Agreed, also, a lot of frustration comes from a lack of explanation.
I wasn't at all bothered by his "business spending" categorization, because at the time I had a whole slew of activities that were business expenses that I would never have paid for if I had to pay taxable dollars for them.
So I immediately understood the concept of certain spending only existing because it's classified as business spending.
That said, there's a worthwhile conversation around that that was missed. A lot of my purely "business" spending was actually my social life. I had a private club membership and an expense account for dinners.
I was regularly going out for great meals with friends in my profession because that was literally my side hustle.
As much as I would NEVER spend that kind of money on restaurants myself, once I wasn't in that line of work, I did end up having to carve out spending for going out with friends.
That whole experience created a ton of reflection on spending and what it means to me. And MMM missed an opportunity to explore a lot of that.
Instead he just stuck with his party line of "I'm still spending the same amount, see??" Which was, although arguably technically correct, definitely incomplete and misleading.
And definitely missed some really meaningful reflection.
That's a great realization that you had about the socializing that even though it was a business expense at the time it needed to be replaced later on the personal end.
One of my biggest expenses/vices is Travel. And I always thought it was frustrating when MMM would say how unnecessary travel was and how bad flying was for the environment was and then have such little to nothing spending on it in his annual reports.
But THEN you'd be like what about the 2 weeks you spent in Ecuador or the week at Fincon or the week you went snowboarding with friends but wrote an article about the frivolousness of skiing so they were all "business expenses". If your doing a month of that travel for work, but it's actually fun then that could be scratching your travel itch so you don't feel like you need travel/change of pace.
But if and when the Blog ends will you then literally sit in Longmont 365 days a year?
I also thought it was very unfair to his wife/kid like Sorry guys no vacations this year but Dad will spend a month hanging with his FIRE blogger friends all over the world. I also remember one line from one of the posts when he was away and how his wife/son "Snuck a carry out pizza and Redbox on him" like I'm sure that was a bit tongue in cheek but your spending how much on this vacation and you bring up they decided to carry out?? LOL
This was actually the most reflective part of my experience.
I was going out to luxury restaurants and the private club sometimes multiple times a week, while with my spouse we were almost never going to restaurants and eating extremely inexpensive food.
It prompted so many discussions around what is luxury, what is worth spending on, etc.
I personally don't love high-end restaurant food, and my spouse whines, like a lot, if he's made to eat anything I haven't cooked for more than a day or two.
A lot of people from the outside saw me living this luxury lifestyle while he was "stuck at home" eating rice and beans and felt bad for him and thought it was shitty that I was "getting" to go out, but not "letting" him do the same. However, my spouse goes to bed earlier than most primary school children, even now, he rarely makes an appearance on a night out, he wasn't missing anything.
As for the "life of luxury", it was a full-on pantomime, it was my job to appear aspirational, while hilariously having zero interest in the trappings of luxury that I was modeling, and ironically, while spending hundreds per meal of company money, I was espousing frugality.
It was literally hilarious.
And that's the thing, without a blogger exploring more of the meaning side of things, we can't actually understand it, and then it's very easy to misinterpret, and because it's the internet, the default is to assume negative motivations.
Because I like and understand MMM (as much as one can understand an internet stranger), I have a lot of patience for why he discusses things the way he does, although I'm highly critical, but from what I think is a respectful position, the same way I would be critical of a good friend's writing.
Perhaps because I've never liked FW, I'm less patient with what looks to me like intentional misrepresentation. I also have a personal thing about high earners cosplaying as middle class, which is VERY common. But I've spent a lot of my career yelling at wealthy folks that they are NOT actually middle class, and that they do NOT understand what that lived experience is like for actual middle class folks.
It bothers me immensely.
One of the things I appreciate most about MMM was how he illustrated so effectively that you can spend an absolute fortune and still just obtain what looks and feels like a "normal" middle class life. This is why everyone feels "middle class," because you can spend enormous sums and still generally just obtain roughly the same quality of life as an extremely frugal person.
The cost premium of "middle class" luxury is so extreme compared to the increase in value that you get, it's batshit insane how much a person can spend while getting only fractional increases in quality of life. The upper limit of spending on a lifestyle that just feels like a pimped-up version of "normal" is batshit insane.
FS is quite beautifully explaining this with his trolling. He's not at all wrong, it is INCREDIBLY expensive to afford a "normal" middle class lifestyle if you opt for the upper range. You actually do have to be seriously rich to afford it.
That has been MMM's point this entire time.
