Life After Poker

Super happy for you!

Although I haven't peaked or hit the same epic rungood in life like you, I hope someday soon I can also describe my life as fucking great! But for now I thoroughly enjoy the pursuit of happiness.

Def going to give ur Quora a reading later and u wrote something that i've felt for a while but never actually posted in words before..."I hope everyone here finds something similar, whether it be in poker or not."

Beautiful stuff man.

best life decision

Why aiming for retirement at 35 if you are so happy with the life you're living right now? Unless you have some specific interests you want to pursue in retirement, I'd say just continue your career. Maybe on the next level on the ladder, maybe in a lower gear, but don't quit just for the sake of it.

Retirement can also mean falling back in a lazy life without too much purpose and that doesn't seem to make you particularly happy.

always awesome to read about people successfully transitioning out of poker

Nice one
Agreed with the planning for retirement being kinda meh. I dread the day when I don't have a job or a major project Im workin on. In your field having your own startup one day seems like a good long term plan?

this is it

well done

On July 24 2014 07:14 PoorUser wrote: always awesome to read about people successfully transitioning out of poker

isnt software SOOO much easier than poker?! my path was very similar and I couldnt be happier. Its easy to play poker when you still feel like it, not so easy to "work a real job" when youre in the mood.

What type of job did you land at the startup? I started by doing graphics design and moved into front end development full time, got the ol senior title about 2 years later, leading a UI team now.

did you finish your college degree or just learn programming and get a job with those skills.

How much do you earn if you think you will earn in 10 years enough for the rest of your life (40-50 years)?

GJ nonetheless

On July 24 2014 06:29 Misjka wrote: Why aiming for retirement at 35 if you are so happy with the life you're living right now? Unless you have some specific interests you want to pursue in retirement, I'd say just continue your career. Maybe on the next level on the ladder, maybe in a lower gear, but don't quit just for the sake of it. Retirement can also mean falling back in a lazy life without too much purpose and that doesn't seem to make you particularly happy.

I definitely get what you mean. My idea of retirement is when the principle on my savings outweighs my annual expenses. I'll still likely be doing stuff like coding, building products, but not really care about the money when doing it. I also think if I'm lucky enough to get to this point, I'd want to do something involving teaching (in the limited capacity that I can), either in my hometown or for those less fortunate. In other words, I'd still work and put my abilities to their best use, but in an area where it'd still be okay if I didn't get paid.

On July 24 2014 11:20 milkman wrote: What type of job did you land at the startup? I started by doing graphics design and moved into front end development full time, got the ol senior title about 2 years later, leading a UI team now.

I'm a full-stack rails engineer, so I build backend systems in ruby on rails, and do equal amounts of front-end with sass, javascript/jquery, react.js. My boss considers me mid-level at this point, I've been at the company for 9 months now lol. It's definitely easier than coding - 10x easier to make 100k in programming than in poker, but programming has a fairly low ceiling compared to everything else. Even if you're in the top 1% of programmers in your field, your salary tends to max out around 250k iirc, so I assume that's why so many go on to build their own things.

On July 24 2014 11:42 traxamillion wrote: did you finish your college degree or just learn programming and get a job with those skills.

Never went back to school, thankfully tech is a progressive industry, and unless you are going to a company with an insanely strong computer science focus like Google, Palantir, etc. no one cares about where you graduated or what your GPA was. It does help if you come from Stanford with a CS degree of course, but being from the middle of nowhere with a liberal arts major doesn't hurt. You just have to prove what you're worth, e.g. what you can build, what you have built, etc.

On July 24 2014 12:00 napoleono wrote: How much do you earn if you think you will earn in 10 years enough for the rest of your life (40-50 years)? GJ nonetheless

My idea of retirement is when the principle on my savings outweighs my annual expenses, and I don't need or ever think I'll need a lavish lifestyle of nice cars, big booty hoes, and making it rain at the clubs. Thus, if my annual interest earnings outweigh the amount that I spend, I consider myself retired. For example, if I only really need 50k a year (arbitrary amount, likely a lot lower) to live, then that's only 5% interest off $1m in savings. $1m in savings in 10 years isn't a cakewalk, but I'm saving aggressively now and it'll only compound. Also, the implied sentiment was that I hope to at least hit a modest homerun in a self-built tech product within the next 10 years that would really speed that up .

I missed this blog a lot. Thanks for the update. GL and keep trucking on!

5% interest? more like 3%, gl beating inflation

You will have to save like 85k/year to near 1M in 9 year with a 5% interest rate and monthly compounding. Also taking into account inflation, will be hard ^^

Not to mention as an 85k/year earner to suddenly cut your income almost in half to retire is going to be quite a beat. I mean honestly it's not really realistic at all to try and retire in 10 years at your age unless you were pulling in 250k/year, and if you were pullingin 250k/year you would choose to keep working because you would enjoy the lifestyle that money affords you despite the work, and comfortably retire in 30 years maintaining that lifestyle.

Given my level of competitiveness, I would consider it a huge beat if my full-time job salary (which will also only increase) made up more than 50% of my actual yearly income in the next 10 years. There are a lot of ways to make money in software, which don't even include the "startup" route (been there, done that ).

Consider it like the poker goals we made on Jan 1st, where we plan to make $X in the year ahead. It likely will only occur if I luckbox or work insane amounts, but still doable.

interesting. I'm playing poker right now for money but am also teaching myself object oriented programming starting with java. I'm pretty noob wish i had learned this as a kid instead of playing games but oh well. I'm like 2/3rds done with a degree but been out of school for 7 years and it is so hard to get back. Figured if i got good enough at programming someone will pay me to build stuff.

Think I should step back and learn BASIC or C 1st?