Problematic

I retired at 32. This is what most people mean when they talk about early retirement. See my much longer comment in this thread.

@[email protected] This is the correct answer.

As another commenter said, it depends a lot on your lifestyle goals. Obviously the answer will be different if you want to spend your time sleeping in a hammock on a beach in Nicaragua eating whatever fruit grows on the nearby trees, versus if you want to pop champagne on your yacht every night with IG models. This is the biggest split in the FIRE community - leanFIRE, or fatFIRE. LeanFIRE emphasizes reducing lifestyle cost in order to retire earlier, while fatFIRE emphasizes increasing income in order to enjoy a more luxurious retirement. As a lemming, I think I am safe in assuming you are more interested in the former.

So then, among leanFIRE, you should decide exactly what flavor you want to pursue.

A fairly traditional leanFIRE would be something like working a somewhat lucrative job, like software or accounting, while you live a very modest life. eg, buying a house, renting it out, and then building yourself a tiny house in the back yard to live in, so you can live rent free. Keeping some chickens and a vegetable garden, and riding a bicycle for most of your transportation needs. You then work your job, saving as much money as possible until you have 20x your annual COL in some stable index funds, and then you quit.

An important note here is that for this to be worth it, your leanFIRE must not be a “starvation FIRE”. You can be happy living a modest lifestyle, and you can learn to be happy living an even more modest lifestyle - but if you aren’t happy with the lifestyle you are building for yourself, then what is the point? So probably the biggest asterisk in all of this is that YOU SHOULD NOT BE WAITING FOR RETIREMENT TO MAKE YOU HAPPY. If you are accepting misery during the period in your life when you are working 9-5 and hoping that quitting your job will make you happier, then you are, at best, simply delaying being happy for years. Because while your happiness can be influenced by ourside factors, at the end of the day, happiness is about what is going on in your head, not what is going on in the world. So regardless of your flavor of retirement, retiring should be about going from happy to happier, not about going from misery to happiness - because the latter ends up actually being a transition from misery to misery but with more free time. So if you are eating rice and beans shivering in a cold apartment in order to save a few bucks to retire sooner, and you hate it, then this is counterproductive. If you are miserable in your life right now, I won’t tell you not to work towards FIRE. And I won’t tell you not to tighten your belt and suffer a little. But at the same time, you should recognize that the biggest thing that will impact your happiness is accepting that you have the ability to be happy right now, and working on that at the same time.

Anyway, suppose you want to get to a semi-retirement even sooner. One strategy here is coastFIRE. This is where you plow money into your investments as quickly as possible so that they will then eventually reach maturity at a traditional retirement age as long as you don’t touch them ahead of time. So suppose you are happy living on 20k/yr. The 4% rule says you need $400k in the market as principle. So then your goal is to put enough money in the market so that you will have $400k when you are at traditional retirement age - which depending on how old you are right now, is significantly less because of the power of compound interest. Lets do some math.

PV (present value) = how much you need invested when you hit coastFIRE such that you will have 400k in the bank at retirement age.

FV (future value) = 400k. The amount you want invested when you start withdrawling cash to live on.

r = anticipated real annual return (all these numbers are inflation-adjusted. That’s the “real” part)

n = number of years in the market. The difference between your official retirement date and your coastFIRE date.

The formula is PV = FV/(1+r)^n

So suppose you want to hit coastFIRE at 30, and retire at 60. So n is 30. And lets assume a conservative 7% real return in the market. Then

PV = FV/(1+r)^n = 400000/(1.07)^30 = $52,200

So plunk $52,000 in your 401k, and now you only need to work to cover your living expenses. Which you can do as an accountant by, say, just working during tax season. Or as a software developer by just picking up occasional contract gigs.

Another option here is what is called baristaFIRE. This is coastFIRE, but rather than continue working your lucritive (but often unenjoyable and stressful) job, you switch to working a job you enjoy. For many people, that might be being a barista. Or it could be any number of similar enjoyable but low paying jobs, like raft guiding or teaching martial arts or making art. This is currently my strategy, where I work as a rigger for concerts for part of the year, then bounce and do whatever for most of the rest.

And another option to consider is what is called geoarbitrage. This is essentially just moving somewhere with a lower cost of living before or after retirement. For example, if you get a software job in SF, then get a remote work option and move to Thailand and decide you want to live the rest of your life there, you can retire very quickly.

So if you want to retire early, your main priority is creating a lifestyle you are happy with which has as low of annual expenses as possible.

Then, don’t neglect working to increase your income via chasing raises and promotions and switching companies.

Then, invest the difference in index funds (most traditional), real estate (a factor in most FIRE peoples portfolio, at least for their own residence), and/or a personal/local business (highest yield, but the most work and biggest risk).

Finally, do note that by pursuing early retirement, you are officially a capitalist. You are using the money you earned as the investment capital of some sort of business enterprise, and are then getting paid by the enterprise for the privilege of using your money. So everyone here hates you. Sorry.

I would really not recommend talking to a financial advisor about this without really knowing what you want. They are, by their nature, quite financially conservative, and their main clientele are people who are in their 50s or older. “Retiring early” to them, means retiring at 58.

🤯

Subtract effort involved from expected emotional benefit.

To actually make your neighbors hedge bigger, you would need to plant new plants next to the additional plants, and tend to them to ensure they don’t die after being transplanted. Which is basically landscaping. Which us a job that pays decently primarily because it is a lot of effortful and unpleasant work. And to make your prank work, you will be doing additional labor to hide the fact that you are landscaping your neighbor’s yard, and will also be working at odd hours - either the middle of the day when they are at work, or more likely (assuming you have a job) late at night. So you are basically taking on a part time job for several months to do this right.

Then, the payoff. Most likely, this person doesnt notice at all for quite a while. When they do notice, the maximum possible payoff you will get is that you run into them in their yard, and they make some offhand small talk comment about “my hedges sure are growing a lot this year”, just before they take a hedge trimmer to them, destroying months of your labor in a few minutes.

A good prank is higher in payoff than it is in effort. Like handing someone a gross prank-flavored jellybean. Or (if you want revenge on someone for some reason) hiding raw fish in their car.

Your idea doesn’t meet this critia. It seems like a lot of work for something the person being pranked wont even notice

This very much feels like a waste of time, even if it did work.

Lemmy’s hate of AI art is so weird, because, like, if you don’t like how it looks, whatever. But being angry at AI for taking human artists jobs is such a weird hill to die on, because none of these artists had a job doing art before AI either

and…?

I feel like this guy could benefit from a script and some editing. I got several minutes in before I gave up on him ever finding his point.

(I’m not talking about house electronics, that’s how you meet god in one of the most painful ways possible)

Learning how to do basic household wiring is seriously not that hard, and has an almost negligible chance of bodily harm as long as you do the basics like… turning off the breaker you are working with. If it is an old house and you arent sure what breakers control what, there are plenty of devices for checking if any given outlet/light switch is still hot before you work on it.

I mean, I feel like R4R communities never work out very well because reddit/lemmy/piefed posts are, by their nature, ephemeral. It is weird to find or respond to a post more than a few hours old, so to find your person/people, it takes quite a bit of luck for you to post, the within a few hours someone looking for what you are offering in the same city where you live happens to check the sub/comm.

Otoh, if you start /c/SydneyCalisthnics, it will probably look like a pretty dead community for quite a while, which will drive people away.

Instead, I think a good place to start would be a weekly post in /c/Sydney detailing various events/meetups/etc that week, where regular events are in the post header, and then people can comment to tell people about their own events or meetups they want to promote.

I know you said no religious books… but I feel like I have to mention the Gutenberg Bible. Not for the religious aspects itself, but for the impact it had on the world via creating the means and purpose for an average person to gain literacy, and because it then caused the Protestant reformation.

In a similar vein, the scientific journal that described the Haber Process, a chemical process that could be used to synthesize ammonia, which could then be used as a fertilizer to provide nitrogen to crops.

The cheap availability of nitrogen fertilizers was probably the biggest contributer to the “Green Revolution” in the mid 20th century, which massively increased agricultural yeilds. And those massive increases in agricultural yeilds are why, worldwide, hunger has dropped to historically low levels in the last century.

I hate everyone involved in this conversation, and the whole affair has made me largely unhappy with the world

I think probably the “purest” form of egg I eat is hard/soft boiled. In this case, I feel like there isn’t much of a smell, and it is fairly neutral. The taste of the whites is fairly neutral. Hardboiled yoke I’m not a huge fan of, but will eat out of habit. Soft boiled yoke is deliscious, and is the best form of egg.

Beyond that, eggs are great because they don’t have all that much flavor themselves, but are very versitile in their ability to carry other flavors in various forms. Eg, cheese, spices, and chili peppers in a breakfast burrito; salt, pepper, and butter on an over easy egg, with some toast dipped in the yoke; etc.

Its kind of like chicken. Chicken on its own doesnt taste that great. It tastes great when it is spiced and cooked well.

I mean, we can imagine a counterfactual where the girl was even more insistant.

“No, anon, you’re taking me on a date! I won’t take no for an answer”

And then they go on a date. Anon is very awkward and has no idea what to do. But at the end of the date, she gives him a bj. Now what?

Well from her perspective, maybe, she did a good deed. She gave him some experience and confidence and set him on his way - hooray!

But from anon’s perspective - being anon - he is in the same position, only worse. After all, for some reason he can’t possibly understand, a girl went on a date with him and blew him, practically handed herself to him on a silver platter, and yet he still managed to fuck it up and didn’t lose his virginity. What a hopeless loser he is (he thinks to himself) - even if he is just given the perfect chance, he must be so repulsive and terrible at sex that no woman will want to touch him once they get close enough.

Certainly anon could hypothetically value any temporary relationship he had. But he won’t. We can tell because of the way he told this story - not as a story of proof that he is desireable and worthy of love, but instead as a story of how he missed an opportunity that will never again come in his life.

For anyone who might feel similarly to anon - no. No it would not have been a turning point.

Why? Because dating is a matchmaking problem. Whether you are looking to hook up or get hitched, you need to sort out the partners who are a good match for you from those which aren’t. So if all anon wanted was any girl to be romantic with him for the rest of his life, and if this girl happened to be his perfect match, then sure, maybe his life would be different. But if anything goes wrong in this plan - which it almost certainly will - then even if this girl kisses him, blows him, fucks his brains out, or dates him for a while, once she peaces, he is right back where he started. No bitches, and no idea how to get them.

The turning point in anon’s life can’t be when someone else just hands him what he wants by sheer chance. A real turning point can only happen if anon makes the choice to change his life of his own accord. Because when anon makes a choice to do something - like learn to dress better, or go to therapy, or politely introduce himself to an attractive stranger - then he is creating a repeatable strategy for improving his life.

If you have a problem that seems unsolveable, the best way to think of a solution is to go sit somewhere quiet and try to meditate. Just set a timer for 20 minutes, 30 minutes… maybe an hour. Then just focus your attention on your breath and don’t do anything. By the time is up, you will have at least one, and sometimes 4 or 5, potential solutions to your problem, and often a much more positive attitude.

Also, don’t fix dry squeaky things with wd40. It lubricates at first, but it was never designed as a long term lubricant, and the grease will pick up debris in not very long, making the problem worse. Instead, use a silicon-based dry lubrication spray.