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This is near to his point. Salary is trading ‘wealth’ for ‘money’. You could literally build that house to achieve ‘wealth’ faster than you can earn it by savin
by jl2718 5y ago
This is near to his point. Salary is trading ‘wealth’ for ‘money’. You could literally build that house to achieve ‘wealth’ faster than you can earn it by saving money from salary.
This essay helped me understand how I made this mistake over well more than that decade you fear. The 80-90% saved from two decades of engineering salary did absolutely nothing to get me closer to debt-free housing security. Money is amazing when you see it for the first time, but it ends up being worthless. Investments too - risk of unmitigated loss for an individual investor is structurally greater than the potential for post-tax gain.
So he’s saying to build wealth, not money, and definitely avoid status games. (But we’re here posting, so, failing that last one spectacularly.)
- polishdude20 5y agoWait, so you're saying to build a house rather than buy it because it's cheaper? I think the overwhelming amount of costs of a house is the actual land it's on. You can't build land.
- eloff 5y agoI'd need a minimum 700,000 to buy a lot or a condemned teardown home on a lot here in Vancouver, BC. Actually that's not Vancouver, that would be an hour away in Maple Ridge or Langley. I'm ok with building (or subcontracting the building of) my own home - but I still can't afford the lot to even start the process.
- jl2718 5y agoYou can build a house anywhere if you don’t need a salary tied to an expensive area.
- polishdude20 5y agoYeah the dream of remote. I sometimes think of getting a remote job and leaving for a cheap area but things like family and friends really tie me down here. It would really suck to see my parents only once or twice a year knowing that there's maybe 20 years or so left with them.
- quantumofalpha 5y agoDepends on location and probably not true in most of the world by area. There's lots of land in the world you can have for cheap. Or even free, e.g. Russia is happy to hand out 1ha in the far east to any citizen with only one string attached - go and do something with it within 5 years, then it's yours. Somehow, not many takers.