What would you do if you got zeroed out tomorrow?

[Jean]

I would collect social service money. I would have more disposable income, and that would be an increase in my lifestyle.

[Laura Ingalls]

Hmm
Would we stay around here?

live in the shelter we presently donate to or my mom’s, brother’s, or adult son’s?

Or alternatively find a hostel to workaway at use the money fly to a low cost country?

I would sell our phones get free government phones/cheap burners and we would have $2500 grubstake to work with.

My life would probably involve way more paid employment than I would want until I was eligible for Social Security our pensions and/or DH or I got some sort of inheritance.

Not the life of leisure I have now still as good as many of my age cohort are going to have.

[CS]

This has been rather depressing for me in I realized I would probably just get a job in the same field I made my money in (they are more than a little desperate for workers) and carry on. Current good credit means than even if family or friends were not available for short term help, an extended stay or short term rental would be easy to find until the permanent job location was found.

The one-way doorness of losing certification in my field has kept me up to-to-date, something I have much mixed feelings about. Having done the semi-retired thing once, I would not do it again. It feels it drags on far too long. If I had to start over, it would probably be 4 years full time then done done done. Go teach English somewhere if I want to slow travel, or even just geo arbitrage until social security kicks in.

[DutchGirl]

For some people here, I see that they find good things in having to start over, so I wonder whether for some of you you could incorporate elements of this in your current life, even though you're currently "burdened" with assets ...

[Frita]

The way I read @AH’s original post, I assumed that my pension (which could take now, but am waiting until age 60 because the payout will be better) and Social Security are no longer available. I also figured that I would not be receiving an insurance payout either. Here’s my rabbit hole.

Next, I wondered what the hell could have happened. My first thought was that while traveling, the Yellowstone super volcano erupted 100k years early. Dang, many friends and family are in the kill zone. Our place and any close areas to camp are toast. I’d appreciate that we’d gone on a trip, feel my emotions/work on my grief, focus on rebuilding social capital, and start making a plan:
1) Move to the Pacific Northwest or Alaska with remaining living relatives and rebuild life.
2) Take advantage of whatever assistance programs were available without waiting around to be rescued.
3) Resubmit FASFA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) as our son would now qualify. Reapply to schools.
4) Live similarly, though perhaps more simply, practice gratitude and appreciation for how lucky we are, and grow stronger and closer as a family.
5) Perhaps pension and/or SS funds are released. If so, we’ll be retired again. If not, we’d just embrace the semi-ERE lifestyle.

[Seppia]

@ffj
Just realizing how being in Italy would be a huge advantage in this exercise as $1000 (DW + I) is basically a month of salary at minim wage.
So hard but not “I need to hit charities in the first week” hard.

@CS
OTOH, use of CC credit lines is a major US advantage, I wold imagine most ERE people have easily 5 figures credit available, which would dramatically help in an emergency.
Sure, the interest rates on debt are predatory (they would be illegal in Europe FYI), but they would be a short term problem

[chenda]

I was going to joke about becoming a sugar baby but having googled it it's like a real thing, with apps and agencies and all sorts

I think I'd get a WFH job and relocate to a very low COL country like Georgia or Turkey and just maintain a very high savings rate till I was back to where I am. I'm not very entrepreneurial at all so it's the only surefire way I could accumulate financial capital quickly.

I might try a sideline in alternative therapy or new agey stuff. That's the only kinda of business I could see myself doing.

[unemployable]

Expenses shown are roughly those I incur per month while housesitting without a permanent address. They include a fair amount of fuel costs, amortization of periodic costs such as car insurance and the occasional hotel night. So they could be cut back a bit in an emergency, but then I'd have more forced spending to buy things I lost in this personal apocalypse or otherwise wouldn't have access to.

I have some $40k of runway with my credit cards, so I'd use maybe $8k of that to buy a vehicle. (I'd also apply for some more credit quickly and lie about my income.) For housing I can housesit or live/camp/sleep out of my car. I'd look for arrangements allowing me to live in an area for at least a few months at a time. From there I can look for jobs and I doubt I'd have a problem finding something paying at least $20/hour. A month of that should get me at least $2500 after taxes. This is more than what I live off already when I have to pay for housing. So it would suck for a few months — OK, a few years — and I'm not sure I'm ever seeing that high-water mark again, but I'd make it work.

[Laura Ingalls]

Axel didn’t say if the cause of being zeroed out was a micro/individual event or a macro/global or national event.

I don’t think I am immune to either but if it is something that just impacts my household the my social network could help me.

If it is a global economy crash resembling a Comark McCaurthey book I am more inclined to think a low consumption/high net worth member of the developed world would be the most insulated from a global sh&t show than pretty much anyone else. Plus I know lots of wild edible plants and fungi.

[suomalainen]

Perhaps I wouldn't feel responsible for being a fallback plan for my kids any more. Perhaps I wouldn't feel like they have some ownership claim on my future years and earning power to supplement their years, their needs, their deficiencies. Perhaps I'd realize that they have just as much agency and opportunity and responsibility as I do to make something of our lives. Perhaps I'd realize that we're all just monkeys and shit happens and any one of us could die at any time for any reason or for no reason and that to fear the future, even when that future contains death, is absurd. Perhaps it would strengthen us as individuals and as a family. Perhaps it would break us - as individuals or as a family.

This ^ is the only challenging part of the question. As to the rest of it - I'd just get to it.

Perhaps this question is really a gut check of whom do you trust to be competent, capable, skillful, resourceful, clever, resilient, driven and yes arrogant enough to rise to the challenge. I, unhesitatingly, trust myself. I guess I don't trust my kids. And the real question is: is that my failing, or theirs?

[AxelHeyst]

Axel didn’t say if the cause of being zeroed out was a micro/individual event or a macro/global or national event.

Micro, the rest of the world goes on as it has been. Someone hit the delete key for all your stuff.

The idea of also zeroing out social capital is interesting as well. No existing friends to crash with which makes the getting back on feet phase pretty cruiser.

[IlliniDave]

All of this assumes there are no medical or health issues, and we can forego health insurance until we land good jobs. Now I don't want to do this again after having earned a comfortable life, but I do believe it is possible if necessary. The kicker though is obviously our ages as we are in our fifties. Not nearly as easy when you are older or married for that matter. I could live in a tent if I had no choice, my wife not so much.

Yeah, this is pretty age dependent. For me it's like running a race for ~35 years, crossing the finish line, then being told to go back to the start and do it again, only now you're 37 years older (and still have all your kids, grandkids, aging parent that needs looking after, etc.). Much different than someone who is still shy of age 30, or even 40. My start over began at 44, but I didn't lose every last nickel of my assets, my job, etc.

It's interesting to ponder whether 37 years of accrued wisdom would offset loss of 37 of one's most vital years.

I might have phrased the OP question as, given what you know now, if you had it to do all over again, what would you do? That's a question I've considered many times, and still think about it occasionally.

My biggest struggle with these sorts of exercises is that where I'm at now isn't an accident. I very deliberately and consciously built the minimal version of what I wanted. So unless the reset comes with a new personality, new likes and dislikes, new goals and aspirations, the water's gonna stick on the duck's back. Sure, survival is possible, even some amount of contentedness. But there seems to be an implicit how will you get back to where you are now in the OP, and barring flukey good luck that offsets the flukey bad luck, I'm already beyond the point of no return.

[Hristo Botev]

This reminds me of some of the Jesuit detachment type prayer exercises I'd do back when I'd go on annual 3-day silent retreats; it's a good exercise and hopefully results in a heavy dose of gratitude.

I'll put a bit of a twist on this fun experiment. No help from extended family and no staying at friends homes.

I don't like or understand the reason for this twist. It's like saying professional licenses would be gone as well along with emptying out your mind of everything useful you've learned over the years, whether in furtherance of "ERE" of just simply by virtue of becoming and being an adult and parent. I am going to assume that this thought experiment isn't truly a "blank slate" type exercise, where one finds oneself and his family dropped in a strange and foreign town with $500 bucks and the clothes on their back, but without any social connections, useful knowledge or skills, or even with the basic survival language skills to communicate.

So, with that caveat, we moved back home last year in part so that I could help take care of my 80-yr old dad and his wife, my stepmom, who has dementia (dad remarried after my mom died; I always feel the need to make that clarification). I am over at their very large 5-br house a couple times a week, and that house could definitely benefit from having some more people in it to not only help out with my dad/stepmom, but also to take care of the cleaning and cooking and maintenance. So, my family of 4 would likely move in with my dad, and honestly, I'm not even sure we'd leave once we got our feet on the ground.

Professionally, my work life probably wouldn't look much different than it does now; there'd just be a few weeks of hustling as I set up my own firm and transitioned clients over--though I'd just transition over the clients I like, as my (former, for purposes of the thought experiment) law partners could have the "bad" clients. The law is good that way, especially in 2023--you need a bar license, a laptop and internet connection, malpractice insurance, an iolta account and an operating accounting, billing software (ideally, though you can still do it the old fashioned way), a Westlaw account (sadly, updated hard copy law libraries are a thing of the past), and you are good to go (especially if you have ~15 years of experience and of client and other professional relationships).

As for my wife, with her professional licenses and relationships in tact, the only "job" that she could lose would be with the hospital, and (a) she only works there 1-2x/week currently, and (b) every June she comes pretty close to quitting that job anyway, as it is a local, community hospital in appearance only--it is owned of course by a large multinational that feels the need to try and get their employees to bend then knee to the typical globalist shit every chance they get and every time they hand over the employee email listserv to the HR department (one thing I love about the law--we still require that only lawyers have ownership interests in law firms; healthcare would probably look a little more like the practice of medicine if only doctors could own hospitals and medical practices). So, good riddance. My wife already makes most of her money doing various independent contractor type side gigs (nutrition counseling/education, doing inspections at various old folks homes and the like that serve food, etc.); and presumably those opportunities would still be there.

My kids' lives probably wouldn't change that much; though they are at an age where seeing their parents "start over" would probably be a good experience for them.

As for losing the digital dollars and cents in the various accounts and all the "stuff" we've crammed in to our .3 acre, most of it wouldn't be missed too terribly much. I've always kind of assumed that "retirement" wasn't ever going to happen anyway--I've spent the past 5 years or so waiting for either Weimar Republic style hyperinflation to wipe out all our MMM VTSAX nest egg, and/or for the government to figure out some sort of way to use climate change or a pandemic or any other hair on fire emergency picked from the existential threat grab-bag to obliterate whatever FIRE dreams I may have once had. So, at a certain level I am already "detached" (in a Jesuit or Stoic way) from the fake digits that are in those various banking and investing accounts.

ETA: To illustrate, my dad worked 12+hour days for many decades in various middle and then upper management manufacturing roles, always pulling in an above-average salary while keeping a close eye on his budget and investment spreadsheets (the very reason we had a PC in the house by the late 80s), while living a relatively modest lifestyle. Yet, he finds himself in a place now figuring out how many months (months, not years) his net worth will last paying for nursing homes and other assistance for his wife, at which point he will qualify for more affordable nursing home care. My takeaway: it's damn near impossible to build truly multigenerational wealth--we are all just waiting in line for our turn for the government to take care of us anyway.

[Henry]

Micro, the rest of the world goes on as it has been.

So it's like a preview of your own death.

[mathiverse]

there seems to be an implicit how will you get back to where you are now in the OP

Really? I don't think so. There is even this in the OP which implies questioning whether your current set up needs to be recreated or whether your old decisions were obsolete and something else would suffice.

I thought this might be an interesting exercise to think through what parts of my current strategy I'm pursuing just because I thought it was a good idea one, two, five years ago, when I had a different set of skills and experiences. A significant chunk of my assets (broadly speaking) were generated doing things I'd very much not like to do again. What would I do to get those assets back... or do I even need those assets?

A lot of answers are about getting back to where they are now though. That's true. But there were others who mentioned they'd likely end up somewhere different than they are now for whatever reason.

[Scott 2]

My biggest struggle with these sorts of exercises is that where I'm at now isn't an accident.

I like the lens to evaluate claims of growth. Despite the personal development I might profess, my response is to resume the grind. Maybe I haven't experienced meaningful change? Is that an argument to double down and try harder? Or one to free myself from aspirational half-efforts?

Often, I think I'm wandering in my own imaginary world of ideas. The "productive" activities are merely entertainment. Privileged play.

It's hard to beat leverage offered by working within the dominate system. When catastrophe strikes, values quickly change. Screw the environment. I don't want to starve next week.

[ffj]

@IDave

Age matters for sure. I recently helped a buddy out earlier this year doing construction for eight hours a day. I'm not 21 anymore.

@Hristo

I could have just written that I would move back in with my parents and gotten a job. How boring is that? But yeah, you are going to be utilizing every bit of social capital you can to keep from sliding even further backward in such a case. I know I would if it were real.

[jacob]

I am going to assume that this thought experiment isn't truly a "blank slate" type exercise, where one finds oneself and his family dropped in a strange and foreign town with $500 bucks and the clothes on their back, but without any social connections, useful knowledge or skills, or even with the basic survival language skills to communicate.

It's a flexible thought experiment. See viewtopic.php?p=275996#p275996 for variations.

Realistically, zeroing out family (bus accident, divorce) or family turning into a liability (drugs, stupidity, criming, ...) seem more likely that zeroing out the financial system anyway.

[Hristo Botev]

Realistically, zeroing out family (bus accident, divorce) or family turning into a liability (drugs, stupidity, criming, ...) seem more likely that zeroing out the financial system anyway.

We may have different concepts of what is more or less realistic.

[jacob]

We may have different concepts of what is more or less realistic.

Yes, it depends which kind of "matrix" we're each living in terms of our various assets and liabilities. Both in terms of what we have and what we can rebuild but also how robust or fragile they each are to external perturbations from where we each are. The thought experiment is interesting because it questions what we may take for granted ... or forces us to (re)consider whether our strategy is path-dependent or optimal.