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.
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.