The meta lesson I learned by squinting at things and holding them at arms distance was this: don’t be middle class. Live like a grad student and then retire having never acclimated to consumptive patterns that seem to be more about auditioning to be upper class than about enjoyment of the life material prosperity can provide.
But, like, how do you actually do that? I make three times what I did in grad school, but somehow it doesn’t feel like my standard of living has changed much, and I still basically spend everything I make...
I guess the problem is that “consumptive patterns” can be sneaky, and sometimes you didn’t notice they were there all along. The rent doubled because I moved to a city, even though my apartment’s not much nicer; my cell phone is no longer on a family plan; my parents no longer buy me plane tickets home for Christmas; I take the train to work every day. Maybe the cat gets sick and suddenly there are vet bills. In other words, nothing that feels like much of a change in consumption, yet the expenses keep going up.
And then there are a bunch of little expenditures, each one of which feels reasonable: What’s the harm in fresh vegetables, or a gym membership; won’t you save money on health problems in the long run? Wouldn’t it be dumb to worry about a $10 movie ticket or spend 20 minutes looking for free parking, when you make $30+/hr? I know people who make a lot of money but spend a lot of time and effort trying to avoid small expenses, and that doesn’t seem like a good way to live either. Sometimes I think the “save half your income and retire early” crowd is actually just faking it somehow.
Do you have a way of seeing your expenditures for the past year, categorized and summed? Use Mint or something similar. Take a day every couple years to go through and look at _all_ of them and determine which are simply extraneous, which you don’t endorse.
If you buy some weights and exercise at home, or exercise using your own body weight, you could save money and time! And maybe even exercise more, if going to the gym is a trivial inconvenience.
But yeah, living alone increases your expenses. The expenses per person then decrease again when you have a partner.
Totally agree about having weights at home. Besides the cost, one upside is there’s no energy barrier to exercising—I can take a 1-minute break from browsing the web or whatever, do a set, and go back to what I was doing without even breaking a sweat. A downside is it’s harder to get in the mindset of doing a full high-intensity workout for 45 minutes; but I think it’s a good tradeoff overall.
A lot of the smaller items are covered in early retirement type blog posts such as ERE and MMM. They both also have books out which are organized better than the blogs. The big ones tend to be things like
people not running the numbers on home ownership: After playing a lot with the NYT rent-buy calculator and both current prices and historical rates of housing inflation in major markets (ie the places you’d actually want to live) I found only two scenarios that paid off. Both hinged on being very confident you were going to stay in the same place at least ten years, which given the opportunity costs of not being mobile for the best available job as well as the often underestimated commuting costs to QoL is a pretty high variance bet. The two scenarios were buying a 2 bedroom condo and renting out the 2nd bedroom, and buying a 3 bedroom 2 bath house with a converted garage, living in the garage while renting out the house and then flipping to living in the house and renting the garage when family planning needs kick in down the road. And this was still only beating renting in advantageous markets like Denver, Austin, Raleigh. Terrible in popular places like Seattle, SF, NY, Chicago etc. Assuming you plow a decent chunk of your salary into index funds otherwise.
Not optimizing their career due to short term comfort considerations. The long term impact of optimally switching to advance several times *early* in your career is massive. Most people don’t apply often enough to nearly a wide enough range of positions in many different cities with excuses like ‘my friends and family are here’ and only counting the immediate salary difference rather than the huge trajectory shift.
A general habit of buying stuff, 90% of which sits unused 99% of the time. Which also causes one to rent bigger places on average.
A general habit of not TDTing ‘reasonable’ convenience expenses and finding more permanent solutions that cost less over a lifetime.
As mentioned in the recent putanumonit post completely insane financial planning folk beliefs. Not parking money in a well run robo-index like Schwab’s.
Dating people who reinforce their bad habits, which feels like validation from the inside. Especially in the justification that those living at lower consumptive levels are ‘missing out on life’ or wasting their time. (They might not be making optimal time-money tradeoffs but the person hasn’t actually checked this, it’s just a reflexive defense)
Not valuing slack enough to fight tooth and nail for it over the longer run.
I don’t know, I’m probably forgetting stuff. The real juice tends to be in stances more than individual decisions. The primary legible stance is something like: once you finish Mario Kondoing your possessions, start in on your processes.
The meta lesson I learned by squinting at things and holding them at arms distance was this: don’t be middle class. Live like a grad student and then retire having never acclimated to consumptive patterns that seem to be more about auditioning to be upper class than about enjoyment of the life material prosperity can provide.
But, like, how do you actually do that? I make three times what I did in grad school, but somehow it doesn’t feel like my standard of living has changed much, and I still basically spend everything I make...
I guess the problem is that “consumptive patterns” can be sneaky, and sometimes you didn’t notice they were there all along. The rent doubled because I moved to a city, even though my apartment’s not much nicer; my cell phone is no longer on a family plan; my parents no longer buy me plane tickets home for Christmas; I take the train to work every day. Maybe the cat gets sick and suddenly there are vet bills. In other words, nothing that feels like much of a change in consumption, yet the expenses keep going up.
And then there are a bunch of little expenditures, each one of which feels reasonable: What’s the harm in fresh vegetables, or a gym membership; won’t you save money on health problems in the long run? Wouldn’t it be dumb to worry about a $10 movie ticket or spend 20 minutes looking for free parking, when you make $30+/hr? I know people who make a lot of money but spend a lot of time and effort trying to avoid small expenses, and that doesn’t seem like a good way to live either. Sometimes I think the “save half your income and retire early” crowd is actually just faking it somehow.
Just some quick thoughts:
Housemates and other group-living arrangements can make living in cities affordable
Pets are expensive (though probably worth it for lots of people)
Flights are expensive (though deals can be had)
Car ownership is expensive
The internet can provision almost all media at high quality, low inconvenience, minimal risk, for free
Do you have a way of seeing your expenditures for the past year, categorized and summed? Use Mint or something similar. Take a day every couple years to go through and look at _all_ of them and determine which are simply extraneous, which you don’t endorse.
If you buy some weights and exercise at home, or exercise using your own body weight, you could save money and time! And maybe even exercise more, if going to the gym is a trivial inconvenience.
But yeah, living alone increases your expenses. The expenses per person then decrease again when you have a partner.
Totally agree about having weights at home. Besides the cost, one upside is there’s no energy barrier to exercising—I can take a 1-minute break from browsing the web or whatever, do a set, and go back to what I was doing without even breaking a sweat. A downside is it’s harder to get in the mindset of doing a full high-intensity workout for 45 minutes; but I think it’s a good tradeoff overall.
just a quick idea: make a 45-minute playlist of workout music?
I feel like my life would get a lot better if I had a list of these things, so I could reflect on them and see whether I actually like them.
A lot of the smaller items are covered in early retirement type blog posts such as ERE and MMM. They both also have books out which are organized better than the blogs. The big ones tend to be things like
people not running the numbers on home ownership: After playing a lot with the NYT rent-buy calculator and both current prices and historical rates of housing inflation in major markets (ie the places you’d actually want to live) I found only two scenarios that paid off. Both hinged on being very confident you were going to stay in the same place at least ten years, which given the opportunity costs of not being mobile for the best available job as well as the often underestimated commuting costs to QoL is a pretty high variance bet. The two scenarios were buying a 2 bedroom condo and renting out the 2nd bedroom, and buying a 3 bedroom 2 bath house with a converted garage, living in the garage while renting out the house and then flipping to living in the house and renting the garage when family planning needs kick in down the road. And this was still only beating renting in advantageous markets like Denver, Austin, Raleigh. Terrible in popular places like Seattle, SF, NY, Chicago etc. Assuming you plow a decent chunk of your salary into index funds otherwise.
Not optimizing their career due to short term comfort considerations. The long term impact of optimally switching to advance several times *early* in your career is massive. Most people don’t apply often enough to nearly a wide enough range of positions in many different cities with excuses like ‘my friends and family are here’ and only counting the immediate salary difference rather than the huge trajectory shift.
A general habit of buying stuff, 90% of which sits unused 99% of the time. Which also causes one to rent bigger places on average.
A general habit of not TDTing ‘reasonable’ convenience expenses and finding more permanent solutions that cost less over a lifetime.
As mentioned in the recent putanumonit post completely insane financial planning folk beliefs. Not parking money in a well run robo-index like Schwab’s.
Dating people who reinforce their bad habits, which feels like validation from the inside. Especially in the justification that those living at lower consumptive levels are ‘missing out on life’ or wasting their time. (They might not be making optimal time-money tradeoffs but the person hasn’t actually checked this, it’s just a reflexive defense)
Not valuing slack enough to fight tooth and nail for it over the longer run.
I don’t know, I’m probably forgetting stuff. The real juice tends to be in stances more than individual decisions. The primary legible stance is something like: once you finish Mario Kondoing your possessions, start in on your processes.