5 ms·

Money buys freedom from wage slavery.

c22 7y ago
At a certain point, sure, but statistically you're unlikely to get there through wage slavery. Anyway, there are other ways to gain that freedom.
- balfirevic 7y ago
  > Anyway, there are other ways to gain that freedom. What ways do you have in mind?
mikekchar 7y ago
There was a cool article I saw quite a while ago where a father of 2 and sole provider for his family found that it was next to impossible to survive comfortably in London on half a million GBP per year. He went through all the numbers and showed how it just couldn't be done. Of course he was making 10x what would be considered a good wage in London. It wasn't his salary, it was his minimum standard that was out of whack. The best part of the article was that it wasn't dead pan humour -- he was just clueless. There is a certain minimum amount of money you need to be comfortable. How much money that is depends a lot on where you live, but it also depends a lot on your values. There isn't one point where you can choose to be free -- there are several and some of them are surprisingly low, monetarily. Most people choose not to be free. It's very interesting.
- alltakendamned 7y ago
  If you can find back the link, I'd like to read this
  - mikekchar 7y ago
    Looking for it. BTW... I am never going back to Huffington Post. Wow... the "privacy controls" are sooooo broken.... Sorry. Can't find it. It was really interesting, though. I found a similar article here: $500K and scraping by - https://www.financialsamurai.com/scraping-by-on-500000-a-year-high-income-earners-struggling/ https://www.financialsamurai.com/scraping-by-on-500000-a-yea... It's interesting how they justify $23K a year for food for a family of 4. But the thing is, I know lots of people who spend that kind of money on food and can't imagine being able to spend less.
    - celticmusic 7y ago
      Food is one of those areas where I definitely spend more, but It's also a conscious decision. I grew up extremely poor, so being able to eat well is something I 100% find worthwhile.
    - GFischer 7y ago
      You have the other extreme, Mr Money Moustache who claims to feed a family of 4 on about 300 dollars a month: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/03/29/killing-your-1000-grocery-bill/ https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/03/29/killing-your-1000... of course, that´s a lot of rice, noodles and beans (not that there´s anything bad with those, but I´d get bored).
      - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
        Healthy though, variety in your food does tend to increase the number of calories you consume.
        mikekchar 7y ago
        I live in Japan and my grocery bill, excluding alcohol is about $50 per week for my wife and I. We eat a really wide variety of foods, but actually that variety means that we eat less meat. For breakfast we usually have rice, an egg, natto (fermented soy beans) and miso soup. The soup contains a variety of different ingredients depending on our mood: potatoes, onions, mushrooms (4 or 5 different kinds), daikon (a kind of large, sweet radish), carrot, wakame seaweed, tofu (very soft, grilled or deep fried), etc, etc, etc. I often have some oatmeal in the morning if I'm feeling hungry, or we'l substitute some of the rice for other grains like barley. Once or twice a week, we'll have a small piece of fish: usually grilled, but often prepared in different ways -- dried fish, pickled fish, marianated in sake lees, in a miso sauce, etc, etc. For lunch it's always a lunch box during the week with the ubiquitous rice. However, there will be Japanese pickles, usually a stir fry, or left over dinner. We always have some meat or fish in the lunch box, but only something like 20 grams or so -- just for flavour and texture. I try to make dashi maki tamago (a rolled omlette). There are lots of preprepared things we add as well (some of which we buy, some of which we make). Things like hash browns/tater tots, potato salad, crunchy vegetables cooking in a sweet soy sauce sauce, etc, etc. The main shape of a Japanese lunch box is 1/2 of the box is rice, 1/4 is some main dish, 1/8 is some accent, and the remaining 1/8 is either fruit or pickles. The sizes are small so it's easy to get variety over the week. On the weekends, we will occasionally go out for lunch, but usually for ramen (which only costs us $5-7 each including tax and no tip -- advantages of living in Japan). Then for dinner we have tended to adopt a kind of tapas style of eating -- which is common in Japanese izakayas (think pub). So we make 4 or 5 small dishes and nibble on them (usually with some beer or Japanese sake). My wife will spend time in the evening to make some of these dishes ahead for the week. I usually take over the kitchen on the weekends and make European style foods (though, normally "poor" people's foods like stews, etc) We often use the left overs in the lunch boxes. One thing is that we eat very little meat/fish from a N/A perspective. Even when we eat yaki niku (Korean style barbeque), each of us will eat a maximum of 150 grams of meat each -- and that includes some beef, some pork and either a sausage or a bit of chicken. The rest is vegetables. Sometimes we'll have a piece of fish for dinner, but it's just a small piece and also just one of the 4 or 5 dishes that we have for dinner. Meat is not a main dish, ever. It's just an accent. We don't often have desert, but when we do it's almost always seasonal fruit. Virtually every month where we live there is a new fruit coming into season. We don't eat fruit out of season -- we only eat local fruit. This means that we really look forward to it coming out and we just to buy it. Cherries are always hard because the season is only about 2 weeks! When I worked at the high school here, the school nurse told be that the Japanese don't really do the "food pyramid" thing. Instead they recommend that you have 14-15 different foods during the course of the day. You can see that we don't go out to dinner much: Usually 5 or 6 times a year and it's a really special treat when we do. But it's nice because the food around here is so great that it's a pleasure to cook with it. I think the money mustache guy has it right: avoid optimising your time for work and instead optimise it for enjoying doing things for yourself. Get your calories from inexpensive things (we're mostly getting calories from rice, veg and fat). Then you can add variety, but the key is to have a lot of variety in small portions. Just my 2 cents, anyway. There are lots of good ways to live and I don't mean to say that other ways are worse than this. It's just that you can spend a small amount of money, get a large amount of variety and not eat a large number of calories.
- rswskg 7y ago
  I've seen simnilar calculations putting it at £150k and assuming private schools. To be fair, I would probably agree with that number.
  - mikekchar 7y ago
    I've lived in London (even fairly recently) on 32K :-) No kids, but a non-working wife... I have a bad habit of taking jobs that look like fun rather than pay well :-D I'm not being sarcastic when I say that you can probably draw that line pretty arbitrarily and make a pretty good case that you are giving up something crucial if you go below that level. Even being single, though, I think it would challenge the most frugal person to live on less than 25K in London. For a spouse and 2 kids... a heck of a lot more, to be completely fair.
    - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
      The average London wage is about £35K, not a huge amount more and probably skewed by the super rich. Having said that I think London is a terrible place to live on a low wage.
      - mikekchar 7y ago
        We were quite comfortable on 32K, but it was tight and we couldn't save any money. About 12K for a nice 2 bedroom garden home (in lovely Watford ;-) ), 6K for taxes, 5K for the train, 2K for food, 2K for utilities, clothes, odds and ends and a quick holiday in sunny Bath :-) rounded it out (the tax number may be wrong -- I don't really remember). Despite the horrible commute, living outside of London and commuting in improves your standard of living pretty dramatically IMHO. If we ever go back, I'm thinking of living even a few stops further out: you pay exactly the same amount of money on housing and transportation (the housing market is efficient), but you get a much nicer house -- at the cost of time... Although, I say that... This year we stayed in a friends house in Millwall for a month and my commute was worse than from Watford (although a heck of a lot cheaper). So even being in Zone 2 doesn't guarantee you a good commute.
CalRobert 7y ago
It sure does. Which is why I try to spend it on things I care about, and not things my (landlord, student/car/mortgage debt servicer), etc. cares about. It's easier to not spend a million bucks than to make a million bucks. I love cities and fine food, but eventually I realized how much I was paying for the privilege and decided I wanted out. A cheap house and a garden go a long ways.
rofo1 7y ago
In theory, agreed, but just about everyone I know spend their money in a way that multiplies their "wage slavery".

c22 7y ago

At a certain point, sure, but statistically you're unlikely to get there through wage slavery. Anyway, there are other ways to gain that freedom.

balfirevic 7y ago
> Anyway, there are other ways to gain that freedom. What ways do you have in mind?

mikekchar 7y ago

There was a cool article I saw quite a while ago where a father of 2 and sole provider for his family found that it was next to impossible to survive comfortably in London on half a million GBP per year. He went through all the numbers and showed how it just couldn't be done. Of course he was making 10x what would be considered a good wage in London. It wasn't his salary, it was his minimum standard that was out of whack. The best part of the article was that it wasn't dead pan humour -- he was just clueless. There is a certain minimum amount of money you need to be comfortable. How much money that is depends a lot on where you live, but it also depends a lot on your values. There isn't one point where you can choose to be free -- there are several and some of them are surprisingly low, monetarily. Most people choose not to be free. It's very interesting.

alltakendamned 7y ago
If you can find back the link, I'd like to read this
- mikekchar 7y ago
  Looking for it. BTW... I am never going back to Huffington Post. Wow... the "privacy controls" are sooooo broken.... Sorry. Can't find it. It was really interesting, though. I found a similar article here: $500K and scraping by - https://www.financialsamurai.com/scraping-by-on-500000-a-year-high-income-earners-struggling/ https://www.financialsamurai.com/scraping-by-on-500000-a-yea... It's interesting how they justify $23K a year for food for a family of 4. But the thing is, I know lots of people who spend that kind of money on food and can't imagine being able to spend less.
  - celticmusic 7y ago
    Food is one of those areas where I definitely spend more, but It's also a conscious decision. I grew up extremely poor, so being able to eat well is something I 100% find worthwhile.
  - GFischer 7y ago
    You have the other extreme, Mr Money Moustache who claims to feed a family of 4 on about 300 dollars a month: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/03/29/killing-your-1000-grocery-bill/ https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/03/29/killing-your-1000... of course, that´s a lot of rice, noodles and beans (not that there´s anything bad with those, but I´d get bored).
    - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
      Healthy though, variety in your food does tend to increase the number of calories you consume.
      - mikekchar 7y ago
        I live in Japan and my grocery bill, excluding alcohol is about $50 per week for my wife and I. We eat a really wide variety of foods, but actually that variety means that we eat less meat. For breakfast we usually have rice, an egg, natto (fermented soy beans) and miso soup. The soup contains a variety of different ingredients depending on our mood: potatoes, onions, mushrooms (4 or 5 different kinds), daikon (a kind of large, sweet radish), carrot, wakame seaweed, tofu (very soft, grilled or deep fried), etc, etc, etc. I often have some oatmeal in the morning if I'm feeling hungry, or we'l substitute some of the rice for other grains like barley. Once or twice a week, we'll have a small piece of fish: usually grilled, but often prepared in different ways -- dried fish, pickled fish, marianated in sake lees, in a miso sauce, etc, etc. For lunch it's always a lunch box during the week with the ubiquitous rice. However, there will be Japanese pickles, usually a stir fry, or left over dinner. We always have some meat or fish in the lunch box, but only something like 20 grams or so -- just for flavour and texture. I try to make dashi maki tamago (a rolled omlette). There are lots of preprepared things we add as well (some of which we buy, some of which we make). Things like hash browns/tater tots, potato salad, crunchy vegetables cooking in a sweet soy sauce sauce, etc, etc. The main shape of a Japanese lunch box is 1/2 of the box is rice, 1/4 is some main dish, 1/8 is some accent, and the remaining 1/8 is either fruit or pickles. The sizes are small so it's easy to get variety over the week. On the weekends, we will occasionally go out for lunch, but usually for ramen (which only costs us $5-7 each including tax and no tip -- advantages of living in Japan). Then for dinner we have tended to adopt a kind of tapas style of eating -- which is common in Japanese izakayas (think pub). So we make 4 or 5 small dishes and nibble on them (usually with some beer or Japanese sake). My wife will spend time in the evening to make some of these dishes ahead for the week. I usually take over the kitchen on the weekends and make European style foods (though, normally "poor" people's foods like stews, etc) We often use the left overs in the lunch boxes. One thing is that we eat very little meat/fish from a N/A perspective. Even when we eat yaki niku (Korean style barbeque), each of us will eat a maximum of 150 grams of meat each -- and that includes some beef, some pork and either a sausage or a bit of chicken. The rest is vegetables. Sometimes we'll have a piece of fish for dinner, but it's just a small piece and also just one of the 4 or 5 dishes that we have for dinner. Meat is not a main dish, ever. It's just an accent. We don't often have desert, but when we do it's almost always seasonal fruit. Virtually every month where we live there is a new fruit coming into season. We don't eat fruit out of season -- we only eat local fruit. This means that we really look forward to it coming out and we just to buy it. Cherries are always hard because the season is only about 2 weeks! When I worked at the high school here, the school nurse told be that the Japanese don't really do the "food pyramid" thing. Instead they recommend that you have 14-15 different foods during the course of the day. You can see that we don't go out to dinner much: Usually 5 or 6 times a year and it's a really special treat when we do. But it's nice because the food around here is so great that it's a pleasure to cook with it. I think the money mustache guy has it right: avoid optimising your time for work and instead optimise it for enjoying doing things for yourself. Get your calories from inexpensive things (we're mostly getting calories from rice, veg and fat). Then you can add variety, but the key is to have a lot of variety in small portions. Just my 2 cents, anyway. There are lots of good ways to live and I don't mean to say that other ways are worse than this. It's just that you can spend a small amount of money, get a large amount of variety and not eat a large number of calories.
rswskg 7y ago
I've seen simnilar calculations putting it at £150k and assuming private schools. To be fair, I would probably agree with that number.
- mikekchar 7y ago
  I've lived in London (even fairly recently) on 32K :-) No kids, but a non-working wife... I have a bad habit of taking jobs that look like fun rather than pay well :-D I'm not being sarcastic when I say that you can probably draw that line pretty arbitrarily and make a pretty good case that you are giving up something crucial if you go below that level. Even being single, though, I think it would challenge the most frugal person to live on less than 25K in London. For a spouse and 2 kids... a heck of a lot more, to be completely fair.
  - tonyedgecombe 7y ago
    The average London wage is about £35K, not a huge amount more and probably skewed by the super rich. Having said that I think London is a terrible place to live on a low wage.
    - mikekchar 7y ago
      We were quite comfortable on 32K, but it was tight and we couldn't save any money. About 12K for a nice 2 bedroom garden home (in lovely Watford ;-) ), 6K for taxes, 5K for the train, 2K for food, 2K for utilities, clothes, odds and ends and a quick holiday in sunny Bath :-) rounded it out (the tax number may be wrong -- I don't really remember). Despite the horrible commute, living outside of London and commuting in improves your standard of living pretty dramatically IMHO. If we ever go back, I'm thinking of living even a few stops further out: you pay exactly the same amount of money on housing and transportation (the housing market is efficient), but you get a much nicer house -- at the cost of time... Although, I say that... This year we stayed in a friends house in Millwall for a month and my commute was worse than from Watford (although a heck of a lot cheaper). So even being in Zone 2 doesn't guarantee you a good commute.

CalRobert 7y ago

It sure does. Which is why I try to spend it on things I care about, and not things my (landlord, student/car/mortgage debt servicer), etc. cares about. It's easier to not spend a million bucks than to make a million bucks. I love cities and fine food, but eventually I realized how much I was paying for the privilege and decided I wanted out. A cheap house and a garden go a long ways.

rofo1 7y ago

In theory, agreed, but just about everyone I know spend their money in a way that multiplies their "wage slavery".