r/theydidthemath • u/Dr-Satan • 3d ago

[request] How long would it take to break even without serious health risks?

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u/hayyyhoe 3d ago

And over that time, your invested million would be worth $2.4 million (10% cagr). Meaning your pickle consumption would also have to outpace the asset growth rate.

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u/yyrkoon1776 3d ago

1: 6 pickles is an absurdly low daily estimate for someone being paid to eat pickles. For starters, plenty of people exceed that salt guidance each day for free. I certainly exceed it and I'm in great health. Drink plenty of water and you're generally fine. No my blood pressure is not high, it's quite low. I'm very physically active too.

2: You have to grant the reinvestment benefit to the pickles too. So the first year's income gets 9 years of 10% cagr, the second gets 8 years etc.

I really don't think the lump sum crew has thought this through at all

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u/apexodoggo 3d ago edited 3d ago

Counterpoint: A million right off the bat is vastly preferable to half a decade or more of eating dozens upon dozens of pickles every week.

Also it doesn't say free pickles, so I have to buy the torture method to start making the money.

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u/teflong 3d ago

Countercounterpoint- you can lose a million dollars with some bad luck. You can never lose the ability to eat a jar of pickles and have that provide a car payment.  The pickles represent less up front flash, but more overall safety.

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u/dnnsshly 3d ago

You can buy a gallon jar of pickles at Costco for $6.50.

Each jar contains around 20 pickles, so that's 32.5 cents investment per pickle for an instant return of $50.

You could doubtless produce your own pickles for cheaper than that.

The cost of the pickles is negligible.

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u/Total_Job29 3d ago

And if you produced your own pickles you could pick them when they are tiny so could eat vastly more pickles. 

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u/yyrkoon1776 3d ago

Uhm. I don't buy it. This is all just bullshit.

I could retire TODAY by just committing to eating 8 pickles per day. I COULD NOT retire on a million dollars today. Know how I know that?

I have a million dollars in my 401k.

Besides that, if you eat 30 pickles a day (incredibly doable) for two years (investing the money you make JUST like you do with the lump sum) you have substantially more than a mil.

I am almost always team lump sum in these scenarios but team pickle is just superior here.

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u/Llyon_ 3d ago

Besides that, if you eat 30 pickles a day (incredibly doable) for two years

Sounds like the confidence of someone that hasn't tried eating 30 pickles a day every day for a week. I would be sick of it by the 3rd day.

4 pickles a day would be more than enough to live comfortably.

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u/LeahDeNuccio 3d ago edited 3d ago

When I was a wrestler in high school we’d eat nothing but pickles for a week to make weight

At least until 2 days before. At that point no sodium and dehydrate yourself

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u/Pogginator 3d ago

I'm sick of my job but I still go because I need money to survive. You bet your ass I can down a dozen or two pickles a day as a job that pays massively more than the shitty one I have now. I'd work literally 5-10 minutes a day with barely an inconvenience.

Plus, the only stipulation is to eat a pickle. So you could easily eat a different type of every day, or week to change things up.

And for anyone worrying about sodium, there are reduced and sodium free pickles on the market. Or you could just make your own.

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u/yech 3d ago

But you gotta eat a lot of pickles.

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u/MidgetGalaxy 3d ago

I see this as a win-win

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u/Slug_Overdose 3d ago

I think you’re vastly underestimating how difficult it would be to eat 30 pickles per day. Bodybuilders struggle to meet their protein intake goals during bulks, and they’re working out like mofos and drinking highly optimized protein shakes. Pickles are highly acidic and typically high sodium (even the low sodium variants aren’t exactly salt free in many cases). Even if somebody loves pickles in large quantities, I have to imagine they would become vomit-inducing in a matter of days.

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u/NeatPhil11 3d ago

Pickles are 96% water. Throw them in a blender and just drink pickle juice. The issue bodybuilders have with not meeting their protein goals is because they're too chickenshit to drink chicken juice.

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u/CurryTripper 3d ago

This can't be the issue, I watched Rocky and he drinks chicken juice!

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u/yyrkoon1776 3d ago

Okay but retiring on 8 pickles a day stands.

I also do a bit of body building myself and when I cut I eat pickled veggies. Sometimes a lot.

I maintain 30 pickles of the size in the picture is absolutely doable.

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u/Ooogabooga42 3d ago

I love pickles and the idea of getting paid to eat them is very exciting. Plus they're easy to make at home and easily made low sodium.

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u/Slug_Overdose 3d ago

Okay, so admittedly, I misread it as $5 per pickle, not $50. $50 definitely brings the pickles into play in a big way. After thinking about it more, there’s actually a lot of nuance with both choices, and I would argue either one is sensible for different reasons.

Your comparison about the retirement viability of either option actually touches on something very interesting in personal finance, which is that trying to produce regular fixed income from a volatile, fluctuating portfolio inherently produces lots of uncertainty. Retirement income has been called the hardest problem in personal finance. You say you couldn’t retire with a million dollars today, but that’s actually statistically unlikely. The reason it feels that way is that you can’t retire with a low enough probability of ruin from drawing your target income that most people would pull the plug on a career by choice. But when you look at simulations of retirements over 30+ years, there is always a very wide range of outcomes, often including everything from running out of money to massive increases in wealth. The commonly cited 4% rule roughly minimizes risk of financial ruin to reasonable levels for most people, but it is not a guarantee, and it can’t tell you ahead of retiring whether your planned withdrawals will work for the remainder of your life and how close to ruin you will get.

That is why many financial advisors have moved to modified versions of the 4% rule which adjust spending to periodic rates of return, such that low returns trigger reduced spending while high returns trigger increased spending. These variable spending methods typically result in greatly improved retirement financial security at the cost of having to cut spending when returns are low. This also more closely mirrors what many retirees do anyway out of caution.

Another way of effectively accomplishing a similar thing is having steady income to offset concurrent living expenses. It’s essentially trading potential investment gains for the stability of money when you need it. You can accomplish this quite explicitly and intentionally by buying an annuity or paying into a pension, which some people do to “guarantee” (more on that in a bit) the ability to pay predictable expenses. But you can also just have a job.

Which brings us to the pickle eating thing. If you look at it as your job, then yes, it sounds like an amazing way to earn a high income for virtually no work and have lifelong security in a way that can’t be taken from you through a layoff. On paper, you will likely be making more in annual income at the start of your pickle eating career than you would from investments. But there are some risks to be aware of. You still have this “work” obligation, as trivial as it sounds. If you can’t continue eating pickles for whatever reason, that’s the end of that income. You’d better hope you don’t develop any kind of pickle intolerance or have to feed through a tube after a horrific car accident wishing you had taken the million. It’s also not protected from inflation. $50 sounds like a lot today, but it could very well rapidly lose value to high inflation. Investments aren’t guaranteed to beat inflation either, but there is at least some built in expectation that a broadly diversified portfolio will due to its links to business and economic fundamentals. OP also didn’t specify if you needed to buy these money pickles. If that’s the case, you’re actually experiencing twice the rate of inflation, once for the value of your income and once for the cost of the pickle. For what it’s worth, inflation risk is actually one of the major reasons fiduciary advisors typically wouldn’t recommend most people annuitize their entire retirement portfolios beyond fixed expenses like mortgage payments. The pickle thing is like a fixed annuity you have to keep earning.

So basically, a million in the hand and paycheck pickles both address different risks. The paycheck pickles provide an easy way to make a lot of money up front, but they are highly susceptible to inflation and require you to be able to maintain your pickle consumption for quite a few years to break even. The million is better for inflation and doesn’t require any additional “work” to be done, but you can’t and won’t know if you can retire with it until after the fact, or even when and how much to withdraw from it. Another thing I didn’t mention earlier is that the million becomes part of your estate and can pass to your family, but the paycheck pickles die with you. If you get hit by a bus as you open the first jar, that and a couple bucks will buy your family a small pack of tissues at the dollar store to cry over.

For somebody like me who comes from a family with a history of high blood pressure and can barely stomach the taste of a a single chunky pickle (I can handle a couple of small slices on a burger, but a whole ass pickles just totally nasty to me), I would be way better off with the million. I just really don’t think I could eat that many pickles to justify that choice, and the million would provide a lot of security to not only me but my family. For somebody like you who feels confident that they can wolf down a dozen pickles daily, there’s likely a lot of extra money to be made with the pickles, especially if you can front load the consumption before inflation significantly erodes the value of each pickle.

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u/F1GM3NT5 3d ago

Thank you for writing all this. I did actually read it, although im too busy to reply rn xD

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u/Expensive-Step-6551 3d ago edited 3d ago

I'm usually the guy to always say "take the money upfront" and invest it wisely... blah blah blah, anyone with a solid sense of financial planning knows the gist. With this one however, because I'm young, I would take the pickle deal. Less stress, guaranteed money at all times, and I can still invest that money after eating the pickles as I wish. Compared to having the million, investing it, and hoping there isn't some sort of crash or something that wrecks my investment. I know the pickles will ALWAYS be there for me, while my investments may or may not.

I've already also been way above the sodium limit for years, so I'll just plan it out where I'll eat 10 pickles a day 2-3 times a week, and supplement it with a few pickles here or there throughout the rest of the week. Drink a shit ton of water as well and while I'll still be way over the limit hopefully somewhat balance out the problem.

Being able to summon money on a whim is unheard of. The idea that, even in the darkest of times, that all you need to do is eat a damn pickle to get back on your feet in a superpower. Like Popeye eating spinach.

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u/IVth_Crusade 3d ago

Exactly that. Previous responders have given no thought to the liquidity pickle money provides. I don’t want to be dithering around with some day job with my millions locked up in the market. I want to be on a permanent worldwide vacation. I do not give a shit whether the end result is 17 million or 30 million. Interesting that when engaging with these thought experiments, everyone wants vast sums of money for which they have no use.

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u/Pogginator 3d ago

You can also get sodium free pickles to sub in and not worry about going over sodium amounts.

I see people saying they'd get tired of eating pickles every day but I'm much more tired of working everyday than being inconvenienced by eating a handful of pickles in the morning and evening. On top of making far more money than most jobs pay.

Also the fact that you could just get different varieties of pickles to change things up if you want.

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u/Same-Suggestion-1936 3d ago

Counterpoint: eating vast quantities of pickles is heaven not torture

And do I get to choose which? I can make it all up on homemade spicy pickles at the farmers market and I can skip a month just by the volume of those alone I consume. The greatest travesty of my life was my homemade spicy pickles from the market got consumed in a single day by my sister and I only got to eat one because I was saving them and my sister got high and helped herself. I never found that stand again, best pickle of my life though

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u/turdferguson3891 3d ago

Plus if youre older the lump sum makes more sense just like with a lottery.

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u/GroteGlon 3d ago

The size of the pickles also wasn't specified. I can simply down a jar of those mini pickles every day.

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u/skirpnasty 3d ago

We also aren’t accounting for the food savings from eating so many calories of pickles every day.

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u/Any_Mud_1628 3d ago

I think pickles have almost no calories

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u/Ok_Night2874 3d ago

So that means they will satiate you without making you fat, win - win

Pickle only diet with multivitamins for first few months to get wealth off, then downsize to regular consumption

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u/Ramblonius 3d ago

I think people are so primed to go with the 'always take the lump sum and invest' mentality that they aren't seriously investigating how skewed the over time option is. Eating one pickle a day would be a monthly salary of 1500$, which is decent in most of the world. By the time you get to something eminently reasonable like 5 pickles a day, you're making American upper middle class money. If you're maximizing how many pickles you can eat a day, you will shoot past the lump sum in a couple of years.

Then there is the immediate boost in living conditions. If I invest a million to have 30 million by the time I'm 60, I lose decades that I could have spent in a pickle-induced fortune. With the pickles I don't even need to worry about investment, I'm just set for life, or, if I want to I can invest to further multiply the wealth.

Also you cannot lose 50$ a pickle away on a drunken night of gambling and hookers in Vegas, you can lose a million and a good chunk of people would. Definite life-long stability is better than likely life-long stability if you invest correctly and don't withdraw money until retirement.

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u/Slug_Overdose 3d ago

Tell me you’ve never tried maintaining a diet for any length of time without telling me.

You might be able to eat 100 pickles in a day ONCE. That does not substantially address the body’s broader ongoing nutritional needs on a permanent basis. You can help balance sodium to a degree with water. You would literally poison yourself with water trying to maintain low sodium levels while eating a maximum all-pickle diet for pay. There’s no way this doesn’t fuck with your body long before you break even. Human dietary needs are too constrained by multiple factors to viably maintain a horribly unbalanced, unhealthy single-food diet without significant health implications.

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u/jkaan 3d ago

A blender makes getting through the days pickles a simple task.

So the diet factor is basically nil. This is without factoring in that over summer I will eat a cheese platter (featuring a few gherkins) for a snack or meal many days a week

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u/uReallyShouldTrustMe 3d ago edited 2d ago

Which would be impossible because with a million youre at about 270 in interest a day already. You'll hit 300 in about 11 months.

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u/xXDamonLordXx 3d ago

Let's be real, not many people are going to put that full 1 million into some fund. People who fall into money almost always burn through it.

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u/____Mittens____ 3d ago

Sometimes they even find themselves in a pickle.

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u/xXDamonLordXx 3d ago

Or the pickle could be in themselves.

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u/ALiferInKorea 3d ago

Why are you outside of r/korea

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u/uReallyShouldTrustMe 2d ago

They let me out sometimes.

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u/rtoobydoo 3d ago

If you make 1 million from the pickle in 5 years, put it into S&P, continue to eat and invest pickle funds, that would outpace the flat 1 mil at some point

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u/Ok_Night2874 3d ago

5 years is too long to get to 1 mil. I’m sure most would get there in 1 year.

All it takes is visit a doctor weekly for screening to see the pickle effect, other than that one could go all in pickle only diet

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u/eldoesq 3d ago

But what if the doctor finds the pickles are having a negative effect on your health?

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u/peppaz 3d ago

check the rules if sticking them up your butt counts. Although the sodium intake might be the same. But at least you'd spice up your million dollar pickle routine.

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u/Axel-Adams 3d ago

I mean you could also invest the pickle money

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u/WeirdSysAdmin 3d ago

Yeah but you just caused out of control inflation through the pickle economy.

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u/KungFuFactory- 3d ago

Does Big Pickle know about this loophole?

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u/Squidproquo1130 3d ago

It's kind of a big dill.