That question always makes me wonder how drab their lives must be if they don't have a bunch of things they want to do, but currently simply don't have the time for.
brute had always wondered the same thing. then it happened to him within a year or so.
Hmm, what did you do about it?
I'm pretty sure just catching up on books, movies tv shows and video games I haven't had the time to go through would last me a year by itself. That's just the non productive stuff I don't have time for.
To me, more than fear, it’s the golden handcuffs that get me.
I’ve been wired to delay gratification and be very prudent with money since a very young age (thanks mostly to my parents and a bit to the way I am).
So what have always been strengths/advantages now are a major factor in holding me back from pulling the trigger.
Knowing that every single extra year of work* I stash away 2/3 years extra of expenses is a strong incentive to keep going juuuuuuuust another bit.
*work that I mostly enjoy, except for the moments when I just work too much.
I think I'm most like what Seppia and Riggerjack described. There is some apprehension because I'll be discarding a perfectly good life, but it is probably prudence more than apprehension that motivates me. To reiterate the Benjamin Graham quote from the subject blog: “The purpose of the margin of safety is to render the forecast unnecessary.” From a financial perspective the ratio of financial wherewithal to ongoing financial needs is a simple way of expressing the margin. To increase it one can increase the numerator or decrease the denominator. I don't think I can lower my denominator much without eroding my level of contentedness*, nor am I confident I can maintain my current denominator indefinitely. But I can grow the numerator and I've hit the point in life where the slope is steep. If I was 34 I might not want to wait 20 years to get here, but I'm here now and it's harvest time and I'm going to reap for another year or two while the fields are ripe.
*In a sense I can: if I "take credit" for my retirement annuity (~pension) benefit and apply it as an offset to my denominator I can drive my denominator through zero to a negative number (back to being a net saver) with maybe 2-3 years more work. There's a nonzero chance of that hapening.
classical_Liberal wrote:Right, which is why I view you as probably the most free of the regular forum contributors outside of the leader himself.
Ha. More likely that I am simply the most reckless of the regular contributors. That's what I am trying to understand. There is a spectrum that runs from extremely prudent to extremely reckless and rational is not on that spectrum. Two different people who are perfectly capable of doing the math will make different decisions in the same circumstances, because one is extremely prudent and the other is extremely reckless.
So, for instance, the reason I did not already quit my part-time garden center job, so that I could spend the whole weekend up in the woods, is that I am TRYING to be a bit more prudent and/or I have not yet been creative enough to come up with a scheme that would allow for rational justification of such a decision. My moral justification would be something to do with not wishing to be engaged in the sale of garden chemicals to members of the general public.
