Comment by toomuchtodo
6 days ago
Live below your means and max your savings and investment to FIRE out of the workforce as soon as possible, because you have no control over when you will be made permanently redundant by your age or employers unwilling to hire. The fix is a permanent jobs program to offer jobs to those who want one who cannot find one in the private market, will that fix come? Unlikely. If you cannot find a job, you're simply SOL in the current socioeconomic and political system configuration.
Assuming the above, best case, you work as long as you want to work (until retirement and/or death). Worst case, you're not in poverty when you're no longer able to find work. "It is what it is."
The advice you gave, while not wrong, is retroactive. I think the OP is asking for advice while already in this predicament, not preemptively.
Also, huge swaths of the younger populations can't do this at all because lots of them are not even given the opportunity to work a job (either any job, or a job that will allow them to have any noticeable amount of savings while remaining housed). This will only get worse, the door is already shut for some people.
Unfortunately, if you wait until the ship is burning to have stocked a lifeboat, it is too late. And if you don't have a lifeboat, you're fucked, potentially or very likely through no fault of your own. No one chooses to be born, but they are forced to exist in these systems. Life is inherently unfair.
> Also, huge swaths of the younger populations can't do this at all because lots of them are not even given the opportunity to work a job (either any job, or a job that will allow them to have any noticeable amount of savings while remaining housed). This will only get worse, the door is already shut for some people.
Strong agree. Either policy will fix this or a generation will be lost. It's terrible, tragic, and I/we have little control over this. Do what you can, where you are, with what you have.
"When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.” -- Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison (i am doing my part, to the best of my ability, to free and empower others, ymmv)
>Live below your means
This was among the best advice the man who raised me ever offered.
Decades later, I still live (alone, thankfully!) in a shithole rental without health insurance in a mid-sized USA metro, for less than $2000/month (all expenses). No contracts, cash only; I own my car; no cell phone/email/subscriptions.
My savings grow silently and (immensely &) although my current living arrangement isn't ideal, it is easy. Money unfortunately is among few door-openers for strangers in new cities, you just have to know how to live lesserly.
Previously, my IBEW data center experience allowed me to save/invest enough that I don't have to work any more than extremely part-time, which is how I continue choosing to live. Needing benefits will eventually bring me back into full-time employment, which I dread, existentially...
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This isn't a lifestyle that anybody with dependants nor romantic interests could easily manage – I've dated two women in the past decade, and they were both eccentrics (as well). But I live well (to my own enjoyments): haven't set an alarm clock in many many many many years...
> Decades later, I still live (alone, thankfully!) in a shithole rental without health insurance in a mid-sized USA metro, for less than $2000/month (all expenses). No contracts, cash only; I own my car; no cell phone/email/subscriptions.
I unwillingly ended up doing the same: M34, fully paid flat in a fairly large city, no car, no ex wifes, no kids, no debt of any kind. My monthly fixed expenses are just bills (electric power, natural gas, internet), public transportation and groceries. Everything else (very little) is a monthly subscription i can stop paying if something goes wrong.
I save most of my paycheque (around 60-70%).
Can confirm that after splitting up with my last girlfriend my monthly expenses went down dramatically.
>I save most of my paycheque (around 60-70%)
I am not F.I.R.E. myself ("financially independent, retire early"), but their general rule is that if you save 2/3rds of your paycheck (and don't change your expenditures), you can retire after about a decade of working.
Congrats on your achievement!
>I unwillingly ended up doing the same
I consider myself among the luckiest people I've ever met, however strange life has been (and simple mine seems, to outsiders). Are you happy or sad about your current simplicity (I cannot tell from your wordchoice "unwillingly")?
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Yeah, I am off-grid in rural Colorado. Although I have a couple of side hustles, it would be really thin pickings without some "passive" income and without having set myself up so the big expenses are mostly taken care of.
The last several folks I've dated have been very odd people, mostly living in vehicles.
I don't have health insurance, either. Or indoor plumbing.
But I do play a lot of music, have time to volunteer, and only take work that requires an alarm clock when I feel like it.
>The last several folks I've dated have been very odd people, mostly living in vehicles
It was the simplest of women whom I enjoyed partnering with, most (a mail carrier, a SF bartender that lived in her van and my grow shed). My last two attempts were with an attorney and then a stripper (both women lied professionally for a living... so not much difference IMHO; I met them both as neighbors).
As I enter my seventh year of celibacy, I am strengthened by finally having gotten my earlylife sexuality under control – maybe it's just aging, but I suspect that Tinder-like dating is what ruined courtship (for me, and many others). After a single 2014 "netflix & chill" hookup, I have never utilized such a meat-market app again (happy for the majority that now do; I just think it's devalued both genders, the "fairer sex" more).
/ramble
I have no plans, and hope I can keep this charade ongoing (for at least another decade). After leaving medical school (almost) two decades ago, I have no plans to die within the mercy of our $American $Healthcare $System™. Wishing you continued simplicity in your mountainous adventures (OR and CO are my top US destinations).
I learned the lesson the hard way through loss of a job for over a year and a foreclosure during the 2008 global financial crisis. For others to learn from my costly experience via my advice is free, I hope the advice lands.
Best wishes. I never thought I'd be worth more than $0.00, again (dropped out of medical school even poorer than when started), but somehow it happened (it's not much, but I live much simplerly: tied to nothing with [almost] zero responsibilities).
Dude I'm you but in Central Europe, even including the health insurance part.
I'll bet when you read On the Road [0] you were also left wondering "that's it?! that's the entire journey?! how is this boring text so popular?!"
Us crazies ("I'm on the fun side of crazy," I like to profess) rarely stumble across one-another. Write me a postcard: I'll let you squat in the flat next door for a week; if you get chased out, I also have a shed (air conditioned, but 100sqft).
I've been dying to visit Slovenia (or other poorer EU countries). I'll write back – used to couchsurf before endless eternal septembers.
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