I admire OP's financial project and appreciate his sharing it. I imagine quite a few people may benefit from it.

But make no mistake about it, the #1 reason for any "How I did <anything regarding money>" is really, "I am cheap."

We only get one chance at this life, and the thing that bothers me the most is, "What are you missing that you're too frugal to consider?"

Some of the greatest pleasures of my life came as a result of a discretionary purchase. Incredible people, experiences, even business opportunities came my way because I bought a product, went to an event, or took a trip that most frugal people I know wouldn't have.

Once you decide to be frugal, you'll probably be stuck that way for life because you'll rarely be in position to take advantage of those opportunities that would break the cycle.

If that works for you, fine. But not for me. I may not be extravagant, but I don't want to miss any wonderful opportunity because I was too worried about my bank balance. In the grand scheme of things, how sad that would be.

</sipsLatte>

[EDIT: Yes there is a difference between "cheap" and "frugal". Every time I mention "frugal" above, I really meant "cheap", but I was trying to be nice. I will leave it that way to make the thread below make sense. Also, I failed to mention that there's a big difference between being cheap because you have to and being cheap because you choose to.]

How is being self employed retired? Is this a new meaning of the word retired that I have not heard of?

He notes on his 'start' page that a mere 1 in 9 Americans are self employed like him. Only a few 10s of millions of people then?

I think your office of national statistics would disagree with you buddy, you're a handyman, your wife's a realtor. You're not retired.

What a plonker.

With any non-trivial assortment of servers, you need a dedicated sysadmin. The security issues alone should dictate this, but your developers don't need to be worrying about sysadmin stuff. They need to be coding.

I totally agree with proper deployment procedures. But having them doesn't eliminate the sysadmin at all. Sysadmin should be deploying standard packages that are necessary for the system, along with updates for them. Developers should be deploying in-house code, and updates for that.

I worked at a company that hired a sysadmin too early. When he quit, I ended up doing his duties and mine, too. Of course, I automated 99% of it and everyone was happy. That was really early in the life of the company.

Later, when it came necessary to hire one, they didn't. They'd expect a developer to deal with the issues, and were always dissatisfied with the time it took, and the lackluster results. Eventually it got so bad they hired a dedicated sysadmin again. Now, unlike the past, they actually needed one and he was busy all the time. Developers stopped being unproductive for weeks at a time, working on projects they didn't understand and couldn't complete satisfactorily.

For a startup, yes, skip the sysadmin at first. But once you have a complex system, hire one. It'll save your company.

This is a nice article, but two observations:

- He made a great home investment, apparently bought cheap and later was able to rent it for a lot of money. This is good for him, but somewhat lucky (or, alternative, a spark of insight into real-estate)

- He made nice returns on stocks

Both are fine, but not a part of "corporate programmer salary"