penalty. BUT if you do so you’ll owe tax that year (withdrawal).
So to summarize, you can avoid all tax if it’s spent on medical stuff. For non medical (post 65) it’s still good, but not as good.
Still an amazing deal because old people tend to spend a lot more on healthcare.
i tried that hack one year. Cigna just emptied my account on the first try with a provider charging 2 emergency room visits when I was there only for a xray.
Cigna refused to lift a finger unless i sued them both.
At least the 401k, IRA, and HSA don't require knowing anything particularly arcane. Money goes in, don't touch until 59 1/2 (401k, IRA) or 65 (HSA).
529 plans can get a bit more complicated because you'll want one from your state (if your state has an income tax) and they may offer several, but then it's less about knowing tax code specifics than about what the differences are between their offerings.
right, it’s not that arcane at all. I discovered all this over a couple weekends in my 20s. Started on reddit, then moved on to more official guides and books. I spent maybe 5 weekends in total doing this learning.
It’s really not that hard and i don’t understand why more people aren’t interested. Let’s reframe for a minute…if i said a high earner could retire a year earlier, or maybe even a few years earlier just by learning some semi-advanced tax strategies. Should they do so? Yeah. They’d be crazy not to lol.
Is it really x% of the profits? Most of the investment and financial advising services that I've had pitched to me (although that's not too many, tbh) seem to charge x% of your portfolio, and if their sage advice doesn't create a return greater than x% then sucks to be you.
As much as I hate the American health care system as a senior citizen, there is an out of pocket maximum that you can budget for if you have all of the parts.
From what I understand it’s Medicare Part A+B and either Part C or Medigap.
Of course private insurance especially for older Americans like Part C and Medigap is Byzantine if you actually need it and some doctors don’t accept Medicaid (low income) and a few don’t even accept Medicare.
I don’t know much from either first hand or second hand experience because my mom and dad (83 and 81) are under my mom’s teacher’s retirement insurance and between them (two pensions + social security) medical expenses are more of a nuisance than something that they stress about.
My comment had nothing to do with being a senior citizen.
If you're putting the maximum in your HSA each year, you're participating in a high-deductible healthcare plan.
> If you got your HSA-qualified HDHP through your employer, your average [premium] looked like $90 per month if you were single and $432 for your family.
> Median annual deductible for private industry workers participating in HDHP plans was $2,750.
> Average out-of-pocket maximum was $4,422 for single coverage.
I’ve only had one employer that allowed after tax contributions (which for other people reading this is not the same as Roth 401K).
The issue is that most companies don’t allow it because of compliance reasons and rules regarding highly compensated employees. Of course the one company that did allow it was BigTech.
Not that I’m missing much. I doubt I will be in a higher tax bracket at retirement than I am now and I live in a state tax free state.
To me the primary benefit is when it comes to RMDs. Having a mix of traditional and Roth allows me to draw down the traditional in lower tax years to avoid RMD and have the Roth to fill in those later years or pass on to children. Plus, if you’ve maxed the $23,500ish of the traditional 401k and still have extra to save, it’s more tax advantaged in a Roth vs a taxable brokerage account.
These are obviously champagne problems but if you’re a high earning W2 it’s worth considering.
I think I should be able to do that post retirement by optimizing withdrawals with balancing tax brackets the first few years of retirement. I will have to put catch up contributions
in a Roth 401K anyway starting next year (new tax law).
There is no secret. I’m 51 and the math says I won’t be able to retire until the earliest when I’m 66.5 and my wife turns 65 and probably won’t retire until I’m 68.5 and my wife turns 67. Since she will be claiming spousal social security (50% of mine) and that’s when hers doesn’t get any larger by waiting.
That’s with my projecting maxing out my 401K + catchup contributions + in a couple + in two years after another obligation falls off maxing out a Roth.
Don’t cry for me. I work remotely, we travel extensively and do the digital nomad thing sporadically. Like next year we are going to Costa Rica for a month and half in the winter and travel domestically in the summer. We live in a unit of a condotel we own and it gets rented out when we aren’t at home to cover the market.
The way I see it, no need to wait until retirement to travel and by the time I do, we will be doing longer stays in Costa Rica, Panama City, etc
I’m not rich, and I make around $200K as a staff consultant working at a third party cloud consulting company.
An important part that could have been beneficial would have been to add, "today".
I had a class where the teacher did something similar, but she showed that if you started a ROTH today and contributed only the 4 years you were in college and then stopped forever. You would have nearly the same amount of money as someone who started 1 year after they completed college and invested every year until retirement.
Ultimately she was encouraging us to take out student loans and invest it or use any excess scholarship money to max out a ROTH IRA. She even advocated for investing all student loan money and opening credit cards tp actually pay for college, making minimum payments until graduation. Then moving away to a LCOL country and learn the language for 8-9 years while remaining in school taking 1 online class a year and travelling the world on student loans and not to worry about starting a career until 30 and start paying once you are back and start a job.
The today does matter but just did the math on that and your teacher was whack.
The gap is so big I’m going to be imprecise and won’t matter.
A Roth allows 7k a year I believe. So 4 years of school, 28k total.
Let’s be generous and say you start with 30k at age 18. At 65 you’ll have 700k.
I started at 26, my salary has been increasing at 6k a year average. I don’t max it out, but hover around 10-15%, I get a 100% match on up to 7% of my salary. I’m 10x ahead of the 18yo on the same projection and 5x ahead 10 years earlier.
Not even going to get into the interest rates and how you’re fucking up your finances tremendously for the rest of your adult life
I'm not sure what numbers you are using / getting, you didn't show the math. But if you start with 30K at 18. You would have ~$800,000 at 65.
If you start at 30, and put in $600 a month, each month, until 65. You would have ~$1,088,000.
Yes, in the end you get more, but that is with contributing for 35 years each month, vs just contributing in the beginning. I know those aren't the exact numbers that would be relevant because it was actually making the annual contribution for 4 years, not the lump sum. But the numbers were similar, yes you have more in the end, but you could also have a reasonably similar amount without actually working and contributing for 35 years.
Yeah, that was covered, it was an entrepreneurship class so one of the first things we learned was how to start an LLC and pay ourselves at least enough to get the EIC and to make sure we had enough years to qualify for Medicare. I remember one of the examples was about how Donald Trump licenses his signature and pays himself a royalty everytime he uses it or something similar.
My millionaire, step-father-in-law, gave this advice to my brother when graduated.
I was lucky, my physics department administrator told me the same thing when I was graduating.
The 2ND best piece of advice is to rollover your 401k when you move to a new company -> this cost me at least 500k because they effectively stagnate when your company isn't paying the maintenance cost (AIUI).
> this cost me at least 500k because they effectively stagnate when your company isn't paying the maintenance cost
Is this true? My understanding is that the fees come out of the account itself. There's other good reasons to roll over (primarily investment flexibility) but I have not heard of something like this.
Vanguard is one of the cooler-structured brokerages. Vanguard (the management firm) is owned by the mutual funds themselves, of which you are an investor of. So their shareholder obligation is genuinely towards "clients" of the individual mutual funds. As far as I'm aware, this is the only mutually-owned mutual fund firm.
It's definitely got a solid track record and good fees, but these are things I'd feel weird about advertising it on HN for.
- they have bad customer service
- they have a bad website that hides important information
- they don’t have cheaper funds than others
- they were latest to the party on commission free trading.
vanguards very large and they're a mutual fund, so they have a lower profit motive than most brokers for it. they're basically the standard retirement fund company now
What I think they're referring to is their sheer size (ratio of customers or $ invested to staff) has meant historically the annual % fees on mutual funds and other investments have been lower than at other institutions.
It's... less unique to Vanguard these days, as several of the large providers have equivalent low-cost funds you can invest in; but 15 years ago it was more significant, iirc.
My mistake was not starting early, because the numbers were small and it didn’t seem worth the time. The habit and systems are important to build, so that when the numbers do get bigger it goes to the right place.
Starting my adult life with the markets in freefall made it hard to get in the habit of investing. All through school, people told me "most people don't start investing until their 30s, and end up in a worse than they ought to because the time-value of money compounds a bunch if you add a few more years." I thought I knew better than to be one of those people.
Instead, I ended up keeping a lot of savings in cash during years when the interest rates were approximately 0. I've tried to get better at putting money into the markets over the past few years, but my financials look very different than they might have.
> In other words, 2008 had no meaningful impact on you then.
People who graduated in the late 00s might not have accrued big financial losses, but it had a very meaningful impact on my comfort investing.
I don't follow. The markets were low, great time to invest. Great time to buy a home. 2008 was bad for people who owned homes or were already investing.
You have to view it from a new investor's perspective. They have just started their career, earning (small amounts of) money for the first time, and investing would have them see a loss of 5-10% of their hard earned money, at least in the short term. They wouldn't know, or would have to believe that the loss will be outweighed by future returns at the time.
Not sure if it's appropriate to post ChatGPT's response here, but I gave the same challenge to o3 and it's response was:
```
2025-07-20 10:32
That’s an exhilarating challenge! But here’s the sober reality:
*1. Scale & Surface Area*
* *Jira* and *GitLab* each represent well over a decade of engineering effort from dozens‑to‑hundreds of developers, QA, designers, product managers, and SREs.
* They’re not just web apps—they’re ecosystems: issue tracking, CI/CD pipelines, permissions, integrations, APIs, marketplace extensions, mobile clients, high‑availability clustering, compliance tooling, analytics, and elaborate permission models.
*2. Engineering Effort in One Week*
Even an aggressive “strip‑to‑core‑features” build would demand:
That’s after *scope‑cutting to the bone*—and still well beyond seven days for even a seasoned full‑stack team.
*3. Minimum Viable “Clone”*
If the goal is a demo that looks Jira‑ or GitLab‑like and handles the absolute basics (login, create issue, simple Kanban board or Git repo viewer), you’d still need:
* *Pre‑built OSS components* (e.g., Focalboard, Gitea, Drone CI)
* *Glue code* to stitch UI, auth, and database models
* *DevOps* for cloud deploy, backups, SSL, monitoring
* *Acceptance tests* so the demo doesn’t fall over during the pitch
With a well‑coordinated *5‑7 person tiger team*, an MVP façade might be shown inside a week—but it would be fragile, feature‑poor, and nowhere near production‑ready.
*4. What \$1 million can buy fast*
* *Fork & skin* an existing open‑source platform (e.g., Forgejo for GitLab‑like, OpenProject or Plane for Jira‑like).
* Hire a *dedicated squad* (engineers, designer, DevOps) on a 3‑to‑6‑month crash program to reach parity for the specific subset of features you actually need.
* Budget for *security audit, uptime SLA, and ongoing maintenance*—because the first release is only the beginning.
*5. Suggested Next Steps*
1. *Clarify scope:* Which exact capabilities do you really need on Day 1?
2. *Select a foundation:* OSS codebase vs. greenfield build.
3. *Form a team + timeline:* Realistically 12–24 weeks for a hardened v1 with a mid‑sized team.
4. *Milestones & deliverables:* Demo, beta, public launch, enterprise tier.
5. *Contingency planning:* Budget for security, scaling, and feature creep.
If you’d like, I can help map out a detailed project plan, assemble a tech‑stack recommendation, or break down resourcing and costs. Let me know how you’d like to proceed!
```
edit: typo