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I like living in the US. We bought our home in cash. Our home is currently an RV---bear with me here. The cost of it was $16k. We pay a combined $6000/year in

I like living in the US. We bought our home in cash. Our home is currently an RV---bear with me here. The cost of it was $16k. We pay a combined $6000/year in rent (half of which is my half). You need $200k in investments to support such a cash flow (which I have). So the total cost or asset base or our current living situation is about $216,000 (not counting repairs which I can mostly do myself). We're seriously thinking of moving to Oregon (away from California) buying a house in cash for around $125,000. If real estate taxes are $1,500, this requires 50,000 in investments. Thus the cost of living of switching over to a house would be $175,000. Again, a lot of the maintenance I can do myself. It would be cheaper to not live in an RV, but it was a fun experiment.

munin 15y ago
oh! neat! some friends of mine live in a van (it's a big van but not quite an RV), it's a pretty sweet deal. I think you have a good thing going on for yourself. if you can save that kind of money it definitely changes how you interact with the world. I only had 1/10th of what you have in investments and it definitely made me bolder in the world. I wasn't being hyperbolic about insurance carriers though, and I'm sure you already know about this but I'd really caution you (and others) on this. As a small (10 person) company, we had a health insurance policy that was dropped without cause by the carrier. They told us to our face, "sue us". They know we won't, because what would it accomplish? We'd lose (burn) money, they have money to burn, it makes no sense. When you're small (an individual or a small company), they can get away with doing that to you. So, you're making payments on a policy, but I'd wager that when you need it, is when you'll be getting a letter in the mail saying "after we received your letter telling us to terminate your policy, we did"...
rorrr 15y ago
Living in an RV is like living in a tiny tiny shitty studio, plus you have to pump your own shit and piss regularly. Yeah, I can live in a tent and hunt for food. Zero dollars per year. Sorry, but fuck that. None of these stories are inspiring.
- georgieporgie 15y ago
  plus you have to pump your own shit and piss regularly. In every RV park I've seen, people normally use the shared facilities toilet and shower facilities. Same thing with live-aboard slips at marinas. It's more like living in a dormitory than a studio.
  - erejacob 15y ago
    Those common facilities are mainly intended for tourists and weekenders who would rather not have to clean their shower, toilet or deal with the pump-out station after they go home again. Permanent residents (like we are) will have their own sewer hookup (a hose coming out of the RV which is tied into a receptacle in the septic or city sewer system), electricity, and water. So it's more like living in a small house that could technically be driven away. Every few days I have to empty the tanks which, since everything is permanently hooked up, means pulling two levers that flush the tanks into the sewer. It takes about five minutes to empty them and I can go and collect my mail while that happens.
potatolicious 15y ago
What rorrr said, but not in quite such an inflammatory tone. I think it's great that you've found a lifestyle you enjoy that also allows you to get by with very little money. What I take issue with is your judgmental tone in the article - as if there's something wrong with everyone else for not wanting to live in an RV. This country faces a dire economic crisis, and there is no doubt that the income of the middle class has been getting shredded - and continues to drop. Unemployment is at an all-time high. It seems incredibly callous and foolish to sweep these all away with a "well, maybe they should be living like me".
- munin 15y ago
  especially when your lifestyle was enabled (albeit, in this specific instance), apparently, by public spending (grad school, postdoc, and subsidized higher education in his country of origin) you're effectively a net neutral on the system, however, when you factor in all that society has invested in you, you're very much a net negative.
  - jpadvo 15y ago
    > ...you're very much a net negative. Not he spends his life inspiring and educating people about how to control their finances, and make money serve them instead of the other way around. That would be a very valuable social contribution. And yes his lifestyle is extreme, but people don't have to follow him that far to get benefit from what he says.
  - tryitnow 15y ago
    "you're very much a net negative" Not at all. I can vouch that he's certainly has had a positive impact on my life and on the lives of those I have recommended read and follow his advice. The nice thing about retirement is you can engage in "charitable" endeavors (which really is what his blog is basically, I see no way he can make a lot of money off of it and that's not his intention).
  - erejacob 15y ago
    I think you can make that argument for my country of origin. They can add negative for the brain drain as far as I'm concerned. I guess the same holds for a lot of Indian or Chinese students who came to the US. As for grad school and postdocing, the way it works is that this has very little to do with training or investing. I feel I earned every cent they paid me for doing research. Grad school and the postdoc system pretty much a cheap way for universities to get labor at 50-70% of the private market rates. Universities call grad students "students" so they can get around various labor laws and not paying for things like health insurance. The use postdocs because it's easier to lay off people compared to staff scientists. So they hire persons with masters degrees to do grunt work for 25k/year and call them grad students. Then they hire the smart ones with PhDs for 40k/year and call them postdocs. Basically you're put in front of a computer or in a lab and told to work on this task much like private industry except maybe your work is a bit more interesting(?) You write reports about your work called "papers" and after 4 years you write a giant progress report and call it a "PhD Dissertation". There's very little actual training or education involved in this process. Or at least not more than you find in the private sector. It's pretty much labor like it is in private industry. I guarantee you that without grad students and postdocs, very few scientific papers would be published, because grads and postdocs are the ones doing the actual research. When you see news of some professor discovering something, you can pretty much be sure that it was discovered at 11 in the evening by some grad student or postdoc of his. He was just the manager and subsequently in charge of public relations. That's fine BTW ... it's not like Steve Jobs single handedly built the iphone, but he still gets all the credit for it. I myself published over 30 papers in my career, many of them first authored putting in 100 hours week a lot of the time, so I think I earned the money I made. You can argue whether those papers are the equivalent of an $800 toilet seat, but that's a different discussion altogether. I put in the sweat equity "on the bench". I earned that money. Professors mostly spend their time teaching, managing their workers, excuse me, "teaching" their grad students and postdocs, and writing grant proposals. Academia has the same typical structure as anywhere else. The only time you spend any meaningful effort being "educated" without giving back is as an undergraduate.

munin 15y ago

oh! neat! some friends of mine live in a van (it's a big van but not quite an RV), it's a pretty sweet deal. I think you have a good thing going on for yourself. if you can save that kind of money it definitely changes how you interact with the world. I only had 1/10th of what you have in investments and it definitely made me bolder in the world. I wasn't being hyperbolic about insurance carriers though, and I'm sure you already know about this but I'd really caution you (and others) on this. As a small (10 person) company, we had a health insurance policy that was dropped without cause by the carrier. They told us to our face, "sue us". They know we won't, because what would it accomplish? We'd lose (burn) money, they have money to burn, it makes no sense. When you're small (an individual or a small company), they can get away with doing that to you. So, you're making payments on a policy, but I'd wager that when you need it, is when you'll be getting a letter in the mail saying "after we received your letter telling us to terminate your policy, we did"...

rorrr 15y ago

Living in an RV is like living in a tiny tiny shitty studio, plus you have to pump your own shit and piss regularly. Yeah, I can live in a tent and hunt for food. Zero dollars per year. Sorry, but fuck that. None of these stories are inspiring.

georgieporgie 15y ago
plus you have to pump your own shit and piss regularly. In every RV park I've seen, people normally use the shared facilities toilet and shower facilities. Same thing with live-aboard slips at marinas. It's more like living in a dormitory than a studio.
- erejacob 15y ago
  Those common facilities are mainly intended for tourists and weekenders who would rather not have to clean their shower, toilet or deal with the pump-out station after they go home again. Permanent residents (like we are) will have their own sewer hookup (a hose coming out of the RV which is tied into a receptacle in the septic or city sewer system), electricity, and water. So it's more like living in a small house that could technically be driven away. Every few days I have to empty the tanks which, since everything is permanently hooked up, means pulling two levers that flush the tanks into the sewer. It takes about five minutes to empty them and I can go and collect my mail while that happens.

potatolicious 15y ago

What rorrr said, but not in quite such an inflammatory tone. I think it's great that you've found a lifestyle you enjoy that also allows you to get by with very little money. What I take issue with is your judgmental tone in the article - as if there's something wrong with everyone else for not wanting to live in an RV. This country faces a dire economic crisis, and there is no doubt that the income of the middle class has been getting shredded - and continues to drop. Unemployment is at an all-time high. It seems incredibly callous and foolish to sweep these all away with a "well, maybe they should be living like me".

munin 15y ago
especially when your lifestyle was enabled (albeit, in this specific instance), apparently, by public spending (grad school, postdoc, and subsidized higher education in his country of origin) you're effectively a net neutral on the system, however, when you factor in all that society has invested in you, you're very much a net negative.
- jpadvo 15y ago
  > ...you're very much a net negative. Not he spends his life inspiring and educating people about how to control their finances, and make money serve them instead of the other way around. That would be a very valuable social contribution. And yes his lifestyle is extreme, but people don't have to follow him that far to get benefit from what he says.
- tryitnow 15y ago
  "you're very much a net negative" Not at all. I can vouch that he's certainly has had a positive impact on my life and on the lives of those I have recommended read and follow his advice. The nice thing about retirement is you can engage in "charitable" endeavors (which really is what his blog is basically, I see no way he can make a lot of money off of it and that's not his intention).
- erejacob 15y ago
  I think you can make that argument for my country of origin. They can add negative for the brain drain as far as I'm concerned. I guess the same holds for a lot of Indian or Chinese students who came to the US. As for grad school and postdocing, the way it works is that this has very little to do with training or investing. I feel I earned every cent they paid me for doing research. Grad school and the postdoc system pretty much a cheap way for universities to get labor at 50-70% of the private market rates. Universities call grad students "students" so they can get around various labor laws and not paying for things like health insurance. The use postdocs because it's easier to lay off people compared to staff scientists. So they hire persons with masters degrees to do grunt work for 25k/year and call them grad students. Then they hire the smart ones with PhDs for 40k/year and call them postdocs. Basically you're put in front of a computer or in a lab and told to work on this task much like private industry except maybe your work is a bit more interesting(?) You write reports about your work called "papers" and after 4 years you write a giant progress report and call it a "PhD Dissertation". There's very little actual training or education involved in this process. Or at least not more than you find in the private sector. It's pretty much labor like it is in private industry. I guarantee you that without grad students and postdocs, very few scientific papers would be published, because grads and postdocs are the ones doing the actual research. When you see news of some professor discovering something, you can pretty much be sure that it was discovered at 11 in the evening by some grad student or postdoc of his. He was just the manager and subsequently in charge of public relations. That's fine BTW ... it's not like Steve Jobs single handedly built the iphone, but he still gets all the credit for it. I myself published over 30 papers in my career, many of them first authored putting in 100 hours week a lot of the time, so I think I earned the money I made. You can argue whether those papers are the equivalent of an $800 toilet seat, but that's a different discussion altogether. I put in the sweat equity "on the bench". I earned that money. Professors mostly spend their time teaching, managing their workers, excuse me, "teaching" their grad students and postdocs, and writing grant proposals. Academia has the same typical structure as anywhere else. The only time you spend any meaningful effort being "educated" without giving back is as an undergraduate.