Quote:
Originally Posted by Cville'sFinest
Yes it does do you know the definition of work?
You even said that jobs that you may like are above your IQ level so that does indicate that you believe that you are to dumb to have the type of job that you want. The reality is you don't have to be a genius to be a doctor or any other fun job you described you just have to put in the WORK. Retiring early does mean laziness maybe not destitute. It's basically saying I'm not even going to try to live up to my full potential I'm going to be content with this and do what ever I want that suits me.
One point in my life I probably had this attitude but once I got married I realized that it wasn't all about what I wanted in life and that I had to provide for some else and do whatever I needed to do to provide the best life possible. If you can do this on $20K a year more power to you.
Money doesn't buy happiness but it can open doors and to waste your potential and your abilities to provide value and sustenance to an organization or a partner because you want to sleep in is ridiculous. Do you really want to look back and realize you could have achieved so much more if you at least tried. Failure and losing is one thing but not even showing up to the race come on man. 
BTW your GF might be cool now with this lifestyle but once that ring and baby come along. Marriage has a way of changing priorities. Good Luck |
I have to take issue with this one. Some people CHOOSE to trade their lives for money... others CHOOSE to enjoy their lives even if that means they don't make much money. I have a perfect example of this in myself and my brother. I make my living as a musical performer, with my wife. I am enjoying my life and not making an amount of money that anyone beyond college age would consider "a lot". The one and only thing I don't like about my present situation is that the performances I do put something on the calendar which must be done at that time regardless of whatever else I might have to do or want to do instead. I never find myself thinking "crud, I have to do a show today"... the closest I've ever come to that is looking at a day wherein I have three shows and being like "this is going to be a long day". Let's face it... all of that driving, three setups and tear-downs... that can get tiring by the end of the day... though the equipment handling is great exercise. The shows themselves, however, are always fun. If I could make more money doing what I do right now, and I didn't have to drive so much to get to the shows, I'd probably think I was in heaven.
My brother, on the other hand, makes about twice as much money as I do. Of course, he lives in an area that has a much higher cost of living and an exponentially higher cost of housing... on MY money, my wife and I are buying a house... but on HIS money, every bank he's talked to said that they can't finance him. He comes home from work every day, at best, bored. Ask him how his day was and it's always "eh....". He'll be the first to tell you that he's always bored at work.
Now, you see, I know that I have the intellectual ability and work ethic that would enable me to get a similar job - one that pays very well but is at least one of the following things:
-boring
-aggravating
-insignificant in the grand scheme of things
-stressful
I simply choose not to do that. I've been there and done that. I've had business situations where I made a ton of money but had plenty of bad things to say about what I do. I've watched myself slowly go nuts, even though the bank account was fattening up at a pleasant rate. I learned, from that experience, that life is not all about money. Let's face it - money is an illusion anyway. It has value only because we have collectively agreed that it has value. By itself, it has no value. Our paper currency is made of plain materials that have no intrinsic value and our coinage hasn't been made of anything that's considered a "precious metal" since the late 1960's (half dollars still contained some silver until, I believe, 1968). Currency values float all the time and we have no control over those values. The US Bureau of Engraving and Printing is churning out money all the time and essentially giving it to banks. Truthfully, I don't think ANYONE knows what the United States money supply is. Most monetary transactions these days involve "e-currency". When you swipe your credit card at Wal-Mart, a number in Visa's computer system goes up by the amount of the purchase (showing that you now owe the credit card company that much more) and another number goes up in Wal-Mart's computer system showing how much more money Wal-Mart now has. No currency of any kind has exchanged hands nor will exchange hands. Wal-Mart may make several billion dollars per year in profit but if they ever had to buy something for $1 billion and the seller demanded cash, they'd never be able to produce it.
People always say you need to plan for the future but the future is so uncertain that nobody can ever plan for it. I'm watching my parents worry about their future because the pension system that my father counted on (and paid into) for decades is now imperiled by the precarious financial situation of their home state. If that goes down, so does my parents' main source of income. One of the main retirement plans that people of my generation have figured on for many years (Social Security) is also imperiled and likely to be functionally bankrupt by the time the kids of Baby Boomers reach retirement age. Okay, so it will still be able to pay out some benefits, but hardly enough to make much of a dent in likely costs of retirement! Those costs are forever changing - medical care has never been more expensive, elderly people are being forced out of their houses because their property taxes have been raised to an extent that they can no longer afford them, food is becoming increasingly expensive, etc.
The point is that you cannot beat the system unless you're one of the few elite people who control the system. Even those people with "fun jobs" apparently aren't really "winning". I heard mention in an earlier post of people with "fun jobs" being musicians, athletes, etc. I ask you this. If those people were in such a fun and fulfilling profession, why is it that so many of them end up abusing substances, committing suicide, etc? Why is there a "27 club" attesting to the unusually high number of big-name entertainers who killed themselves (either intentionally or through overdosing) at age 27? I'm staring down my 34th birthday next month and I've never felt the need to use any kind of abusable substance! These people wouldn't take so many drugs that they'd endanger themselves in any way if they REALLY felt that their lives were that great. So, even the people who appear to be at the top are not necessarily flying so high in their own minds. Athletes? Half of them are on drugs, and very few of them will get beyond middle age without severe mental or physical problems. Not long ago I read an article by a guy who QB'ed his team to a Super Bowl championship ten years ago and now cannot even walk around without the aid of a cane... and climbing stairs is very painful. He said "when you're a career athlete, you have to give your body to the game". That's very true. These people may have their time in the spotlight but it's very short... and then they have to live the rest of their lives often in unimaginable conditions of pain and agony. That's why so many ex-athletes commit suicide.
"Fun jobs"? Take it with a grain of salt. There are plenty of fun jobs out there but very few of them pay well. You have to take your pick. Are you going to enjoy your life, or are you going to trade your life for what we all use to live? Frankly, I think it's a zero sum game no matter which way you look at it. Since almost nobody truly enjoys his work life and makes lots of money at the same time, you have to figure that making lots of money will dramatically decrease your quality of life. If you want a truly fulfilling life, you can't fixate on money. Play the system to your advantage. I didn't vote for these tax-and-spend entitlement-mentality liberal lunatics who somehow always seem to get elected, but hey, if they're going to set up a system whereby people who don't work get money, I'm not going to worry about what's going to happen to me when I am no longer physically capable of working. If I reach that point in my life and don't have two pennies to rub together, I'll be taken care of, somehow. I don't know how, but it'll happen.
NOBODY can know how they're going to be taken care of in the future. People will talk about what they're doing to prepare for it... man, you just never know. You have rental properties that provide passive income? The landlord-tenant laws can change and now it ain't so easy to make that money. A weather disaster may wipe out those properties and you'll find that your insurance doesn't cover passive income loss... so what'll you do for the years it takes to get the properties rebuilt? Suppose nobody wants to rent there now because it was leveled by a disaster? Suppose your disaster insurance premiums triple, severely cutting into your profit, and you can't get tenants to rent from you at the higher rents you'd have to charge to recuperate that insurance premium? . . . . . You have a pension? If your pension plan somehow goes bankrupt (which it has for countless people in recent years), now whaddya gonna do? Social Security? It doesn't pay much to begin with, and also, if the powers that be (who don't care a lick about you as a person) decide to reduce your benefit amount so the trust fund will remain solvent for many more years to come, now whaddya gonna do? It goes on and on. NOTHING is foolproof.
So if our OP believes that he has a plan, and he's happy enough with it right now, let him rock with it. It may work, it may not. If it does work, hopefully he'll enjoy his life. If it doesn't work, hopefully he'll have a backup plan or be okay with living out the remainder of his days using whatever resources are available to someone with none of his own. Life is not all about wasting the only nonrenewable resource you have (time) just to receive more worthless paper that they're cranking out every day.
And you know, deep down, I think everyone realizes this. When my wife and I told the people we knew, in Texas, about our plan to go on the road and make our living as performing musicians, you should have seen how many people making six figures, living in nice houses, driving new cars, and planning for their future turned green with envy. Why would they envy us? We were going to be making "just enough money to live", driving a 17-year-old motorhome and living in it, parking wherever we could park, etc. Security and stability would be practically nonexistent. But you know what we WOULD have? LOTS OF TIME TOGETHER. FUN. ADVENTURE. EXPERIENCES. The stuff that makes life worth living. We wouldn't hate our jobs, wish we could spend more time with family, etc. Later on in life when we're no longer doing this, we'll have stories to tell, fond memories of our time on the road, etc. You can't put a price on that. You can't put a price on lying on your deathbed and having no regrets about things you wish you could have done that you didn't do. We may not leave a lot of MONEY to our offspring (assuming we ever have any) but we sure as heck will be able to teach them about how to live.
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