erejacob's comments

Yes, money can be an agent of change. Time also. Some may do best working in a traditional structure. Others do better on their own. I helped found a nonprofit organization during my first year of "retirement". However, I found that I could be far more effective on my blog talking directly to people instead of spending time writing grant proposals, so I quit the nonprofit.

But 2-3% of my assets. I wouldn't get too hung up on the details. I didn't earn 40k every year. Some years were less. And some were more (see FAQ). I didn't live in New York.

Everybody can run their own spreasheets for their personal income and tax situation presuming an expense level of 6k/year. Figure an investment return of 3%+inflation (so 6% or so total). See what you get.

It wasn't written "for a general audience". I and my regular readers are regularly judged negatively for not choosing to consume and go into debt like everybody else so the blog is more of a support group for those who are willing to go against the stream and actually save money so they can avoid the typical middle class problems above.

I admit, there's a bit of "I told you so"-attitude, although one quickly learns that nobody really wants to take responsibility for the poor choices they've made or for that matter are going to make. Whereas everybody is willing to attribute their good decisions to their personal genius. The general zeitgeist of the housing boom and subsequent bust illustrates this well.

Okay, that's nitpicking. Make that 26k invested then. Also, you can reduce the taxes by diverting into an IRA. Also, after the first year, you can begin to add investment income on top of your regular income. This investment income will increase by about $1000 each year.

Why do people here have such a fascination with toilets?

The way a regular toilet works: Water automatically enters the bowl. You do your thing. You press a lever.

The way an RV toilet works: Water enters the bowl when you press a pedal. You do your thing. You press another pedal. That's my toilet anyway. From the perspective of one's posterior it's pretty much the same thing and you can do all this while sitting on the throne.

Some RVs have flush toilets or even vacuum toilets.

It is really a pity. If I had just claimed that I spend twice as much as I actually do, people wouldn't be so quick to discard the idea. However, it really is a matter of efficiency. It wouldn't surprise me at all if my neighbors spent 50%, 100%, 200% or even 400% more than me despite living in essentially similar structures and enjoying similar things. As mentioned elsewhere, it's mostly an attitude towards what money is, means, and can do for you.

I was living on 5-7k for five years before I got married. Being single or married doesn't materially affect the math. If you're single, you can live in a smaller space, but you'll spend slightly more on rent. This is nearly a wash. However, if you're single you don't have to go along/compromise with your partners less than frugal choices.

@rorr - Uhm, yes, your point? I did say I was living on 5-7k/year.

I pretty much spend my time trying to "educate" unaware, materialistic consumers. I've affected more people than I can count (those who've told me) and presumable more beyond those (who didn't tell me).

So I have a blog, a book, a forum, and now a wiki. There's not really a rat race option for what I do, but if there was, maybe I'd take it.

Incidentally, I don't really have a problem with people using the freedom they've gained from stepping off the treadmill to do nothing. If someone wants to use their freedom to become a "beach bum" I have no problem with that.

I think you can make that argument for my country of origin. They can add negative for the brain drain as far as I'm concerned. I guess the same holds for a lot of Indian or Chinese students who came to the US. As for grad school and postdocing, the way it works is that this has very little to do with training or investing. I feel I earned every cent they paid me for doing research.

Grad school and the postdoc system pretty much a cheap way for universities to get labor at 50-70% of the private market rates. Universities call grad students "students" so they can get around various labor laws and not paying for things like health insurance. The use postdocs because it's easier to lay off people compared to staff scientists.

So they hire persons with masters degrees to do grunt work for 25k/year and call them grad students. Then they hire the smart ones with PhDs for 40k/year and call them postdocs.

Basically you're put in front of a computer or in a lab and told to work on this task much like private industry except maybe your work is a bit more interesting(?) You write reports about your work called "papers" and after 4 years you write a giant progress report and call it a "PhD Dissertation". There's very little actual training or education involved in this process. Or at least not more than you find in the private sector.

It's pretty much labor like it is in private industry. I guarantee you that without grad students and postdocs, very few scientific papers would be published, because grads and postdocs are the ones doing the actual research.

When you see news of some professor discovering something, you can pretty much be sure that it was discovered at 11 in the evening by some grad student or postdoc of his. He was just the manager and subsequently in charge of public relations. That's fine BTW ... it's not like Steve Jobs single handedly built the iphone, but he still gets all the credit for it.

I myself published over 30 papers in my career, many of them first authored putting in 100 hours week a lot of the time, so I think I earned the money I made.

You can argue whether those papers are the equivalent of an $800 toilet seat, but that's a different discussion altogether. I put in the sweat equity "on the bench". I earned that money.

Professors mostly spend their time teaching, managing their workers, excuse me, "teaching" their grad students and postdocs, and writing grant proposals. Academia has the same typical structure as anywhere else. The only time you spend any meaningful effort being "educated" without giving back is as an undergraduate.

As does working for $40k a year and investing 30k annually which is what I did. There's no stock market magic required.

Exactly!

It isn't hard to do. It's only "hard to imagine" for those who aren't doing it. It's like being a runner and having a hard time convincing couch potatoes that running isn't primarily dominated by sweating, side stitches, gasping for air, and near heart attacks.

It's been my experience too that the majority don't give a second thought to what money represents. To most people money is something that comes out of a slit in the wall when they insert their plastic card. Some realize that this only keeps working as long as they maintain their job and don't get fired, but some don't consider that possibility either. Money really is life. Most people are born without things to sell, so they can really only procure money by renting out their mind or labor for others to use. One can always make more money but nobody can make more life. Hence, it's somewhat of an optimization problem: How much life to give up to procure enough money in order to make money with money instead of selling one's labor or thoughts.

PS: I'm jealous of your liveaboard experience. That's what I originally wanted to do but wifey wasn't prepared for the possibility of having our home sinking for whatever reason and to be honest neither was I (I hadn't taken up sailing at that time so I was clueless). Thus we settled on the RV.

Well, not to worry, most people won't make "the sacrifice".

Maybe if we transitioned to a production based economy but producing only quality items we needed. That way we wouldn't have to work so much. Unemployment would go down because people weren't scrambling for the the ability to consume. Concepts like planned obsolescence would go away.

A lot of what we refer to as "growth" is just an indicator that the volume of economic transactions is going up. However, just because the economy is getting bigger doesn't necessarily mean it's getting better. Breaking windows and replacing them creates economic growth, but it doesn't make the house better.

Yeah, it's not rocket science. The biggest money losers are too much house and too much car and all the interest payments that go towards it. Even by eliminating the interest by paying in cash you're already cut your expenses on those items by 50%. The rest is just details, but most importantly. Don't buy ANYTHING on credit.

I am aware of inflation. I did not intentionally imply anything about CPI. I was referring to the old generations attitude of "make it do or do without" compared to the current attitude of "just charge it on the card".

I like living in the US.

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

Rent is included. See Frequently Asked Questions for a budget.

I just borrowed the title from the previous article. There's a budget here http://earlyretirementextreme.com/frequently-asked-questions and tons of other information on the rest of the site.