If you are an engineer working at a company, I'd expect that the resources provided by the company and the access to coworkers make you more productive. If you think you would be more productive on your own, this may be a sign to change employers.
Join the Engineering Leisure Class
181–190 of 197 posts
Re: Join the Engineering Leisure Class
#182I've been doing this for 8 years and love it. I'm married with 5 kids. We live in rural Wyoming (no income tax, bought a comfortable house for $86k). We've always lived well below our income so we have no debt and sufficient savings. I mostly choose to work on "products". That helps me focus on problems that people actually care about without any of the startup pressures. Although, I've also written several open sour…
Starting by cutting down to 4 days a week (32 hours) is a good idea. I became an independent consultant in 1998, but for the 20 years before that I worked 4 days a week (and this was for a variety of large corporations - you have to ask, firmly sometimes).
I have never regretted the lost income from reducing my work hours.
Re: Join the Engineering Leisure Class
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the point of retiring early, if you're stuck having to pinch-pennies, cut-coupons, all to living within a very modest budget? I have to do something with my time, so I might as well get paid handsomely for it.
MMM is living off an effective annual budget of $40k per year for a family of 3. That's roughly 45th percentile, so not that modest.
I haven't done much research into his life style, but I assume with $40k he and his family are able to do the things they want to do. Though that isn't necessarily the same things other families want to do.
Re: Join the Engineering Leisure Class
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll have to respectfully disagree with the idea that "anything worth doing is nontrivial." This might certainly be the case for you, but I would love to just spend some time learning Haskell, writing an OS for fun, reading papers on Theoretical Computer Science, or trying to find security exploits. I don't think these things are hard, at least they certainly aren't things I would doubt myself to be able to do. These…
> I would love to just spend some time learning Haskell, > writing an OS for fun, reading papers on Theoretical > Computer Science, or trying to find security exploits. What you describe sounds like what students do in a university. Maybe you should consider another degree in CS?
Indeed I didn't finish my degree and would love to go back and even get a PhD! But.. it doesn't make much financial sense right now, especially when you consider that the earlier you save and invest the better the outcome, so I'm waiting till the time is right.
Re: Join the Engineering Leisure Class
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if you live well within your means Which they define as no morgage. No car loans. No TV. "Fuck cleanliness". "Luxury is a weakness". Fix your own car. Don't use AC in Phoenix (?!). > your previous investments can take care of your lower-than-average expenses How can, to use MMM's numbers, 17 years of living on 50% income somehow support 50-70 years of living on that other 50%? His answer? Drop your spending by anot…
> He's living currently on about 25k a year, which is a over 25% of his starting income, and certainly more than the 4% he advocates above Something is wrong with your math there (unless I am misunderstanding you). $25k is not more than 4% of his total savings. (In other words, he has more than $625,000 in his investment portfolio). He exceeds his own advice, because to him it is not deprivation.
He actually has an article where he lays out how he went about saving before he retired, and he basically had $800k in liquid cash/investments before he retired.
But I don't think he actually saved the full $800k; he probably had quite a bit less than that, but with the power of exponential growth, looked at his statements one day and had $800k. It sounds like he also makes a bit of money doing odd jobs throughout the year, too, and since the $800k was more than enough for them to live off of in the first place, it's grown quite a bit since they retired. I doubt he's put any actual numbers out there, but he's hinted at the fact that he's got several million dollars in his investment portfolio now.
He talks about exponential growth a lot. The problem is, people don't really grasp the concept. For example, if you save $5 extra per week (instead of buying that Starbucks coffee on Friday, for instance), it doesn't really sound like a lot. But if you invest that $5 (MMM suggests index funds, which are pretty low-risk/low-growth -- so we'll use 6% annual growth here) you actually end up with about $3600 at the end of 10 years. Sure, this isn't a lot, and most of the growth occurs near the end of the time period, but it's $1000 more than it would be just sticking it in a savings account. MMM advocates a whole bunch of these little changes in your lifestyle, which add up over time.
While he does take it to the extreme, he states often that he's not telling people they need to do what he does.
Re: Join the Engineering Leisure Class
#186> Luckily, there’s a corner of the Internet dedicated to breaking the link between “comfort” and money. The problem with this is that it moves in the wrong direction. You spent all this time learning how to earn more money for your time. Then what do you do after you earn a bunch of money? Figure out how to trade your time for money again, just in different arenas? Why, so you can avoid having to spend more time doin…
> It's possible for your skill-set to be so valuable that you can maintain ridiculous incomes on, as Tim Ferriss puts it, four hours a day. Tim Ferriss' extremely valuable skillset is being a flim-flam man / borderline scam artist who markets questionable pesudoscience nonsense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Ferriss#BrainQUICKEN
I don't see anything in the Wikipedia article that implies he was a borderline scam artist. Even the "controversies" section only really talks about the fact that he used steroids in the past and something about Amazon reviews for his books.
I'm not necessarily saying you're wrong... but what has he done that's actually bad? He says himself that the things he writes about worked for him, and he shows how he measured it in his own life. That doesn't mean it's scientific fact and will work for everyone necessarily.
Re: Join the Engineering Leisure Class
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
No income tax is because you live in Wyoming, or because you don't work and therefore don't earn a salary?
no state income tax in Wyoming (also Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, and Texas; Tennessee only has taxes on investment income)
No income tax or sales tax in New Hampshire, but comparatively high property tax from what I understand.
Re: Join the Engineering Leisure Class
#188> Luckily, there’s a corner of the Internet dedicated to breaking the link between “comfort” and money. The problem with this is that it moves in the wrong direction. You spent all this time learning how to earn more money for your time. Then what do you do after you earn a bunch of money? Figure out how to trade your time for money again, just in different arenas? Why, so you can avoid having to spend more time doin…
I just wanted to mention that MMM sometimes rubs me the wrong way too. A more analytical approach that I found more thorough and more intriguing is at "Extreme Early Retirement" here:
http://earlyretirementextreme.com/
His book is especially interesting.
Granted, the author of this book is quirky and ends up doing a lot of work that you could hire someone to do for $10 an hour. But the author stressed that- at least for him- he'd rather spend his team mending clothes or fixing his bike that being in academia (his prior career).
Re: Join the Engineering Leisure Class
#189> Luckily, there’s a corner of the Internet dedicated to breaking the link between “comfort” and money. The problem with this is that it moves in the wrong direction. You spent all this time learning how to earn more money for your time. Then what do you do after you earn a bunch of money? Figure out how to trade your time for money again, just in different arenas? Why, so you can avoid having to spend more time doin…
Yeah, the MMM manifesto would never work for me - it basically says that I would have to be setting aside over 90% of my income (given my salary range), which wouldn't allow for things like a newer car, owning a house over 300 sq. ft., or traveling to Arizona to visit relatives. Personally, I refuse to give up my life today for the possibility of a life tomorrow. There's too few guarantees that there will be a tomorr…
I think it's fair to say that this is 95% of people's first reaction to hearing about MMM or similar bloggers.
Here's something you can take away from MMM even if you don't agree with everything he says.
Based on your post, these are the things that are important to you (or at least a start):
- Newer car - owning a house over 300 sq. ft. - Traveling to Arizona to visit relatives.
Maybe there are a dozen or so other things that are important to you that you could add to that list.
Now open up your bank account and find out how much spending happens on stuff that isn't important to you. 50%? 80%?
If you can dial down the spending that doesn't make you happy or the spending you do that just out of habit then you would be able to do more that does matter to you... nicer house, nicer car, more frequent and longer trips to AZ.
Re: Join the Engineering Leisure Class
#190> Luckily, there’s a corner of the Internet dedicated to breaking the link between “comfort” and money. The problem with this is that it moves in the wrong direction. You spent all this time learning how to earn more money for your time. Then what do you do after you earn a bunch of money? Figure out how to trade your time for money again, just in different arenas? Why, so you can avoid having to spend more time doin…
Having skills saves you both time and money in the long run. Let's say your toilet is broken. If you can fix it yourself, you need maybe a couple hours. You can do those couple hours any time, for example, on the weekend when you weren't going to be working for money anyway. If you don't have any skills, you have to pay a plumber to come fix it, for maybe $200. That's already four hours of working at $50/hour. Plus,…
Programmers routinely underestimate the complexity of every other field.