Post: #1

Quote:Stephanie williams’s apple pie sends Celestian Rince into raptures. The homemade pastry and filling, superior in taste and texture to anything you can buy. The heady scent that fills the couple’s bachelor apartment as it bakes. The time and care that she devotes to making it. And then there’s one other factor: the ingredient cost. The homemade dessert has become a symbol of the frugal life they share.

Rince and Williams, twenty-eight and thirty, are part of an anti-consumer, penny-pinching movement that’s finding favour with millennials—a generation more often cast as a group of entitled social-media addicts who live at home, work little, brunch with abandon, and expect their boomer parents to foot the bill. If their practices sound a bit like those recommended by old retire-rich handbooks The Wealthy Barber or Your Money or Your Life, that’s because they have elements in common; these early retirement enthusiasts have adopted a simple philosophy, applying such age-old principles as thrift, ingenuity, and self-sufficiency to the modern age. In a twist that feels uniquely millennial, they meticulously record and then share their expenses on a personal-finance blog, incomingassets.wordpress.com.

Rince and Williams live in a co-op housing complex in the Vancouver neighbourhood of Gastown, blocks away from their downtown jobs. As they walk or cycle almost everywhere, they don’t need a car or even take transit. They plan their weekly menus with care, comparison shopping to find the best prices, and eat all of their meals at home. These efforts minimize spending on food, shelter, and transportation—a household’s biggest expenses.

Then there are the extras. The couple doesn’t frequent coffee shops, smoke or drink, or—notably, in 2017—own smartphones. They spend little on household items and clothing; in 2015, for example, their joint total spending on shoes was $241, which they felt was too high. For entertainment, they attend free lectures and borrow books, movies, and video games from the library; score deeply discounted “under thirty-five” tickets to the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra; hike on free trails; and host dinner parties. Their budget does include one big splurge—$9,000 a year for international travel to such places as Guatemala, France, China, and Thailand.

It costs the two of them less than $1,500 a month to live—and that number includes the $787 rent on their 400-square-foot apartment. Their combined income, meanwhile, is just under $90,000 a year. They save roughly 60 percent of it. When their investment income hits a point that it can pay the bills, they’ll bid their jobs as receptionist and administrative assistant adieu. Their savings amount to about $260,000.

Much of the thinking behind their lifestyle originated with a brash blogger known as Mr. Money Mustache. Originally from Caledonia, Ontario, Mr. Money Mustache (a.k.a. Peter Adeney) lives outside Boulder, Colorado, and is a purveyor of what he calls financial “badassity.” At forty-two, he’s been retired for more than a decade. Adeney runs a personal-finance website, mrmoneymustache.com, which has 750,000 unique visitors a month. He lives with his wife and eleven-year-old son on as little as $24,000 a year. As The New Yorker reported in a 2016 profile, he refuses to buy a mop, since washing the kitchen floor with a sponge works just fine; his spending is so finely calibrated, he’s still kind of pissed about a Rubik’s Cube he bought for his son in 2015 that broke.

It would be easy to say that Rince and Williams will “grow out of it” once the demands of traditional adulthood catch up to them. But the Mr. Money Mustache Meet-Up group Williams co-founded two years ago includes such people as Trevor van Hemert, who lives in co-op housing in Burnaby with his wife Brittany and two-year-old son. He hasn’t “worked” in the traditional sense—i.e., for someone else—in seven years.

A tight job market in Victoria once pushed van Hemert to take a $12,000-a-year position managing a composting company called Pedal to Petal. The urban-agriculture collective picks up residential and commercial kitchen scraps and bikes them, in five-gallon plastic buckets, to urban farms and composting facilities in the area. Van Hemert realized that the buckets themselves could have further applications in diy culture. He founded a website, fivegallonideas.com, and filled it with articles on wine- and sauerkraut-making, beehives, birdhouses, and as many other conceivable uses as he could think of. It drew diy fans from all over the world. Van Hemert says Five Gallon Ideas now boasts up to two million readers a year, and its advertising and affiliate revenue constitutes the bulk of his $2,500 monthly income. (He notes that he has several other revenue streams, including freelance website design and sales of an ebook he wrote.)

“Being able to support myself is a rite of passage. Many of my peers haven’t achieved that yet.”

When he last worked an office job, van Hemert says, he suffered from back problems due to sitting for long hours, and found it depressing to leave for work before dawn and return home after dark. “What was most important to me was not having to work for somebody,” he says. In order to accomplish this goal, he had to be pragmatic. “It is almost like this guaranteed base income that everybody is talking about,” he says. “I just made a guaranteed base income for myself.” His spending level now is in line with living on the poverty line. “But that didn’t matter to me,” he says. “Because I’m still living better than the vast majority of people in history.”

This modest lifestyle allows him to be an involved father—he stays home with his son, while his wife works full-time. He grows food in community plots, is planning a garden for his co-op, and volunteers for Car Free Day. He also runs a blog (Indie Personal Finance) and contributes to the site earlyretirementextreme.com.

The writing of Neil Howe—one of the co-authors of the 2000 book Millennials Rising, which likens millennials to the GI generation that rebuilt society from the ashes of the Second World War—has caused van Hemert to think about the role that he and his peers will play in shaping human history. Thrift alone won’t solve the crises millennials are facing—what van Hemert calls “a fever pitch of problems”—which include everything from climate change and political gridlock to the astronomical cost of living.

“The criticism from baby boomers is that millennials don’t know how to handle their money,” he says, citing the wry logic of a recent Guardian article that demonstrates that even someone who forgoes their $22 brunch every week would need to save for 175 years to make a down payment on a house. People his age are starting urban farms and camping illegally in vans. Van Hemert and his wife themselves lived in an RV until recently, and he once lived in a sailboat. For millennials like him, alternative business models, unorthodox living arrangements, close-knit digital communities, and old-world skills are filling the void left by the disappearance of affordable housing, stable jobs, decent incomes, and benefits.

“We’re the ones making the creative solutions, not necessarily because we want to, but because we have to,” van Hemert says. “That’s our destiny as a generation.”

From the outside, it all seems like a lot of work—not only to dedicate time and effort to frugality in an age of convenience, but also to step, essentially, outside one’s own culture. Vancouver is, of course, a place where it’s not uncommon to see teenagers speed past in Lamborghinis, young couples laden with bags from Chanel and Prada, and mega-mansions torn down and rebuilt at great expense, only to sit empty for all but a few weeks of the year. In the land of lavish opulence, voluntary austerity is a radical lifestyle to adopt.

But even so, the most striking thing about a couple such as Williams and Rince is not their adherence to thrift—it’s their lack of stress. Williams and Rince don’t worry about being laid off, fired, or outsourced. They are undaunted by the city’s housing crisis. They feel confident that whatever life throws at them, they will be (financially) okay. For the same reason, they don’t feel pressured to work long hours or to sacrifice their own ideals for the sake of job security.

As a classic Gen Xer in Douglas Coupland country, I can’t overstate just how appealing this sounds. Stress defines our existence. Like many of my generation, I endured my twenties and thirties in perpetual anxiety about keeping my head above water. That continues in adulthood. We vault out of bed every morning in a state of panic, making hurried stops at coffee shops—either to stave off despair or for the adrenaline needed to face the day—only to slog for ten or twelve hours at “prestige” jobs that don’t pay overtime. Those of us who have children struggle to slip away from the office at five (“Leaving so early?”), rushing to daycares that eat up half our salaries. In spite of such herculean efforts, we often find ourselves scraping by—struggling to keep up with rising rents or runaway real estate markets—a mere paycheque away from calamity. The lifestyle Williams and Rince are modelling, as extreme as it sounds to a person accustomed to artisanal coffees and designer handbags, is still far less extreme than the one we are living.

It’s also hard to argue with their priorities, given both the environmental impact of North American living and soaring personal-debt levels (Canadians’ debt-to-income ratio currently sits at a record high of 167.3 percent—meaning it would take an average of 67.3 percent more than we earn in a year, after tax, to cover such household debt as mortgages and credit cards). Still, there’s something about this conversation that feels at times out of touch with the psychology of the cash-strapped middle classes—let alone the working poor.

I grew up poor. I know what it feels like to wear second-hand clothes and to pine for designer jeans. To watch my single mother anxiously count out change for bus fare to school. To live in fear of dental emergencies and Christmas. To live in poverty is to live in a constant state of emotional crisis, without a safety net.

As an adult, I’m more frugal than most. I take public transit, often cook at home, shop little, track spending, and am debt-free, after making my final student-loan payment not long ago. But anything that even hints at involuntary deprivation takes me back to that old insecurity—and a craving for creature comforts. So I think it’s important to recognize that there are many reasons for spending money beyond literal survival—and that one of the luxuries of a lifestyle like Rince and Williams’s is the knowledge that one could, at any point, rejoin the middle-class mainstream.

It’s worth noting that they arrived at their lifestyle via radically different routes. Rince is a child of privilege. Born in Singapore, he immigrated to Canada as a toddler. As far as he can tell, his parents have not worked since. He graduated from the University of British Columbia, debt-free, with a degree in creative writing. Meanwhile, Williams is the daughter of two teachers. She was born in Golden, BC, grew up in the Okanagan, and then, after her parents’ divorce, lived in rural Manitoba, where she finished high school through correspondence. Her financially astute father retired at fifty-nine; she started reading personal-finance books as a teen. Thrift is all she’s ever known.

The couple doesn’t want to have children (in fact, a framed certificate confirming Williams’s Fallopian tube removal hangs in the living room). They don’t aspire to home ownership, or even car ownership. If they marry, they won’t throw a big bash.
Theirs is a life lacking in the rites of passage that we Gen Xers so fetishize. But Rince sees their situation differently. “I consider being able to financially support myself a rite of passage,” he says. “Many of my peers haven’t achieved that yet.”

The early retirement approach does seem viable in a way that middle-class striving no longer does. It seems as if thinking about the world through the lens of maximizing your independence by minimizing your overhead could, at best, transform your life and, at worst, result in your amassing thousands of dollars in savings.
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Plus, Williams and Rince are adamant that if you end up feeling deprived, you’re not doing it right. “Frugality is not about depriving yourself of what you want,” Rince says. “It’s about figuring out what you want and then figuring out how you can achieve that.”

https://thewalrus.ca/meet-the-frugal-mil...etirement/

Post: #2

Can most people trim costs? Yes.

Should people also think about raising their income? Yes, and seems to me most of the "money mustache" crowd doesn't like to admit it. (alternative explanation: they prefer low stress and coasting)

Past a certain point, you can't cut expenses any further. You can save 1/3 of a 75k income, or 1/4 of a 100k income and end up with the sake amount. What you can't do is save more than 100% of what you make.

Why not work towards higher pay (whether in your field, or better, via side income) and pay attention to unnecessary expenses simultaneously?

Post: #3

Agreed, Polars.

I think that we should be comfortable living on less, but some part of me thinks this is a conspiracy from up on high to make people comfortable with the fact that all the great benefits we used to have are being cut and that we need to get used to the idea of living suboptimally.

Or maybe I'm nuts.

Post: #4

"“The criticism from baby boomers is that millennials don’t know how to handle their money,”"

And they still don't. This sounds like a miserable existence.

Post: #5

Sounds like they're not even investing that money and throwing it into a savings account.

And what's a housing co-op? Sounds like a large share house to me.

No, thanks. I'll take my private apartment, car, and nice things over this pauper living.

Post: #6

What people who opt to simply "live on less" often find out the hard way is that if you don't have a solid income coming in then you can be wiped out financially really quickly by one large unfortunate event or several smaller ones.

And if you're not earning big (and never have) then you're not in a position to START earning big when you really need to.

Post: #7

They live in fucking Vancouver, where the living standards are not at all representative of much of the rest of Canada or the world for that matter, which is why they live the modern day version of 1880's London slum-dwellers.

I'd tell him to stop being such a pussy and move to Alberta once things pick back up, but we're full.

Post: #8

The more money I make, the smaller my needs get.

I do agree with increasing your income, however money management skills are also lacking. There is something inherently wrong about getting paid on Friday and being broke the next week. Or many of the (non-Millennial) contractors who blow their incremental payments (on who knows what) and then come to me to ask for an advance. Sure, I'll give you an advance if I know you well enough, however I will also extract work from you for asking for more money.

The best way to do well is to work for more $$s, whether it's a side hustle or a new job/promotion, it doesn't matter. Once you make the money save some for emergencies and then invest the rest. Remember, the more you work, the less time you have to spend your hard earned money.

Post: #9

Penny pinching couple; spends $240 on shoes and $9k on recreational travel annually. Sounds like they are living plenty comfortably to me.

That said, I say good for younger men and women practicing some financial restraint and being future-minded, though it is an odd concept people committing wholesale to dropping out of the race to contribute to society as early as possible (no desire to raise children or be the workforce).

Post: #10

(05-25-2017 11:03 AM)General Stalin Wrote:  Penny pinching couple; spends $240 on shoes and $9k on recreational travel annually. Sounds like they are living plenty comfortably to me.

That said, I say good for younger men and women practicing some financial restraint and being future-minded, though it is an odd concept people committing wholesale to dropping out of the race to contribute to society as early as possible (no desire to raise children or be the workforce).

I guess they don't plan on ever having children. This is why their frugality works.

Post: #11

(05-25-2017 11:46 AM)LouEvilSlugger Wrote:  

(05-25-2017 11:03 AM)General Stalin Wrote:  Penny pinching couple; spends $240 on shoes and $9k on recreational travel annually. Sounds like they are living plenty comfortably to me.

That said, I say good for younger men and women practicing some financial restraint and being future-minded, though it is an odd concept people committing wholesale to dropping out of the race to contribute to society as early as possible (no desire to raise children or be the workforce).

I guess they don't plan on ever having children. This is why their frugality works.

They said she has her fallopian tube removal documents framed and on the wall so apparently not. Fucking wierd.

Post: #12

(05-25-2017 07:59 AM)Fortis Wrote:  Agreed, Polars.

I think that we should be comfortable living on less, but some part of me thinks this is a conspiracy from up on high to make people comfortable with the fact that all the great benefits we used to have are being cut and that we need to get used to the idea of living suboptimally.

Or maybe I'm nuts.

I think there's a balance between conspicuous consumption and owning one pair of underwear. For decades the trend was bigger is better

McMansion > 3 bedroom house on 1800 sqft
SUV with seating for 12 > minivan or station wagon
4 cars > 2

What you end up with is money tied up in unproductive, depreciating assets that don't generate income, and on the contrary, require $$$ for upkeep. I think some of this is a trend reversal to higher quality of life via rejection of consumerism...and given that consumption (and related debt) is a big part of GDP, discouraging it is not in the interests of capitalism.

Post: #13

They're selling a book and have ads on their website. It sounds like they figured out the other side of the equation.

And what's more likely: a bored journalist stumbled upon the blog and decided to interview the couple, or the couple was looking for marketing opportunities and proactively reached out to a journalist?

I say good hustle!

(05-25-2017 07:59 AM)Fortis Wrote:  Agreed, Polars.

I think that we should be comfortable living on less, but some part of me thinks this is a conspiracy from up on high to make people comfortable with the fact that all the great benefits we used to have are being cut and that we need to get used to the idea of living suboptimally.

Or maybe I'm nuts.

I thought the conspiracy was to keep everyone deep in debt chasing a lifestyle they can't sustain through student loans, mortgages, car loans, and credit cards. I can't keep up with all the conspiracies.

Post: #14

The globalist #collaborator journalist sheisters are selling this as a good thing:

Quote:A tight job market in Victoria once pushed van Hemert to take a $12,000-a-year position managing a composting company called Pedal to Petal.

The real reason why some make it work with austerity is not because they love it so much, but simply because they have to. It is good that they find happiness and contentment there, but wait when they want to have kids and the kids grow up in the same near-poverty.

The mega-rich have indeed convinced the poor to love poverty and not even blame anyone for it.

Also your early retirements plans are based on predictions about future interest rates, stability of currency etc. All of those are on very shaky foundations if you plan on a minimalist retirement based on your own funds. A simple carbon tax rise which is set to go up by thousands of percent in the next decades - that global warming tax will wipe out your calculations - and the worst part is - they are all for it.

Post: #15

Great share; repped you.

Quote:Plus, Williams and Rince are adamant that if you end up feeling deprived, you’re not doing it right. “Frugality is not about depriving yourself of what you want,” Rince says. “It’s about figuring out what you want and then figuring out how you can achieve that.”

We won't all have the same "want", but I respect them and this is the right way to live. What do you want? LIVE THAT.

Post: #16

I've said before that there's a bifurcation on RVF between ballers who like to spend nearly all of their $$ on nice things on the one hand, and on the other hand, more frugal, minimalism-minded guys.

While I think that the idea of not having a mop because a hand sponge will do is pretty lame, I also think that a lot of consumption is pretty wasteful and doesn't even make anyone's life better. The example above of depreciating assets like having more cars than necessary is a good one.

In the end it's about balance, as things generally are. Saving money and being somewhat frugal are probably good things overall, as they force you to be somewhat self-reliant. I've learned to cook delicious food, and I walk more and ride my bike rather than driving, which makes me fit. But you've got to keep frugality in check. A lot of people from Mr Money Mustache and the early retirement community look fucking pasty, chubby, and seem to be pretty blue pill and unimaginative. For example, they'll eat bread or rice instead of spending more money to buy fresh vegetables and meat, because it's cheaper. In my eyes, that's a big error.

(05-25-2017 07:54 AM)polar Wrote:  Can most people trim costs? Yes.

Should people also think about raising their income? Yes, and seems to me most of the "money mustache" crowd doesn't like to admit it. (alternative explanation: they prefer low stress and coasting)

Yes. After a while of going down the rabbit hole of less consumption/more frugality/minimalism, you reach a point of diminishing returns. Meaning that some things about frugality make more sense, like learning to make your own healthy food, gaming the credit card points system, and learning to live in a smaller space with less unnecessary crap. Other things, like doing your own laundry (when you could just pay extra to have someone at the laundromat do it for you, and then go for a hike or whatever), I'm less inclined to agree with.

Though I think that there's something to be said for having a less stressful job. A lot of jobs are bullshit. If you find something that you're good at and you like, and it pays pretty well, your life is going to be a lot happier overall than if you take a really tough job where your fight or flight system is constantly engaged. With the time and energy that you save, you can learn and do things that you want to. For me, that's languages, yoga, and jiu jitsu.

(05-25-2017 09:51 AM)The Beast1 Wrote:  Sounds like they're not even investing that money and throwing it into a savings account.

A lot of them invest the money in low-cost index funds, like Vanguard's VTSAX. This takes all of an hour or less to set up for automatic investments each week/month. I prefer this style of investment to active investment, because I save a lot of time that I can use to do things that I want.

Post: #17

Good on these guys for being frugal - even cheap - in a place like Vancouver that can be crushing financially on people if they are not careful.

But I have to wonder why they are working shitty jobs for only $45k a year, when they could work shitty jobs for $72,000 year (construction). Or why would they have a quarter million in the bank other than thinking ahead to 'retirement' or what they think of as retirement. My neighbor is retired for 10 years, is 65 and works at Costco and makes more than these guys. It sounds like besides pinching pennies they don't have all that much ambition. Typical privilege really.

Post: #18

(05-25-2017 09:59 AM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  What people who opt to simply "live on less" often find out the hard way is that if you don't have a solid income coming in then you can be wiped out financially really quickly by one large unfortunate event or several smaller ones.

And if you're not earning big (and never have) then you're not in a position to START earning big when you really need to.

I always like these stories, and to a certain extent live the life. They always seem to attract a similar cohort of comments along the lines of "they're lying/they're gonna go broke/wait till kids etc."

The truth is most people are piss poor at delayed gratification, cost/benefit analysis, and any sensible awareness of what options are out there.

People with two new cars who could probably get by on none. I have a female friend on her third iPhone within 18 months because they lose them when a $100 used android phone would equally accomplish all their facebooking. 30x what her "needed" spend is, because she's irresponsible and wants the status of an iPhone. Coffee which is marked up 5000%. One one hand you can say "it's only $5" someone like me says the price is irreverent, for $5 I can have almost as good coffee for a month.

Myself and a lot of these other people live a life of this. It's second nature. It's not about sacrifice, but more about constant analysis, planning, and timing. For a good portion of time when working I had no place. A few things at my parents, work provided accommodations, and then vacations. Some people might say "well I need a place even if I'm only there 2/12 months" but to me that means you're effectively paying 6x market rent which is a huge waste. It doesn't mean not taking vacations. It means going to Vietnam vs Philippines because flights for whatever reason are a third of the price.

250k isn't really FU money though, most of these articles that attract so much vitriol are 30ish ppl who had very well paying jobs, and just saved 80% of it. $1m is perfectly doable to live a decent life in perpetuity, and if you do fall into those people who were making 200k/yr at 29 while spending 20k of it, odds are even if there is a market crash worse than anything known since the market started (more or less what the 4% rule plans around) odds are they can go back to work and at least survive.

So many people seem to think it's like a set of dominoes, and once you hit go you can never adjust spending or work again. Honestly though after taking a break for ~2 years, I just got bored. Went around the world 3x, ended up better off than when I was when laid off due to a good market, but ended up going back to work to keep busy. Mr Money Mustache himself does a lot of construction on the side, runs the blog, and his wife runs an online shop, although all for motivations other than money. There's a fair bit of argument about what exactly it means to be retired. I always liked the description that it lets you tell your boss he's acting like an asshole when he is.

Post: #19

(05-25-2017 09:59 AM)Leonard D Neubache Wrote:  What people who opt to simply "live on less" often find out the hard way is that if you don't have a solid income coming in then you can be wiped out financially really quickly by one large unfortunate event or several smaller ones.

And if you're not earning big (and never have) then you're not in a position to START earning big when you really need to.

Most people allow their lifestyle track their income. If you're going to save money you need to keep your expenses in check.

These guys get their expenses in check (perhaps way too much so) and then pick jobs that give them the minimum amount of stress per hour worked. Savings rate (and income) is almost an afterthought.

Post: #20

Obviously, it may go a bit too far, but there's a lot to like about this.

As a society, we've gone too far in the direction of consumerism and lost community connectedness and basic homemaking skills.

People eat out a lot and buy garbage from grocery stores. Modern women lack the ability to cook or bake and think that their "careers" justify this inability, even after they drop out of the job market to be a full-time mom.

These counter-cultural spenders are doing it right. They are baking apple pie from scratch (something most people "don't have time for"), hosting dinner parties, reading good books, getting exercise and taking advantage of the cultural delights of their city.

There are all things that I'm trying to put more time into, because once you get yourself to a point (as I have) where you only work a few hours most days and still get a fulltime income, binge watching TV shows gets boring real fast.

It's easy criticize, though, and justifiable so.

What they are doing is only doable because they aren't having kids. The smarter choice would be to relax their thriftiness just a touch and put some of that travel money ($9K a year) into starting a business where they hold the equity.

Retiring at 34 might seem cool, but I suspect it will get boring fast when you've only got $22K to live on each year. Running a well-thought out business, while it might not allow you to retire quite as early, will keep you busy in an area of personal passion might be the better choice.

Post: #21

From reading some of the blogs, the adherents to this type of lifestyle treat early retirement like many seniors treat actual retirement. They still work, but at greatly reduced hours and more for enjoyment rather than need. Sure, spending only 20k a year in savings sounds terrible on it's face, but if the house and car are paid off (if you have a car), it could be a rather a nice way to live. When you add in another $10k from 3 six hours shifts a week at a low stress job (or double if both adults work), some of these people are still adding wealth and increasing passive income in "retirement."

I say good on them. I have a friend, while not living this lifestyle exactly, has leveraged his passive income and investments to the point where he has an "FU salary." The start of this was a semi-frugal living.

Post: #22

So if they invested their money into metro Vancouver real estate even a year or so ago they would have made probably 100k at the very least already.

They'd probably rather collect 0.1% interest. Useless hipster faggots

Post: #23

(05-25-2017 08:06 PM)Suits Wrote:  Retiring at 34 might seem cool, but I suspect it will get boring fast when you've only got $22K to live on each year. Running a well-thought out business, while it might not allow you to retire quite as early, will keep you busy in an area of personal passion might be the better choice.

If the UN and global warming fanatics get their way, then those 22k won't be enough to live off in 20-30 years.

Frugal living is fine and I am all for it, but you should take good long-term considerations into account. Not all times will be the way they were in the last decades.

Post: #24

I think there's definitely a cultural obsession with shopping as an activity, which places gratification as occuring from the purchase, as opposed to the actual needs the item is able to meet for a person.

It seems odd though that many of these people "work for themselves" for some pretty shitty pay.

I'd rather work for someone else at 2-3 times that pay and then spend 2-3 years off. Creating additional revenue streams is great, but I wouldn't want to be limited in my spending by having to rely on just that.

This article avoids the topic of stress that being poor can bring.
Just this past week I had to buy lunch twice (first was due to my lunch stored in fridge going bad over the weekend, the other due being offsite from work longer than expected). It felt good to just buy myself a nice lunch, when I know people in their shoes would have a small mishap like mine and likely go hungry out of spite, or buy lunch and be bitter about the cost.

Post: #25

(05-26-2017 03:48 AM)Sidney Crosby Wrote:  So if they invested their money into metro Vancouver real estate even a year or so ago they would have made probably 100k at the very least already.

They'd probably rather collect 0.1% interest. Useless hipster faggots

And if they had of bought Apple stock in 1999 with 100x leverage they'd have been billionaires.

This reaction is all so common. First, they almost certainly don't have it just sitting in a bank account eroding to inflation. It's likely in indexed market ETFs, which means based on the last 100 years of data or so, they should be able to pull 4%, inflation adjusted, out for 30 years with 0 chance of going bust, and like an 85% chance of it lasting forever. This is also assuming no other income, which generally isn't the case either.

They key is predictability. If you know when the next speculative 30% YoY increase to whatever asset is coming, based on zero change in fundamentals, please let us know. Housing's had a great run, but if you look at the last 100 years of data instead of 7, you see a return that is generally less than the markets.

I'm not sure why so many love to hate on these people, jealousy maybe? For the same reason ppl like to hate on super fit people, or great players in that it brings to light all the excuses you have for not achieving whatever are bullshit?

Even 250k isn't exactly a trivial sum, likely more than a lot of people here saved up. Rather than reflect on what they did differently than you and how to improve your lot, it's far easier to the ego to say "actually I am doing everything right - look at that bullshit pathway and sacrifice they had to take to get there. No different that sacrificing for fitness, or embarrassing yourself to get better with girls. Generally any enviable position takes an unenviable pathway (or a shit ton of luck) to get there.