>They do often go broke after their career. That is sad. It is also completely avoidable with _very_ basic financial planning. I think feeling sorry for them is a disservice, because it makes it seem that this outcome is hard to avoid. It's not hard when they're making 500k+/year:

this is a good point and also I believe obviously wrong.

What are the stats on people making 500k a year on losing that going broke? Do they outperform sports stars etc.?

If it is the same then that implies that on the average people do not handle 500k basic financial planning well, or two that basic financial planning won't do what you say with that amount of money (for what, 5 years?). At any rate it would mean that generally people suffer this way and thus it is doing a disservice to point out how dumb they were for not doing basic financial planning.

If it is not the same then it implies that there may be something about the career that makes it harder then it does for other people in which case you are doing even more of a disservice.

I believe it is actually there is something about the career that makes it harder (this belief is formed by just thinking about it and doing absolutely no data analysis because I just do not have the time to devote to it past this HN post)

But I think we can create a thought experiment that shows why it is different

Many of us here are familiar with careers the top of which make 500k a year, there are a few engineers who could make that much. Or management at tech firms, it doesn't matter. There are people who can make that much.

Now if you lose your 500k job in tech what happens? You probably fall down a level to a lower paying job in tech. Let's say 390,000. That's a significant drop, but it's still a pretty nice wage.

The reason for this is because the tech career is a pyramid, 500k at or near top. And a pyramid means that the levels lower than the higher levels are wider (this being an analogy) and being wider has more entries for you to fall into.

Sports is also a pyramid. Or really several pyramids. There is the small pyramid of multi-million dollar players who can fall into single millions and then into the hundreds of thousands. But mainly the pyramid you are dealing with is an inverted pyramid. That is to say the sports career chart is top = player, most players, when you fall out of player level you fall into a level with fewer slots - coaches, commentators, agents, recruiters. If you can't fall into one of these slots and perform adequately (perhaps because you are doing a high paying job that also has high risks of causing brain damage [depending on sport obviously]) then when you lose your 500k sports job you are probably significantly worse off than most of us are when we lose our 500k programming jobs (obviously counterexamples abound, like if you lose job due to illness that means you won't get 390000 programming job either)

Anyway I believe your point that these people should not be pitied over much because they could handle their problems with basic financial playing probably is a bit mean, and one I often hear around here.

as it the case with most analogies, the pyramid analogy is severely flawed, but I do think it makes the one point clearly which is that when you loose a 500k programming job there are more lower paying jobs in the same industry you can fall into, when you lose a 500k sports job you might not have a lower paying job you can fall into because there just aren't that many in the sports industry.