In-person meet ups are great, especially for shared hobbies. A lot of things are starting to be remote only, which can also be fine, but I just prefer meeting IRL.
Was a pretty good day. Walked to the park with my dog, made progress on a chair I’ve been building, and played some mandolin. Mowed the lawn too, I have one of those non-electric reel mowers so it’s a decent workout.
I don’t want big name celebrities doing voice over for animated movies. Give me actual VAs
Right now I alternate between DuckDuckGo and Ecosia. Google results have been getting worse and the forcing of AI summaries was the final straw for me to stop using even the !g shortcut in DDG. At least DDG let’s you disable them.
Waking up late on weekends, making a good cup of coffee, throwing on a record, and just relaxing before the day gets going.
Playing an instrument and jamming with others.
Finishing projects. Making stuff by hand.
Taking long walks with my dog.
Reading outside.
Music and dancing.
Being amongst nature.
It’s changed over time, but right now I’m digging Yorushika (Japan) and Lola Amour (Philippines).
When I was younger I might’ve said The Mars Volta or At the Drive-In.
Before that maybe Led Zeppelin
As others have mentioned, the common guidance is to figure out your annual expenses, i.e how much you need to live off of, and divide that by safe withdrawal rate (typically ~4% based on the Trinity study) to come up with a total amount needed to retire early. So for example, if you determine you need $60k/year, the formula would suggest saving $1.5M (60,000 ÷ 0.04 = 1.5M).
The basic idea is save a big enough nest egg so that you can live solely off interest, meaning you never touch the principal and your account grows in perpetuity.
The hard part is two-fold IMO:
Health care costs vary greatly (if you don’t have access to public healthcare depending on your country) and tend to increase with age
Housing costs are situational and can either decrease (if you own your own home and payoff your mortgage) or increase if you rent or have to move/refinance/etc.
Your family size may change. Kids can greatly throw off projections. Taking care of elderly parents. Having a partner start or stop working. All these things can impact your assumptions. Therefore, it’s usually good to add some buffer.
Inflation should also be accounted for. This can be difficult to project for the remainder of your life, so some tend to just look at historical inflation, but there’s no guarantee the future will follow the same trend. Same for lifestyle creep, but that’s (usually) more controllable.
The common guidance (from say Buffet, Bolgeheads, etc.) for most people is to invest in low-cost index funds (availability depends on your country). I emphasize “low-cost” because there was another study that showed the only sure-fire predictor of alpha (performance above a certain benchmark, like the S&P 500 if you’re in the US) is the having low management fees. Historically, this should return anywhere from 5-10% but again past performance is not indicative of future returns.
While you’re young and have more time in the market, you genreally want to invest in higher risk/higher reward type investments. Idea being you benefit from higher returns while having more time to weather downturns. Then as you age, you can shift towards lower risk/lower reward investments, like bonds, so you’re not as exposed to market fluctuations.
One last thought, there are also variations of FIRE, like Barista FiRE, Coast FIRE, where you don’t have to completely stop working but are financially independent so you can choose where/how hard to work.
Good luck,
That’s pretty cool. When I built my storage and garden sheds, I looked into shingling them with wood, like cedar shakes, but couldn’t find any readily available. If only I had access to a mill!
Picked up the mandolin for bluegrass last year. My local jam has mostly guitar players so wanted to try out a different sound. Played a bit of guitar before that but lately it’s been all mando.
Also have some fuzzy memories of finishing moves from playing video games:
Mandible claw (Mr. Socko)
Torture Rack
Jacknife Power Bomb
Sweet chin music (stomps)
The Spear
Rock Bottom
F5
Attitude Adjustment
I started buying physical media again (in addition to data hoarding) because I don’t like the idea of just “renting” everything and having some company decide to remove media from their catalog at any point.
Been buying books, manga, Blu-rays, DVDs, CDs, and records so I can enjoy things without the internet.
Hate the that AI is being shoved into everything as well without any ability to opt out. I’d rather just avoid using your product completely if that’s the case.
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen features a pretty dysfunctional family and has some funny bits.
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace is probably one of my favorite novels and has both a dysfunctional family and characters living in a halfway house. It’s main motif is addiction, be it to entertainment or substance. However, at a over 1000 pages and with a non-linear plot, it might require some persistence to get through.
No TV but the more pernicious thing now is anything connected to the internet. Feels like “no TV in the bedroom” should be updated to “no screens in the bedroom” since a lot of folks end up doom scrolling instead of going to bed.