The best post I saw today on the Mr Money Mustache forums was...

[grantmeaname]

I am sure others have said this more eloquently, but the recipe for happiness is:  1. Find out with exactness and extreme specificity what makes you happy.  2. Do the same for what makes you miserable.  Stop doing number 2 (the shit) that makes you unhappy, and do way more of number 1 (what makes you happy).

[MoseyingAlong]

Ideally, if I could I'd move my house and business + me and daughter and grandkids all to one area and we'd all get along. I'd also have my parents still around and other family members, also some of my old friendships.. oh and that old girlfriend that use to make me breakfast in bed.. and I'd like to be 20 years younger please.

. . . .

I think I have to keep going as is, wait until May when the city plan is revealed. Realise that I only have to really do those inspections to earn enough, and importantly I have to live life large now and not wait (mentally) until some future time when I'll magically enjoy life... like live it large now. Get on airplanes, say no to hard work, go out dancing, play music, go do that fantastic hike, check out that meetup, plan a foreign destination holiday with my daughter and grand kids and do it.

1.  It's fine to do the "I wish" thing, but if you spend too much time on that, you just get sad about not having something that literally cannot happen.  You're better off long-term if you force yourself to focus on the things that are actual possibilities.

2.  That second thing is far and away the most important thing you've said.  Do that.  Figure out even one thing that would make your life more enjoyable now.  Go do that -- today, or this weekend at the latest.  Rinse, repeat.  There's no magical point at which everything comes together and the fairy godmother waves her wand and poof! you're happy.  You make yourself happy by repeatedly doing things that make you happy.  Now is all we've got.  So go do it!

Love the wisdom from @Laura33

[Mariposa]

This one by @Zikoris. I especially appreciate the part about inoculating yourself against consumerism.

I think you're kind of coming to it from the wrong angle. I don't think your lifestyle should rely on motivation at all. I've had a 60%+ savings rate for a long time and I've never been motivated. Here's a three-step process I recommend:

1. Inoculate yourself against consumerism by learning the truth bout how things work. Read books or watch documentaries. For documentaries, The Story of Stuff (re: plastic) and Just Eat It (re: rampant food waste) are good. For books, check out Buyology and Brandwashing by Martin Lindstrom, Why we Buy: The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill, The Rare Metal War by Guillame Pitron, Dying for an iPhone by Jenny Chan, and Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara. Once your eyes are opened to this stuff, you lose most desire to buy, period.

2. Automate or eliminate all the bullshit in your life. Automation beats motivation 100% of the time. Your FIRE process can be automatic and require zero ongoing effort.

3. Focus your time and energy on fun things and enjoying life. This is easy because you've eliminated the desire to consume and automated everything boring. FIRE happens in the background without you having to do anything.

[nereo]

@Metalcat for her awesome reminder that it’s never been about frugality.
https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/welcome-to-the-forum/$1-rule-to-prevent-impulse-purchases/msg3322333/#msg3322333

I am willing to work 40 years, I will likely end up with more money than I can spend, and both my spouse and I have walked away from opportunities to make 7 figures annually.

We don't live frugally because we can't afford more, we live frugally because living frugally has made us happier and healthier people.

MMMs old school blog talks a lot about frugality, happiness, and health correlating, and that has been ridiculously true for us. He also talks about how if frugality should never feel like sacrifice. It's about getting more out of your life by spending less.

Is spending more sometimes the very best thing you can do for your quality of life? Absolutely! I have literally the best and most expensive walking aides that money can buy. Sometimes spending the most you can is absolutely worth it.

However, what you seem to not resonate with is that the process of defaulting to spending less pushes you to be a creative thinker, and to truly assess what has value and why. Not only that, but it pushes you to critically understand what actually makes you happy.

When my spouse and I first were introduced to MMM by my financial planner, frugality foundationally altered how we discussed literally everything we did. We explored every decision through the lens of health and happiness, which when you do that day in and day out for years, really solidifies your understanding of what matters and motivates the other person.

We also discovered so many things about ourselves by pushing our frugal limits. We became exquisitely aware of what each of us dislikes and what efforts feel burdensome and why. The fun part of that is that when you truly understand your limits, it gives you the confidence to get even more expansive and creative in your thinking about life.

FTR, our financial planner is now one of our closest friends, has an 8 figure NW and is still living a remarkably frugal life and one of the happiest people I know.

Frugality is not depriving yourself, it's actually about maximizing your quality of life. I often say that I'm not cheap, I'm a snob about spending. It doesn't matter if I can afford it, I will always examine the more inexpensive options because doing so has consistently opened up surprisingly more satisfying and interesting doors.

In my experience, as someone who has lived a very spendy lifestyle in the past, I personally find the spending path to be incredibly boring. It takes very little thought to try and spend your way to a higher quality of life. A marketing system will hand you what it says are the superior items and experiences and you just comply and spend and end up living a life that's pretty much prescribed for you by the consumerism machine.

If you are guided by spending more, you will see that the more you spend, the more almost monolithic the lifestyle becomes at that wealth level. The people of various wealth levels tend to live in the same areas, they have similar finishes in their homes, they drive similar cars, the men wear similar suits and watches, the woman carry similar bags and wear similar clothes. Their kids go to similar schools, their vacations are to similar places, their hobbies are similar, they belong to similar clubs.

It's hilarious that the more money you spend, you think you're accessing more options, but because there are relatively fewer options at the luxury level, you actually end up corralled into a strangely generic world where the most expensive dress shops have to keep a log of who has purchased what dress to wear to what gala so that no two attendees show up wearing the same dress, because we all go to similar galas.

If that's truly your best life, then great, enjoy. I'm sure you will be very well dressed and accessorized and that your car will fit in perfectly in the garage of the private club.

That is NOT my ideal life, and the longer I lived in that world, the more bored I got. I had a lot of "is this it? Is this what we worked so hard for?"

Frugality actually opens up so many interesting doors. When you start knowing very deeply what satisfies you as a human being, and you start looking for less consumerist options to meet those needs, you start seeing options that you would never have even seen if you just chose the typical spendy option that looked "best."

I was never able to be truly happy being corralled into the wealthy lifestyle and community. Too much jockeying for status, too many miserable people, too much sameness, too little diversity. It was just never felt satisfying. It felt like an endless ladder of status.

The world is filled with near infinite options, and it's easy to conceptualize money as giving you more options. But while that is technically true, you can only actually explore so many options. So the lens through which you filter your options has a massive impact on what is available to you.

You can use consumerism as your lens where the more you can afford, the more you filter for more expensive options. If this truly produces the happiest and healthiest lifetime for you, then great, I hope you deeply and passionately enjoy your life with a profound sense of purpose and satisfaction.

That lens will never produce that result for me. I know from experience. A frugal lens, for us, has consistently produced results that are so much more beneficial and so much more fun.

Primarily looking at "off the beaten path" options that cost a lot less has resulted in some pretty wild adventures. Our life has become anything but boring since we stopped letting "what we can afford?" guide our decisions and switched to "what inexpensive option would actually be better?"

I don't look to save money because I can't afford to spend more. Neither my spouse or I have any intention of ever retiring and will probably make even more money in our "retirement" years, similar to MMM himself.

In our lifetimes we will likely have more wealth than we have any clue what to do with. And yet, we will still use frugality as the lens through which we explore our spending options because the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

We are happier, healthier, and have more fun by a shocking margin since we changed our foundational understanding of how spending benefits us.

And I have the assholes who yelled at me in my early days in this community to thank for it.

[Dicey]

You beat me to it. I was coming to quote the same post. I loves me some straight-up @Metalcat! Thanks, @nereo!

[Ladychips]

We don't think about money very much anymore, though I try to do a manual accounting summary a few times a year just to keep on eye on things.  Yesterday's year-end summary suggests that our invested assets have roughly doubled in size since I retired in 2018.

In retrospect, looking at my working career feels like looking back at high school.  It's like this part of my life's ancient history that felt super important and stressful at the time, but from the vantage point of adulthood you just have to laugh at how silly it all was.  Yes, you had to go to class and get good grades but all of the stressors and the social pressures and the identity crises, which seemed like existential threats at the time, are now obviously the byproducts of a weirdly unnatural social experiment for kids with half-finished brain development.  Why did we care who was voted prom queen, or which of your friends got the same fifth period math class, or who got cut from the tennis team?  None of that stupid shit really mattered, right?

My old job feels just like that now.  A ridiculously contrived social experiment in which we all did our honest best to succeed at things that totally didn't matter.  Even in cases where I felt my work was meaningful and important, in retrospect I was making those measurements in units of dollars and it turns out dollars aren't real.  I still attend a monthly retiree-breakfast with some of my former coworkers, and hearing them reminisce about it is EXACTLY like going back to your childhood hometown as an adult and listening to the townies reminisce about their high school glory days.  Sometimes funny, but ultimately kind of pathetic and depressing.  Why haven't you moved on to bigger and better things? 

Retired life is good.  Without a professional identity you get to decide who and what you are as a person.  It's freeing, in a way, because with almost no monetary constraints you have very few limitations and also (even more importantly) zero expectations.  Even the best job in the world requires you to do certain things at certain times, and those expectations become restrictions become burdens become prisons of your own making.  Once you buy your financial freedom all of that falls away, and it's suddenly pretty obvious that virtually every job makes the worker a slave of sorts.  You must produce wealth for someone else, or else you will be homeless and hungry.  You must obey these rules for dress, speech, timeliness, haircut, deference, quotas.  We accept this as the normal state of things.  Give a man a few million dollars and a paid-off house, and he can reject all of that and self-actualize for the first time in his life.  Who knows what you'll become?

My partner and I are still busy.  I won't bore you with too many specifics, but we're still maintaining a full schedule every day.  We work when we want to (even for money, sometimes!), we travel when we want to, we support our kids and our aging parents in ways that wouldn't be possible with full time jobs.  We contribute to causes we believe in, we spend time with friends, we host family gatherings, we go on adventures.  Every day I'm grateful for the years I spent being too frugal in my 20s and 30s because they bought me freedom from my 40s onwards.

For all of you still plugging away, inching towards your retirement goal, just know that it's absolutely worth it.

I love it when someone expresses how I feel. Thanks @sol!

[Gerard]

Thanks, Sol, for writing that, and Ladychips for reposting. I know someone who will be helped by reading this.

[Vindicated]

That @sol quote sounds like a monologue from a great film.  I don't know if that film exists yet, but it should, and it should win some awards!

[BicycleB]

I just love how @SwordGuy keeps finding ways to mix time, money, and skill to be a positive force in the varied aspects of his FIREd life - giving, writing, creating art and other physical objects, supporting artists, and the "financial" art of landlording. Thus the post below, which combines all of these, is one of my favorite forum posts of all time.

Just printed out the 2nd draft of the print layout for my newly edited book.   Need to double-check it for typos and other visual issues, plus decide whether I want to add 4 illustration place holders or just leave the pages blank.

Should finish that task tomorrow and be binding the first copy starting Monday or Tuesday.

Just got checks for $35,000 from our farm for last year.

About to send out a check for $6,000 as a donation to an Asheville, NC shared printmaking studio that got flooded out.  (Any printmaking artist can use the studio and its tools for a fee, which means more printmakers can get back to work making their art.

Next week, I'll be delivering some spare jewelry making tools to a jeweler from that area to help them get started again.  I'm hoping to find out the plans for a similar jewelry making studio and see if a similar donation will get them back on their feet.

Had a new record this year whilst again failing my Evil Landlord (TM) test - we got Christmas cards from 50% of our tenants.

[Moustachienne]

We don't think about money very much anymore, though I try to do a manual accounting summary a few times a year just to keep on eye on things.  Yesterday's year-end summary suggests that our invested assets have roughly doubled in size since I retired in 2018.

In retrospect, looking at my working career feels like looking back at high school.  It's like this part of my life's ancient history that felt super important and stressful at the time, but from the vantage point of adulthood you just have to laugh at how silly it all was.  Yes, you had to go to class and get good grades but all of the stressors and the social pressures and the identity crises, which seemed like existential threats at the time, are now obviously the byproducts of a weirdly unnatural social experiment for kids with half-finished brain development.  Why did we care who was voted prom queen, or which of your friends got the same fifth period math class, or who got cut from the tennis team?  None of that stupid shit really mattered, right?

My old job feels just like that now.  A ridiculously contrived social experiment in which we all did our honest best to succeed at things that totally didn't matter.  Even in cases where I felt my work was meaningful and important, in retrospect I was making those measurements in units of dollars and it turns out dollars aren't real.  I still attend a monthly retiree-breakfast with some of my former coworkers, and hearing them reminisce about it is EXACTLY like going back to your childhood hometown as an adult and listening to the townies reminisce about their high school glory days.  Sometimes funny, but ultimately kind of pathetic and depressing.  Why haven't you moved on to bigger and better things? 

Retired life is good.  Without a professional identity you get to decide who and what you are as a person.  It's freeing, in a way, because with almost no monetary constraints you have very few limitations and also (even more importantly) zero expectations.  Even the best job in the world requires you to do certain things at certain times, and those expectations become restrictions become burdens become prisons of your own making.  Once you buy your financial freedom all of that falls away, and it's suddenly pretty obvious that virtually every job makes the worker a slave of sorts.  You must produce wealth for someone else, or else you will be homeless and hungry.  You must obey these rules for dress, speech, timeliness, haircut, deference, quotas.  We accept this as the normal state of things.  Give a man a few million dollars and a paid-off house, and he can reject all of that and self-actualize for the first time in his life.  Who knows what you'll become?

My partner and I are still busy.  I won't bore you with too many specifics, but we're still maintaining a full schedule every day.  We work when we want to (even for money, sometimes!), we travel when we want to, we support our kids and our aging parents in ways that wouldn't be possible with full time jobs.  We contribute to causes we believe in, we spend time with friends, we host family gatherings, we go on adventures.  Every day I'm grateful for the years I spent being too frugal in my 20s and 30s because they bought me freedom from my 40s onwards.

For all of you still plugging away, inching towards your retirement goal, just know that it's absolutely worth it.

I love it when someone expresses how I feel. Thanks @sol!

I love this too. What thread was it from?

[Metalcat]

I love this too. What thread was it from?

If you click on the person's name in the quote, it will take you to the post. Also, FYI, this exact post was already posted above by someone else, but no harm in celebrating something twice, it just shows how hard it resonated.

[Moustachienne]

I love this too. What thread was it from?

If you click on the person's name in the quote, it will take you to the post. Also, FYI, this exact post was already posted above by someone else, but no harm in celebrating something twice, it just shows how hard it resonated.

Excellent. Thanks!