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Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: epower on February 03, 2018, 10:54:33 PM

Title: Finances and Frugality on Autopilot- What Now?
Post by: epower on February 03, 2018, 10:54:33 PM
My wife and I have cut back spending, gone as frugal as we feel we can without depriving ourselves and have put superannuation, mortgage payments and index fund investments in autopilot.

We feel all we can now do is keep the routine going and begin to focus on other things in life (health, fitness, friendships, community, etc).

FIRE seems many years off now so do we just set and forget our finances and check say once a year on our progress?
Title: Re: Finances and Frugality on Autopilot- What Now?
Post by: okits on February 04, 2018, 01:02:24 AM
YES.  Set it and forget it and go live your life!!

From your posting history, it seems you had obsessive habits around personal finance that were making you unhappy.  You know from experience that your moods and mental health are better when you pay much less attention to tracking your assets, reading PF blogs, checking financial news, thinking about optimization.

Go live your life and be happy.  You've posted numerous times about exercise/fitness and starting a family.  Both are great places to direct your time and energy.

For the past several years, I’ve spent far too much time reading blogs, forums, books and obsessing over my personal finances.

I’ve got to a point where it is all automated. Wages come in, mortgage and index fund payments go out and I live on the rest.

I don’t need to think any further but I continue to obsess, check financial news, my index fund and checking account balances and think and lose sleep over trying to maximise everything.

I used to be rather care free about life and much happpier but the more I go down the personal finance rabbit hole the less happy I become.

I find when I'm reading this forum, checking early retirement blogs, fantasising about being retired early, I'm actually rather miserable.

I'm miserable because all I do at work is dread being here and dream of not working. All I do on my weekends is imagine if everyday was like this. It actually causes me to get rather down and depressed about life in general.

Compare this to stopping reading all blogs early retirement, not reading this forum much if at all and generally trying to just get really great at my job and enjoy the small things throughout the day I'm generally much much happier. I'm still saving the same percentage of my income and the FIRE date doesn't really change, but I find my mood swings so much from constantly thinking about early retirement to not thinking about it so much.

Anyone else the same?

When I first started out getting a bit more frugal and learning about investments, I really enjoyed the early retirement blogs online such as FrugalWoods, OurNextLife, etc.

However, over time reading these blogs now just makes me depressed. I have many more years to go until I reach FI, don't even know if early retirement is for me but get depressed when I read their posts of them going on yet another ski trip, doing yoga at home at 11am on a Tuesday or just going on about how great life is.

It's the reason I stopped using Facebook and only check it once per week (I keep messenger if people contact me directly however). It seems like these financial blogs are now just morphing into social media, showing off the highlights of their life.

Anyone else feel the same? What are your experiences or tips?