What would be a good way to calculate "fuck-you money"?

I usually try to keep enough money to sustain my lifestyle for 6 to 8 months in a liquid account. I call it the very same thing, "fuck you money". It is so I can drop my current situation at a moment if I need to or want to. Even financial planners I have worked with suggest this as a way to start a portfolio. First have enough savings for a 6 to 8 month drought of unemployment. Then put into the 401K, then a diverse index fund, then market specifics (like biotech, or whatever).

I want one of Ookseer's fuck-you monkeys. First heard the actual term about ten years ago defined very differently, and I imagine that whichever way you first heard the phrase is the 'right' definition. Ergo, the one true right definition of "Fuck You Money" is whatever sum required to enable you - should the need arise - to shout "Fuck You" in the face of your employer and flounce out of the building, without running the risk of wishing you hadn't in the morning. Or, in other words, six months' after-tax salary as a minimum, nine better, twelve ideal.

Elfword, I believe the farmer would prefer "fuck thee" money.

Would an Amish farmer want "fuck-you" money?

From my experience this ain't a really well-formed question. For over ten years I have been living on half my take-home pay trying to bank something akin to "fuck-you money", and I am not there yet. For a regular working person with any money anxiety, you are unlikely to ever get to a level where you can tell the whole human race "fuck you". That just is not a realistic idea. A million.five is not even close. If and when null terminated ever got thirty mil, he or she might be totally flabbergasted how not-far that quantity takes him or her.

Okay, if I wanted to make a spreadsheet for fuck-you money, this is what I'd put on it: Interest Rate Rate of Inflation 1 year, 5 year, 10 year S & P 500 performance Dollar/Euro exchange rate Dollar/Yen exchange rate Treasury rate Basically, everything that you'd get from Yahoo Finance. I think the concept of a retirement calculator can only be loosely applied here- retirement is really a long-term goal. Fuck-you money is something where you get up in the morning, grab a cup of coffee, go look at your spreadsheet and say "fuck YEAH!"

I suspect that $FU would increase once you had it. Not just in terms of "growing to spend what you have", as Ookseer put it, but in terms of leisure time. Once you have that money, and presumably quit working, you suddenly have a whole lot of extra time on your hands. How you spend that time could easily increase your spending.

once you have around 400k ready to invest, personal wealth managers will suddenly be very happy to talk to you Why at 400K? What is special about that number?

Having read Cryptonomicon, I'd want to get into the spirit of things and throw pretty much everything, including the price of a new kitchen sink. The value of Fuck-You-Money acts like a bar. If you're above the bar, you're in Fuck-You territory. Any lower and you're just wealthy, but without any real power to say Fuck-You. The problem is that you'd have to somehow account for everything that relevant in your life. Getting married? That'll eat into fuck-you-money. Getting divorced without a prenup? There's goes 1/2 of your fuck-you-money. Got some crazy 1 in a billion liver disease? Have a child or have 11 children? If you want to do a spreadsheet, you'd have to have a method to include/exclude factors that apply to you. For instance an indicator I'd add in would be the cost of another college degree. Why? Because fuck-you-money implies being able to walk out on your boss and/or career at a moments notice. For some people, they'd hate their boss, for others it would be the job itself. So if you have fuck-you-money to walk out on a career, then eventually you'd think about going back to school to learn about another field. (Or at least I would.) So a new college degree should be factored into fuck-you-money. So what I think I just said was put everything in there, add and subtract as needed. Sorry...it all sounded better in my head.