7 ms·

"At the same time, there is a depressing message for the rest of us: Maybe the fact that you would even consider retiring to a life of luxury at a young age is

"At the same time, there is a depressing message for the rest of us: Maybe the fact that you would even consider retiring to a life of luxury at a young age is a sign you aren’t going to succeed at a high enough level to make that an option." Now wait a second... didn't the author just finish talking about diminishing utility? This sounds like the mindset of someone who really doesn't understand just how little it takes to work and/or retire comfortably. The vast majority of people don't need to travel the world in a private jet to enjoy retiring luxuriously in their 50's (or in most cases even earlier).

Thieum22 12y ago
Indeed, Mr Money Mustache is a good resource for people looking for an early retirement with an average salary: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/
- brianwawok 12y ago
  Even faster on a nice engineer salary.
  - ska 12y ago
    The amount of salary doesn't really matter so much as the fraction of it you are willing to live on long term.
    - pessimizer 12y ago
      You don't live on fractions, but on absolute amounts.
      - Kliment 12y ago
        The "fraction" refers to expense rate versus savings rate. If your "absolute amount" is low enough relative to your income, your savings rate is high so you can retire earlier.
      - ska 12y ago
        But that's the point. This process is "faster" on a higher salary if and only if your final target income isn't also higher. For many people this will not be the case, e.g. the person with a 100k/yr salary has a higher retirement cost of living targeted than the person with 50k/yr salary does. Of course, if you are happy living a 50k/yr lifestyle and retirement but happen to make 100k/yr, yes, you should be able to retire much faster.
        brianwawok 12y ago
        It has a HUGE impact. The MMM lifestyle is something like 25-30k to live. If you make 50k.. you can save at most 20-25k, taking (10-15 years to retire, would need to do math). if you make 200k, you can save 150-175k, reaching retirement in 2-3 years. The "higher income -> higher lifestyle" is a myth MMM tries hard to dispel. You don't NEED newer cars because you make more money. You don't NEED a bigger house. Sure you can choose those things...
        ska 12y ago
        It has a huge impact if you are willing to approach it that way, but my point is that I don't believe many/most people in that 100k+ earning range actually are willing to retire to a 20/25k range, at all. Which leads you back to scaling everything up to the number you are willing to you are comfortable with.
Retric 12y ago
Most 'professionals' quickly reach the point where money is really more about status than anything else. Sure, there are a few toy's, but the gap between a 25k car and a 250k car is not actually that big for most day to day driving. Often a 50$ watch is more useful than a 50,000$ watch. Rent a 35' boat for a weekend and it's a fun experience, own a 35' boat and it's a long term hassle. Not that status is useless. Being able to afford a high status area has plenty of knock on benefits. But, where the benefits of a middle class vs poor are might be huge past that there are significant diminishing returns. So, IMO it's really a question of how much you care about status vs. any thing else. 50 year old with 90 million in the bank are a dime a dozen in some circles, where a CFO at Google get's a long list of people paid to do what they say.
- zeroonetwothree 12y ago
  The cost of a car is only weakly related to how well it suits you. I find my $12k car much more pleasant than many much more expensive cars I've tried (I admit I haven't tried anything in the $250k range).
  - jaynos 12y ago
    I'm much more comfortable in my used Subaru. My fear of buying a new car comes from knowing that I don't want to spill coffee in it (and I definitely would).
- hsitz 12y ago
  "Most 'professionals' quickly reach the point where money is really more about status than anything else." This sounds like something a young person would say. It's certainly not what most successful "professionals" would say. Most professionals feel like they're on a work treadmill same as everyone else, except they're doing it to support a more expensive house, more expensive cars, more expensive clothes, more expensive food, more expensive education for their kids, more expensive frills than people who make less money. The consumer society we live in encourages/creates spending patterns that almost unavoidably rise right along with our salaries. These patterns of high spending then feel like they're "necessary" and they raise the bar for what feels like a safe retirement nest egg. It is possible to avoid this consumer-society treadmill, but it's not easy -- it requires swimming against the stream -- and a relatively small percentage of people do it. Avoiding it is basically what the Mr. Money Mustache website (referred to in other posts in this thread) is about, and it's interesting to note that the people who seem to gravitate to that plan often retire with a fraction of what "professionals" would consider a safe retirement nest egg.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
ChuckMcM 12y ago
Yes he did, this is a very poorly written article. I know lots of people who have retired "early" because they came into enough money[1] that they didn't need to work for their lifestyle any more. As the mmm[2] web site is pretty good at pointing out, you don't need a whole lot to live pretty comfortably, especially if you're not going to work every day so you can live where property values are low. There are people who feel financially insecure even with tens of millions in their accounts, and then there is a friend of mine who walked away with $1.2M after selling his house during the dot com run-up and moved to Boise, IA. He's been there ever since and really loves it. In my experience the people who "can never get enough" are the unusual cases, not the folks who just happen to like what they are doing and it pays well, but people who focus all of their energy on increasing that number at the bottom of their portfolio account. There are a whole lot of people who are "retiring" than you read about in the funny papers. They don't call it retiring of course, because retiring carries a stigma of sitting on a porch sipping mint julips and telling stories about the 'good old days', but they feel bad about calling it 'full time vacation mode' which is really what it is. [1] Generally technology people of course, and generally through stock they owned in a company they worked at as an employee. [2] http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/
- austinlyons 12y ago
  Boise, ID? :) a funny related t-shirt from Raygun: Ohio, the great potato state (above an outline of Iowa). https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/2f/ea/93/2fea932c734ec6311eff8db84471ca7d.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/2f/ea/93/2fea932c7...
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    Argh :-) of course. is malatypism a thing?

Thieum22 12y ago

Indeed, Mr Money Mustache is a good resource for people looking for an early retirement with an average salary: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/

brianwawok 12y ago
Even faster on a nice engineer salary.
- ska 12y ago
  The amount of salary doesn't really matter so much as the fraction of it you are willing to live on long term.
  - pessimizer 12y ago
    You don't live on fractions, but on absolute amounts.
    - Kliment 12y ago
      The "fraction" refers to expense rate versus savings rate. If your "absolute amount" is low enough relative to your income, your savings rate is high so you can retire earlier.
    - ska 12y ago
      But that's the point. This process is "faster" on a higher salary if and only if your final target income isn't also higher. For many people this will not be the case, e.g. the person with a 100k/yr salary has a higher retirement cost of living targeted than the person with 50k/yr salary does. Of course, if you are happy living a 50k/yr lifestyle and retirement but happen to make 100k/yr, yes, you should be able to retire much faster.
      - brianwawok 12y ago
        It has a HUGE impact. The MMM lifestyle is something like 25-30k to live. If you make 50k.. you can save at most 20-25k, taking (10-15 years to retire, would need to do math). if you make 200k, you can save 150-175k, reaching retirement in 2-3 years. The "higher income -> higher lifestyle" is a myth MMM tries hard to dispel. You don't NEED newer cars because you make more money. You don't NEED a bigger house. Sure you can choose those things...
        ska 12y ago
        It has a huge impact if you are willing to approach it that way, but my point is that I don't believe many/most people in that 100k+ earning range actually are willing to retire to a 20/25k range, at all. Which leads you back to scaling everything up to the number you are willing to you are comfortable with.

Retric 12y ago

Most 'professionals' quickly reach the point where money is really more about status than anything else. Sure, there are a few toy's, but the gap between a 25k car and a 250k car is not actually that big for most day to day driving. Often a 50$ watch is more useful than a 50,000$ watch. Rent a 35' boat for a weekend and it's a fun experience, own a 35' boat and it's a long term hassle. Not that status is useless. Being able to afford a high status area has plenty of knock on benefits. But, where the benefits of a middle class vs poor are might be huge past that there are significant diminishing returns. So, IMO it's really a question of how much you care about status vs. any thing else. 50 year old with 90 million in the bank are a dime a dozen in some circles, where a CFO at Google get's a long list of people paid to do what they say.

zeroonetwothree 12y ago
The cost of a car is only weakly related to how well it suits you. I find my $12k car much more pleasant than many much more expensive cars I've tried (I admit I haven't tried anything in the $250k range).
- jaynos 12y ago
  I'm much more comfortable in my used Subaru. My fear of buying a new car comes from knowing that I don't want to spill coffee in it (and I definitely would).
hsitz 12y ago
"Most 'professionals' quickly reach the point where money is really more about status than anything else." This sounds like something a young person would say. It's certainly not what most successful "professionals" would say. Most professionals feel like they're on a work treadmill same as everyone else, except they're doing it to support a more expensive house, more expensive cars, more expensive clothes, more expensive food, more expensive education for their kids, more expensive frills than people who make less money. The consumer society we live in encourages/creates spending patterns that almost unavoidably rise right along with our salaries. These patterns of high spending then feel like they're "necessary" and they raise the bar for what feels like a safe retirement nest egg. It is possible to avoid this consumer-society treadmill, but it's not easy -- it requires swimming against the stream -- and a relatively small percentage of people do it. Avoiding it is basically what the Mr. Money Mustache website (referred to in other posts in this thread) is about, and it's interesting to note that the people who seem to gravitate to that plan often retire with a fraction of what "professionals" would consider a safe retirement nest egg.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

ChuckMcM 12y ago

Yes he did, this is a very poorly written article. I know lots of people who have retired "early" because they came into enough money[1] that they didn't need to work for their lifestyle any more. As the mmm[2] web site is pretty good at pointing out, you don't need a whole lot to live pretty comfortably, especially if you're not going to work every day so you can live where property values are low. There are people who feel financially insecure even with tens of millions in their accounts, and then there is a friend of mine who walked away with $1.2M after selling his house during the dot com run-up and moved to Boise, IA. He's been there ever since and really loves it. In my experience the people who "can never get enough" are the unusual cases, not the folks who just happen to like what they are doing and it pays well, but people who focus all of their energy on increasing that number at the bottom of their portfolio account. There are a whole lot of people who are "retiring" than you read about in the funny papers. They don't call it retiring of course, because retiring carries a stigma of sitting on a porch sipping mint julips and telling stories about the 'good old days', but they feel bad about calling it 'full time vacation mode' which is really what it is. [1] Generally technology people of course, and generally through stock they owned in a company they worked at as an employee. [2] http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/

austinlyons 12y ago
Boise, ID? :) a funny related t-shirt from Raygun: Ohio, the great potato state (above an outline of Iowa). https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/2f/ea/93/2fea932c734ec6311eff8db84471ca7d.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/2f/ea/93/2fea932c7...
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  Argh :-) of course. is malatypism a thing?