Ask HN: What would you do to turn $100K into $1M in 3 years?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33948846

by guinness74 • 4 years ago

31 36 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

How would level up $100k an order of magnitude?

PaulHoule• 4 years ago

What probability can you accept for losing it all?

guinness74• 4 years ago

Assume the money disappears if it doesn't turn into $1MM.

MerelyMortal• 4 years ago

So you don't mind if you essentially gamble it and lose it all, as it would disappear anyway?

TotoHorner• 4 years ago

It depends on the time and risk you’re willing to take.

If you’re high risk, low time then I’d just put it all in Ethereum.

If you have a large amount of time, I’d start an online business and use the $100k to hire international contractors.

xupybd2• 4 years ago

Horses, the casino, maybe some other sports betting?

It doesn't really matter to do that in 3 years you're gambling.

If you have a business that you're passionate about and are willing to spend huge amounts of energy on you might be able to generate that sort of money with 100K starting. However I'd argue you're putting in a lot more than $100k. You'd have 3 years of lost earnings.

chinabot• 4 years ago

I know this Nigerian Prince...

MilnerRoute• 4 years ago

Doubling your money -- three years in a row -- would get you to $800,000. That's asking a lot. I think the only way to do it is make a lot of high-risk investments, and hope some of them pay off.

But I also think we're undervaluing the possibility of just hanging on to $100,000.

quickthrower2• 4 years ago

Assuming you are a DINK or SINK.

1. Move to cheap COL.

2. $100k = 3 years run way, and some modest expenditure (ads, servers, etc)

3. Build a bootstrapped business.

4. You might have $1m or be on your way to it.

DINK = Dual Income, No Kids

SINK = Single ""

COL = Cost of living

Or downpayment on home in upcoming area while working at FAANGs leetcoding and playing offers off each other. Renting all your rooms out, sleep in garden tent.

carlmr• 4 years ago

I like how you used 3 acronyms exactly once, then explained all of them.

brudgers• 4 years ago

Most people will struggle to turn $100k into $100k in ten years.

WheelsAtLarge• 4 years ago

100% right, people tend to think they are great investors but most people aren't so people end up losing a chunk of the money, if not all of it. Carefull!

jacknobody• 4 years ago

Buy and sell... but know your market!

Remember - before you buy something - be quite sure you can sell it quickly and that you won't lose money on it.

bfrog• 4 years ago

If I knew I’d already have the idea in play!

yuppie_scum• 4 years ago

Wait til the next time you hear about the market having a terrible day and dump it all in VOO. That’s the easiest way to make garunteed money. But a 10x is gonna be real tough in 3 years.

Alternatively, look into REIT limited partnerships.

davewasthere• 4 years ago

Casino. All on Black. Repeat 3 more times (hoping your luck holds out for each). 16x in under an hour. (or zero most likely... but definitely lowest effort) I don't recommend this approach however

But yeah, if you're talking USD, then one could easily live comfortably for five years in Vietnam/Thailand for $20k/year. (Although you could easily live in a ton of countries if you pick your town/city/area correctly) Then smash out all those side-gig bootstrap ideas that come to mind. If you can build MRR of approx $6k, then you've effectively built up the equivalent of $1M earning 7% in the bank.

Actually, my latest company was started 3 years (and nearly a month) ago, and is now earning easily that in revenue from one of its Saas products, so yeah, it's definitely acheivable.

throwawayacc3• 4 years ago

Casino. All on Black.

Haha I love this! There was a gentleman that put his entire life savings on red and televised the event [0].

In reality for anyone reading, if you do want to gamble against the house, I suggest playing Craps and betting the Don't Pass Line. After surviving the first roll(s) and the button has been placed, you're allowed to place an additional bet called "laying the odds". This is the best bet in the casino. It is exactly 50/50, 0% house edge. The total casino edge for this combibed bet is less than 1% [1], where are roulette, red or black can have a house edge over 5% [2].

[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=Airbq7bn0_o

[1] https://easy.vegas/games/craps-dont-pass

[2] https://roulette.com.au/rules-bets/red-black/

xupybd2• 4 years ago

Vietnam for $20K US a year. That is a very good lifestyle. You could do the same here in NZ and the cost of living is much higher.

If you are trying to save as much as possible you'd be able to live on half that in Vietnam easily.

falloutx• 4 years ago

For $20k/year, you can choose so many countries. I would recommend Vienna, Austria. I live in the Netherlands and my expenses are 27k/year living alone and I can imagine you can have amazing lifestyle in Austria for 20k/year.

GianFabien• 4 years ago

By using compounding. If you net 5% profit per week, then you'll have $1.26M in a year ! Or at 1.5% net per week $1.02M in three years. If monthly, then 7% net per month for three years $1.14M.

The trick is to find something that you can buy low, sell high consistently. Obviously in the above scenarios you are reinvesting all your gains to operate with ever greater amounts of capital. It would also be prudent to pick transactions at some small fraction of your total.

BUT ... it is unlikely that you can implement the above as a passive investment and it might require to do a considerable amount of work. Oh well .... them's the breaks!

merek• 4 years ago

How much risk are you willing to take?

High risk appetite: You might see massive returns, but will most likely lose a lot (e.g. gambling, speculative stocks).

Low risk appetite: Achieve much smaller returns, but the chance of any loss is much lower (e.g. blue chip stocks, bonds).

Maybe you're asking how to earn massive returns with minimal risk? If I knew, I wouldn't tell you. I'd be busy taking advantage of the opportunity. If a stranger on the internet wanted to share their secret on how to make 10x your money in 3 years, it's almost certainly a scam.

Sorry, there are no easy answers.

Deprogrammer9• 4 years ago

Buy a two men & a truck moving company franchise. During peak months in a large city you can profit 1.5 million a month IF iffffffff you can pull it off. :P

moving companies are money printing presses.

kmoser• 4 years ago

1. Start your own crypto coin or NFT

2. Pump

3. Dump

pdevr• 4 years ago

Find a product you can promote using paid traffic, which yields you enough margins.

Assuming that you get paid monthly, that there are no caps on the product, and that you get the same margins consistently:

A product with 100% margin will have you grossing $1 million in four months.

A product with 50% margin will have you grossing $1 million in six months.

A product with 25% margin will have you grossing $1 million in eleven months.

A product with 20% margin will have you grossing $1 million in fourteen months.

Even a product with a mere 10% margin will have you grossing $1 million in a little over two years.

sdfgdfghj• 4 years ago

Assuming you can sell the whole of your inventory in 1 month, re-invest all income and do the same for the next month?

Also assuming the margins are after all expenses? Isn't Amazon FBA taking like 30% cut?

dhruvkar• 4 years ago

Doesn't have to be a physical product.

Informational, educational, software products through affiliates are also targets to run paid ads against.

nullbyte808• 4 years ago

250: APPL 250: GOOGL 250: NVDA 250: AMAZN

Will take prolly 8 years though. But you have 25K available cash as a margin loan/credit line.

082349872349872• 4 years ago

Inherit. But the 3 year window suggests it'd be more feasible to marry well.

jameshush2• 4 years ago

Spend $2000 on all the FAANG interview prep courses/mock interviews you can, interview at 10 places, get 2 offers, take the offer that pays the most. Move to SF, live with 10 people in a 5 bedroom place (with bunk beds) for $800ish/month to save money. Eat free food at your new FAANG job and rice/beans on the weekend. Work freelance on nights and weekends on the highest paying, most boring bank/adtech software projects you can find. Save more than half your income. In 3 years the market should be back to normal so your stocks should 2x or so bringing you to close-ish to $1m, realistically it’ll take 7-10 though if you live like you’re broke.

Lionga• 4 years ago

Or live a in low COL country with low taxes, spend nothing on stupid leet code courses (the time is much more valuable than 2000$) and just freelance. You can make 300K easy if you would be able to get into FAANG, and take home 270K after taxes.

Spend 800$ to live in a fancy, big apartment or a nice small house, eat out as much as you want, do vacations live a good life on 20K per year.

After 3 years you will have 750K saved + 100K was never touched and only need 15% growth in 3 years (instead of the illusional 100% growth of stocks hoped for in the above comment) to be at a million. Even if stocks go down you are easy FIRE with a SWR that gives you 30 to 40K a year so close to double of what is needed.

This should work much much more likely than the crazy thing OP suggest, not even sure if meant with sarcasm or not.

Source: Did exactly that in the last 3 years

tsingy• 4 years ago

Any tips for someone just starting out, with 0 professional work experience attempting the same? I'm not aiming for 300K a year (more like 24K+), I just want a remote job while living in a low COL country.

jameshush2• 4 years ago

@Lionga how do you make $300k easy? Genuinely curious, not throwing shade. Even when I was managing a 20 person engineering team for a fast growing USA based startup I wasn't even seeing that much in salary + bonus. It was pre-IPO so the stock was illiquid. I was also interviewing 3-5 people a week and putting in employment offers every month and the market salaries (at the time, this was about two years ago) for senior react developers and even and experienced DevOps person never hit $200k.

I spent a year trying to do freelance (10ish years of experience and some major brands like NFL and Microsoft) and couldn't land anything close to that either, so I ended up getting a normal job.

I'm currently doing something similar to what you're doing (I live in Taiwan and work for a California company.) Where are you living where you have a 10% tax rate? Even Signapore's income tax isn't that low. I'm assuming when you say "take home 270k after taxes" you mean personal income taxes?

My suggestion of leetcode grinding was a bit tongue in cheek but I still think it's the least risky, most control-able way to reach that goal in three years.

Like I said though, I'm genuinely curious. I'm always down to learn about ways to make more money for less work :D

deadcoder0904• 4 years ago

hire a cheap developer from a 3rd-world country to build a lensa ai clone in react native so you get both android/ios version.

since ai art is popular right now, make it better than lensa.

hire influencers with a 20% cut if they refer your app.

invest in pr & aggressive marketing in addition to that.

if you do it right, this should turn your $100k into $1m in <3 months of launch.

if you don't get it done fast, then you can try instagram photoshoots or try to automate onlyfans with an ai.

this will take some work but its a sureshot way to make >$1m with the ai hype.

marssaxman• 4 years ago

If there were any reliable way to do this, people who knew the trick would be doing it, not talking about it. As soon as the opportunity became common knowledge, it would be flooded, and the margin would disappear.

scott_siskind• 4 years ago

It's not just that. It's an annualized return of roughly 116%, when for comparison, the US stock market has a long term return of roughly 7%.

In the investment world, anything close to 10% return is usually highly risky, speculative.

So it's downright unattainable, since the vast majority of the population which invests money gets returns that are 20x lower in a good year.

yucky• 4 years ago

Since you didn't specify legality, the easiest way would be to move to a college town and become a drug dealer. Although if your goal really is a million then I would suggest you walk away at that point before getting caught, since it will take less that 3 years to do if you aren't using your own product..

Ask HN: What would you do to turn $100K into $1M in 3 years?

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