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

[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!

[BNgarden]

Man, up here, we're just trying not to get taken down with you folks.

As for how to deal with it, that's tricky, because it really is so in your face, but it's kind of like how me and my clients deal with bodies that are constantly in painful chaos. The big thing is to really monitor and adjust how you engage.

You have to make space for the suffering, fear, anger over the helplessness etc, but you also have to really build up your awareness of the things you do actually have power over.

The assumption most people operate under is that life should feel manageable and safe, and that's just frankly untrue and total nonsense. It's also what most conventional therapy focuses on, which is highly effective for cases where someone is having an exaggerated response to stressors, but is kind of useless when the stressors are legitimately pretty terrifying, unfair, and unreasonable.

It takes time and effort to build up your tolerance to a fundamentally unsafe, unfair, and unreasonable existence. But it's important to remember that the default assumption that the world is safe, fair, and reasonable, is a product of EXTREME privilege, and nowhere near, remotely true for the majority of human beings.

And yet, most human beings function quite well. Many who live under brutal circumstances actually have pretty solid mental health relative to a lot of more privileged folks.

A lot of highly privileged folks have become convinced that safe, fair, reasonable conditions are a prerequisite for being able to cope with their lives, and that's simply not true. In fact, it's absolute gibberish nonsense, and a huge disservice to them as their perceived ability to adapt and adjust is severely atrophied.

People say to me constantly "I don't know how you handle it" about my ridiculous medical nonsense, but it's not a characteristic of me that I'm able to handle it, it's a characteristic of having experience going through this shit and understanding what resources I need to get through it with more resilience and less damage.

I have extreme privilege in that I have a hell of a lot more access to resources than others do, so I roll with punches pretty easily compared to most. But the key is that I know what I need and I figure out how to get it, and pretty much everyone on this forum has those same resources: valuable skills, intelligence, interpersonal skills, and the capacity to research options.

That's pretty much it, that's all you need to navigate just about any scenario to the best of your ability.

That doesn't mean life might not get brutally fucking harder. It very well could.

BUT THAT'S NORMAL.

It's normal for life to be brutally fucking painful and hard. Who sold you the idea that it wasn't supposed to be???

And the follow-up quote #9237 in that journal as well.

As usual, MC offers a really useful and well-articulated perspective, on human resilience (and base assumptions) in "these times".

[FireLane]

@alcon835 has a great FU money story:

How's this for a very delayed FU story?

At the end of 2023, I was the highest performing person on my team and in my group for 5 years running. As an individual contributor, I regularly had meetings and interactions with the executive team because of the level of impact my work had on the organization's bottom line. Often, they were looking for my opinion on ways we could improve the organization since I was one of the few people who could both talk openly and strategically with the executives who also had a boots on the ground view of the organization. I was considered one of the top people in the entire company and had personally trained about 2/3rd of the employees when they were hired - not because it was part of my job but because the relationships i built and the long-term value real training provided the organization (and my paycheck) was worth the investment.

Oh, and I was burned the fuck out.

Not only that, I wasn't sleeping well. I had been sick for a few years - pretty much a constant cold (turns out it was allergies). My marriage wasn't even much of a relationship anymore, just two people living in the same house. On top of that, I'd spent the previous 3 years slowly losing everything in my life that defined who I was. I was depressed, riddled with anxiety, and deeply unhappy.

And so I went to my boss in November of 2023 and told him I needed a 2-month sabbatical. A few weeks later he pulled me aside and let me know that he personally was blocking the sabbatical. You can read the whole interaction earlier in this thread. It was toxic as fuck.

I talked to my partner, did some budgeting, and figured out I could easily take a 1+ year sabbatical without any issue. And so I saved up a few extra months and picked March 1st as the day I'd give my notice with March 15th as my last day. And then I vanished from this forum for awhile. During that time I got divorced, estranged myself from my family, got therapy, learned I have ADHD and Depression, got medicated, and changed most of the things about my life that had previously defined who I was. I'm much, much happier now. And I am finally figuring out who I am and what I want.

But that's not what this thread is about. What happened in March? What happened when I actually turned in my notice to the boss who told me he was forcing me to stay burned out?

In some ways it was satisfying, in other ways it was anticlimactic.

During my 1:1 with my boss on the 1st, I let him know right away that I was turning in my notice, that I didn't have another job lined up, and that I was taking the sabbatical I'd asked for. He asked me why (which I wasn't expecting) and I decided in to tell him: I was depressed, my marriage was falling apart, I needed a mental, emotional, and physical reset to figure my shit out. He got sort of choked up and asked me why I didn't tell him any of this in November, but the truth is I tried to, and I told him that. If he had asked and not assumed my reasoning, I would have told him all of it. He didn't have much to say about that. He didn't really apologize, but he didn't not apologize. It was weird.  From there, most of the company wanted to talk to me. The entire executive team had various one-on-ones with me to either congratulate me on "getting out" and confiding that they weren't far behind or they were trying to manipulate me into staying. I got to talk to every employee I wanted too, made sure we had each other's contacts, said our goodbyes. Folks asked me to stay but no one was too serious about it - most of them were burning out too. 

On my last day, the CEO had an exit interview with me. He's someone who thinks he's much smarter than he is. Not that he's dumb or anything, he's mostly very smart, but not nearly as smart and strategic as he thinks. He ended up spending most of the interview telling me I didn't really need a sabbatical and getting away from working doesn't solve anything which offended me deeply. Then he told me he wanted to plan a call in May to see how things were going and if I wanted to come back. I told him no thanks and then asked him some questions I'd been wanting to ask for a long time. His answeres were pretty weak, honestly. Mostly non-answers and, "i don't remember, that was awhile ago." kind of stuff. He tried again, at the end, to push me to setup a time to talk to him in May and I very clearly said no, I wasn't going to do it.

Because, dude, fuck you, it's too late.

 A year later and I still get texts from folks periodically, updating me on their lives, asking how I'm doing, looking for someone to talk to who understands the frustrations of that place. I'm privileged to have made so many friends at that job. 

Six months after I quit most of the ELT was gone - they'd quit or been fired. The CEO "voluntarily stepped down" (yeah right!) the exact month I predicted he would be fired by the Board of Directors for failure to achieve any of his goals. Seven months into my sabbatical I accepted an offer at a new job doing exactly the kind of work I'd been asking to do at the old one for years. it turns out - I'm really good at all the stuff they didn't want me to do. And I'm enjoying it so, so much. It's stretching me every day and I am happy.

So if you feel completely lost and burnt out, if the things in life you thought were important are taken away from you, if all you want every morning is a break from the pain and horrors of the job you do, and you're a mustachian who knows what it costs to live day-to-day and how much financial runway you have - then do it. Quit your job. Take that sabbatical. Give yourself a break. The world is about a lot more than retiring early. It's about living a life you can enjoy and be happy with. We privileged few need to remember that more than most.

Oh, and I'm SO GLAD I didn't end up doing the sabbatical. What i thought would take me two months took me seven. Man, if I had gone back to work in May I would have been an absolute wreck. My decision to quit my job and take a no-specific-end-date sabbatical changed my life for the absolute better.  Quitting that job was the best thing that ever happened to me.

[Tasse]

An excerpt from a much longer (and excellent) @Laura33 post, but this is the part I need repeated to me daily:

And then once you have your priorities list, go execute that -- and do it without fear.  Yes, there's a chance that if you do XYZ, there will be negative repercussions.  But there is no path here that avoids all negative consequences -- really, there never is.  So stop trying to convince yourself that if you just managed to do A or B or C just exactly right, you could make everything work out.  You can't.  And the entire reason you do the analysis in advance is to figure out which consequences you can live with and which you cannot, and why.  So don't be afraid that bad shit might happen; go into it knowing that bad shit will happen, and that's ok, because you've chosen that bad shit because you know it is most aligned with your values and priorities.

[grantmeaname]

Great post. She's so overdue for a promotion up the Laura ranks - she's done more than enough to be Laura25 or even Laura20 IMO.

[Dicey]

Great post. She's so overdue for a promotion up the Laura ranks - she's done more than enough to be Laura25 or even Laura20 IMO.

❤️ ❤️ ❤️

[Laura33]

Great post. She's so overdue for a promotion up the Laura ranks - she's done more than enough to be Laura25 or even Laura20 IMO.

LOL -- thanks, guys.  But I'm really Laura Eddie Murray, so there's no such thing as a promotion from there.  ;-)

[AMandM]

Another gem from @Laura33, on financial compatibility and mutual respect in marriage:

Well of course there are ways this can work.

There are also ways this can crash and burn spectacularly.

The best determiner I know for the ultimate success or failure of a relationship is not the how alike the couple is, but how the couple manages their inevitable disagreements. 

If you both think your views are "right," that means that by definition you think the other person's views are "wrong."  And that means that you are likely either (1) believing you can convince the other of the error of their ways, or (2) planning to tolerate their wrong-ness.  Neither option has any real likelihood of success.

The way things do work is if you go into things with a fundamental belief that each of your money attitudes is a response to whatever history created it, that the habit/approach serves a purpose to the person involved, and -- most critically -- that that purpose is a legitimate need.  A relationship cannot succeed if it does not meet the needs of both parties -- and you cannot meet someone's needs when you do not believe, at a deep level, that that need is legitimate and worthy of your time and effort. 

Note that you do not have to agree that the specific money habit is the best way to meet that need -- just that the need itself is legitimate and requires your willing and freely-given support.  She seems to have a really good understanding of what drives your money habits.  You need to develop that same understanding of what drives hers.  Only when she truly believes that you "get" her hopes/fears/concerns will she be open to talking about different ways to meet the need that might be more productive or efficient.  Otherwise, she'll just see any comments or suggestions as criticizing the need herself -- as invalidating her own experience and self-knowledge -- even when you're just trying to be helpful.

FWIW, my DH and I were very, very different about money when we married (he was the spender, I was the saver).  We developed some techniques to allow us to manage our money with as little friction as possible, such as saving first and giving each of us some "fun money" each month.  But the only reason this worked was because those techniques kept me in my lane -- because as long as whatever stupid stuff he bought was within the budget we set out, or came from his fun money, I had no right to criticize it. 

To this day (29 years later), I do not understand why he feels like he does about some things.  Like, he has explained to me that he enjoys picking up the tab at lunch, because it makes him feel like a success to do so.  I really, really do not understand that at a fundamental level.  But I do understand that it is important to him.  And as his wife, I want him to feel successful, happy, powerful, etc. etc.  So I made sure that our budget included money for him to do that.  Now, sure, I grumble inside that it's just nonsensical.  Then again, I'm not exactly a tower of objective logic myself, and I'm sure I have my own weirdnesses that make equally no sense to him.  It works because we both prioritize the things that matter to each other, regardless of whether they actually make sense to us. 

And that brings me to my last point:  humility.  The belief that any one way is the "right" way is fundamentally hubris, plain and simple -- it is the belief that you have somehow infallibly been able to identify a logical, objective truth, and that others who disagree are simply not as smart/logical/clearsighted/etc. as you.  We are all imperfect.  We are subject to confirmation bias, we have limited perspectives based on our own background; we cannot possibly know everything or see everything, and even if we could, our own imperfections would prevent us from identifying an objective "right" answer more often than not.  The best advice I can give is to start every disagreement by realizing that whatever your partner has done, that action was entirely logical to her -- even (particularly) if it makes no sense to you -- and focus on figuring out why she sees that action as logical.  If we want to have an ongoing relationship, our job is to learn the other's perspective, rather than dismissing anything you disagree with as proof that the other is stupid/illogical/etc.  Value judgments that place your intelligence/insight/logical abilities/morals/etc. above hers will destroy your relationship faster than anything else I can think of.  You need to respect her abilities enough to truly believe that her actions have a rational basis -- and you need to love her enough to put in the work to understand what that is.