Help me out here, Nords: we are talking about a reporter who has clearly decided what the story will be, what works, etc. and is just looking for real world examples that happen to fit his pre-conceived notions about how things work. Isn't this a little, oh, misleading/slimy/garbage journalism?
Actually, no. I have just seen a lengthy conga line of reporters who come here looking for real world meat to feed into their preconceived story line and I have to wonder why the management here tolerates it and why upstanding, fine people like Nords play along (I understand everyone supplying the meat likes the media exposure). So please, sir, explain how the filling out of the story line is ethical journalism...
Well, as they say down at Sing Sing, silence implies consent. I guess we can all draw our own conclusions on this one.
Yikes, Brewer, it's just been a few hours since your first of these three posts, and we have the time-zone difference too. Gimme a chance to respond before you carry out the execution.
Another perception of the reporting would be that the writer already knows how FI works and simply wants to confirm the details from someone who's done it. Or he wants to hear what didn't work in those assumptions. Or he's just crafting a human-interest story with no scandals or hype-- full of boring advice like "LBYM" and "high savings rate". If only he could jazz it up with some action photos like Hawaii surfing... oh wait.
He could find plenty of examples of failure too, but he probably has all he needs from Early-Retirement-Fails.org. I'm not sure whether there's a market for those articles unless it's celebrity schadenfreude.
As for those preconceived notions: he knows now that #1 didn't work for me (and it probably wouldn't have worked for your employer). He already knows that Fiverr and eLance (#2) are probably only a living wage if you're spending that money in India or the Philippines. He knows that my spouse and I didn't do #5 (in fact we upsized) or #6 (although we refinanced multiple times). And he knows now that we didn't do #7 or #8, either.
But I referred him to more ERs who have done those things.
Interesting side issue: I shared what I've learned about freelancing over the last four years, and now he has a whole new bunch of people to interview. Maybe it's for Men's Health, or maybe it's just for swapping tips to boost his own freelance career. Either way we helped out each other.
What he's going to do with Men's Health is connect me with more military readers who can learn how to reach financial independence. I'm not sure how that would be seen as misleading/slimy/garbage journalism.
I've done interviews where the [-]interrogator[/-] interviewer had preconceived notions about how we reach financial independence. Thankfully this was not one of those interviews. I suspect that the moderators are pretty proficient at screening out those guys, too.
I may be a little out of touch because I only drop by here once a week to search for keywords like "Nords" and "military", or whenever I get an alert to one of my subscribed threads. If you guys have links to that conga line of reporters then I'll track them down too.
