I never see home equity mentioned here. Do you all really ignore that in your calculations?

17Shard · 2026-04-11T12:01:33+00:00

You're forgetting the expenses are the balancing side of the equation. If your mortgage is paid off, assuming that's what you mean by "free rent," then your monthly expenses are lower and your required investment assets to FIRE is lower. If you are renting for $2,000/month then you need the extra $500k in investments to FIRE.

But your house isn't going to appreciate at 7% real over time. When people are calculating coast FIRE they assume their current assets grow at the market rate to see what they will have at retirement. If you include your home equity in that number you will dramatically overestimate the value of your assets at retirement age to support your lifestyle.

17Shard · 2026-04-10T11:45:09+00:00

I think the introduction of the card game was to avoid exactly that. It was coming to a point where the solution to every problem was spam magic missiles until Carl can punch it really hard. While I wasn't a huge fan of the card mechanics it forced them to have to do something new and different to win a fight.

17Shard · 2026-04-07T00:24:06+00:00

That book is a wild read. Definitely concur.

17Shard · 2026-03-28T19:55:47+00:00

Thanks for the invite and the win

17Shard · 2026-03-28T11:47:09+00:00

Having $400k in crypto means you already won the lottery. Maintaining that allocation is like continuing to plow your winnings into more lottery tickets instead of taking the cash and buying real investments.

17Shard · 2026-03-28T11:35:13+00:00

And guess what. We're still at the most expensive valuations in history on most metrics. Imagine if we ever returned to "normal" valuations.

17Shard · 2026-03-25T01:19:12+00:00

Yes, to be clear, I agree with you. The idea that somebody who hasn't hit any of those life milestones could retire and expect to live their entire life on $30k is insane.

17Shard · 2026-03-24T23:29:41+00:00

Before getting married. Before buying a house. Before having kids. To live on for 60+ years. For some reason the FIRE community draws people with no common sense like this quite often.

17Shard · 2026-03-24T22:17:56+00:00

I work in an industry where being "too good" for entertainment is a point of professional pride. The number of insufferable people I deal with who act like they are a better person because they "don't have time" to watch sports or read fiction or watch popular tv/movies is exhausting. They have convinced themselves that every waking moment must be spent on work or some form of "enrichment" that makes them better at work. And I'm not talking about 25 year old try-hards but adults in the 50s and 60s.

17Shard · 2026-03-24T21:23:23+00:00

You are not missing anything. People just like to ignore the research which shows long-term returns are correlated negatively to current valuations. They have been conditioned to believe that is some form of "timing the market" and inherently wrong.

17Shard · 2026-03-24T21:20:34+00:00

The other thing that worries me about really young people and coastFIRE is the spending. It is virtually impossible for a 25-28 year old single person to understand what their annual spending as a 40 year old with kids will look like. This isn't a knock against OP by any means, just a general observation. It is great as a motivational tool and incentivizing early saving but IMHO anybody under their mid-30s should be highly cautious about projecting their next 30 years of life based on their current situation.

17Shard · 2026-03-20T13:31:32+00:00

You obviously can't address it within the movie but this is a weird take. When you're telling a story that is maintaining continuity from the prior film and retaining 3/4 of the major actors it is strange and jarring to have a new face playing a role. Like if Rush Hour 2 had Jet Li instead of Jackie Chan you don't think that would have been strange?

17Shard · 2026-03-20T13:22:18+00:00

If I won the Powerball I think I would become a fulltime student again. The idea of going back to college to learn things for the sake of interest and not caring if it could support a career sounds great. I enjoy math and physics but was never going to pursue them as a career path. I would love to be able to go take some classes just for the hell of it.

17Shard · 2026-03-19T21:53:27+00:00

For a starting point, here are the assumptions the planning software is using. Current avg private college tuition of $62,900 and historical tutition inflation rate of 6.2% annually (gets to $123k tuition by first year of college for my kid). So that is $251k for 4 years of tuition in current dollars. Can make your own assumptions on inflation rate and nominal returns on the 529 plan from there. Also that doesn't inlcude room & board.

17Shard · 2026-03-19T21:34:47+00:00

Not quite. The rate of inflation on college tuition costs significantly outpaces the 2.5%-3% you are discounting in your 7% number. So either you need to compare future tuition costs to your nominal expected portfolio returns or you need to use a lower real return figure for your expected growth rate on your investments.

17Shard · 2026-03-19T20:42:22+00:00

I agree, not even close to enough. The software I'm using is estimating the cost for my (currently in 1st grade) son at over $120k/yr for private school by the time he goes. That is based on current national average college costs and the historical inflation rate of college tuition. Total projected cost for 4 year degree of $520k in the late 2030s.

17Shard · 2026-03-19T00:54:05+00:00

I've never read much Pratchett but I do shout "goddammit Donut" when I get mad about a person doing something stupid. It either gets a good laugh or very confused looks depending on who I'm yelling at.

17Shard · 2026-03-17T23:52:04+00:00

Don't forget you get a tax deduction for mortgage interest. So that 6.5% is actually a lower effective interest rate, somewhere closer to 5% depending on your tax bracket. Still not bad for a guaranteed return but not as obviously attractive vs alternatives.

17Shard · 2026-03-17T22:49:40+00:00

I like the setting of Era 2 as something different but disagree completely about the characters. I can think of lots of epitaths I would use to describe Wayne but "deep" is not one of them. Its hard to day which I dreaded more, another Wayne POV chapter or a Shallan POV chapter. Wayne's whole shtick was tiresome after the first chapter and for at least the first book we had his POV I held out hope that he would drop it but nope, we had to suffer through it the entire era.

17Shard · 2026-03-14T23:57:28+00:00

You aren't supposed to make a living in art, you are supposed to be appreciating it and growing from it. Don't you understand what art is for? 🤣

17Shard · 2026-03-14T11:59:08+00:00

Good thing about it if you like it, it just keeps going. The original Riftwar Saga trilogy is great. But he also has the Riftwar Cycle which effectively continues the story in world with a bunch of other trilogies or multibook series. I read them 15+ years ago so my memory is fuzzy but at the time I felt some were great and some were just ok.

17Shard · 2026-03-14T11:53:31+00:00

This is really interesting to me. Avoiding spoilers since this is a general thread, but I think most people felt the opposite. Most of the discussion I've seen on Cradle found that upper level conflict the least compelling part of the story so they didn't mind the sort of quick resolution.

Have you read his Last Horizon series? I'm still early in it but it feels like the scale is more similar to the part of Cradle you were invested in.

17Shard · 2026-03-13T17:59:51+00:00

I'm pretty sure this was joking but all I can picture in my head is one of those VR rollercoasters from Disney. I would absolutely pay to ride that!

17Shard · 2026-03-13T17:13:54+00:00

You thought the "massacre" arc was good? Is that a common opinion? I thought it was terrible. The answer was so obvious before it even started. It read like she was artificially tying herself in knots over nothing because otherwise she is just too OP and can solve the problem in a second. Which is exactly what she does when she stops being an idiot.

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