> wish I had fuck-you money and could spend my day engrossed in whatever I find interesting

A good mental exercise is to calculate how much you'd need to survive indefinitely in a pocket of rural America or the third world. No international travel. No bells and whistles. Limited cuisine. But survival and leisure unlimited.

When I've run the numbers for a comforable living, they've come to $300k (Vietnam, $12k/y) to $500k (West Virginia or Portugal $18k/y). But one could halve (or more) those figures by accepting standards of living our grandparents would have found adequate.

Then you make a choice. That world. Or the one you have. (Or something in between.)

Two-fifths of American households have a net worth over $300,000; more than half over $150,000 [1]. That means somewhere between a lot of and potentially most Americans have, on a global scale, fuck-you money. Just not fuck-you money to retain their status at the centre of the first world.

[1] https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentiles/

Coll idea. One thing: This numbers exclude healthcare costs as you get older this gets more expensive.

For countries with free healthcare, it is usually limited to people working there or citizens and ( in the German case ) recognised refugees.

American software engineers maybe. But I heard somewhere that most Americans live paycheck to paycheck or at most have a few thousand dollars in savings.

WV is probably heavily underrated. Such a beautiful part of the US.