I take the philosophy as recognizing what's important to you, and ordering your life around that.
I really think this is stretching it...as soon as you say "what's important to you" you start down a slippery slope that leads to $800 blenders. It's possible to justify nearly anything by saying "well, that...that is important to me, so it must be ok". That's definitely not the fundamental of the philosophy.
Certainly I wasn't trying to make light of "recognizing whats important to you". It's a deep philosophical introspection that needs to take place and certainly not a casual spur of the moment process ("Your Money Or Your Life" and the concept of Minimalism both touch on this introspection). The good news is once this understanding happens, financial discipline becomes quite easy. It's only difficult when one hasn't come to terms with what real value is to them.
For example, there was a recent discussion here about hiring people to clean and it turned out that a huge proportion of MMMers hire cleaners. We have 2 kids and 2 FT jobs but if we hired people to do stuff like this for us we wouldn't save anything as our incomes just aren't that big - also, this seems completely against the spirit of the blog.
I must have missed that cleaning thread. But my thoughts.
1. Cleaning person sorrynotsorry. But again, I'm high income. In the vein of the frugalwoods threads, we weren't always high income. But now we're pushing 50 and we're engineers and our pay has been going up for 26 years (me) and 16 years (spouse).
2. When you've got "extra" then yes, introspection is important. So, an $800 blender. Is it going to last 40 years? Because I'd argue, it might be okay if it lasts 40 years, or if you got it on sale, or whatever. If blenders are your thing.
As I've spent a lot of time reading lately, and various things, I think about life and goals and philosophy. As I'm living through this President, and thinking about life, and savings and poverty and wealth.
Where I fall is this:
- While I could live like MMM (like we used to, before kids) and save up enough to retire, retire, then let someone else get the benefit of our jobs, I don't want to. I like working. But there's only so many hours in the day. Given the choice of "what to do with my time"... spending time with my kids, my spouse, working, volunteering, sleeping, exercising ... all of these come before mopping the damn floors. So I pay for someone else to mop them.
- One of the things that hit me, in reading various books, is the benefit of paid work. There are quite literally millions of people who want work and can't find it, or have work but it doesn't pay well to live. For some of them a JOB is all that keeps them sane. In some (third world mostly) countries, if you are middle class you are EXPECTED to hire servants, to give other people jobs, and it's considered selfish not to. This particular thought is very new to me (only the last couple of weeks), and it really has made me think.
Much like I bitch about the Waltons, and how they pay shit and have employees on welfare and rake in the bucks - because they can - am I much better for working for pay and hoarding? I'm not really a hoarder, but it's a different point in the same scale, really. Donating to charity, tithing, hiring people - when you can afford it - are acts of generosity in some respects.
I don't really see many things in black/ white - most things are shades of gray to me, so philosophical debates are interesting to me and they make me think. I mean, several of my family members are "servants" (clean homes for a living) and it puts food on the table.