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A comment on Why I Quit My Job to Travel the World. Parent comment

Re:Why I Quit My Job to Travel the World by cpursley on Monday June 06, 2016 @01:45PM (#11848669)
Maybe this goes without saying, but the average family in North America lives well above their means. Rent to own furniture, a leased lexus for the wife and ginormous pickup truck for the office job husband, dinner and drinks out multiple times per week etc. when you can find everything you need for a comfortable material existence used on craigslist, cook at home, etc. It's possible if you have gainful employment and discipline. I didn't have either of these in my 20s. Now that I do, I'm focused on avoiding the seemingly inevitable "I deserve it" lifestyle inflation and "It's only $xxx per month" debt.

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2013/02/22/getting-rich-from-...

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Re:Why I Quit My Job to Travel the World by rfrank on Monday June 06, 2016 @01:47PM (#11848691)
> Rent to own furniture, a leased lexus, dinner and drinks out multiple times per week etc.

You really think that's how most Americans live?

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Re:Why I Quit My Job to Travel the World by djloche on Monday June 06, 2016 @02:00PM (#11848819)
no, most Americans live worse than that. They finance their entire life. The education, the house, the cars, the furniture, the food, the everything. If you want it all, and have the cashflow, you can have it all for a set of minimum monthly payments that leaves you with little actual cash in the bank and an increasingly large debt to pay.
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Re:Why I Quit My Job to Travel the World by cylinder on Monday June 06, 2016 @02:20PM (#11848973)
It's the eternal blind optimism of Americans. What's the monthly payment? Oh, I can swing that! My salary is X and always will be, or higher! Never mind that these been a recession about every eight years during my lifetime!
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Re:Why I Quit My Job to Travel the World by kmonsen on Monday June 06, 2016 @02:14PM (#11848932)
I don't know about the details of what you said, but one more thing I find important is that even if you could afford it you take away at least one year of saving for the future.

I try to work hard these days to pay off my mortgage early and save for retirement. Using my current savings and loosing one of my good years of income seems like something that should at least be mentioned.

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Re:Why I Quit My Job to Travel the World by gozur88 on Monday June 06, 2016 @02:39PM (#11849136)
I can't help wondering how many of these mid-career vacationers the rest of us will be supporting when they run out of money later in life.
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Re:Why I Quit My Job to Travel the World by coldtea on Monday June 06, 2016 @03:08PM (#11849409)
Or how many of those didnt-vacation-and-now-I-spew-bitterness -and-lost-my-savings-anyway-due-to-buying-a-house-or-other-bs we mid-career vacationers will be supporting...
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Re:Why I Quit My Job to Travel the World by gozur88 on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @04:25AM (#11853135)
I'll play the odds.
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Re:Why I Quit My Job to Travel the World by coldtea on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @08:17AM (#11853897)
I wouldn't. The mid-career vacationing types tend to do better than the "go-with-the-defaults" drones, and they have some life experience to shelter bad times too.
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Re:Why I Quit My Job to Travel the World by gozur88 on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @03:44PM (#11857195)
No, they aren't.
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Re:Why I Quit My Job to Travel the World by mratzloff on Monday June 06, 2016 @01:54PM (#11848757)
[citation needed]
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Re:Why I Quit My Job to Travel the World by mratzloff on Monday June 06, 2016 @04:54PM (#11850273)
Your first link is about credit card debt, and your second link is about a family with no credit. You can't link the two. What point are you trying to make? You said this:

Maybe this goes without saying, but the average family in North America lives well above their means. Rent to own furniture, a leased lexus for the wife and ginormous pickup truck for the office job husband, dinner and drinks out multiple times per week etc.

But none of your links actually back that up. If we're trading personal anecdotes, fine, but otherwise you're caricaturing the average family as struggling because of (I would guess based on your implication) stupidity and greed. This doesn't seem to match my experience of the "average" family, but it is common dog whistle language.

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Re:Why I Quit My Job to Travel the World by cpursley on Monday June 06, 2016 @01:56PM (#11848785)
Not sure why I'm getting downvotes. I can't reply to the person below, but yes, this is how most folks live according to the stats and my observations. Everything is financed. Working from home in a suburban Atlanta neighbourhood, at least once per week I see a rent-to-own furniture truck unloading something at a neighbors home. I don't even own a TV because my priorities are different.
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Re:Why I Quit My Job to Travel the World by rfrank on Monday June 06, 2016 @02:08PM (#11848885)
Have some stats that aren't from mrmoneymoustache.com? You may want to give this a read in the meantime: http://killermartinis.kinja.com/why-i-make-terrible-decision...
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