Spend $2000 on all the FAANG interview prep courses/mock interviews you can, interview at 10 places, get 2 offers, take the offer that pays the most. Move to SF, live with 10 people in a 5 bedroom place (with bunk beds) for $800ish/month to save money. Eat free food at your new FAANG job and rice/beans on the weekend. Work freelance on nights and weekends on the highest paying, most boring bank/adtech software projects you can find. Save more than half your income. In 3 years the market should be back to normal so your stocks should 2x or so bringing you to close-ish to $1m, realistically it’ll take 7-10 though if you live like you’re broke.
Or live a in low COL country with low taxes, spend nothing on stupid leet code courses (the time is much more valuable than 2000$) and just freelance. You can make 300K easy if you would be able to get into FAANG, and take home 270K after taxes.
Spend 800$ to live in a fancy, big apartment or a nice small house, eat out as much as you want, do vacations live a good life on 20K per year.
After 3 years you will have 750K saved + 100K was never touched and only need 15% growth in 3 years (instead of the illusional 100% growth of stocks hoped for in the above comment) to be at a million. Even if stocks go down you are easy FIRE with a SWR that gives you 30 to 40K a year so close to double of what is needed.
This should work much much more likely than the crazy thing OP suggest, not even sure if meant with sarcasm or not.
@Lionga how do you make $300k easy? Genuinely curious, not throwing shade. Even when I was managing a 20 person engineering team for a fast growing USA based startup I wasn't even seeing that much in salary + bonus. It was pre-IPO so the stock was illiquid. I was also interviewing 3-5 people a week and putting in employment offers every month and the market salaries (at the time, this was about two years ago) for senior react developers and even and experienced DevOps person never hit $200k.
I spent a year trying to do freelance (10ish years of experience and some major brands like NFL and Microsoft) and couldn't land anything close to that either, so I ended up getting a normal job.
I'm currently doing something similar to what you're doing (I live in Taiwan and work for a California company.) Where are you living where you have a 10% tax rate? Even Signapore's income tax isn't that low. I'm assuming when you say "take home 270k after taxes" you mean personal income taxes?
My suggestion of leetcode grinding was a bit tongue in cheek but I still think it's the least risky, most control-able way to reach that goal in three years.
Like I said though, I'm genuinely curious. I'm always down to learn about ways to make more money for less work :D
Any tips for someone just starting out, with 0 professional work experience attempting the same? I'm not aiming for 300K a year (more like 24K+), I just want a remote job while living in a low COL country.
You need a start. That's pretty much it. Everyone starts somewhere the important thing is to keep learning and growing. This means different things for different people, but it usually boils down to spending a long time learning and a bit of luck.
Going back to getting a start, unless you know people or get lucky first this will probably be something that doesn't pay well and is hard, but don't get stuck, keep learning and growing.
