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It seems weird to have secret retirement savings, even if she doesn't ask, but I don't know you or her so I'm in no place to judge your relationship. I don't have a wife or anything, but I tell my cats everything.
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Oct 23, 2013 21:47
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Lightning Zwei posted:1) The people who put the money in their Vanguard are selfish and honest about it. I didn't want to get involved in this thread, but come on this is ridiculous. There's lots of great charities out there that can be identified by thorough research and communication. Sure, volunteering your time is great, but they need money too. You don't have to choose between keeping 100% of your money for yourself and donating 100% of your money. Plenty of us aggressively save as well as donate regularly to charity. Nobody is telling you that you have to do the same, but don't call my decisions foolish when you don't know how I reached them. As has been said before, Financial Independence is about being able to make decisions for yourself.
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Nov 5, 2013 21:21
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MrKatharsis posted:Goons literally giving their money away ITT. Have you seriously never given anything to anyone? You've never done somebody a favor or helped out a friend? I guess that's in line with frugality, but it's not a life I'd want to live.
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Nov 5, 2013 21:52
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Somebody said it best in another thread here, that an emergency fund should generate a return like airbags should make your car go faster.
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Nov 6, 2013 17:20
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Yeah, I don't understand why anybody would do that unless they entered some weird alternate reality where savings accounts and money market accounts no longer exist?
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Nov 6, 2013 19:06
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I might be paranoid, but I'm personally more worried about theft. If somebody gains access to my account in some way (forged check, lifted debit number and pin, or even in person with a gun and a ride to an ATM), I want my emergency fund to be safe. In fact, something happening where my checking account got cleared out is one of the specific emergencies I'd think an emergency fund would be useful for. Even if you get the money back, it would likely take some time and I don't want to miss a mortgage payment over it.
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Nov 6, 2013 20:51
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Jeffrey posted:A debit limit serves to help this as well. Also you should probably be even more worried about identity theft and malware on your PC getting your online banking/investment passwords than you are about whatever is in your savings/checking accounts. Sure, but to me it's about balance between risk and liquidity. Moving money from checking into savings has just about no decrease in liquidity, but has an arguably large decrease in risk. You could decrease your risk even further with bars of gold in a safety deposit box, but that would reduce liquidity. A good rule of thumb for me is that if I wind up in jail, I should be able to access that money from jail that night to post bail.
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Nov 6, 2013 21:22
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Yeah, it can be pretty discouraging when you find out how much people like money mustache actually rake in. Of course financial independence is easier when you have more money. The easiest situation would be inheriting enough money to be set for life, and then it gets progressively harder from there. Learning how to live on 50% of your income at $30k though is theoretically just as effective as living off of 50% at $100k. Sure it's more difficult to do, but if you can pull it off, you're in just as good a spot.
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Nov 6, 2013 23:46
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TLG James posted:My checking account is pulling 2% interest. I think my savings account is pulling something pitiful like .2%. Sorry, lack of context; I was talking about an emergency fund. There are definitely very valid reasons to put money in a checking account instead of a savings account, and it seems like you've got a great deal on yours.
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Nov 7, 2013 18:30
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He's just a bit of a hypocrite now, because while he seems to have started out completely honestly and legitimately, he's basically come out of retirement to work his new job as a super famous blogger who makes an undisclosed but presumably huge amount of money by blogging about how you don't need to make money.
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Jan 23, 2014 15:29
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Cicero posted:The whole point of financial independence isn't that you do zero work, it's that any work you do is chosen without the implicit coercion of "I have to do this or I won't be able to afford rent." Besides, writing roughly one blog post a week doesn't exactly strike me as a time-consuming endeavor. He probably spends what, a few hours a week actually writing? My point is more that Financial Independence is really easy when you're pulling in (presumably) six figures for making one blog post a week, so any information about his current situation isn't really relevant to me.
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Jan 23, 2014 17:39
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Saint Fu posted:It doesn't matter how much he's making now, just that he's spending <$25k/yr and is presumably happy. All because he saved up $600k and can now live off those dividends alone. Not getting why his current income is relevant. I may be mistaken, and it's difficult to say since he redacts all the numbers whenever he posts stuff about money, but I am under the impression that he's no longer living that lifestyle and his blog has basically become a work of fiction. I could be wrong, and it's honestly not my business how he lives, I just found his blog to be taking a shift towards more political opinion than useful financial advice, and it was no longer relevant to me so I stopped reading it.
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Jan 23, 2014 17:49
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Ah cool, I hadn't seen that post, so that's some interesting insight. That said, I don't even see that as a particularly frugal budget. For somebody that champions bicycles and calls people "car clowns," he sure spends a lot on gas. 25k sounds like a cheap annual expense, but considering he pays no rent or mortgage, it's not that unusual. If you figure average is something like $1250/mo on mortgage or rent (and this varies wildly by location, but humor me), that's an additional $15k, bringing us to $40k annual expenses. To afford that, you'd need an annual pre-tax household income of over $50,000, which is right around the median income in the US. Again, I don't mean anything personal against the guy, and there's good advice to be had there, but he's honestly a pretty average guy with pretty average habits. The big huge important advice he gives, is that you don't have to expand your lifestyle as your salary increases, and everyone can be pretty happy living with totally normal and average spending habits. If this were the way he phrased it, I think I'd be more likely to continue reading his blog, but he's got this awful attitude where he thinks he's better than everyone else and it's really off-putting. He's a fortunate dude who was smart enough to exercise common sense and take advantage of windfalls, but I don't think he deserves his reputation as a champion of frugality. I don't think that means he's lazy or a sell-out or anything though, and I agree that the criticisms of that nature posted earlier have got to be trolling.
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Jan 23, 2014 18:05
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No Wave posted:They're not trolling. I don't think you're in touch with the reality of how people see money in the US. I think we're talking about two different things. I was referring to the comment that being frugal and riding a bicycle is lazy. That just seems intentionally inflammatory to me. I do however think statements like the above can be dangerous. What's relevant to the people who subscribe to SA is not representative of the general public. Most people will think you're crazy to consider early retirement because they're living paycheck-to-paycheck not because of irresponsible spending but rather being born into inescapable poverty. That's outside the scope of this thread though.
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Jan 23, 2014 21:02
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Cicero posted:Most people in the US aren't born into inescapable poverty though, and yet most Americans still live paycheck to paycheck. What is with the whole "lol the US is a third-world country" thing going around SA these days? Yes the US has crappier social services compared to western Europe and things suck more for the poor here, but goons seem to be intent on exaggerating the problems until it sounds like the US is some North Korea-level hellhole. You're twisting my words around, but this thread isn't the place for this argument. I didn't say most people are in poverty, I said most people who can't comprehend early retirement are, but maybe my experience is different from yours. Anyone I know who's well-off enough to be able to consider a 401k have at least had a brief mental debate about the possibility of retiring before 65, even if they ultimately discounted it. The only people I've met who would "look at me like I have two heads" if I mentioned ER did so because they had no money to set aside for retirement at all. Whether or not we need more social programs or anything to that effect has nothing to do with what I said, and I never called the US a third-world country, so I don't know where the hell that came from and can only assume you're the one with an agenda.
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Jan 23, 2014 21:22
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SpelledBackwards posted:God, this threads and the Newbie Personal Finance one remind me that It could be worse, my girlfriend has six figures of student loan debt and can't find a job.
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Jan 27, 2014 15:22
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Don't try to time the market. Barring any obvious signs of a bubble, buy a house when and if you feel is the right time for you to enter home ownership. Things like market price fluctuations are fairly minor compared to the ongoing expenses (time and money) of home ownership.
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Mar 20, 2014 22:38
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loki k zen posted:I guess my issue was there are loads that say yes and loads that say no, and without knowing much about finance idk who to believe. It's a home, not an investment. If you want to set down and stay somewhere a long time, consider buying a house. If you don't there's nothing wrong with renting and using all the money you save to invest more. They both have their pros and cons.
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May 6, 2014 22:25
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If you're going to factor in things like that, you'd also need to factor in the savings of not having medical costs in later life from being out of shape and obese. Alternatively, add in the savings of not needing a gym membership to the bike riding.
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May 9, 2014 17:08
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loki k zen posted:This may not be a popular one, but not drinking alcohol has saved me so much money. I haven't completely quit, but cut way back for health reasons (I need to lose a ton of weight), and a nice side-effect is that I'm saving about $200/mo. I knew how much I was spending, but I never really thought of how ridiculously large of an amount that is. My new regime is I pick up a box wine (that's actually pretty decent) for $18 and it lasts me 2-3 weeks when I limit myself to one glass per night. Now that I've broken the ritual of cracking open a bottle of nice wine with every dinner, or tossing back a six-pack on the weekends, I sometimes don't even have my one glass because it's really just not that important. I think the key here isn't that it has to be cheap poo poo, or that you have to be a teetotaler, but rather that it should be treated more like a special occasion thing than a hobby.
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May 13, 2014 20:26
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It's been interesting for me since I've been undertaking lifestyle changes to lose the aforementioned weight, how similar the lifestyle changes for weight loss are to frugality and FI. You can go on spending freezes or crash diets to get yourself out of a really bad situation, but without major lifestyle changes, you'll probably go back to your old ways and get right back into the same kind of trouble. The solutions are pretty similar too: tracking spending and tracking calories. The greatest advice that I've found for both situations is to never do anything unless you're willing to do it every day for the rest of your life. If you try it and it's not something you can imagine doing long-term, it will eventually fail and you need to try a different approach. Generally what it comes down to is finding sustainable moderation in all things.
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May 13, 2014 20:33
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Bloody Queef posted:This is very state based, but licensing for food making can be onerous. Some states require a commercial kitchen which can cost over $100 an hour to rent out. If this is something you want to do, check and see if your neighborhood has a community association that has a commercial kitchen available, or if anyone you know has one in theirs. You might be able to find one that's available very cheaply or even free to people living in the neighborhood.
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Dec 11, 2014 20:50
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