It helps that I love to write software; I'd just continue writing software in retirement. I tried to retire once and I ended up writing software anyway, so might as well as get health insurance coverage.

I could retire comfortably in a few years, but my earning power is at it's peak. Every extra year I work provides significant extra resources for my family, to help the girls afford their first houses and get a good start in life when they graduate. I'll probably work another 5 years beyond what I'd probably do if it was purely about self-interest for myself and my wife.

I'm lucky that I enjoy my work, so it's not a massive sacrifice, but I do enjoy my leisure activities more. I'm really looking forward to being able to go somewhere interesting in the world with the missus and just stay there for 6 months. Also I'm a Brit here in the UK so health care is just not really an issue.

The Tories really don't like the NHS so I'm assuming they will continue to squeeze it. I wouldn't be surprised if we end up paying for things like joint replacements.

I thought having a possibility to graduate is 'the good start' in life.

Help could mean a lot of things... it could mean $20K towards their down payment all the way up to buying the damn thing, the poster didn't really clarify.

This whole "builds character" thing is a bunch of bullshit that people spout off to poo-poo those that have a leg up in life.

They’re both hard working, they do well at school and have part time jobs over the summer. I’m not worried about them on that score.

Thanks for the reassurance. :)

I've been writing software for 40 years, for fun and profit, I'm about 100% sure I'll never stop, so like you I'd like to monetize it as long as possible.

EDIT: Yes, SOME tools will account for inflation by asking you what you think inflation might be between now and retirement day. (Who knows?) Most don't account for costs that will rise much faster than inflation, like housing and health care.

Correct. But that doesn't mean you *shouldn't* plan. That's why you rebalance your portfolio every few years, and adjust your budgets, and expectations, and make lifestyle changes. It takes a lifetime to prepare for retirement. And its kinda hard to fuck up by your own hand if you are diligent: save 10-20%/yr., cover the basic investment grid, buy and hold. With 30+ years experience and many friends in the same boat, that's a winner.

Also, retiring on $100k today would require $148k/yr in 10 years with 4% inflation, so you're right, that number will at least go up via inflation.

That's why it matters who you vote for. Medicare/Medicaid will be your primary healthcare in your 60's, but we absolutely need the ACA/single-payer, not just for early retirees, but to prevent insurance companies from forever inflating premiums and bankrupting us.

I tried to get my own answer for this question in a couple of ways (retired 5 years ago, age 62 so not early).

First, I tracked my expenses, but didn't have a planned budget. I wanted to know how much I spent and where it went. I kept monthly and yearly summaries on a spreadsheet and made charts to better visualize trends and variability. I think just tracking expenses was encouragement to live modestly and contribute regularly to savings: information not coercion.

Second, I tracked potential future income/benefits. I have an employer retirement plan and an IRA plan. Before retirement, I used the retirement plan's calculators to estimate that benefit. For my IRA I used a 4% withdrawal estimate.

Third, I assumed my expense totals would be the same in retirement. I might spend less on commuting, work clothes, etc., but more on medical care, vacation travel, and so on. I estimated housing costs for either renting or having a mortgage. (Ended up selling the house when I retired, moving and renting for 3 years, then buying a new place and getting a small mortgage for that.)

Over the short term, assumptions of continuity are reasonable. As you point out, the longer term is much more of a question mark. So, fourth, I tried to make allowances for uncertainties and contingencies. How much padding or margin did I want to be comfortable? Perhaps 10% to 20% more income than one's average expenses would feel comfortable? Perhaps a contingency plan for part-time work?

All these numbers will be in current dollars, so they will be comparable. What I discovered when running my numbers (after learning about an opportunity to buy some retirement plan benefits with money I had saved in a 401-K) was that I could then afford to retire. I can't predict the future either, but felt comfortable with the uncertainties I could see.

Following one's own situation roughly once a year, one can see how different conditions and assumptions give different results. Generally, the less one spends and the more savings one has, the more flexible one can be in choosing jobs, places to live, lifestyle, and so on.

I think you'll find those numbers are not especially high for a house. (As opposed to a condo which have their own fees.) My house is not especially large--but it is about 200 years old although renovated so budgeting a few hundred dollars per month for maintenance seems reasonable.

I honestly doubt that most people could get the cost associated with maintaining a house below $500/month or so.

No one claimed it was free, and if it’s not a burden then what’s the problem? My point is that $80K without a mortgage or retirement allocation leaves significantly more money left over than $80K with those expenses. Where is the problem?

Right, which is why people should save 10-15% starting from a young age.

> Even at a safe withdrawal rate of 4%, $2M is "only" $80k a year.

That's quite a lot more than the median household income and by the time you're withdrawing your retirement that $80K is purely spending money--your house should be paid off and you're not setting 15% of that $80K aside for retirement any more. $80K/year is a lot of spending money to most people.

> You're not driving around in Ferrari's and eating caviar on that (parodying a rich lifestyle here). Of course there are levels, and one could live modestly in a LCOL area on that, but that's not what most people have in mind. Particularly for a "millionaire".

The meme of a millionaire driving Ferrari's and eating caviar is dated due to inflation. Most people with any real-world experience with money (including my no-higher-education, blue-collar family) understand that millionaires don't live like that these days due to inflation.

My current job pays well but is very stressful, and that had me thinking more about FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early), but then I realized that on anything less than 120K a year (also have a mortgage to pay), I couldn't afford the therapist I'm seeing right now, and I'd be on the hook for dental cleaning, every other expense. My current plan is to save enough that I could technically almost retire on it, and then start prioritizing low stress jobs over income. Let the nest egg grow on its own even if I don't contribute as much with a lower paying job, and still get some benefits.

I'm sure there are stressed engineers there as well, but I'd be surprised if it's actually a higher %.

https://walletburst.com/coast-fire-calc

As OP said if you don’t have a mortgage then you’re going to have a lot more extra money than someone with an 80-120k income and a mortgage.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28062162

The gist is that lowering your other expenses and qualifying for ACA could dramatically lower your health insurance expenses as well.

$2 million in investments AND a payed off mortgage and still, it doesn't pencil out to retire? Seems like over the past decade+ the 'value' of even $1 million has become more and more diluted. To support even just a middle class, to upper middle class lifestyle, can get very expensive.

I personally do it every month. I know where every dollar has gone every month, and I also track a 12-month moving average. So I have a sense now of what our yearly expenses are. I compare that with the ever-changing recommendations of what a "Safe Withdrawal Rate" is, and then I try to squint into the future to mix in the effects of: taxes from retirement income; social security (even at the 80% level if no one fixes it); increased retirement expenses from having fun; decreased retirement expenses from not working and getting old; increased retirement expenses from health.

But ultimately, it just comes down to the trio of savings, interest rate, and expenses.

1 million saved = 40k per year, adjusting with inflation. 2 million saved = 80k per year, adjusting for inflation.

If you can live a life you want for 80k a year, then sure - 2 million can do it.

And yes, there will always be a "what if the economy collapses etc. etc", but retiring doesn't mean you can never ever for any reason hold a job again or make money.

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/05/29/how-much-do-i-nee...

> Luckily, the math in this case is pretty interesting: there is very little difference between a 30-year period, and an infinite year period, when determining how long your money will last.

You should be fine at 4% forever. If you can spend a little less some years, or go make a few dollars somewhere hey, boosts your odds even more.

Obamacare changes that. If you don't have much income you get ACA federal tax credits.

> That's assuming you don't end up with a huge "out of network" bill by accident

New laws mostly take care of that. No more out-of-network doctors walking by your hospital bed while you're sleeping and sending you a $5000 bill. Also if you have an emergency while out of state your insurance takes care of it.

The "metal" plans all have the same network. The only difference is how much you pay vs. insurance.

Yeah, max out-of-pocket per year. Something like ~$24,000 family / $12,000 individual on our ACA plans. Gold and Silver ACA plans are basically identical in this state, you're just guaranteeing you pay more in premiums with Gold (so, in a bad year, the totals work out about the same, but in a good year the Gold is more expensive). We have exactly two ACA plan providers here, and their plans are nearly identical except that they have very different (both terrible) networks.

So if you get cancer you'll be paying $12,000/yr, on top of premiums (another $20,000 or so, for a family silver plan, if you're not getting assistance) until you're cured or you're dead. Two people get very sick, about $24,000 per year that they remain very sick, on top of premiums.

> For the 2021 plan year: The out-of-pocket limit for a Marketplace plan can’t be more than $8,550 for an individual and $17,100 for a family.

The Affordable Care Act stipulates various terms which result in young and/or healthy people explicitly subsidizing old and/or unhealthy people:

1) only age, location, and smoking status are able to be taken into account for pricing. And everyone must be offered insurance (i.e. no exclusions for pre existing conditions)

2) age rating factors - premium for costliest person (64 years old) must be at most 3x those of least costly person (21 to 24 years old)

3) out of pocket maximums

Figure out how low your expenses can be while still being quite happy with your qualify of life. Some expensive things don't provide the happiness you think they will.

Diversify the kinds of investment accounts you have. Maximize your tax-advantaged accounts like a 401k, but then contribute to a Roth IRA if available, and then plow money into a taxable brokerage account. When you approach retirement, plan to have some time period of expenses covered by cash on hand.

Then use cash, brokerage and Roth funds to cover expenses, while converting what you can from 401k or traditional IRA into Roth funds, and minimizing the income/taxation that results so you can still qualify for credits. Funds converted to Roth will be available for tax-free withdraw after 5 years, so continue to convert over time, while using the post-tax accounts to cover expenses.

There's a lot you can do to "engineer" your taxable income in early retirement.

Currently, if you're married, the first $24K or so is tax free. If you're in California, there are plenty of credits/deductions, so it's likely more than $24K.

Also, you can have a 401K Roth, where all withdrawals are tax free.

You should just factor this into your living costs. As long as you aim for the right fraction of your earnings to go into savings rather than an absolute amount, you'll be fine.

Have you considered moving to a country with quality healthcare at cheaper price? Mexico comes to mind

It would be interesting to have Medicare age gradually lowered to ~26, but I have not seen this floated around as a possibility

- Move to America, become rich

- Move back to Canada, retire

- Win

:P

Assuming that you have little-to-no Canadian assets now, dispose of everything at no-to-low cost when you leave, move to the US for a decade or so and rack up a lot of RSUs/exercised options, maybe surviving an IPO or two, while enjoying a strong USD, you can move back comically wealthy compared to your peers.

You may or may not have to toy with your employer's immigration lawyers as they scramble to get you a green card while you avoid filing any paperwork.

(This is not financial advice, contact a licensed professional, tell your friends, etc.)

Yes and no. TN is technically only for specific professions drafted in like the 80s or something. It's incredibly stupid. For example, many Canadians use "Computer Systems Analyst" for their TN which explicitly forbids programming, as a programmer is not considered a professional job in the eyes of NAFTA. It's bananas. If you don't have a decent secondary education with a recognized degree, you're likely out of luck.

And while yes, you can effectively ride TN status forever, it has a lot of downsides. For one, it's not portable, so you have to restart the process if you switch employers. In theory you can't even seek employment while on a TN. Two, the customs agent letting you into the US can decide at their leisure whether or not you qualify. It's rare but I know of a few instances of people getting rejected for no real reason. If they think you are abusing it, they will reject you, etc. If you lose your job for whatever reason, you have to leave ASAP. There is not much peace-of-mind with TN status.

Compare to an H-1B, which confers a ton of benefits, like a straightforward path to a green card (also possible with a TN but a lot of lawyers are less comfortable), easy to switch employers, your employer must pay for everything, if you're fired your employer has to pay for your travel, there is a lengthy grace period where you can be unemployed to either find work or wrap up your affairs, you can stay in the country while waiting for approval, etc. It's a million times better than TN.

Attorneys probably also dislike TN status because they really are not necessary. The applicant, not the company, must pay the application fee. In theory you don't need lawyers at all, but it is pretty useful for them to prepare the documents and cover letter for you. Get your ducks in a row, etc.

Most Canadians I meet in the US who are on TN status or H-1B visas are, at least initially, on the path to a green card. Most half-decent employers who are willing to sponsor want to put you on that path anyways, since it ensures your position is not going to evaporate because you were denied at the border or something. Most people on non-immigrant or immigrant-status visas want a green card anyways, so it is sort of the default path.

Lastly, most folks do not know about the downsides of a green card, such as the frustratingly complex tax burden if you are abroad, that it expires if you leave for ~5 years, etc.

Once you get to staff+ you effectively remove any real pay difference based on your locality.

There is also the fact of a 10% or however much copay, which will be a lot over time if you get a chronic illness (which would also reduce your ability to go back to work).

Additionally, most people expect healthcare costs to rise with age, so will want a buffer on top of what healthcare currently costs to cover future bigger expenses.

Lots of folks I know get FatFIRE (>=$5MM assets, $200k/year in income at 4% SWR) in the US and then retire to Portugal [1] (which has universal healthcare, and gets you access to the EU).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portugal_Golden_Visa

The long term plan was always to make sufficient money to retire early, then go home. Complicating this easy straightforward idea was that I got married (!) and now have a kid who I don't want to uproot. So now I wait for college-days, and then sod off back to the UK :)

The cost of my (paid off) house in the Bay Area will fund a small mansion by the sea in the UK. Long walks on the beach with the dog seem appropriate, and will even be good for my old age :)

I'm a Brit. I have lots of family in the UK. My wife doesn't have any siblings, her mother lives in Costa Rica, and her father lives in Southern CA but hasn't visited in the 10 years we've been married (we've been there).

Perhaps it wasn't clear, but I was expecting the kid (man, at that point, I guess) to come with - there's plenty of excellent universities in the UK, and he'll even be legally able to have a beer or two...

By the time you need to get on a plane to visit, 2000 miles vs 5000 miles isn't a tremendous difference. (Assuming normal times with open borders).

I firmly believe that the problems of cashflow during retirement, outside medical costs discussed here which are very US-specific, are much more about lifestyle choices. If one desperately needs that luxury they bathed in in last 30 years and it became the base standard life, then there is tough time ahead with possibly sad outlook. We all know more humble life leads to more happy life long term at this point, so to each their own.

Why I believe this - the most awesome memories from my life is doing stuff that costs very little - long backpacking trips around the world where plane tickets there & back are maybe 50% of the cost of 1-month long adventure. Doing many awesome sports one can do in the mountains (hiking, climbing, via ferratas, ski touring, paragliding, etc.). All these need initial gear investment and then just gas costs + rare equipment replacement costs.

These activities also highly increase chances that one reaches retirement actually in good shape, and can relatively kick ass till 75-80. I expect to be highly active during 60-70 retirement, based on genetics in my family. And a bit of luck obviously, one needs that for everything.

While doing these activities, I've met tons of people who are properly age-retired. During work week (maybe outside of July&August tourist seasons), you will find that most hikers in the Alps are retirees for example.

In Canada, doctors and hospitals are covered. But if you need a lot of drugs, you might need to keep working. You also need to budget for dental and vision, as those are also tied to employment agreements.

So if you want to do that, come to Canada before you retire and having a job here will help you get in.

Maybe, but I don’t know anyone who’s less happy being retired. They might not be living their retirement fantasy, but the pressure and stress of having to work is gone.

I've known lots of people who spiraled into various levels of depression after retirement. It's even more likely if the retirement wasn't voluntary.

In the no longer useful to employers vein, in the working class town I grew up in there was a common observation that retirement was a harbinger of death. That when someone retired their lifestyle would quickly decline to sedentary decay, boredom medicated with alcohol (or other things). Death would quickly follow.

As an aside, tangentially there's a wonderful passage from Mark Twain in Tom Sawyer -

“Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”

> Americans cannot imagine stopping work before they've either (1) purchased everything that they could conceivably want, or (2) collapsed from physical exhaustion.

If your material needs and desires are sufficiently low, and your resources sufficiently high, you could retire. Age or usefulness to an employer could be an upper bound, I suppose.

I look at it like this: finances are like a bathtub. What you spend is the drain, your income (whether salary, interest, cap gains, etc) is the faucet, and your resources are the water in the tub. Retirement is the point where you can turn off (or turn down) the faucet and not run dry. Some people have big drainpipes and need a big tub and lots of water; others can live with a trickle.

For many their work is very core to their identity and without it, they have little to do.

Generally the difference between a consultant and a contractor is kind of diffuse, but basically a consultant has more autonomy and is expected to offer advice and guidance based on their experience, while a contractor is expected more to just implement a plan given to them. But as I said it's very diffuse and many people use the term contractor and consultant interchangeably.

As to what it requires, literally just that you can convince someone to pay you money for you to give them advice. Often a consultant will have a lot of experience in a specific area and will be brought on by companies that need help and expertise in that area for a specific project, but don't want to hire an expert full time.

There are also consulting companies that employ people and hire them out to other companies as consultants. At which point you just get a regular salary from your employer and the company you are hired out to pays your employer for the hours you work.

https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2020/03/cognitive-de...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/10/191029131506.h...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6153553/

"I used to think I just didn't have the time for all the things I wanted to accomplish; lockdown proved that isn't true!"

Not exactly scientific, but I can relate to that.

I think I will be fine once I retire sometime.

I think the idea is that a lot of our wants / desires are urges that come and go, but our dreams and needs are deeper than that and we have to let those urges pass before we can find out what our true desires are.

Perhaps I lack dreams.

He'd started a business with a friend in the 1970's that became quite successful in the Detroit Metro area. He retired and like a good Italian, bought a house in Florida and played golf everyday. After a few months he hated his new life, and wished he'd never sold his business. He realized after he retired that his work was something he enjoyed doing, that his clients - most of whom he knew for 20+ years - were people he loved to see and visit. All that changed after he retired and sold the business to my older brother and a another business partner. There was no going back, and that was that.

It sounds like this was one of the big mistakes. Hindsight being 20/20 and all, it's hard to see it all now, but it sounds like he could've attempted to transition some of his best business relationships into personal ones, with lunches and/or some other kinds of personal meet-ups. Of course, enjoying the work, it does sound like he sold too soon!

This is still a personal anecdote though. As per the article, we aren't very good at predicting or evaluating what makes us happy. We think retiring and doing "other things" is what we want, but is it? It might be working, running a business, or golfing. You have to figure that out for yourself, and ideally in a way that doesn't require irreversible decisions.

There is a treasure trove of information in the Bogleheads wiki: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Getting_started

Bogleheads, inspired by Jack Bogle, founder of Vanguard, leans towards topics of investing, having lots of money, and being able to afford the things you want. If you visit the forums, expect to be encouraged to amass a very large fortune to be able to handle anything.

MrMoneyMustache.com has an environmental slant, and tends to attract relatively high earners like software developers, with the message that you don't need to spend every last dollar to find happiness, and some careful allocation of your money can greatly decrease your working career and open up other possibilities for you (while lessening your impact on the planet.) There's a focus on being flexible and resilient, and many people expect to get their annual expenses in the $30k-100k range, trusting the 4% safe withdrawal rate, and thus having an investable net worth of $750k-$2.5m.

EarlyRetirementExtreme.com is geared towards someone who wants to be very self-reliant and capable, massively decreasing your expenses by decreasing consumption and paying for services you could handle yourself. Here the expectation might be that you could live on as little as $10-25k annually.

People love to divide themselves into tribes.

Bear in mind that you have been the beneficiary of an exceptional bull market

If the stock market reverts to the mean over the next ten years, it won’t seem quite as possible though.

Stock market returns may be muted and uncertain but cash pays nothing for sure.

The property market in the UK is at record highs in terms of price:income ratios, but it can still make sense to buy rather than rent due to record low interest rates (Gross rental yields being 4-6% and interest rates 1.5-4%), and the certainty it gives you (Investing your 20-25% deposit won't do you much good if house prices and rents outstrip the stock market in the 20-30 years before you retire)

Will you have to work again?

The honest answer could simply be "yes." Depending on your circumstances. The more nuanced answer is...

Look at things like The Trinity Study / Monte Carlo simulation, https://www.cfiresim.com/, https://engaging-data.com/visualizing-4-rule/, https://firecalc.com/intro.php, https://retirementplans.vanguard.com/VGApp/pe/pubeducation/c... and so on.

To start, we assume that 1) we cannot predict the future but 2) the best predictor of the future is the past.

Then we make some assumptions that we think we could apply to the future, like how much we'll spend each year, how we'll allocate our assets / investments, and how long we need our money to last. From there, we take historical data and apply our unique assumptions to the historical data simulating each time period available, and we take a close look at the results.

To get 100% success, you'd need something like no inflation, or invested assets greatly exceeding our expenses. For example, if you spend $100,000 / year, and you have $4 million invested, even if inflation matched your investment return, you could still live off this money for 40 years.

But you probably don't need a true 100% success rate. More likely, you need just a bit of flexibility, and a backup plan. Most failures happen due to something like stagflation or negative returns very early into your retirement. Your best option at that point is to return to work and reduce expenses until you've passed some of the worst, and then return to retirement with a much higher predicted success rate. If you retire without flexibility and a backup plan, blindly spending 4% of your assets each year regardless of the market and inflation, staglation could ruin your chances of success. But why would anyone choose to do that?

I cannot bring myself to "invest" in something or believe that "my money works for me" - that's delusional. Money does not "work".

People get all upset about the stance, but all I am saying is that everyone wants to profit off someone else' work and I do not think that's the best way forward. Especially not in an era, where labor overall will decrease in value (we will continue to automate more and more) - which just means poverty for anyone w/o capital (it's that simple).

Edit: Also, I'm not speaking as a "loser" of this system - but on track to the first million - it's just that I can imagine another world and so many people take the "capitalist framework" as a given - which it just not is. There are ways to think about society in a more nuanced way, without losing all the competitive niceties of capitalism.

Your attitude seems to be financially masochistic to me and possibly a way to justify your own actions.

A neighbor sees their predicament and thinks if he could only buy a lawn tractor he could help them out. But he doesn’t have the money.

So he borrows the money at 5% interest, buys the tractor and offers to cut their lawns at a low rate. He uses the money he makes from his customers to pay the payments on the tractor and even reinvests some of that to buy a truck with a plow so he can plow their driveways when it snows.

He’s happy, his customers are happy, the bank that loaned him the money is happy. It seems like putting “money to work” in this way seems like a good thing to me but maybe I’m missing something.

This seems an overly literal diversion from the point of that phrase.

Money disassociates social relations under capitalism. You fear wanting to pay people to work for you, but they too just work for the money. There is nothing ethical or unethical about that, it is just how the structure of capitalism influences the production and reproduction of society.

You might want to study theory or history, engage in labour actions, teach, help the needy, etc. but the system doesn't privilege anyone unconditionally. To have the opportunities to do what you find important, you need the resources: education, money and also time.

So it is up to you, to live by the standards of an ideal society or to exploit the current circumstances as best you can.

My issue is not based on morality, but on the fact that we as humans are capable of reflecting on our existence. And that each of our lives is determined by a large amount of luck.

I could be born smart, ill, rich, poor and so on. Does some accidental property give me more rights and opportunities than others? My western net worth would allow me to retire right now in many parts of the world - but did I earn this privilege? Of course not, it was pure accident.

My issue is that people take a huge amount of lucky accidents as a justification of all kinds of power grabs and entitlements. And capitalism just has the potential to magnify this effect - e.g. by letting the "smart" and "lucky" control the "less smart" and "less lucky" and call it all "natural" and without alternative.

The system privileges the top unconditionally. Think what you want, but let's not pretend that capitalism is an ethical system where the laborer isn't exploited.

Forget the slogans, descriptions and tortured analysis. Can you as a human sell things to another human for more than you paid for them in a situation where you are both happy with the price?

If so, do so. If not, I suggest you take a look at what is motivating your feelings.

I would be really interested to understand how someone can exchange a good for someone else's labor (which is what you're describing above) but they can't invest--which is merely paying someone's wage in exchange for a share of the profits. In both cases the participants in the exchange find the agreement to be mutually enriching, so it's not like either is particularly inherently exploitative.

My goal is simple: try not to make things worse.

Breaking out of the capitalist cycle seems quite difficult to do while still maintaining a decent quality of life.

The laws of nature require that food, shelter, and healthcare require the labor of some people and apart from slavery those people need to be compensated for the fruits of their labor. In order for each of us to share in the fruits of their labor, we have to have something with which to compensate them, which is ultimately our own labor.

It feels like anti-capitalists believe there is some forest of money trees that the capitalists are sadistically preventing anyone from accessing.

What is bad is that I capital can just work and earn money, those not lucky need to be creative and actually use and sell their abilities.

Also bad: while there is competition, there is just a huge amount of excess and waste work because everybody is determined to out-compete the others.

In the end, a capitalist company aims for perpetual growth and monopoly, because that's where you can set your price and maximize your profit.

Yeah, inequality is a bummer, but it's a small price to pay to lift billions out of abject poverty. Further, we can do more to calibrate our capitalist systems to be more efficient which is to say we can reduce the amount of inequality and lift more people further out of poverty. That said, capitalism has allowed many of us have been able to lift ourselves out of the labor class and to begin to earn passive income even if it hasn't allowed all of society to do so in perfect lock-step. It's a centuries-long process (7+ billion people distributed through a lot of different cultures and political systems with varying degrees of corruption especially among the non-capitalist systems), but we can get there.

> Also bad: while there is competition, there is just a huge amount of excess and waste work because everybody is determined to out-compete the others

Far less than any other system known to man.

> In the end, a capitalist company aims for perpetual growth and monopoly, because that's where you can set your price and maximize your profit.

Our system largely marshals this corporate greed to the benefit of all of society. Many of us believe it can be marshaled more efficiently (i.e., less inequality and less poverty, probably by steeper taxes on the rich), but we're talking about calibrating the existing system--not changing to a fundamentally different one. Indeed, we haven't found an alternative to capitalism that isn't utterly catastrophic, so complaining about capitalism seems horribly destructive (by all means, complain about the degree to which our system could be made more efficient, but complaining that capitalism is responsible for the constraints imposed by nature is ultimately counterproductive).

I would suggest that's because its capitalism that provides that quality of life.

Socialism is then understood as the overcoming of this constraint, but as always if you ask n socialists/communists you get m answers, where m > n.

It is messy and tiresome to discuss, especially when everyone insists that their personal understandings of what terms mean are the only real ones. More so when you've heard every position a dozen times already...

That's a constraint imposed by nature, not by capitalism. Capitalism tries to optimize the amount of profit per unit labor so as to elevate society out of poverty.

This seems like the fundamental misunderstanding that anti-capitalists make--everyone wants to minimize the labor required to achieve a decent quality of life, but anti-capitalists uniquely (seem to) believe that capitalism is the reason we have to labor in the first place.

Uh, its not “abundantly clear” that its the best system there is, which is why it was mostly thrown out in the mid-20th Century in favor of the modern mixed economy, which mitigate its harms with elements of socialism that are hostile to the basic property relationships underlying capitalism, and the major subsequent debates in the developed world have been largely about fine tuning the balance of capitalist and socialist elements of the modern mixed economy; there is a strongly pro-actual-capitalism faction in modern developed world (e.g., adherents to Austrian school ideological economics), and they are naturally popular among the disproportionately powerful, but they aren’t the consensus, any more than the faction that thinks that the problem with the mixed economy status quo is retaining capitalist elements (the anti-capitalist faction) is.

Why do so many people protest against climate change? Why is it ok for corporations to externalize costs? Why is all the considered good?

I'm all for competition and fierce fights, but let just not forget that we live in a "society" and not in a box, everyone for themselves.

Only idiots are always happy. If we see flaws, no matter how small, we try to proceed to the next level by fixing those, there is a brief moment of perceived happiness, but it passes rather quickly, and so cycle continues. What you described is Work-In-Progress. Capitalism is the system that allows that, it allows itself to self-correct.

> Or the people soon displaced by computers and algorithms

Everything that can be automated - should be automated. Humans is a creative reserve that is limited, physical labor needs to become obsolete. Also you don't see any horse carriage operators complaining about being displaced by automotive industry, do you?

> let just not forget that we live in a "society" and not in a box, everyone for themselves

That's right, everyone is not against you, they are just for themselves.

> they don't understand that capitalism minimizes the amount of work required to meet their needs/desires

Anyone who thinks this is merely "ideology"--that there are non-capitalist systems that afford better quality of life for less labor--is invited to support their position with evidence.

I’m profoundly disinterested in semantic arguments or moving goalposts.

> The question isn’t whether you can do better in terms of quality of life for workers with less labor than capitalism, the question is whether there is a limit to how far you can move away from capitalism while continuing to improve on that.

Fair enough, but even then the answer by all appearances is “not very”. In other words, no system has done better than those of modern first world countries.

This resonates. I took a 1-year sabbatical after 12 years in the tech industry. I kept a big text file with all the things I wanted to do once I had the time. When I finally did, I realized I only wanted to do one thing from that list (of 30+ items). The rest sounded good on paper, but I never had the motivation to do them. This was a harsh realization, but now when I think "I wish I had time to...", I know it's an illusion. We tend to make time for what we really want. Overall, it was useful to realize.

I've recently been wondering if I should instead be trying to view life as a "sustainable marathon" rather than trying to cash out quickly (FIRE).

1. Spend any extra money you make, knowing that you'll work 20 hours / week at least until social security arrives. If you start to hate work or having trouble finding work, you likely have very little to fall back on. Social security might not support your lifestyle, so expect a very pared back retirement late in life.

2. Spend a lot less than you make, but still spend amply to cover qualify of life and the things you enjoy and value. Invest the extra and have a cushion that covers unexpected job loss, periods of burnout, and the option to go long periods without any work at all if you have other interest you want to pursue. Be prepared for retirement now or when you're much older, but always having everything you need to cover the lifestyle you've designed.

3. Be miserable now, spending way less than you make, hating your job and hoping once you have a huge nest egg, you can make yourself happy!

Some people think early retirement is #3 but it's really #2. And many people do #1 until they start to realize they don't love being tied to a job at 40 as much as they enjoyed it at 20. (And that spending lots of money doesn't always make up for the obligation to work as well as they hoped.)

> hoping once you have a huge nest egg, you can make yourself happy!

this is a super uncharitable way of putting the ideas of fi. i would suggest the idea is more like "learn to view money as apart from happiness and recognize that the things that make you happy are more on the intrinsic side of things- self growth, real relationships with people near you, serving others and dont waste the time you have on earth by giving it to some corporation or other entitiy unless you want to"

It doesn't! But some people believe that's their option. That you spend so little that you're miserable. And the job might only be something you endure to make money to someday retire.

We agree. I just may not have communicated that I was being somewhat "extreme" to make the point that "early retirement" doesn't have to be that way. If you re-read my #2 you can kind of see that I'm getting to the same point as you.

Honestly, that isn't incompatible with FIRE. Being financially independent allows you to take the few months off needed to find that 20 hours a week / low stress job.

In the community, retirement is viewed more as a 'freedom from compelled labor' than 'do nothing for the rest of your life'.

I kept busy writing games, doing art, making things from wood before my career/family, I see no reason why I will not again when retired.

As I do have a family (and nearly an empty nest now) I have become quite comfortable not having much of a "social life". I still want friends, still need the occasional connection, but it is not nearly as central to my life as it was when I was younger.

No, I expect I will do just fine as a retiree.

(Maybe I should add, I still have managed to squeeze in projects this whole time in my off hours even while holding down a job + family. I know there are plenty of unmotivated people and so maybe I was not the target of the post.)

Non-profit organizations exist to provide their staff with great jobs"? He honestly believes that? How many has he worked with? I've worked with non-profits my whole life, and some are flawed, but many do tremendously valuable work. No to the beach? Depends on your preferences.

To the author: Taking personal, anecdotal experiences and drawing "objective" rules from them is the modus operandi of the fool. Maybe take your retirement time to learn to be less of a fool.

This article says $7 million: https://www.wealthmeta.com/blog/being-a-doctor-vs-being-a-so...

Here's the back-of-the-envelope calculation: Annual salary: $250K (it is much higher at FAANG). Assume 25% tax (effective, not marginal), which leaves us with $187.5K, which is about $15K per month. Assume $5000 in monthly expenses, which leaves us with $10K per month investable money. (Note: since net worth includes house and 401(k) I have not deducted mortgage or 401(k) payments). So $10K includes those items.) Now use a compound interest calculator to see what $10K per month at 8% interest (assume investment in S&P 500 and allow for some market crashes) will result in, at the end of 30 years. It is about $14 million, which would include your house and your 401(k).

Here's a spreadsheet that allows you to plug in your own numbers: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ryu_-mVYxSdJbW8lmf1z...

I think your tax calculation is way low too, but haven't done the math.

EDIT: Also: house should not be included in your net worth for the purposes of calculating retirement draw-down, unless you plan to liquidate your home equity to live on.

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...

What happens if you want to buy a condo in a competitive market that requires a 200k downpayment? Or have a medium-sized wedding? Or have two kids in day-care?

I understand that the FIRE response would be that you don't _have_ to buy into all that stuff, but saying that it's just a little algebra and some simple assumptions is fantasy unless you want to live like a single 24 year old your whole life.

Controlling expenses and living a humble life style is pretty much the opposite of living like a single 24 year old. At least for me and most of the single 24 year olds I knew back then.

It takes wisdom and maturity to realize that you don't need all that stuff. And if you can find a partner with the same outlook, you can certainly avoid spending tens of thousands on a wedding, or buying a condo in a competitive market. And there should be no need for day care if you're retired.

This is _exactly_ what I take issue with. Look, "live below your means and be thoughtful about what spending will make you happier" is great advice. So is "plan for a future where you don't have to work".

"Get a high paying remote job from a young age with no student loans, move somewhere cheap, actually find a partner there, don't dare find someone that makes teacher or non-professional salary or has health problems or student loans, wait until you're retired at 38 to have children, don't dare have kids with health problems or special needs, and lecture everyone else about how easy it is." is perhaps not the wise and mature advice you think it is.

I'm just the right age (37) to have grown up alongside the FIRE thing. I have a number of friends who tried it, some of them to the point of being smarmy about it. 100% of them hit late twenties and realized that the combo of "making a high income while having very low expenses" involves significant trade-offs, and is super hard to keep up. All of my friends eventually abandoned it, but I don't think that's the rule.

Describing FIRE as easy and saying that anyone who fails to do it is somehow less wise or immature is nonsense peddled by a bunch of people who retired early by writing "how to get retire early" blogs.

I haven't heard anyone claiming it's easy or that any failure to do it is due to a lack of wisdom or maturity.

I think wisdom and maturity are required, but that's not all that is required. There's also a fair amount of discipline, and alignment with the tradeoffs, plus a good helping of privilege and luck.

> "Get a high paying remote job from a young age with no student loans, move somewhere cheap, actually find a partner there, don't dare find someone that makes teacher or non-professional salary or has health problems or student loans, wait until you're retired at 38 to have children, don't dare have kids with health problems or special needs, and lecture everyone else about how easy it is." is perhaps not the wise and mature advice you think it is.

That's not even close to what I claimed required wisdom and maturity to realize.

For me, I didn't feel like there were many trade-offs. The key take-away is prioritizing value and figuring out what brings you joy in life. By doing this, I was able to eliminate a lot of unnecessary spending. I don't feel like I ever missed out on anything.

If you mean after you retire, you'd plan for those things within your 4% swr budget just like you would if you were making a salary.

If you mean before, then it depends on whether you're planning on getting married annually for the rest of your life, or if it is a one time expense. If it is a one time expense, I'm sure everyone here is capable of doing the math to figure out how much a large one-time expense will delay your retirement. (hint: it is one-time expense / earnings)

If it is recurring, then the math still applies.

Unless you know of a way to put $84k/year into a roth account.

As of 2021, a very high income married one-earner household can potentially put away $19.5k/yr pre-tax into a traditional 401(k), $38.5k/yr into a after-tax Roth 401(k) which can be optionally converted to a Roth IRA, plus $6k/yr for both the worker and the spouse into Roth IRAs, plus $7,200/yr into a family HSA (if it's available thru your employer).

That's $19.5k + 38.5k + 6k + 6k + 7.2k = 77.2k tax advantaged. $57.7k of that is not subject to income tax or capital gains upon distribution, as long as you are following the rules. Not too bad.

But a material chunk of the $14M belongs to the government (not available for the individual to spend).

If someone takes out a $2M loan at the age of 58, and retires at 59 (before any of it is paid back), do you think that should be money considered in a retirement calculation?

Also, Capital gains is treated differently than ordinary income.

Your income tax bracket is irrelevant in determining your capital gains rate (at least for now).

Income tax bracket doesn't directly correspond with capital gains brackets, but total income affects the capital gains tax rate.

I got my dream by 18 years old. When music became my work I hated it.

Made me think differently about life.

I read something not all that long ago that I wished I had read when I was much younger. "Make something you like your career and keep your passions for yourself, if you are able."

Obviously, this doesn't work for everyone. Some people have that all consuming thing where the process of selling your passion doesn't kill the love for it, but it didn't mesh for me =/

A couple good things though:

- I can finally listen to music without overanalyzing it. Which is to say I can now enjoy music.

- I find a lot of ways to use creativity in my job, and has given me an edge thus far (or so I think).

I think when it is no longer your job you might begin to enjoy it again?

My career turned out to be software engineering because I liked writing software as a hobby. The job does take the software-writing energy out of me. But from time to time when I have started a little project of my own I have found it to be enjoyable again.

> Most important, do not retire in the expectation that it will be easy to find rewarding non-profit volunteer work.

Thankfully, this has not been an issue with me.

I definitely don't have the massive nest egg that another commenter mentioned, but I've got enough to avoid starving, and I am happier than I ever thought I'd be.

That's how I'd recommend viewing non-profit work in advance of retirement. Is there a non-profit you're spending effort on now? Spend more effort there. If not, it's probably a good idea to examine your values and find some organizations that advance them and start helping out.

Before you can even begin to approach questions like this, you have to get a lay of the land at least... read an article on philosophy and religion in the encyclopedia.

These aren't new questions. They've been dissected and applied to the furthest reaches of our understanding. It's all written down and at our fingertips 24/7.

They underlie the primary question in the article. Retirement is irrelevant. In a very roundabout way it seems like that is what Mr Greenspun is trying to say, but it kind of comes across as (the illustrious Gordon Lightfoot put it) a "rich man's spiritual".

> In olden times, the average person didn't expect to be happy.

How can this even be proposed? Maybe I just read way too into this. Is it a joke?

edit: I don't like leaving such negative comments. I envy Mr Greenspun. I'm not 37 yet but I'm not too far off, either. If I could retire at that age and spend the rest of my life exploring philosophy and leisure... well I could hardly think of a finer place to end up in one's life. Starting to ask the questions at all is how to start. Kudos.

First off, the author continued:

> Life could be a struggle for survival with hard work and adversity at every corner. Marriages were arranged by parents and if, after 20 years, the couple hated each other, there was no option to divorce.

While I guess that particular life experience is not necessarily incompatible with happiness (“I love my life as a sustenance farmer!”) it was definitely, by modern standards, very hard, and not at all what most people strive for in their retirement.

For instance, before we escape the first phrase in the section you quoted the author assumed that hard work and adversity run contradictory to happiness—or even actively oppose it.

I left the Gordon Lightfoot reference for a reason: the pleading of people for more material resources as the only road to their personal salvation from misery is there in psalm as a "rich man's spiritual".

"If I only had more X I could find my happiness/peace/salvation". In this article Mr Greenspun appears to begin to make a departure from that notion, but seems to keep tripping over strongly-held beliefs justifying a lust for financial rewards. That's not an easy thing to get away from.

Hell, there are tomes upon tomes about that very struggle—confusing the idea that you may as well enjoy the material to your capacity (he references Camus in that manner) with the material enjoyment being a prerequisite for your happiness.

That's worse than not using them.

It's like pasting

    rm -rf /

The point where you took a wrong turn was assuming that philosophy is all based on hearsay. There's been a lot of effort to ground pretty fundamental ideas to what we understand about reality, to the extent that we understand it. It's worth working to grasp some of that. It helps. If you like quantizations and mathematical/logical formality that exists as well, but mind that you'll probably want to do a lot of comparative reading.

To put this in programmer's terms: why would you re-implement libc when you haven't even looked at the existing source code or surrounding arguments? That would look like a fool's errand: not because the effort isn't worthwhile, but because you could save yourself a lot of time and use the lessons of the past to inform your next efforts rather than blindly making all of the same mistakes or rediscovering what was already known (to our best efforts). Worse, you might end up wandering around ranting about how someone should implement a core supportive library for a common systems language without ever looking to find out if there is one in the first place.

My personal experience is that giving the problem space a bit of thought and coming to preliminary conclusions before comparing with what mainstream thought has to say makes the whole ordeal more fun and possibly lets you learn the finer nuances and different perspectives more.

PS: the analogy with libc is quite interesting after thinking about it for a bit actually. If you just want to use a C library, you don't reimplement it. But if you want to learn about C or libc specifically, re-implementing libc from the specs is probably the best way to do it.

Once you start to understand how they were formed in the first place, I think you would be less ready to deride them.

In fact, I'll bet you it entices you because you'll end up catching yourself saying "hey, I thought of that".

But what you'll find is that that one notion you may have figured out on your own is itself a nuance of a larger system of understandings. That you'll find a lot more work has been done than you realized to understand and prove each of those notions to the best of our collective knowledge.

Then you'll understand why grabbing a single notion and anchoring to it like the author is doing is so fundamentally flawed that it's not a positive exercise.

To use the "rich man's spiritual" reference again: the "rich man" of the poem is basing his salvation on the idea that he has to have enough of whatever new thing he decides is between him and heaven/salvation/happiness before he can ever attain it.

The "rich man" put that barrier there, himself. He created the frame for his experience and bound himself to it by creating it in the first place. In the poem, the central character is making the declaration that he needs more to defend his existing material accumulations, so it's not exactly a 1:1. But that kind of self-imposed framework based on nothing grounded can be self-limiting. It can make it hard to understand real fundamentals.

Through this process, things that have withstood the test of time are probably worth a look, but then with time comes a loss of context and relevance.

I mean, I wasn't even saying most/all/many philosophies are dead wrong. It's all about the signal to noise ratio after you've read more than a couple books. You'd be a fool to blindly believe in the process of how ancient wisdom is passed down mostly by a long standing popularity contest. Worse, even good ideas come with "addons" and extra baggage that needs to be thrown out, because ancient elders knew that common people wouldn't understand the core ideas and thus attached "click baity" stuff to ensure the ideas keep passed down over generations.

> In fact, I'll bet you it entices you because you'll end up catching yourself saying "hey, I thought of that".

Sure, this happens often. I consider this independent validation of my own ideas. Without this independent "verification" process, you're almost taking what you read on faith. (yes, the explanations or justifications they give are often not the real ones...)

But we also might not be. However we might be getting into dangerously personal territory there since we're approaching remarks on belief systems and people get pretty touchy about that kind of thing.

I'm curious how think that taking things to their logical end means morality is arbitrary.

My understanding puts everything onto a pretty firm plane that leads me to understand that anything I do to others I'm doing to myself. That's enough to guide my actions accordingly.

"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun's_tenth_rule

>The rule expresses the opinion that the argued flexibility and extensibility designed into the programming language Lisp includes all functionality that is theoretically needed to write any complex computer program, and that the features required to develop and manage such complexity in other programming languages are equivalent to some subset of the methods used in Lisp.

>Other programming languages, while claiming to be simpler, require programmers to reinvent in a haphazard way a significant amount of needed functionality that is present in Lisp as a standard, time-proven base.