It's enough for me to live the way I live right now, indefinitely. I currently live in silicon valley paying very high rent ($1100/mo). If I didn't want to work I could live somewhere a lot cheaper.
"Retirement" means different things to different people. I was talking about financial independence, which means I can choose to retire, but more likely it will mean I find work I enjoy more, without considering the pay as much.
There are some risks, nothing is guaranteed:
- I could have health problems that cost me too much even with health insurance
- The market could crash and never recover
But if the market crashes and doesn't recover, maybe I'd have to go back to work for a while. Health problems are a risk for everyone, and no amount of money is going to guarantee good health. However, I bet that leaving the office job early will reduce the risk of health problems overall anyway.
Life could go anywhere -- this is just my current plan. It has been my plan since I started working 2.5 years ago, but it may change.
If I meet someone, who knows. :)
But I am happy already, while I'm single and don't own a house. I also don't assume that it's necessary to own a house when one is married. The hypothetical We could decide whether it's worth trading 2-3 more years of work to buy a house. Maybe it would be, maybe not. The key is to consider the options, and not just assume you have to do what everyone else does.
"In the second part, you will apply these concepts to develop a simple command line application, expose it as a webservice, and then integrate other students' command line apps and webservices together with yours to create an open-source mobile HTML5 app as a final project."
I am a little confused. Does that mean we cannot simply develop our own startup idea? Why do we have to integrate other students' apps?
