It seems to me that there’s a continuum with a focus on expense reduction at one end, and a focus on maximising investment returns at the other.
If you look at the financial problems most people in developed countries face, do those problems exist because people, for whatever reason, consistently spend more money than they actually earn, or do those problems exist because their investment returns were only 9% last year instead of 15% like the year before?
Hopefully the answer is obvious.
That’s why, in my opinion, the teachings of ERE and MMM are infinitely more valuable and more applicable to the majority of people.
Bogleheads sounds as if it’s people who are already wealthy, tinkering obsessively with their substantial portfolios. I appreciate that probably isn’t the case, but it’s my perception simply from reading posts from various threads on these forums.
I don’t wish to sound crass, but the investment side of things is a walk in the park. Most people will struggle with investments for two reasons.
1. They have ZERO money to invest because they’re up to their eyeballs in debt and are ignorant antimustachians.
2. They don’t know about the existence of index funds, and get suckered into some active managed stuff that sounds really technical and complex (read: crap and expensive) by predatory salesmen types.
The most valuable financial information online for most people is MMM posts from April 2011 up to some time in 2013. Cutting expenses is the way forward. A friend of mine recently got back in touch asking for some advice on investments. Roughly 3 years ago he was spending 78% of his income and wasn’t sure where the other 22% was going. Now he’s got a much higher income and is saving 55-60% of it all because I wrote him a couple of emails in 2015 and included some links to early MMM content. I just covered the basics and said “Devour MMM’s blog”
I didn’t include links to ERE, at least initially, because the writing style is less accessible and the methods too extreme for most (me included). I still love it and recommended it eventually because it makes you think hard about your choices. Or at least it does with me.
Regarding healthcare, I imagine the Bogleheads strategy would be to live and eat like a stereotypical opulent “Westerner”, lots of food and not much else, but make sure you have the best possible health cover, regardless of cost.
For ERE I imagine the strategy would be to have far cheaper health cover, but eat really healthily and simply (home cooking), avoid smoking/alcohol and work out at home with a pullup bar, gymnastics rings and kettlebells, actively ensuring that obesity and sarcopenia (and all the subsequent problems) are banished.
Different strokes for different folks I guess, but I like the self-reliance that ERE and some of MMM talks about. It’s empowering.
One of the things that ERE makes plain is that the solution to most people’s problems these days is “throw money at it”. It’s borderline being prepper/survivalist mentality for personal finance in some places, but I find that quite appealing as well, rather than simply saying “Get filthy rich, and then just spend your way out of trouble.”
