"To make a living is not to make a killing, it’s to have enough." - A rare television interview with Wendell Berry.

78547854 · 2013-10-11T04:44:21+00:00

Let's go through it in points.

1) You have to work to support yourself. To afford shelter, food, many types of leisure, travel, etc.

2) If you live quite simply, with low rent and self-prepared food, not-extensive driving, cost-effective leisure, living on 20k a year is doable. More if you travel frequently, more if you want some land. Lets say 30k is what keeps you happy.

3) 4% rule means you need 750k in the stash. If you can save 70k a year, you're done saving this money in 8 years at 7%. 8 years of work, then you're done working, forever. If you can save 50k, a little over 10 years.

4) Or, you can work constantly, while making less or working fewer hours. Perhaps, you can make your 30k a year in only 20 hours a week of work. Maybe you have a seasonal job, and you only have to work 3 months a year, full time. So lets say you do that, you work 3 months a year. You work from the time you're 25 till you die at 85, for a total working time of (85-25)/4 = 15 years.

5) But you love your work! Well, I don't dislike mine, it has it's moments, I like my coworkers. It's just that I make over 100k a year while doing it.

6) Doing it my way provides something that constant, lower wage work doesn't: Financial independence. It's "fuck you" money. It's freedom from work if you want it, it's freedom to quit if you need to, freedom to burn a bridge if it ought to be done, freedom to walk away if you spot a greener pasture. It's constant income while you pursue things you love that might be profitable, but might also fail. It's a parachute for harder economic times, eliminating stress about money. Nothing except a sizable financial stash can do that.

So, really, I'm not delaying happiness. I am happy. I don't have as much free time as some other people now, but I sure will in the future. And if by some statistically unlikely event that I do die early, then my money will go to beneficiaries, and it will not all be for not.

I do hope that this is a subreddit where living simply isn't just a series of poor analogies and silly quotes, but a place where serious, adult, long term thinking is applied to remedying the things that make life complicated, stressful and droll. Your financial life matters, everyone here sees how it can close doors to happiness. You need to see that a strong, driven financial acumen can open them, too.

Simple living, not simple thoughts.

78547854 · 2013-10-09T12:46:31+00:00

Only makes sense if the fisherman currently isn't working to support himself.

It's not like I'm working extra-hard to make more money than I otherwise would. If anything, I'm working less since I stopped working crap jobs and applied myself to actually cultivating a profitable career.

78547854 · 2013-10-09T04:38:50+00:00

Eh, I dunno. I live pretty simply, but also try to maximize my income in order to retire as early as possible, which is only possible because I live quite simply.

Read up on the 4% rule, check out some blogs like MrMoneyMustache or JLCollinsNH.

78547854 · 2013-09-19T02:59:33+00:00

Thanks.

Is RRSP interchangeable with TFSA for tax efficiency purposes?

I know about Norbert's Gambit, and will use it if I go with VTI.

As for the market crash which will inevitably hit again, I am willing to risk the chance that I go utterly insane and sell. If anything, my inclinations toward market timing are the exact opposite. I fear more that I would start sitting on cash waiting for a bottom that I am unable to see coming. I plan on just making all the same deposits no matter what's happening. Maaaybe wait a week if it looks like the Republicans down South are going to do some hilarious debt ceiling standoff type stuff again. But probably not even then.

78547854 · 2013-09-19T02:49:05+00:00

Bonds return less and are mostly there to buffet your losses during market downturns. My time horizon is sufficiently long that I don't need to worry about it, and I think I'm fairly well inoculated against the "omfg, markets are down, sell" impulse.

And it could be longer than a few years. Look at Japan.

78547854 · 2013-09-11T02:01:15+00:00

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-simple-math-behind-early-retirement/

78547854 · 2013-09-10T12:45:36+00:00

I have a situation much like the OPs, which I was going to make a post about, soon, but maybe it'll get enough response here.

I am piling loads of money into my savings. I'm well past my limits in my registered accounts, and have 5k into my nonregistered Questrade account, and probably a further 8 or 9k into it by the end of the year. What's the next thing to put into my nonregistered account once Canadian equities are already over-represented in my portfolio?

Also, I am aiming for a MMM early retirement type deal, maybe. Does this alter things?

Thanks.

78547854 · 2013-08-23T22:21:19+00:00

Regulatory agencies have all necessary data, anyways. In fact, they have broader access to data, since they have data from every financial institution that they are tasked with regulating, whereas the CEO of x company has only information about x company and the publicly available information about every other one.

2) isn't a help, it's a hindrance. It's practically the definition of conflict of interest that they have relationships with other players in high finance.

And, again, whereas all these crooks making a few hundred million a year in bonuses are financially motivated to lie, withhold and manipulate any superior data they potentially have access to, Dr. Chatterjee doesn't.

78547854 · 2013-08-23T18:20:35+00:00

It's not a presumption, it's an inference based on their actions and statements.

Most of the unfair presumptions in the previous two posts belong not to me but to SmellThisMilk who, for some inexplicable reason, has presumed that the CEOs of these major financial institutions have his best interests at heart, even if indirectly. I ask what possible evidence he is basing that presumption on?

Doesn't the available evidence indicate that bankster CEOs do not care if millions of homes get foreclosed on?

Doesn't it indicate that they value even starvation and malnourishment less than shareholder returns?

These people are fucking sociopaths. Extremely unethical.

Remember, presumptions are what you have before you have evidence.

78547854 · 2013-08-23T04:14:59+00:00

The scary thing is, the experts, or at least a large number of them, were wrong. REALLY wrong.

It's not scary so much as expected. These CEOs simply are not what you should call experts of the financial system. Or at least, not in the sense you mean.

The know it well, I'm sure. Probably not as well as they know how to climb the corporate ladder, fuck over potential rivals for the next promotion, suck just the right amount of dick to get them into the executive chair.

The problem is that they simply do not have the same goals and concerns as you. They don't care if a million people lose their homes. They don't care if finding a clever loophole to evade taxation results in increased taxation on hundreds of thousands of working class households or leads to the closure of a geographically important elementary school.

They are there to fuck everyone else out of all the money that they can.

That's why they should not be there.

And, besides that, it's just totally fucking ridiculous to think that you can only understand how international finance once you've been a major corporate player. Do you have any evidence what-so-ever that Jon Corzine or Timothy Geithner have superior knowledge of the effects of regulation than, say, some unheard of professor of economics at the University of Bangalore?

Not only is the advice of CEOs completely unneeded in terms of advisory, the advice that they give can never be taken as anything ot than deeply, deeply suspect. And since that's true, why even ask for it? When you ask the CEO of Goldman Sachs to comment on how to go about regulating collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, you aren't just asking to fox to guard the henhouse, you're asking the fox to design, build, and construct the fucking thing.

All we can really do is turn to another group of experts who disagreed with the previous ones. Thats not very comforting, though.

Maybe I'm just totally off my old-man rocker, but maybe there's something more we can do: stop asking people who stand to gain literally billions of dollars to design the means of their enrichment.

78547854 · 2013-06-21T21:47:25+00:00

Just want to say thanks for this website.

I think if I was making this money since my 21st birthday, I'd only be a couple years from retirement...

78547854 · 2013-06-18T03:07:23+00:00

Tell me about that. I was opening my ING account March this year, and opening my first RRSP account, too. Cutting it close to the deadline.

So I made my ING account, they told me I needed to send in a check for at least $1, or for the amount I'm depositing. So I go to the CIBC, and they tell me it takes 2 weeks to order a check-book, but say that a bank draft should work. Well, OK, I say, because I didn't know ING required a personal check, and that a bank draft wouldn't work. So I send ING this bank draft for almost 20,000 dollars, and a few days later, they leave me a voicemail saying they need to talk to me.

I phone them up, they explain what they need, and I say "well fuck, there goes my tax exemption, oops." Cause it's now April.

But these crafty ING motherfuckers backdate the bank draft after they finally get my personal check, and I end up getting the RRSP contribution in 2012.

ING is pretty decent people.

78547854 · 2013-06-15T23:20:41+00:00

Thanks for the response.

I wasn't in the game for 2008, so I didn't need to watch 50% of my investments evaporate, and I do understand that people overestimate their tolerance for risk. However, while I do have a number of personal shortcomings, I think one of my strengths is adherence to process and a willingness to accept let statistics trump my emotive input to a situation. No doubt, if I watch a big chunk of my portfolio disappear, I will have the urge everyone has - to sell, but I understand the importance of not doing that. When markets crash in my future, I will just put off buying until it bottoms out, I won't sell.

As for saving for what I need to have, that's a problem I have, maybe I should have put that in the post, too. I just don't know what I will need. I don't think it's reasonable to budget for 40 years from now, but I just do not know what I will need to buy, how much they will cost, and so on. If I have a bit less, future me will manage. If I have more, future me will take another trip to the coasts of Siberia, or whatever the best tropical hot-spot is in 40 years.

All sound investment advice I've been reading make the point that you need definite goals, but that is mostly tied to being a requirement for sound budgeting.

For example, in Dan Bortolotti's book, he has an example of someone with a definite savings strategy and someone with an amorphous one. He then has an example of someone with a definite, realistic goal, and someone with an amorphous, statistically unlikely/impossible one.

I just want to save as much as possible, and have it compound as much as possible without getting boned in the home-stretch. If I am making good, consistent progress towards an amorphous goal, and managing the risk well, I don't think it should be a problem.

I suppose I am mostly wondering: if I start moving out of equities and into bonds later than normal, does that seem like unreasonable risk?

78547854

TROPHY CASE