Being fulfilled, with the ERE lifestyle?

[AnalyticalEngine]

I'm confused as to what the fuck is going on with Mindy and Carl. They saved $4.3M and then joined FIRE six years ago to pinch pennies? Or it took them six years of pinching pennies to reach $4.3M?

Carl is the guy who runs the 1,500 days blog and co-owns the MMM HQ in Longmont. He starts with ~$500k in 2013 with the goal of "to build a portfolio of $1,000,000 by February of 2017." He ends up meeting this goal but then way oversaves due to scarcity mindset/"penny-pinching" and networth runaway mode. Because once you hit $1mil - $2mil, runaway mode gets real crazy real fast.

Everyone is talking about them because they recently went on Ramit's I Will Teach You to Be Rich podcast where Ramit told them to stop hoarding money and go spend more. So Mindy and Carl decide to do this and Carl, just last month, spent $10k on a private concert because they had oversaved and are trying to take Ramit's advice.

Incidentally, I remain unconvinced that Ramit isn't an information hazard. He's been making the rounds in FIREland over the past two years or so because there are a lot of people who oversaved and now everyone is following his advice and FIRE has become very spendy.

[Henry]

@ Analytical Engine

Thank you for explaining.

It has to be the most ridiculous shit I have ever read. 10K for a private concert? Who did they get, the last living member of Sha Na Na?

[ertyu]

Ramit should be used correctly. It's very obvious that he is trying to make money by telling people to allow themselves to spend money. Going off his talk at google, he asks people to define their rich life: what does it mean to you? And what does -that- mean (in specifics)? The idea is to get people to dream about how they want to live and what they want to be able to do, and to use that as a -positive- stoke instead of approaching money with a prohibitive, you can't do this / you have to cut that mindset -- as he has rightly discovered, can't and no are not very inspirational or aspirational.

The deal is, though, if when you're asked "what does a rich life mean to you" you say anything other than "this," you have a system design problem. You're focusing on tactics - cutting this, cutting that - without those tactics being informed by any strategies or system thinking. So he gets people to think one level higher and like many other bloggers etc., tells people to spend freely and extravagantly on what makes them happy and be frugal with what does not. Not exactly a revolutionary idea - iirc Jacob had a time of paying 1.5k or sth like that for martial arts training at a time when his yearly spend was 6.5k (numbers approximate, also it might've not been jacob).

I think the problem comes when people overlook the system design principle - asking themselves about what life they would be truly stoked to lead and using that stoke to inform their behaviors. Instead, many unthinkingly latch onto the blanket "wheee, we're allowed to spend now" just like they unthinkingly latched onto the "all spending is a sin" mentality earlier.

[ertyu]

It has to be the most ridiculous shit I have ever read. 10K for a private concert? Who did they get, the last living member of Sha Na Na?

I have heard told it cost a million to get Mariah Carey. It's not exactly uncommon to get your favorite artist to perform for you if you're as loaded as the middle eastern dudes that allegedly flew her over to sing to theit buddy on his birthday. If you're a proper celebrity, you can't just go to a random concert without getting mobbed either. The prince of Monaco, for instance, invited the winners of eurovision 2021 to perform at his yacht club a couple of days ago. If anything, 10k sounds like it's on the cheap side.

Imo, if you have excess cash, supporting artists (directly, or on patreon or kickstarter etc.) is a very pro-social way to spend it. Creates positive externalities. tl;dr i support that dude and his private concert.

[Henry]

10K is not a private concert. It's a wedding band playing AC/DC at the end of the night so the drunk fathers can bond playing air guitar.

[AnalyticalEngine]

@ertyu - Agreed, I don't really have a problem with Ramit in a vacuum, and I do think asking yourself "what does my rich life look like?" is a very useful mental exercise for people trapped in scarcity mindset. My biggest issue with him is that he poses as a guru and uses this sales tactic of acting like he can solve all your problems, guru-style, which I always find to be a red flag that someone is trying to sell something. In his case, that's all his books and expensive classes. He's very clearly making money on what people want.

A secondary thing I've noticed is within the broader FI community is that his advice tends to just tell people to spend more on consumerism. Like spending on travel, experiences, restaurants, whatever. How much of a genuine problem this is depends on how you view consumerism (which is a major difference between FIRE and ERE), but I think it's noteworthy the conversation usually centers on these distractions like "I'm going on a cruise to Europe!" rather than the social or community actions one could take with all that money. But then again, I suppose $4mil is enough to buy yourself whatever consumerist thingy you want but not really enough to buy major social power.

[Henry]

Sounds to me like's he's just a salesman taking advantage of a specific sector of HNWI's.

[jacob]

Incidentally, I remain unconvinced that Ramit isn't an information hazard. He's been making the rounds in FIREland over the past two years or so because there are a lot of people who oversaved and now everyone is following his advice and FIRE has become very spendy.

Ha! A few weeks ago, I was interviewed by a NYT editor wanting to know how I (as one of the OGs) felt about fatFIRE taking over the FIRE-sphere. I responded that it was likely just a symptom of the market finally peaking and that the hype [cycle] would die down once a trading range became experientally fixed in the everyman mind; just give it a year---common attention spans are short. I might also have mentioned something about https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths and how "get rich quick & easy"-mentality was just getting a new set of [FIRE] clothes by certain individuals. I never heard from her again.

[zbigi]

(on how impressive is $1m for "regular" people)

I think it also depends on age. Until someone hits their midlife crisis (usually sometime between 40 and 50 yo), if they're ambitious and somewhat capable, they may scoff at having a mere $1m at the cost of taking on an extreme lifestyle. However, as people age, people often realise that they've typically overestimated their abilities and how easy things will be for them - and that, in spite of decades of nebulous plans and ambitions, they're still working that bad job and have little savings at 50 years old. In such situations, $1m and not having to work, even at the cost of heavy lifestyle changes, should earn much more respect.

No it wasn't. It was about learning how to cook inexpensive meals instead of eating out all the time. Lentil soup was one out of many recipes given. It just hit a note or a sore spot and went viral. Interestingly, the blog post in question also included a simultaneous recipe for tuna salad. IIRC, nobody ever objected to that part. Weird.

Didn't you write that you opted to cook that soup in weekly batches on most weekends through your grad school in Swizterland, as it was the most time and money efficient? Or is my recollection overly simplifying here?

[7Wannabe5]

Everybody who oversaves will eventually have to deal with this issue, generationally if not individually. For example, my very frugal friend who achieved net worth in excess of 100 million had an adopted daughter who could easily blow $20,000/month on miscellaneous. So, if your motivation for ERE is ecological, you might want to make plans such as a trust to protect a wilderness area. So, the main rational reason why you might not choose to do it now rather than after you are dead would be that you have fairly high expectation that you might need more money in the future to bail yourself out of coming era of crises; the known unknown. I must admit that one of the reasons I valued my friendship with mega-millionaire was that I frightened myself so badly by reading disaster scenario books, I thought it might be a good idea to be in the posse of somebody who could afford to charter a private helicopter, etc. However, what I learned when I had to help him die of cancer during the Covid lockdown was that money actually isn't all that helpful in an emergency situation if you haven't already established structures through which it can readily flow.

[jacob]

I think it also depends on age. Until someone hits their midlife crisis (usually sometime between 40 and 50 yo), if they're ambitious and somewhat capable, they may scoff at having a mere $1m at the cost of taking on an extreme lifestyle. However, as people age, people often realise that they've typically overestimated their abilities and how easy things will be for them - and that, in spite of decades of nebulous plans and ambitions, they're still working that bad job and have little savings at 50 years old. In such situations, $1m and not having to work, even at the cost of heavy lifestyle changes, should earn much more respect.

There's a particular person in my "focus-group" (read: facebook friends and relatives) whom I consider the anti-thesis of financial wisdom. I recall seeing a post just after they graduated HS in terms of how many of their graduating class was "going to become famous" whatever that means. The general agreement was on the order of 70%. Youthful ambition and nebulous plans, indeed. For this type of person "a million dollars" simply translates into "solves all my money problems as well as buying a treat for myself and everybody I know". They have zero concept of what "million" means in financial/cashflow terms. It's the ERE WL1 mindset.

Didn't you write that you opted to cook that soup in weekly batches on most weekends through your grad school in Swizterland, as it was the most time and money efficient? Or is my recollection overly simplifying here?

Yeah, I did. See here: https://earlyretirementextreme.com/cook ... han-4.html ... but while eating like that is a sufficient solution for the food part of ERE and better than the ramen+ketchup diet of the typical student, it is not a required solution. The main advantage here is that it's very very fast! There are more interesting but equally cheap meals for those who want to put in more effort. I did that during my undergraduate years and after meeting DW. My grad school diet was an aberration.

[Henry]

Do you think Warren Buffet would listen to this Ramit guy's barrel of bullshit? "Listen Warren, I looked at your numbers, and it's my professional opinion that you're over invested. You need to enjoy your money. My brother Runoffwithit will select the best songs on iTunes for $20,000.00 per selection."

Ramit is a predator. $4.5M is a lot of money. But on the other hand, it's not. He's making the entry level wealthy feel wealthier than they actually are.

[guitarplayer]

Painfully true. You have just essentially joined the largest group of addicts on the planet, who because of their sheer number and hegemony, do not even consider they need a 12 step plan.

Hey, I was trying to make this point viewtopic.php?t=12546 but less eloquently

[Henry]

@Guitarplayer

It's a complex issue because I do believe an essential ingredient to AA/NA etc. is the substitution of a potentially fatal addiction to a more benevolent addiction ie. people replace addiction to drugs and alcohol with addiction to AA/NA and then onto other "better" addictions. And I'm not against that. We've all seen the essential hollowness of owning a golden tower in the middle of the wealthiest city in the USA but I would purport that that addiction is "better" than smoking crack on the sidewalk in front of said golden tower.

[lillo9546]

I think if you’re worried about this stuff you should just give up. Go and live like your friends and neighbors and don’t look back.

When you're in "ERE mode", you likely wouldn't want to. You're currently listing the trappings of modernism.

Traditionalism: family, faith, duty to a familiar place and a role in society. A paycheck, being comfortable.
Modernism (you): growth and success in money, power, fame, and/or sex. A career, awards, climbing to the top, taking risks.
Postmodernism: seeking experiences, happiness, doing things together, belonging to a community, being safe.
ERE (post-postmodernism): competence and independence to chart one's own course, doing what you want within reason, only owning what you need, evolving towards self-actualizing at a natural pace with an ever increasing understanding and care for the systems we live in.

Thanks all for joining the discussion!

Broadly speaking:
- "normal" people have a complete life. Family, Friends, Partner and Children, a Job or a Business, Fitness, Leisure, Hobbies, Travel, Material goods, etc.
And these are those who have done everything they were told since they were children, since school, without ever asking themselves anything or studying the system. They followed a straight path and never took back.
I have examples of very happy friends who had children with their partners at 26, and who got married at this age. I really love them!
To summarize, let's say that these types of people are children who still believe in the "Santa Claus tale".

- "advanced" people have another POV. Family, Friends, perhaps they are unable to find an ideal partner or have children because their focus it's on something else, a Job or a Business, Fitness, Hobbies, Travel and a lot of pondering on material goods.
The problem here was knowing the system, unmasking "the Santa Claus tale", and no longer being able to choose a path because of that. The system is a flaw. But how do we create a path?



In life it is more important to be confident in the things you do rather than evaluating and lose lifetime to chose them.
Normaloids have the right path, and feel safe, have a greater sense of satisfaction with society and their status. The clear example is precisely the lives of my friends and acquaintances.
"Advanced" people who have discovered the truth no longer feel satisfied doing things they know are wrong. Creating the path is difficult. It brings suffering. Doubt yourself. It requires a tremendous amount of time.
I can say that I have unmasked Santa Claus, and also that I have tried to pursue an alternative path, but at the moment I feel at the lowest point of the abyss, which ofc, want me to go back on the traditional route.

I certainly define myself as a person who has managed to understand that some things are not needed, who has lowered his needs, consumption, who has a different vision of the world but I feel like saying that true love, true sensations of warmth and affection, the best moments, can only be found in people who live a cohesive society, even if they unconsciously live incorrectly, at 'dark to the horrors of the system, even tho we are talking about going for an aperitif, or a restaurant with your partner, instead of going to do just a walk.
Reward system it's sculpted in our brain and trying to not reward yourself with what society show you since childhood, it's like telling someone to not take their drugs. You can imagine, because you also felt, the discomfort of "unwind" all you learnt, and try to be accomplished in different ways. But tricking the reward system is so hard.

I'm making an attempt to go back for a second and reflect, take back what I had left behind because I believed I was going down the "wrong path of the system".
So I am trying a period of time back to the traditional route.
I immediately felt relieved of a huge burden, to make you understand how much effort I invested in trying to change my lifestyle. I'm certainly still applying the ERE rules, but to my old traditional lifestyle, and I feel more "Integrated" in society, more supported by "normaloids", even if I continue to analyze my choices and theirs.
There are positive things: I can see impurities in a glass of water, where they can't see them.

Anyway, the law of nature "of the strongest" tells man to dominate over other species, and to dominate over those similar to him, or to form domination groups. Be careful, I don't mean to subjugate other people, but to be dominant, like a reference person, to be a great sage in a village.
All this is possible in a society in which this type of person must have the resources and marry with the society of his time. In this case, for better or for worse, we must not hide, but become entrepreneurs who solve problems, who have a family, friends, passions and hobbies, travel, meet new people. At this point, I believe that applying the "philosophy" (and not the lifestyle), ERE, is much easier. Once you know the truth, and go back to live a traditional lifestyle, applying the ERE philosophy is child's play: less consumption, less needs, a fair measure of savings rate, true and genuine relationships, and much more.
But what should we leave?: living by eating cheaply, having few experiences, preferring to save too much, live the risk of being labeled as a "strange person", to not accept a marriage and start a family for FI reasons, to not go out at that dinner because of savings money, etc.


Unfortunately we are animals and society imposes comparison. For those who have understood it, comparison, the real one, is used to give your status a level.
It's not a weakness, but a demonstration of strength! A man without resources, those that do not take a position in today's society, tell me how does he not suffer? How could He demostrate strenght and a full vigorous life?
It's like seeing a gorilla from a long time ago who didn't have the coconuts, or such other desired possession, that all the other gorillas had.
It's not about the possession itself.
It's not about the comparision with others.
It's not about a material desire.
It's about nature that want you to be compared to other of your species, to be able to validate the "specie evolution" law.

[Salathor]

Going back to the start of this conversation, I would say that "learning to spend money" IS an important and underdiscussed topic for the actual ERE/leanfire style people (not the standard MMM/tech guy whose "lean" is 90k a year or whatever).

One of the reasons I'm working again was because when I retired I was not ready to start spending my dividend income. Every single dollar of it felt like torture, to the point where we realistically had a 0% spend rate because of small side gigs (me) and writing income (my wife). We still saved way too much and felt pinched the whole time.

That said, spending 10k on a concert is insane for a 1m-2m net worth. Something like, "commit to spending 300 this month on fun stuff and donating 200 to charity" is much different than "spend like you're a very high net worth individual who plans to work forever".

[AnalyticalEngine]

@Salathor - Agreed. Escaping scarcity mindset is difficult, and it's also hard to unlearn the urge to hoard money. It's also a mistake to work forever and not spend money because there are certain things that are much easier to experience in youth.

I was procrastinating submitting a PR at work, so I watched Ramit's talk at Google. It was about 10% useful advice and 90% sales tactics to use on WL2-3/Kegan3 people. I think I actually learned more about sales than useful spending advice, but I digress.

His main useful advice is to extremely cut excessive expenses then imagine spending 4x on your current spending your favorite activities. He then did this useful sales tactic of asking some people in the audience their favorite activity and noticing that a lot of people said "this is silly but--" and then giving them social permission to like what they already like (how to target Kegan3) and becoming a guru (the "I" in "I will teach you to be rich").

This probably seems amazing at the WL3-4.5 level but completely breaks down at WL6 because the goal becomes your system and not the money, such that even if you have 4million, you still might not spend on tea in plastic bottles because you value the wastestream more than the cost.

Note I don't actually care how anyone spends their money, it's mainly Ramit's sales tactics I want to point out. It's largely just relating well on Fe and getting people to think very slightly out of their Kegan and WL. Honestly not a bad tactic to learn from.

Anyway, I must confess I have listened to a lot of Carl's podcasts, and @Jacob's point about this being the result of a market high checks out. Carl has mentioned pouring a lot of money (hundreds of thousands) into Tesla then losing a sizable amount of his portfolio in one day and then basically not caring because "the market will go up again." Easy to say during a bull market but all of this is an exercise in missing an understanding of the system. He got this attitude after his Ramit podcast appearance and honestly this mindset seems like a worse information hazard than the concert.

[DutchGirl]

Thanks all for joining the discussion!

(...) But how do we create a path?

Lillo, I would think ERE, and all the other ideas and tools that you have explored, should give you more tools to live a good life, not less.

I think almost everyone with half a brain (and yes, that includes you) thinks about what life they want to live and what they want to do with their life. You don't truly know what other people think and feel, so perhaps there's more to them than what you (or anyone) can see from the outside.

So the task you have is to create a life for yourself that makes you satisfied with it. That could include having a partner, having kids, having a job, having status in society - if that is what you truly want, of course you can choose those options. And of course you will have to work for it, and of course you can't choose everything at the same time, and as I said before, you will also need some luck to achieve the things you want, too. ERE and other knowledge that you have could be used to make your life (even) better. Example: some other person has $100 and buys two movie tickets and popcorn for a nice night out, you have $100 and you use it to have fun during a full weekend... or who knows, you use it to build/create something that will bring fun for many years to come. With the same resources, you will be able to do more, or also to deal with more challenges that life can bring.

Personally, I do take from ERE what I find useful for my life, and the rest I see as something that is not useful for me but that very well may be useful for someone else. Or maybe some of it will be useful for me in some other period of my life. ERE is an inspiration to me, not a rule that I have to follow to the letter. I hope you will also find a way to integrate the parts that are useful for you into your life.

...and for the other conversation going on here at the same time... the situation with Carl made me realize (again) that having a lot of money doesn't automatically make you happy, nor will it allow you to automatically finally live the life you want to live. Because you may not even know what that life is. So while I'm getting close to the finish line for how much euros I need to live on - this shows me once more that I need to spend more time on creating a life that I want to live and prioritize that over chasing (more) money.

[zbigi]

- "normal" people have a complete life. Family, Friends, Partner and Children, a Job or a Business, Fitness, Leisure, Hobbies, Travel, Material goods, etc.
And these are those who have done everything they were told since they were children, since school, without ever asking themselves anything or studying the system. They followed a straight path and never took back.
I have examples of very happy friends who had children with their partners at 26, and who got married at this age. I really love them!

Such people are not that common. With current rates of divorce, burnout and addictions (just for example, over 2% of people in my country are addicted to alcohol), how many people can get on this path, and stay on it, content, for decades? Seems rather hard/unlikely, which was one of the reasons I've always looked into unconventional ways of living.

[jacob]

To summarize, let's say that these types of people are children who still believe in the "Santa Claus tale".

There's a rather famous experiment showing the preference for "social cohesion". See https://earlyretirementextreme.com/the- ... -line.html ... There's also a folktale illustrating this on a societal scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emper ... ew_Clothes The Road trip to Abilene paradox, wherein a group decides on a wrong choice because they all use a strategy of trying to agree with other people's opinion, also comes to mind. It may be illuminating to ponder how you would answer/behave in such situations?

Clearly, this effect is important, but it also plays out differently in different humans. Not all humans are conformists or "animals" so to speak ...

"It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question."

It's definitely not an issue of being either a human or an animal. It's more a range with extremes. Humans are herd animals but with different tendencies towards herding. "Fitting in" is not something I ever personally cared as much about as I care about other things (see http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html ), but "fit" seems important to you and something you struggle with in terms of having an outside perspective on how "this complete mainstream lifestyle" actually works. This is quite normal.

As the FIRE movement became more popular, a lot of newcomers, who were closer to mainstream values, started dropping the original ingredients and post-consumerist goals. Pursuing just the FI aspect at a slower rate, say 20-30% savings rate, seems like a rather popular choice. I don't see anything wrong with that.

Add: To illustrate the difference, consider the problem of "shelter". Should you buy on standard house or spend your resources on an alternative house on wheels or made out of strawbale? The latter may very well be more optimal in terms of comfort and liveability, but the former has more resale value because that's still what everybody else wants. Many thus choose a suboptimal solution for themselves because it's what everybody else apparently wants or think they want. This illustrates the Abilene paradox quite well.