Decentralizing FI for strategic reasons?

[mathiverse]

FBeyer is a case study for intentionally decentralizing FI: viewtopic.php?t=7089

From intro post:

What to expect from this journal?
As opposed to many others I won't focus nearly as much on how I'm saving money unless I come up with something I feel is extremely clever.

I'm saving enough money that I will inevitably become FI much sooner than my state-mandated retirement so reaching that particular goal is not really of any concern to me, at all! It's going to happen. There is NO stopping me. The thing that does worry me is how to keep my head cool on the way to FI; how to avoid focusing so much on becoming FI that you're not enjoying your journey there. There is no point in filling your life with suffering for 10 years to enjoy the next 40 if you could enjoy the first 15 years and love the next 35. There is no point in becoming FI if you have nothing to retire to, but I also believe it is pointless to fill your life with current worries solely to reap the benefits later. In other words, even if you have something to retire to, there is no point in heaping on things to retire from either.

As a consequence this journal might be much more about how to keep your house in order, how to keep from going insane at work, and how to avoid stressing out about all the day-to-day chores you need to do.

...

So: less talk about saving money, more talk about not becoming a loon on the way to FI.

From later in the journal:

I do not adhere to ERE solely because I want to be financially independent, but because 'the renaissance man knows not his work from his leisure'. I've managed to turn 36 and become relatively wealthy and I haven't even followed the standard career track. Part of me makes me think that I could actually be cut our for doing this whole ERE-without-fretting-about-FI thing just fine. I'm not solely in this for the opportunity to Never Work Again(TM) but to Work With Whatever I Choose.

And for now, I choose to work in AgTech.

Sure, I only have about 8 years expenses saved up, but if I was FI right now, I'd want to engage in this project anyway, so the only sensible way forward in my opinion is to say yes to the job, get a crazy low pay and draw down on some of my stash while the project progresses.

The worst that can happen is that I'll have to find a new job in two or three years and I know for a fact that there are many people who are interested in hiring me, or interested in hooking me up with someone else. Some day I WILL be FI, and it won't be long. But this way, I get to leverage my non-normative stash and take on some chances that others might not be able to.

[mathiverse]

Also I'll note FBeyer wrote a book (not sure if it was published as I haven't gotten that far in his journal) that seems related to the idea of writing an ERE book that is more accessible:

I think the FI community is myopically focused on 'saving money' rather than spending money right. There is a tendency to focus on money, rather than what people have done with their lives in order to live closer to their ideals. People think FI is about money, when it is really a matter of lifestyle engineering. So therefore, I wanted to write a book that deals with the good life, and how to find it, and in particular show how to live A Good Life without spending more money on it than you should.

The idea is to first explain the psychological biases that keep us from doing a lot of the things that we instinctively know we should, but we are afraid of for various reasons. And also expand on certain other ideas that are useful when you want to Get More for Less. Then I want to provide the reader with a long list of things to do/try/experiment with in order to gauge their own agency, competency and to experience those various psychological biases in a completely safe (but admittedly sometimes also weird) environment.

The overarching theme is the idea of spending right, not spending less, and what is right for everyone of us is completely unique. Therefore it is imperative that people learn what 'enough' means to them, so that they can be free to follow their dreams in the safest, most productive manner possible. That requires some experimentation and I'll try to propose a framework for doing so.

Financial independence is mentioned in a separate section, but it is not the main focus of the book. The book is rather akin to Your Money or Your Life, actually, except I suggest a playground of things to experiment with, in order to experientially dial in to one's personal needs. EREs will recognize a lot of ideas from Jacob's book, but overall it is meant to be much more accessible to the layman.
In terms of frugality it IS rather extreme, once you start applying it, but I never mention a specific spending level, or set artificial boundaries on expenses. I'll have to trust that the reader will know the right level for that, over time. My hope is that the extreme levels of frugality will start to sneak up on people so they 'discover' how little you can really live on, rather than set it as a goal at the onset (like some tend to do with ERE where the current 'goal' seems to be 7000$ per year.)

Furthermore, the book is built like a toolkit, so the topics are separate and can be applied independently of each other. That way the reader can mix and match. That also means the books gets rather long, even though you might only need a subset of the information in it.

[kawaivf1]

A common (but not universal) story is people accumulate to some FI number, and then then quit, and then they wind up making income anyway. So, they oversaved.

But, accumulate to FI math makes sense, and conceptually its easy to grasp. So it's a robust way of achieving FI and money security.

However, if one is capable of navigating a bit more uncertainty, and is willing to commit to getting one's skills up faster, then there exists another path. The path of FI as secondary order yield, a side effect of a well put together WoG.

This path looks like skill up on postconsumer praxis and get CoL down very low, and save up some FU stash, something like 5-10 years at minimum, up to 20 years. At this point, if you're FTE, quit, probably. This is the first milestone: five to ten years of runway with a VLCOL means you never have to FTE again.

Do watchu gotta do to heal thyself and recover from whatever it was you had to do when you were FTE.

Then: commit to to the learning journey of building a WL7 level WoG. Build a web of skills with homeotelic loosely coupled goals and be working on closing loops and making everything in your life make sense and work together, and maintain yourself in a stance of being open to serendipity etc...

...and the idea is to spin up multiple sources of secondary-yield, i.e. incidental, income, that covers and then exceeds your CoL. To be generating in excess of expenses as a side effect of living a life the way you want to live.

This is exceptionally difficult to paint a picture of, I think, because everyone's WoG will be very unique structurally if not topologically, and so there aren't any simple directions to give, unlike with fire, where you can just say "Once your CoL is n% of stash you can quit, although you should do your own homework on withdrawal strategies etc, don't be an idiot".

But this FI-as-side-effect approach sounds more like loosey goosey handwavey stuff. "Figure out VLCOL, then get an FU stash, then do your best to speedrun the ERE curriculum to WL7 and then you'll have figured out multiple sources of incidental income. Whether or not you are FI according to FIRE math is only academically relevant."

The thing is, you have to do it fast. Maybe it just seems fast. It's not that most people take a long time, I think it's that most people run up to WL5 very quickly rapidly and then stop there. It's not that it intrinsically takes a long time to get to WL7, it's that most people simply aren't even trying to get past WL5 optimizer stage, because why?

It occurs to me that the carrot of FIRE is very distracting. The problem is that it is at WL5 ish. So if it really is the carrot of FI that attracts you to ERE, well, you get the reward at WL5. And then for most people there is no other visible carrot. The reasons for going on to WL6 or 7 or whateverthehell 8+ is are... opaque, fuzzy, even repellent to some. So you get the carrot at WL5, and then you're good, and you're basically done.

Which is fine, of course, but I think the fact that so many people are content with WL5 and stop there gives the impression that making it to WL7 is a) very difficult, b) takes a really long time and c) basically no one does it.

c) might be true, but I think a and b aren't *necessarily* true. I think it's just a matter of staying on the path and maintaining momentum, and soon enough you'll get there, if that's what you want.

The easiest way to stay on the path I think is to decentralize FI as a goal, to avoid getting stuck in the FI-at-WL5 trap. Instead of putting FI as the goal at the end of the FTE phase after which one's real life begins, put FI as a likely effect somewhere down the road *as a result of having lived your real life for several years already.*

This takes away this huge milestone of apparent freedom that, honestly, has a lot of baggage associated with it for many people, this word 'retired', and is truly difficult to navigate.

By ending one's relationship with traditional FTE with only a FU stash (let's define this as 5-20xCoL, enough for breathing room but not enough to consider yourself FI-forever), this sends a signal to yourself that while yes, you've just made a big change in your life and everything is different now, you're not completely independent, you don't have total freedom of action yet! There is still work to do.

Yes, take a nice long break, go travel overseas, do a thruhike, live in Baja for a winter, put it all out of your head for a bit, signal to yourself that you're entering a new phase of your life, but then, as my friend Arti would say, Keep F'ing Going. Keep developing your skills. Explore activities that you enjoy and are meaningful to you that might have some renumerable component.

If the FU stash gets lower than you like, explore different options for earning: seasonal work, part time work, freelance, side hustle, job-as-skills-learning-experience, etc. Be open to serendipity.

At first, you might be w*rking more than you'd like, or the type of thing you're doing for $ isn't exactly what you'd like. If it weren't for the money, you wouldn't do it. But compared to the FTE version of yourself, you've got abundant surplus time and life-energy, and you're constantly improving your skills, your WoG, etc. So with every year, your relationship with generating $ improves. You find multiple streams. You find yourself doing less of what you don't like, and more of what you do. Serendipity compounds. You work on your inner game to ensure to protect yourself against zemblanity. Instead of working towards this big overnight flip of a switch (pulling the trigger on FTE because FI), a discrete change, you're constantly working on improving and tweaking and tuning, a much more gradual and certainly non-discrete process of development.

At some point, you notice that you aren't doing anything you don't like to do. Your stash isn't at n%SWR yet, but that's fine, you're content with how your WoG is set up. This is the second major milestone.

A few years later, you notice that your stash is below n%SWR, in fact it happened a few months ago and you didn't notice. Oh hey, neat, how about that. This is the third milestone, which is epilogue.

Your life doesn't change: it already did.

--

Okay. Criticism? What's naive about this? Are there non-obvious ways this fails?

Thanks for writing this. I think it explains my dilemma exactly, but I was having a hard time wrapping my head around it. Obviously I have a lot of thinking to do since for a 1/3 of my life I was solely focused on my FI number.

[Divandan]

This has been a great thread to read through and revisit.

I have also been going through the journals for Alex Heyst and the posts on your website as well since I see a lot of parallels to my current situation (high income so not much necessity to go the extreme route which has severely limited my creativity).

Next up for me is to read YMOL again as that is the stage I think I am at currently.

Not trying to skip a step/steps but what are the accelerators to understand the levels & mentality tied to it. These were the ones that I could come up with:

- No buy challenge that extends for multiple months as opposed to a single month where you just buy something the following month (no buy month feels like accounting trickery)
-Low spending food challenge- no take out, coffee to go with a strict grocery budget ~$200
-The general quote of "Don't throw money at the problem, throw competence at it"

We are moving into our new house (this week) but I am thinking it is a no brainer way to create some competence from a technical perspective (would label myself as incompetent in this field)

[ertyu]

subsume "low spending on food" into "don't throw money, throw competence." If you buy staples and cook for yourself, completely from scratch, the savings take care of themselves.

[xmj]

This is one of the reasons I've been skeptical of the open source movement in software. It really does seem to devalue the work of programmers.

Working on FreeBSD, I've met a few who've made their bundle during the heyday of the 90s bubble and then contributed to OSS just for the fun of it. Similarly, when Whatsapp's founders sold to Facebook they rewarded the OSS stack driving it... handsomely.

What game are others here playing?

An infinite one, I hope - where the goal isn't to win (anymore) but to keep playing. One more day/month/year, etc [similar to what Jacob hinted at above]

I have also been going through the journals for Alex Heyst and the posts on your website as well since I see a lot of parallels to my current situation (high income so not much necessity to go the extreme route which has severely limited my creativity).

Next up for me is to read YMOL again as that is the stage I think I am at currently.

If you're limited by creativity, give Charles Long - How to survive without a salary a read. Great eye opener for leveling up; it also tackles some questions related to communication arising from that choice.

[Divandan]

Thanks, xmj! I owned and read CL's book, but it was a long time ago, and I don't know where it is now. Much like YMOL, I might have to reread CL's book as well, as I saw Possum Living also got recommended in some older threads.

[AxelHeyst]

@divandan - Something I've been experiencing and thinking about recently relevant to your question about accelerating trajectory through the levels is where I spend my attention. I think this is an obvious thing, but I feel like most people's Overton windows are pretty narrow here. I think focusing on attention design is an upstream action that can have HUGE impacts downstream.

I realize that didn't make much sense, let me unpack that.

1. I attribute my speedrun of early ERE curriculum to the fact that I spent a large portion of my attention on it. I read the book four times in a year, I read ch5 probably a dozen times, I pored over the forum archives and the wiki, tracked down all the recommended reading lists and studied those, transcribed the yields and flows thread into my own words, made qualitative graphs as an exercise in clear thinking, journaled about it, talked to as many people about it IRL or over zoom as would tolerate me ranting, etc etc. I feel like I'm just over the past six months or so easing into a phase where my attention is more spent on those things that ERE praxis enables me to do, rather than the mechanics of ERE praxis itself.

2. Every time I do an internet fast (typically that's six days of no internet a week for at least a month), I find myself spending more time doing the things I say I want to do than otherwise, and loving it. All that's happening here is I'm cutting out a big chunk of attention that goes to checking email, the forum, news, and whatever other things I do when I fart around on the internet.

3. a nine to twelve hour a week gig I had over the winter just ended. My attention is now going to things that I care more about including skilled activities like moto repair, underground greenhouse design, writing, etc. I really noticed the extra time and cognitive space in my life as a result of this change, and how much easier it feels to do the polymathic things I'm interested in doing in a natural cadence of following my day's stoke.

I'm trying to give illustrative examples to make a simple point that I'm struggling to articulate clearly here for some reason, which is that
a) learning/adopting a new thing requires effective engagement of attention, and
b) the less other crap you spend your attention on, the more attention you'll have available to expend on your ERE journey (or whatever you want to make progress on), and so
c) a high leverage upstream action you can take is to intentionally cut, control, or constrain the amount of attention you spend on lower-value actions.

Apply yields and flows analysis to everything you spend attention on. Do you watch movies? Do a reverse fishbone diagram on movie watching (I watch one movie a week as part of family time with my parents). Do you have a data plan on your phone? Reverse fishbone that. Do you use the internet every day? Why? Could you use the internet every other day? Or once a week?

So a first step in self attention management is cutting out or pausing stuff in order to create as much potential cognitive bandwidth to put towards what you think is important.

The next step is to get immersed. Fill your attention with what you want to accelerate at. Read all the recommended books. Read all the old classic threads. Restate the material to yourself in your own words (Ahrens How to Take Smart Notes). Find ways to put yourself in a situation where you are forced to ERE your way out of it (moving in a house that needs some work sounds great!). Endeavor to begin answering questions / contributing to forumite questions as quickly as you can (best way to learn something is to teach it...).

[Divandan]

Thanks for this message and the thoughtful response; it makes perfect sense.

If I apply it to my life from a focus standpoint, we just spent the last year house hunting, putting in offers, and finally got a house. The bandwidth I have freed up from emails, paying attention, seeing houses, and putting in offers is huge.

It also makes perfect sense as you laid it out, which is a combination of creating the space for your focus (limiting social media, mobile games, scrolling, basically anything that takes up a bunch of time that doesn't bring much value) + carving the time out to keep reading about these topics that interest + last but not least the application of the knowledge.

This was the final piece/most crucial piece. Reading up on how to fix stuff, how to save on food costs, and how to start a garden is great, but it really needs to be applied and then, as you mentioned, shared to further reinforce the ideas.

I think all of the pieces are starting to slowly click together, but the quote I keep going back to is, "Don't solve problems by throwing money at the problem but by throwing competency at it."

[AxelHeyst]

My brother pointed out that I've been using the word 'decentralize' when I actually mean 'decenter'.

Decentralized: (of an activity or organization) controlled by several local offices or authorities rather than one single one.
"a decentralized education system was introduced"

Decenter: displace from the center or from a central position.
remove or displace (the individual human subject, such as the author of a text) from a primary place or central role.
"for decades, poststructuralists decentered the author as the originating source of meaning for the literary work"

He's right! The smarter Heyst brother strikes again. This thread should have been titled 'Decentering FI for strategic reasons?'

To decentralize FI IS a thing, but it's pointed at by the Income Robustness Score - generating multiple diverse flows of FI-level living expenses. To decenter FI is to displace FI from the central role of one's efforts/goals/WoG.