I loved this post! Frankly, it reminded me of the MMM of yester-year, the one that got me all FIRE’d up, so to speak. I can, however, see how it resonates the wrong way; ie MMM was super lucky and shouldn’t encourage people to make fool-hearty moves.
I really don’t think the disagreement is about “confidence=money”. This is highly metaphorical and obviously not evidence based. The disagreement is more in how each person is planning to lead life with their stache. There’s a large spectrum of people, different ages, desires, talents, etc. As matter of fact we could probably have dozens of separate sliding scales.
Producer------------------------Consumer
Younger------------------------------Older
Idealistic--------------------------Realistic
Enjoys new--------------Enjoys sameness
Risk Taker-----------------Security Seeker
Etc, etc, etc
The point being, MMM’s advice in this article is for people who are on his side of these scales.
A 29 year old who has saved 10X spending, who just wants to focus their energy effectively on personal goals, with spending <20K a year for personal and environmental reasons, could easily live the life they want today. Because something they do over the next decade is gonna earn money and they’ll likely end up filthy rich like MMM. 20K a year is a piece of cake for a smart, motivated young person in the rich West.
However, an upper-middle class spending 50 year-old who is burnt, wants to provide the most expensive opportunities for their future grand kids, finally wants to be able to travel the world in luxury, and has very little productive aspiration left, would get destroyed following that same advice. Hell, in this situation with current market valuations, I’d want to go OMY at 4% too!
Neither is good or bad, just different people in different situations, with different goals. Realize this blog and the culture being promoted by the forum (originally anyway) was for people in similar situations as MMM.
This article, like all good MMM articles in the same ilk, has a very specific audience in mind. People like him. For that audience its really very sound advice:
Be confident and live the life you want, as soon as you have the financial ability to do so. Once you’ve reached that personal sweet spot, more money has significantly diminishing returns. So much so, you are actually sabotaging the success of your plan.