58yo perma-traveler, retired at 38yo

Say hello!!
Crusader
Posts: 342
Joined: Wed Aug 19, 2020 11:16 pm
Location: Toronto, Canada

Re: 58yo perma-traveler, retired at 38yo

Post by Crusader »

I find it fascinating that you truly don't seem to give a damn about any societal expectations. I don't mean to pry, but I am again curious, so I have a few questions (feel free to ignore them).
shemp wrote:
Fri Jan 01, 2021 2:00 pm
Investments up about 25% for year
This is considerably better than the market. How/where did you learn about investing? Any resources you would recommend?
shemp wrote:
Fri Jan 01, 2021 2:00 pm
Maybe 10 years from now, when I turn 70, get residency in Ukraine and move my storage locker there.
Do you not think that, given your high NW, you would be better off with the medical care you would get in the USA?

And, less importantly, regarding your sugar baby:
- Where did you find/meet her?
- Do you not miss the "she chooses to spend time with you for you (not your money) because you are special" factor (a.k.a. "the girlfriend experience", which I don't really think you can get when money is involved)? Does it bother you that she sees other people? (I am assuming she does). Do you not get lonely without a "deeper connection" with a life partner?

shemp
Posts: 152
Joined: Wed Jun 12, 2019 11:17 am

Re: 58yo perma-traveler, retired at 38yo

Post by shemp »

As of start of last year, I was 30% cash, 70% non-USA stocks in the VXUS ETF. That ETF was up like 8% for 2020. The reason my portfolio as a whole was up about 25% (24.7% in my spreadsheet, but since I'm estimating taxes due, decimal precision is misleading, hence the rounding) is because invested my cash into stocks near the very bottom of the market. How did I know we were near the bottom? Because I was reading a bunch of forums and the level of gloom and doom was hysterical as of Saturday 21 March, so Monday morning I placed my orders to buy. By that point, my cash was over 40% of my investments, due to the 30% or so fall in stock prices by then. Then I did some trading, in hopes of taking advantage of a double dip. Since the double dip never materialized, I hurt myself with these operations. Briefly, I had 9% of my money in silver, but sold too soon and missed the big run up in that. But I did enough things right that I ended the year up nicely. Perhaps most importantly, I never once held anything that wasn't good value, other than some non-USA tech stocks that make up a small portion of some ETFs. In particular, I avoided USA tech stocks, same as I've been avoiding them since 2018, when I sold all my USA stocks and built that 30% cash position.

As for reading recommendations, start with Benjamin Graham "Intelligent Investor" and proceed from there. I am indeed very smart about investing. Especially, I'm smart enough to know there are plenty of people much smarter than me who will take advantage of me if I let them. Which is why I'm mostly a passive investor and only go active when there is so much hysteria that I'm certain the people smarter than me can't possibly take advantage of it all themselves, much less take advantage of me at the same time, plus I have to be certain I personally can safely take advantage of the hysteria, and those combined conditions are rare.

No, I don't think medical care in the USA is necessarily better, especially minor things. For serious things, like heart attacks or strokes, simpler just to die. On my 60th birthday, it occurred to me that I am in risk of winning the booby prize of very long life by tsking such good care of my health: too stupid and stubborn to know when to call it quits. Age brings wisdom, and wisdom teaches that the worst day in a person's life is the day they are born, the best day is the day they die, the good die young, the bad hang around way past expiration date, and Earth is more than likely a penal colony where the Gods reincarnate souls who misbehaved during previous lives on some other planet. No idea what I did wrong to get sent here, but evidently it was a minor infraction because I've had a pretty easy life so far. Hopefully, after I die I won't be sent here again however.

I found my sugar baby girl on mamba 4.5 years ago. In general, sex among intelligent people is mostly about feeling high social status or else connection to someone they love. If someone just wants physical pleasure, masturbation combined with drugs is the way to go. I explained above how I give the girl a feeling of high social status (she is high income relative to her peer group thanks to me). She also gives me a feeling of high social status. My peer group is NOT average people, but rather unattached drifter single older males like myself, and paying for sex and not giving a damn about monogamy actually raises a man's social status in this subgroup of society. Or such is how I see things, and how I see things is what matters to me, not how other people see things.

As for sex as connection to someone I love, I have little need or desire for that, and neither does the girl apparently, or maybe we are connecting enough to meet our respective needs in this regard.

Crusader
Posts: 342
Joined: Wed Aug 19, 2020 11:16 pm
Location: Toronto, Canada

Re: 58yo perma-traveler, retired at 38yo

Post by Crusader »

Everyone keeps recommending that Intelligent Investor book. I read the first few chapters a while ago and concluded that I don't have the guts/gambler's mind/risk tolerance/the nerves to pick individual stocks just yet, so I've been investing in index ETFs almost exclusively. In an article I read when I discovered Jacob (not sure if you are reading this, Jacob, hi!), he mentioned that he has met people who consistently beat the index but I don't really have the right to ask him because a) why would he tel me? and b) I haven't read his recommended finance books yet, so I wondered if you are maybe one of those people.

I would say that I am reasonably intelligent, but for me, I don't think that sex/love/relationships are about having a feeling that my social status has increased, at least not consciously or not your typical social status. I've hung out with very successful people before (in terms of class/money) but I found them utterly boring and unhappy. And I went on dates with girls who are much richer than me (it did nothing for me). On the other hand, put me in front of a (good/successful) musician and I will melt instantly. I think that in my case, it's about what you value and what brings a new dimension to your life experience. But hey, maybe I didn't reach your level of nihilism/anti-natalism/whatever yet (or I am not intelligent as per your definition).

ertyu
Posts: 2893
Joined: Sun Nov 13, 2016 2:31 am

Re: 58yo perma-traveler, retired at 38yo

Post by ertyu »

Crusader wrote:
Mon Jan 04, 2021 7:34 pm

I would say that I am reasonably intelligent, but for me, I don't think that sex/love/relationships are about having a feeling that my social status has increased, at least not consciously or not your typical social status. I've hung out with very successful people before (in terms of class/money) but I found them utterly boring and unhappy. And I went on dates with girls who are much richer than me (it did nothing for me). On the other hand, put me in front of a (good/successful) musician and I will melt instantly. I think that in my case, it's about what you value and what brings a new dimension to your life experience. But hey, maybe I didn't reach your level of nihilism/anti-natalism/whatever yet (or I am not intelligent as per your definition).
imo "intelligent" in this respect is knowing yourself and doing what is congruent with you and your own values and desires. shemp knows himself and has developed a well-thought-out strategy to meet his needs. He has found a consenting adult who is on board, and has formed an arrangement which appears to work for both parties. The lesson here imo is to examine yourself and form a thought-out, proactive plan to work towards what would make you happy rather than to do exactly what shemp has done.

shemp: thank you for explaining your strategy, curiosity satisfied :D

7Wannabe5
Posts: 9372
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 9:03 am

Re: 58yo perma-traveler, retired at 38yo

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

shemp wrote:Pretty young women can go years without sex and not feel deprived, so offering such women sex in exchange for sex is ineffective. (Unattractive women are different, since they are desperate for male attention. Women who babble about sex in forums are typically very unattractive in some way, possibly physically, possibly psychologically, so listening to such women gives a very misleading impression of women in general. Pretty young women with pleasant personalities are NEVER short of male attention.) That doesn't mean these women are frigid and incapable of enjoying sex. Rather, it means that sexual desire in them mostly arises as a means to get what they really want, which is social status among other women.
Eh, true and not true. For instance, I babble about sex in forums and I am also quite the obnoxious slob, so I won't offer up myself as example to the contrary, but I do know other women who will trade sex for sex who are quite pleasant and attractive. The trick is that it has to be the kind of sex that they like more than the kind of sex that you like. It is also the case that getting the kind of sex that she likes is a means by which to improve social status with other females who also like sex. Even back in high school, there were some lunch tables where some girls (the bipsies) showed off their new "friendship" rings, and other lunch tables where the girls talked about meeting a guy at a college party who spanked her or going for a motorcycle ride with the cute stoner with such a cute butt. The main difference between "the bipsies" and the girls who went directly for what they preferred sexually, was whether or not they were also in the A.P. classes. IOW, the girls who were confident that they could earn their own money/status cared less about acquiring/showing off "friendship" rings, etc. It didn't always work out well for those of us who wound up with speed skaters or musicians as first husbands, but we were being true to our own sexuality rather than watering it down with security needs.

However, as in most markets, people are often suspicious of any good offered for "free", so most intelligent women who do enjoy sex for the sake of sex, eventually learn that it is a Win-Win to also put a price on it, but the price will still often be reduced if the sex on offer is particularly of the type she enjoys rather than otherwise. For instance, I would likely be willing to clean up my act a bit and settle for only maybe a Cafe Americano as payment, if I could find somebody who vaguely resembles a morph of Sean Connery and Jimmy Smits willing to enact my Bunny and the Wolf fantasy in a National Forest type setting, even though it never works out when I try to get men to enact my fantasies, because they are either too hard-wired, too literal, or too oppositional-defiant. So, mostly I just let them surprise me with whatever tricks they have up their sleeves already.

shemp
Posts: 152
Joined: Wed Jun 12, 2019 11:17 am

Re: 58yo perma-traveler, retired at 38yo

Post by shemp »

To reiterate, if a person wants physical pleasure, masturbation plus drugs is the way to go. Only the crudest mental retards are at this level. Normal humans are socialized during adolescence to feel uncomfortable living in complete solitude and masturbating.

Because women are so prone to "attention whoring", it's next to impossible to learn anything from reading their gibberish, but we can try. If a woman gets physical pleasure from having her buttocks hit, why not just collapse onto a hard chair repeatedly, versus being spanked by a man? Answer: because physical pleasure is a minor factor compared to social factors.

Better evidence of the overriding importance of social factors is provided by men. For example, MGTOW/incel types constantly predict great social changes in the USA if prostitution is legalized or sex doll technology improves, etc. But in fact prostitution has long been legal in England, parts of Australia and Canada, Spain, Germany, parts of the USA state of Nevada, etc, and this has changed nothing with regards to relationships between normal men and women. Sheep vaginas have been comparable to human vaginas for thousands of years, long before anyone thought of sex dolls, but has there ever been a society where normal men routinely had sex with sheep to avoid the costs of relationships with women? If sheep can't substitute for women, then neither can sex dolls. Prostitution, sheep and sex dolls all fail to provide the vital social factor.

Why are MGTOW/incels so oblivious to this blindingly obvious truth? Answer: because these MGTOWs/Incels are not actually bothered by their lack of sex with women, but rather lack of social factors. In particular, lack of social status. People in general are more aware nowadays than in previous generations of their social status, because of mass communications technology. In the case of men, sexual access to pretty young women has always been a prerogative of high status males, and for various reasons, that access is nowadays being increasingly concentrated in the hands of the elite males, hence the MGTOW/incel complaints.

No amount of legalized prostitution or better sex dolls can help with the angst of a bottom status man (or woman) who resents being bottom status. He/she is going to have to learn to stay away from social media and other technologies that simultaneously make such individuals aware of their low status and make them yearn to be high status. Rather they need to put all their efforts into learning how to be happy with whatever is the highest status they can reasonably achieve, which may be very low in the hierarchy in some cases. For every top 1%, there has to be a bottom 1%, by the laws of simple arithmetic.

Anyway, main point to remember is that probably no one here in this forum is primarily motivated by physical pleasure with regards to sex (exceptions, if any, have surely already discovered the masturbation/drugs path). Sex among humans is almost exclusively about social factors. (Incidentally, I may have been misleading by using social status interchangeably with social factors. Status is the chief social factor, but not the only one. But I'm not going to write a carefully edited book on this topic here to fully clarify things, especially since this journal is intended to be mostly about personal finance, not sociology/psychology.) Typically, we have all been socialized such that we can only be happy when in a "suitable" relationship with a "suitable" mate. Suitable means different things to different people. In particular, suitable relationship may not involve sexually activity for some people.. As previously noted, my peer group is unattached older male drifter types, hence my concept of suitable relationship/mate is quite different than if my peer group were married and still employed homeowners with children and grandchildren, let's say.

---

Also, to return to personal finance. Though I am proud of my market timing operations in March, as discussed above, I hope everyone understands that I am well aware of the dangers of the bubblicious market we are in now. That awareness should be clear from reading between the lines of my comments about avoiding tech stocks and only buying stocks (and silver back when it was cheaper) that seemed good value. Because there is no alternative (TINA®) I am sticking with those stocks for now, but might build back up a 30% cash cushion at some point if the market continues rising. Need to wait until April of this year to get long term capital gains rate on taxable account, however.

ertyu
Posts: 2893
Joined: Sun Nov 13, 2016 2:31 am

Re: 58yo perma-traveler, retired at 38yo

Post by ertyu »

What other forums do you follow? The twitter accounts I follow for the purpose of sentiment monitoring never really got properly despondent, and i don't think this forum did either.

7Wannabe5
Posts: 9372
Joined: Fri Oct 18, 2013 9:03 am

Re: 58yo perma-traveler, retired at 38yo

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

Because women are so prone to "attention whoring", it's next to impossible to learn anything from reading their gibberish, but we can try. If a woman gets physical pleasure from having her buttocks hit, why not just collapse onto a hard chair repeatedly, versus being spanked by a man? Answer: because physical pleasure is a minor factor compared to social factors.
I’m actually interested in the general topic of sexuality, particularly as it relates to economics. Also, I have dated at least two men who previously had relationships with much younger women overseas, and I had a couple younger friends who were GFE escorts, so I’m not wholly unfamiliar with the dynamic.

Anyways, the obvious first response to your question would be something like “For much the same reason I can’t tickle myself.” However, that leads to infinite regress where one might ultimately imagine a sex robot programmed to be surprising. I agree that status is very relevant, but there are sexual dynamics that are somewhat independent of the greater social dynamic. For instance, I might interact with a partner who is very attractive for a number of reasons which would be quite evident to anyone in a social setting, but if he says something like”...and then you can tie me up.” , I am going to be disappointed. Also, more common things like men who are so lazy they always want you to be on top or men who have narrow band of arousal, so they want you to put on high heels every single time you interact, etc etc . The overall skill and status and even sensitivity that a man conveys in social setting does not necessarily match his behavior in sexual context.

anticonsumerist
Posts: 34
Joined: Thu Mar 28, 2019 1:08 pm

Re: 58yo perma-traveler, retired at 38yo

Post by anticonsumerist »

shemp wrote:
Sat Aug 03, 2019 2:27 pm

I'm 58 yo now, born in USA and still live there part of year. Semi-retired from corporate job as computer programmer at age 34, then ran very profitable home business for a few years selling computer programs I had written. Fully retired at age 38. Been traveling past 20 years
Long term lurker here.
This prompted me to come out.
Shemp, this is extraordinary! Retiring at 34 (or 38, whichever you take), already 20 years in retirement starting from such an early age, at least that much or hopefully more time to enjoy life, and still having a financial status such that $1m emergency healthcare costs wouldn't impact you!
I believe you might be the only one in such financial position despite retiring so early around here.

Would you care to explain how you got there as inspiration to the rest of us? What was your average salary until 34? How much did you make on average per year working from home between 34-38? How much of the current total net worth has been due to active income vs investment returns?

Also, if you care to elaborate, how do you manage to find a steady sugar baby in eastern Europe? Are there websites for that? Or Do you meet such girls physically at bars, pubs? Any other specific recommendations to create a similar arrangement?

Please keep your posts coming, this is extremely educational.

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