Liberty

http://waitbutwhy.com/2016/10/second-presidential-debate.html

If you can't tell the difference between comments about sexually assaulting women and those comments from Clinton, then you have serious problems. Edit: As a matter of fact, the response from the hardcore Trump supporters on these comments simply validates the accuracy of the "deplorables" comment. Exactly. I suppose it's the blind leading the blind...

"Character is what you do when nobody’s watching. This is Trump sober, mid-day, with someone he barely knows, while wearing a mic."

And this made this article be published early: http://nyti.ms/2dLMFdJ

Watch the video. Classy.. ::) https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-recorded-having-extremely-lewd-conversation-about-women-in-2005/2016/10/07/3b9ce776-8cb4-11e6-bf8a-3d26847eeed4_story.html

You missed my point. What I am saying is that a risk averse approach yields suboptimal results in life. Yes you can cut your spending down to an art, my point is it still wouldn't make much difference in your life. And if all you want is a simple living free of any modern conveniences, you might turn Amish. I think they beat MMM hands down and they've been doing it for ages. Buffet has become a poster boy for everything these days.Yes he lives simply but he is a capitalist and has billions of dollars. You and I don't and wouldn't get it just by living like him. And he risked a lot in his life. Anecdotal evidence and why this MMM riles me so much. An old friend of ours visited us last month. A 35 year old and a slave of PwC for 10 years. He told me how he just found out about MMM and would cut his spending by 50% and should be "retired" in 10 years. I asked him why don't he just quit now and open his own practice since he already has enough connections to gin up work. He said it is very risky and he doesn't know anything about opening a business He might consider doing it after he retires. A complete wuss who has an opportunity to retire in 2-3 years but instead chose the "safe" approach to slave himself away for 10 years by cutting things. I told him he should consider selling his kidney. Why keep an extra organ? And that is why MMM is so popular because it is a weak approach to wiggle out of your current situation in a "safe" way. The whole thing is a farce. If you are able to cut 50-70% of your spending, what does it say about you to start with? That you were a fool that was wasting away all that money and a blog figured it out for you. What about the job? If you hate it so much that you want to quit in 5-10 years. Aren't you wasting prime decades of your life working on the same job.People don't want to answer these questions because they are very inconvenient to your psyche. Instead "saving" for 10 years and dreaming about the life afterwards is "safe" so everyone follows that. No one wants to risk anything. And that is why these people would make terrible investors and entrepreneurs. These endeavors requires a lot of risk taking and comfort in an uncertain outcomes , a quality that just doesn't develop overnight. And no ,investing in 10 blue chip companies wouldn't make me an investor or an entrepreneur because it wouldn't move the needle for me. Its more akin to investing all your net worth in a nano cap. This is going in circles. I disagree with a lot of what you said. Taking a different path is risk taking, and MMM focuses a lot on increasing earnings, not just cutting expenses. MMM didn't hate his job, nor did I, we just wanted more freedom and variety. Anyway, let's stop here.

Liberty, I don't think there's much point arguing about thins, not that I don't enjoy the discussion. I think that this is a world view that if you don't get it in 5 minutes you'll just never get it. People are just wired differently. You brought in Buffett. For comparison purposes I'll take a polar opposite: Trump. Both are very rich and can afford to get anything that they want. One lives in Omaha in a larger but otherwise quite average house, works 9-5 and then goes home and watches Breaking Bad or whatever, and gets a good night sleep. The other lives in a gold plated penthouse in NYC, works insane hours, barely sleeps, and engages in twitter wars in the middle of the night. Both seem really happy with their lives. If you forced them to trade places that will probably both be so unhappy that suicide would not be out of the question. It's really as simple as that. Different strokes for different folks. I see people everyday, working ever longer hours. But they want bigger and bigger houses that they don't need. They can't afford them, so they decide to work even longer hours and buy then further away (where they're cheaper) and then they spend extra hours in traffic jams to commute back and forth every day. Then they have to spend more money to get extra crap to fill the bigger house, and more money on repairs and more time on cleaning. To me and maybe you just seems totally idiotic. But to them it makes perfect sense and I'm the idiot. Who knows? maybe I'm lazier than them. I just know that i really like my time :). Of course. The whole point is know thyself and do what truly makes you happy and fulfilled. If you thrive in a high-pressure environment and truly love luxury, that's fine. Nobody's pressuring anyone to go a certain route. The main problem is that most people just go with the flow and aren't even exposed to the alternatives that might actually work better for them. There's a huge machine that studies human psychology and has been iterating for decades on the best way to sell people stuff, and most of that comes from associating happiness and the good life with certain products and lifestyles that they want us to buy. They're very good at it, but it doesn't mean it's the way to go for everyone. People also don't understand the tradeoffs. Unless you are born wealthy, you usually have to make pretty big sacrifices to acquire all the stuff you think you need. You might sacrifice your time, your health, you might sacrifice your peace of mind or your family relations. The cliché can be true and the things you own can end up owning you because you can't get off the treadmill of bills coming in, so you become a slave to some job that you might not like all that much. And so you exchange quality time with your spouse and kids, or with a good book or friends, with time dealing with commuting and office politics and that power-hungry middle manager, etc. Trump might project that he's "tremendously" happy, but I'm not sure. He's a salesman first, pretty much playing a character every time he's in public. Trump seems both insecure and never satisfied (always needs more power, more money, more glory and fame).

Welcome to the board, DD. Don't worry, no boiling cauldrons here. Cheers!

Buffett is a great example of frugal living, as are many brk executives. He knows how he wants to live and what makes him happy and does exactly that, doesn't spend more just because he has more, doesn't clutter his life with the superficial trappings of success that he doesn't particularly care for. Would he be happier with 10 houses and yatchs and planes, drinking $5000 bottles of wine and eating caviar?

First off I didn't make any comments about you or your mindset. I know you only from your posts and you seem to be an intelligent person. So lets not take it personally. All I am saying is maybe this MMM guy works for a certain type of people and he may have helped them by showing a different path. But there is nothing revolutionary in the strategy and wouldn't benefit the society as a whole.I would much rather focus on the other side of equation i.e. earnings and growth with some risk involved. A good analogy is going long or shorting a stock. You can only short up to zero but are unlimited on the other side. Then why focus on something with limited potential. That doesn't mean you don't monitor your stock for a potential downside.Its just that your energy is focussed on maximum growth and you are not looking for scams ,shady companies.For a novice both would work well but long only is a better approach. The common lifestyle of most people is mind numbing and soul killing, as well as unhealthy in many ways. Cranking things up so they make more money isn't a solution. Rethinking the link between spending and happiness and between freedom and happiness is, imo, likely to have a much bigger effect on life satisfaction. I was taking the mmm approach long before his blog ever existed. I just think he's one of the best teachers of this approach. I think the main insight that he, and others, are trying to communicate is that we live in a world of incredible abundance and surplus. We're vastly richer than most people that ever lived, and than most people currently alive around the world. Even kings and queens of other eras had only few of the comforts that we take for granted today. Yet because of a few psychological phenomenons (hedonistic treadmill, relative value, peer pressure, etc), most people inflate their lifestyles to the breaking point, are stressed about money, keep comparing themselves to others who seem to be doing better (or to fictional characters on TV and in advertisment), and have no control over most of their time/life. I see the opposite of your analogy with long/short. Working a typical job can only get you so far because most of your waking hours for all your prime decades are called for. Being independent has so many more ways to be fulfilling, even if you still work as much. Freedom means having a choice. You seem to have found at least some independence through running a business. This is another common path. But I think the freedom probably matters more than the money. Would you go back to being an employee for more money? The mmm path certainly isn't the only one. But entrepreneurship isn't for everyone either.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/personal-finance/household-finances/house-prices-will-not-rise-forever-base-your-financial-decisions-accordingly/article32219135/

If everybody did it it wouldn't work. Isn't that the argument against the US lifestyle to begin with? You can also get the gist of Buffett's letters in an hour, but that's not the point, is it? And the only person funding my retirement is myself. I deferred spending in the past and made sacrifices to earn more so that I'd have surplus resources in the future. I bought time. There's no such thing as a free lunch. And as you know if you've read Mr. Money Mustache, he's been earning more than enough to live in retirement even if you remove the blog income, just by working on hobbies and side projects. The point isn't that you go to a beach and do nothing, but that you are free to work on what you want to how long you want; spend as much time with your family as you want, etc; for the kind of people who are motivated and disciplined enough to get to the point of FIRE, a lot of those side-projects are going to be good earners. Personally my work now is being an investor, but if I stopped enjoying it, I could index or give my money to Turtle Creek or whatever and go do something else. That freedom to do what I please every day is worth more to me than earning 1 million a year working some downtown 9-5 job five days a week. If you love your current work, that's great. Being in business for yourself probably is more freeing than what most people do all day. But don't try to minimize this great strategy as clipping coupons and mowing your lawn. It's an important mindset change that most people never even consider, because most people who are lucky enough to end up earning "3x more" than they used to just spend 3x more, with little effect on their long-term life satisfaction. I do think you misunderstand my mindset. I don't have a scarcity mindset. I have way more money than I need, and I don't even know what else I'd buy if I had more. My wife and I have a hard time finding gifts to buy each other because we already have everything we want, or if there's something we really want we just buy it, so we usually have it by the time a birthday rolls around. My engineering side finds it elegant to save money and optimize my lifestyle. I get more pleasure out of cutting waste than out of buying expensive crap. Maybe it would be a hardship for you, but it isn't for me, and many others.

The whole point of the FIRE strategy (Financially Independent, Retired Early) is: Maximize your income while minimizing your expenses to minimize the time you have to spend working for others and not being in control of your life. You don't even have to actually retire, you just have to know that you can if you want (I'm just as busy as I ever was, but I work on my own projects now rather than on someone else's and that feels great). The real sacrifice is not buying stuff second hand on craigslist because you can get it at 20% of the price of the new item or driving a regular car rather than a luxury automobile, the real sacrifice is spending 8-10 hours a day commuting and doing what someone else tells you to and not being able to just quit your job if you stop liking it and not seeing your family and being stressed about office politics and money because your lifestyle inflates as fast as your income...

All of your criticisms are convincingly addressed numerous times by Mr. Money Mustache, and the picture you paint is a strawman, so I'm going to take a wild guess and say that you haven't read very much of his stuff (maybe you don't have time because you work a full-time job). It's the traditional approach of throwing money at everything, and imagining that making as little effort as possible will lead to happiness, that is stressful and demoralizing. Regaining independence and control is the energizing and uplifting path. People are frugal not because they "struggle to spend each dollar" but because they are rational about it and decide that they'd rather buy their time and freedom rather than more stuff that doesn't make them happier. If you ever have the time, start at the bottom here: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/all-the-posts-since-the-beginning-of-time/ The first few posts aren't as good, but he gets his stride pretty quickly.

Also, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/10/howard-stern-donald-trump-2016-214322

I "retired" (became a full time investor) earlier this year at 34 mostly through frugality and saving. Investing returns are just the cherry on top. To each their own. To me the value of money is peace of mind, independence and freedom, not buying lots of shiny stuff. There's not that much shiny stuff I want anyway once I have good computing devices (I do) and all the books I want to read. We still travel and buy everything we really want, but that's surprisingly inexpensive when you understand that past a fairly low level, there's little correlation between spending and happiness.

Here's a Q&A about investing with @Bluegrasscap on Twitter, I thought that many here would probably find it interesting: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5AhopgMAgqubFlmLTBOZWRXRjQ/view

"Trump team realizes it’s been played as WikiLeaks fails to come through with bombshells about Clinton" http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/trump-backers-realize-theyve-been-played-as-wikileaks-fails-to-come-through-with-bombshells-about-clinton Oh no! How could someone promise that they're going to deliver something only for the publicity and then not actually do it.

New post by MMM on why he bought an electric car and his experience so far: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2016/10/04/so-i-bought-an-electric-car/ It's a good read. Crazy how cheap he got it.

You don't screw around when it comes to mental health and PTSD issues. This is powerful, Biden just roaring, watch it: Also, Trump probably shouldn't mention Reagan:

https://twitter.com/rationalwalk/status/783017155012890624

I've owned both in the past, but not currently, except BRK for my wife's account.

http://i.imgur.com/W8lsJgW.png

Quite the thread recapitulating the past week for Trump:

Nerdwriter on Twitter does a nice deconstruction of how Trump uses language to sell, I thought it was interesting: