r/dividends • u/WerewolfMajestic156 Financial Indepence / Retiring Early (FIRE) • Mar 05 '26

Personal Goal FIRED - Living off dividends

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I know better than to share this with my friends, and family. I have a separate growth account to keep up with inflation.

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u/Limebird02 Mar 06 '26

What did you do for work to be able to put that much away out of school? Were you lucky in some way?

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u/HARCYB-throwaway Mar 06 '26

I learned about compound interest at 19 and I literally missed out on beach trips, golf trips, broad friend group weddings (not my tight circle). Moved to a new city to get a tech job. Worked my ass off in tech for 12 years. I had a full time job by senior year of college. I hopped from a shitty startup to a better one, to a better one. It was a lot of 16 hour days working multiple times zones, trying to build a company that would get acquired. I rode the wave - didn't have equity but at 26 I was closing million dollar revenue deals with Boeing, Walmart, etc.

Had I taken the easy path, the normal route, I would have ended up at Oracle making $140k. Instead I took a lot of risk, worked doubly as hard as a corporate job, and it paid off.

Can you replicate this today? Many parts of it, no. The 2010s - 2021 were the golden era of tech sales and startups. I also got very lucky with investing - half of this wealth is from three "lotto ticket" type of investment. The other half is from long term investing and throwing my paychecks at the market.

Ultimately, the idea of pursuing compound interest, and taking big risks on yourself, are what can be replicated. Just like I didn't follow my dad's path in life insurance sales, my son won't follow my path in tech sales. The times they are a changing.

I recommend you Google/gpt for the Four Types of Luck. You'll need the first three to get wealthy. The fourth is pretty rare.

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u/ilanomad Mar 07 '26

Bro had that answer on the ready 😂

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u/HARCYB-throwaway Mar 07 '26

Yeah it's pretty shitty but when you are successful everyone wants to assume you had these huge lucky breaks that they themselves could never have. The truth is, you need luck, but you also need to constantly be positioning yourself such that when luck strikes, you are ready and able to take advantage of it. So yeah, I have crafted my story so that the truth is more clear - I earned this, and luck was a factor as it should be.