ERE Motivation:

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M
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ERE Motivation:

Post by M »

I am curious, what motivated you to pursue ERE originally? Financial freedom? Financial security? Dislike of chosen profession/job stress? Dislike of doing same thing more than a few years at a time? Concerns about climate change/resource depletion?

Why are you following this lifestyle?

I will start.

When I was a kid I saw some families in my neighborhood lose their home to foreclosure. This was a new idea to me - the idea that you can simply lose the place you call home due to not paying the mortgage.

So the first reason I started saving and changing my lifestyle from normal work - spend lifestyle was to buy a house and pay it off as soon as possible.

While going to community college I bought the cheapest house I could find and paid it off before I turned 21. After I graduated college I was a little concerned about future job prospects with only a two year degree, but did not want to continue working full time while also going to school full time. So I started saving money to quit my job and go back to school. I put this money into savings...then cds...then bonds, then mutual funds, etc. Eventually it dawned on me that if I did this long enough and kept my expenses low enough I wouldn't really need to go back to school and could instead live off the investments. A few years after following this path I found this website and it seemed to match most closely with what I was doing.

So in my case, my primary motivation was to seek financial security.

What is your motivation for ERE?

AxelHeyst
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Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by AxelHeyst »

Desire to align my lifestyle with my values and worldview (cc, ecosystem destruction, energy descent, etc), reduce/ eliminate cognitive dissonance, and increase readiness for whatever comes next.

Secondarily, to enable the eccentric lifestyle that I couldn't figure out how to pull off before...

ertyu
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Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by ertyu »

I'm not sure how I originally landed onto reading FIRE blogs. I was depressed and burnt out, but on my own devices I never questioned the idea of working until retirement age -- I took it as a fact of life, "just what you do." I didn't know anyone who retried early, and to me retirement meant that you stop working and your income becomes the state pension.

After surveying "the buffet of blogs" if you will, I think ERE fit me best temperamentally. I was never particularly ambitious or materialistic; I spent a lot of my 20s in grad school (dropped out of my phd in the end) living happily on my grad student stipend when everyone else around me was talking about how much income they were forgoing by not being in the workforce full time. I didn't aim for more money because I didn't see myself as needing more money in spite of having interesting living situations like sleeping on the floor of people's curtained-off living room that they rented (literally shower curtains on a clothesline cord that ran across one wall of the living room) and so on.

I grew up poor so I wasn't a stranger to second hand shopping and so on. It was also normal for the generation of my grandparents, and to a smaller extent my parents, to have significant handyman/handycraft/fiber craft/canning and self-provision skills. Maybe it helped that I like beans and lentils hahahaha -- they were also a staple in my household growing up. I think I intuitively understood the idea behind the lifestyle Jacob suggested.

As opposed to others, the ecological benefits are an afterthought to me, sort of like, "oh and it's also good for the environment, makes sense, nice -- and wow yeah I do generate so much more trash when I buy bottled water and order take-out compared to cooking for myself, don't I."

The resilience and survivalism bits were also not front and center. This was maybe because to me, they were self-evident and self-explanatory. It was obvious to me that when there are shortages and inflation, a subsistence farming plot or a village house where you can grow vegetables (and maybe the occasional hen) will save your ass. My best friend in school -- his aunt's family had to keep their winter coats on indoors because they couldn't afford to heat their place. I had personally seen people survive adversity using ERE practices. And so, the cultural shock wasn't as large for me as it would have been for a regular middle class American.

As I neared - and am now in - my 40s, the salience of the need to self-fund my retirement grew as well -- though I'm not going to lie, at one point I hated my life and my job so much the only thing I wanted was to stop working regardless of the "poverty" of the lifestyle I'm going to have to afford that. I still feel no direction in life, but at lest I managed to get some sanity back during my time off for corona and find my current job which I don't hate as much.
Last edited by ertyu on Sun Sep 25, 2022 5:14 am, edited 2 times in total.

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fiby41
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Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by fiby41 »

It is antimotivation: looking at people I don't want to become.

My father heming and hawing about going to work everyday and how he'd voluntarily retire if he could, asking me to grow up quickly to help him out etc. I thought this is no way to live. This stress is not required. I don't want to be like him. I maybe conjuring memories but I may've searched how to retire early trying to help him out. Assuming the design of the ERE front page hasn't changes since 2010, spending 10 secs there and closing it thinking f this s tis too thicc seems too dificult to understand. Now that he can retire he doesn't. He'd be bored if he did if the months under lockdown are any indication and instead has poured 1.5 to 2x what'd take my parents to live perpetually into building his 'dream house' and will gladly pay for the loan taken for doing so for the next 8 years while simultaneously complaing about it.

Nowadays its the 3 seniors who've been working with my current employeer for 5,10 and 15 years respectively. Droves have come and left after them for better salaries, quality of life and/or work-life balance.
Last edited by fiby41 on Sun Sep 25, 2022 1:26 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Seppia
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Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by Seppia »

I come from a semi-upper middle class family in Italy but culturally fairly frugal by normal standards.
When I started working I had a bit of the typical lifestyle inflation, but in fairness I was making very little money so every increase in spending did actually bring a better quality of life. Even while making small money I was already saving 20% or so as I thought that was the “right” amount.
As my earnings went up, so did my spending, but eventually (around the time we were DINKS lining in NYC) it stopped making sense.
Like I was “forcing” myself to spend.

Ironically, I found out about MMM on a watch forum.
It all made sense pretty quickly and discovered ERE right after.

So to me rather than finding ERE because I wanted something, it was more one of those cases where you read something and go “how haven’t I figured this out myself before?”

I have to say that our life philosophy is “ERE-lite”; I think it’s a step after MMM or similar, but certainly not as advanced as other folks here.
In ERE-speak, it’s like we reached a Wheaton level that suits us and have little motivation to push forward.
It may be tied to the fact that I hold a managerial job where anything beyond (in ERE terms) what we do already may shift others’ perception of our family from “cute slightly odd people who live a minimalistic lifestyle” to “these guys are completely nuts and I best avoid them”.
We like to fly under the radar.
Or maybe I’m just spoiled and lazy

DutchGirl
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Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by DutchGirl »

For me the original ERE motivation was that I had studied a profession and found one nice place to work at, but the rumour at the time was that this type of work would soon become obsolete due to scientific advances. So far it hasn't, by the way, but I wanted to reach ERE soon so that I would be able to retire when my job would become obsolete.

So my motivation would fall into the group of financial security.

Now I have found that it also brings freedom, which is really nice. But I want the security of it first and most.

fingeek
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Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by fingeek »

Interesting to hear others thoughts here! It's helpful to think of this in the awayfrom-towards dimension.

One of my highest values is personal security/freedom, but I realised it's more of an away-from position, in that "I don't want/can't be under control of anyone else, I need to be in control of my own destiny". So that's been the main away-from driver for me - get/keep control over my self.

Second, and more emerging (towards), I've realised there's a lot out there that is hard to access when in full time job. That flexibility and freedom to explore different things (growth, hobbies, set up your own business, slow down/veg out when you want, "waste" time learning about something completely orthogonal to my current life) is definitely interesting to me.

jacob
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Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by jacob »

Resource depletion.

I wanted to see if it was possible to live an interesting/good life within an equitable slice of a finite pie. I immediately determined the $-amount. Initially I was a clueless consumer and so had to give up a lot of things. Standard mistake of thinking that a "new diet" means eating less of the old diet than changing what I ate. (Fortunately I was already in a position of having realized that buying stuff didn't increase happiness. #hedonicadaption). Over the first few years, I learned alternatives to buying products and services. The unspent money [from my phd stipend] was turning into capital, a previously ungrokked concept for me, and simultaneously accumulating at a rate of ~4 to 1.

Arranging these skills and capitals (stocks and flows) in a coherent and cohesive system led to formulating the ERE philosophy. It was indeed possible to live a good life for $7k/year AND it also turned out to be more interesting. Ditto richer in all other dimensions but spending compared to the "earn-buy"-system. Even an optimized version of the "earn-buy"-cycle (WL5) would not be as fun to me because #hedonicadaption.

Side-effects: About 4 years in, I realized I was pretty close to not having to work for a living anymore. This gave me the "extreme early retirement"-angle which people seem to be far more interested in than equitable sustainable practice or practical resilience. Also, if you're prepared for resource depletion, you're prepared for pretty much anything, so climate change is a comparable cakewalk.

zbigi
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Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by zbigi »

jacob wrote:
Sun Sep 25, 2022 8:28 am
Also, if you're prepared for resource depletion, you're prepared for pretty much anything, so climate change is a comparable cakewalk.
I was wondering about that recently. Back when you were just starting ERE, you were a strong believer in economic decline scenarios (e.g. peak oil) and yet you were assuming that you'll continue to be able to get good returns on your capital. Were you assuming that you'll just invest super-well and manage to get decent returns in spite of economic headwinds?

basuragomi
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Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by basuragomi »

Pathological need to DIY everything + need to optimize the scope of, and resources available for, DIY projects.

Kind of like this but with more interesting things than getting rich: "Throat was one of those people who could identify the thought at the other end of the process, in this case I am now very rich, draw a line between the two, and then think his way along it, slowly and patiently, until he got to the other end. Not that it worked."

jacob
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Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by jacob »

zbigi wrote:
Sun Sep 25, 2022 8:48 am
I was wondering about that recently. Back when you were just starting ERE, you were a strong believer in economic decline scenarios (e.g. peak oil) and yet you were assuming that you'll continue to be able to get good returns on your capital. Were you assuming that you'll just invest super-well and manage to get decent returns in spite of economic headwinds?
No, I was merely assuming that a diligent investor would be able to find something somewhere that would yield a real return of 3%. Why 3%? Because that's about what the time-discount of nature is. The rate at which trees grow, for example. Thus perhaps not super-well but definitely taking responsibility and going beyond the "fire&forget"/"magic of compound interest"/SWR-thinking that has come to dominate the FIRE-sphere. My attitude towards living off capital is described in the last (IIRC) section of chapter 7 in the ERE book. Unfortunately, I think it was mostly ignored over the quick&easy approach that became fashionable during the QE-era.

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Ego
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Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by Ego »

Many years ago we asked one another the question, "What would you do if money were no object."

While the question was posed in the positive - what would we DO? - we soon realized that there was also the implicit, unavoidable question within the question. The negative - what would we NOT DO?

The earlier one retires the more positive "doing" things one needs to sustain them.

ffj
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Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by ffj »

Having children.

I came to ERE already living the lifestyle for the most part. In fact, it was this book way back in 2001 that gave me the hope and motivation that it was possible not to be beholden to others the rest of my life: https://www.amazon.com/Average-Familys- ... 0471416274

When you are an hourly worker it can be very hard to see light at the end of the tunnel; there are just so many hours a week you can work and oftentimes the wage isn't that significant anyway. When the kids came, I almost became desperate to find a way out of my financial situation. Hence I read and studied every book on finance I could get my hands on, with a lot of them in retrospect pretty much trash. Remember before 2008 there was a huge lead-up where everybody thought they could get rich. Anyway, the simple book above that you can read in a day changed my life and I now had a plan, which was very liberating.

So when I came across Jacob and his blog, before the forum, it was very refreshing to find reinforcement for my lifestyle. And very well written! ( I think the blog should be its own book) While I will never live as austere as some here again, I did my time, I think this is a wonderful movement to provide hope for any person whatever their status in life. Especially someone like me who came from simple beginnings making shit pay working under not so ideal conditions and/or poor managers/bosses. I love that these principles work wherever you may find yourself.

A little bit of the book above, a little bit of Dave Ramsey, a little bit of Your Money or Your Life, and ERE set the stage for my financial success and freedom.

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unemployable
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Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by unemployable »

Ah yes, I knew I said it somewhere:

Lack of an alternative that was more attractive, more actionable or had a better guarantee of success.

Although I now see the word perceived belongs in front of all that.

A more seminal event was growing up in the Rust Belt in the 1980s and watching the bottom fall out of my father's career. I was determined not to repeat that experience and have always lived below my means as an adult. So Dad taught me well, but not in the ways he intended, and probably not with the results he had hoped for. At least that's how the ethic of resiliency spoke to me.

I turned to ERE -- basically, living off my assets as if I were never to work again -- around 2013 when I had failed in attempting to resume my career after taking some time off. Maybe I should have persisted longer, maybe I should have networked better, but by then I had lost the spark to continue.

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Lemur
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Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by Lemur »

I just want to do things on my own time and at my own pace. 9-5 job takes up a lot of your time...

I discovered MMM first. Decided that was too slow. Found ERE.

#1 priority is the ability to sleep in everyday. That is what I am most looking forward to when I'm not longer a salaryman lol.

Vagabond
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Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by Vagabond »

Location and time independence with a bit of fear mixed in was the initial reason, now it's turned into an all around better way to live.

7Wannabe5
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Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

I had a number of motivations, external and internal, functional and not-so-functional, that drove my initial interest in ERE. One motivation that was external and not-so-functional was wanting to prove my point or win argument with my millionaire-next-door type/level SO at the time who stated "You have to be making $40,000/year before you can start saving money."

Hristo Botev
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Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by Hristo Botev »

A BugWorld office job that demanded too much of my time and energy, at the expense of time and energy that should have been dedicated to God and family (and making my family even bigger), along with a false dilemma/dichotomy type misunderstanding that my choices were either BugWorld, on the one hand, or "early retirement," on the other.

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mountainFrugal
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Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by mountainFrugal »

DIY academic tenure in a geographic location of my choosing. I was interviewing for tenure track positions at large research institutions. I found out that I was also competing with established professors using open rank job calls as leverage to get pay raises at their home institutions with no intent on ever taking the jobs. This included my PhD advisor and my late wife's postdoc advisor (for her field). My late wife was told that she would better the chances of an academic position if she were to get a divorce. Academia claims to be free to examine any idea, but if you need grant funding for experiments, your ideas are narrowed to what the funding body is willing to give you money for. I decided to chart my own path to tenure. I left academia for industry and saved most of my earnings. Around this time I started reading Jacob's blog and ERE offered a more interesting way to balance lifestyle with resource use and pursuing ideas than more mainstream versions of FIRE. Here I am living the dream: working on intellectually stimulating projects of my choosing while doing art and getting after it in the mountains everyday. No committees, no politics, no toxic colleagues. True tenure.

Of course PhD comics perfectly captures this: https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive_pr ... micid=1436

recal
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Re: ERE Motivation:

Post by recal »

I've mentioned this in my journal, but I became disabled in 2011, when minimalism blogging was a big thing online. I was young and naive and I thought if I got rid of all of my stuff, the pain would go away. It didn't, despite what all of these people said.

It was simple. I knew I would never be able to sustain the "normal" lifestyle, and what a lot of people did by choice, I had no choice but to follow. I believe Jacob's was the first blog about early retirement I found from the minimalism thread of blogs, but it was too advanced for me to understand as a teenager who'd never made a dollar. I read early FIRE stuff as it was emerging and did the math, but was more focused on the low lifestyle need than retiring to support that amount via passive income streams.

My number which I still stand by is $15,000. As I told myself as a teen, "I just have to make $40 a day." Due to the time limitations I have, it made sense to sustain this on 2 hours of work a day and chill the rest of the time. I am now spending double that (lol) because I didn't realize I'd develop another disability that somehow makes the second most expensive place in the country a necessity to continue existing.

With the second disability, I pursued a more traditional lifestyle that I know has a very fixed timeline before my "career" collapses under me. That's when I re-connected with ERE, which stayed in the back of my mind since my early readings as a 14 year old of the 21-day challenge.

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