My experiences of working both in the US and in Europe (Germany and Switzerland) was that the number of hours worked in the US was higher, but the intensity of work was lower: There was more office chitchat, more goofing around, more "watercooler/coffee talk", and so forth. There is also an extreme culture of "presenteeism" in the US that starts in highschool (where being physically present is much more important than being attentive in any form).
This is an important point, and kinda scary; because I'm now actively aware of it and how I haven't viewed it this way before.
I wonder if the European attitude is just more similar to mine, being comfortable with and accepting of a job as a backdrop to build a life around, rather than something intolerable to escape from ASAP at any cost. Probably has to do with the jobs themselves being more comfortable.
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/financial-independence-...
It's foolish to focus just on enjoying your job right now, finances be damned, without planning for the future. For what it's worth, I think it's also foolish to despise your job every day for years and years just to retire a few years earlier. But that's not what FIRE is, that's just one group of people taking it to extremes, as is common in any endeavor. For most people, it just means diligently and consistently setting money aside that will give them a level of freedom that those who don't will never achieve.
It's not about hating your job (or even loving your job) - it's about buying your own independence. For those without family wealth it's building your own safety net and bringing money related anxiety to zero and making it easier for your children to take bigger risks too.
This lets you take more risk (like doing a startup) with the downside risk contained. There's a reason startups are more often started by people with family wealth, they're ultimately risking a lot less.
Americans work hard in part because there's more upside potential than in Europe, but there's also more downside risk. I think we could do more to protect the lower bound which would be good for entrepreneurship and society, but we shouldn't put restrictions on the upside (I'd argue restricting upside disincentives risk taking and wealth creation).
One of my main 'contrarian' opinions is that wealth inequality isn't actually a big deal, and as long as you protect the lower bound is desirable in a society. You also need to control how that wealth is leveraged into political power though (and that can be a problem).
Retirement on a normal schedule and security for a few months of rest here and there are, I would say, baseline financial responsibility (if you can afford them). These are marginal sacrifices, not a lifestyle/subculture.
Last year I bought a dirt cheap (sub-100k) house in the countryside with good internet because I don't _ever_ want my boss to have the power to take the roof over my kids' heads. I am not quite FIRE but it certainly helps.
"A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well—this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole."
Furthermore, we have more free time/vacation, nicer hours, less commuting, and what not. So you often don't feel like you're living at work - or even worse, work that you hate.
And it is possible to live the FIRE-lifestyle here, if you plan ahead and live somewhat frugally. But still, there's an expectation that you contribute to the system.
I have a dream that someday the "workplace <-> health insurance" link will be broken in the US. For a few years I thought we might have had a chance, but it seems to have become a back-burner issue again.
The thing that is most maddening about employer-sponsored health insurance is the people who have it don't realize how big of a gulf there is between what is affordable for them vs others in terms of health care.
I have friends with good employer health insurance that go to the doctor over every little cough and sniffle and funny rash.
I have decent health insurance, but it costs enough and has a high enough deductible that every potential trip to the doctor is prefaced with "Is this an issue worth $100?" That's a pretty high bar to clear. Usually you go to the doctor and the answer is "well just wait and see if it goes away." That's not $100 worth of advice.
And if it's after hours, you're looking at closer to $500 minimum. I can't count the number of times my wife and I have debated "Is this bleeding bad enough for a $500 bill?" when one of the kids does something dumb and gets hurt.
I actually like this (generally speaking) as it causes you to bear some of the upfront cost and allows you an easy way to question the value of an action. With that being said, we should all be able to email our PCP to get answers to questions or schedule 15 minutes video calls.
I’m not against UHC, I think as I’ve mentioned before there are merits to both approaches (we just happen to do neither in the US). What I like about “is this worth $100” is that it introduces some upfront personal responsibility and decision making versus “well I sneezed let’s go to the doctor it’s free!!”.
I just wish it was a more evenly distributed fee. I don't particularly mind that it's expensive to get care (I wish it was a bit less expensive), but the fact that I know so many people who go there seemingly on a whim precisely because it's cheap is frustrating.
Does the set of Affordable Care Act healthcare plans that can be purchased by individuals by themselves qualify as breaking the link? I know that they're not all perfect, but it seems like a step in the right direction.
$2000-$4000/mo family plans?
It's a mortgage with only downsides and no appreciation.
The upside is you get health care.
As it stands now, I think the last I checked a family plan costs ~$3k / month for me.
If I qualified for subsidies, I could get the same plan free. And I think that was also factoring in my current income, only changing whether my employer offered a health plan.
Edit:
Looked it up. In November 2019, the cheapest family plan available on the marketplace in my area was a "Catastrophic" level plan with a $16,300 total deductible for $1217.90 / month.
It's not about having to quit your job. It's about having the option to quit if you decide to. Should you decide not to quit you can keep earning money, without having any real need for it, which means you can invest and get even more money.
It's great that you enjoy your job _today_ (you are probably a minority). But what about 5 years from now? 10 years? Whatever you are working on may change. If you are an employee, your manager could be replaced by a crappy one. If you own your company, the market forces might change.
Not having your job tied to your ability to put food on the table frees you to do whatever you may decide to do.
As a Berliner, this is what most of my colleagues aim at. They all have colourful lives outside the office setting.
More importantly, those were just examples. Replace teaching with running a bookstore or tending to a community garden or living on a sailboat in the Med and all of a sudden, professorship isn't nearly as desirable. You can always find someone to teach after a long career in industry, no need to lock yourself into academia. :)
Everyone has different life experiences. Many people have had bad experiences and believe early retirement to be their best option.
I hope you can broaden your mind to at least emphasize with people who do not entity their job.
You want people to work harder? Pay them more for it. Or at least fairly
But linking pay-to-product can be a hard problem!
Long story short (I have refactored this comment a few times), employees are "significant investors" in the business and should be paid as such.
Stock options are a perfect example of this.
Note the "significant" bit though. Most places with "stock options" do it as a token option. A bargaining chip of employment, to negotiate and minimise costs for the company. In Australia, mostly not an option at all.
Which leads to your: "You want people to work harder? Pay them more for it. Or at least fairly"
Or as I think: If I don't have skin in the game then why should I care?
But I have to admit, I have also seen this behaviour in European engineers, so it is not unexpected.
- Swedes do clock out after 8 hours, but they work all that time.
- Americans can spend a lot more time at work, but there is a lot of "just hanging out" going on.
That's the beauty of being FI anyways, if you want to work then work. If you don't want to work then don't work. Simple as that.
This isn't rocket science, workaholics.
My wife once talked to an elderly lady that was working in her 80s because she said she had nothing to do, as she had worked all her life in multiple jobs.
I guess imagination gets eroded when you are conditioned to be a wage slave for too long.
Edit: all the constant activity (always had hobbies on the side too) has kept her in good physical shape plus decent diet and she's Japanese. Definite oba-tank who will probably soldier on well past 100.
I'm not saying the system is great - I'm in favor of single-payer system overall. But tying access to health insurance to employment as a default mindset really has to be stopped, somehow.
Everyone's paying it, in one manner or another, either through subsidies, or employer contributions, or paying direct. These are the average costs (relative to location and age) for health insurance plans from for-profit health insurance companies.
But the context was with respect to people planning to retire in their 50s. Plenty of people budget for car payments, and they can budget for health insurance costs too.
14.6% of your wage is the health insurance deductible, 4.687,50 EUR is the so-called "Beitragsbemessungsgrenze", that is the cap from which on your wage is free - it's regularly adjusted (upwards usually).
You can reach that maximum if you are self employed and voluntarily member of the public health insurance - meaning you have to pay both the employers and the employees share. If you're employed, your employer pays about half of it.
Your chosen health insurance can optionally add an extra fee, usually less than a percent or two, most are free.
Also, that "maximum/wage" thing - is that per person, or for a household (spouse/kids/etc)?
The cap is per wage, so every person earning a wage gets the same cap applied to their individual income. (one of the ways that households with a single high earner profit, while two people earning a moderate wage have less). No bonus for kids here, buy if you're member of the public health insurance, your kid is covered for free.
Maybe instead of trying to paint the problem of american healthcare access as a mindset issue, you can recognize that there are many legitimate problems with linking healthcare to employment.
Why should anyone go broke over a medical expense? Why in a developed country? Why is that only a common fear in the US?
"can you really stop working in your 50s when the health problems come and you realize you now need your employer for the health insurance?"
If you get to your 50s, think you can retire, and don't have a plan for this stuff, you're out of touch.
I did some work for a small insurance broker - about 15 employees. They provided health insurance for all employees. They invited me to a few company meetings, and the owners asked what people thought the cost of the insurance was, per month, per person. Lots of $100 and $150/month guesses. I said '$600'. Someone laughed, and the owner said "you're close - it's $586". The room went silent. It was going to be going up to, IIRC, something like $630/month, and he was preparing people for "hey, we're going to cover this, but we're probably not going to be able to do much else, or may have to cut back some minor reimbursement stuff."
People often think of their insurance as good (or will respond so on surveys), until they actually call upon it and it evaporates, leaving them with multiple hundred-thousand-dollar bills related to the treatment of cancer.
Well, in all fairness, my and my wife's health care in the USA has been WAY better than it was in Japan. It costs like 20x as much, though. That's my theory as to why nobody in power wants to actually fix the US system. Maybe the system really is the best if you have unlimited money and unlimited tolerance for bureaucracy
Some people will do just fine with their hobbies and projects, others will have a hard time adapting - many even coming out of retirement, due to boredom. Really depends on the individual.
One thing I've heard a lot, from older colleagues, is that people tend to become mentally dull once they go into retirement - at least on the skills they used daily at work.
You need to be pretty disciplined and motivated to maintain your skills at a professional level, once there's no hurry or pressure to deliver anything. Days turn into weeks, weeks into months, months into years - before you know it, you've spent a couple of years of your retirement just chilling around.
As a US based developer with almost 20 years of experience across four cities and (as a consultant) many different corporate cultures, I've never met a single person who consistently works 10+ hour days, or more than 5 days per week.
As somehow who has worked for a shorter period of time, I've met dozens of such folk, many of which I have provided support for on weekends or odd times at night.
In either case, anecdotes are not adding much to the discussion.
Strikes me how similar this is to the mentality in adolescence so prevalent: once I get to college, then I’ll start “living”!
We just keep kicking the can.
There is a medical cost cliff at 65 when Medicare (large medical subsidies for retired-aged people) kicks in, but the private medical costs of an old-but-not-quite-65 person are pretty high, especially in the USA where pretty much all food is optimized to overload your senses (and as a side-effect, your pancreas).
It goes much deeper than that. The notion that work could not possibly be "living" is much more popular in Europe too. With employment so over-regulated and entrepreneurship discouraged it's easy to see why people treat "work" in a very transactional way.
For most people there just isn't a lot of obvious upside waiting for them if they work extra hard. Salaries are extremely compressed compared to the US. The only way to make real money[0] in Europe is by running a business but that's discouraged too.
Even education - there's no Ivy League of Europe, there's no Stanford. There are some schools that may be considered good, but elite - not really.
[0] well I guess anywhere, but there are many diverse career paths in the US that will reliably get you to a few hundred k. In Europe not so much.
That's because in Europe social welfare contributions are usually deducted from your salary automatically, thereby making it lower. Which, however, doesn't necessarily mean you're getting less.
> Even education - there's no Ivy League of Europe, there's no Stanford. There are some schools that may be considered good, but elite - not really.
Elite on what scale? I've had the pleasure to see what [math/physics] research at various universities in the US and in Europe looks like and I don't think there is any difference in quality. How would there be one? I think I remember reading somewhere that about 50% of STEM professors in the US are from outside the US.
Besides, the Ivy League-related elitism in the US to a large degree comes from the marketing that those schools (need to) do. They are private institutions after all – in contrast to most European universities –, so they need to maintain that myth.
Of course you're getting less. If you're not using any of the programs you're getting a terrible deal. If you want private healthcare you're going to have to pay for it yourself (and it will only cover basics). I never used a government program once in my life. Actually I'm not even covered by the socialized healthcare. Not that I would like to be, but if I get seriously sick as in cancer there isn't a viable private option. But for normal doctors and procedures I can pay cash just fine.
But either way you cannot explain the differential with just taxes. There are many places in Europe where you might end up paying less as a percentage than America. It's regulation and overall culture too.
Not to mention all sizable EU countries have a lower GDP per capita. Economically they're just inferior.
> Elite on what scale?
No, the point isn't that these schools produce people of vastly superior intelligence or skill. The point is a 15 year old in high school does not feel a lot of pressure to work super hard to get into an "elite" institution, because it's simply not on the radar for most people. .
Just like most people don't have a prospect of a promotion offering vastly superior pay, they don't have a prospect of a school offering vastly superior opportunities.
Exactly!
Even in a fairly well paid European country like Germany the salaries are a joke for high performers.
It is difficult as a dev to earn, even after a decade of experience and working incredibly hard, more than €100k/year.
But a good junior with 1-2 years of experience can earn €50k/year.
So you can’t even make double after taxes of what a junior makes. Almost no matter how hard you work.
And yet you could take it easy and have a great work life balance and after a decade be earning €80k/year.
In the world's top 20, there are 10 North American universities and 7 European universities at the moment[1]. That's not such a huge difference, given the fact, that undergraduate degrees in most European countries are only taught in the local language. As a result, only universities in the UK and Switzerland are able to reach the "elite" status – and these countries combined are much smaller than the US.
[1] https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-un...
While "most" might be true quantitatively, from what I've seen most of local "best" schools do offer studies in English. Most top schools in Germany seem to offer this. Even an American could get in on these super cheap deals. But there aren't that many takers (from the US). Given the enormous cost differential you'd think people would be storming these schools.
I have some Indian friends that attend such a program at a local university. From talking to them most wanted to go to US (some Canada) but couldn't get in or afford it and this was their second choice. Also none are planning to stay.
The rankings, again, I have to dispute. The best way to rank schools would be to actually ask people which schools they'd go to if cost/admissions wasn't a factor.
Even in Germany, probably 90% of the undergraduate courses are taught in German only. The percentage of postgraduate courses available in English is much higher, though. Still, most professors are required to be able to teach in the local language. Therefore, the number of international faculty members outside the UK and Switzerland is very limited.
Because there isn't a lot of demand for English courses? Otherwise you'd expect them to increase prices and offer more English courses.
We can go even further - if Germany really offers anything close to an American standard of living and education you'd expect many people would learn German and go live there.
That's because the first undergraduate degree is completely free for all Germans.
> We can go even further - if Germany really offers anything close to an American standard of living and education you'd expect many people would learn German and go live there.
My entire point was, that European universities outside the UK and Switzerland are unable to compete with the US schools, because they are very unattractive options for foreign professors who don't speak the local language.
This is in part because research is organized differently in other countries. Lots of world-class research happens in Germany, but in research institutes rather than universities.
For anybody living outside of the UK, going there isn't all that different from going to the US. The tuition is only somewhat cheaper too I think. As opposed to most "best" schools in mainland Europe being essentially free for locals.
So I'd assume any kid in Europe planning to go to Oxford is probably planning to apply to American schools too.
And not sure how reliably you could get accepted too. Like say for myself, when I was younger I really wanted to go to one of the top US schools (ended up not going to any). It was pretty obvious to me I'd never get accepted if I went to a local high-school so went to a prep-school in the US. The UK, I assume, has their equivalent of that too.
The EU citizens from outside the UK are able to study in Scotland without paying any tuition fees.
The University of Edinburgh is as highly ranked internationally, as Yale, Columbia, and Cornell[1].
The University of St Andrews is as highly ranked locally, as Cambridge and Oxford[2].
> So I'd assume any kid in Europe planning to go to Oxford is probably planning to apply to American schools too.
That's completely wrong. Almost nobody is considering the US when applying to the universities in England, because England offers Tution Fee Loan to all EU students, that only needs to be repaid when one's income is over the repayment threshold[3].
However, this might end in 2021, because of Brexit.
[1] https://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/world-un...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/education/ng-interactive/2019/ju...
[3] https://www.ucas.com/finance/student-finance-england/tuition...
I stand corrected on this then.
> The University of Edinburgh is as highly ranked internationally, as Yale, Columbia, and Cornell
The rankings I have to disagree with, I'd like to see something that compared expected income or net worth for graduates.
Let's say you're given an opportunity to go to "University of Edinburgh" or Yale with all costs paid for. I think you'll have a hard time finding people who would pick the former.
Universities are primarily ranked by the quality of their research output, not by the expected net worth of their graduates.
> Let's say you're given an opportunity to go to "University of Edinburgh" or Yale with all costs paid for. I think you'll have a hard time finding people who would pick the former.
At least in Europe, a graduate of University of Edinburgh would be worth as much as a graduate of Yale in most industries, including finance, law and tech. They would have equal chances of getting a banking job in London, or working for a FAANG company in Zurich.
The Ivy League only really matters, if one wants to live in the US. And most Europeans don't. Because Europe is not about becoming super rich, but about never becoming poor.
For instance, in my EU country I can take as many years off as I want, and still remain fully covered by the national health insurance by paying just 40€ / month. If a broke my leg tomorrow, it wouldn't cost me anything at all.
Therefore, I couldn't care less about being "a high net-worth individual" as long as I don't need to stress about the basic things in life, and have enough freedom to work only with – or for – the companies I really like.
Of course not. You'll still have a better network even if you don't stay in America. Say if you need VC funding for your startup in Europe, you'll be dealing with Americans sooner than later. Or if you're dealing with China or India, they share the same preference too. It'll help. And although there aren't that many truly private European VCs I sincerely doubt they wouldn't notice.
I doubt most people outside of the UK know the University of Edinburgh. Everybody knows the top US schools. Never heard of anybody bragging about a University of Edinburgh credential.
I'm not even remotely a fan of higher education or the academia at all. But nonetheless like most people I would notice if somebody had a highly-coveted credential.
> At least in Europe, a graduate of University of Edinburgh would be worth as much as a graduate of Yale in most industries, including finance, law and tech. They would have equal chances of getting a banking job in London, or working for a FAANG company in Zurich.
That point is moot, obviously you couldn't do any major hiring if you expected American credentials in Europe.
Yet, the reverse likely isn't true. A Yale credential would open more doors in America and wouldn't close any in Europe. Hence it's superior.
My point was, that for 99% of Europeans living in Europe, there is absolutely no difference between a degree from Yale and a degree from University of Edinburgh.
Therefore, given a chance, probably 60-70% would still go to the UK rather than the US, just because it's much closer from home.
Even if I was poor I'd rather stay in the EU.
But from talking with them, it seems like their focus is on retirement - hopefully in their 50's. That's their grand plan, because that's when they'll start "living".
It's a bit of a contrast to us Scandinavians - as we really like to live in the present. No pie in the sky dreams.
Which is also why we guard our working rights and work-life balance like a national treasure.