By far the best investment you can make is to upgrade your earning potential.
I run a software consultancy and I could easily employ someone who specialized in writing software tests or a release engineer at 7x your current wage (these are unglamorous but ultimately not had things). Making 7x per hour changes the income and wealth equation dramatically. You could literally self teach both of those areas in 6 months.
Two books from the library, free gitlab account, fork 2 open source projects, implement test suite, begin writing tests. Start submitting pull requests upstream when you get good.
80% of software companies can benefit from work in those two areas and they provide more value than they cost so there’s effectively infinite work.
If that field doesn’t appeal to you I’d suggest starting a business. A recent study of people who earn more than a million a year (maybe posted here two weeks ago?) has shown that it’s primarily business owners. Typically in boring, but very established value areas, typically with a local monopoly.
Things like car dealerships, auto repair. The article (which I can’t find right now) also mentioned “marketing research”? which baffles me.
A clever person could learn a lot in the library over a weekend about starting and operating a business, about choosing a good business to start (businesses without a lot of competition, but a solid customer base are good. I’d choose one that will still work in an economic downturn)
Beware the taste for the expensive lifestyle. It’s easy to creep by degrees to a lifestyle beyond your means. If your expenses exceed your income it doesn’t matter how much money you make, you’ll be in debt to you reverse it. I’ve lived both ways and can tell you low expense is the only way to go.
As someone who self-hosts a lot of different apps, self-hosting is really a slippery slope. Once you start enjoying the control over the system and data, you want to self host everything.
The most important aspect is the security and you learn this by doing it.
My entire self-host apps are hosted behind a private VPN called Pritunl, it provides self-hosted corporate VPN like setup where you can manage users and access to servers.
I host these following apps/products right now:
- Pritunl (corporate like VPN)
- Superset (Analytics)
- Bitwarden (Password Manager)
- OpenVPN with Pihole (Personal VPN with Adblock)
- Wireguard with Pihole (Personal VPN with Adblock)
I currently have 10 fully remote engineering jobs. The bar is so low, oversight is non-existent, and everyone is so forgiving for under performance I can coast about 4-8 weeks before a given job fires me. Currently on a $1.5M run-rate for comp
this year. And the interviewing process is so much faster today, companies are desperate, it takes me 2-3hrs of total effort to land a new job with thousands to chose from.
Uncountable accelerates R&D for industrial scientists across leading materials, chemicals, and life sciences organizations. With our SaaS solution, our customers get better products to the market in half the time.
Uncountable was founded by MIT and Stanford engineers and has been profitable since 2016. Our team has grown from 6 to 20 over the last two years.
---> Uncountable is looking for engineers who can spearhead the development of the Uncountable Web Platform. The position is heavily product-driven and comes with challenges across the stack.
--> Senior and principal positions are available.
--> Summer internships and working student positions are also available.
These are full-time positions in San Francisco, New York City or Munich. Remote options within the U.S. and Germany are available for senior candidates. Learn more: https://www.uncountable.com/careers
80% of software companies can benefit from work in those two areas and they provide more value than they cost so there’s effectively infinite work.
If that field doesn’t appeal to you I’d suggest starting a business. A recent study of people who earn more than a million a year (maybe posted here two weeks ago?) has shown that it’s primarily business owners. Typically in boring, but very established value areas, typically with a local monopoly. Things like car dealerships, auto repair. The article (which I can’t find right now) also mentioned “marketing research”? which baffles me.
A clever person could learn a lot in the library over a weekend about starting and operating a business, about choosing a good business to start (businesses without a lot of competition, but a solid customer base are good. I’d choose one that will still work in an economic downturn)
Beware the taste for the expensive lifestyle. It’s easy to creep by degrees to a lifestyle beyond your means. If your expenses exceed your income it doesn’t matter how much money you make, you’ll be in debt to you reverse it. I’ve lived both ways and can tell you low expense is the only way to go.