EVERYTHING Too $$$ Now

[TopHatFox]

I bought a burger and fries + beer for myself to celebrate getting a new job, and it was ~$30 + tip. It was just Rock That Burger, not La Boutique de Burgers. How is the regular person making it out there? If I had a date, that’s $70 for burger & fries. o:

It’s getting so bad I’m thinking of doing only intellectual hobbies like learning math, languages, & coding. Either that, or one-time cost or save-you-money hobbies, like frisbee golf, hiking, bicycling, canoeing, car repair, home repair, etc.

I KNOW most ppl don’t have these inclinations, so I’m thinking either these businesses will suffer and potentially go out of business left & right, or the public will go homeless or shack up with more roommates.

A large part of FIRE seems to be being a hermit, or insourcing all entertainment/services; it’s expensive as soon as you leave the house. Was it always this expensive in regards to median salary?

[AxelHeyst]

What if instead of going to Rock That Burger you went to Aldi's, bought a couple lbs of grassfeed beef and some other stuff, then walked to a park and had a bbq with your friends and everyone used splitwise for whatever your grocery bill was?

FIRE = hermit is either a preference or a lack of imagination/willingness to learn new skills.

It’s getting so bad I’m thinking of doing only intellectual hobbies like learning math, languages, & coding. Either that, or one-time cost or save-you-money hobbies, like frisbee golf, hiking, bicycling, canoeing, car repair, home repair, etc.

The horror!

[TopHatFox]

@axelheyst - Yes, Aldi or Costco is usually best. But dang, ppl in the 90’s could go get a burger + fries at a middle of the road restaurant and it was $10, a similar price to the Aldi route now. I suppose it’d be different if salaries went up too, but they don’t seem to have. I remember MMM mentioned his first coding job paid 70k 20 yrs ago, and that’s still what most of the entry-level ones pay today (if not 60k). So, yes, developing skills is becoming less and less a cool thing we do, and more of a thing regular ppl will need to adopt

Best place to get value for $ if you don’t feel like cooking seems to be Chinese or Japanese Buffet. $15 for all you can eat, and a lot of it isn’t unhealthy

[AxelHeyst]

Oh, yeah, that seems to be true.

It's almost as if the fundamental resource of industrial civilization is becoming more energetically expensive to procure on top of the cascading interconnected failures and increasing maintenance costs of a complex and complicated world system...

Man, wouldn't it be cool if someone came up with a personal-scale approach to ruggedizing our lifestyles ahead of the austerities baked into the globalized future that didn't suck and in fact led to better lives? Someone should work on that...

[TopHatFox]

True, yes oui, but what will happen to average person? Also can’t deny that it’s raising the difficulty/margin for us too. Parts + raw materials + used products are more expensive, for example.

[Seppia]

I seriously doubt a coder working for the 2023 equivalent of Cisco in the MMM times gets paid $60k, I see that salary for Social Media managers with 3 years experience in Southern FL
IIRC one junior level job (engineer) at Google or similar is easily over $120k.

In any case prices of eating out in the USA are completely insane outside of the big fast food chains*.

That's why in the now 6 months we've been back in the US we probably ate out 5-6 times. It was for real Italian pizza only, for approx $50 a pop (two basic pizzas for $18-20, tap water, 25% tip).

*at McDonald's etc you can still get a filling, somewhat satisfactory and very unhealthy "meal" for sub $10.

[TopHatFox]

@Seppia, I think I remember him writing an article saying something like “when you’ve been riding out the good times earning 70k/yr,” so that sounded like what he thought was a reasonable salary in that decade. Maybe not his tho.

[AxelHeyst]

Yeah it effects everyone, just in different degrees depending on one's, uh, dependencies. You're right.

As for the average person: I hope the forum servers can handle increasing traffic.

[TopHatFox]

Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how the general public reacts to this seemingly new normal. I guess I’ll just become the additional barista, chef, etc. almost always. It’s like when a car rental company charges you to have an additional driver, and you then become the “additional” driver. ^_^

[Seppia]

@Seppia, I think I remember him writing an article saying something like “when you’ve been riding out the good times earning 70k/yr,” so that sounded like what he thought was a reasonable salary in that decade. Maybe not his tho.

I did not explain myself great. What I meant is that today’s equivalent of MMM’s $70k paying job (at Cisco) is probably a $120 or so job at Google.
So salaries have gone up. Especially for skilled people.

[theanimal]

I mean, going to a restaurant is always going to be expensive, especially if its a chain or fine dining. Most people do have that inclination as most people's savings come out to more or less 0. Mrs. Animal and I eat at restaurants maybe 1-2 times a year. When we do we prioritize small, independent restaurants or stands and make them out to be an event, ideally with friends and family. An example of this is our somewhat biannual taco tour. This has led to some excellent experiences and allowed for interactions that we wouldn't have had if we just went out to eat without any thought. Our regrets for eating out when we do are now near 0. If I am able to find such things in the middle of Alaska, surely you can do the same in Miami.

It’s getting so bad I’m thinking of doing only intellectual hobbies like learning math, languages, & coding. Either that, or one-time cost or save-you-money hobbies, like frisbee golf, hiking, bicycling, canoeing, car repair, home repair, etc.

This has to be satire, you do know where you are posting right?

Parts + raw materials + used products are more expensive, for example.

Jacob's (along with others on this board) annual spending has continued to decrease over the years while personal quality of life and inflation (obviously) has increased. Hmm..

[AxelHeyst]

Yeah also there's been volatility in many materials. I held off on some building projects a year and a half ago when a stud was $8 or whatever. Now that they're $3 again I'm doing some of those projects. But the real fix is to get on my salvage materials game and source studs at $0...

[Ego]

I think you are right. Your generation is getting screwed in twenty different ways. But every time you post something like this I want to repost this quote.

You graduated with a degree from a good school with little help from your family. Hell, you weren't even a citizen when you started. Rather than graduating with a mountain of debt you have a pile of FU cash. How did you do that? Could you show other people how to do it? I know part of it is that you have good grades and are good at standardized tests, but I think there is more to it than that. I feel like I've been reading about the FIRE world for a long time and I've never heard a story quite like yours.

I for one am excited to see how you find ways to manipulate the working world and other aspects of life to your benefit in the same way you manipulated higher ed.

[TopHatFox]

What I don’t understand is why the most rich ppl don’t in-action want to raise wages/salaries for their employees. My guess is they’d prefer to replace them with AI, which interestingly is already happening at IBM. UBI, welfare, and flat salaries have a proven track record of reduced worker motivation + societal collapse, but I’d argue so do low wages to prices of common items like housing, cars, insurance, fun, and so on. There’s a site that tracks CEO pay to median salary, and some of them are off the charts, like 1000x, 300x, etc. Often times, the CEO isn’t even the owner of the company, just a really high paid employee. Is the natural human inclination to horde power? It doesn’t make sense long-term, either, because ppl are likely to stop working or just try less.

@theanimal, I’d imagine they spend less over time because they learn more skills over time and therefore insource more work. Also, they likely end up owning a house outright, which given our tendency to choose a small home, reduces money spent on housing/year. They also get older, and I saw that older ppl have less close friends, and spend more time indoors than their younger counter-parts (maybe cause they’ve been there done that). I do think the floor of frugality has been raised since 10-20 years ago. The main new opportunity is more common remote work.

Do you guys have restaurants outside of Anchorage, Juneau, or Fairbanks? :p

[unemployable]

I've seen the future. I can't afford it.

[TopHatFox]

@unemployable, username checks out. Interestingly, the solutions to solving poverty at the individual level are similar to getting rich: more skills, technical field or trade, business/high pay, low expenses to income, more income per capita/revenue per capita, etc. Surviving can be interesting in and of itself cause you get to see what happens and do some stuff you’ve always wanted along the way

It’s a weird thing, like if we had millions of dollars, wouldn’t we just buy as many burgers and fries and enjoy them, perhaps even routinely (assuming it’s a healthy burger + fries)? I doubt multi-millionaires are agonizing over restaurant outings. So then I wonder if frugality is just a cope for limited resources. The real solution is to see cooking/frugal living as the preferred option to begin with, but again I’m not sure if this is just a cope. I can kinda see it with some semi-permanent DIY like your own car repairs, but with something routine like food preparation, it’s kinda a PITA.

It’s probably a big side effect of salary work. Your income is pre-determined/median, and therefore any purchase reduces your savings for the year. By contrast, if the income comes in from, say, ppl purchasing a product you’ve built with past work, perhaps that changes the feeling, especially if that income is high (like a financial planner charging $100 for a successful, scalable personal finance course)

-----

Perhaps a way to compare is when you're a high-level in a video game, where you have so much money that basic purchases like in-game food or a steel sword (such as in Elder Scrolls Skyrim) are not even thought about, and even if you buy a fancy souped-up sword, you can defray the cost by brewing and selling a few high-level potions.

[unemployable]

That's the opening line from one of my favorite 80s songs. More true than ever.

Persistent structural inflation was the one thing that promised to destroy traditional early-retirement models, worse than a stock-market crash could. And here we are.

[mathiverse]

It’s a weird thing, like if we had millions of dollars, wouldn’t we just buy as many burgers and fries and enjoy them, perhaps even routinely (assuming it’s a healthy burger + fries)? I doubt multi-millionaires are agonizing over restaurant outings. So then I wonder if frugality is just a cope for limited resources.

Some frugal actions are definitely NOT copes. There are many things unavailable if all you have to offer is money. There are many things only kind-of available and only if you're willing to accept something that is not quite what you wanted.

As for eating out, I could see a person deciding that the non-monetary downsides of eating out aren't worth the non-monetary upsides. Money doesn't have to factor into a decision not eat at many restaurants.

[TopHatFox]

SOLUTION: in-source almost everything, buy a house outright, do only one-time cost, DIY hobbies, or learning hobbies, and work/business-work for the foreseeable future 'till death amen. It's the only way to feel like I'm enjoying day-to-day life while also the future simultaneously. There's also no "omg, but you gotta do it in 5-10 years pressure" if I think it's 'till death. I wonder if I'll feel differently if I sell a successful startup. Time will tell.

[theanimal]

My last statement was tongue in cheek. The majority of us on here could afford to spend more if we desired but have chosen not to not because we are "coping" but rather that we see that it leads to a more satisfying life. Money is just one form of capital and its use is often a very inefficient way to find contentment.

Have you ever read the ERE book?