EA - Consider Financial Independence First by River

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Consider Financial Independence First, published by River on December 27, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Over the course of your working life, you will earn some amount of money, spend some amount of money on yourself (and those close to you), and spend some amount of money and time on strangers. EA is about figuring out how to deploy the time and money we spend on strangers effectively. And as a movement of mostly young people, there is a tendency to start devoting time and money to strangers early in our careers. I want to suggest that this is often a mistake – that many of us should front load the money we spend on ourselves, by achieving financial independence first, by which I mean having enough savings that you could live off of it indefinitely, and then earning to give or doing direct work in an EA cause area.This is the strategy I am pursuing. I got interested in EA a couple of years ago during the pandemic, about the same time I was moving towards a new career in software engineering. I’ve been a software engineer making low six figures for about a year, and I’ve been putting about half my income towards my current expenses, and half towards financial independence1. After I reach financial independence, in something like five years, depending how the markets go, I expect to either earn to give (which I will be well set up for), or find direct work mitigating existential risks. Either way, learning about the various existential risks and mitigation strategies, and the people and organizations working on them, will prepare me to do that when the time comes.Some of my reasons for pursing financial independence first are selfish. I’m starting my third career in my mid thirties – I want a feeling of material security, and I’m not going to get it from an employer. I want the lower level of stress and anxiety that I expect I will have when I can pay for my rent and groceries on my own, regardless of my employment. I want the freedom to pick a low paying job, or even an unpaid job, over a higher paying but less meaningful job, without worrying about the impact on my lifestyle. I want the freedom to leave a job if the boss I love gets replaced by a boss I hate, without having to ask whether I can afford it. And it’s ok for an EA to make decisions for selfish reasons like this. EA doesn’t have anything to say about how much money anyone should donate or how much time anyone should spend altruistically. EA only tries to answer the question, after time or money has been committed to strangers, how to deploy it effectively.2Other reasons for pursing financial independence first are altruistic. If your altruism is of the earning to give variety, then achieving financial independence first allows you to donate the entirety of your post-financial-independence salary. Over the course of your life, that means donating more total dollars. If you believe that lives saved in ten or twenty years are as valuable as lives saved today, and that dollars donated in ten or twenty years will not be too much less effective than dollars donated today, then this means doing more good.If you hope to work directly in an EA cause area, the accounting is much less obvious, but the conclusion may be the same. The early part of your career, particularly the first few years, is when you have the least skills and the most to learn. I spent quite a bit of time in training at my current job, where I was gaining skills but at a net cost to my employer. So the altruistic cost of working outside EA is at its lowest at the beginning of your career. And the altruistic benefit from building skills faster working outside EA may be worthwhile. Often it is easier and faster to build skills in a large, established organization, compared to a newer smaller startup-like organization. EA organizations...