Eh, ours are rattan covered in duct tape. You want to learn to fight with a real steel sword while wearing real steel armor? Armored Combat League. You could join your country's national team! For example, I know several people on the USA Knights ('course, the ones I know are also SCA fighters...)
That seriously sounds like a challenging and fun thing to learn. It has to be extremely physically demanding!
Thanks for the replies, I enjoy reading others' perspectives and insights! I guess a number of things have me concerned about putting most of my money into investments, though I must admit I am still very, very new to all of this and will probably come across as naive and uninformed...
I understand your worry, but I think there are some things you need to consider.
1. The Great Depression. Didn't people kill themselves because they lost all of their money during the great depression?
Speculators who were investing on margin (i.e., borrowing money to invest) lost everything. If you had invested throughout the crash and afterward, you would have been OK in a relatively short time, believe it or not. Joshua Kennon has a good blog post on this:
http://www.joshuakennon.com/it-did-not-take-25-years-for-the-stock-market-to-recover-from-the-peak-of-the-1929-crash/2. The Housing Market Collapse.
I have personal experience here. Again, the lesson is to not over leverage (borrow more than you can afford to cover, hoping for appreciation to fill the shortfall). I refinanced my house and took 50k out to buy 10 acres of property because "they're not making any more and it can only go up in value, right?" Not so much... the value of my house tanked, I owed more than it was worth for nearly 10 years, and the property value is also much less than I paid.
You know what though? It's OK and I'll survive that too. I kept paying the mortgages, I'm planning to finally sell that house in 2016, and I bought another house near the bottom of the crash and will profit from the appreciation of the recovery, making it hurt a bit less. I didn't over leverage and thus I could afford to think long term.
3. Relying on the same economy people on MMM try to minimize their participation in.
Spending wisely in accord with your values doesn't mean not spending at all. MMM has a good post addressing this, in fact:
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/04/09/what-if-everyone-became-frugal/I guess this whole philosophy seems so strange to me (even though I'm striving for the same goals and lifestyle as most of you!). I guess I am definitely financially risk-averse after what happened to my family during the housing crisis, which has also made me more skeptical of advice from people who are SO CONFIDENT that their way is the only right and best way. Anyways I'm eager to hear more thoughts on this.
I think that as my husband and I get closer to retiring, I always pictured us having a huge amount of money in savings, real money that is not tied up in investments, even if some or most of our money IS in investments (I get the whole "cash loses value due to appreciation" thing). Like once we get closer to retirement, build up a huge savings account fallback just in case our investments or my husband's pension disappears into thin air.
Finally, I'm going to address the last part I bolded above. Transitioning to safer investments as retirement nears is definitely part of many people's plans. How to do so and the composition of those safer investments is a topic beyond the scope of a reply here. However, large amounts of cash (in proportion to your investments) is actually a *riskier* choice.
If you haven't tried it so far, I encourage you to run some of the retirement calculators and simulate this. CFireSim is a great one, written by a member here, which uses actual historical market returns to calculate your probability of success (i.e., not running out of money) over many periods. If you run simulations with increasing proportions of your money in cash vs. invested, your probability of success goes *down*. Heavily.
http://www.cfiresim.com/Finally, here's a great blog post from Jeremy at Go Curry Cracker on retiring at the worst time ever; this would have actually been in 1965, right before a long period of stagnant market returns and high inflation.
http://www.gocurrycracker.com/the-worst-retirement-ever/