Chuckanut
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
The guy can retire whenever he wants to. I just don't want to hear any complaints when he hits the SS Full Retirement Age and sees how small his check is.
This reminds of younger me a decade ago. I thought I could retire with $600K by moving to extreme LCOL country. I am glad I did not take that path because I would have sacrificed my kids' life for mine. And couldn't have been happy knowing that every day. But then again, hindsight is always 20/20.
Good friend of mine charted the path I was planning and he just came back to homeland with no money left in coffers. I am glad I didn't do it.
Someone suggested in a reply to one of my threads that I check out the "Early Retirement Extreme" forum.
On there, I found a 32 year old man, married, with 3 very young children, ages 9, 8, and 3, asking if he could retire NOW with $800K and no debt. The consensus was that he's ready now but should consider working "a little longer" to create a pad to cover the increased amount his kids will cost him as they grow up.
YIKES!!! And here I am worrying about whether my DH and I are ready to retire at age 61/57 with about that amount!
Either I'm way off base or he's in for a rough future. I think I'll stick to this forum, where people are either more reasonable or at least more skeptical.
+1 - and Jacob's did for me, after a while. I had long had a slight problem with his approach, in that it felt overly academic and analytical. I sensed a whiff of inauthenticity in the way he presented his lifestyle. It felt as if he were merely performing a scientific experiment, as opposed to actually living the life. Yes, my sensitivities are a bit too finely tuned or, as my ex-fiancee would say, "I'm very picky when it comes to people", but it didn't come as a surprise when he announced that he was re-entering the world of work, as a highly-paid quant trader. Think of that - to go from making your own rake, to earning a big wad of money. Bit of a change eh?
I really like clever people, but also dislike emotional dishonesty - and I felt that there was a bit of that going on with both Pete and Jacob. Actually, a LOT of it going on with Pete, and a bit with Jacob.
You have to sacrifice if you want to FIRE! LBYM and all that kind of stuff.
ETA: You spendthrift you.
For what it's worth, I've always been somewhat turned off by Pete's shtick, but while Jacob's approach is significantly more extreme than I prefer, he does do it honestly. A lot of it is him being a hyper-analytic person with a low socialization need. I enjoy going to eat out, he's the sort who hates menus because it doesn't give him time to find the optimal solution. My wife and I enjoy travel, though not much is jet-setting, but he'd rather be woodworking in the basement than spending a week in Nice. As I recall, he only did the quant thing for about 2 years - he was doing the algo type analysis for fun and wanted to see if he could get it to work for trading, didn't get what he wanted from it, and left. Other than probably spending more on commuting, I don't think that his spending ever changed, because he'd solved that problem and didn't need to change anything or revisit the issue.
Anyway, I've found the ERE site interesting, but often in a manner of looking at the extreme options and figuring out what I care about cutting and what doesn't matter and can be reduced without much effort or concern on my part. That sort of analysis certainly helped up my saving rate while I was working and probably helped me get to retirement last year before I hit 40.
For what it's worth, I've always been somewhat turned off by Pete's shtick, but while Jacob's approach is significantly more extreme than I prefer, he does do it honestly. A lot of it is him being a hyper-analytic person with a low socialization need. I enjoy going to eat out, he's the sort who hates menus because it doesn't give him time to find the optimal solution. My wife and I enjoy travel, though not much is jet-setting, but he'd rather be woodworking in the basement than spending a week in Nice. As I recall, he only did the quant thing for about 2 years - he was doing the algo type analysis for fun and wanted to see if he could get it to work for trading, didn't get what he wanted from it, and left...
I have always enjoyed MMM. Not sure why some folks here do not care for him much? Perhaps a few examples will help me understand.
I have always enjoyed MMM. Not sure why some folks here do not care for him much? Perhaps a few examples will help me understand.
I think many of the people on here are high spenders and don't want to accept that you don't NEED $60K+/yr to retire. You can retire on <$30K/yr like many, many people have. Not everyone wants to travel the world or eat out 10+ times a week.
I haven't read that forum since Jacob took that high dollar full time job as a quant, in Chicago.
The amazing level of frugality that is reported on that site is unrealistic for the kinds of lifestyles that many of us live. Despite that, I do think that reading there could be valuable for motivational purposes when saving for retirement.
For example, a person might think, "Jacob made a rake rather than buying one. Oh well, I suppose that is insane but I guess I could at least check the Dollar Store or yard sales, to see if I can find a cheaper rake than those at Home Depot."
The FIRE bloggers all suffer from a cult of personality to various degrees. MMM perhaps being the most extreme, but others have the problem too. Being blogs, they control the platform, the content and its tone. And more importantly, they can censor comments that aren't appropriately rah-rah or deferential.
That's why an open forum like this, will always be much more worthwhile.