Your Money or Your Life

[archerships]

Prompted by nostradomnatrix's recent post, I've created the ymoyl ("Your Money or Your Life") community for those who're interested in achieving financial independence and/or retiring early. Here's the community bio:

Do you want to be free to choose how you spend your time? Are you sick of working for pointy-headed bosses? Do you have a passion that you would be pursuing, if you only had the money?

Then this community may be for you. It is intended for people who want to achieve financial independence and/or retire early ("FIRE"). The community title comes from the book "Your Money or Your Life" by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, which explains how you can become financially independent by becoming more careful with how you spend you money and your time. If you haven't thought about achieving financial independence before, it's a good place to start. Another good place is the Retire Early Home Page

Feel free to post your daily money logs, frugality tips, links to articles related to early retirement, questions, etc.

Comments

[rillifane.livejournal.com]

Having already done exactly that...and retired at age 50 I encourage all of you to do exactly the same thing. There is nothing so good as waking up when you feel like it and knowing you don't have to do anything.

[crasch.livejournal.com]

I agree. I envy your current lifestyle. If I may be so bold, how much money did you make annually when you were working? How much of it did you save?

Re:

[rillifane.livejournal.com]

Lets say that I made substantially more than I required to live but that this was largely due to being an extremely frugle person. (A skinflint according to most people who know me in r/l).

[mindwalker.livejournal.com]

Sounds interesting - I think I will join that community.

I bought that book about a year ago, and had trouble getting through it, as I realized the authors were proceeding from very different premises than I was. The underlying environmentalism/anti-consumerism of the book really bothered me. The idea that both the world and myself would be better off if only I would quit buying so many things kind of seemed like rubbish to me. Since I have such a long list of things I'd like to get, I really prefer not to do many of the things they suggested.

This book, like many self-help books, kind of had the opposite effect on me from what I was hoping for. I was hoping it would provide me with ways to truly become financially independent, but instead it made financial independence seem even harder to achieve, given the kind of lifestyle I prefer.

I like the "idea" of being financially independent, especially in regards to being "employed" - things like setting one's own hours, style of dress, etc.., but I have also found that being self-employed can be quite expensive due to the overhead. So I determined that I might actually be better off to be an employee somewhere, for the time being at least. The trick to doing this while avoiding being a wage slave is to think of my employers not so much as employers, but more so like people I pay with my services who will in turn find money for me. I try not to think of them as my "boss" even if they set my hours and tell me what to do. Of course, it probably would be better to be truly financially independent, but I'm not sure I'm willing to accept what I perceive to be the necessary trade-offs at this point in time.

[crasch.livejournal.com]

Yea, much of the environmentalist rhetoric is annoying. What I found most valuable was the idea of valuing goods in terms of the amount of life they cost, the realization that if I saved more than it cost me to live, I wouldn't have to work any more, and the fact that they had actually done it (proof of concept, plus step by step instructions).

If a particular good is worth the amount of your life it costs, and you can afford it, by all means, buy it. The key is to be aware of the trade offs you're making in terms of freedom and material goods.

In my case, my biggest ongoing expenses are books. I drive a cheap car, live in an inexpensive apartment, don't eat at expensive restaurants, dress in inexpensive clothes. And I strongly dislike doing things just to keep my job, so I favor the tradeoff of time for material goods.

[mindwalker.livejournal.com]

I agree - I also find the idea of valuing goods in terms of life energy very useful. I think I first came across this concept in a Reason article a a few years ago, that talked about how just about everything was getting less expensive. The author based this assertion not on actual prices, or even merely inflation-adjusted prices, but on the amount of work one must perform today in order to be able to purchase a particular good or service vs. the amount of work one would have had to perform at some point in the past to obtain the same good or service.

Ever since reading that article, I have valued just about everything I buy in terms of how much I must work in order to obtain it (and of course, how much extra work I must put in just to pay the taxes on the income I receive from my work!).