Hi wagerlab,

If your burn rate is 3.5K/month, with $100K, you can survive for at least 28 months comfortably, give or take. That's 2.5 years of not working for money. If you're already an amazing programmer, go build a product and sell it at $100/license. You only need 10,000 copies to make $1,000,000, and burn through just a fraction of your money. You can probably build something in less than 6 months and start building a real business around it. With proper SEO, marketing, perseverance, and some luck, the chance of you reaching the sales number isn't all that bad, providing that your product is compelling enough for users to fork out $100. As you say, your weakness is you can get bored easily, then find a way to keep yourself interested: find a partner, outsource boring stuff elsewhere, and plainly just make it a goal to build a meaningful business for yourself and for your family.

Nothing is more profitable than investing in yourself. You can double up your money is no time at all. Instead of solving really hard technical problems just for the fun of it, try solving people's problems and make a tidy profit along the way. There are tons of ideas and problems worth solving. You will be much more wealthier in a short time, and you can have your ego petted as well.

Personally I quit my job last year to work on my own startup. I was making $90,000/year and was billing $85/hr, but I was getting burned out working on other people's stuff. So I quit. $85/hr is quite a bit of cash, the money was addicting. I was 24, single, living cheaply in Chicago. My expense was $1,500/month, and with some light traveling, that was about $2,000 - $2,500/month. I was able to save quite a bit in just a few months. After saved up to $20,000, I quit. I'm not wasting my life working for money. Not when I have other choices to build up a much better future.

Now I'm actually invest 100% of my time into my startup and I'm building it up alone by myself. My life is my start up until I get it launch in September, then I keep on pushing till I make it. Everyday I push out something new, write some thing amazingly awesome, or just get really productive -- all for myself.

I'm very easy to get distracted with new ideas and bored with existing ones. However, I told myself specifically to not think of new ideas, and not to get bored with my startup. It's been 2 months working non-stop on it, and I feel more energized than ever. From HTML slicing to server setup, compiling stuff, to writing the next best UI to solve a problem for user, I'm doing it all. If my startup doesn't generate money right away, I'll keep pushing it. I don't know what next year will be like, but I know it will be a lot better. What's funny is that I don't consider myself a very good programmer. I can get by with some stuff (like JavaScript). I can barely programming Ruby on Rails the right way, none of that C++ hardcore programming. I secretly envy those C++/C guys that can hammer out code that looks really hard, but I don't care. I'm building my own product and I feel good about it. My life has a meaning, instead of just working for money.

The best thing is, if nothing happens (very unlikely), I can still get back to consulting, making a nice 6-figure salary, and execute my plan B of become a millionaire: investing in real estate.

My plan B is simple. I plan to purchase 1 rental apartment every year. Where I lived in Chicago, you can get an apartment for $60K - $80K (foreclosures), and rent them out at $900/month, positive cashflow on day one. I can purchase one a year if I save 50% of my income (not a hard thing), and repeat this a few years. If I leverage the home equity of the rental properties, I can reduce the time to about 6 to 7 years before hitting the $1,000,000 net-worth. And these properties can only appreciate in values, since they are already really low in price. I WILL be a millionaire before 40 and I don't even have to think. However, I chose to be a millionaire by 30, so I quit my job because obviously my job won't get me to where I want to be when I'm 30. I don't think I can get a salary of $333,333/year for the next 3 years to make $1M. And if I really have that salary, I'd just quit to do my own thing. If I'm that good, then why I'm not investing in myself rather than working a 9-5 (or in this case, a 6am-12am job since you'd better be worth every penny at $333,333/year)?

So there you go, it's my plan of turning an amount much less than $100K into $1,000.000. Precisely, I have $2,500 (I traveled quite a bit and invested some money in Vietnam with my family between the time I quit and when I started fulltiming on my Startup) in my bank account and I hope that will last till September, which shouldn't be a problem since my burn rate right now is about a whopping $400/month, if not less. I'm single still, and will be suspending my iPhone very soon to switch to Skype. When I run out of money, I'm sure I'll figure something out.

So I hope you'll have an updated post in a year telling us here about your journey to make $1,000,000. Good luck following your heart and passion.

Alex