I've been reading his blog for a few years, and he does some have some insightful advice on shedding unnecessary expenses and living on a frugal spending diet. I've been able to get down to one car that is almost paid off, and double my savings and investment portfolio. My favorite article from him is living close enough to work to bike (although working from home is most ideal).
However, his blog comes with a bit of smug (calling himself a "cult", or "Good news, there's a recession coming"). His faithful mantra of "retiring at 30" is a pipe dream unless: (1) you have a big income i.e. $200k per year by the time you are 25, (2) have a software engineer wife that makes as much as you and have no kids, or (3) inherited a large sum to begin with. All of his case studies are about him and his wife who were pulling $100k before they "retired", or the lawyer who was pulling in $160k a year at 26. Kudos to them, but good luck trying to retire as a welder or car mechanic making $50k.
MMM is too smug and pushy for a good portion of the general public. His writing can awfully hostile, it could be toned down a bit and his message would get further - some of his advice is very sensible.
The problem with frugal blogs (in general) is they do one or more of the following; push penny pinching 24/7, "if you aren't eating lentils everyday and living in a cardboard box you're fucking up," they are too condescending, or they are only applicable to the already rich/privileged, like Mitt Romney's "just borrow 10s of thousands of dollars from your parents to start a business, easy!," and are out of touch with they "everyday man," or fail to recognize that people are different than them.
I think I could write a blog that is more accessible, I have experience being both very high income and very low income. It's such a saturated market though I doubt I'd get any readers. Maybe I'll do it just for myself some day to formulate some of the thoughts I have on the topic.
I would assume that an important part of trying to retire early is to choose a career path that doesn't max out at $50k per year.
From what I've seen he suggests two things are necessary to retire early: 1. Save lots of money (which requires making money that you can save). 2. Don't spend lots of money. He seems to be pretty transparent in how he does both. If you want to save lots of money, but choose a career that leads to a $50k a year job, it is necessarily going to take you longer to retire than someone who chooses a career that leads to a $150,000 per year job. I'm not sure that makes it a pipe dream--just that if your time horizon is going to be different based on the decisions you make.
>good luck trying to retire as a welder or car mechanic making $50k.
Maybe you don't feel the need to retire at 30 when you are a car mechanic.
I've worked in car shops (not as a licensed mechanic) and the mechanics I worked with seemed to have a lot more fun and more free time than us office jockeys despite our 'better jobs.'
That's what almost every one of these success stories, blogs, etc. are. They're very heavily weighted toward survivor bias and elide much context around being born into relatively privileged circumstances.
I'm going to extend my comment. I've been reading James Altucher's books like "Choose Yourself" and his blog. Altucher's philosophy is somewhat similar, except he focuses on tapping into your creative mind and finding unique ways to supplement your income to the point that you're not necessarily retired, but doing what you love.
The goal then is not necessarily to retire, but to just get to a point where you are working for yourself and supplementing that with existing savings + a frugal lifestyle. That's basically what MMM/Pete is doing now with his blog. That is, I believe, how a welder/car mechanic/McDonald's employee can retire early.
To apply MMM's ideas, on a 50K salary assuming monthly expenses of 1,250 (that's the hard part), if you put away 50% every year you can retire on a 375K nest egg (4% safe annual draw) after 15 years, or age 37. Roughly.
>>good luck trying to retire as a welder or car mechanic making $50k
I know a few people here in India who as cooks and welders have retired early. You have to ruthlessly put your interests on the top. Things like frugality etc, are qualifying conditions. But the necessary conditions are keeping an endless watch on your income, learning new skills and to a degree being able to move on from your jobs to ones that pay well.
That also involves doing things like getting into renting, and squatting useful real estate by buying way in advance and having others pay for your investments later.
In short you need to consider your financial interests as the only things that matter, and do what it takes. More often than not, it will usually create a situation where you trample on others along the way.
The top 5% of households earn over $200,000. That is a large and wealthy audience, that is equally as interested in retiring early as people making 50k. In the United States alone, the top 5% of earners is a large audience, and again, the wealthy audience that any blog, or cult, or merchant is looking for.
The people making 50k have to figure out the irrelevance to their situation on their own.
The people making 150k don't, as they are a hop away from being in the top 5%, and a hop away from learning what is needed to cement their financial independence.
Something that seems to be lost in this thread, which looks to be mostly a debate about whether or not early retirement is feasible for normal people:
For normal people, MMM strategy is about making uncomfortable decisions (plain, reliable used cars, no fine dining, no fancy houses, no downtown-big-city living locations) to avoid the most uncomfortable thing of all: work.
If you would rather have a job your whole life so you never have to eat a bean or drive a 20 year old car, you're not the target audience. People who are driven to early retirement & financial independence are people who DESPISE jobs and are willing to spend their whole life at a much smaller income bracket in exchange for not having one.
They don't want your new devices, cable tv, leased cars, and downtown apartments. They agree those things are nice, but not nice enough to take on an extra 40,000 hours of "servitude" with an employer.
The strategy is simple: if you can live on 20% of your income, and save the rest, then in a few years, you will have the ability to reproduce that same income indefinitely. The amount of the income doesn't matter, and that is being lost here for some reason. If you can't do 20%, you can do 30% and a few extra years. Or whatever.
The MMM strategy is about ditching the job, and balancing the trade-offs to something you can stomach. If you can't stomach it, fine, but that doesn't mean it's not a viable strategy.
The MMM way is more about locking in your luck than anything else. Be frugal, when lady luck smiles and you have a lot of income make sure you do not waste the proceeds and avoid living above your means at all costs. Having skills is a plus and in his particular case it helps if you are good at building a personal brand so you can ride the self help bandwagon.
Very useful information compared to most other self help institutions though, far more actionable but a bit preachy and unaware of how complex other peoples lives are but such over simplification can help to make a point.
Also, he seems to pretend as if he is the first person ever to live like this but there are many others that simply never thought of themselves as special in any way. See also: the millionaire next door.
Something I’m curious about regarding Mr. Money Mustache - is he actually retired, in the sense that he doesn’t do anything to bring in income (except through passive index investing)?
It seems like he has a brand that is pretty lucrative, so it’s unclear to me if he:
1. has enough money to be functionally retired at his current lifestyle, but chooses to continue his brand anyway,
2. has enough money to be functionally retired, but not at his current lifestyle, and so chooses to continue his brand,
3. cannot functionally retire and simply “transitioned” from professional software development to professional blogging.
I follow the logic of his blog series (reduce spending dramatically, increase savings dramatically, invest optimally), but I can’t tell how much of it contributes to his current lifestyle.
Allow me to just throw out that I love the transcript. I know it is a lot of work, but I wish more podcasters would publish them.
I watch/listen to very few podcasts; don't drive regularly, which is where I would normally consume them, and otherwise tend to skip them because so many are a tedious waste of time. Plus, I just prefer text to video.
The easiest way to retire early is to enlist in the military, at least in the US, anyway. After 20 years of service, you are set for life with life-long retirement pension and healthcare. Of course, there's a high risk, since there's always wars and deployments, etc and many don't make it past 10 years, after they get fed up with being in the military.
When I was in the army, I saw a lot of people in their early 40's who retired after their service, and many spent their time either working in another job, because of boredom of retirement, or activities like traveling. These were those who enlisted right after high school, with nothing but a HS degree, but they were doing much better off than my friends who had college and MBA.
Military pensions continue to be the top reason why most young people across the world are attracted to join the forces.
But there is a catch though. You really have to serve the minimum time. And like you said most get either fed up, or they are discharged early. The other part is in many parts of the world, there is relative peace, so its a safe bet. Plus most of the times apart from the training days, they actually see good physical exercise everyday to its like a win-win job.
In India armed forces have asked for a kind of roll over pensions, where every year your pensions are revised and you are paid as much as the highest paid servicemen retiring in the rank you retired from. Of course there is a lot of opposition from the civilian side for something like this.
Given the relative peace in the Indian subcontinent, in most cases its possible for many people to make it through without much risk, and if you join early, you can come out by 40, with a neat yearly increasing pension for the rest of your life.
They also have short service commission jobs in the Indian army, which don't carry these benefits. And they often go unfilled for the obvious reasons.
The biggest question I face regarding early retirement in the USA is how to handle health care expenses, because the situation is so messed up. There is huge uncertainty around the future of healthcare, especially regarding coverage and quality.
So far, all the early retired people I have seen have either a working spouse or have retired abroad. It would be great to know if people here, especially those who retired early, have solved the problem of healthcare coverage.
I know the vast majority of you are 6-figure types and MMM is still making 6 figures annually from his blog and his wife's 'hobby' business and that he never actually has to touch his retirement investments and can in fact add more money to them annually than most people in the U.S. actually gross.
According to the U.S Census Bureau "The per capita income for the overall population in 2008 was $26,964; for non-Hispanic Whites, it was $31,313; for Blacks, it was $18,406; for Asians, it was $30,292; and for Hispanics, it was $15,674."
It's taken me 11 years to get to 32k, I got super lucky early this summer and got hired for some remote work, full time on top of my current job, for a tech company thanks to someone at YC helping me out. A day after I started I was told I was inelligible for employment because several years ago I had to file bankruptcy.
So while you all sit nice and well with your 6-figure incomes, talking about how horrible your lives are when you earn more in a year than I do in 3-5 years BEFORE your bonuses and 401k match and all the benefits you get that real businesses don't offer their employees... just know a lot of us are busting our asses just to feed ourselves.
Ben Thompson of Stratechery (https://www.stratechery.com) - in addition to just talking about tech, would be good to hear about how he's grown his blog into such a great business.
This is such a weird content piece from YC. Is this supposed to help us understand brand marketing? If so, I want to hear from people who have piloted the brands of massively successful startups, not a guy who says he's head of a cult.
Though I don't agree with or support self-help / Tim Ferris types personally, I'm open to the idea that this guy has some key insight into branding for startups, but this content doesn't really have any of that.
I appreciate a hustler as much as anyone, but this guy doesn't stand out from your generic Tim Ferris / Gary Vee snake oil lifestyle sellers.
I do also use to read his blog but I don't follow 'frugalism' as a cult. I cherrypick what I consider that adds significant value to my life. The same with other "isms" like Agnosticism, Centrism, Minimalism and Intellectualism..
How much money do you have to have in index funds to live comfortably off dividends? Isn't it an astronomical amount? I have ~$100K in index funds and i'm making about $100 (if even that)/month right now which just gets reinvested. You'd have to have at least half a mil to get any kind of serious money out of this.
Only to say that there is "nothing new under the sun", Mr. Money Mustache's basic message is (was) essentially "common sense", some time ago I cited an old Italian proverb in a similar enough topic:
He only uses his own experience to show how it can come out in practice (and of course it needs to be scaled - down or up - depending on personal income, financial situation, family size, etc. and of course expectations).
Results will of course be different, but the basic principle remains valid.
Mr. Money Mustache started me down the path of exploring my own personal philosophy. I now worship MMM as a diety (MMM !== Pete Adeney in my religion). Thanks for the teachings Pete.
I find it interesting that both he and his wife were high income earner earners. That makes it easier to save appropriately and get to financial freedom sooner. I think he even notes this in some of his blog posts that the opportunity to become financially free is limited. A lot of people don't have a 3 month or 6 month reserve which I think is the first goal. Get there first.
He and his wife are STILL high income earners. From his affiliate links, sponsored posts and going on and on about his wife's etsy business I guarantee you they are still making six figures without ever having to touch their retirement investments. Call him out on that and guess what, he will NOT approve the comment on his posts.
man, what a weird pov. Start at the beginning - "nobody should do the 40 mile pleasanton to sf commute". I guess he means pleasanton to mv, because if you were to go to sf you'd just take the bart door to door. So do you know how many engineers drive from pleasanton, or in general east bay, to mv ? I'd wager its upwards of 100k, considering the backed up traffic on 680 between 8 am to noon. now are all of these engineers fools ? the majority of them have a nice tech gig in mv at the biggest tech firms - the sexiest startups and boring profitable enterprises, a solid 150k+ paycheck, stocks, 401k etc and are paying off their mortgage in the east bay on a large 3k sq ft house in an incredible school district. the tech companies themselves encourage this behavior by plying free wifi-buses on 680 so you've done your git commits en route. so which part of this is objectionable and why ? even if facebook builds a company town in san mateo or wherever, engineers are ultimately humans who have reasonable human desires to buy a house & get hitched & start a family & send the kids to school, so all of that isn't going to happen within the confines of a company town designed for the 20 year old median programmer crowd. in all likelihood, this 40 mile commute, whether to east bay or south bay or wherever will be the norm, because the alternative is what ? all of us moving to colorado and riding our bicycles to work?! i mean i envy your frugal no-waste healthy bicycle lifestyle, but i just don't see all these engineers with giant beer bellies either. they do the 40 mile commute because there really isn't much of a choice, and most companies do offer some form of on-site fitness regimen, so the majority does keep in shape. financially the outcome is positive as well - appreciating equity in a spacious sunny california home, 7 figure retirement accounts, kids in good schools. if the only downside is a 40 mile commute, i'll take that any day of the week.
His point of view is that those perks don't justify the commute. I'm personally inclined to agree with him having tried both.
There's a fair amount of research suggesting short commutes are good for mental health and the effects of regular walking/running/cycling are well known.
I read a couple of his blog posts, and his "your doing it wrong because you don't value what I value" attitude is a huge turn-off. He probably has some great gems of wisdom but they're lost in the moralizing about why I shouldn't have a car and why I'm inferior because I didn't get a windfall and pay off my mortgage. I do that specific "mega commute" he mentions (I'm in Livermore so it's even farther), and trust me, I don't live out here because I like to commute over 100 miles each day!
Does anyone else think it's a bit funny to see an MMM interview on YC? Through their investments, YC seems quite pro-consumerism. Consumerism is the antithesis of being mustachian. It's always kind of bothered me that HN (and YC) seems to encourage conspicuous consumption.
Yeah, I think on the surface it could seem contradictory. MMM does advocate frugality but he also advocates spending money on things that increase happiness and don't hurt the environment. I'd say many (though obviously not all) YC companies actually do check that box.
[+] [-] joeax|8 years ago|reply
However, his blog comes with a bit of smug (calling himself a "cult", or "Good news, there's a recession coming"). His faithful mantra of "retiring at 30" is a pipe dream unless: (1) you have a big income i.e. $200k per year by the time you are 25, (2) have a software engineer wife that makes as much as you and have no kids, or (3) inherited a large sum to begin with. All of his case studies are about him and his wife who were pulling $100k before they "retired", or the lawyer who was pulling in $160k a year at 26. Kudos to them, but good luck trying to retire as a welder or car mechanic making $50k.
[+] [-] astura|8 years ago|reply
The problem with frugal blogs (in general) is they do one or more of the following; push penny pinching 24/7, "if you aren't eating lentils everyday and living in a cardboard box you're fucking up," they are too condescending, or they are only applicable to the already rich/privileged, like Mitt Romney's "just borrow 10s of thousands of dollars from your parents to start a business, easy!," and are out of touch with they "everyday man," or fail to recognize that people are different than them.
I think I could write a blog that is more accessible, I have experience being both very high income and very low income. It's such a saturated market though I doubt I'd get any readers. Maybe I'll do it just for myself some day to formulate some of the thoughts I have on the topic.
[+] [-] troupe|8 years ago|reply
From what I've seen he suggests two things are necessary to retire early: 1. Save lots of money (which requires making money that you can save). 2. Don't spend lots of money. He seems to be pretty transparent in how he does both. If you want to save lots of money, but choose a career that leads to a $50k a year job, it is necessarily going to take you longer to retire than someone who chooses a career that leads to a $150,000 per year job. I'm not sure that makes it a pipe dream--just that if your time horizon is going to be different based on the decisions you make.
[+] [-] gerbilly|8 years ago|reply
Maybe you don't feel the need to retire at 30 when you are a car mechanic.
I've worked in car shops (not as a licensed mechanic) and the mechanics I worked with seemed to have a lot more fun and more free time than us office jockeys despite our 'better jobs.'
And the pay wasn't half bad either.
[+] [-] sidlls|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joeax|8 years ago|reply
The goal then is not necessarily to retire, but to just get to a point where you are working for yourself and supplementing that with existing savings + a frugal lifestyle. That's basically what MMM/Pete is doing now with his blog. That is, I believe, how a welder/car mechanic/McDonald's employee can retire early.
[+] [-] the_gastropod|8 years ago|reply
Retiring at 30 while earning $50k would be difficult. But retiring at 40 or even 50 is still relatively easy on such a salary.
[+] [-] hammock|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UK-AL|8 years ago|reply
The housing expense often costs more than owning a cheap car.
[+] [-] misnamed|8 years ago|reply
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/29/mr-money-musta...
[+] [-] kamaal|8 years ago|reply
I know a few people here in India who as cooks and welders have retired early. You have to ruthlessly put your interests on the top. Things like frugality etc, are qualifying conditions. But the necessary conditions are keeping an endless watch on your income, learning new skills and to a degree being able to move on from your jobs to ones that pay well.
That also involves doing things like getting into renting, and squatting useful real estate by buying way in advance and having others pay for your investments later.
In short you need to consider your financial interests as the only things that matter, and do what it takes. More often than not, it will usually create a situation where you trample on others along the way.
[+] [-] ringaroundthetx|8 years ago|reply
The top 5% of households earn over $200,000. That is a large and wealthy audience, that is equally as interested in retiring early as people making 50k. In the United States alone, the top 5% of earners is a large audience, and again, the wealthy audience that any blog, or cult, or merchant is looking for.
The people making 50k have to figure out the irrelevance to their situation on their own.
The people making 150k don't, as they are a hop away from being in the top 5%, and a hop away from learning what is needed to cement their financial independence.
[+] [-] stefantheard|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jk2323|8 years ago|reply
Also, is he retired? How much time does the blog consume? How much income does it generate?
[+] [-] jrochkind1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mod|8 years ago|reply
For normal people, MMM strategy is about making uncomfortable decisions (plain, reliable used cars, no fine dining, no fancy houses, no downtown-big-city living locations) to avoid the most uncomfortable thing of all: work.
If you would rather have a job your whole life so you never have to eat a bean or drive a 20 year old car, you're not the target audience. People who are driven to early retirement & financial independence are people who DESPISE jobs and are willing to spend their whole life at a much smaller income bracket in exchange for not having one.
They don't want your new devices, cable tv, leased cars, and downtown apartments. They agree those things are nice, but not nice enough to take on an extra 40,000 hours of "servitude" with an employer.
The strategy is simple: if you can live on 20% of your income, and save the rest, then in a few years, you will have the ability to reproduce that same income indefinitely. The amount of the income doesn't matter, and that is being lost here for some reason. If you can't do 20%, you can do 30% and a few extra years. Or whatever.
The MMM strategy is about ditching the job, and balancing the trade-offs to something you can stomach. If you can't stomach it, fine, but that doesn't mean it's not a viable strategy.
[+] [-] jacquesm|8 years ago|reply
Very useful information compared to most other self help institutions though, far more actionable but a bit preachy and unaware of how complex other peoples lives are but such over simplification can help to make a point.
Also, he seems to pretend as if he is the first person ever to live like this but there are many others that simply never thought of themselves as special in any way. See also: the millionaire next door.
[+] [-] dsacco|8 years ago|reply
It seems like he has a brand that is pretty lucrative, so it’s unclear to me if he:
1. has enough money to be functionally retired at his current lifestyle, but chooses to continue his brand anyway,
2. has enough money to be functionally retired, but not at his current lifestyle, and so chooses to continue his brand,
3. cannot functionally retire and simply “transitioned” from professional software development to professional blogging.
I follow the logic of his blog series (reduce spending dramatically, increase savings dramatically, invest optimally), but I can’t tell how much of it contributes to his current lifestyle.
[+] [-] _jal|8 years ago|reply
I watch/listen to very few podcasts; don't drive regularly, which is where I would normally consume them, and otherwise tend to skip them because so many are a tedious waste of time. Plus, I just prefer text to video.
So, thank you!
[+] [-] otterpro|8 years ago|reply
When I was in the army, I saw a lot of people in their early 40's who retired after their service, and many spent their time either working in another job, because of boredom of retirement, or activities like traveling. These were those who enlisted right after high school, with nothing but a HS degree, but they were doing much better off than my friends who had college and MBA.
[+] [-] kamaal|8 years ago|reply
But there is a catch though. You really have to serve the minimum time. And like you said most get either fed up, or they are discharged early. The other part is in many parts of the world, there is relative peace, so its a safe bet. Plus most of the times apart from the training days, they actually see good physical exercise everyday to its like a win-win job.
In India armed forces have asked for a kind of roll over pensions, where every year your pensions are revised and you are paid as much as the highest paid servicemen retiring in the rank you retired from. Of course there is a lot of opposition from the civilian side for something like this.
Given the relative peace in the Indian subcontinent, in most cases its possible for many people to make it through without much risk, and if you join early, you can come out by 40, with a neat yearly increasing pension for the rest of your life.
They also have short service commission jobs in the Indian army, which don't carry these benefits. And they often go unfilled for the obvious reasons.
[+] [-] sjg007|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanmercer317|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RestlessMind|8 years ago|reply
So far, all the early retired people I have seen have either a working spouse or have retired abroad. It would be great to know if people here, especially those who retired early, have solved the problem of healthcare coverage.
[+] [-] ryanmercer317|8 years ago|reply
According to the U.S Census Bureau "The per capita income for the overall population in 2008 was $26,964; for non-Hispanic Whites, it was $31,313; for Blacks, it was $18,406; for Asians, it was $30,292; and for Hispanics, it was $15,674."
It's taken me 11 years to get to 32k, I got super lucky early this summer and got hired for some remote work, full time on top of my current job, for a tech company thanks to someone at YC helping me out. A day after I started I was told I was inelligible for employment because several years ago I had to file bankruptcy.
So while you all sit nice and well with your 6-figure incomes, talking about how horrible your lives are when you earn more in a year than I do in 3-5 years BEFORE your bonuses and 401k match and all the benefits you get that real businesses don't offer their employees... just know a lot of us are busting our asses just to feed ourselves.
[+] [-] craigcannon|8 years ago|reply
Let me know if you have ideas for other folks. You can comment here or email me - [email protected]
[+] [-] refrigerator|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SandersAK|8 years ago|reply
Though I don't agree with or support self-help / Tim Ferris types personally, I'm open to the idea that this guy has some key insight into branding for startups, but this content doesn't really have any of that.
I appreciate a hustler as much as anyone, but this guy doesn't stand out from your generic Tim Ferris / Gary Vee snake oil lifestyle sellers.
[+] [-] galfarragem|8 years ago|reply
I do also use to read his blog but I don't follow 'frugalism' as a cult. I cherrypick what I consider that adds significant value to my life. The same with other "isms" like Agnosticism, Centrism, Minimalism and Intellectualism..
[+] [-] avenoir|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jaclaz|8 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14593794
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14594858
He only uses his own experience to show how it can come out in practice (and of course it needs to be scaled - down or up - depending on personal income, financial situation, family size, etc. and of course expectations).
Results will of course be different, but the basic principle remains valid.
[+] [-] robertcorey|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AVTizzle|8 years ago|reply
And how would you describe your personal philosophy?
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sjg007|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanmercer317|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dxbydt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ck425|8 years ago|reply
There's a fair amount of research suggesting short commutes are good for mental health and the effects of regular walking/running/cycling are well known.
[+] [-] ryandrake|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluetwo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] craigcannon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brndnmtthws|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loeg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] craigcannon|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pdog|8 years ago|reply
If you're selling consumerism and buying mustachianism, it means you think the former is overpriced.
[+] [-] wojt_eu|8 years ago|reply
Also with rampant ageism in tech you do need to retire before 40 /s