Well. This is quite a thread.
Do we think any of the FI bloggers are just making it all up?
Sure, here’s a couple of bloggers who have been making it up.
Anton Ivanov:
https://www.budgetsaresexy.com/the-millionaire-liar-next-door/ Not only did he do it in 2014, but in 2018 he’d started it up again with a different site. What really annoys me about Mr. Ivanov is that he’s reputedly a U.S. submarine vet. He’s been in an environment whose training should have convinced him that ethics and truth are easier (let alone better) than lying.
Rob Bennett:
http://www.passionsaving.com/rob-bennett.html Who could be diagnosed as struggling since the late 1990s. Note that he’s taken most of his site’s “endorsements” out of context from the people he quotes, from all the way back to Scott Burns and all the way up to Wade Pfau.
I’ve attended FinCons for eight straight years, and the last one had over 2500 attendees. I’m sure that some of them are delusional, quibbling, or even flat-out lying about their finances-- but perhaps the truly remarkable point is how few of them are doing so.
Another interesting aspect of FinCon is the number of CPA attendees who do the bookkeeping & tax returns of motivational entrepreneurs (including bloggers and startup coaches). The anecdotal misrepresentation among those entrepreneurs is widespread because apparently their get-rich-quick advice isn't working for them either.
I was just reading another forum post about how Financial Samurai (who I've never really read) has gotten very click-baity and focused on how "impossible" FI is. Made me wonder -- is it possible any of these financial bloggers who claim to be FI are just making it up for the clicks?
Sam gives the impression that FI stresses him even more about wealth preservation and raising a family. Perhaps money really does make us even more of what we already are. And yes, his site has a different focus today than years ago.
I don’t know whether he’s ever attended FinCon.
OTOH -- There's not all that much factual content to any of these blogs.
Before I started The-Military-Guide in 2010, I published years of spending numbers on Early-Retirement.org. It was an interesting exercise in public accountability, but it also highlighted that old saying: “Comparison is the thief of joy.”
Too many people in their 20s and 30s end up comparing their numbers to your 40s and 50s. Or they don’t adjust for inflation, or they have more kids than you. A few will even throw the privilege card-- I’m referring to the one about commissioned officers, not ancestry or family wealth.
On a website with thousands of readers, I’ve found it more helpful to list percentages or to index my numbers to a starting value of 100. In small groups (like a Camp Mustache or CampFI) I’ll dig into the details and share actual numbers with people who already understand the comparison issue. Some of those people are also the type of person who's still skeptical that their FI number will continue to compound, and they usually have a wicked case of Just One More Year Syndrome. They're working from a scarcity mentality and I'm trying to convince them about abundance.
While we're bagging on financial bloggers, I'll add my pet peeve.
Why is it that basically nobody wants to talk transparently about their finances from age 18 to about age 26? Most who are very proud of their financial situation seem to have an origin story like: "This story begins at age 29 when we were happily married, with two super-expensive graduate degrees, 400k in home equity, two paid off cars, 250k in tax advantaged accounts, and zero debt of any sort."
Wait... if that's where you're at at 29, you basically already have the world by the tail. I'm not even interested in what comes next. What I want to know is how you got there. And if the unstated story as a whole lot of intergenerational wealth transfer, then all this really is is a story about how rich families tend to stay rich, which is about the oldest story in capitalism and not particularly insightful or interesting.
I have to wonder how many people even have records dating back that far. I'm one I the more nitpicky, long term trackers around, with eight years of to the penny records, and even I didn't start until I was 25.
Heh. You've read J.D. Roth and Jim Wang, right? They're the types of personalities who keep records. Many other bloggers have been tracking since high school or college, especially the net-worth ones in the Rockstar Finance database:
https://directory.rockstarfinance.com/personal-finance-blogs/I started age 18 with $1500 in my checking account and a “free” college scholarship. By sophomore year I had a credit card and a net worth of -$1000 but fortunately still had the scholarship. By the end of junior year I was consistently in the black (thanks to my new girlfriend, who later married me) and by senior year I was up to a net worth of $3000. Most of that came from a forced savings program run by the college to ensure we had enough after graduation to pay for deposits on apartment rentals and utilities.
After college I was uber-frugal (mostly due to spending all my time at the Navy’s nuclear power training and getting qualified) and by age 25 that high savings rate got me back to a net worth of $22K. Because it was the the 1980s and real estate always went up, I’d also bought a condo with a zero-down VA loan.
Spoiler: it didn’t go up for me.
But when I was at sea for 90-day submarine patrols, I condo-hacked by having a realtor friend rent it out to tenants as a fully-furnished crash pad.
I first started tracking my spending after college (in 1982). The next six years of that was pencil & paper. Our first PC in 1988 came with some forgettable personal-finance shareware, and we saved the printouts. In 1992 we upgraded to Quicken, and today we have over 150,000 transactions. Since 2015, however, we no longer budget and we’ve tracked our transactions in Personal Capital.
The rest of our 20s and 30s in the 1980s-90s is here:
https://the-military-guide.com/four-decades-of-investing-lessons-learned/ Another spoiler: high savings rate.
I'm not really sure if there are any current FIRE bloggers that are totally upfront about ALL their spending and ALL their income sources.
Ouch! This is why I give all of my writing revenue to military-friendly charities.
If you feel that I’m part of that “not totally upfront group” then please post feedback here or send me a message.