It seems to be easy to be penny wise in general because that mostly boils down to frequent choices made daily, weekly, and even monthly. There's lots of familiarity with these choices, it's easy to figure out the best choices and get practice at making better choices.
The problem is with bigger one-off choices where there's not much chance to develop solid heuristics/familiarity for. There's often more unknown unknowns. It can take a significant amount of time to research the options and/or figure out DIY solutions. There's a greater risk on unexpected cost/time overruns.
Today I had a choice of paying $500 USD for the Ford dealership to replace the blend door actuator on a 2008 Ranger. I could've potentially fixed it myself, it's only $30 USD for the part. The actuator is in an awkward spot under the dashboard (behind the glove box). The proper way to fix it is apparently to remove the entire dashboard, the more DIY version is to attempt to gain access by removing the glove box. The best case scenario would be to fix it within a couple of hours and $30 in materials, worst case could've been more involved, let's say 10 hours & lots of frustration.
I opted to pay for it, but wondering if I'm valuing my time too highly or being pound foolish ha. Curious what other people think? What's your heuristics around the larger one-off choices?
Easy to be penny wise, harder to be pound wise.
Re: Easy to be penny wise, harder to be pound wise.
I think you actually can develop a heuristic that would cover things like how much DIY to do on your car. Stuff on cars break eventually, so while the specifics of your Ranger issue is a one-off, it's part of a predictable pattern of vehicle ownership. You could have a heuristic like "I will at least attempt to DIY fix anything on my vehicles up to and including replacing the transmission." Or, alternatively, "I replace the oil and fluids and otherwise pay someone else to do it, I don't care to learn any more about cars and I'm willing to pay to be able to spend my brain on anything else." Or your heuristic is "car ownership is dumb, I'd rather solve transportation problems with Public transportation/biking/renting strategies."
With any of these heuristics you wouldn't have to make a decision about whether to DIY it or not, you'd already have the decision pre-made.
For me, I DIY all my moto fixes and maintenance but would pay a fabricator to make a custom part or fix a weld if I needed that, that's my heuristic. And I'm likely to adjust my heuristic to "I don't own motor vehicles at all" in late spring/early summer.
The heuristics come from my sense of stoke, identity, curiosity, and values. If I experience dissonance or stress when following my heuristics, maybe there's a mismatch somewhere and I need to update the heuristic. But having to evaluate every individual decision is exhausting.
With any of these heuristics you wouldn't have to make a decision about whether to DIY it or not, you'd already have the decision pre-made.
For me, I DIY all my moto fixes and maintenance but would pay a fabricator to make a custom part or fix a weld if I needed that, that's my heuristic. And I'm likely to adjust my heuristic to "I don't own motor vehicles at all" in late spring/early summer.
The heuristics come from my sense of stoke, identity, curiosity, and values. If I experience dissonance or stress when following my heuristics, maybe there's a mismatch somewhere and I need to update the heuristic. But having to evaluate every individual decision is exhausting.
Re: Easy to be penny wise, harder to be pound wise.
Time. Take lots of time. Hardly ever does an important question require an immediate choice. A life-threatening medical emergency might be a rare exception.
Take your time for learning, from others and/or from first principles.
Take your time to get a better feeling for the solution. Seeing a building plot in all four seasons for example will really help answer questions like "Do we really want this expensive big window on the north side?".
You don't _have_ to move. That only makes sense if you're convinced you're heading in the right direction.
Also, buying time to keep the unknown unknowns at bay is not entirely impossible. An alternative to rushing to the car service for issue X on your old clunker is to be prepared for it: "I know I'm driving an old clunker. There's an inherent risk of it breaking down and stumbling into a mess of unknown unknowns. I want to at least try to fix my car myself, so.... If it breaks down, I can use my parents' old car/cycle to work/use our car sharing subscription/... while I research a solution." Not the brightest explanation, but I'm sure someone else can word this more elegantly.
Re: Easy to be penny wise, harder to be pound wise.
One option is to ask around. What choices did other people make and how do they evaluate their choice? For every subject, there will be someone who knows more about it than you do.
There are a lot of frugal people in The Netherlands but nobody repairs their own car. Parts for newer cars are fragile, and have to be installed carefully following the instructions, using the tools that apply a precise amount of force to an exact spot. The risk of failure or causing additional problems is not worth it in terms of money.
Re: Easy to be penny wise, harder to be pound wise.
~’keep your problems as slow and simple as possible’, aka be able to have your problems sit on the shelf for a while without major impact to your life system. Having alternative/diverse means of fulfilling the same need (transportation in this instance) is a way to slow your problems down, giving you time to think/strategize/expose the problem to serendipity, like a friend visiting out of the blue who’s favorite hobby is fixing friends cars while teaching how they do it…
Re: Easy to be penny wise, harder to be pound wise.
I have always liked the thought of being able to make my own vehicle repairs. Going to a mechanic always makes me nervous, and at the surface it seems like it should be easy to do myself. A lot can go wrong when attempting to fix a car though... You could cause more damage during the repair, leading to more costly repairs, or even an accident. There’s a good chance you’ll have to buy and store expensive tools that may only get used once, although you might be able to rent them too.
Another thing to think about, if you try to do it yourself, and cause more damage, will you be able to final alternative means to get to work, food, etc. on short notice?
After considering the alternative outcomes, along with the expense/risk of buying a new(er) car, I don’t feel as bad about giving a mechanic some money to do the repairs in a couple hours time. For added perspective, the average monthly payments on new and used cars are $734 and $525, respectively. If you pay that much once or twice a year, you’re not going to fall too far behind. A good mechanic is key.
I think the best financial/risk alternative to this would be to set myself up to where I don’t need to own a car.
Another thing to think about, if you try to do it yourself, and cause more damage, will you be able to final alternative means to get to work, food, etc. on short notice?
After considering the alternative outcomes, along with the expense/risk of buying a new(er) car, I don’t feel as bad about giving a mechanic some money to do the repairs in a couple hours time. For added perspective, the average monthly payments on new and used cars are $734 and $525, respectively. If you pay that much once or twice a year, you’re not going to fall too far behind. A good mechanic is key.
I think the best financial/risk alternative to this would be to set myself up to where I don’t need to own a car.
Re: Easy to be penny wise, harder to be pound wise.
I've done a lot of my own car repairs - I would've enjoyed this particular challenge. I also unclogged a deep clog in a bathtub a few weeks ago using a $20 snake. That sucked as well but was worth the cost vs time calculation I had in my head. Only took me an hour. I'm sure a plumber would've charged me $300 or so.
One heuristic that crosses my mind might be the the minimum wage calculation. So your Ford repair was estimated at $500. Subtract out buying the part yourself at $30. So $470. Divide that by the minimum wage of $15 an hour. That is 31 hours worth of minimum wage labor you'd have to theoretically perform to pay someone else to do it for you. Worth it to DIY.
Alternatively, you could use the real median income of ~$28 an hour which would mean about 16-17 hours of labor. I think this is what MMM wrote about in one of his earliest blog articles (think he used $25 an hour). Still doesn't seem worth it two work a job for 2 days to do a car repair you can do in under 10 hours (at the worst) unless the repair was truly out of your realm of skills.
Also consider everytime you fix something, its sort of like a real life RPG in a way. You level up your skills...and you gain the confidence to fix more things in the future.
One heuristic that crosses my mind might be the the minimum wage calculation. So your Ford repair was estimated at $500. Subtract out buying the part yourself at $30. So $470. Divide that by the minimum wage of $15 an hour. That is 31 hours worth of minimum wage labor you'd have to theoretically perform to pay someone else to do it for you. Worth it to DIY.
Alternatively, you could use the real median income of ~$28 an hour which would mean about 16-17 hours of labor. I think this is what MMM wrote about in one of his earliest blog articles (think he used $25 an hour). Still doesn't seem worth it two work a job for 2 days to do a car repair you can do in under 10 hours (at the worst) unless the repair was truly out of your realm of skills.
Also consider everytime you fix something, its sort of like a real life RPG in a way. You level up your skills...and you gain the confidence to fix more things in the future.
Re: Easy to be penny wise, harder to be pound wise.
How high is your marginal net hourly wage though? In other words, how much does an extra hour actually yield you? That can very much skew this comparative advantage calculation in favour of diy. My average net wage is ~60€/h. Not replicable though, and extra hours are taxed to death. An extra hour will probably yield me only ~15€/h net. An extreme case, but rather important to keep in mind in an accumulation phase.Lemur wrote: ↑Sat Oct 05, 2024 6:23 pmOne heuristic that crosses my mind might be the the minimum wage calculation. So your Ford repair was estimated at $500. Subtract out buying the part yourself at $30. So $470. Divide that by the minimum wage of $15 an hour.
...
Alternatively, you could use the real median income of ~$28 an hour
Re: Easy to be penny wise, harder to be pound wise.
If you carry this form of marginal optimization analysis to one extreme, human working just for enough kcals to stay alive (roughly $3/day) vs. solar cell powered machine, the machine will usually be more optimal/efficient for any task it can perform in terms of solar acre per work unit adjusted for depreciation and/or embedded energy. At the other extreme, we have Elon Musk with daily income very conservatively estimated at $30,000,000 and (Wow, this is maybe kind of interesting! Just did calculation.) ChatGPT currently consumes approximately $25,000,000 in electricity/day. No wonder the tech moguls are frightened.
Re: Easy to be penny wise, harder to be pound wise.
Among others, I use the heuristic talked about here: whether or not the skills I learn in a DIY project could be applied in the future.
If the project was somehow a one-off where none of the skills or tools would transfer to another project in the future, you might value your time greater than if you'll apply what you learned to a future project.
Also, I love that you compared this to an RPG, that's great
Re: Easy to be penny wise, harder to be pound wise.
Owning a car is like marrying the Wicked Witch of the West after you knocked her up because if you spend too much time in the poppy seed patch you'll entertain any idea not nailed to the floor. Maybe that's not a perfect analogy but to get to the point, buying car is entering a joint venture with evil guaranteeing nothing but more evil. I think that's why JLF says to avoid cars as well as TV as well as some of my posts. Personal finance has butterfly effects. So penny ante things add to up to future dollars - less stuff, less space huge savings. So I don't think it's a penny vs dollars dichotomy. I think it's a cascading thing. For instance, a few months ago, my co-workers brother-in-law was fixing his car and it fell on top of him and crushed him to death. It was dark out and he was probably drunk but I'm thinking that's not entirely unique in the DIY auto repair world. Because he and his wife were sleeping in separate bedrooms, murder was initially on the table. I understand that's kind of an extreme example but pinky swear it did happen. So my giving up book purchases gives me more money in order that I can have a pest control service contract so during the night a bat doesn't bite my ass and I end up in some rabies induced coma only to die and then enter an extremely undesirable afterlife forever listening to a bunch drunken idiots who thought it was a good idea to fix their cars in the middle of the night. So when you think about it, those pennies can really add up.
Re: Easy to be penny wise, harder to be pound wise.
You wonder if his life insurance policy excluded home car repair, especially whilst inebriated. Hopefully wifey checked first.Henry wrote: ↑Mon Oct 07, 2024 8:52 amFor instance, a few months ago, my co-workers brother-in-law was fixing his car and it fell on top of him and crushed him to death. It was dark out and he was probably drunk but I'm thinking that's not entirely unique in the DIY auto repair world. Because he and his wife were sleeping in separate bedrooms, murder was initially on the table.
Re: Easy to be penny wise, harder to be pound wise.
Getting crushed under a car is a big deal. Use jackstands.
I’m still fixing my cars. I can afford to have somebody else do it. I can afford a new Toyota if I decided to give up wrenching. I have a deep fear inside that if I waste money I’ll be poor again like the old days when I couldn’t afford a car. So I continue to drive junk. Likely a psychosis. When I splurge I buy new parts at Autozone instead of going to Pick-n-Pull.
When I cut myself or burn my hands I wonder why I’m still doing this. I’ll likely die with more money than I needed. Worse, it may be in a cancer hospice brought on by exposure to automotive chemicals. Something to think about. Lately I’ve been thinking of junking my old Mercedes cars and getting an appliance like a Toyota Prius or the Lexus variant. And a service agreement. I’m getting too old for this shit. But that new car smell must be carcinogenic.
Right now I’m cleaning up my parents’ home to eventually sell. It’s cleared. I dumped everything in dumpsters. ERE people would have freaked at all the useful stuff I tossed. I also tossed a lot of collectible art and furniture. The real estate agent freaked out. She said she would introduce me to her estate brokers but I said no. It’s faster to cut up the furniture with a chainsaw and smash all the ceramics. They pack better in the dumpster that way and it discourages dumpster divers. Especially me.
I tossed all this useful stuff like fabrics, metal wire, gunpowder, chemicals, bar stock, hardware, electronics components, appliances, tools, etc.. My dad stole anything not bolted down from Bell Labs, NASA and his egghead institute to use as repair materials for our cars and home. I told myself if I need it I will just buy it back. It’s really expensive to store stuff. A lot of this junk was in my parents’ detached garage and under the house in a basement. They hoarded all kinds of stuff for seventy years. They had this huge cache of raw materials to fix stuff. A lot of it they never used. It was like they had a bank of things to withdraw from. Mostly acquired free from government labs and friends who died or moved away.
It was a way to save money but judging from the cost of storage space it’s kind of a wash. There is the joy of walking down to our basement and finding just the o-ring you need to seal a faucet. But now there is Amazon.
My thinking is that though there may be a few thousand in “treasures” there it’s like 0.1% of the value of the home. I need to move the home and get the money invested. The house is making low single digit returns right now. I think this is being pound wise and penny foolish. I can literally buy back most of the stuff at market prices if I need it with the sale proceeds.
No garage sale, no consignment shops, no donations to museum charity sales. Just smash and dump. I did it all myself because I was afraid if I involved others there would be requests to save things for people…i.e. store things.
Because of the exponential nature of investment growth I think it’s really important to scrape up as many pennies as you can when you are young. This may mean making a lot of sacrifices in the early days when it counts. Now as an old dude with money and frugal habits I’m starting to realize I might have overdone it. I’m going to likely die of cancer induced by automotive chemical exposure and leave most of my money behind.
I’m still fixing my cars. I can afford to have somebody else do it. I can afford a new Toyota if I decided to give up wrenching. I have a deep fear inside that if I waste money I’ll be poor again like the old days when I couldn’t afford a car. So I continue to drive junk. Likely a psychosis. When I splurge I buy new parts at Autozone instead of going to Pick-n-Pull.
When I cut myself or burn my hands I wonder why I’m still doing this. I’ll likely die with more money than I needed. Worse, it may be in a cancer hospice brought on by exposure to automotive chemicals. Something to think about. Lately I’ve been thinking of junking my old Mercedes cars and getting an appliance like a Toyota Prius or the Lexus variant. And a service agreement. I’m getting too old for this shit. But that new car smell must be carcinogenic.
Right now I’m cleaning up my parents’ home to eventually sell. It’s cleared. I dumped everything in dumpsters. ERE people would have freaked at all the useful stuff I tossed. I also tossed a lot of collectible art and furniture. The real estate agent freaked out. She said she would introduce me to her estate brokers but I said no. It’s faster to cut up the furniture with a chainsaw and smash all the ceramics. They pack better in the dumpster that way and it discourages dumpster divers. Especially me.
I tossed all this useful stuff like fabrics, metal wire, gunpowder, chemicals, bar stock, hardware, electronics components, appliances, tools, etc.. My dad stole anything not bolted down from Bell Labs, NASA and his egghead institute to use as repair materials for our cars and home. I told myself if I need it I will just buy it back. It’s really expensive to store stuff. A lot of this junk was in my parents’ detached garage and under the house in a basement. They hoarded all kinds of stuff for seventy years. They had this huge cache of raw materials to fix stuff. A lot of it they never used. It was like they had a bank of things to withdraw from. Mostly acquired free from government labs and friends who died or moved away.
It was a way to save money but judging from the cost of storage space it’s kind of a wash. There is the joy of walking down to our basement and finding just the o-ring you need to seal a faucet. But now there is Amazon.
My thinking is that though there may be a few thousand in “treasures” there it’s like 0.1% of the value of the home. I need to move the home and get the money invested. The house is making low single digit returns right now. I think this is being pound wise and penny foolish. I can literally buy back most of the stuff at market prices if I need it with the sale proceeds.
No garage sale, no consignment shops, no donations to museum charity sales. Just smash and dump. I did it all myself because I was afraid if I involved others there would be requests to save things for people…i.e. store things.
Because of the exponential nature of investment growth I think it’s really important to scrape up as many pennies as you can when you are young. This may mean making a lot of sacrifices in the early days when it counts. Now as an old dude with money and frugal habits I’m starting to realize I might have overdone it. I’m going to likely die of cancer induced by automotive chemical exposure and leave most of my money behind.
Re: Easy to be penny wise, harder to be pound wise.
One big change for me in the last few years was to totally decouple my income per hour from my decision tree(s).
The aspect of "am I going to be so pissed off and furious that I'll have ruined multiple days of my life for this" is far more important now. Even then.. I still make the "mistake" of doing the hard work, even if it's incredibly frustrating, because it builds competence and thus confidence.
You might noodle around with throwing that idea of "my time is worth $$" out the window. IMO, a consumerist/wage-slave mindset underpins that language game.
Re: Easy to be penny wise, harder to be pound wise.
Others gave very valuable pointers already. Here are my $0.02.
One other thing to consider is opportunity cost. What is the opportunity cost of doing something? Is your alternative to doing repairs to go to bed really early and restore your body after exhausting week? Or is it to veg out on the couch eating chips (no judgement to those who do this)? Is the opportunity cost too high or too low?
Second, is there a competing project that might give you a higher return for about same time/money investment? Maybe in addition to the broken actuator there is a leak in your basement that needs to be addressed too. Which one would you pick? How urgent are either of those things? In the example of the leak, focusing on the actuator might be pound foolish because it could morph into a full blown flood with much higher damage.
I am also looking for balance in things. Sometimes I also choose to delay projects that are not urgent and don't greatly pay off. That's ok if it doesn't get done at all. Ruthless prioritization and all that.
One other thing to consider is opportunity cost. What is the opportunity cost of doing something? Is your alternative to doing repairs to go to bed really early and restore your body after exhausting week? Or is it to veg out on the couch eating chips (no judgement to those who do this)? Is the opportunity cost too high or too low?
Second, is there a competing project that might give you a higher return for about same time/money investment? Maybe in addition to the broken actuator there is a leak in your basement that needs to be addressed too. Which one would you pick? How urgent are either of those things? In the example of the leak, focusing on the actuator might be pound foolish because it could morph into a full blown flood with much higher damage.
I am also looking for balance in things. Sometimes I also choose to delay projects that are not urgent and don't greatly pay off. That's ok if it doesn't get done at all. Ruthless prioritization and all that.
Re: Easy to be penny wise, harder to be pound wise.
Indeed I see people repair an old Mercedes. It takes them time, and I see them puzzle about something with quite a few friends, but the car rides afterwards. I don't see anyone repair a Toyota Prius. My guess is newer cars are too optimised (= fragile) to be repaired by individuals. If it's okay to ask, what are your thoughts on that?
The classic example of exponential growth is rabbits. Rabbits reproduce rapidly and the number of rabbits doubles every four weeks. It's obvious that rabbits cannot keep this up forever.
Now the same is true for investing. Whatever happens, investing will not make infinite people infinitely rich. Exponential growth can only exist for a limited time. The traditional solution for investing is bubbles, or inflation, or depression, or war. These eliminate excess "wealth".
That's one of the interesting things about ERE. Retiring after five years is much more reliable than retiring after 30 years. Exponential things must go awry on longer time scales.
Re: Easy to be penny wise, harder to be pound wise.
We have almost finished clearing our parents house. As you say, you have to be a bit ruthless otherwise it never gets done. We put a lot of furniture on facebay and offered it for free to collect. Some random person actually criticised us for offering for free a 1970s corner cabinet which apparently is worth £200 or something. Its just not worth our time trying to sell it. If someone wants to resell it for profit that's fine by us.Sclass wrote: ↑Mon Oct 07, 2024 11:50 amRight now I’m cleaning up my parents’ home to eventually sell. It’s cleared. I dumped everything in dumpsters. ERE people would have freaked at all the useful stuff I tossed. I also tossed a lot of collectible art and furniture. The real estate agent freaked out. She said she would introduce me to her estate brokers but I said no. It’s faster to cut up the furniture with a chainsaw and smash all the ceramics. They pack better in the dumpster that way and it discourages dumpster divers. Especially me.
Re: Easy to be penny wise, harder to be pound wise.
@chenda that’s great that you’re making progress cleaning up. It’s such a daunting task when you first look at it. There’s an ERE lesson in the trash pile somewhere. Maybe more than a few.
@delay I’m not too sure about modern vehicle repair. My hope was to get something more modern that I could get serviced at the dealer for a high price. I think I was trying to say my DIYing paid off and I don’t really have to spin a wrench to save money anymore. While I enjoy the mechanical aspects of repair my hobby was originally born out of poverty.
Because of the exponential nature of investment the beginning is lackluster while the end is intense. I never said things grow exponentially forever. I don’t think I’m near consuming the world GDP with my investments yet. The early seeds had the biggest impact is all I meant. So sacrificing more when I was young was a good plan. Up to a point…,
The big issue I struggle with is “enough”. I’m thinking I overdid the savings and missed out on some life. It’s getting late to make this realization.
@delay I’m not too sure about modern vehicle repair. My hope was to get something more modern that I could get serviced at the dealer for a high price. I think I was trying to say my DIYing paid off and I don’t really have to spin a wrench to save money anymore. While I enjoy the mechanical aspects of repair my hobby was originally born out of poverty.
Because of the exponential nature of investment the beginning is lackluster while the end is intense. I never said things grow exponentially forever. I don’t think I’m near consuming the world GDP with my investments yet. The early seeds had the biggest impact is all I meant. So sacrificing more when I was young was a good plan. Up to a point…,
The big issue I struggle with is “enough”. I’m thinking I overdid the savings and missed out on some life. It’s getting late to make this realization.
Re: Easy to be penny wise, harder to be pound wise.
If someone's focused on efficiency, the calculus very quickly shifts to outsourcing everything but a specialization.
Behind every top performer, there's a team. They are not cleaning, cooking, driving, mowing, shopping, commuting, picking clothes, repairing cars, raising kids, etc. It's an arms race. Whoever can sustain the greatest support system outcompetes.
I used to think the rich outsourced because they were lazy and self indulgent. Some, maybe. But more likely - they are playing to win. That comes from creating leverage.
The question is - how do you want to live? What presence do you want to have in the world? Is it to consume only your fair share of the GDP? Exert as much financial power as humanly possible? Chase your stoke with no consideration to money at all?
There's not a right answer to the OP's question. Just different paths. At this point in life, I'd replace the vehicle.
Behind every top performer, there's a team. They are not cleaning, cooking, driving, mowing, shopping, commuting, picking clothes, repairing cars, raising kids, etc. It's an arms race. Whoever can sustain the greatest support system outcompetes.
I used to think the rich outsourced because they were lazy and self indulgent. Some, maybe. But more likely - they are playing to win. That comes from creating leverage.
The question is - how do you want to live? What presence do you want to have in the world? Is it to consume only your fair share of the GDP? Exert as much financial power as humanly possible? Chase your stoke with no consideration to money at all?
There's not a right answer to the OP's question. Just different paths. At this point in life, I'd replace the vehicle.
Re: Easy to be penny wise, harder to be pound wise.
Very true. Also why I might argue that it is better to be this guy's "mistress" than his "wife." In theory, a systems thinker should eventually "beat" an optimizer because an optimizer is relatively more predictable.Scott2 wrote:Behind every top performer, there's a team. They are not cleaning, cooking, driving, mowing, shopping, commuting, picking clothes, repairing cars, raising kids, etc. It's an arms race. Whoever can sustain the greatest support system outcompetes.
In terms of the Copying/Comparing/Compiling/Co-ordinating/Creating framework, this outlook "compares" a "compilation" of optimizations and/or constraints ("only fair share")on optimizations with some internal values matching mechanism. For example, I recently happened upon a podcast created specifically for my clan ("ADHD Nerds" AKA the Smiling Nerds)within the more generalized tribe of my people (Cuckoo-Bananas-and/or Extreme-Eccentric-Edgy- Nerds.) One suggestion offered on this podcast was that ADHD causes the brain to prioritize (or possibly optimize) the Interesting over the Important (or possibly the optimal.) So, generally, we all mainly find ourselves functioning (competing) within the known (therefore towards "boring") paradigm of Modernity/Optimization. If I borrow the simple theme sometimes found embroidered upon a toss pillow, "Live, Laugh, Love" might serve as good-enough basis for "core-internal-values matching mechanism operating within optimization function." Then I would observe that whether consciously or unconsciously manifested, a lifestyle that consistently maximizes for Money is most likely being run by a human whose internal embroidery is balanced more towards "LIVE ,laugh, love." Thus, as SClass noted, the likelihood of realizing that you have over-saved, over-earned, or over-competed/optimized increases with age for reasons beyond achievement of outcome/overshoot of exponential growth; it increases as you come closer to realizing that you absolutely will not survive.The question is - how do you want to live? What presence do you want to have in the world? Is it to consume only your fair share of the GDP? Exert as much financial power as humanly possible? Chase your stoke with no consideration to money at all?