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Blackjack2000 posted:I think it's obnoxious when people think they are full time occupations. quote:Jobs require us to do the things we don't want to do. They force us to get up early and get ourselves into the office. They make us stick with it when things are frustrating or not working the way we want them to.  Although honestly you could say the some thing about hobbies depending on your level of drive and commitment. quote:Are you sure that's what it is? Are you sure the reason you're not making games is because you're not required to? Your angle here seems odd. I had a kid, that's hard work, and nobody required me to do it. Granted, it's a lot harder to give up on than trying to make games on the weekend.  quote:You admit that you're not the most "self-disciplined guy" and that's good, neither am I. But doesn't that make you wonder what you would do with all that extra time if you really had it? I mean, would you really write games, or would you play them? quote:I laughed at the Onion article, but the problem with that attitude is that people get all worked up thinking that they're missing out on their passion. Do you really only have one passion? I mean, I love soccer, sailing, coding, reading, writing, traveling, seeing my niece, and a whole bunch of other stuff that I work into my spare time and my weekends.
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Mar 2, 2015 09:22
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Blackjack2000 posted:
A few things: - most jobs are exhausting, and people spend their off-hours recuperating - the projects that give me meaning in my life are things that could be IP to my lovely loving company. I have to carefully avoid working on certain stuff they could one day decide to want, and take me to court over. - continuing your education in anything except the trades is very hard in the hours you listed. I took two machining classes the past year to learn engine lathes, and there are some things, and I mean some things, that make leaving work early to machine until 11pm difficult. - to continue on that point: a big FI dream of mine is learning a touchstone of physics, like general relativity or something. They don't offer those classes on the weekends. Textbooks exist, but complicated subjects benefit from the live instruction and q-and-a of a classroom. - for volunteering: don't take this the wrong way, but have you been involved in a real organizing campaign before? Campaigns have a tendency to suck up every available second of free time. Which, again, most people use to recuperate, because most jobs are exhausting. - also for volunteering: any radical (read: effective) organizing campaign, or even non-radical campaigns like fighting for worker rights or consumer rights that affect your industry, are going to make you layoff material. My company, for instance, has a very short list of acceptable volunteering opportunities. - and you know that traveling's easier and cheaper and usually better when you can leave on a Tuesday morning and spend a month somewhere. Full time career = week-long vacations = travel without language immersion or learning cultures deeper than a guidebook - I fill probably about 50% of my non-work time on my own project, but I've been working on it for 2 years, and yes, my full-time career is preventing me from making progress on it.
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Mar 2, 2015 09:24
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Mofabio posted:- and you know that traveling's easier and cheaper and usually better when you can leave on a Tuesday morning and spend a month somewhere. Full time career = week-long vacations = travel without language immersion or learning cultures deeper than a guidebook Yeah, all of my good traveling experiences have been at least three weeks long, and the ones I really want to do (like hike the AT) take 4-6 months. Hiking 8 hours a day for 160 days straight isn't an occupation but it is very time consuming. My wife and I are trying to plan a vacation now from April 3-11 and it's just dumb. Spend a week being a suck at a resort or bumbling around some country with some small, persistent amount of stress over language and time to try to get a better experience? They both suck and cost like $3000 because her work has forced us to move to a place that's far away from everywhere and where we would never choose to live.
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Mar 2, 2015 14:23
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Cicero posted:How are any of those 'vapid' or 'a bit obnoxious'? You think it's obnoxious when people learn other languages or travel, or volunteer? What? I don't know if I'd say obnoxious, but they certainly are the common things that everyone seems to think they really want to do. Although to be completely honest if you aren't doing ANY of that right now then you probably won't suddenly start if you retired. Most people who have a passion for something will at least sometimes work at it. If that's all you can come up with and you don't have any proof that you do any of it now I'd say you don't really know what you want to do. Now a guy up a bit talked about a personal project he spends a lot of his free time on now - that is an example of a passion that he would devote time to
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Mar 2, 2015 14:27
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Blackjack2000 posted:Hmm, maybe it's not them that lacks imagination, but you? And I don't mean you personally; let me see if I can illustrate. Today, Sunday, I went into the office for about 11 hours. It was 20 degrees and snowing outside. Again. Yesterday was similarly cold, and I just kicked around the house all day, reading and browsing the web. I figured today I'd go into the office and get some stuff done. I did. A whole lot. In fact, I nearly finished a huge project that was a bit of a stone around my neck. Now, when I go into work tomorrow, I can work on VBA coding, which is something that I've been teaching myself and improving for the last few years (and something I love doing). I'll also have time to study for the CFA exam. (My boss lets me do that during work hours because, hey, I get my poo poo done, even if it means going to the office on a Sunday.) Wasn't expecting such a reaction from my post! I suppose calling people slaves can be a bit controversial, though. tuyop posted:That might be a strawman. The unspoken premise of Rick Rickshaw, as I understand it, is that the people who aren't in favour of FI or early retirement also hate their jobs but can't imagine a life with meaning without those jobs. Hence, they're financially and existentially enslaved to someone else's dream. This is not you or me. I mean, I worked literally 80 hours last week for absolutely no pay because I love my vocation. That love also makes me care a lot about my savings rate because I never want anyone to force me to work against my morals. This is a great response and pretty much the point I was trying to get across. Blackjack2000, you seem to enjoy your work. That's great! I am not talking about you. I am talking about the people who's jobs are literally killing them. They're stressed, out of shape and consequently unhealthy. But they couldn't imagine their life without their job! I was drunk at Christmas time, sitting with my brother-in-law and dad at the dinner table. It was 4am. I happened to mention the idea of retiring early, and my brother-in-law jumped all over me, one of his arguing points being "What would you do with your time?". This is a man who hates his job. He loves simplicity. He's at his happiest when he's outside cutting down dead trees in his backyard. But he's pushing 40 and his belly is beginning to push outward. If he could cutback on some of his consumption and retire by 50, maybe he'd be able to save himself mentally and physically. That way he could spend less time at the office and more time outside with his kids. Sadly, I think his 40s are probably going to be tough on him, and he'll be working until 65, because they have to have their $700 camera and $400 Michael Kors watch.
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Mar 2, 2015 16:03
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tuyop posted:I don't think that most people derive much coherent purpose from their jobs, though. And I work with teachers. I know a good deal of people who effectively are their jobs. It's very depressing.
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Mar 2, 2015 17:27
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Cicero posted:Who said they were full time occupations? I'm confused, I don't remember anyone asserting this. Those seem to be the things people say they will do when they retire (or achieve FI) and leave their careers. What I'm saying is that those things won't replace a full time occupation. They don't place demands on you. I think that's extremely important. Your job places demands on you, your kid places demands on you. You're needed. I think that's important.
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Mar 3, 2015 02:58
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It's probably true that many people derive a sense of purpose and well-being from being needed. Many other people probably don't give a gently caress and find certain activities intrinsically valuable. Think of all the dancers (or aspiring dancers), musicians, artists, actors, etc. who find their occupations intrinsically valuable regardless of the "need" they feel that others have for them. You're saying that an occupation is important because it's a means to an end (being needed). Even if that's true, I can imagine many ways to spend time that are closer to ends in themselves because people might find them more intrinsically valuable than most careers. Hell, even being a full-time volunteer meets your criteria for value and gives you the freedom to get out if you need to, so I'd say that I disagree, an "occupation" (read: job) is unnecessary for a life well lived.
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Mar 3, 2015 04:57
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Blackjack2000 posted:Those seem to be the things people say they will do when they retire (or achieve FI) and leave their careers. What I'm saying is that those things won't replace a full time occupation. They don't place demands on you. I think that's extremely important. Your job places demands on you, your kid places demands on you. You're needed. I think that's important. I'm pretty sure there is such a thing as self motivation. In fact, doesn't this thread embody that sentiment?
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Mar 3, 2015 05:08
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I work in a job that most people would assume, looking in from the outside, is a soul-sucking corporate drone job. But I actually love it. I like the people I work with, and I get to work in a really exciting field and have a real impact on important things at a multi-gazillion dollar company. So, when someone assumes that everyone hates their job and hates their boss, they're probably saying a lot about their own job.
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Mar 3, 2015 07:37
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canyoneer posted:I work in a job that most people would assume, looking in from the outside, is a soul-sucking corporate drone job. I don't hate my job, but I would love more leverage when negotiating, being able to take longer vacations or even sabbaticals, say no to unrealistic deadlines without risking my ability to pay rent or eat, etc.
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Mar 3, 2015 10:58
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Blackjack2000 posted:Those seem to be the things people say they will do when they retire (or achieve FI) and leave their careers. What I'm saying is that those things won't replace a full time occupation. They don't place demands on you. I think that's extremely important. Your job places demands on you, your kid places demands on you. You're needed. I think that's important. So start your own business on your own schedule with your own vision with employees who depend on you for pay and whose compensation you set.
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Mar 3, 2015 14:50
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Or if you work in a field where that is impossible, unionise the gently caress up.
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Mar 3, 2015 14:53
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Xoidanor posted:Or if you work in a field where that is impossible, unionise the gently caress up. I'd like to hold out glimmers of hope that the idiots I come across can actually be fired for being idiots, so I'll pass. poopinmymouth posted:I don't hate my job, but I would love more leverage when negotiating, being able to take longer vacations or even sabbaticals, say no to unrealistic deadlines without risking my ability to pay rent or eat, etc. This is my goal. I want to be officially geared for retirement so that I can walk away at will before looking for anything else, not after, and can negotiate more strongly for benefits. At some point I'd like to change industries into one of my hobby fields, but that's almost entirely consumption because those industries pay less and are filled with people throwing themselves at them for huge discounts regardless of job quality, so if I end up there I'd like to be financially secure first so that I can not put up with the poo poo that emerges sometimes in those situations and can stomach the "cool job" discount.
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Mar 3, 2015 15:42
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I think I've honed in on what's been bothering me about MMM: he takes political questions and de-politicizes them. Lemme draw some contrasts. MMM has probably written more about bikes than any other frugal habit. How many articles does he have making fun of SUVs, structuring your lifestyle to bike everywhere, modifying your bike? He fuckin' loves bikes. Notably though, in every single bike article, he mentions climate change. The guy cares about climate change. Doing a back of the envelope calculation, he's kept around 50,000 kg of CO2's carbon in the ground. Cool. I've got a friend who also cares deeply about climate change. He cares so much, in fact, that in 2011, he took a train from California all the way to DC to protest (and get arrested protesting) Keystone XL. This was the protest that made the pipeline a topic of public discussion. For reference, the Alberta bitumen contains around 240 billion metric tons of future CO2, or 4.8 billion times what MMM has done personally by restructuring his life. Take however many derating factors you want, 4.8e9 >> 1. There're a lot more examples. Instead of using all his free time to rally to fix his son's school, he's just taking his kid out and homeschooling him. Content of education is obviously a political topic, and is going in directions (more testing, more standardized curriculum) that he's actively trying to escape. As long as his son gets a good education though, everything's okay. He (especially in his first articles) talked about the drudgery of a 9-5 and the joy of free time. At the beginning of the 20th century, most US workers put in 12-14 hour days, and it was only because of a 60-year labor/socialist campaign (and the adoption of their platform as the New Deal) that in 1937 we got the 8 hour day - the 9-5, instead of the 7-9. Kinda like with CO2, his personal actions help a little, but the hours that we work are a political decision. He could campaign for something radical like 20 hour work weeks or 5 months of vacation, or even loving paid sick days - god knows he has the time - but like with CO2, like with school, he's happy if he and his family get the benefits, and the rest of us don't. It seems like one of the big benefits of FI is, if you care about issues, you can take greater action on them. You have the time, you don't need to care about your arrest record from a protest, and you can rally for issues that'd otherwise risk your job, like labor or voting for your boss or free speech rights in the workplace, or whatever else bothered you about your job. tldr: It just gets frustrating to read him care about political issues, and either not know they're political issues, or not care enough to do anything about them.
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Mar 3, 2015 19:33
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It isn't really fair to fault the guy for prioritising his own life over making the sacrifices that political activism entails, regardless of his circumstances. 
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Mar 3, 2015 19:44
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Xoidanor posted:It isn't really fair to fault the guy for prioritising his own life over making the sacrifices that political activism entails, regardless of his circumstances. Here's one of my favorite examples of the contrast: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2014/10/28/mmm-challenge-can-you-go-car-free-this-weekend/ "On weekends, we simply chill together. It is my idea of living, and it is the foundation of our relationship together as a family. We sit on couches and read and write books and comics. The boy and I ride down to the creek and carve channels and dams in the rocks and sand. Then we’ll climb some trees, max out the swingsets at the park, and maybe do some urban planning in the sandbox. We get home tired and nicely sunned out, and he’ll disappear to his room and make songs with Ableton while the lady and I will make some dinner. At this time of year it tends to cool down and get dark outside pretty quickly, so we’ll start a fire in the woodburning stove I built into the new house. Some wine may be poured. All of that, and it’s still only Saturday night. There’s still time to have friends over, or walk over to someone else’s place to mingle all the neighborhood kids and prepare a feast." ... in an article about the evils of cars, about how a friend just died in a car accident. Like, my friend was in DC for a week to get arrested protesting Keystone. He can't spare a week for an issue he cares about?
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Mar 3, 2015 19:50
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Mofabio posted:I think I've honed in on what's been bothering me about MMM: he takes political questions and de-politicizes them. You sound smarter than me and certainly more knowledgeable regarding climate change, but I'm not fully understanding your argument here. Are you saying if people biked more instead of driving personal tanks, it wouldn't matter? The amount the first-world drives, particularly North America, creates demand for gasoline, which creates demand for oil, which creates demand for Keystone XL. And the bigger the vehicles we drive, the more materials have to be mined, transported, manufactured and transported. MMM has admitted himself that he attacks problems on a micro level, because humans have a huge problem with understanding scale. One family driving tens of thousands of miles in an SUV per year is not an issue. Millions of families doing it is. He's trying to stop people from doing that, one family at a time.
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Mar 3, 2015 20:02
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Some people think that fundamental human change starts (and ends) with the individual. Edit: Furthermore, I'd go as far as to say that protesting political issues is much more naive and less likely to affect change that altering your immediate sphere of influence of 3-5 people and letting others in to your way of life through a blog. root of all eval fucked around with this message at 20:08 on Mar 3, 2015 |
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Mar 3, 2015 20:04
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Mofabio posted:Like, my friend was in DC for a week to get arrested protesting Keystone. He can't spare a week for an issue he cares about? Who cares what your friend is doing? The purpose of financial independence is to improve your life, not to fix the world's problems.
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Mar 3, 2015 20:18
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Mofabio posted:Here's one of my favorite examples of the contrast: He's already acting politically though, his entire blog is him trying to sell others on his lifestyle. Your issue rather seems to be with him not sacrificing anything (like your friend) rather then him not doing enough. I mean do you seriously find him unsympathetic because he chooses to spend his weekend with his son instead of spending it probably pointlessly screaming at the barricades? BossRighteous posted:Edit: I'd agree, the Keystone example Mofabio brought up is one of those many cases where protesting is completely and utterly pointless as the protestors do not hold the necessary leverage to informally change a decision years in the making. The best they might accomplish 99% of the time is to delay it which changes nothing in the grand scale of things.
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Mar 3, 2015 20:23
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potatoducks posted:Who cares what your friend is doing? Well, for me, it's nice that living frugally also happens to agree with mother nature. It always bothered me that the apparent path to living a good life was always in conflict with the Earth. Fortunately I now see that is not the case.
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Mar 3, 2015 20:24
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BossRighteous posted:Some people think that fundamental human change starts (and ends) with the individual. An individual leveraging their actions beyond their own sphere of control can have massive impact on things. Mofabio i believe is aking the argument that thus far, handfuls of people protesting and even fewer getting arrested has thus blocked the exploitation of carbon resources beyond any one person's capability to generate. If the blockage continues to prevail, the individual has much more impact influencing the policy of the masses and not being a bike freak with a blog influencing a few people. I tend to agree with this argument since localism is inherently fragmented and can exert 0 power over the things that effect policy. Bike enthusiasts lives are not practical beyond urban, near urban living conditions and unless you change policy to shape a society with less need or less ability to get carbon spewing resources, it's pretty much pointless to try anything other than to feel good about yourself for riding a bike. Political protest isn't naive, it's an attempt to have an impact far beyond what you could accomplish on your own and in the case of climate change, it's probably the only one that will matter. potatoducks posted:Who cares what your friend is doing?
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Mar 3, 2015 20:25
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That's a really weird complaint about MMM when you consider how many people he's probably convinced to bike more through his highly popular blog posts (me, for example). That's probably helped reduce the impact of climate change a couple orders of magnitude more than +1 protester. edit: the way I look at it, MMM's blog represents a sort of bottom-up activism, focused on convincing individuals to change their lifestyle directly, rather than getting the government to set policies that then change individual lifestyles (e.g. petitioning for increasing funding for walking/biking/transit). There's room for both types, no need to set them against each other. Cicero fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Mar 3, 2015 |
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Mar 3, 2015 20:32
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Rick Rickshaw posted:Well, for me, it's nice that living frugally also happens to agree with mother nature. It always bothered me that the apparent path to living a good life was always in conflict with the Earth. Fortunately I now see that is not the case. Sure, and I think it's great that you can fit it into your moral system. But I don't think it has to have a political slant. On the contrary, I wouldn't be surprised if he took efforts to make his blog apolitical. His site is supposed to be about financial independence, not financial independence and environmentalism. Religious conservatives can also be interested in financial independence...... right?
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Mar 3, 2015 20:36
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How much marginal CO2 will go unreleased by your friend taking a train somewhere and getting arrested? Do you think the alberta bitumen will go unburned, keystone or not? I really doubt his efforts will have any positive effect and probably caused more carbon emissions than they prevented, unlike MMM who genuinely influences others to personally reduce their carbon footprint.
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Mar 3, 2015 20:37
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I guess I look at policy and protest as parallel pursuits. The ideas and goals may seem the same at the surface but they are largely meant to serve a different purpose. Is protesting Keystone meant to incite policy change, or social awareness? Because it's clearly not doing anything to affect policy. Local/state protest can have more direct influence, but when you are talking federal level policy, they couldn't care less about protesters, even to the tune of 100k+. It's almost the same thing really. Protesting is applying just enough effort to make yourself feel better instead of devoting yourself to becoming a lobbyist or representative that can affect actual change.
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Mar 3, 2015 20:38
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Cicero posted:That's a really weird complaint about MMM when you consider how many people he's probably convinced to bike more through his highly popular blog posts (me, for example). That's probably helped reduce the impact of climate change a couple orders of magnitude more than +1 protester. If we're using Mofabio's calculation that MMM has not used 50.000kg versus the 1000s of protesters keeping 4.8billion times that in the ground. I don't care how wildly successful your blog is it's not as big of an impact. Great that people are choosing to ride a bike and that can help with FI, but the impact isn't as big on climate change. e: It's true there's no need to set them against one another necessarily until you get people disputing that society or collective action can have an effect beyond the individual. I don't buy it for the same reason i can open a web browser and see GM and Ford have much more impact than any given individual. AgrippaNothing fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Mar 3, 2015 |
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Mar 3, 2015 20:39
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AgrippaNothing posted:If we're using Mofabio's calculation that MMM has not used 50.000kg versus the 1000s of protesters keeping 4.8billion times that in the ground. I don't care how wildly successful your blog is it's not as big of an impact. Great that people are choosing to ride a bike and that can help with FI, but the impact isn't as big on climate change. I think the hangup is that some of us are not willing to attribute the carbon savings to the protesters.
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Mar 3, 2015 20:44
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quote:Bike enthusiasts lives are not practical beyond urban, near urban living conditions quote:and unless you change policy to shape a society with less need or less ability to get carbon spewing resources, it's pretty much pointless to try anything other than to feel good about yourself for riding a bike. What you're missing is that individual lifestyle changes themselves can influence big things like how much drilling for oil goes on. They don't drill for oil for fun, they do it because the demand is there, and thus, the prices make it profitable. When oil prices collapsed last year, there was a major slowdown in fossil fuel extraction and exploration. If demand drops (and this is part of what has been suppressing gas prices, that demand is flat or down in the first world), then prices drop, then drilling drops.
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Mar 3, 2015 20:44
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tuyop posted:You're missing the spending half of the equation, and that's what MMM harps on so much. A person saving 50% at 250k will reach FI at exactly the same time as a person saving 50% on 32k. The difference is in the lifestyle each person wants to live. That's also the source of derision, because in both cases lifestyle and savings rate are matters of want and prioritization rather than raw ability. Yes, this makes sense if you assume that similar amounts of hardship and sacrifice are necessary in both scenarios. I would disagree, as living on $16k seems much more difficult than living on $125k.
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Mar 3, 2015 21:25
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AgrippaNothing posted:If we're using Mofabio's calculation that MMM has not used 50.000kg versus the 1000s of protesters keeping 4.8billion times that in the ground. Why do the "thousands of protesters" all get credit for the collective effect of their action but MMM only gets credit for his own personal action? He got me to bike so much that I now only fill my gas tank up once every two months instead of twice a month (and I'm trying to get that to three months). He has a fuckton of readers. If he convinced ten thousand people to save 50k then that's a little closer to the order of magnitude of those protesters' results. But in the end, you can do both: you can bike and you can protest. MMM is only posting about and trying to convince others to do the one which actually relates to financial independence.
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Mar 3, 2015 21:59
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Dessert Rose posted:But in the end, you can do both: you can bike and you can protest. MMM is only posting about and trying to convince others to do the one which actually relates to financial independence. Oh for sure. I think what MMM's doing - showing that it's possible to have a rewarding, carless life - is reassurance to people and policymakers who'd be nervous about what a low-emission future might look like. I didn't want to focus on climate change - if he spent a third of his articles talking about how The Immigrants Are Taking Our Jobs, I'd wonder equally why he wasn't at the border with the minutemen (is that still a thing?). I wanted to talk about how FI frees you up for activism in general, and how arguably the world's most-read FI mapmaker's idea of activism - again, in spite of deeply caring about climate and how our work/life balance is terrible - is volunteering once a month in his son's school. And he's quitting that soon too. Somebody mentioned that he depoliticized his blog on purpose in order to focus on FI. That's probably right, and it's also true that there are a shitload of political blogs out there already and the world doesn't need one more. I'm not even calling him out for not doing enough (even though the couple activists I know would droooool for the amount of free time he's got). I'd be happy if he just mentioned that the things he cares about are political, and could even have political solutions, and that it ISN'T either/or.
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Mar 4, 2015 00:18
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Mofabio posted:I think I've honed in on what's been bothering me about MMM: he takes political questions and de-politicizes them. In the grand scheme neither of them have an effect because eventually it will all be taken out and burned (unless the human race dies off but then who cares about climate change) In the short-term, riding a bike actually prevents co2 from entering the air TODAY, whereas even if your friend singlehandedly prevented them from accessing it, the same exact amount of co2 would continue to be produced and eventually once prices got so high it would be mined anyway.
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Mar 4, 2015 00:30
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Mofabio posted:I wanted to talk about how FI frees you up for activism in general, and how arguably the world's most-read FI mapmaker's idea of activism - again, in spite of deeply caring about climate and how our work/life balance is terrible - is volunteering once a month in his son's school. And he's quitting that soon too. Isn't this exactly the point of FI? Not having to care what other people think about how you spend your time, and doing what you value to the point you value it?
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Mar 4, 2015 01:29
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blugu64 posted:Isn't this exactly the point of FI? Not having to care what other people think about how you spend your time, and doing what you value to the point you value it?
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Mar 4, 2015 02:26
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BossRighteous posted:Some people think that fundamental human change starts (and ends) with the individual. This, MMM is pretty explicitly a Stoic. Stoics don't believe in wasting time or effort on things that you can't control (because fussing over global carbon emissions or whatever-the-gently caress will upset your tranquility for no good reason). All the protestors in the world can't directly, individually control what governments or companies do, so a Stoic is not very likely to protest unless they get off on straight-up vitriol. Now, if everyone shared that life philosophy and critically and consciously considered the things within their control and how to align them with their values and morals, the world would be very different. Of course, the only part of this over which you have any control is whether you do it yourself, and maybe whether you tell others about it. MMM has fulfilled his stoic duties with his lifestyle and blog.
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Mar 4, 2015 03:14
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Cicero posted:But his values are wrong. There is the interesting observation that his blog has made him a multimillionaire who could easily afford a $100k/yr or more after-tax lifestyle, and he's said publicly that he intends to donate these proceeds. But of course, since he's not screaming his head off and getting arrested in an ineffectual tantrum against reality, he has poor values.
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Mar 4, 2015 03:16
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Cicero posted:But his values are wrong. What? I said he depoliticized political questions. This would also be true if he had different values. I also said an advantage of FI is that, if you care about an issue, you can become an activist without the normal array of negative consequences, up to and including job loss. Also... Obama just vetoed Keystone. Keystone became a political issue only after the extremely successful Aug-Nov 2011 string of protests. ------------------- Ok anyway, I have an FI tip! I've been using the "don't break the chain" system, slightly modified for my priorities. I'll X a day only if money spent falls into one of 5 categories: food, bills, bike repair, gifts, and DIY. I have to break the chain when I buy gas, when I buy clothes, when I have to replace something rather than repair it, and most other stuff. I've noticed 3 benefits: I spend less overall, I have to think about every purchase to remember and categorize and assess its usefulness, and best of all, when I get the weird urge to lose money, I'll buy something that will help my project (which moves my project along faster). If you're thinking "those categories are ridiculous", the general idea is to make an X category consisting of necessities to stay alive, however you define them, plus stuff that makes you happy in the long-term. In the "break the chain" category, put your bad money habits that can be replaced. For instance, I'm happy with the level that I eat out now, but if I weren't, I'd break the chain whenever I went out to eat. If you're really unsatisfied with the rent you're paying, you can break the chain once a month. It's kind of the second cousin of a budget, but set at zero for almost everything, and set at infinity for the stuff you already have under control (or want to do more of). It works about as well as you can care about your chain, and (in my experience) if you get a string of chain breaks, you stop taking it seriously, and the system falls apart. So make it so a 3-week chain is challenging, but attainable.
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Mar 4, 2015 04:16
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Man we should shift this to the bad with money thread because protesting and voting are both horrible with money.
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Mar 4, 2015 04:20
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