No offense, but you’ve got it wrong. Yes, you’re right, it’s bad to say “fuck you” to people. Point conceded, congratulations on your astute moral compass, it’s working just fine. Don’t ever change. But we’re not really talking about saying literally, OK? We are talking about saying “fuck you” not in the confrontational sense but in the sense of being able to withdraw without apology from the tiresome, petty, and sometimes degrading world of wage work. It doesn’t mean saying or doing rude things to your neighbors, or kids, or spouse, or even necessarily your boss. One could express it by saying “take this job and shove it” or even “I find the demands of work to be petty, degrading, and uninteresting, and I refuse to do them anymore”. But “fuck you” just has this succinctness, this aptness, this je ne sais quoi that makes it suitable as a term of reference even though you’d never actually use it. This has been explained several times now, and if you still can’t get it, you must be so blissfully enraptured with your own point that you have become wilfully dense to what others are saying.
I can only guess that ITR has never held down a job. At least not the sort of job where the boss tells you on Friday afternoon that he needs a memorandum on his desk first thing Monday morning, then the memorandum sits unread on the bosses’ desk for a month. Because if ITR had held that sort of job, he would understand that “fuck you” is actually an understatement a lot of the time.
Sheesh is right. I never intended to inspire lengthy blather about word choice; I wanted to discuss the attitude behind everything written in this thread, and only mentioned the words “fuck you” as a humorous lever to pry open the discussion. Even if your wryness meter isn’t functioning, post 53 ought to have clarified the point.
But that’s the same as saying that you only have superficial relationships with them. Real friends do sometimes make demands of each other, though hopefully within the bounds that all involved would call reasonable. For someone to qualify as a friend, they would I assume, sometimes ask for emotional support, understanding, ‘shoulder to cry on’, etc… and be willing to offer the same in return. Nonetheless a true friend isn’t someone you could blow off without consequence; you have an attachment to them going deep enough that cutting it would cause some distress. Thus the relationship isn’t wholly voluntary, in as much as each can inflict hurt on the other if it breaks.
What the fuck…? “Fuck you” money is your buffer against quarrelsome customers and annoying vendors - people with whom you have a purely financial relationship.
I can be dirt poor and still casually alienate my friends. Screw 'em! 
I figure the good old $1 million mark would do it, although I’ll probably never see it. My “career” as a gypsy journalist worked against Razorette’s attempts to invest anything for retirement. So, I’ll probably work until I’m in my seventies, hoping to hit the Lotto jackpot each week.
It’s not “fuck you” to your friends, it’s “fuck you” to your boss (or customers, clients, vendors, banks, whoever you need money from or owe money to). Obviously, if you like your boss, you don’t have to say it. If the only thing preventing you from saying “fuck you” to your friends is your financial situation, then you’re a dick. But the power of FU money is being able to ditch any relationship that you are financially obligated to maintain, even if it’s abusive.
Let’s take a look at a real world example:
Boss: you’re going to need to be in both Saturday and Sunday this weekend, we have a big flooferflaffle that is a priority to the client.
Me: but I have travel plans, we’re going to see my nephew for his birthday
Boss: well, you should reevaluate your plans with regards to your career goals and long term employment [translation: “fuck your plans”]
Me, with no money: ok, I’ll be in [translation: “shit. I wish I could quit but I have car payments and the rent is already 2 days late”]
Me, with FU money: fuck you, I quit
Many people are or have been stuck in jobs with asshole employers, and FU money is the point where you don’t need to put up with it, because you can quit and go do whatever you want at any point. I don’t think anyone here is talking about ostracizing your friends or family just because you have the cash.
Another possible outcome:
Me, with FU money: Sorry boss, but I planned this trip a long time ago. However, I’m happy to get to work first thing Monday morning.
Boss: Ummm, now that I think about it, the client won’t mind waiting a few extra days.
See, 8 times out of 10, if you are ready to walk, the other side will meet your terms.
Alright, friends aren’t a perfect analogy to bosses (whatever is?), but most of the time my friends are doing just fine, and in a normal day I have the choice to be with them or not. With FYM, I’d have that choice with my boss, EVERY day.
Pluss, a friend of mine that made as much demands as some bosses evidently do, wouldn’t get to for very long. Sure, friends can make demands, and should, but they shouldn’t be something you’d rather be without. Like bosses might.
Yes, that’s the whole point. Anybody I only have a superficial relationship with, and who makes undue demands on me, is entitled to be told “Fuck you”. The most common illlustration of this phenomenon would be “work”. People generally engage in “work” due to the fact that they need “money”. Thus, money allows you to end superficial burdensome relationships, leaving you time to focus on your more meaningful ones. Saying “Fuck you” is an optional but often satisfactory privilege of this condition. We refer to the money enabling this happy condition as “fuck you money” because it is a term that whose meaning would be immediately obvious to anyone more intelligent than a marmot.
Ding! Ding! Ding!
Give that man a copy of our home game!
That’s exactly it.
Getting back to basic assumptions, I really can’t seem to Magiver the numbers or change things in such a way that lets me meet goals realistically while taking out more than 2% a year without taking to much risk or straining my conservative assumptions. And, if we want FUM than we need confidence in our response.
To mix paraphrases from multiple characters in different works of fiction in entirely different media, let me say.
I’ve held the world in my hand like a marble with pretty veining. I’ve travelled the four corners of the world. I’ve fought many a good man, and I’ve lain with many a good women and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s this:
One may either attempt to raise one’s means to meet one’s aspirations or lower one’s aspirations to meet one’s means.
$100,000/year may not be Fuck you money, but maybe it’s “please excuse me, Money” or maybe even “Go to Hell, Money.” 5mm gets me that. It leaves me wiggle room, room for a bad market, room for a mistake, and it also gives me room for one or two major capital expenditures in the event of opportunity or emergency, or what have you.
All right. Now that that’s figured out we’ve done the hard part. Now all I have to do is get that sum.
Anybody like any particular stocks right now, or got a line on tomorrow’s trifecta?
One thing that you might not be considering is this: if you walk into a bank and say “I have recently withdrawn my considerable savings from one of your competitors because they displeased me. Can you do better?” the bank will very likely do better. When you bring $5,000,000 to a bank, you can get a better overall rate than I can get with my weekly paycheck, especially if you tell the bank manager you intend to park your money in his vault and live off the interest. Hell, I’m an ordinary Joe, but USAA will give me 5.91% for parking $175,000 in a CD for seven years. That’s over $10,000! A few years of that and you’re talking real money. 
Seriously, though, the more you bring in the door, the better they’ll take care of you.
Let me try to be more clear about what I’ve attempted to get across in this thread. People have attitudes. Attitudes change, but observation suggests that they rarely do. If a guy leans towards surly at 25, all odds are that he’ll still be that way at 35, and 45, etc… Likewise, a person’s attitudes pervade everything in a person’s life. I’ve never met anyone who’s explosively short-tempered around their family and friends while being all sunshine and roses at work, or vice versa.
The presentation of the thinking in this thread suggests an attitude. The original post and many of the following ones strongly imply that the author has a certain attitude. Specifically, it suggests viewing work as an unpleasant experience full of burdensome relationships, which is only endured to reach a state where we can avoid work. Now I’m not sure how close or far any of you folks are individually to this definition. I can only infer from the general tone of what’s been said.
My point is that this is not the right way to look at it. We should live life to enjoy life, not to prepare for future enjoyment of life. Excessive dwelling on the future in a sign of mental frailty. Consider a scenario where a recent graduate has two job options. The first earns $60,000 per year and consists of tedious drudge work in an unpleasant office environment with as asshole boss and worthless co-workers. The second earns $50,000 per year, but everything else about the situation is superior. Office-mates are supportive, work is intellectually challenging, and life is generally good.
Now, which job should the graduate take? Under the philosophy of fuck you money, obviously the first one. It reaches that abstract financial bar a lot faster. But the graduate should take the second job, since it offers a path to a happy life.
The concept of fuck you money is fundamentally flawed. If the graduate starts out by taking out a calculator, maybe some calculations will show that by earning this amount, with these projected raises, and scrimping and saving and investing in these ways, he or she can achieve fuck you money by age 55. But it might not work, because life is more complicated than basic calculations. Things happen: accidents, diseases, stock market crashes. Imagine that our graduate gets to age 53, fuck you money is just over the horizon, and suddenly he or she gets cancer or has a car crash. All of a sudden, in come hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills, and meanwhile earning are lost while they recuperate. The grand plan is in ruins, there are more financial entanglements than ever before.
Pretty unhappy life story, wouldn’t you say? Far better to simply take life as it comes, have a determination to get along with people, and be happy.
If I pulled a random pedestrian off the street and asked them to evaluate “fuck you money”, I’d expect extreme puzzlement, possibly mixed with outrage at my un-Christian language. In fact, Scylla devoted two thirds of his original post to defining the concept, which suggests that it isn’t immediately obvious. I guess the population of marmots around here is larger than immediately apparent.
My FYM is a little, but not much higher.
I figure with a mixture of tax-advantaged investments, I can net about 4% per annum. However, my FYM needs to grow per annum to keep up with the cost-of-living. CPI (“inflation”) isn’t really the best measure. College, for those with children, and health care have both well exceeded inflation. So if I am netting 4% per annum, it is best that 1/4 to 1/3 be funneled into inflation-hedging investments (to complement the tax-advantaged investments).
Assuming 4% per annum net, with 33% reinvested for growth:
$6,000,000 * .04 = $240,000.
$240,000 * .67 = $160,000
$160,000 after all income taxes and income expenses, but before property taxes and household expenses.
Given that I ain’t as young as I used to be, I’ve lost too much of the time value of investing $80,000 annually, beginning ‘today’, in an inflationary hedge. I would need to seed my inflationary hedge. Another $500,000 should do it.
Thus, FYM = $6,500,000.
That’s why we have state lotteries. The odds are only slightly worse than betting on a single or small basket of stocks to skyrocket, or on a longshot on tomorrow’s trifecta. And the payoff is greater.
I put together a spreadsheet.
I assumed a 3% return after inflation AND taxes.
I assumed that half of the consumption takes place on June 30th, and half on Dec 31st. That’s another way of saying that my per year consumption figures may be a little overstated, but not too much.
Then I calculated a Terminal Year, which is the year that our hero goes bankrupt after depleting their assets. I don’t go beyond 120 years.
Hey, if you don’t like my assumptions, make your own.
Starting Consume real Terminal Interpretation
Dough (US$) return Year
1,000,000 250,000 0.030 5 Fuck me
1,000,000 100,000 0.030 12 Fuck me
5,000,000 100,000 0.030 120+ No, fuck you
5,000,000 250,000 0.030 31 Fuck me
10,000,000 250,000 0.030 120+ No, fuck you
7,000,000 250,000 0.030 61 No, fuck you
8,000,000 250,000 0.030 104 No, fuck you
So I would put FYM in the 5-8M range.
Seriously man. Have you seen the new houses they’re putting up at watchung and grove st? The asking’s something like… 1.7 mill.
To answer the original question, I would want 4 or 5 million around before I’d consider myself “set for life.”
Does this fuck you money scenario involve only working if you want to? Or does it specifically mean not working at all?