Financial Independence Daily FI discussion thread - November 06, 2019 |
- Daily FI discussion thread - November 06, 2019
- Motivation needed: Early on the FI journey, need some advice to beat the lifestyle creep.
- Data on rule changes impact on sub activity and quality
- Has anyone heard when and where the Playing with FIRE documentary will be available for streaming?
- What ways might Soc Security be means tested?
- Weekly Self-Promotion Thread - November 06, 2019
- How possible is it for me to eventually become a billionaire?
- Raised Very Wealthy and Can’t Recalibrate
| Daily FI discussion thread - November 06, 2019 Posted: 06 Nov 2019 12:07 AM PST Please use this thread to have discussions which you don't feel warrant a new post to the sub. While the Rules for posting questions on the basics of personal finance/investing topics are relaxed a little bit here, the rules against memes/spam/self-promotion/excessive rudeness/politics still apply! Have a look at the FAQ for this subreddit before posting to see if your question is frequently asked. Since this post does tend to get busy, consider sorting the comments by "new" (instead of "best" or "top") to see the newest posts. [link] [comments]  |
| Motivation needed: Early on the FI journey, need some advice to beat the lifestyle creep. Posted: 06 Nov 2019 01:37 AM PST Hello everyone, I have been a member of this sub for quite a while, and though I have been inspired by many, most of the posts here seem to be written by those who already on the FI journey for quite awhile, and sometimes its hard for me to relate to.Most of my saving was used as a downpayment for our first apartment with my spouse, and I started saving again almost from 0. Before we got this place, we made a decision not to buy anything major (furnitures or devices) for the new home, except things like absolutely necessary like lightnings and so on. It's been only a few months after the purchase of the apartment, but we have replaced our sofa, most of our kitchen wares, got new coffee maker, microwave, made the cat its own catio on the balcony, new sets of linens, etc. Reasons are because either something broke, or too old or ugly and didn't fit into the new place. I also upgraded to the new iphone, and the old one went to my spouse as her old phone battery is dying fast and unreliable. But you get the picture. Now we don't have to finance any of those purchases, but it means the saving stash grows quite slowly, and though I understand the mathematical part of saving, it still feels so little and sometimes i just want to treat ourselves a nice dinner or a day out doing something fun. It sounds like we are the basic consumers, but we were very frugal in the past, especially when both of us were studying. Most of our stuff were old, or given to us, and when we moved into the new place, the apartment has a newly renovated kitchen and bathroom, and all of our stuff suddenly looked like an eyesore. To be honest, I am happy with how our place looks like right now, as I reasoned that those would be 1-time purchase for quite awhile. I also feel like I don't have as strong motivation to save as before the apartment purchase, but I definitely want to be FI. My question is when it is a lifestyle creep, and when it is not? How do you justify these impulses? Edit: Thank you everyone so much for your comments. I have received a lot of good advice here. For context, we are living in Finland so we don't have the investment systems like Roth or similar kinds like in the States, but I pay about 7-8%/month for social security (or state pension fund) & unemployment fund. Meaning if something happens and I lose my job, I would get unemployment compensation for roughly 75-80% my monthly salary for about 6 months while looking for a new job (or more - maybe, i never really look into it). We both had small investments in some basic index funds & we didn't have to sell them when we purchased the apartment. We keep our finances separately for tax reasons, and have a mutual account for family stuff. Beside mortgage, we don't have any other loans. We both have about 2-3 month salaries for emergencies, and we don't touch them if we want to buy things like phone or furnitures and so on. We keep a relatively low cost lifestyle but like some people pointed out, probably we had been too frugal in the past and when we bought the place, we sort of went overboard. We do maintain a budget but it's only for the mutual expenses. Now I will try to set up some sort of discretionary money like some people have suggested, i think it's a really good idea. [link] [comments]  |
| Data on rule changes impact on sub activity and quality Posted: 06 Nov 2019 07:20 AM PST Presenting this without much comment in the main post, you can find my personal opinion as a comment below. TL;DR - The rule changes that went into place in August are having a measurable impact on activity on /r/financialindependence. Top level post activity is down 25%, average comment levels are down about by about 33%. Is this good, bad, necessary or otherwise? Discuss Rule Changes The rules for the sub were formally changed on 7/29 per this post from departed mod /u/ER10years_throwaway. Code for Data Collection If you are interested in a simple script to scrape Reddit data, mine can be found here. I personally prefer just hitting pushshift.io vs. using PRAW. This is what the data looks like if you are curious. Results are limited 1000 per call: https://api.pushshift.io/reddit/search/submission/?subreddit=financialindependence&&limit=1000&after=1546300800 Charts I know this sub loves a good spreadsheet. Here are the three charts I think are relevant:
Observations
Summary The data is pretty clear that the 7/29 rule change post is suppressing overall comment and post activity on the sub. However, it is very subjective if this is a good or bad thing. Some folks complain about the sub being "quiet", while others are rejoicing to be saved from endless low effort posts on the front page. Daily Threads seem as healthy as ever. The most charitable interpretation - the new rules & mods are saving us all from the worst-of-the-worst low effort content. The least charitable interpretation - the mods are evil, power tripping, and preventing me from arguing about whether or not to include the value of my 1st Edition Gen 1 Pokemon holographic card collection in my net worth. If you want to see some of the garbage that is getting groomed by the mod team, click this link and control-f search for "[removed]" and read the title attributes... its not pretty. This is the first 1000 posts starting from 10/3/19 as a recent sample: [link] [comments]  |
| Has anyone heard when and where the Playing with FIRE documentary will be available for streaming? Posted: 06 Nov 2019 02:54 PM PST |
| What ways might Soc Security be means tested? Posted: 06 Nov 2019 02:40 PM PST I am planning to RE with three income streams: a pension, money from my nest egg, and some very low effort online work which I will gradually phase out later when Soc Sec kicks in. An article today from Motley Fool came up on my news feed that there are proposals to use a pension as a criterion for the Windfall Elimination Provision to lower soc security payouts. https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/11/05/heres-how-having-a-pension-affects-your-social-sec.aspx That would suck since I contributed to this pension and had a lower salary because the pension was part of my compensation. What other proposals are there to means test social security, and how likely are they? [link] [comments]  |
| Weekly Self-Promotion Thread - November 06, 2019 Posted: 06 Nov 2019 12:07 AM PST Self-promotion (ie posting about projects/businesses that you operate and can profit from) is typically a practice that is discouraged in /r/financialindependence, and these posts are removed through moderation. This is a thread where those rules do not apply. However, please do not post referral links in this thread. Use this thread to talk about your blog, talk about your business, ask for feedback, etc. If the self-promotion starts to leak outside of this thread, we will once again return to a time where 100% of self-promotion posts are banned. Please use this space wisely. Link-only posts will be removed. Put some effort into it. [link] [comments]  |
| How possible is it for me to eventually become a billionaire? Posted: 06 Nov 2019 03:18 PM PST Throwaway because personal details. Also I just wanted some feedback. I was pulling an all-nighter for no reason and randomly decided to play around with a compount interest calculator and spreadsheets. I feel like this is possible at least by the end of my life. Why? I don't know. The goal. The accomplishment. The potential to be in the top few thousand in wealth. If I'm being honest, I'd probably just donate the money. The fact that it feels possible makes me want to try. Background Information I grew up near the San Francisco or Sillicon Valley area, immigrant parents from a developing country working IT jobs. Dad is also into stocks. My parents were quite frugal, and while I'd be jealous of other kids who lived 'better' lives, I understand how great it was that they were, especially with the kind of money they were probably making. Later moved to a place a few hours from their hometown because my grandparents had health problems, hard transition for me though. The lower cost of living must have been good too I guess. Made it through high school and now I'm an 18yr old who studies computer science at a university in the midwest. I don't know if I will continue to do computer science though. My calculations I know these calculations don't factor into account taxes on the profits I make, but I still do think it is still possible. Please do correct me if I am wrong. It is a somewhat conservative estimate too. Again, this is just something I did while pulling an all-nighter so I have no clue if it would even work. The 10% rate of return for the initial part of these comes from S&P500 or Nasdq Index, with potential to time the market, which should get at least 10% annually. The 20% rate of return for the second part is admittedly a random number I chose that happened to give me over a billion as the answer. However, many companies do cross this at some point so it should be possible. I could also try to time the market with index funds and real estate. Or just do real estate. While the invested amount starts off rather high, these calculations also assume I don't receive promotions or set up other sources of income. They do also assume that I keep my job. The second part does assume that I use my entire NW to invest, but given that I have tried to be somewhat conservative in other parts, and that it assumes I don't get a promotion or do a side hustle, I think it isn't too innaccurate. If I were to invest 50,000 a year for 30 years at a 10% rate of return, compounded 12 times annually, that would get me to 9.4 million. Then, if I were to 'retire' and spend time investing in stocks, real estate, and maybe smaller companies… Investing 9.4 million at 20% for 30 years compounded once annually would get me to 2.2billion This is twice what I would need, and should account for whatever taxes is imposed on this, right? Challenges
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| Raised Very Wealthy and Can’t Recalibrate Posted: 06 Nov 2019 10:59 AM PST Hey guys, please don't flame me for this. I'm not rich, far from it. I have a NW of ~40k at 25 due to what is essentially my own inability to save money. I grew up not really understanding the concept that things cost money and that I can't just get whatever I want. My parents imparted on me things like waiting to get what I wanted or not getting the amount of something I wanted, but I always got what I wanted in the end. Things basically didn't have a cost, they had a waiting period. I'm not blaming my parents, I lived a great life but it's left me with little ability to recalibrate to "normal" living. Things like business class to Europe now cost $5k for one person and that's a ridiculous amount of money now that I'm on my own but I didn't realize what a luxury it was at the time. My parents don't support me in any way and haven't since college, as they shouldn't. I make great money working in finance but I just can't shake the $250 here $600 there purchases or dinners leading to bam racking up like $5k of ridiculous spending in one month. I feel like I need financial therapy or something, I just can't recalibrate and it's resulted in me not saving any money despite earning a great living. I'm surrounded by people who make an insane amount of money, more than I could ever imagine, so that also hasn't helped in terms of warping my view of money. Any advice would really be appreciated. This isn't a "feel bad for me" post, I genuinely want advice as I cannot keep working 18 hour days 6 days a week for the rest of my life while saving only my 401k. I want to FIRE and maintain a lifestyle that my parents wouldn't be embarrassed of. I'm not trying to be snarky, but I want to have my parents be proud of me and be able to brag that I saved all this money and can live a good lifestyle without having to work. I'm genuinely brutally sad about my working conditions and how I've been unable to save any money while working 100 hour weeks, I'm really down right now so please be nice. [link] [comments]  |
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