Combine this with the idea that the most worthwhile investment by far is investing in yourself. Take whatever percentage of your income and use that to help you learn skills that will increase your income. (This includes not just technical skills, but self-marketing skills, self-confidence, anything. You will probably have more and more ideas the further you progress.) Most likely, you will have a much greater return than if you simply invested the same money in more traditional investments like the stock market.
There are two problems with self-investment. First, there's coupling or frictional losses, by which I mean that X amount of money invested in yourself does not directly translate to X*(1+epsilon) money next year, even probabilistically. You have to put in work. Money invested in the stock market doesn't go through a stage in which you use your new skill; it remains, as it were, money all through the period, so there's no loss from transforming from one form of capital to another. Second, the proposed purpose was to free yourself from having to work, throu...
Thus spake Eliezer:
It seems that many here might have outlandish ideas for ways of improving our lives. For instance, a recent post advocated installing really bright lights as a way to boost alertness and productivity. We should not adopt such hacks into our dogma until we're pretty sure they work; however, one way of knowing whether a crazy idea works is to try implementing it, and you may have more ideas than you're planning to implement.
So: please post all such lifehack ideas! Even if you haven't tried them, even if they seem unlikely to work. Post them separately, unless some other way would be more appropriate. If you've tried some idea and it hasn't worked, it would be useful to post that too.