Initially my search had an acre as the minimum lot size. There are probably much better deals in Montana than what I saw. Same for Texas.
The issue in Texas is it takes forever to get anywhere from those river front and lake communities. Not a problem if you're remote, bit of a drag if you work in Austin.
> how can you claim this with a straight face (in terms of low variance)?
Because I’ve been following tech salaries for 10+ years. If you can’t retire early (before 65) after making 150k+/year for 20+ years, you’re rather living way beyond your means or have very high expectations for what a normal person retirement looks like.
edit: or I guess in America it means you had a medical scare or two that burned all your money. But that’s not a problem anywhere else and has little to do with the maths behind savings. Tech incomes come with decent insurance at least
Though what you say is technically true, most people I know don't have the mindset to save and invest for the long term. Many people making six figures live paycheck to paycheck. They spend every dollar they make, and then some.
If we had better financial education in America, early retirement would be much more common.
You can get that as a tech employee with much less risk.
Get into tech in your 20’s, do good enough work, invest the money you aren’t using, and you can retire by 45 or so with a very low degree of variance.
Lake houses are pretty cheap too. Plenty of cute lakes in unpopular hard to reach areas.