By @JaredDilian
I made a big discovery the other day. That the FIRE movement is also connected to the tiny house movement. Which makes sense. You’re living off of $20,000 a year, crapping outside so you don’t run up your water bill, and you live in a tiny house to keep expenses down. You’re going to do this for fifty years. Sounds like fun.
One of the nice things about making money has been the ability to occasionally fly first class. Yes, I often get upgraded, but I pay for it, too (usually when I am bringing my DJ controller and I want more room). Can you imagine crushing yourself for 15 years to retire at 35 with a tiny amount of money so you can crush yourself for the next fifty years until you croak? This is supposed to be the better way?
In my entire experience in dealing with finance or money, I have found few things that are dumber. One quick lesson: for some people (not all), the solution to not having enough money is to...make more money. What I mean by that is this: if you are a schoolteacher and you are having difficulty getting by on $40,000 a year, then stop being a schoolteacher. You can do things that make more money. Or you can just say that “I like being a schoolteacher” and be content with making $40,000 a year, because making $40,000 is a choice, as is most things in life. You make your choice, and you don’t get to whine about it.
Retiring at 35 and living in a tiny house is a choice (it is a choice to have screwed-up kids as a result of it). That is the choice that they have made, but I suspect when we get our bear market, they will be whining about it. Money is a choice. They can choose to go back to work and make money. Likely they will not, and live a life of utter deprivation.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. It’s part of the lazy zeitgeist, for sure. Go back twenty years and people were working their asses off. If you said that you were going to live in a tiny house in 1998, you would have been ridiculed, and rightly so. Today, that is the goal, because work sucks, or something like that. I am such a dinosaur. I work all the time.
Honest, non-sarcastic question. Say you want to retire early. What do you want to do?
Your options:
- Chase a white ball around
- Watch FOX News at top volume
- Get sloshed at noon
- All of the above
Some non-awful options:
- Write a book
- Learn to play a musical instrument
- Pick up a sport or a game, like chess or poker, get really good at it
How many people do the former and how many people do the latter?
People are not good with unstructured free time. Myself included. I talk to my old Coast Guard colleagues. Massive amounts of infidelity. Lots of unstructured free time. 50 years in a tiny house. Noooooooo thanks.
