Comment by gerbilly
9 years ago
>good luck trying to retire as a welder or car mechanic making $50k.
Maybe you don't feel the need to retire at 30 when you are a car mechanic.
I've worked in car shops (not as a licensed mechanic) and the mechanics I worked with seemed to have a lot more fun and more free time than us office jockeys despite our 'better jobs.'
And the pay wasn't half bad either.
I personally think this is the healthier way to live. I mean all power to somebody who can be in a financially beneficial position at the same time as doing what you love...
but one's place in society is not (or at least shouldn't be if the society is healthy) an isolated position. There's that old phrase "no man is an island". I understand I'm probably applying it outside of its original context, but it works just the same. Society is an interactive and interdisciplinary thing and I think we probably have need of more auto mechanics, welders, construction workers, rescue workers, firemen, pilots, etc than we do financial blog writers. Of course, I still appreciate a diversity of opinion and there's nothing stopping a financially-sound fireman write a financial-advice and good-living blog.
Ultimately the whole retiring at 30 thing just reminds me of a Trailer Park Boys beer/plotline: "Freedom 35" (its not great beer, by the way)[0]. They work so hard and so terribly to try and escape the need to do any work, and their lives are so much worse off for it. Of course, they're a poor example of the strategy to be sure. I've worked beside warehouse types who ended up working overtime for 30 years with successful investments and all with the same dream, but they still wound up working an average of 60 hours a week for 30 years...
And I really think there are more blindspots than are even mentioned here in those kinds of ideas, though I appreciate how many people have chimed in to that general aspect already.
[0] http://www.lcbo.com/lcbo/product/trailer-park-boys-freedom-3...
I understand what you are saying (i.e., don't assume to know what a mechanic wants) and you are right. I think his point was that most people don't actually have the freedom to make that choice (live frugally to retire early).