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

[Laura33]

@Villanelle.  I have seen this time after time.  My DH's natural response to frustration or hurt is to get angry -- and even though he's not angry at you, he's generally not pleasant to be around, which makes things twice as hard for me, as I have to manage him on top of the problem itself.  And yet he wonders why DD won't ask his advice or talk to him about important things (and why I don't immediately turn around and tell him what she tells me) . . . .

It's been touched on in this thread, but I think it bears repeating.

One of the myriad reasons women don't report assaults, is that they are afraid of the reactions of men in their lives.  One of the very last things a girl or woman needs as she processes her own reactions to that event is to then have to manage the reactions of men around her.  How often have we heard dads and boyfriends and husbands and male friends say, "I'm going to kill him!," in reference to a male perpetrator?

Suddenly, a woman or girl processing her own trauma has to deal with talking down a man in her life from doing something stupid.  Or she has to stress about her situation causing a man in her life to get in serious legal trouble, and all the guilt that goes along with that.  "I got raped, and my dad ended up in jail because of it."   Or, "we were getting mugged, dad tried to fight back and got shot trying to protect me, and now he's dead because of me." 

These are strong factors when a woman decides to keep her assault to herself.  A man who exhibits that kind of reaction to a theoretical assault doesn't feel like a safe person with whom to share you were attacked, assaulted, drugged, groped, stalked,  or otherwise harassed. Because you know there's a very good chance that it will become necessary to manage him, rather than deal with the aftermath of the incident.  It may feel like a supportive approach, but it is not.  And it makes the incident more about the man than about the woman who was actually attacked, which strips her of power and agency in a time she most needs to feel those things.

It can be easy to get defensive when you hear stuff like this.  Blah blah, toxic masculinity is just a trendy liberal pet project, man can't do anything right, etc.   But it is a stark reality for women, and setting aside ego to listen to women who have BTDT can allow you to be a better ally and support system for the women in your life.  If your reaction to even theoretical crimes against the women in your life has anything to do with reactions that might get you in trouble--guns or fights or vague violent statements-- you show you probably aren't a safe place for them to go. And that makes everyone less safe.

[Malossi792]

@ChpBstrd distilled the whole MMM phenomenon into one really cool paragraph:

Sounds like you're making the right moves after a couple of years of gambling.
(Shortened)
6) Really it's a game of preventing lifestyle inflation. If you can't stand living in a smaller house than your peers, driving a cheaper car than your peers, having a more basic fashion sense than your peers, etc. then you'll never catch up to your own escalating spending. There's a reason why most 40 year olds have practically nothing to their name, and it has something to do with spending. You need to decide right now to be an outcast or iconoclast of sorts, or else you'll get pulled into the lifestyle most people live, which makes FIRE impossible.

[grantmeaname]

Some days it sure does feel like the next two years are going to go slowly. Then I start down the rabbit hole of…”ok, 109 weeks left, and I have 6 weeks of vacation banked, so it is 103 weeks, and then I will earn 11 weeks of vacation, so it is 92 weeks, and there will be 4 weeks of holidays, so that is 88 weeks…and maybe I will take off two weeks of “slick leave” as mental health days, so that is 86 weeks…”

Hopefully I can maintain sanity until the time comes! Any suggestions about managing the mental aspect welcome!

Hey. You asked for suggestions, so here's a brutal Face Punch for you that might help.

Never, ever, ever wish away years of your life.

You will never be this young again, you will never have these days back, you will never again have some of the opportunities that you will have over the next few years.

You will regret if you sleepwalk through years of your life just because they don't look exactly the way you want them to.

You aren't in prison, you are living the very life that you have chosen and built for yourself. If your job is so miserable that you can't live your life to its fullest right now, then quit your job and do something else.

If your job isn't life-ruiningly miserable, then sure, it's absence will be really nice, but it is NOT a prerequisite for you to start living your best life and fostering the key components of truly enjoying your life NOW as it is.

DO NOT live for tomorrow. That's just failing to live. And it will set you up for not knowing how to live once you are retired.

I personally retired and then very soon after lost my ability to walk properly. Two years later I'm crippled in bed with a broken femur and making plans to break the other one. Life doesn't always just cooperate nicely with being exactly how you want it to be.

But guess what? I've still lived an awesome life in this time and spent all summer having a massive and life-changing adventure. You don't need life to be ideal in order for it to be optimal.

So consider this a kick in the ass to start living your best life now and stop thinking crazy thoughts like "I just want the next two years of my relative youth and vitality to disappear."

Like seriously, what the actual fuck?

[AlanStache]

Some days it sure does feel like the next two years are going to go slowly. Then I start down the rabbit hole of…”ok, 109 weeks left, and I have 6 weeks of vacation banked, so it is 103 weeks, and then I will earn 11 weeks of vacation, so it is 92 weeks, and there will be 4 weeks of holidays, so that is 88 weeks…and maybe I will take off two weeks of “slick leave” as mental health days, so that is 86 weeks…”

Hopefully I can maintain sanity until the time comes! Any suggestions about managing the mental aspect welcome!

Hey. You asked for suggestions, so here's a brutal Face Punch for you that might help.

Never, ever, ever wish away years of your life.

You will never be this young again, you will never have these days back, you will never again have some of the opportunities that you will have over the next few years.

You will regret if you sleepwalk through years of your life just because they don't look exactly the way you want them to.

You aren't in prison, you are living the very life that you have chosen and built for yourself. If your job is so miserable that you can't live your life to its fullest right now, then quit your job and do something else.

If your job isn't life-ruiningly miserable, then sure, it's absence will be really nice, but it is NOT a prerequisite for you to start living your best life and fostering the key components of truly enjoying your life NOW as it is.

DO NOT live for tomorrow. That's just failing to live. And it will set you up for not knowing how to live once you are retired.

I personally retired and then very soon after lost my ability to walk properly. Two years later I'm crippled in bed with a broken femur and making plans to break the other one. Life doesn't always just cooperate nicely with being exactly how you want it to be.

But guess what? I've still lived an awesome life in this time and spent all summer having a massive and life-changing adventure. You don't need life to be ideal in order for it to be optimal.

So consider this a kick in the ass to start living your best life now and stop thinking crazy thoughts like "I just want the next two years of my relative youth and vitality to disappear."

Like seriously, what the actual fuck?

Had I read that this morning I probably would have rage quit at 10am and been RE right now :-p 
Not sure if I would be in a better or worst position tonight! 

[Malossi792]

Many FIRE devotees are too focused on escaping work, and don't have a clear plan of what they're going to do with all that time when they get there. Once you have the position of strength in negotiating your working conditions (FU money), you can work fewer hours, at better rates, with people you enjoy associating with. The most powerful bit of the FIRE strategy is "save most aggressively when you're young so that it has more time to compound." Get that step sorted out, and then you have the freedom to choose between RE, or working more and getting rich.

Retiring early makes sense if you have a vision that requires maximum flexibility and time off. If you want to backpack around the world or homeschool multiple children, that's a good reason to retire. If you want to reskill into an entirely different form of work (or take on work that isn't as lucrative), FI buys you that freedom, but you're still likely to be earning some money. If you just want to travel, hike, or hang out with friends more often... you can do all those things while you have a job. The problem preventing those things isn't work, it's internal.

As far as environmental costs are concerned, there are a lot of things you can spend more money on that aren't imposing any environmental costs. In fact, a lot of fancy expensive things can be better for the environment. Get richer and you can move to a more expensive walkable neighborhood. You can pay a premium for things that were produced in more sustainable ways, or were made locally and didn't need to be shipped across the ocean on a carbon-belching container ship.

I think FIRE had it's moment, and most people realized that FI is the best part, and RE is only really worth it for

• people who really, really hate their jobs, or
• people with really clear (and generally somewhat eccentric) visions for what they're going to fill all that time with

.
For most people who achieve FI and don't want to live in a van or run a weird Catholic/Mormon homeschool operation, the real path to living your best life is to use that leverage to

• downshift into some kind of related work role with fewer hours and greater flexibility, or
• take on some other kind of work that provides lower compensation, but is deeply meaningful/enjoyable.

Work gets a bad name around here, but the idea that work provides a sense of meaning and purpose is not something to be scoffed at. There are lots of great jobs in the world. Once money is no object, it becomes a lot easier to get one of those desirable and competitive jobs. Lots of people are attracted to FIRE because they were pushed by financial desperation into jobs they hate. Well once you're not financially desperate, you can get a job you don't hate. For the big FIRE content creators, they found flexibility, reduced hours, and sense of purpose in providing educational content on the internet about lifestyle and personal finance. Now they're trying to figure out what to do with that money.

I think FIRE is attractive to people who received lots of guilt/shame messages about money as children. If you were conditioned to believe frugality is a virtue and opulent spending is shameful and/or stupid, and then you grind your way through school to get a high-paying career... Well then the FIRE approach lets you exemplify those "virtues" you internalized as child without ever confronting the internal scripts around scarcity. Then someday you realize you're rich and you never exercised the muscle of spending money well to make your life more beautiful. Will second @BeanCounter that Ramit Sethi's stuff is a great counter-balance to the scarcity mindset.

Pure gold here.

[roomtempmayo]

Great post, @Log .

[Laura33]

Many FIRE devotees are too focused on escaping work, and don't have a clear plan of what they're going to do with all that time when they get there. Once you have the position of strength in negotiating your working conditions (FU money), you can work fewer hours, at better rates, with people you enjoy associating with. The most powerful bit of the FIRE strategy is "save most aggressively when you're young so that it has more time to compound." Get that step sorted out, and then you have the freedom to choose between RE, or working more and getting rich.

Retiring early makes sense if you have a vision that requires maximum flexibility and time off. If you want to backpack around the world or homeschool multiple children, that's a good reason to retire. If you want to reskill into an entirely different form of work (or take on work that isn't as lucrative), FI buys you that freedom, but you're still likely to be earning some money. If you just want to travel, hike, or hang out with friends more often... you can do all those things while you have a job. The problem preventing those things isn't work, it's internal.

As far as environmental costs are concerned, there are a lot of things you can spend more money on that aren't imposing any environmental costs. In fact, a lot of fancy expensive things can be better for the environment. Get richer and you can move to a more expensive walkable neighborhood. You can pay a premium for things that were produced in more sustainable ways, or were made locally and didn't need to be shipped across the ocean on a carbon-belching container ship.

I think FIRE had it's moment, and most people realized that FI is the best part, and RE is only really worth it for

• people who really, really hate their jobs, or
• people with really clear (and generally somewhat eccentric) visions for what they're going to fill all that time with

.
For most people who achieve FI and don't want to live in a van or run a weird Catholic/Mormon homeschool operation, the real path to living your best life is to use that leverage to

• downshift into some kind of related work role with fewer hours and greater flexibility, or
• take on some other kind of work that provides lower compensation, but is deeply meaningful/enjoyable.

Work gets a bad name around here, but the idea that work provides a sense of meaning and purpose is not something to be scoffed at. There are lots of great jobs in the world. Once money is no object, it becomes a lot easier to get one of those desirable and competitive jobs. Lots of people are attracted to FIRE because they were pushed by financial desperation into jobs they hate. Well once you're not financially desperate, you can get a job you don't hate. For the big FIRE content creators, they found flexibility, reduced hours, and sense of purpose in providing educational content on the internet about lifestyle and personal finance. Now they're trying to figure out what to do with that money.

I think FIRE is attractive to people who received lots of guilt/shame messages about money as children. If you were conditioned to believe frugality is a virtue and opulent spending is shameful and/or stupid, and then you grind your way through school to get a high-paying career... Well then the FIRE approach lets you exemplify those "virtues" you internalized as child without ever confronting the internal scripts around scarcity. Then someday you realize you're rich and you never exercised the muscle of spending money well to make your life more beautiful. Will second @BeanCounter that Ramit Sethi's stuff is a great counter-balance to the scarcity mindset.

Pure gold here.

You totally beat me to it!  This was fantastic.

[Log]

Aw thanks y’all (:

[Laura33]

@Metalcat as usual.  This one hits a little close to home.

Thank you :)

My dad's place is in peaceful suburb not far from Boston. I think it would be pretty restful, especially because the in-law suite has a separate entrance so I would get some privacy. I've also been talking to my suburb-of-Philly friend a bit more about me moving in. He asked if I wanted to house-sit for a month this summer while he takes his family overseas, so that could be a good test run. The parks non-profit still hasn't gotten back to me when they said they would, so I nudged them for an update. I think what I decide to do re: taking a train out West, or breaking my lease and living with my dad or friend will hinge on what their answer is. 6 months isn't a long time, and like you said JAYSLOL I can use that time to get my license, maybe a car, and hatch a concrete exit strategy without burning through my savings. If I don't get it, I either go back to the temp agency or straight up break my lease and move in with my dad or friend like Metalcat suggests.

I'm having feelings of doubts/second thoughts about my decision that I'm trying to cope with. The survivalist in me (who is very loud and very frantic) is panicking about voluntarily throwing away a completely secure job (they never fire anyone), a solid paycheck and full health insurance coverage. This is the rationalization that kept me here for so long: the job is, by definition, dealing with a ton of unbelievable bullshit, but so are a lot of jobs, and this one isn't likely to get pulled out from under me. I know that other jobs with benefits exist, and that trading my daily happiness and mental health for financial security is not exactly the best trade-off, especially when I don't have any chronic health issues that require regular health insurance usage. I guess because this is the first job I got that provided that security, it feels like it's going to be extremely difficult to find something else that will, but maybe that's an old script like Metalcat said.

So I'm trying to remind myself that I don't really know what else is out there and I'm only able to imagine what my limited experience has shown me. That I get one shot at this life, and I know for sure that this isn't what I want to be doing with it. That money isn't a reason to live. That happiness can be found in many places, and it's up to me to find it. That I can't cling to a stable-but-unhappy life just because it feels "safe." That safety is an illusion. That my friends love and support me and were overjoyed when I told them I put in my notice. There isn't anyone in my life (including you kind people!) who thinks this is a bad decision. Even reminding myself of all these things, I feel totally unmoored, but of course I do--I'm making major life changes.

Last summer I saw an old friend that I hadn't seen in many years. She was asking where I was living and what I was doing for work, and when I told her, she had this utterly baffled, disbelieving look on her face and bluntly asked, "Why?!" I was a little insulted in the moment, but I couldn't stop thinking about it: Why? Why am I living here? Why am I doing this job? The fact that I didn't have an answer besides "basic survival" was disturbing and stuck in my mind up until now. It felt like I didn't have reasonable options, but maybe it's just because I didn't/don't know what options there are.

This isn't survival instinct. It's the natural bias to perceive whatever you are doing as the safer option. 

No matter how bad, toxic, or risky someone's current situation is, the stupid human brain applies a "safety" premium to it that makes it feel really risky to give it up.

This is the basis for fear of change.

In reality what you have done is take a guaranteed risk of being unhappy and traded it for an unknown risk. But the truth is you are perfectly capable of creating a safer future for yourself by eliminating the known risk of being unhappy doing what you were doing.

You aren't craving actual safety, you are afraid of the unknown and raving certainty.

The more psychologically flexible you are and the more comfortable you can be with the unknown, the better you will actually be at building a more robust, secure, and happy life for yourself.

The number one risk most people take in life is being afraid of the unknown.

Being willing to not know what the future holds is NOT the same as being aimless or reckless. In fact, it's the opposite.

Because you've never done what it takes to build a happy, healthy, optimal life, you don't yet trust yourself to do what it takes. You worry that the best you could do was the life that made you unhappy. You don't yet *know* that you can do that.

You have to actually start doing it to build the faith in yourself that you can.

This is literally how you approach any new challenge in life. You have to face that you don't know for sure if you can do it, but you put in your best effort and try, and if you are determined enough, and the goal is obtainable, you will very likely succeed.

Right now you're like a freshman at college terrified that you might fail. Everyone who has completed college thinks your fears are naive and quaint, but to you, they feel real.

Well, that's how happy people are looking at you right now. Staying in your old life would be like a highschool graduate avoiding college because of fear of failure. You've already made the decision and now you're just intimidated by it, but anyone who has been there thinks that fear is kind of cute because the chances of you failing to build a happier life compared to being miserable is pretty low if you just put in the work.

I am very comfortable with uncertainty. In fact, if my life is exactly the same in 10 years, I'll be pissed. Lol.

This past year I had to agree to a surgery that could possibly result in above the knee amputation. That unknown was scary, but I trust myself so much to make my life great that I knew I would still have a great life. No matter what happens, I know I have the skills to cultivate a full and happy life.

I have that faith because when push came to shove, that's what I did. When things that felt safe were taken away or I had to walk away, I always found a way to learn from it and make my life better and happier.

Building a happy life is a skill you have to learn. You learn it by doing.

If you waste your life doing shit that isn't happy or healthy, you never get to learn this skill. You may have no clue how to build your best life. That's normal, you haven't learned how to yet. Get on learning that.

But sticking with what doesn't work and failing to learn that isn't "safe" at all.

That's like staying in a horrible marriage because you don't believe anyone decent will ever love you. That's not safety, that's familiarity.

It's going to take effort to figure out your best path forward, but effort is way more enjoyable than festering.

Think of it this way, imagine you are horribly unhealthy, weak, out of shape, obese, and your doctor has told you you have type 2 diabetes. Continuing to live your unhealthy lifestyle is comfortable but going to destroy you. Overhauling your entire lifestyle is intimidating and you have no faith that you can even do it. You've read about people trying to lose weight who have ended up heavier in the end.

But sticking with the unhealthy routine you know is guaranteed to destroy you. Figuring out how to build a healthy lifestyle is a matter of getting the right information, the right supports, and putting in smart forms of effort.

You're only going to end up worse off if you don't seek out the right supports along the way and don't figure out what skills you need to succeed. Your biggest risk is to over complicate it.

You have everything you need to figure out how to build your best life. The biggest barrier to that was your previous job. The whole world of possibilities is open to you now and there is SO MUCH MORE security in having options than in being stuck with something that is actively bad for you.

Familiar DOES NOT equal safer.

[FireLane]

I nominate this post by @ChpBstrd on America's economic outperformance:

I suspect our questioning of the value of economic growth would sound crazy to a person 100 years ago, when only rich people had indoor plumbing, electricity, or telephones, when a typical person had only 4-5 sets of clothes, and when the growth of American children was actually stunted by chronic malnutrition and deep material poverty.

Back then, the problem was not enough goods available to meet everybody's needs. We've thoroughly solved that problem. For the past 20 years the most exciting growth markets have been in the categories of time-wasters (iphones, social media, streaming, gaming), status symbols (SUVs, pretty trucks, McMansions, fashion), and luxuries (travel, restaurants, hotels, video doorbells, sweets).

Now our shortages are time, family cohesion, social cohesion, meaningfulness, clean air, clean water, clean soil, and attention. From a modern perspective, it seems fair to ask: Why we aren't producing more of these things, and why we are still so singularly focused on producing (and consuming) more Wal-Mart shit?

The answer is that the things we lack cannot be sold to us, and we look to advertisements to set our life's ambitions.

In a related article they point out that, adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), average incomes are higher in Mississippi than in France (!)  https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/04/13/the-lessons-from-americas-astonishing-economic-record

But who among us would rather be a Mississippian than a Frenchman? The Mississippian could lose everything if they need hospital care, they have minimal retirement security if stock markets don't cooperate, they are at many times greater risk of death by homicide, their food is unhealthy, and because of the way their society is structured much more of their income must be spent on transportation.

The French are rioting because they might have to retire at age 64 instead of 62. The Mississippian will be lucky if they can retire years later than that, but unlike the Frenchmen at least they think they have it made.

[roomtempmayo]

Fantastic post, @ChpBstrd .  The contrast of Mississippi and France cuts right to the fact that having a good life isn't the same as having more money.

[deborah]

From the FIRE = Privilege thread

I think that there are many factors beyond our control that allow us to achieve FIRE or not. We were serious early about living on only one of our incomes because we'd lived through a bad recession that directly hit us. However, I didn't become absolutely hair-on-fire about frugality until one of my co-workers (younger than me) died in front of all of us at the office and I realized that death could come for any of us at any time. Was this how I wanted to die? Never seeing my husband because I was spending all my days and nights at work?

My co-worker who died never had a chance to pursue FIRE. Unbeknownst to any of us, she was supporting a large extended family of people (mostly children and teens) because she was the only one in her family that had been lucky enough to get a good job that paid for her education and then promoted her. When she died, suddenly there were a lot of members of her family who couldn't afford to feed themselves and pay rent, much less dream of FIRE. And the company life insurance wasn't going to produce money quick enough. We banded together to get as much money as we could to her family.

Her example haunts me. She was the epitome of not privileged: African-American from a very poor area of the country with a thick accent that made it difficult for her to do the things that help one get ahead in corporate America. She was also quite sick, though we didn't realize it at the time. We were just puzzled by why she fell asleep inappropriately at times. Her life was far, far harder than I realized from the outside and I felt terrible when I was finally aware of what she was dealing with and just how impressive she was.

She did not reap the benefits of her hard work, but two children (not hers, she never had children) that she helped put through college will. The children that she kept alive and on the straight and narrow will. She could never have FIRE'd and in my arrogance before her death I wouldn't have understood why. She was quite, quite frugal. Frugality doesn't equal FIRE. Intelligence doesn't equal FIRE. Mindset doesn't equal FIRE.

She was not "the masses." I'm not sure anyone actually is. But yes, I do think that the ability to FIRE is the outgrowth of a a variety of advantages not available to everyone. It probably does mean that we can't understand everything others face, even as empathic people.

[BicycleB]

From the FIRE = Privilege thread

I think that there are many factors beyond our control that allow us to achieve FIRE or not. We were serious early about living on only one of our incomes because we'd lived through a bad recession that directly hit us. However, I didn't become absolutely hair-on-fire about frugality until one of my co-workers (younger than me) died in front of all of us at the office and I realized that death could come for any of us at any time. Was this how I wanted to die? Never seeing my husband because I was spending all my days and nights at work?

My co-worker who died never had a chance to pursue FIRE. Unbeknownst to any of us, she was supporting a large extended family of people (mostly children and teens) because she was the only one in her family that had been lucky enough to get a good job that paid for her education and then promoted her. When she died, suddenly there were a lot of members of her family who couldn't afford to feed themselves and pay rent, much less dream of FIRE. And the company life insurance wasn't going to produce money quick enough. We banded together to get as much money as we could to her family.

Her example haunts me. She was the epitome of not privileged: African-American from a very poor area of the country with a thick accent that made it difficult for her to do the things that help one get ahead in corporate America. She was also quite sick, though we didn't realize it at the time. We were just puzzled by why she fell asleep inappropriately at times. Her life was far, far harder than I realized from the outside and I felt terrible when I was finally aware of what she was dealing with and just how impressive she was.

She did not reap the benefits of her hard work, but two children (not hers, she never had children) that she helped put through college will. The children that she kept alive and on the straight and narrow will. She could never have FIRE'd and in my arrogance before her death I wouldn't have understood why. She was quite, quite frugal. Frugality doesn't equal FIRE. Intelligence doesn't equal FIRE. Mindset doesn't equal FIRE.

She was not "the masses." I'm not sure anyone actually is. But yes, I do think that the ability to FIRE is the outgrowth of a a variety of advantages not available to everyone. It probably does mean that we can't understand everything others face, even as empathic people.

+1. @Metta, thanks for having posted this.

[Malossi792]

First, this is absolutely the place for you.  I know this board often feels like it is full of highly-paid professionals who can easily put aside 75% of their income, but some of the strongest, most helpful contributors have never made a ton of money, and yet still manage to save and have satisfying lives. 

Second, I very much encourage you to read as many of the original MMM posts as you can.  You don't have to agree with everything or want the same life Pete has.  But there is an infectious sort of optimism in there that I think you need very much.  You sound like you are not particularly happy with your life.  I think what you need to realize is that the life you have now is a choice, and if it's not working for you, there are many, many, many other options out there that are completely within your power.

E.g., do you actually like your job?  $40K is a crap salary for someone with years of training and experience.  If you love the work and people so much you are willing to live on the salary, great -- that's a perfectly reasonable choice.  But if you're staying put because you feel stuck and are scared of leaving what feels safe, then it's on you to make a change.  There are many fields that will pay you as much or more that don't require years of training or experience.  Dive into the research, find a career counselor, brainstorm your options with your friends or SO, etc.  Hell, there are people here who make far more than you by teaching English abroad in in places that cost a hell of a lot less to live than wherever you are.  Or if you don't want a job change, look for a side hustle -- you can probably make some decent money on the side teaching English online.

Also, do you track your expenses?  It would very likely be helpful to do a full case study, detailing your income and expenses.  You'd be amazed at how much money people blow on stuff simply because they assume that's a normal part of life and a need, when in reality there are cheaper options, or maybe you don't need it at all.  I am particularly worried that you have any CC debt at all, given your income level, as the interest on that could well be bleeding a notable part of your leftover $.  There are also many folks here who can advise you on whether the retirement savings vehicles you've chosen are the best options given your current situation.

The key to all of this is realizing that almost everything is a choice -- but we, as a species, are very very good at justifying those choices as needs, and then whining about the consequences of that choice.  For example, your animals.  Having pets is a luxury, and getting rid of them is a very easy way to save what can be significant cash.  And yet I guarantee if I advised you to get rid of the pets, you'd get angry and defensive, because they're part of your family and probably one of the relatively few parts of your life that consistently brings you joy.  So I'm not actually going to advise you to get rid of your pets.  What I am going to advise is that you recognize that you are choosing to have pets instead of putting $XXX per month into retirement.  You can decide that that the tradeoff is worth it, but then you don't get to complain about not having that $$ for retirement.  You can decide that you want to stay in your current job because XYZ, but then you don't get to complain about how you make so little.  Etc. 

Every choice comes with tradeoffs; no matter which path you choose, you will have a finite number of dollars and a finite number of hours, and you can spend each of them only once.  The way to becoming more satisfied with your life is to recognize your own power instead of feeling like a victim of circumstances beyond your control.  Question everything -- your job, your location, your housing, your hobbies, etc.  Each of those things is a choice.  Look at the pros and cons of each choice as objectively as you can -- heck, post them here for input.  Then make the choice that provides you the most of what you want with the fewest negative tradeoffs.  And if that choice doesn't end up working, make another one.  Nothing needs to be permanent. 

Note:  your choices will not be perfect; no one does everything right the first time, and the future never turns out like we expect it to.  But we learn from screwing up, not from getting everything right.  So take a chance, make a change, see where that gets you, then adapt as needed.

Just @Laura33 being amazing as usual.

[roomtempmayo]

@AMandM in the Money Mindset thread, with a good message for all of us who were raised by post-materialist hippies or are just naturally skeptical of consumerism.

To me, the key is to understand that money is a tool. It's the most versatile tool available. It can be used to accomplish many different tasks: provide shelter, food, and education; improve or safeguard health; keep danger of various kinds at bay; increase physical and intellectual pleasures; alleviate others' suffering; and, of course, acquire stuff.

It's also the most misunderstood tool. Many people think (or act as though they think) that the only task money can accomplish is to acquire stuff, so to them money is just a temporary placeholder for stuff. In that view, "caring about money" equals wanting more stuff. And since "more stuff" is not exactly a noble goal, caring about money seems shallow. It makes sense to feel guilty in this context.

But you can break the money-stuff connection if you can be clear about the actual tasks you want this tool to accomplish. Then, if you are satisfied that they are worthy tasks, hopefully that can help reduce your guilt.

[Laura33]

Damn.

Karl Marx said that politics is the question of who works for the benefit of whom. In his era, it was a downtrodden serf class working for the benefit of the nobility and clergy. Our era upends this logic though, with people working for what they think is their own benefit.

The folks spending their lives toiling in jobs they hate are doing so because they believe fancy houses and cars and cell phones will make them happy. They continue doing this, year after year, despite all the evidence they are not becoming happy. They consume hours per day of media and social media propaganda reminding them that more stuff will make them happy, and framing life as a competition to have the nicest stuff. The ads and sitcom lifestyles motivate them to go out and hustle more money each day. This propaganda-work motivation cycle is not all that different than communism, except it is more effective in persuading people to work harder than they otherwise would. It is more effective because it tricks people into believing self-benefit is the acquisition of stuff, when in fact a human needs a bit more variety than that to have a good life.

That said, money is a claim on other people's future labor. It is the essence of having other people work for the benefit of you. It may seem wrong to seek control over other people in this way and to become a parasitic non-contributor, but keep in mind that somebody has to do the work required to support a high quality of life. Somebody has to grow the food, drive the truck, run the stores, account for everything, dig the ditches, manufacture the water pipes, make the shoes, pave the roads, treat the sick, etc. Money keeps this cycle of work going, and to a large extent much of the work is done because people want the work outputs of other people (i.e. the stuff). It is neither good nor bad, it is simply the way things evolved to incentivize the work that is necessary to produce our lifestyles. The miserable workaholics are the ones who believe in the system's propaganda a bit too deeply, and who cannot imagine questioning the system's axioms.

What you're contemplating is not to become a workaholic who drives a leased SUV, lives in a McMansion, subscribes to 5 streaming services, and gets the newest iPhone every year while hating their life. You're contemplating hacking the system by consuming a lot less than you produce, and buying investments instead of stuff. Eventually, you hope to purchase your autonomy and freedom by having investments earn enough to support your cost of living (Note the parallels with escaping serfdom. Some things never change.).

But in addition to this opportunity to escape working all your life, there is a threat. In the culture you live in, almost nobody is willing to work for the benefit of others without money. Those without money go without good quality foods or medicines that could save their lives. Those without money are herded into places where it is too dangerous to walk down the street or drink the tap water. Ours is a cruel culture where elderly people are made homeless because they cannot work to pay rent, and millions of children go to school each day hungry. Those who fail to work will suffer.

You will grow old some day, and be unable to work. This culture will treat you quite badly if you haven't amassed some money by that time, to purchase the labor of people in the future when you cannot do the labor yourself. In addition, you have parents, and may have kids. You and everyone you love may face the risk of an early disability or a large financial loss, such as a house fire, lawsuit, or theft. If that happens and you have no money to spend, this culture will literally leave you to die. Ask the people who can't afford insulin. Maybe things ought to be different, but what ought to be won't matter when it's winter someday and the energy bill is due.

Seen in this light, you don't owe this culture anything. Your only reasonable option is to earn and invest money while you can, while rejecting the propaganda about stuff=happiness. That's the only outcome which allows you to have your needs taken care of when you're too old to work or to take care of the needs of others who hit their own pitfalls. Having money gives you the quasi-political power to direct other people's work toward the benefit of people who matter to you, including yourself. It keeps you from becoming another desperate person drawing down the very limited reserves of charity to the detriment of the other charity recipients.

Money and stuff are both tools, and both are often misused. If you have negative attitudes about money, maybe consider whether you have a too positive attitude about stuff. Those people rumbling up and down the street going to jobs they hate in fancy SUVs are sacrificing their actual happiness for the sake of a symbol of happiness sold to them through propaganda. The people in the drive-thru are signing themselves up to suffer the pains of heart disease because they are told it's a great deal. The people spraying chemicals on their manicured lawns will know the suffering of cancer someday. The people who are fashionable today will spend the last 20 years of their lives in ratty clothes, worried about running out of money because they didn't save.

To some extent, it is the stuff we covet in excess of our needs which causes the suffering. If everyone lived like a Mustachian, there would be no need to worry about having enough money, we'd live longer, healthier lives, and we'd be a lot less interested in sacrificing family, friendships, time, and contentment for the sake of "trading up" houses/cars/clothes/jewelry/toys. We can't save the deep believers, but we can extricate ourselves from the trap they're in.

[Gremlin]

Wow @ChpBstrd.

I don’t know that qualifies as the best post on MMM today.  Maybe, just maybe, that’s the best post here of all time…

[cleverscreenname]

Agreed. Very eye-opening.

[Glenstache]

Agreed. Very eye-opening.

especially the avatar, which adds a nicely mad-scientist vibe to the whole post.

[maisymouser]

To me, the issue here is that you are conceptualizing your futures separately.

"I want this" vs "He wants that"

Okay...but where are each of you in each other's visions?

For example, I could not care less about access to a basketball court where I live. I've never played basketball, never will, never watched it on TV, it just isn't something I care for, in fact I find basketball incredibly annoying as a sport.

However, playing basketball multiple times a week makes my spouse a happier, more peaceful, more reflective person. So I will never, ever consider living anywhere where there isn't access to both indoor and outdoor basketball courts because access to basketball is essential for my happiness because it's essential to my partner's happiness.

Access to basketball is in fact higher on *my* list of priorities than anything I would want for myself because the impact on *my* quality of life is so profound having my spouse have basketball as a physical and mental health outlet.

Let's say you "win" the argument and you move rural and get what you "want" and your wife ends up miserable and complaining every day about her commute and resenting you for it.

Did you actually win?

Now, to be clear, I'm not saying some "happy wife, happy life" bullshit. You BOTH owe this consideration to one another.

Where are you in her vision of living in the city? Is she accounting for how that impacts your well being and the state of your marriage??

My point is not that either of you needs to compromise, it's that you need to start building these visions collectively. If you're already getting to the point of having a clear vision of a lifestyle that YOU want for YOURSELF and the only thing standing in the way is that your spouse doesn't want it...then you skipped way ahead in the vision process and left your partner out.

I don't know what the solution is, but I do know that you need to really talk about these things and not from the perspective of having two separate plans that are competing.

You need to come at it from the perspective that both partners have needs and that those needs ALL need to be met. Her needs are your needs and your needs are her needs. There is no competition.

It's not just about knowing what the other person wants, it's about understanding why they want it and what it would cost them not to have it. Then collectively, you work together to triage which things age true needs, which are wants, which can be met now and which can be met later. Which can be met full time and which can be met part time.

Would a very small city flat and weekend country home meet both of your needs? Or would living in the city but close to green space be an option? Would living in the city and renting a rural office space that you can commute to be a possibility?

To be clear, I am not offering any of the above as solutions, I'm offering them as talking points so that you can each better understand the borders of each other's wants and needs.

You learn A LOT about what someone actually wants from a situation by understanding their rational for accepting or rejecting a compromise solution.

The more you talk it through, the more your priorities will align, and the more obvious the solution will be, and it may be radically different than either of you anticipated in the first place.

My spouse and I just went through this recently, and were both absolutely shocked by what the solution turned out to be. Literally never would have guessed it, and yet we're both thrilled.

It was the creative, collaborative process of aligning our needs as collective needs that opened up our thinking and expanded our options.

When you fully embrace each other's needs as your own, because frankly, they are, you can never have your dreams at odds, because your own dreams will always account for the other's needs.

So if either of you have an "ideal life" that would be miserable for the other, then it's not really a dream life, is it?

This was the post I needed to read today. Totally different situation but just the advice I needed to hear.

[FireLane]

@seattlecyclone on whether early retirees should sign up for benefit programs that they don't need, even if they're legally eligible:

You are not only using this for Supplemental Nutrition, but for handouts from Utilities, Cable Cos, and Amazon. I'm just pointing out if you are retiring early, you should have enough saved to take care of yourself without burdening others. I'm a share holder (owner) in the above companies and I don't want to give you a free handout. The income limits on ACA subsidies were suspended for covid, but are coming back 2025 a 4x the PL. I have spoken up in threads where people were artificially lowering their income to take advantage of ACA subsidies. FIRE will get a bad name if part of the game plan is go on public assistance. I mean, you do you, but I see this as no different from someone bragging they are reducing food costs by going to a different soup kitchen every night. There is frugal and there is cheap.   

We have a culture where accepting certain forms of public assistance (such as SNAP) is seen as a sort of moral failing that no self-respecting person would do if they have any other option, while other forms of public assistance (such as tax credits for homeownership) are seen as perfectly normal and respectable. You are perpetuating this culture. Why? What principled reason is there to say that people who qualify for assistance program A should decline it unless they would literally risk starvation or homelessness without it, while people who qualify for assistance program B should universally sign up guilt-free?

I happen to think these distinctions are harmful. There are plenty of folks who might qualify for SNAP, who might actually be able to meaningfully improve their lives with a hundred dollars a month in assistance with grocery payments (and related discounts on other essentials), but nevertheless don't take it because they fear the social stigma that would bring. I'd like to see less of that, and that starts with each of us deciding not to treat participation in these programs as immoral. Each of these programs has rules for who qualifies, and that should be the end of it. We don't do our neighbors any favors by trying to impose a higher set of unwritten rules and shaming those who qualify under the written rules but not the unwritten ones.

My moral rule for this is much simpler: it's wrong to lie about your financial situation to get on these programs. If you tell the truth, and you take the benefits you qualify for based on that truth, you get zero judgement from me.

[UlrichvonLichtenstein]

@seattlecyclone on whether early retirees should sign up for benefit programs that they don't need, even if they're legally eligible:

After witnessing PPP loan forgiveness, my new life mission is to qualify for as many government subsidies/entitlements as I can. I’m a tax accountant and our wealthiest clients benefited the most from those “loans”. Absolute joke.

[neo von retorch]

After witnessing PPP loan forgiveness, my new life mission is to qualify for as many government subsidies/entitlements as I can. I’m a tax accountant and our wealthiest clients benefited the most from those “loans”. Absolute joke.

That’s a really odd life mission.

It's on a par with the people who arrange their lives to minimise the tax they pay.  No way am I giving my government that much power over the way I choose to live.

It's the "life mission" part i don't get.  We certainly try to minimize our taxable burden by optimizing our spending and saving, but to say something is  one's "life mission" implies that it is something which holds the upmost importance to them. 
To each their own i guess...

Could you click the original thread and continue the debate there? This thread is for the best posts we saw. Thanks!

[MoseyingAlong]

@Laura33 knocks it out of the park again!
@Laura33 If you ever write a book or start an advice column, please let us know. I'd pay quite a bit to read your thoughts on a regular basis.

So the thing I still can't get past is that we're still all Sneetches.  We are all part of a tribe.  And so we naturally all want to (a) demonstrate that we fit into that tribe, and (b) establish the highest social status we can within that tribe.  The former protects against being cast out; the latter provides the best choices of food, shelter, and mates.

In our current society, we distinguish ourselves with things like beauty products and big trucks.  In other societies, it could be tattoos or piercings or super-elongated necks or lower lips.  In Victorian times, for women, it was who had the teensiest waist/biggest bustle/palest skin.  If we were tropical birds, it might be the best possible mating dance to outshine all the other birds. 

None of those other things make a lot of sense to us, because that's not our culture, and so that's not what we value.  But we do have cultural values of our own, and whatever those are, we devote -- and will continue to devote -- what seems like illogical and unnecessary resources to those values to establish our place in the social order.  Maybe in 20 years it won't be big trucks, but the coolest electric vehicle.  If that happens, then we won't be spending so much on big trucks, because it's not about the truck.  But we will still be throwing stupid amounts of money at the coolest EV, because we'll still be Sneetching our way through life.

I think the true value of this place is that we establish our own tribe, with our own values that are different from the primary culture we live in.  It allows those of us who've never fit particularly well into that primary culture to feel like we fit somewhere, and it provides an alternative to those who aren't particularly happy within those society-set expectations.  It shows there is another way to be happy and secure and content, without having to throw around money we don't have on stuff we don't need.

[Laura33]

@Laura33 knocks it out of the park again!
@Laura33 If you ever write a book or start an advice column, please let us know. I'd pay quite a bit to read your thoughts on a regular basis.

So the thing I still can't get past is that we're still all Sneetches.  We are all part of a tribe.  And so we naturally all want to (a) demonstrate that we fit into that tribe, and (b) establish the highest social status we can within that tribe.  The former protects against being cast out; the latter provides the best choices of food, shelter, and mates.

In our current society, we distinguish ourselves with things like beauty products and big trucks.  In other societies, it could be tattoos or piercings or super-elongated necks or lower lips.  In Victorian times, for women, it was who had the teensiest waist/biggest bustle/palest skin.  If we were tropical birds, it might be the best possible mating dance to outshine all the other birds. 

None of those other things make a lot of sense to us, because that's not our culture, and so that's not what we value.  But we do have cultural values of our own, and whatever those are, we devote -- and will continue to devote -- what seems like illogical and unnecessary resources to those values to establish our place in the social order.  Maybe in 20 years it won't be big trucks, but the coolest electric vehicle.  If that happens, then we won't be spending so much on big trucks, because it's not about the truck.  But we will still be throwing stupid amounts of money at the coolest EV, because we'll still be Sneetching our way through life.

I think the true value of this place is that we establish our own tribe, with our own values that are different from the primary culture we live in.  It allows those of us who've never fit particularly well into that primary culture to feel like we fit somewhere, and it provides an alternative to those who aren't particularly happy within those society-set expectations.  It shows there is another way to be happy and secure and content, without having to throw around money we don't have on stuff we don't need.

Awww, thanks!  /blushes/

[AMandM]

@ChpBstrd once again with keen analysis plus sympathy:

The observation about the people in their 40s who made a series of bad choices and shortcut decisions stands out to me.

This is close to a universal experience because we have so many more choices to make than any cohort of humans in history. Career, housing, education, debt, car, consumption patterns, drugs, exercise, friend groups, dating, marriage, divorce, level of sacrifice for family, food choices, etc. are all things old world peasants didn't have the luxury of worrying  about. The odds of a young person going out into the world and knowing how to optimize all these critical life decisions - it's practically nil.

What's worse is the media highlighting the one-in-a-million people who did run the gauntlet and somehow and allegedly got most things right and/or lucked out. The rest of us get to compare ourselves to them, right after this ad which is intended to convince us to make another bad decision.

You're right, politics is the outlet for all this frustration, but the system itself is an unlikely game for most people to win. Politics is so emotional because we project our anxieties, insecurities, fears, and regrets onto theatrical characters, rather than making cold policy calculations around self-interest and values. A lack of self-accountability is partly to blame for the sorry state of politics, but the other side of that coin is a world full of pitfalls.

We can't ignore the pitfalls either. A teenager who tries a cigarette might condemn themselves to a painful early death, and leave their future family broke. A person in their 20's signing a car loan condemns themselves to a decade of financial insecurity. Eating at restaurants will make you obese and broke. The wrong college major will leave you with five-figure debt and a job waiting tables. The examples go on and on, because much of our culture and economy has the effect of destroying people.

This is not a rant against our freedom of choices, it is an observation that our ideas about individual decision-making and responsibility, plus our ideas about the primacy of making money, have led us to build a world full of traps for each other. This is a place where regret is inevitable, and it is perhaps also inevitable that people will direct their frustrations toward each other.

[dandarc]

Fro-Gal bringing the heat on corporate culture:

<snip>


Allow me to add, from my 15 years of corporate experience before FIRE, that corporate/company culture, the whole hierarchical militaristic command-and-control fake-family office-space bullshit miasma of it, SUCKS. It’s awful. And this is from someone who is VERY good at it, who first-hand knew how to excel in it, become “rich” from it (enough for FIRE) and single-handedly support my family (kids, husband, extended family) from it and see through the bullshit and laugh at it etc. It’s still a thin layer of fecal matter over everything. So yeah modern feudalism has the capacity to ruin many a night of sleep and suck the pleasure out of the most innocent of craftperson’s hearts.

To be clear, there is no “fixing” this. It is the nature of the beast. I fucking love capitalism. The fix is to yourself. If you can tolerate it, you dip in and out, use it for what it’s good for (the delicious heroin drip of money every two weeks, expensive health insurance, five-star travel, a nice computer?) and GET OUT periodically. Notice, when you’re in a corporation, how many lifers surround you. They didn’t understand the game. You did, at least financially.

</snip>

[monarda]

Gem from Malcat today,
On enjoying what you do, in context of the "big picture"

Quote from: AlanStache on March 25, 2024, 08:25:35 PM

    Everyone in the building or research fields at some point has to grapple with the realization that they will not cure cancer or put people on mars.  That is just a hard reality of life and the world.  If turning a crank to advance your field makes you happy, then have at it, but know that someday you will have to stop turning the crank regardless and there will still be big questions or problems in your field that you did not solve.  Not saying it is all meaningless but make sure you are enjoying the journey.

This is a conversation that DH and I have often.

We're all just metaphorically the left headlight guy at GM.

Your work really only matters insofar as you enjoy it. If you do anything of financial value, then there's a lineup of folks behind you dying to take your place.

And even then, at very best, you can be a small part of something very big , or a big part of something very small.

If you do end up a big part of something big, good fucking luck with that because we live in a toxic system rife with corruption and fraud, so do you really want to end the kind of person who can stomach what it takes to be a big figure doing big things?? Do you have any idea how *gross* that small pond is??

Anyhoo.

DH and I talk about this a lot because he's a very, very small part of a very, very big thing: global emissions reduction. Meanwhile, I'm a very big part of a very small thing: I directly improve individual lives.

The real benefit of all of this though? That we enjoy it and DH and I get to have wonderful long talks about what we do, how we think about it, etc, etc.

Work that feels incredibly important very quickly feels like shit that doesn't matter once you stop doing it. So in the end, what matters is whether you look back fondly of the experience of having done it.

Because I can pretty much guarantee that if you don't, then it will all feel pretty meaningless, because nothing any one of us does is anywhere near as important that it felt at the time that we were doing it.

What I remember most are the relationships I had. The "achievements" of my former career have rapidly faded away and don't really feel remotely relevant anymore, but I remember vividly with pride the dynamics I cultivated with my staff.

I was the only doc on Fridays, and we ran an insane schedule on those days because I had more capacity than anyone else. And people assumed that everyone hated Fridays because the workload was fucking insane. But Friday was everyone's favourite day. We laughed so much on Fridays, my assistant called it "FriYay!"

When I look back, it's the joy, the collaboration, the support we gave one another, the culture of a team that could be truly happy while working our asses off. That's what I'm most proud of, that's what I miss as well.

I most proud of building a staff culture where when one staff member had a complicated miscarriage, my mid level staff *volunteered* to do extra shifts of lower level staff work at lower level staff pay for an entire month to give her time off. I actually refused to let them do it, but they ganged up on me and insisted.

I did some insanely cool shit in my career, but 4 years later and I can barely tap into the feelings I have about my "accomplishments," but I can vividly tap into feelings of deep, profound emotions of pride when I think back to the joy and generosity of my team culture.

I look back on my work with so much fondness not because it was so important or so impressive, but because I truly enjoyed it. I truly enjoyed doing very difficult things with wonderful people who I deeply respected and trusted because they were great people to work with.

My first job was arguably my most prestigious job, and that was close to a decade ago and I honestly barely remember it because I wasn't happy there. I go back there regularly because I'm still a patient there, and every time I go, I can pretty much only remember the times I was made to feel small. It's the site of arguably my most impressive professional achievements, and being reminded of it only makes me feel and sad.

As I build my new profession, this all makes me ferociously protective of my ability to enjoy my work. Because at the end of the day, I know that that's what I'll remember, how I felt doing the work, not what I did.

[AlanStache]

Easiest way to get into this thread is to write a prompt for Metalcat... :-)

[curious_george]

Easiest way to get into this thread is to write a prompt for Metalcat... :-)

Haha - yeah I think over half the posts in this thread are from Metalcat. It's pretty amazing how well she can type out a long post explaining advanced things in simple paragraphs. 

[nereo]

Every so often a poster starts a thread in dire need of help and direction. Sometimes a member responds with an astonishingly thorough and useful post. Shout-out to @Nords for being a compassionate human brimming with information on how to handle elder care within the VA system.

This is one of the most helpful responses to a specific post I have seen in a long time.

https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/ask-a-mustachian/elderly-parent/msg3250922/#msg3250922

[Nords]

This is one of the most helpful responses to a specific post I have seen in a long time.

Thank you, @nereo, I appreciate the morale boost.

This particular Q&A (with the keywords & links) might have to be expanded into a blog post for other military families.  I'm starting to get a lot of questions from adult children of vets from the Korea & Vietnam wars.

Lately I've been answering the questions that everyone wishes they never had to ask in the first place.

[partgypsy]

I nominate this post by @ChpBstrd on America's economic outperformance:

I suspect our questioning of the value of economic growth would sound crazy to a person 100 years ago, when only rich people had indoor plumbing, electricity, or telephones, when a typical person had only 4-5 sets of clothes, and when the growth of American children was actually stunted by chronic malnutrition and deep material poverty.

Back then, the problem was not enough goods available to meet everybody's needs. We've thoroughly solved that problem. For the past 20 years the most exciting growth markets have been in the categories of time-wasters (iphones, social media, streaming, gaming), status symbols (SUVs, pretty trucks, McMansions, fashion), and luxuries (travel, restaurants, hotels, video doorbells, sweets).

Now our shortages are time, family cohesion, social cohesion, meaningfulness, clean air, clean water, clean soil, and attention. From a modern perspective, it seems fair to ask: Why we aren't producing more of these things, and why we are still so singularly focused on producing (and consuming) more Wal-Mart shit?

The answer is that the things we lack cannot be sold to us, and we look to advertisements to set our life's ambitions.

In a related article they point out that, adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), average incomes are higher in Mississippi than in France (!)  https://www.economist.com/leaders/2023/04/13/the-lessons-from-americas-astonishing-economic-record

But who among us would rather be a Mississippian than a Frenchman? The Mississippian could lose everything if they need hospital care, they have minimal retirement security if stock markets don't cooperate, they are at many times greater risk of death by homicide, their food is unhealthy, and because of the way their society is structured much more of their income must be spent on transportation.

The French are rioting because they might have to retire at age 64 instead of 62. The Mississippian will be lucky if they can retire years later than that, but unlike the Frenchmen at least they think they have it made.

I think about the above quite a bit. You are correct in that the things most people need, cannot be sold. So they are sold things, in leiu of those things. And it just compounds the cycle.

[partgypsy]

This is one of the most helpful responses to a specific post I have seen in a long time.

Thank you, @nereo, I appreciate the morale boost.

This particular Q&A (with the keywords & links) might have to be expanded into a blog post for other military families.  I'm starting to get a lot of questions from adult children of vets from the Korea & Vietnam wars.

Lately I've been answering the questions that everyone wishes they never had to ask in the first place.

There are so many resources available from the VA that even I am not aware of, and I work for the VA. My father was a veteran. He chose to always do private care though to be honest he was probably eligible for a lot more. I do appreciate when he passed on, we did have them do the flag ceremony at the burial, and also got the free grave marker (FYI for those with veteran parents) https://www.va.gov/burials-memorials/memorial-items/headstones-markers-medallions/  ALSO! the VA has expanded support for family caregivers of veterans. If you are a family caregiving for a veteran who needs medical care/help in the home, it is def worth asking your local VA what may be provided. It might surprise you.

[FireLane]

@clarkfan1979 about the fizzling of FIRE blogs and the value of Mustachian principles:

This is a great thread with many high value comments. I'm just going to echo some of the things that were said earlier and then put my own personal twist at the end.

I agree that blogs are not popular with younger people and will therefore die off slowly. However, just because the blog traffic is dying off, it doesn't mean the principles are not alive within people's lives. I think incorporating MMM principles were at one time new and exciting. Going from living paycheck to paycheck to having a 30% savings rate within 6 months is super exciting. However, once you have a 30% savings rate for 10 years, it gets kind of boring. The weird part is that when you have a 30% savings rate for 10 years, you are going to accumulate wealth. The wealth part becomes less exciting, but that person now has the freedom to pursue more of their own personal interests, instead of of just trying to survive. Pursuing the personal interests is exciting, which is a product of MMM principles. However, the MMM principles themselves are now well known, boring and normal to oneself.

Because of 7 years of grad school, I was always frugal during most of my adult life. In 2011, I got my first job teaching college full-time with a base salary of 40K. Now this didn't make me rich, I was now in a position in which I had "extra money". If I didn't spend all of that "extra money" the world was telling me that something was wrong with me. In February 2014, MMM gave me permission to save and invest my "extra" and be proud of it and not ashamed. He validated my frugal habits, which was a life changer.

By cutting back on the waste, my wife quit her toxic full-time job and transitioned into part-time work by May 2015, only 14 months after discovering the MMM blog. In 2015 we were working less hours than 2011, but still managed to save more money in 2015 than 2011. From 2011 to 2014, our net worth went from zero to 150K, both working full-time. From 2014 to 2024, we went from 150K to 1650K, with my wife working part-time 2015 to 2024.

I really don't try to preach MMM principles because that never works. I just try to live a happy life and if people ask me questions, I can answer them with MMM principles. I really don't like the victim mentality that exists in popular media right now, especially when those people have financed new cars and so much waste in their budget. If anyone ever hints at me being an "evil rich person", I immediately reference my car. It cost me $2750 in January 2020. Insurance is $40/month and registration is $65/year. The person who is usually complaining is driving a 40K financed SUV, with insurance of $150/month and registration around $500/year. When people say that cars are too expensive post pandemic, I tell them that my mechanic of 4 years that I trust was selling a 2007 Nissan Versa hatchback with 150K miles for $3,000 for a client in June 2024. Do you want his number? The car might still be available. If I needed a car, I would totally buy it.

I also agree that this forum has shifted to more "Fat Fire", myself included. My wife and I went to Gibson's steakhouse in Chicago two weeks ago for my 45th birthday and it was $325 with tip. The portions were big and we got a second dinner out of it with left overs. I'm originally from the suburbs of Chicago and never been to a Chicago steakhouse. I'm glad we did it, but we probably won't do it again. Might go back for a $100 lunch. While a $325 dinner might deserve a face punch, I feel like it's much more acceptable to do it at age 45 with a net worth of 1650K vs. age 35 with a net worth of 150K.   

[grantmeaname]

@Laura33 on intergenerational wealth - emphasis added by me

First, you don't need to decide anything right now, which is good; you have time to think and research. 

My biggest concern about gifts right now would be that your kid might simply use those funds to increase her lifestyle above what she could afford on her own -- that she would effectively become dependent on your largesse to maintain her lifestyle rather than learning what it's like to stand on her own feet.  There's value in being on your own, struggling, making your own ends meet, etc., early in your career; that's when you are building the habits and muscles and resilience to manage hard shit.  And there's always hard shit.  Developing those skills when you're young and the consequences are minor is how you prepare yourself to handle the hard shit when you're older and the consequences are significant. 

So from that standpoint, I wouldn't share anything with her about your future gift plans.  Let her find her way through on her own right now.  When you do decide to give something, target it to specific life events and big things -- e.g., you can offer to help with a downpayment on a house when she tells you she's looking to buy. 

Also consider whether you want to focus on any future generations.  Funding a grandkid 529 can be a huge financial relief to both the kid and the grandkid (helped us ensure both kids could graduate with zero debt, which in this world is a huge leg up).

FWIW, we're in a similar stage with our own DD -- 23, in first job out of college.  She is learning a ton from being on her own -- and she's learning more from her mistakes than from the stuff she gets right the first time.  For example, she rented herself a lovely, expensive apartment right downtown.  It's fabulous, she can totally afford it on her salary, it has allowed her to do things like walk to the farmers' market and be the downtown base for her friends, etc.  Except now she's decided she hates her job and wants to quit and is rapidly discovering that there aren't a whole bunch of other jobs out there for new grads that can cover that kind of rent.  So she is now berating herself for choosing the more expensive place and planning to stay in the job as long as she needs to until she can get the apartment sublet. 

We obviously could bail her out and cover the rent until she gets a new job (and there's a part of me that wants to do exactly that -- my dear child is unhappy!  Must fix!).  But how does she learn if we shield her from the consequences of her decisions?  So instead, I said "and that's why I read MMM -- not because I want to walk out of my job tomorrow, but because I want to be able to walk out of my job tomorrow."

[MoseyingAlong]

@Laura33 on intergenerational wealth - emphasis added by me

First, you don't need to decide anything right now, which is good; you have time to think and research. 

My biggest concern about gifts right now would be that your kid might simply use those funds to increase her lifestyle above what she could afford on her own -- that she would effectively become dependent on your largesse to maintain her lifestyle rather than learning what it's like to stand on her own feet.  There's value in being on your own, struggling, making your own ends meet, etc., early in your career; that's when you are building the habits and muscles and resilience to manage hard shit.  And there's always hard shit.  Developing those skills when you're young and the consequences are minor is how you prepare yourself to handle the hard shit when you're older and the consequences are significant. 

So from that standpoint, I wouldn't share anything with her about your future gift plans.  Let her find her way through on her own right now.  When you do decide to give something, target it to specific life events and big things -- e.g., you can offer to help with a downpayment on a house when she tells you she's looking to buy. 

Also consider whether you want to focus on any future generations.  Funding a grandkid 529 can be a huge financial relief to both the kid and the grandkid (helped us ensure both kids could graduate with zero debt, which in this world is a huge leg up).

FWIW, we're in a similar stage with our own DD -- 23, in first job out of college.  She is learning a ton from being on her own -- and she's learning more from her mistakes than from the stuff she gets right the first time.  For example, she rented herself a lovely, expensive apartment right downtown.  It's fabulous, she can totally afford it on her salary, it has allowed her to do things like walk to the farmers' market and be the downtown base for her friends, etc.  Except now she's decided she hates her job and wants to quit and is rapidly discovering that there aren't a whole bunch of other jobs out there for new grads that can cover that kind of rent.  So she is now berating herself for choosing the more expensive place and planning to stay in the job as long as she needs to until she can get the apartment sublet. 

We obviously could bail her out and cover the rent until she gets a new job (and there's a part of me that wants to do exactly that -- my dear child is unhappy!  Must fix!).  But how does she learn if we shield her from the consequences of her decisions?  So instead, I said "and that's why I read MMM -- not because I want to walk out of my job tomorrow, but because I want to be able to walk out of my job tomorrow."

@Laura33 is the bomb.
Probably every other post of hers I want to add to this thread.

[Dicey]

Metalcat nails it again:

Well, happiness levels tend to increase with more money so that’s one marker.

Do you really believe there's no upper bound to that effect?

I’m not sure.

For the person who would be happy with a nice apartment in the city and a second home on the beach in Florida half or more of a $10m stash could be spent on real estate. Say that leaves $5m for a retirement WR of $175k. Taxes and carrying costs on the residences could take maybe $125k, leaving about $4k a month to live. Would she be happier to spend $5k+ a month? Maybe there’s family who could use a little help…maybe there’s grandkids?

Perhaps there’s a limit. But $10m—nice as it is—is probably not it for many people.

I have a beautiful city apartment and a summer home on the ocean in one of the most stunning locations on earth. They cost me less than 300K combined.

In a consumerism society, there will always be a way to spend more money on things that are relatively modest in terms of their benefits. No one is arguing that there isn't.

That's a feature of the MMM philosophy, not a flaw.

By focusing on spending less, you can sometimes be pushed to be more creative about your options and truly assess the value of them.

I always wanted a waterfront summer home. This is just something I always knew I wanted. By focusing on finding less expensive options, I pushed myself to explore less common locations. I made hundreds of phone calls researching different areas of the country.

I landed on a spot in the middle of nowhere, talking to a real estate agent who used to work in the same industry I used to work in. He and his wife were about our age, child free, similar professional backgrounds and interested. They were from Toronto.

They had taken a vacation out here one year and fell so in love with the area that they impulse bought a house that weekend. Then after coming here for a few summers, they dreaded going back to Toronto, so they left their life, their careers, and moved here.

I was like...well fuck, that's a hell of an endorsement.

There was a property that would make for a good AirBnB investment, so I figure "fuck it" I would buy it, spend a summer renovating it for rental, but also see if this place was as magical as it sounded.

And that's how I ended up buying a property 31 hours away on a remote island off of an island at the edge of the earth in a place I had never even visited. It was also an insanely good deal due to timing, so I didn't want to pass up this particular property.

Within a few weeks of getting here, I absolutely fell in love with the place and the people and now we live here as much as humanly possible and literally everyone who talks to me can see that I absolutely light up when I talk about it. My therapist says buying this house was the smartest decision I've ever made in my entire life.

My point is that if I had endless money and no reason to be actively frugal, I wouldn't have pushed myself to research the entire country, I would have just purchased a lovely river front cottage within an hour of my house, and it would have been lovely, but not massively happiness increasing like this house is. This location is world famous for its astounding nature and incredible people.

Having near-limitless money is convenient, but convenience is not always optimal. Frugality forces the kind of analysis and creative thinking that really pushes you to be introspective about the value of your lifestyle decisions.

Having the money to solve problems with obvious solutions is AMAZING. I'm a big fan of having enough wealth. The amount of cash I've thrown at health problems in the past few years is substantial and I'm insanely grateful to have just piles of capital to throw at expensive problems. I don't want to have to contemplate if thousands of dollars on walking aides is worth the investment, I just buy the expensive walking aides no matter how briefly I benefit from them.

BUT, while there are many decisions out there that simply benefit from more money, there are many, many more that benefit from deeper introspection and insight about self and happiness.

I'm sure that for many people, the expensive city condo and the expensive summer home really are the optimal choice, and spending millions on them really is the best use of their resources. Cool, good for them. But my point is that the cornerstone philosophy of this place is that people put blinders on and just look at the more expensive options as default "better," when there are often creative solutions outside of someone's comfort zone that might be far superior and just not considered.

I found MMM when DH and I were making absolute shit piles of money and we were kind of listless and bored with the lifestyle that more money could buy us. Neither of us were delighted with our jobs either and were on track for climbing the ladders we didn't really want to be on.

Our superiors were wealthier, but utterly miserable and we didn't really want their lives. Mustachianism pushed us to really quantify and qualify what we wanted from our lives, and it turned out that a much, much lower spend produced better outcomes.

Which worked out AMAZINGLY well when I became suddenly disabled and we lost my income, which was double his. So having an AWESOME quality of life that we could readily afford already on his lower income was fucking phenomenal.

And since becoming disabled, that same creative, frugal decision making has resulted in our quality of life steadily increasing since I lost my career.

So while I fully understand that other people have different preferences and lifestyles that truly benefit from more than 10M, ours really wouldn't. And we've put in an enormous amount of work reflecting and communicating to figure out what truly works for us.

I would say if a couple can go through losing a career, the bulk of their income, one partner developing severe chronic pain and losing their ability to walk properly, all during the pandemic, and they manage to come out the other side much happier, then something went right.

And I solidly credit that to our earlier years of exploring the value of spending less to get more.

A bunch of us recently did the Yale course on the Science of Well Being, and virtually every single lesson in the course was something that DH and I figured out through frugality. Not because we always spent less, but because we critically assessed every single trade off in our lives for the maximum benefit.

DH and I now both have careers we absolutely love. We both pivoted away from making more money and towards doing more meaningful and enjoyable work. We both have a deep commitment to health and fitness. Frugality pushed us both to give up alcohol, which actually makes socializing more fun and allows for much richer memories. It pushed us bot to socialize with friends at expensive restaurants, but to do challenging things together, which creates deeper bonds. It pushes us to travel with our animals instead of kenneling them, and that pushes us to try out some really unusual, off the beaten path spots, and focus more on nature-based adventures than tourism.

Most of all, and this is by far the most important thing. It's pushed us to really, heavily invest in loved ones. A 3 hour phone call with my dad on a Sunday morning, sitting on my deck that my neighbour built for me for free, watching the whales play in the harbour costs me a few cents for the tea bags in my pot, and is worth more than any activity I could go out and pay for.

I've worked with seniors for many, many years and few regret not spending more, but most regret not spending more time investing in love.

[Metalcat]

Wow, solid advice from @Metalcat as usual.  All that spoke to me, but especially the part about the pets.

I spent some time walking with my sis on this trip, and she asked when I was going to Hawaii, or Alaska, or whatever.  And...I'm tempted, but man I hate flying.  And did I mention I'm still suffering from whatever I had on this trip?  So tired.

We are very very likely going to adopt a dog in the next 2 weeks.  It makes traveling difficult.  We typically hire someone to stay in our house.  But...why go to Hawaii and hire someone, when you can drive to Bass Lake at Christmas and take the dog?  I'm aware they aren't the same type of vacation...

Watch it, someone will come in and gently smack you for talking about the post in this thread. You're supposed to go chat in the original thread if you want to respond to the content of a post here. I was about to reply to you when I realized I would get smacked too.

[couponvan]

Wow, solid advice from @Metalcat as usual.  All that spoke to me, but especially the part about the pets.

I spent some time walking with my sis on this trip, and she asked when I was going to Hawaii, or Alaska, or whatever.  And...I'm tempted, but man I hate flying.  And did I mention I'm still suffering from whatever I had on this trip?  So tired.

We are very very likely going to adopt a dog in the next 2 weeks.  It makes traveling difficult.  We typically hire someone to stay in our house.  But...why go to Hawaii and hire someone, when you can drive to Bass Lake at Christmas and take the dog?  I'm aware they aren't the same type of vacation...

Watch it, someone will come in and gently smack you for talking about the post in this thread. You're supposed to go chat in the original thread if you want to respond to the content of a post here. I was about to reply to you when I realized I would get smacked too.

With your current location, some poor OOS or international student would love to have a pet and make some $ over Christmas. But Bass Lake also sounds lovely!

[deborah]

Huh. Well, I don't agree with the linked article's supposition that DWZ and FIRE and naturally opposed.
You can certainly both FIRE and die broke -- simply a question of how you plan to divest near the end.

Something about the whole 'living a more balanced and enjoyable life instead of sacrificing current experiences' shtick really irritates me. I've heard it before, usually from someone smugly informing me that they are 'living in the now'. (And they don't need to be smug... that is so wierd to me. That's their choice, fine. But they're smug... and they're in debt with no forseeable way out. This does not compute.)

If you're living on lentils and toenail clippings in your basement crawl space and working 100 hours a week while renting the rest of your house, and don't date because you don't have time (and because you can't find anyone else who like lentil-toenail gruel) then, sure.

But I really disagree that FIRE people aren't living balanced lives. Or even aren't living luxurious ones. As I was saying to a friend the other day, we live like Pharoahs. Climate control, running hot and cold water, refridgeration, access to a vast array of exotic foods and flavorings, including many that have been worth a kings ransom at various times in history. Music and entertainment, freedom of thought and act and movement and association.

I have enough art supplies - paints, pencils, charcoal, quality paper, metallic embossing paper, yada yada -- to make a renaissance artist weep. I have musical instruments, 400 thread count sheets. Sewing machine. Yards of beautiful fabric, crafting tools of all sorts. Books of extraordinary variety and depth.

I'm not missing out.

I don't eat in restaurants (much) or own a car, because those are very expensive ways to get food and transport.
I don't travel big distances because I'd rather save that for when I have more time and can savor slow travel. Expensive spa or ski weekends - don't need em. If anything, my life is more balanced, not less. Because I'm not swinging from the dopamine high of 'treating myself' to the crashing lows of  realizing it'll be 3 months before the credit card balance gets paid.

[Brit71]

On this whole "die with zero" stuff, there's a really good reply:

'living a more balanced and enjoyable life along the way, rather than sacrificing current experiences for a future payoff.'

Please.  Yet another article that (intentionally or not) misstates the FIRE movement to build a contrast with the approach they want to sell.

"Die with zero" isn't some new, earthshaking idea.  It's what the vast majority of humanity does by default.  "DWZ" is just a rationalization to chase immediate gratification -- to paper that powerful urge with a name that sounds like an intentional plan, to pretty it up into a "movement."

Key points they miss:

-- The value of FI.  I don't care if you want to RE or not, but the ability to say FU to a terrible job, to be able to chase something that you really love instead of sitting in a cubicle for 40 years, is one of the most powerful feelings you will ever know.  Sure, maybe you foresake the cruise to Antarctica to get that; OTOH, what is the value of avoiding 20 years of misery?  It strikes me that DWZ chases the short-term highs, whereas FIRE protects you from the long-term lows (while still providing a bunch of short-term highs, they're just not the kind you want to brag about on Instagram).  IMO, DWZ should be limited to people who love their jobs and so are happy to stay there indefinitely to fund their lifestyles.  If you hate your job, hate going to work every day, you are doing yourself a serious disservice locking yourself into needing that job to fund all the trips you take and toys you buy to make your life tolerable.

-- Hedonic adaptation.  If you spend your money taking big trips, give it a few years, and those trips will seem boring.  So then you need to take even bigger and fancier trips to get the same happy feeling.  Then what?  If you've structured your life around doing Big Impressive Things to chase your happiness, what do you do when those Big Impressive Things are no longer satisfying?

-- FIRE isn't about depriving yourself for 10, 20, 30 years to live like royalty later.  It is about finding a current lifestyle that meets your needs and makes you happy that also allows you to save a big wad of cash so have the freedom to choose what you want to do going forward.  Maybe that is quitting, maybe that is going part-time, or switching to a passion job that pays for shit, or taking off several years to spend time with your kids -- there's no single answer that suits everyone.  Ideally, the FIRE approach should give you a fairly steady-state lifestyle throughout your life.  But, again, having that wad of cash also allows for periods that are either up or down, if that is what your plans call for.

-- The power of immediate gratification means FutureYou doesn't get much of a place at the table.  Imagine not having eaten for three days and facing a giant buffet of all your favorite dishes.  There might be a little voice in the back of your mind saying "now, make healthy choices, don't forget the vegetables, don't eat too much or you'll feel sick/gain weight/whatever," but the part of your mind screaming "FOOD DELICIOUS FOOD!!" drowns that out.  People actively suck at projecting bad shit that might happen in the best of circumstances; we are very, very good at coming up with rationalizations about how that won't be me, because XYZ.  How many people rely on their jobs and yet don't have disability insurance?  If you are a healthy 30-year-old(+/-), the single biggest risk to your financial future is being unable to work.  And yet how many people turn down disability insurance because it costs too much?  To me, the real benefit of the FIRE mindset is that it forces you to plan around what FutureYou will want and need -- that long-term, post-FIRE plan is the cornerstone of the movement, which means you can't even really start until you think pretty deeply about what FutureYou will want to be and what kind of life she'll want to live.  It's still a hard thing to project what you will want/need, to override the pull of immediate desires, but at least FutureYou gets a place at the table.

-- It assumes that doing without or doing things yourself is a bad thing, when really, it is the only way to reset your mindset.  As @Missy B notes, even the most basic modern life is filled with luxury.  Who do you think is happier on a daily basis:  the guy who wakes up and says, "wow, I can't believe I live in an era where I have air conditioning in August and whatever luxury food item I might want two miles away at the grocery store"?  Or the guy who takes all that for granted and is constantly thinking "gee, I wish I had a bigger house and didn't have to spend all this time shopping and cooking"?  There is significant power in knowing that you don't actually need all of the trappings.

I could keep going, but I'll stop for now.

[Tasse]

A classic @Metalcat explanation of why frugality is different from self-deprivation.

Mustachian frugality is never about depriving yourself. It's all about getting the most out of your time/energy/money balance.

MMM himself wrote quite a bit about this early on, the difference between being frugal and being cheap.

As I like to say, I'm not cheap, I'm just a snob about spending. I expect the money I spend to produce a massive quality of life improvement, so I expect a lot from my spending.

I think of mustachianism as being about a certain degree of deprivation until you reach FI. I think about the article MMM wrote about how your retirement is built on $10 choices, and to me that encouraged a mindset of scrutinizing even the smallest purchases. Which is fine, and it works, and it allows you to decide what is worthwhile and what is not, but it also gives me a little heartburn. I have made the choice to spend more in certain areas than is necessary because of the added life enjoyment. But there are silly small things that I hesitate to spend money on because we're not FI yet. Nothing too life changing/influential, but I often get a pang of ack I shouldn't buy this, mostly the $5 lattes and such, that I'd like to untrain myself from now. I get frustrated when DD or DS poops in their pullups at night and we have to change it, partially because it's $.30 wasted. Who cares though? I really shouldn't. We're not FI, but we're close enough that I'm ready to relax a bit about spending, seeing as we're on track to be fat FI.

I don't agree at all that it's about deprivation, not even pre-FI. I would examine your discomfort with spending as I have personally never felt that way, even when I was still in major debt. I feel extremely comfortable spending as long as I know it fits with my value system. If it feels like a really good value trade for my time and energy, then I enjoy spending, quite a bit actually.

I don't enjoy spending $15 on a fast food lunch compared to packing a meal at home, but I do feel great spending $30 on really nice French patisseries and a bottle of non-alcoholic champagne and going for a picnic in a stunning location. The $15 lunch is cheaper, but the picnic experience has way more value and is much cheaper and more fun than going out to a restaurant.

I don't have kids, but I do have pets and I don't resent any spending on them because they are such high happiness value in my life.

It's not at all about not spending, it's about asking yourself how to get the max benefit from your money. No matter how much you work, you will always have a finite amount of money in your life. So every single spending decision is a trade off, it's not at all about NOT buying things, it's about knowing how to spend on what really matters and spending on that instead.

Retiring early is an extremely expensive luxury, so it requires a lot of trade offs. Owning a second home is an extremely expensive luxury, that also requires a lot of trade offs. Any large luxury purchase is going to require pulling resources from elsewhere, that's why it's important to be certain that that large purchase is what you really want.

It's not at all about not being able to buy things, no matter how much money you have, every single cent you spend is money that you can't spend on something else. Every single decision you make to spend on something is a decision to not spend on something else. Every cent you spend on buying more free time is money that you can't spend on consumer things, and vice versa.

Money isn't anything in and of itself, it's a representative of time and energy, whose value change over time and context.

I have very little interest in spending $75 on a restaurant meal for the two of us just because I don't feel like cooking, but every week I spend $75 on hiring a kitchen helper to bulk cook our meals for the week. The time/energy exchange for one nice restaurant meal is a shitty deal compared to a week's worth of nice meals.

I'm not willing to buy meat because it's so expensive and I'm a former vegetarian chef, so my legume-based meals are just as tasty. I'm not going to trade my time/energy to eat meat that doesn't add anything to my day-to-day eating experience. That's a shitty trade. But I will happily spend more on quality produce, because it makes a huge difference to my daily eating experience.

I'm not depriving myself of meat, it's just not a high value trade to spend more on it. FTR, I'm not a vegetarian, I love meat and eat it outside of the house whenever I feel like it, I just don't cook it.

Money is just a mechanism for exchanging some of our time and energy for things and experiences. Having a very solid concept of the exchange rate is critical for making effective decisions.

My DH and I have spent a decade talking every single day about the exchange value of things. We've talked through literally every purchase we've made pretty daily to calibrate our understanding of trade off values. We've challenged and questioned them as well. We now spend entirely intuitively and get a lot of joy out of knowing our spending is really great value.

You are correct that as someone gets wealthier, they can become more comfortable with spending more, that's because the time/energy/money exchange changes over time.

Money saved in the past is worth a lot more than money saved in the future, and items bought in the past are generally worth less than they will be in the future, so the literal exchange value changes over time. Understanding that flux is critical for understanding value exchanges. A $10 beverage costs you A LOT more in your 20s if you have credit card debt than it does in your 50s when you're fatFI. It quite literally costs a different amount even when accounting for inflation.

So yes, your exchange system should change over time. My exchange system has altered radically since becoming disabled. My physical energy is so much more precious, so outsourcing is much more valuable than it used to be. Hence why I now outsource cooking, cleaning, and home repairs when doing it myself used to be a solid value.

When you've already made the huge purchase of buying your early retirement and you have extra money, spending that money no longer takes time away from your retirement.

But to me, it's still not deprivation. The cornerstone of my frugality is that I feel like every cent I spend is extremely high value. I thoroughly enjoy economizing where it makes most sense because no matter how much money I make, I know that that economizing frees up resources for something better.

Every single $10 beverage I don't buy opens the door to something better. Likewise, every time I *do* spend on a $10 beverage date with my DH instead of a $100+ restaurant date is also opening the door to something better.

We actually regularly spend money at very expensive cafes. We go with our dog, which helps socialize her, we have very fancy coffees and pastries, and read for a few hours. We get dressed nicely for the occasion, and it satisfies our "going out on a fancy date" desire without costing us a fortune. It's excellent value. But I would never just grab a $10 beverage for the sake of just having the beverage, I would go home and make one for myself. The value of paying someone else to make it just isn't there.

I'm happy to pay a small premium for the "fancy date" experience, especially when I can bring my dog, but I'm not willing to pay a premium just to have a barista make my beverage. That's a poor value trade for me. I'm thrilled to spend the money for a lovely date, especially if the weather is bad, but I am loathe to waste money just to consume a beverage made by someone else, despite it being for the exact same beverage.

I truly enjoy spending money. When I know I'm getting outsized value for what I'm spending, I really, really enjoy it because it's not taking away from the opportunity to buy something better. It IS the better thing.

Plenty of things, to me, are better than retiring early. That's the same for everyone, that's why Mustachians don't live in total deprivation until reaching FI. We all have lifestyle things that are more valuable than absolutely maximizing our time retired. Resenting spending on those things makes no sense.

I don't have babies who soil pullups, but I do have a dog that goes through multiple disposable pee pads every day, and never once have I tallied up what her pee pads are costing me individually (except to find the best deal on pee pads). I'm insanely grateful she's pre-pad trained because we travel with her and live in some really nasty climates, so having a dog that doesn't actually need to go outside is AMAZING. Well worth whatever the pee pads cost me.

Your children also aren't wasting pullups, they're using them as intended. Pull-ups are an amazing invention that filled the need for a diaper transition option that didn't exist before. Some of them being soiled at night and then tossed into the trash is a big part of their value. That's you paying $.30 to not have to deal with soiled night clothes and bedding every time your kid doesn't make it through the night. That sounds like AMAZING value to me.

[solon]

I resolve the issue by being a judgemental asshole.

When I see someone dressed nicely and/or driving an expensive vehicle, I think "Dumbass... should have put their money to work in the markets." or "Look who got deprived of their hard-earned money by being easily influenced by marketing." or "Enjoy those $2,500 rims, loser. You'll be working for one of my companies well after I retire because you lack any sense of value or time." Sometimes I get philosophical and think "Look who made it the point of their life to trade years of working long hours for the shiny object that still does not impress actual millionaires like me."

In doing so, I feel superior to the person who is acting out a cultural script about the things you're supposed to do to be successful and respected by others. I'm the one thinking for myself and setting my own goals. They are the one who is on a treadmill created by rich people, who don't need the respect of others, to perpetually sell status to poor people, who are desperate for the respect of others.

MMM called them consuma-suckas for a reason. Being proud of a car or a fashion brand is like being proud of owning a timeshare.

But honestly, it doesn't cost that much to dress classy. Can we all agree that ripped jeans and a t-shirt is less upscale than khakis and a button-up shirt with collar? Well, those two outfits cost about the same. Women have even more options to dress fancy for less than the cost of sweatpants and a sweatshirt. I personally find dressy clothes to usually be more comfortable than scratchy jeans or floppy pajamas. Similarly, loafers are more comfortable to hang around in than athletic shoes. Best of all, dressy clothes are more readily available at Goodwill or yard sales than casual clothes. I picked up a tan blazer for $10 over a decade ago to wear as a casual jacket and receive complements on it all the time - or at least until I brag about it being a Goodwill find.

Never take advice from anyone you don't want to be like - and that would be me if you don't want to be a judgemental asshole.

But if imagining me rolling my eyes at those designer labels or the $2000 "sport appearance package" on an already unaffordable car helps you to feel good about yourself while saving thousands of dollars, then you're welcome. The stealth wealthy are out there, incognito, judging the shit out of those paying $400 for fog lamps or $250 for Air Jordans in a rare color, and beating the system to get rich from it.

[grantmeaname]

I am sure others have said this more eloquently, but the recipe for happiness is:  1. Find out with exactness and extreme specificity what makes you happy.  2. Do the same for what makes you miserable.  Stop doing number 2 (the shit) that makes you unhappy, and do way more of number 1 (what makes you happy).

[MoseyingAlong]

Ideally, if I could I'd move my house and business + me and daughter and grandkids all to one area and we'd all get along. I'd also have my parents still around and other family members, also some of my old friendships.. oh and that old girlfriend that use to make me breakfast in bed.. and I'd like to be 20 years younger please.

. . . .

I think I have to keep going as is, wait until May when the city plan is revealed. Realise that I only have to really do those inspections to earn enough, and importantly I have to live life large now and not wait (mentally) until some future time when I'll magically enjoy life... like live it large now. Get on airplanes, say no to hard work, go out dancing, play music, go do that fantastic hike, check out that meetup, plan a foreign destination holiday with my daughter and grand kids and do it.

1.  It's fine to do the "I wish" thing, but if you spend too much time on that, you just get sad about not having something that literally cannot happen.  You're better off long-term if you force yourself to focus on the things that are actual possibilities.

2.  That second thing is far and away the most important thing you've said.  Do that.  Figure out even one thing that would make your life more enjoyable now.  Go do that -- today, or this weekend at the latest.  Rinse, repeat.  There's no magical point at which everything comes together and the fairy godmother waves her wand and poof! you're happy.  You make yourself happy by repeatedly doing things that make you happy.  Now is all we've got.  So go do it!

Love the wisdom from @Laura33

[Mariposa]

This one by @Zikoris. I especially appreciate the part about inoculating yourself against consumerism.

I think you're kind of coming to it from the wrong angle. I don't think your lifestyle should rely on motivation at all. I've had a 60%+ savings rate for a long time and I've never been motivated. Here's a three-step process I recommend:

1. Inoculate yourself against consumerism by learning the truth bout how things work. Read books or watch documentaries. For documentaries, The Story of Stuff (re: plastic) and Just Eat It (re: rampant food waste) are good. For books, check out Buyology and Brandwashing by Martin Lindstrom, Why we Buy: The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill, The Rare Metal War by Guillame Pitron, Dying for an iPhone by Jenny Chan, and Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara. Once your eyes are opened to this stuff, you lose most desire to buy, period.

2. Automate or eliminate all the bullshit in your life. Automation beats motivation 100% of the time. Your FIRE process can be automatic and require zero ongoing effort.

3. Focus your time and energy on fun things and enjoying life. This is easy because you've eliminated the desire to consume and automated everything boring. FIRE happens in the background without you having to do anything.

[nereo]

@Metalcat for her awesome reminder that it’s never been about frugality.
https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/welcome-to-the-forum/$1-rule-to-prevent-impulse-purchases/msg3322333/#msg3322333

I am willing to work 40 years, I will likely end up with more money than I can spend, and both my spouse and I have walked away from opportunities to make 7 figures annually.

We don't live frugally because we can't afford more, we live frugally because living frugally has made us happier and healthier people.

MMMs old school blog talks a lot about frugality, happiness, and health correlating, and that has been ridiculously true for us. He also talks about how if frugality should never feel like sacrifice. It's about getting more out of your life by spending less.

Is spending more sometimes the very best thing you can do for your quality of life? Absolutely! I have literally the best and most expensive walking aides that money can buy. Sometimes spending the most you can is absolutely worth it.

However, what you seem to not resonate with is that the process of defaulting to spending less pushes you to be a creative thinker, and to truly assess what has value and why. Not only that, but it pushes you to critically understand what actually makes you happy.

When my spouse and I first were introduced to MMM by my financial planner, frugality foundationally altered how we discussed literally everything we did. We explored every decision through the lens of health and happiness, which when you do that day in and day out for years, really solidifies your understanding of what matters and motivates the other person.

We also discovered so many things about ourselves by pushing our frugal limits. We became exquisitely aware of what each of us dislikes and what efforts feel burdensome and why. The fun part of that is that when you truly understand your limits, it gives you the confidence to get even more expansive and creative in your thinking about life.

FTR, our financial planner is now one of our closest friends, has an 8 figure NW and is still living a remarkably frugal life and one of the happiest people I know.

Frugality is not depriving yourself, it's actually about maximizing your quality of life. I often say that I'm not cheap, I'm a snob about spending. It doesn't matter if I can afford it, I will always examine the more inexpensive options because doing so has consistently opened up surprisingly more satisfying and interesting doors.

In my experience, as someone who has lived a very spendy lifestyle in the past, I personally find the spending path to be incredibly boring. It takes very little thought to try and spend your way to a higher quality of life. A marketing system will hand you what it says are the superior items and experiences and you just comply and spend and end up living a life that's pretty much prescribed for you by the consumerism machine.

If you are guided by spending more, you will see that the more you spend, the more almost monolithic the lifestyle becomes at that wealth level. The people of various wealth levels tend to live in the same areas, they have similar finishes in their homes, they drive similar cars, the men wear similar suits and watches, the woman carry similar bags and wear similar clothes. Their kids go to similar schools, their vacations are to similar places, their hobbies are similar, they belong to similar clubs.

It's hilarious that the more money you spend, you think you're accessing more options, but because there are relatively fewer options at the luxury level, you actually end up corralled into a strangely generic world where the most expensive dress shops have to keep a log of who has purchased what dress to wear to what gala so that no two attendees show up wearing the same dress, because we all go to similar galas.

If that's truly your best life, then great, enjoy. I'm sure you will be very well dressed and accessorized and that your car will fit in perfectly in the garage of the private club.

That is NOT my ideal life, and the longer I lived in that world, the more bored I got. I had a lot of "is this it? Is this what we worked so hard for?"

Frugality actually opens up so many interesting doors. When you start knowing very deeply what satisfies you as a human being, and you start looking for less consumerist options to meet those needs, you start seeing options that you would never have even seen if you just chose the typical spendy option that looked "best."

I was never able to be truly happy being corralled into the wealthy lifestyle and community. Too much jockeying for status, too many miserable people, too much sameness, too little diversity. It was just never felt satisfying. It felt like an endless ladder of status.

The world is filled with near infinite options, and it's easy to conceptualize money as giving you more options. But while that is technically true, you can only actually explore so many options. So the lens through which you filter your options has a massive impact on what is available to you.

You can use consumerism as your lens where the more you can afford, the more you filter for more expensive options. If this truly produces the happiest and healthiest lifetime for you, then great, I hope you deeply and passionately enjoy your life with a profound sense of purpose and satisfaction.

That lens will never produce that result for me. I know from experience. A frugal lens, for us, has consistently produced results that are so much more beneficial and so much more fun.

Primarily looking at "off the beaten path" options that cost a lot less has resulted in some pretty wild adventures. Our life has become anything but boring since we stopped letting "what we can afford?" guide our decisions and switched to "what inexpensive option would actually be better?"

I don't look to save money because I can't afford to spend more. Neither my spouse or I have any intention of ever retiring and will probably make even more money in our "retirement" years, similar to MMM himself.

In our lifetimes we will likely have more wealth than we have any clue what to do with. And yet, we will still use frugality as the lens through which we explore our spending options because the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

We are happier, healthier, and have more fun by a shocking margin since we changed our foundational understanding of how spending benefits us.

And I have the assholes who yelled at me in my early days in this community to thank for it.

[Dicey]

You beat me to it. I was coming to quote the same post. I loves me some straight-up @Metalcat! Thanks, @nereo!

[Ladychips]

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!