EVERYTHING Too $$$ Now

[Sclass]

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?

I think we got so wrapped up in the cook it at home discussion that we lost sight of the original question. The ERE way is make it at home and do a better job than Rock That Burger.

But as @THF asked “is this normal”? No. It’s FUBAR. And staying home, making an artisan burger or pizza in your kitchen is not a complete substitute for a restaurant meal. It’s great and I’ll happy to do it but it’s not going to cut it for a first date with a near stranger. At some point it isn’t cool to go home all alone and make some artisan meal to consume all by yourself.

The median pay you’re talking about sounds nominally kind of low. My first job out of school prior to 2000 paid over $100k for new hires. This was at Hewlett-Packard. Pretty mundane STEM career coding and designing digital electronics. Burgers weren’t $30 either.

So yes, something is off. No wonder why all the young people are complaining. The system is out of whack. Either your job isn’t paying enough to enjoy a burger out or restaurant labor is just too expensive for a normal person. Both sound ridiculous but something isn’t adding up. I’m not in the food prep biz but eventually the restaurant will run out of customers to serve. Or perhaps THF’s pay is way under the median in his locale.

My shopkeeper’s intuition is things are temporarily out of whack. Burgers won’t sell because median consumers can no longer afford them. Restaurants will close. We’ll end up in recession. Restaurant labor will go down in price as the jobs dry up. Burger price will drop.

Maybe? Things can stay out of whack a long time. Look at the car market today. The prices are ridiculous and people are digging deep into their financing to get in a new car despite the insane prices. My friend just paid $42,000 OTD for a Toyota Camry last month. It has a lot of fluffy options but it’s still a 4 cylinder non hybrid model. That’s insane.

The alternative - burger night out in a new Camry is only for millionaires. Sounds crazy.

I mean, we can fight back by all becoming expert mechanics and fixing up a car we got free at the junkyard but that sounds dystopian.

So yes THF, this isn’t normal.

The solutions, like don’t buy a new car, or cook your own damn burger don’t really address the issue that something is not right in the economy.

In the meantime I’m going to stay at home and not partake in expensive outside activities. Hopefully the rest of the country will do this and cause a deflationary recession.

[7Wannabe5]

If you want to maximize everything in your salaryman work, I believe 7WB5 years ago rather comically pursued that lifestyle for a short time after reading Efficiency by WSP.

Yes, whereas my current highly inefficient pursuit of new salaryman lifestyle at age 58 is more tragi-comic.

@THF:

I think ESTJs are the second highest earners, with ENTJs at the top, so don't dismiss the possibility too readily I think the most accurate way to determine whether or not you are INTJ would be how quickly you speak. When you pick up the phone, do you sometimes take such a long time to say "Hello" that the other human thinks the connection is bad?

The graphic you posted is in international dollars. The median income in the U.S. is higher than the number on the graphic, because the number on the graphic has been adjusted to reflect the higher cost of living in the U.S. vs some "average" cost of living place in the world, such as modest city in China or Guatemala. IOW, the lifestyle you can purchase for $60,000/year-capita in the U.S. would only cost you around $60,000/1.4 = approximately $43,000 if you lived in modest city in China or Guatemala. This is why many frugal people engage in geo-arbitrage.

Women also tend to earn less on average/choose non-STEM fields, and someone needs to care for the kid or two. So then you get a STEM guy's salary split b/w a woman and one or two kids. If you divorce at a clip of 70% over 40 years, the lawyers split up whatever you saved, charge you, and you have child support to contend with. I can see how things go south quick. Maybe it's not that we don't earn enough as Americans, but that we lose a lot of it to cost of living, families, etc.

Well, I would note that your new income would really only take you down to median lifestyle if you fully supported a kid and a spouse who did nothing to add to the domestic economy. Obviously, if you compare two families , one who has $60,000 salaryperson with stay-at-home spouse and kid vs. one who has two full-time workers each making only $30,000 and a kid, the first family will have a better lifestyle, because of everything the stay-at-home spouse can contribute in terms of skills applied over free time. Based on my experience as Lentil Baby, I would say that at your current income level, you are approaching the juncture where a competent stay-at-home spouse would add more to your quality of life (even in conventional terms)than an employed spouse with median income (or net median income adjusted for spending habits.) Unfortunately, I have not yet developed my Lentil Baby dating app, so can only provide assistance in the form of this economic overview.

[Ego]

+1 to everything @Sclass said. Things are out of whack. Take advantage of it.

We regularly make meals at home, put them in a picnic basket, then walk or scooter to places where we enjoy the ambiance which is nicer than that of the nearby $16 burger restaurants. A few years ago a local restaurant on a pier was renovated to include a free public seating area that is as nice as the restaurant seating with $22 burgers.

My point.... find ways to allow the $22 burgers to subsidize the ambiance of your home cooked meal.

[Sclass]

@Ego this is the second time you posted that photo and I have always wondered where that is. Looks nice.

[jacob]

There's cost inflation but there's certainly also lifestyle inflation.

A quarter pounder with cheese at McDonalds is $3.75. If people want their burgers to be artisanal and made out of Wagyu beef, that's inflation in lifestyle expectations, not an inflation in cost. At one point in time McDonalds used to be a fine thing but now even people in poverty---or at least the upper middle class people who claim to speak for them---complain if the food isn't organic, locally sourced, or served with aesthetic plating.

It's the same width housing, cars, clothes, electronics, ... It's more expensive than it was 25 years ago or 50 or 75. However, houses are also 50-100% bigger, and ditto the rest of the stuff. Earlier in the thread I wanted to do a comparison between median wages in different countries with they way they went about things in terms of typical housing, transport, and food. It turns out that Mexico is pretty close to the world average at 1/4 of the US.

What's interesting is that ERE HQ is a pretty close match to Mexico BOTH in the way we live and in what we pay for it. However, unlike the median Mexican in Mexico, our higher (median US) salaries made FIRE possible. Whereas a Mexican immigrant to the US would likely send the surplus home to the family. Whereas an American would spend it on "bitch-ass sedans" and "avocado toasts" to keep up with the Joneses.

The "psychic damage" comes from the easy comparison to other people with a higher variation of spending levels. This is due to the US having a fairly high Gini index. If the Gini index was lower people would not be complaining about their struggle because their family can only afford a McMansion compared to the family down the street who lives in a DoubleMansion with extra crispy bacon. It's a good thing that the Emirates isn't right across the street or people would lose their minds from seeing all the luxury cars that a 2x income relative to the US buys.

How to avoid "psychic damage"? It ain't so easily ignored, but it can be replaced with other values. For example, the ERE values is to be a hyper-competent being and living an interesting life. Money doesn't help much in that regard and so adding more $$$ quickly loses both it's appeal and utility. There are lots of things I want to do, but money is not going to get me there because it's limited by skills and creativity and not what I can afford. OTOH, if value is mainly perceived in terms of what one can spend, then that implies that one's value to oneself is determined by how much money one can make; while one's value to others depend on one's ability to earn more than Mr Jones; then the natural outcome is competition and hyperconsumerism. We can get a glimpse of the results of that from Ego's Something from Nothing posts. Every time I see the unopened/unused items that those tenants discard I wonder how they feel about their lives.

Another way to avoid the damage is to hack it. It turns out that humans would rather make 75k insofar their neighbors/colleagues make 50k than make 100k if it meant that their neighbors/colleagues made 150k. There's a relatively easy way to make that happen. The problem is that standard advice encourages people to do the opposite. This in turn moves the goal posts ... like a donkey running around with an unreachable carrot suspended in front of it. Put that in the rodeo.

[Ego]

@Sclass. Balboa Park in front of the Museum of Art. The restaurant on the left, Panama 66, has $16 burgers. The Prado restaurant just behind me when I took the photo has a lunch menu with a burger for $20.95.

[Western Red Cedar]

Trying to figure it out tbh. It'd be nice to just be able to buy whatever I want within reason.

Feel free to go ahead and buy whatever you want within reason. You don't need to follow the path that @Jacob pursued, and you don't necessarily need to limit your spending to $7,000 per year. ERE is a philosophical framework, not a religion. IIRC, you said in your journal you weren't really interested in "retiring" early anyway.

In terms of eating out, you might do a bit better looking for a deal before you leave the house. On Saturday DW and I went to a bougie Mediterranean restaurant and got 2 beers, 1 mocktail, and three plates of food for $35 + a 20% tip. We know the good happy hour deals and frequent those. There are plenty of options other than a Costco hotdog if you feel like dining out.

Burgers weren’t $30 either.

I looked at the menu for Rock that Burger in Miami and the basic burger is $12 and the basic fries are $4.

Restaurants make most of their money on alcohol sales.

[ducknald_don]

@jacob It probably works both ways though. I’m not sure the person earning $150k when their neighbours are on $100k is in a great emotional position either. The temptation to look down on people with less is high.

Roosevelt said that comparison is the thief of joy.

[Sclass]

@Ego. Nice. Looks like Europe. I’ll check out the museum next time I’m in town.

@jacob - I get it. There are a whole bunch of knobs people are adjusting upwards. It’s just my feeling that the legacy default settings don’t work. If you use those “default” settings the machine overheats and burns up. It’s like we are shipping the product with defaults that no longer work.

One consistency I’ve observed is adventurous and creative people always seem to beat the game by either hacking the knobs or making a new game.

@7W et al it would be great to bonk down everyone’s consumption to minimally sustainable levels. We could solve a lot of problems if we had a God button. Global reset to lower default settings in one click with permanently grayed out fields. But nobody is getting rewarded for pressing it.

[7Wannabe5]

I’m not sure the person earning $150k when their neighbours are on $100k is in a great emotional position either. The temptation to look down on people with less is high.

It has been my experience that either living in a place that has a vibrant variety of income/lifestyles or someplace where those who have less are new immigrants and/or young is the best. Suburban America is a hellscape of subdivisions and school systems exactly pegged to some socio-economic class level. Unfortunately, I must report that quality of education is much better in the more expensive districts. In my neck of the woods, the purchase of a $500,000 house will also buy you access to a school district where the daily environment/experience for the students is much akin to working at Google Campus. In the neighborhoods where houses are up for auction for $5000, the public schools are pretty much like dangerous refugee camps.

Over the past 40-50 years of neo-liberal globalism as economic policy, the median income of Americans has gone down relative to just about any standard, while the prices of the three goods that most determine placement in the middle class; education, health care, and housing have risen appreciably relative to other goods. Yes, almost every 12 year old I teach owns a cell phone, so what? It is also blatantly obvious that fewer of them have what was considered to be the reasonably secure middle-class lifestyle afforded by a man working on the line for GM in my childhood.

[white belt]

@jacob It probably works both ways though. I’m not sure the person earning $150k when their neighbours are on $100k is in a great emotional position either. The temptation to look down on people with less is high.

Roosevelt said that comparison is the thief of joy.

I’m not sure that quote is correctly attributed to Teddy Roosevelt, but if it is, keep in mind Roosevelt was born into one of the wealthiest families in the US on par with the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. It’s easy to have such “wise” perspective when you literally have never had to worry about money in your entire life and when you come out on top compared to 99.99% of the population.

Isn’t stoicism essentially rooted in feeling better about yourself because your life is better than that of a pauper? So if anything, looking down on people seems to be beneficial in some ways for mental health or overall life satisfaction.

[jacob]

Regardless of inherent motivations or how people feel about it subjectively, the behavioral economics result shows that humans objectively value their relative social standing a great deal. In the example above (real numbers can be googled) people are willing to give up 25k to get from the 0% percentile to the 100% percentile. That's like being the guy who just spent his first paycheck to get on the hook for a fancy car to wow his friends.

This kind of social competitiveness is maybe also why people are increasingly sacrificing financial security and other things that go unseen, like a good night's debt-free sleep, in favor of anything that signals greater social standing.

[white belt]

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:

I’m pretty sure this has been discussed ad nauseum, but if you’re trying to be frugal and taking a girl out to dinner for a first date, you’re doing it wrong. First dates should be casual and non-committal like coffee, drinks, ice cream, or maybe happy hour if you want to include appetizers and drinks. Follow up dates can be meals cooked at home, picnic, etc etc once some connection and trust has been established. I was single for years and went on lots of dates but I honestly can’t remember going to a restaurant meal as a first or early date. If you don’t hit it off with your date in the first 15-20 min, now you’re stuck sitting through a 90 minute meal with them!

[chenda]

It’s easy to have such “wise” perspective when you literally have never had to worry about money in your entire life and when you come out on top compared to 99.99% of the population.

It's like when Instagram models with perfect abs tell their followers to have that extra burger and not worry too much about your waistline because life's too short. I'm like yes it's very easy for you to say...

I think stoicism is more about accepting whatever fate throws at you, although there may be an element of 'some slaves get beaten even more than me so I really should be grateful to the gods as some have it even worse'

[Ego]

We can get a glimpse of the results of that from Ego's Something from Nothing posts. Every time I see the unopened/unused items that those tenants discard I wonder how they feel about their lives.

My unique position provides me glimpses into how they feel about their lives. When they apply, I get to see their finances. I sometimes wonder if I have a better idea of their precarious positions than they do themselves because I get to see it in one concise report of debts and income. Those of us who track income and expenses know the power of this simple exercise.

Also, your wonder about how they FEEL about their lives is spot on. Human beings have evolved natural responses to precarious situations. We feel distressed. If we are healthy, that distress prompts us to make changes. One of the reasons I am so adamantly against anxiety & depression medications for most people as well as alcohol & marijuana is because the distress these drugs dampen is the result of a million years of evolution screaming at them. Their subconscious mind is telling them that something is desperately wrong. Change is needed. When they drug it, they fail to heed the warning, continue further down the wrong road, then increase the dosages to cope, further exacerbating the viscous cycle.

By and large, these are good people making a series of seemingly small decisions that combine to bury them before they realize what has happened.

[chenda]

Their subconscious mind is telling them that something is desperately wrong. Change is needed. When they drug it, they fail to heed the warning, continue further down the wrong road, then increase the dosages to cope, further exacerbating the viscous cycle.

I think that's true in many cases, but in others depression and anxiety are the result of other mental health problems or developmental issues e.g. autism, borderline personality disorder etc.

[TopHatFox]

ON COST REDUCTION - DEDUCTIONS

Are these the only ways to reduce taxable income:

1. 70K/yr salary + 5-10K bonus
2. SEP-IRA contribution: I think up to 25% of base annual income (17.5K, 2023) + employer match small % (maybe has to be part of 17.5K)
3. Trad IRA contribution: 6.5K (2023)
4. Standard Deduction: 13.85K (2023)
5. ICHRA Health Insurance: Not sure what this is, but I don't think it's an HSA

----------------------

ESTIMATED ANNUAL INCOME TAX, GENERAL

$75K annual income/bonus
-$37.85K deductions
= $37.15K taxable income

($10,275 - 0) *.1 tax bracket (2022) = $1,027.5
(37.15K - $10,275) * .12 tax bracket (2022) = $3,225

$4252.5, Estimated General Tax Burden

-----------------------

ESTIMATED 2023 INCOME TAX, ACTUAL

Staring in May (7 months / 12 months), so 127 work weeks / 219 work weeks =

.58 of working year * $75K annual income/bonus =

$43,500 annual income/bonus
-$37,850 deductions

= $5,650 * .1 (2022 tax bracket) =

$565.0, 2023 Tax Burden

[Slevin]

Also, your wonder about how they FEEL about their lives is spot on. Human beings have evolved natural responses to precarious situations. We feel distressed. If we are healthy, that distress prompts us to make changes. One of the reasons I am so adamantly against anxiety & depression medications for most people as well as alcohol & marijuana is because the distress these drugs dampen is the result of a million years of evolution screaming at them. Their subconscious mind is telling them that something is desperately wrong. Change is needed. When they drug it, they fail to heed the warning, continue further down the wrong road, then increase the dosages to cope, further exacerbating the viscous cycle.

This may be good specific advice for specific people, but generally this is a take that might be damaging to many others.

You're blindly assuming "million years of evolution" (this is a bad appeal to "all individual bits are lindy") created this "magical" sense of feeling anxiety / depression that is "always right" about situations that are causing stress or depression and is always correct that something is broken or something is within changing parameters, etc. Just no.

A) Evolution doesn't just do "good things", i.e. see our useless appendix, wisdom teeth, etc. You can sort of assume that the overall thing (homo sapiens) is generally functional, but not any one specific function necessarily. Depression or anxiety might be good for causing people to make changes, but to me a crippling disability that doesn't let you function seems like a very bad way to tell you to change the way you function, as it seems to impair doing that at all.

B) Even if that was the case that anxiety and depression are good triggers for change, some people may have overactive (or underactive, but thats a different case) triggers of anxiety, that turn on high levels of anxiety even when, from everybody else's perspective, everything is totally fine or even good. I.e. like getting extremely anxious about choosing between different mustards at the grocery store to the point of breaking down crying, or get extremely freaked out when their partner doesn't text them back for 2 hours because they are in a work meeting. Which is why it can be a good thing to use the medication to turn a "broken functioning" sense into a "functional" bit. Over time it may even be able to use the medication to teach the brain that the "functional" way of that sense working is the default, and the person can actually improve form having taken the medication.

[jacob]

Also, your wonder about how they FEEL about their lives is spot on. Human beings have evolved natural responses to precarious situations. We feel distressed. If we are healthy, that distress prompts us to make changes. One of the reasons I am so adamantly against anxiety & depression medications for most people as well as alcohol & marijuana is because the distress these drugs dampen is the result of a million years of evolution screaming at them. Their subconscious mind is telling them that something is desperately wrong. Change is needed. When they drug it, they fail to heed the warning, continue further down the wrong road, then increase the dosages to cope, further exacerbating the viscous cycle.

Wait what?

While genetic evolution has conditioned humans to respond in a way that conforms to banding together to gather the basic needs for the tribe in the form of staying warm, fed, safe, and pursuing high-status to get laid, it only works at a species level (Oh shit! Mogh just derped himself over a cliff. Whatever---*cries a lot*---but we'll get over it next week.) Language allowed culture to form that is the propagation of behavior beyond innate instincts. That started 150000y ago. Civilization aka mass collective behavior started 5000y ago. This is still where we are now. We definitely have evolution and language limits still screaming at us, but abstractions and technological civilization is where we now live. Listening to those ancient impulses create many current problems but practically none of the solutions. At this point it's simply impossible to band together with 50 other humans and live off the land in the wilderness in a world of 8 billion humans with only 10% of nature or wildlife remaining. Better use the memetic/cultural/language developments over the past 5000-150000 than more archaic parts of the human brain space.

[TopHatFox]

Not sure if the link below has the UberEats delivery fee built-in (there's a separate delivery charge added on final check-out), but the great offending Rock That Burger Menu reveals itself :

https://www.ubereats.com/store/rock-tha ... Ta0FYbjnDg

(there are add-on charges for extra-what ever too, and don't forget sales tax, or the suggested tip on the little iPad thingy)

------------------

The commenters at the bottom don't seem to mind the prices, even saying they're good