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Doctor Party posted:4) You can not simply enter medical school "with any degree". You have to take the minimal requirements for whatever medical school you are applying. These are often a typical 2 year set of pre-med courses like physics, biology, chemistry etc, some schools require calculus and biochem and other random classes. So while you can major in philosophy you certainly need almost 2 years of the classes you'd think a medical student would need. This isn't true of all medical schools by any means. Maybe it's an American thing? My alma mater's medical school (Canadian, well-regarded) has no requirements about courses and about 10-20%, depending on the year, of their undergraduate medical students come from social science disciplines including philosophy, theology, literature, etc. If you can get a degree in music performance and learn enough of the required core subjects to do well on the MCAT, you can certainly get into medical school. You need to have a good enough grounding in the subject matter to perform well on the test and also to keep up once you get to medical school, but it certainly seems that there are people who can do it. I didn't study medicine there, but I did teach medical students there at one point, and honestly I found the ones whose undergraduate work was in the humanities rather than the hard sciences were more teachable. Nothing against the pre-med gunners who made their dreams come true, but often they couldn't answer questions that required lateral thinking or critical enquiry. Mind you, by the time I got them they were in second year (I taught clinical skills in the obstetrics bootcamp right before their OB/GYN clinical block) so maybe the theologians were scrambling all of first year to keep up in a way that was invisible to me. So I guess the moral of the story is that if you have a humanities degree and want to be a doctor you should go to school in Canada? I think your other points are spot-on, though, for the most part. Medicine is not the approach you want if your goal is to get a good ROI on the time and energy you invest. You can eventually make good money, but you will always work really hard for it, which I'm guessing is not the approach that someone posting a "Tell me about becoming wealthy" thread is hoping to take.
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Dec 6, 2016 06:20
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I don't know; you'd have to ask a dentist.
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Dec 6, 2016 19:45
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Money exists to get you what you want. If what you want more than anything is never to work for pay again, then a lifetime of giving up most luxury, front-loaded with a decade or so of extreme frugality, makes sense. If what you want is to live a comfortable lifestyle with many small luxuries or a few large ones, and continuing to work seems to you like a reasonable tradeoff, Mr Money Mustache's approach is not going to be helpful to you. I'm debt-free and make six figures, so it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility to retire after 10 years of crazy frugality, but I'd rather not. Life with a dog and a car and takeout sometimes and as many babies as I want seems more fun to me than financial independence without all those things, but then, I like my job. What can I say, I'm hopelessly middle-class. Dogfish fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Dec 7, 2016 |
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Dec 7, 2016 04:22
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Tony Montana posted:How does someone in their 20s make the choice that the worst thing in life would be to work for pay? How do they know? What do they know of what they are they are giving up, they haven't experienced much of life yet! Travel to Europe on a budget, it's miserable. You can got to Thailand or Vietnam and spend a few dollars a day and live like a king, until you grow up a bit and as many cheap cocktails as I can drink each day doesn't equate to how I think a king lives anymore. Dogfish posted:Money exists to get you what you want. If what you want more than anything is never to work for pay again, then a lifetime of giving up most luxury, front-loaded with a decade or so of extreme frugality, makes sense. If what you want is to live a comfortable lifestyle with many small luxuries or a few large ones, and continuing to work seems to you like a reasonable tradeoff, Mr Money Mustache's approach is not going to be helpful to you. How does someone in their 20s know that they don't want to work for pay? How do they know they want to be a doctor, or marry someone, or have kids? There's no way to be sure that the decisions you make at 25 are the decisions that the self you'll be at 45 will have wanted you to make, but there's no remedy for that. It sounds like you don't find the experiences associated with extreme frugality meaningful or appealing. My suggestion to you would therefore be not to practice extreme frugality. People are different, and different people want and like different things. You don't have to personally approve the lifestyle choices of everyone on the planet.
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Dec 8, 2016 01:36
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Tony Montana posted:Yes, very good. Different people are different. I am glad you are here to explain that. Do you understand you are undermining your own argument? How can you commit to something with such a huge opportunity cost as frugality to the point of missing out on life as someone in their 20s because of the future promise of.. what? I don't see the experiences associated with extreme frugality as necessary. I think it's just a plan some people have come up with, but it doesn't apply to me or my life. Sure, that sounds reasonable. So why are you so mad about it? While in my 20s, I committed to a professional career, got married, and created a human life. Those are all huge commitments, and they all come with opportunity costs (the tiny human, especially). Just like when I took out a large loan to complete my professional training, I accepted that my full professional salary wouldn't be mine to spend for the first couple years I was in practice, because I'd have to pay back those loans. I chose to pay back those loans quickly for a variety of reasons, but I could also have chosen to pay the minimum payment for 15 years and have the opportunity to eat more takeout and take more vacations during those 15 years. That just wan't the choice that matched up well with my goals and personality. Doesn't mean I was right, doesn't mean someone who chose to eat Indian food and go to Vegas for 15 years was wrong. Just people tailoring their lifestyles to their personalities. It doesn't have to be a moral question, or a question of right and wrong, which is the part you seem to be having some trouble with. "Missing out of life," to you, means missing out on the opportunity to enjoy spending money. But that only works if you DO enjoy spending money. I live on about 30% of my six-figure income, not because I'm depriving myself of anything, but because after I've bought all the things I want, I've spent about 30% of my income. Some people just want fewer things, and some people enjoy having unconstrained time and a sense of independence way, way more than they enjoy the other stuff that money can buy. If you love lavish trips and fancy cars, there's nothing wrong with that, and I'm happy that you get to enjoy them! But that's not the only, the best, or the correct way to live for everyone.
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Dec 8, 2016 02:53
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Tony Montana posted:I'm not mad. It's more the frugality idea as being floated as the 'smart' way or the 'people with their poo poo together'. You know what I'm talking about, if you've read much of BFC you'd know exactly what I'm talking about. I read and post in BFC frequently - including the FI thread because I enjoy marvelling at the extremes of human behaviour. I believe that what you intended to communicate was "Don't worry, you don't have to drink the FIRE Kool-Aid to be wealthy and/or live a good life," and I think you're right. I also don't think that's what you actually communicated, and you certainly communicated an awful lot of emotional intensity around the topic. That's what I, and I suspect also the other posters who responded negatively to you, were reacting to. That's all. (I also think some of your "people in their 20s are babies who can't make decisions" stuff was weird, but you know what, I'm not here to tell you how to understand the world.) I agree that financial planning should depend on the financial climate in which one finds oneself, and where one lives is a part of that. That seems very sensible to me. Also, as a general aside, I find the number of people arguing that wealth and current gainful employment are always mutually exclusive really interesting and tracks in a really interesting way with shifting understandings of what it means to be "middle class." To the people who think if you work you're not wealthy: can you expand more on why you think that? Dogfish fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Dec 8, 2016 |
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Dec 8, 2016 16:28
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| # ¿ May 2, 2024 08:57 |
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Tony Montana posted:"people in their 20s are babies who can't make decisions" - come on man, don't strawman me so obviously. I said people in the 20s who think theyve got it all worked out and like to tell others about how smart they are and foolish you are, are actually barely adults and are complete rookies at the whole life thing. They don't actually know poo poo and what they do know someone else told them. Nobody knows enough about someone else's life to tell them how to live it. People who go around telling other people they've been living wrong because there's only one correct way to do things are always idiots and can be safely ignored, no matter what their age. There's a pretty wide range of people in their 20s, too - by the time I was 26, I'd been living on my own for ten years without support, had lived on three continents, and was halfway through a professional degree. My sister is 26 now, going on year six of her undergrad, has never lived on her own without assistance and has had two part-time jobs in her entire life. It's awfully hard to accurately pigeonhole people. I definitely don't agree with you that "focus on the content and not how people are saying things" is good advice, but that may be due, as you point out, to our vastly different cultural backgrounds. (It's very cold here, which makes us want to conserve our energy by being precise, I suppose.) My counter-advice to the OP would be to be careful to say what you mean in a way that your audience will understand, because miscommunications can cost you time, goodwill, and sometimes even money. I would also caution OP not to accept "Oh, it's just [casual conversation/locker room talk/a joke/etc] as an excuse from others who don't do so. But maybe that's just the Canadian way.
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Dec 9, 2016 03:18
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