Greedy Goblin

Thursday, June 28, 2012

The key to riches: high re-investment rate

I got a very good comment to my Marie Antoinette post. My return on investment (how much ISK I make from 1M capital) isn't especially high, but I have an insane re-investment rate and that explains my really high income.

I mean I made 72B and spent only 3.6B on anything but making more money: 1.5B on playing for free on main for myself and my girlfriend, 1.1 spent on the Logi/Triage pilot and 1.0 on the titan pilot. The rest of the money were spent on creating more money in some way (trading, Rorqual industrial, selling a Nyx pilot). That's 95% re-investment rate.

The most obvious advice that any rich person would give you is: "spend less than you earn and invest the rest". If someone makes just $30K a year and invests 33% of it into a 5% yearly profit instrument, he'll be a millionaire in 37 years, so if he does it in his active life, he has a really nice pension fund. If someone makes $100K and settles with living on 20, investing the rest, he'll be a millionaire in ten years, and will have a 9M pension fund.

Most people don't invest so much and prefers to live a wealthy life now. Also, real life has must-be costs as you must eat even if you know that a dollar saved today is 7 dollars without any work by the time of retirement. In a game there aren't such costs. You can save almost all of your income. Most people just don't. They spend it on whatever they like or stop generating wealth when their wallet isn't empty.

Of course I'm not advocating my 95% reinvestment rate. But 50% is a reachable amount. To keep the books easy, I'd suggest a dedicated seller alt who lives in Jita. Such char can be near-maxed from 500M SP and a day running around for standings. You contract the ore, mission loot or whatever you gain by your moneymaking profession to this char. This char sends half of the income back to your main for spending. The other half stays there and only used for investments made to help you make money. It doesn't matter what way you use to make money, you'll see your income skyrocketing after this. For example you were mining but after you saved half income, you could soon start a second account for an Orca pilot who boosts, holds ore and protects your Hulk by shield transporters. If you were missioning, a logi second account can increase your income greatly. The point is to spend every second ISK you earn on the process of earning more. Soon you'll have more than you can spend.


Thursday morning report: 69.1B (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.1 spent on logi, 1.0 on Titan, 0.5 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx)

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

If someone was missioning "right", a Logi account would add next to nothing to the income/hour.

But yes, I fully support the idea of reinvesting isk, be it in faction gyros, heat sinks, or whatever ones money maker is. But as you've pointed out before, there's a finite limit on how optimized an essentially grinding isk source can be, ie, once one hits max skills and fully pimped out Machariel, it can't get any better short of playstyle changes which could've been done sans pimp (for the most part).

Gevlon said...

@Anonymous: the logi adds the ability to decrease tank and put on more damage/CC modules.

Anonymous said...

A min/max'd Mach for L4 missions would be shield fit with 4xGyros and 3xTracking Enhancers, possibly a T2 burst dmg rig. All the midslots would be dedicated to tank plus a prop mod. It cannot get any more dps short of officer guns/gyros as midslots cannot allocate anything towards dps except for tracking computers/target painters...which are already stacking penalized and similar effects generated by simply flying right in the first place (ie, minimizing transversal).

Similar arguments can be made for the Nightmare, Tengu and Vargur.

Anonymous said...

@Gevlon a mission fit tengu has the maximum dps it can get, and still tanks enough so it doesn't need a logistics.

i'm not sure what you mean by cc though.

Gevlon said...

If your missioning ship is already great, get another one maybe to double the force? Or a noctis that happily collects loot.

There is surely a way to do it faster/for more income than fitting officer mods that draw pirate attention.

Anonymous said...

a tengu with a moderate fit is able to kill 90% of the mission ships faster than you can do the locking.

Anonymous said...

I would want to add that a high re-investment rate only works well in EVE, but not so in real life, where banks implode all the time, pension funds are notoriously unsafe and the stock market likes to crash at least twice a decade.

Anonymous said...

"faster than you can do the locking"

so would a remote sensor boosting alt help?

Anonymous said...

@Anonymous 10:59, this is why you diversify your investments (so when one thing goes bad you have other things that didn't). Also this is way you make steady investmetns; in ensures you're investing when prices are down two.

Yes there are ups and downs in the short term, but the equity markets are up over any 20 year period you'd care to name.

Anonymous said...

"Yes there are ups and downs in the short term, but the equity markets are up over any 20 year period you'd care to name."

Nikkei 225 is down by > 50% over a 20 year period (June 1992 - June 2012).

You should be careful with creating generalized rules from one extremely limited sample.

Anonymous said...

Gevlon, I completely agree with you about ratting. I've always been of the opinion that a good ratter wants to make isk, so having shiny stuff that increases your income by 0.1% isn't worth the investment. I fly dirt cheap BS that repay themselves in 3-4 hours of ratting, and I've refined ratting techniques/fit so that I make more isk than most people in machariels. I have more spare isk than they would, AND if some idiot manages to gank me (I'm in null), I've already repaid my investment ten times over, and can easily afford a replacement... (this is solo ratting mind you, no dual box).

The best dual box setup would be a max DPS ship (up to four damage modules) with something like a dominix for some support/anti tackle, and some sentry drones assigned to the main DPS ship. You're still essentially flying the same boat, but for a small investment you're adding >50% more dps AND making it safer for yourself. With the new drone damage modifiers this setup is that much more efficient.

NP said...

Exactly!

In my head, I consider my wallet to be how much profit I generate on a standard day of trading. With this strategy, the worst that can happen is my wealth will stop growing.

For example, if I were Gevlon, in my head I would think I had 1 billion isk, not the 70 billion he uses to make that 1 billion / day.