I live way more frugally these days. I don’t intentionally scrimp and save, I just find it difficult to spend what I make without buying $5,000 purses that will get donated when they’re way out of fashion in 2 years.
I know, I know: first world problems. But it’s emblematic of the wealth inequality in the US: a lot of people are struggling to make ends meet while some people have to invest effort into finding ways to spend the money they make.
This is fascinating. I suspect 99% of people simply don't care and can't even tell a $50 purse from $5000 one, and this Gucci vs Hermes rivarvly is only relevant for a tiny minority of sad snobs. Like the other poster said, good for you for ditching this.
It’s kind of ironic: these days, within my private world, my job and the money I make cause people to distrust me at first. Most of my friends make less than a quarter of what I make, so I have to be careful about new purchases (e.g. a friend of mine had been saving for a $2500 guitar which I could easily have bought on a whim — but I got a way cheaper one so as to not make her feel like shit because she is far more dedicated to her music than I am). At the same time I can’t buy my friends things like that because it distances me and makes them feel they owe me. I don’t see it like that — I feel the amount of money I make is arbitrarily unfair because I blindly made a career decision 20 years ago that worked out from me. But they do, so I have to be sensitive.
I still wear the flashy clothes, purses and shoes in a work context because they make me feel like a confident bad bitch and I’m client-facing. But I do it for me rather than the external validation (ok, and maybe a bit of imposter syndrome).
Also it’s entirely the same with the men so this isn’t a sexist thing — it’s just bespoke suits, shoes and watches for the guys. And a class ring on your finger if it’s from an Ivy. And this is true regardless of the kind of “business” — go to the music world and it’s all streetwear with $500 Supreme t-shirts and $2500 limited-edition sneakers; and the tech world has hoodies, bicycles, cars and the latest bleeding-edge tech. It’s all peacocking.
She was walking down the sidewalk an a woman coming the other way had an even more expensive purse which she turned toward her.
The expensive purse woman took a subtlety diagonal path to gradually force her to the side until she had to step behind a light post to avoid a collision.
Quite the power move hahaha.
They make their money by telling people that owning them sends a signal to others.
To me the biggest luxury in the world is being able to live reasonably happily within one's means and not having to worry about it. To think about one's finances as little as reasonably possible while not overspending and still getting to have fun with it sometimes, with the confidence that a reasonable amount of it is being saved for retirement someday. It doesn't require being rich, just having a sense of the value of things and the value of one's own time and life and life experiences, and getting good at quick, rough estimates of one's financial situation.
The more I have to worry about money the less happy I am, even if it's tons of money and I'm just figuring out how to best utilize it. Obsessing over money leads to a person thinking about nickel-and-dime bullshit throughout the day, every day. That's fun for some people, I get it, but they need to realize they're wasting time thinking about nickel-and-dime bullshit because it's fun to them, not because it's practical or pragmatic to do so. And that's fine if they want to do that, but they just tend to be miserable people to spend time with who are always missing the forest for the trees when living life.
In my opinion spending money is usually more work than it is worth, even without considering the time it takes to earn said money. Like, you have to go to the store, keep track of another item in your home which you basically never use, throw it away etc. Or go to a restaurant, order things, wait for 30 minutes just to eat and then wait to pay and so on. Or going on trips to exotic places, which mostly entails wasting a day sitting on a plane just to visit a country with barely functioning infrastructure.
So to me it looks like people work hard to spend their money for no reason at all and that is what keeps them miserable.
Why pay $10 for a salad when $20 can pay for a week of salads customized exactly the way you want. (and organic)
Money doesn’t just buy a different grade of items. It also buys a whole slew of novel experiences, of which you only get so many in your life.
Yeah, some amount of spending can make you happier.
Live while you're alive. You don't know when the bus is going to come around that corner a little too fast.
I would honestly never live like this, regardless of my financial goals. I hope the husband is actually enjoying it...
> I would honestly never live like this, regardless of my financial goals.
Yes you would. If your financial goal was to have enough money to put food on your table, you'd care less where that table was located.
And I also disagree; I have lived in a studio before.
But in this context -- owning a 4 bedroom house yet deciding to rent out the remaining rooms to live in one of the bedrooms -- it is indeed extreme frugality.
> Yes you would. If your financial goal was to have enough money to put food on your table, you'd care less where that table was located.
So you think that there are people out there who own a 4 bedroom house and have a 7 figure (?) household income and yet struggle to put food on the table??
Or do you just have trouble sticking to context?
To be fair you wrote "never", not "within this context".
I'll keep that to myself because I don't want to offend anyone and get downvoted, though a lot of it is drawn from what I was like when I dated someone like the author.
She only had to spend half of her post-China childhood in poverty before her mom started earning doctor money, but she still thought/behaved very much like the writer of this article. Though unlike the author, she hates her parents.
I see compulsive frugality as a boon in a capitalist society. Especially in the United States.
If you opt out of the growth is required mindset its perfectly possible there are other economic models which work just fine to live under despite the scary sounding descriptions.
The Japanese are committing suicide at higher rates than Americans[1], and a million of them have chosen to live as shut-ins rather than participate in society.[2] They're also not having children. Maybe that's your utopia but it sure isn't mine.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Japan [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomori
Or amphetamines, which are very illegal in Japan.
I lived there for half a year when my wife was teaching english after college and I wouldn’t want to go back. The dirty looks I got, the salarymen sucking their teeth at me, the houses I was denied from renting, the list goes on and on.
And I look white and put together. God help you if you’re black or an ‘inferior’ darker asian.
This guy.
I left Japan because I felt that the fabric of Japanese society was unraveling. Maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but at a minimum, the “social contract” was changing dramatically, and it was debatable whether the change was good or not. My opinion was that it was not.
Note, however, that I was not in Tokyo. Tokyo and the rest of Japan are basically different worlds. I may have a different opinion if I lived and worked there.
Things that made me sad:
- People with good, stable jobs were hyperconservative with their money, as though a crash had just happened or was imminent. This has killed the velocity of money in the country, and it’s terrible for the economy. Simple example, a group I used to be a member of used to have four big enkai (basically a party) at roughly between $100 and $250 a head (sometimes with hotel/onsen stayovers) as well as second, third, and fourth stops at additional bars. For folks with lesser means, the folks with greater means would pick up their share of the extra bars. Now that same group meets once a year at about $50-$60 a head and there is a 1-2 drink second bar. Incomes of the participants is the same or better than before. Note that I am not advocating one over the other, just that it’s indicative of the drastic slowing of the velocity of money in the economy.
- Once-proud towns are becoming villages (legal distinctions) and are having to merge into other towns. This has squashed a lot of the furusato identity, imo.
- Houses in provincial areas, some of them extremely nice, are either abandoned or only used during obon and maybe new year celebrations.
- Top students from top 20 universities are not guaranteed really good jobs any more. Decent ones, sure, but great ones? No. They are feeding much lower down on the food chain now.
- Ways for non-salarymen to have a good social/financial living have decreased dramatically. Far fewer OLs (love or hate the idea of them, they were a great way for men and women of a similar social status to meet/date/get married). For folks with no college, opening a little bar or snack is nothing like it used to be. It’s still possible, but the number of enterprising folks who can open a small bar and reasonably expect to make salaryman level of income or better (it the past, it was often much better) is far smaller than it used to be.
- Degree credentialing has become a thing. I think this was sort of brought over from the US, but the implementation has been terrible. For reference, in my department (I was a professor), the worst students and future professors were the only folks who applied to grad school. The worst students did so because they couldn’t get a job, and a masters degree would help them the next time around. The department took them for the money.
- My close friend and real estate agent and real estate manager actively discouraged me from buying a house. She said it was a bad investment unless you had access to privileged deal flow (like she did) or were going to die on that land (probably not that house).
I could go on. Needless to say, I did not think that my future in non-Tokyo Japan was going to be like living in some sort of utopia. Far from it.
I now live in California. It has its problems, too, but i much prefer it to where I was in Japan. Maybe Tokyo is different, but I wasn’t willing to make that bet over California.
Note that I love Japan, and there are certain aspects I miss about living there, but “great feelings about the current and future social fabric” is not one of them.
I thought about buying one in 2011-12, but there was a good chance I was going to leave the area, so I did not buy.
On a personal level, I’m not so concerned about buying a house in general. If I ever buy one, it will be as an investment at a rock bottom price.
Additionally, where I live, you can rent a place for much less than you can buy it. The only recent time that this was not true was after the crash, and that was only for a brief period of time (4 years tops).
I grew up poor, but not as poor as the lady in the article. And it was in Ireland, so there was a social security net, my college degree was paid for, etc. So I feel comfy enough once I have a year's take-home income in the bank. Past that point I feel good spending money on things my partner and I enjoy, things we may not have time for if we have kids or might not be able to do at all when we get old. Working hard is only good if the work in itself is rewarding, or the money buys you things that are rewarding. Money in itself doesn't really have that allure. A six or seven figure bank account wouldn't excite me - I've spent the best part of a million pounds since I started my career, and certainly don't regret not saving it.
The view of these proponents is usually that if you can max out savings for 10 years or so by living extremely frugally, the next 40 or 50 years of your life can be lived without having to seek employment, which seems reasonable if that’s what you care for.
OTOH many people find their careers soar with time, as they build experience, empathy and learn their way around how the corporate world works. The financial rewards get larger, but more interesting is the opportunity to solve tough technical problems (well, for me, as an engineer).
I also find it a little wasteful to not enjoy ones youth, which is not a time that will come back, and is likely the only time where you can experience life somewhat unattached and figure out what kind of partner would work best, what kind of personality works best, which city is a good one to lay roots etc.
This is a pretty restricted view of turn power of money. Charity and/or helping one's family is rewarding. Also rewarding, as the other commenter pointed out, is the freedom to not chopse between non-rewarding work and poverty.
The freedom to choose doesn't require enough income for a frugal lifetime without work. It just requires enough income to find a more rewarding job. The marginal benefit declines, the longer you look the more likely you are to find what you're searching for. That's why I only keep a year's worth of takehome on easy access (apart from my pension, house equity, etc.)
A life without a job is a life without purpose. People who retire early die early. Even outside a conventional job, money is proof that you create value; if there's no money in whatever activity you choose, it's probably a consumption good.
Do you have a link to the list of states?
(see citations)
“In 2012, the media reported the case of John Pittas, whose mother had received care in a skilled nursing facility in Pennsylvania after an accident and then moved to Greece. The nursing home sued her son directly, before even trying to collect from Medicaid. A court in Pennsylvania ruled that the son must pay, according to the Pennsylvania filial responsibility law.”
Also, my spouse's parents wouldn't necessarily require care, but honestly I'd really prefer if they came to live with us too.
I may be an outlier, but I see the nuclear suburban family lifestyle as a recipe for misery and loneliness. I look forward both to multigenerational living and to more dense walkable neighborhoods.
I married a woman with full knowledge we would have to support her mother who had cognitive issues due to a stroke.
I’m not sure where this idea came from that it is somehow an Eastern ideal to take care of your parents. It is common across many parts of Europe and the US.
Social Security is nice, but that’s just money. It doesn’t address the emotional and cultural aspects of keeping the elderly part of society.
I also budget about 10% toward educational purchases (equipment and services, mostly tech) for personal projects and learning, which I think will financially benefit me long term even if it means I save less now.
OP's $1.7M in investments? If I had that, yeah, I'd surely be saving 90% of it, too. Maybe 95%.
I've listened to enough financial independence podcasts to know that it's absolutely possible to hit a 90% savings rate. There are guests on the show who have done it on much less income than my family, and we'll be lucky if we hit 40%. It just depends on what assumptions of necessity you're willing to give up to do it.
Actually, to me, savings percentage isn't important as a bottom line number. It's just a helpful intermediate number for understanding cash flow. I'm much more interested in net wealth contribution and how that dials up to future plans involving large sums of money (e.g. moving or expanding house, education, letting go of wage income, major philanthropy, estate plans, risk management).
This article just feels like a vector to drive traffic towards her sites, though.