Financial Independence Daily FI discussion thread - Sunday, November 21, 2021 |
- Daily FI discussion thread - Sunday, November 21, 2021
- Book review: 'Phantom' by Keisuke Hada, a Japanese novel about FIRE
- What were your emotional turning points, savings-wise?
- If 20% of the U.S. population began to follow the FIRE philosophy, what would any economic impact look like?
| Daily FI discussion thread - Sunday, November 21, 2021 Posted: 21 Nov 2021 02:02 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] |
| Book review: 'Phantom' by Keisuke Hada, a Japanese novel about FIRE Posted: 21 Nov 2021 06:26 AM PST (tl;dr) This Japanese novel, not available in English translation, is a fairly dark but nuanced story about a young woman who attempts to FIRE and risks getting lost in the spreadsheets. Hanami is a woman in her early thirties, childless, unmarried, working an office job at the Japanese branch of an American food manufacturer in Chiba. She earns a mediocre salary but saves every yen she can and invests it into the stock market – preferably into U.S. stocks because they pay out higher dividends than Japanese ones. To save up the capital for her investments, Hanami cuts costs wherever she can. She has invested a lot of energy into finding a rent-controlled apartment and drives an extremely small and cheap car. Her social life too is subjected to a strict savings regime. In the opening passage of the novel, Hanami receives a wedding invitation from an old acquaintance. She quickly estimates what it would cost her to attend the party, a little more than 10,000 yen ($100, more or less). Then she starts calculating in her head:
In the end, Hanami goes for the money and declines the invitation. Her future self – the sixty-two-year-old woman whom she imagines long happily retired on her investments – takes precedence over both her current and future social obligations. Some people think of early retirement as a quest for self-realization, a way of building a more fulfilled and less consumption-driven life for yourself. But Hada paints a darker picture of the FIRE mindset. Hanami is motivated primarily by fear and by a desire to "get on the side of the exploiters" before it is too late for her. Working conditions at her company have recently deteriorated because the US management has been putting the squeeze on the Japanese branch: people are getting fired, benefits are getting cut. Hanami does not grumble like her co-workers but feels compelled to buy more of her company's stock instead. She has also quit smoking long ago, preferring to put her cigarette money into high-dividend tobacco stocks. Tied up with this fear-driven urge to get on the winning team are deeper anxieties about aging and the passing of time. Hanami loves to go surfing – she particularly loves the feeling of living only in the now as she rides the waves. Will she still be able to enjoy life that way when she is older and will have more time? Will the money that means so much to her now still be of any importance then? A recurring theme throughout the novel is the "ghostly" quality of the money that Hanami accumulates. As long as it consists only of numbers in her brokerage account, it does not feel real and fulfilling to her. But actually putting it to use in the here and now would defeat the purpose of building a dividend-paying machine that will sustain her future. Hanami's boyfriend Naoyuki – a lackadaisical guy who has coasted through life on his good looks alone and usually spends his money as soon as he receives it– finally becomes the catalyst to her inner conflict. He introduces her to the 'Village': a hybrid online/offline community founded by a charismatic YouTuber. The members of the Village also want to escape from the corporate rat race, but they believe in the imminent collapse of the fiat currency system and try to circumvent this by establishing a money-less society. Their rural commune works on a trust-based bartering system whose members trade each other goods and services. The rest of the novel plays out less as a conflict between this belief system and FIRE ideology than as an internal struggle for Hanami as she finds out more about the 'Village', and also about its darker side. Hada's novel is at its strongest when it examines these inner struggles and truly gets into the head of its protagonist, an unlikable but complex woman. (Conversely, the story loses some of its focus towards the end as the author attempts to cram in other themes.) 'Phantom' is remarkable in several aspects. It is a nuanced if bleak take on the ways people confront the twin problems of money and time. Hanami with her borderline pathological obsession with money is hardly a flawless character, but neither are the other people that populate her world – her spendthrift co-workers, her aging parents who never saved enough and are now confronted with serious money problems, and of course the cult-like members of the 'Village'. Hada never judges these characters, even if they sometimes seem like caricatures; he prefers to observe them and use them to examine various aspects of his overarching theme. Also notable about 'Phantom' is that this book – to my knowledge the first 'serious' novel ever about the modern FIRE philosophy – was not written by an American but by a Japanese. Keisuke Hada, who won the Akutagawa prize in 2015 and is considered a writer of highbrow junbungaku in Japan, attempts to use ideas about finance imported from abroad as a lens to examine social and cultural fault lines in Japanese society. Hanami's dream of FIRE is also a dream of America. She learns English to read investing websites, she watches US television series about rich people whose apartments seem improbably big compared to her cramped room, and she pictures herself living in New York as she listens to Miles Davis while driving her miniature car to work. The Village (ムラ), conversely, represents nostalgic ideas of communal living that are presented as typically Japanese, but also some social pathologies that the author ties to events in recent Japanese history. As with the other questions it raises, the book never provides an easy answer to this conflict. It invites you instead to reexamine your own beliefs about money, about time, and about what constitutes a life well-lived. [link] [comments] |
| What were your emotional turning points, savings-wise? Posted: 21 Nov 2021 07:51 AM PST Compared to many on this sub, I have relatively little savings. I have an emergency fund of $20k and about $220k invested (besides retirement accounts). My investment dollars are mostly active savings, not so much gains, as I've only recently learned not to bother with individual stocks (I made some mistakes). I've been watching it grow for a few years now, and introspecting what the money means to me. I think of it in terms of increments of years in Mexico. I feel like I could live in Mexico for about $20k/year and be fine. I felt pretty good about the $100k threshold, by comparison $200k didn't feel as significant. It made me wonder how you guys evaluate your savings and what are some of your financial thresholds, where you noticed that you relaxed a bit, in terms of feeling like you had FU money. [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 21 Nov 2021 10:23 PM PST Let's assume they followed it at a median level of aggressiveness, whatever that means to you. [link] [comments] |
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