Create the PERFECT ERE Life...

[palmera]

Given my life circumstances, I did everything pretty right, except for 3-4 years during my early-to-mid 20s (I call them my dark years) where I was less than a pay check away from financial disaster and ran up tens of thousands of dollars of debt just on stuff and going out. Why did I do this:
1. to feel like I was 'keeping' up with peers

2. to distract myself from the depression, self-loathing and emptiness I felt during this time
If it were not for the dark years, I'd have tens of thousands of dollars to invest in the stock market after the crash and pick up another property at a cheap price.
I still did okay, but I guess here's the IDEAL life steps for me:
-work throughout high school and summers, save money for school

-get a practical degree that will get me a well-paying job

-study abroad, pick up a second language and international work experience

-get career off the ground

-pay off student loan less than a year after graduating

-pick up a side hustle

-save 75% of income

-live at home until parent kicks me out

-then skip moving into the sexy downtown 1 bedroom and live in a student hole with 6 roommates

-get laid off with sweet severance package during the Crash

-find another, better job soon thereafter.

-use savings and severance money to buy a couple property and some undervalued stocks

-have family move into one of the properties, while I live in the other

-spend the next couple of years fixing up properties, sell at a premium, capital gains tax free
All of this should have netted me $250k minimum by the time I was 30. Now I'm a few years behind, so my biggest lesson to others:
It's in your best interest to look after yourself physically, mentally and emotionally so that you don't veer off track and further away from your goals. Although the dark years DID provide the inspiration for a seemingly unlimited amount of art that I'm creating, so I guess it was worth it for me.
Also, from observing friends: marry/date the right person.

[Stahlmann]

The reason for my suggestions, i.e. not computer science, is the risk that anything that can travel via phone, fax, and network is likely ultimately to go the same way as anything that could travel via shipping container.
Eventually, it will even be possible to outsource surgery (via robotic interfaces). I have a harder time imagining it will be possible to outsource plumbing.
I think the middle class office jobs are going to same way as the manufacturing jobs. So the pertinent vocation question is:
Do you foresee global competition?

I just read on another forum, where I try to keep with the pace about increased demand for "administrative, project management jobs" in German automotive OEMs as they outsource more and more of their work... additionaly they switched to agile/scrum methodologies so... they impose new updates in projects faster than containers arrive in Hamburg

I feel old

Edit: oops, it's simply good ol' "concurrent engineering". The idea that country based on consumers who really trust in its national "brand" had to resort to such practises really bugged me.

[Revan]

Has anyone in this thread changed their minds on what you would do?

Also, what life would other forumites (that haven't replied yet) do with your life starting at 18?

[AxelHeyst]

I actually wouldn't change much, just a few tweaks that would make a big difference: I'd still go to the school I went to for the degree I got (Cal Poly SLO, mechanical engineering, minor in sustainable environments, good experience and degree for the $ at the time). I'd join one club as a freshman that involved fabrication/construction (ideally the Solar Decathlon club, otherwise any of the other clubs that involved welding/machining/fabrication/etc). I'd have read Cal Newport's books about studying so I wouldn't have to spend as much time doing hw.

I'd backpack/travel internationally and/or do internships, ideally as far away from home/the US as possible, over my summers, to get that experience without taking a gap year before or after college.

I'd take the same job after graduation that I did, but I'd have put off my start date a few months to build a minimalist tinyhouse back home where I'd have access to free living plus a shop. Or I'd have done it over one of my summers. Then I'd have found a place within 5mi of the office to put it for nominal rent (someone's backyard, inside a warehouse, etc). While taking my career seriously I'd keep my CoL <$10,000 and also deliberately seek groups/individuals/collectives doing community-based co-living and urban gardening/infrastructure projects (not uncommon there).

The two major clusters of my WoG would be a) work, building career capital and skills, accumulating towards FI, and b) contributing to and being engaged in the urban east bay solarpunk radical infrastructure community.

By five years in I'd be FI and living in my tinyhouse in the middle of an urban brownfield-renovation garden/eco-project situation with lots of options, all of them very cool.

Also I'd read a stack of books about psychology and I'd write "don't get a gf until you're 30" in sharpie on my wrist every single morning.

[7Wannabe5]

I think I wasted many more burn cycles on attempting to make conventional marriage work for me than I did on attempting to make conventional career work for me. So, very boldly and creatively declaring myself polyamorous in the mid 1980s might be my first big revision. I would also sub in a reading great books with others intensive experience for the two years I spent/wasted at engineering school. Finally, I'd mail young me a box full of books on the topic of permaculture. Once these three degrees of freedom or perspective were in place, something very much like an ideal for me ERE lifestyle would likely organically emerge.

[Saltation]

Looking at SSA records I never maid more than 30k in one year until I was 25 so there is a lot I would do over.

I would have ignored my parents advice while in high school to go out and "party and live life". I went from a 4.0 student for two years to nearly tossing my acceptance letters away because I was involved with the wrong high school crowd near the end. Aside from this the other real kicker is the Great Recession occurred right after graduating high school and was very impactful in our area. You simply could not find jobs just starting out for much more than minimum wage and if you did you were working 20 hours a week. I also will not entertain skipping marriage or children. That aside:

- Ages 18-20: Go to a technical college for CNC machining or HVAC and be fully employed by 20 making 2-3 times as much as what I was at all ages until 28-29.

- Ages 20-22: Stay at home with family and save as much as possible before marriage.

- Age 22: Get married and buy a house with savings from living with parents.

- Age 23-24: Pay off house with DW. Start family earlier than I we did.

- Age 25 and forward: Invest 50% of my earnings. DW ends career and starts business and stays home with children. DW places all earnings from that business in investments. Wait until enough to retire.

Following this I would already be semi-ere. I would have 400-500k in investments (minimum), paid off house and off-grid cabin.

[Revan]

This thread intrigues me because I'm actually at this point in my life right now. I've narrowed it down to essentially two options:
Option A: Go to college and a get a degree in the arts or sciences (at the moment I'm leaning towards economics). This is primarily because I really enjoy learning, but also somewhat influenced by societal expectations. I'll work a day or two a week at a bicycle shop and take summer classes to graduate early. By the time I graduate I should have enough bicycle repair experience to start my own repair business or at least get a decent-paying job in shop.
Option B: Become a carpenter's apprentice. I looked into the program and it is taking applications over the next couple of weeks. As Jacob mentioned in his post, the apprenticeship is four years with an increasing salary that starts at around $17/hour. I could still work one day a week at a bicycle shop to learn bicycle repair. After the four years I can move wherever a want and should be able to find work relatively easily at ~$40 an hour.
Option B is a much more non-conformist approach, at least in my family (both my parents have advanced degrees). I believe I can gain most of the academic knowledge that I would get with Option A by just studying the textbooks/subjects on my own.
Either way, I have a lot of thinking to do before I make a decision. I enjoy reading the responses in this thread, so props to jeremymday for starting this.

I'm curious if you could go back and change anything. Now that you have gone through college, and the military.

I'd take the same job after graduation that I did, but I'd have put off my start date a few months to build a minimalist tinyhouse back home where I'd have access to free living plus a shop. Or I'd have done it over one of my summers. Then I'd have found a place within 5mi of the office to put it for nominal rent (someone's backyard, inside a warehouse, etc). While taking my career seriously I'd keep my CoL <$10,000 and also deliberately seek groups/individuals/collectives doing community-based co-living and urban gardening/infrastructure projects (not uncommon there).

Also I'd read a stack of books about psychology and I'd write "don't get a gf until you're 30" in sharpie on my wrist every single morning.

Oh, I'm stealing that idea of a tiny house in someone's backyard. I never even thought of that. That would make looking for a place to live so much easier.

Also, it seems smarter for me to wait on relationships until 30 as well.

[AxelHeyst]

Also, it seems smarter for me to wait on relationships until 30 as well.

Let me contextualize my statement: I had a psycho-emotional bug in my software that made it exceptionally difficult to stay grounded in my own self while in any kind of relationship, and it also filtered for partners who fed dysfunctional mechanisms in both of us. One effect of these relationships was me spending a LOT more money than I otherwise would have on just myself, or even in the context of a healthy/functional relationship. It took me a long time to figure out this bug, fix it, start being capable of healthy/functional relationships, and start being able to save money/make decisions about money rooted in my own reasoning and desires.

Simply 'not having a gf' until 30 wouldn't have solved my issue: it's a good method for becoming a 30-yo man-child, at which point (in my case) I'd likely have gotten into dysfunctional relationships anyways and probably blown whatever savings I'd accrued up to that point. The trick is that I couldn't have known about the bug until real-world testing (getting a gf and going whoa wtf is this hot mess of my life), so, honestly, I don't know what sequence of events I could have done to avoid that particular cluster of dysfunctional effects. The only obvious answers are therapy, professional *and* DIY, early and often, and cautious testing (aka getting into relationships but e.g. not moving in within the first couple months, setting clear boundaries around money, etc).

Any amount of money and/or effort to aggressively speedrun a program of emotional, social, and psychological maturation would have been worth it purely from a financial perspective in my case, and on the far side of a long and meandering ad hoc DIY 'program', the emotional, mental, relational benefits are slam-dunk worth it as well.

[Henry]

Life is messy. No matter what you do or decisions you make, there will be lots of cleaning up to do. The only question to ask yourself is "Is this meta mess worth the commitment of constantly cleaning up the micro-mess." The problem is most people enter their first macro-mess before asking that question. For instance, take the expression "hot stripper." The inexperienced focus on the "hot" part. The experienced focus on the "stripper" part. If you can extract yourself from your first macro-mess with only psychic and financial scars, consider yourself lucky. One, you were able to get out alive, and two, you were able to get out unencumbered by additional human life. You are the captain. Before grabbing the wheel, make sure you take a good look at who's on the boat and decide if they're worthing drowning with before the boat starts sinking.

[7Wannabe5]

Yeah, wise observation, and if you are female just sub in "moody hipster" for "hot stripper." Although, if you do go ahead and reproduce with one these, your children may eventually thank you for blessing of good bone structure and/or sense of rhythm.

[Jean]

More unprotected sex to create a legacy.

[ertyu]

@Revan: one doesn't get born knowing oneself in-relationship, knowing how to handle oneself in relationship, knowing how to get to know one's relationship partner, knowing what's important vs. what one -thinks- is important in a partner, knowing how to communicate all of the above to another person, knowing how to discuss issues in an impartial, us-vs-the-problem manner and arrive at conflict resolution, etc. These are skills. If you are lucky, your parents will have modeled some of them. But even so, they take work, and they take time. If you wait until you're 30 to begin developing them (regardless of whether you actually have relationships or not), you will end up being the guy that the successful professional homeowner women talk about in the misadventures in dating channel of their fandom discord server*, wondering how an actual adult can be this incapable.**

If you yourself are attractive and economically successful, you could probably start a relationship with a younger, more immature partner. Which sounds all fine and well, except you will now both still have relationship skills on par with recent high school graduates, and you will not avoid any of the conflicts or headaches you were trying to avoid by waiting to have a relationship anyway. All this shit takes practice. Don't skip it, especially if you're the guy that doesn't know why the dumb normies ask you whether you've tried X food at Y place yet and what you thought about it.

(*) suspiciously specific, I know. I'm in the same fandom server, listening and lurking (in said dating channel, i do engage in copious time wasting outside of it)

(**) all of the above assumes you are heterosexual and interested in conventional family formation. But even if you are not, you would still need to know how to communicate in order to have a successful relationship, and you'd still need to practice. One could argue the practice is even -more- important in that case because non-conventional relationships don't come with the amount of social scripts, gender roles, etc. that already exist for cishet relationships - you will need to develop and discuss what a relationship is and what it means to each of you completely from scratch (the cishets also should, but many skip it, imo to their detriment)

All of the above said, my personal biggest mistake is not investing early enough.