DH isn't a bad guy or a wicked overspender. The dock and shed both are gross and we've been kicking the expense down the road for a few years, until they truly fully apart.

DH has offered to continue working full-time indefinitely if I'd like to stop working now completely to be with the kids. It just doesn't make sense. I can work a solid day a week and make what he makes working full-time. The utility of him being home full-time is also greater, because he can do stuff like rebuild the dock if we decide to go that route or do all the landscaping work or cooking/cleaning etc. He does a lot around the house that I'd hire out otherwise or don't enjoy doing myself. It's actually very selfish that I'd like him home full time.

When it comes to big purchases, we discuss and debate and come to an agreement over each one. I'm confident we'll spend appropriate amounts on the dock, shed, new cars, etc when the time comes. But I might be overstating the amounts now just to be safe.

100% decided. We're happy with two. No more!

Sounds like a good plan, barring future mission creep from DH. Make sure you're both clear on the plan and that it's not going to be ok to raise future objections/up the number indefinitely.

-W

Using the 4% rule isn’t a way to “dial in” your numbers. It’s a back of the envelope ballpark since there are so many variables that can change across a very long time horizon. You’ve got your ballpark, so now just chip away and revisit it annually as some of these variables (including various family decisions) change. Look back at your posts in this thread for the evidence!

You're basically done anyway, unless you plan to simultaneously increase your spending (and be really inflexible about it) and never earn another dime/collect any social security/inherit anything/find any change on the sidewalk.

-W

I'm reading Die With Zero, which is also getting me to want to put less emphasis on having all the dollars.

It’s good to consider the opposite end of the problem. Also, remember the 4% rule is an extremely conservative estimate. It is far far far more likely you’ll have more money than you planned.

I just got back from Camp Mustache Toronto where several of us FIREes are contending with the “good” problem having too much money. If I don’t want giant chunks to disappear on taxes, I’ll have to spend a bit more than I currently do.

And I didn’t OMY much, and made no attempts for fatFIRE.

I don’t have much interest in spending more (I was never even able to waste my parents’ money) in everyday spending.

This is the time I am considering more lavish trips or helping with my niece’s education. And possibly some home improvements.

If the money hadn’t grown so fast, it wouldn’t have been a big deal as I like tent camping and can live with chipped paint in the bathtub.


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I do think there's a good chance we'll end up in this camp, or we'll ramp up our spending as we see our savings start to take off. The reality is, I might take some time off work in the future to maximize my time with the kids, but once they're too old or busy for me, I'm probably going to fall back on working to fill some of my time. And if I continue to be compensated at the rate I am now, we won't need to touch our savings.

When I picked my daughter up from her first day of preschool today, I was agonizing over whether I should splurge on a treat from our local farm stand's bakery to celebrate. I eventually told myself to shut up and spend the $18 on cookies and pumpkins. Geez!

Quote from: WorkingToUnwind on August 24, 2024, 07:36:43 PM

The car math is misleading. We have two cars and do not live in a walkable area, so we plan to keep two cars and conservatively replace them both every 10 years, or one every five years. I'm not sure how much we'll spend on future cars, but the 2021 Ford explorer we just bought was 30k. DH has talked about getting a plug in electric car that's a few years old when the Prius dies, but we do plan to run the Prius into the ground. He thinks one that is a few years old will cost around 30k. I have not verified this.

So all the other things on the list are definitely driven by DH, but I'm not opposed to them. I'd love solar panels and I think we will eventually need another bedroom and bathroom. We plan to get more info about the cost of the addition soon, but it's not a cut and dried adding of square feet. We'd have to do some repairs to parts of the house and repurpose a room and add a floor. So without an actual quote or two, we're really not sure.

I know he's interested in a higher end shed and dock, but he is willing to scale things back. These aren't numbers that we're married to, just helping us create a back of the envelope guesstimate.

Where it stands now, I can cut back to one/1.5 days a week for 3-5 years and cover our expenses while our stash grows to 3 million. I feel pretty okay about that. I am going to play around with my schedule a little in the fall and winter, and if I still want more time home with the kids then I'll cut down to 1.5 days/week when DH fires.

Check out Costco's website for sheds. They have a lot to choose from for way less money than that.

We love Costco. We actively pursue any excuse to buy something from Costco. I imagine DH has looked into Costco sheds, so I'll have to see what his take is on them.

Mustachian frugality is never about depriving yourself. It's all about getting the most out of your time/energy/money balance.

MMM himself wrote quite a bit about this early on, the difference between being frugal and being cheap.

As I like to say, I'm not cheap, I'm just a snob about spending. I expect the money I spend to produce a massive quality of life improvement, so I expect a lot from my spending.

And yes, all of us in mental health are having to grapple with the market changing and Psychology Today no longer being sufficient to provide client flow for many providers. Every day I see posts from therapists who are closing their PT accounts because they're getting zero referrals and can't justify even the $30 cost.

Quote from: Metalcat on October 20, 2024, 05:24:43 AM

Mustachian frugality is never about depriving yourself. It's all about getting the most out of your time/energy/money balance.

MMM himself wrote quite a bit about this early on, the difference between being frugal and being cheap.

As I like to say, I'm not cheap, I'm just a snob about spending. I expect the money I spend to produce a massive quality of life improvement, so I expect a lot from my spending.

And yes, all of us in mental health are having to grapple with the market changing and Psychology Today no longer being sufficient to provide client flow for many providers. Every day I see posts from therapists who are closing their PT accounts because they're getting zero referrals and can't justify even the $30 cost.

I think of mustachianism as being about a certain degree of deprivation until you reach FI. I think about the article MMM wrote about how your retirement is built on $10 choices, and to me that encouraged a mindset of scrutinizing even the smallest purchases. Which is fine, and it works, and it allows you to decide what is worthwhile and what is not, but it also gives me a little heartburn. I have made the choice to spend more in certain areas than is necessary because of the added life enjoyment. But there are silly small things that I hesitate to spend money on because we're not FI yet. Nothing too life changing/influential, but I often get a pang of ack I shouldn't buy this, mostly the $5 lattes and such, that I'd like to untrain myself from now. I get frustrated when DD or DS poops in their pullups at night and we have to change it, partially because it's $.30 wasted. Who cares though? I really shouldn't. We're not FI, but we're close enough that I'm ready to relax a bit about spending, seeing as we're on track to be fat FI.

Do you know why the psychology today referrals have slowed down? Are people using other websites, are they using a different referral strategy altogether, are they just accessing mental health care less? I started using PT in 2021 at the peak of the pandemic, so the referrals were endless. Now it's a teeny trickle. I don't want to have to hustle again, making connections with PCPs and therapists. I've done that before and you put so much time into a relationship and then they send you one referral, or none. It's so hard to predict who will connect with you. I have a therapist who sends me all of her clients, and she sees a lot, and other than that it's usually internal referrals or clients referring their friends or family when it's not PT.

I don't agree at all that it's about deprivation, not even pre-FI. I would examine your discomfort with spending as I have personally never felt that way, even when I was still in major debt. I feel extremely comfortable spending as long as I know it fits with my value system. If it feels like a really good value trade for my time and energy, then I enjoy spending, quite a bit actually.

I don't enjoy spending $15 on a fast food lunch compared to packing a meal at home, but I do feel great spending $30 on really nice French patisseries and a bottle of non-alcoholic champagne and going for a picnic in a stunning location. The $15 lunch is cheaper, but the picnic experience has way more value and is much cheaper and more fun than going out to a restaurant.

I don't have kids, but I do have pets and I don't resent any spending on them because they are such high happiness value in my life.

It's not at all about not spending, it's about asking yourself how to get the max benefit from your money. No matter how much you work, you will always have a finite amount of money in your life. So every single spending decision is a trade off, it's not at all about NOT buying things, it's about knowing how to spend on what really matters and spending on that instead.

Retiring early is an extremely expensive luxury, so it requires a lot of trade offs. Owning a second home is an extremely expensive luxury, that also requires a lot of trade offs. Any large luxury purchase is going to require pulling resources from elsewhere, that's why it's important to be certain that that large purchase is what you really want.

It's not at all about not being able to buy things, no matter how much money you have, every single cent you spend is money that you can't spend on something else. Every single decision you make to spend on something is a decision to not spend on something else. Every cent you spend on buying more free time is money that you can't spend on consumer things, and vice versa.

Money isn't anything in and of itself, it's a representative of time and energy, whose value change over time and context.

I have very little interest in spending $75 on a restaurant meal for the two of us just because I don't feel like cooking, but every week I spend $75 on hiring a kitchen helper to bulk cook our meals for the week. The time/energy exchange for one nice restaurant meal is a shitty deal compared to a week's worth of nice meals.

I'm not willing to buy meat because it's so expensive and I'm a former vegetarian chef, so my legume-based meals are just as tasty. I'm not going to trade my time/energy to eat meat that doesn't add anything to my day-to-day eating experience. That's a shitty trade. But I will happily spend more on quality produce, because it makes a huge difference to my daily eating experience.

I'm not depriving myself of meat, it's just not a high value trade to spend more on it. FTR, I'm not a vegetarian, I love meat and eat it outside of the house whenever I feel like it, I just don't cook it.

Money is just a mechanism for exchanging some of our time and energy for things and experiences. Having a very solid concept of the exchange rate is critical for making effective decisions.

My DH and I have spent a decade talking every single day about the exchange value of things. We've talked through literally every purchase we've made pretty daily to calibrate our understanding of trade off values. We've challenged and questioned them as well. We now spend entirely intuitively and get a lot of joy out of knowing our spending is really great value.

You are correct that as someone gets wealthier, they can become more comfortable with spending more, that's because the time/energy/money exchange changes over time.

Money saved in the past is worth a lot more than money saved in the future, and items bought in the past are generally worth less than they will be in the future, so the literal exchange value changes over time. Understanding that flux is critical for understanding value exchanges. A $10 beverage costs you A LOT more in your 20s if you have credit card debt than it does in your 50s when you're fatFI. It quite literally costs a different amount even when accounting for inflation.

So yes, your exchange system should change over time. My exchange system has altered radically since becoming disabled. My physical energy is so much more precious, so outsourcing is much more valuable than it used to be. Hence why I now outsource cooking, cleaning, and home repairs when doing it myself used to be a solid value.

When you've already made the huge purchase of buying your early retirement and you have extra money, spending that money no longer takes time away from your retirement.

But to me, it's still not deprivation. The cornerstone of my frugality is that I feel like every cent I spend is extremely high value. I thoroughly enjoy economizing where it makes most sense because no matter how much money I make, I know that that economizing frees up resources for something better.

Every single $10 beverage I don't buy opens the door to something better. Likewise, every time I *do* spend on a $10 beverage date with my DH instead of a $100+ restaurant date is also opening the door to something better.

We actually regularly spend money at very expensive cafes. We go with our dog, which helps socialize her, we have very fancy coffees and pastries, and read for a few hours. We get dressed nicely for the occasion, and it satisfies our "going out on a fancy date" desire without costing us a fortune. It's excellent value. But I would never just grab a $10 beverage for the sake of just having the beverage, I would go home and make one for myself. The value of paying someone else to make it just isn't there.

I'm happy to pay a small premium for the "fancy date" experience, especially when I can bring my dog, but I'm not willing to pay a premium just to have a barista make my beverage. That's a poor value trade for me. I'm thrilled to spend the money for a lovely date, especially if the weather is bad, but I am loathe to waste money just to consume a beverage made by someone else, despite it being for the exact same beverage.

I truly enjoy spending money. When I know I'm getting outsized value for what I'm spending, I really, really enjoy it because it's not taking away from the opportunity to buy something better. It IS the better thing.

Plenty of things, to me, are better than retiring early. That's the same for everyone, that's why Mustachians don't live in total deprivation until reaching FI. We all have lifestyle things that are more valuable than absolutely maximizing our time retired. Resenting spending on those things makes no sense.

I don't have babies who soil pullups, but I do have a dog that goes through multiple disposable pee pads every day, and never once have I tallied up what her pee pads are costing me individually (except to find the best deal on pee pads). I'm insanely grateful she's pre-pad trained because we travel with her and live in some really nasty climates, so having a dog that doesn't actually need to go outside is AMAZING. Well worth whatever the pee pads cost me.

Your children also aren't wasting pullups, they're using them as intended. Pull-ups are an amazing invention that filled the need for a diaper transition option that didn't exist before. Some of them being soiled at night and then tossed into the trash is a big part of their value. That's you paying $.30 to not have to deal with soiled night clothes and bedding every time your kid doesn't make it through the night. That sounds like AMAZING value to me.

Quote from: WorkingToUnwind on October 20, 2024, 07:04:32 PM

Quote from: Metalcat on October 20, 2024, 05:24:43 AM

Mustachian frugality is never about depriving yourself. It's all about getting the most out of your time/energy/money balance.

MMM himself wrote quite a bit about this early on, the difference between being frugal and being cheap.

As I like to say, I'm not cheap, I'm just a snob about spending. I expect the money I spend to produce a massive quality of life improvement, so I expect a lot from my spending.

And yes, all of us in mental health are having to grapple with the market changing and Psychology Today no longer being sufficient to provide client flow for many providers. Every day I see posts from therapists who are closing their PT accounts because they're getting zero referrals and can't justify even the $30 cost.

I think of mustachianism as being about a certain degree of deprivation until you reach FI. I think about the article MMM wrote about how your retirement is built on $10 choices, and to me that encouraged a mindset of scrutinizing even the smallest purchases. Which is fine, and it works, and it allows you to decide what is worthwhile and what is not, but it also gives me a little heartburn. I have made the choice to spend more in certain areas than is necessary because of the added life enjoyment. But there are silly small things that I hesitate to spend money on because we're not FI yet. Nothing too life changing/influential, but I often get a pang of ack I shouldn't buy this, mostly the $5 lattes and such, that I'd like to untrain myself from now. I get frustrated when DD or DS poops in their pullups at night and we have to change it, partially because it's $.30 wasted. Who cares though? I really shouldn't. We're not FI, but we're close enough that I'm ready to relax a bit about spending, seeing as we're on track to be fat FI.

Do you know why the psychology today referrals have slowed down? Are people using other websites, are they using a different referral strategy altogether, are they just accessing mental health care less? I started using PT in 2021 at the peak of the pandemic, so the referrals were endless. Now it's a teeny trickle. I don't want to have to hustle again, making connections with PCPs and therapists. I've done that before and you put so much time into a relationship and then they send you one referral, or none. It's so hard to predict who will connect with you. I have a therapist who sends me all of her clients, and she sees a lot, and other than that it's usually internal referrals or clients referring their friends or family when it's not PT.

I don't agree at all that it's about deprivation, not even pre-FI. I would examine your discomfort with spending as I have personally never felt that way, even when I was still in major debt. I feel extremely comfortable spending as long as I know it fits with my value system. If it feels like a really good value trade for my time and energy, then I enjoy spending, quite a bit actually.

I don't enjoy spending $15 on a fast food lunch compared to packing a meal at home, but I do feel great spending $30 on really nice French patisseries and a bottle of non-alcoholic champagne and going for a picnic in a stunning location. The $15 lunch is cheaper, but the picnic experience has way more value and is much cheaper and more fun than going out to a restaurant.

I don't have kids, but I do have pets and I don't resent any spending on them because they are such high happiness value in my life.

It's not at all about not spending, it's about asking yourself how to get the max benefit from your money. No matter how much you work, you will always have a finite amount of money in your life. So every single spending decision is a trade off, it's not at all about NOT buying things, it's about knowing how to spend on what really matters and spending on that instead.

Retiring early is an extremely expensive luxury, so it requires a lot of trade offs. Owning a second home is an extremely expensive luxury, that also requires a lot of trade offs. Any large luxury purchase is going to require pulling resources from elsewhere, that's why it's important to be certain that that large purchase is what you really want.

It's not at all about not being able to buy things, no matter how much money you have, every single cent you spend is money that you can't spend on something else. Every single decision you make to spend on something is a decision to not spend on something else. Every cent you spend on buying more free time is money that you can't spend on consumer things, and vice versa.

Money isn't anything in and of itself, it's a representative of time and energy, whose value change over time and context.

I have very little interest in spending $75 on a restaurant meal for the two of us just because I don't feel like cooking, but every week I spend $75 on hiring a kitchen helper to bulk cook our meals for the week. The time/energy exchange for one nice restaurant meal is a shitty deal compared to a week's worth of nice meals.

I'm not willing to buy meat because it's so expensive and I'm a former vegetarian chef, so my legume-based meals are just as tasty. I'm not going to trade my time/energy to eat meat that doesn't add anything to my day-to-day eating experience. That's a shitty trade. But I will happily spend more on quality produce, because it makes a huge difference to my daily eating experience.

I'm not depriving myself of meat, it's just not a high value trade to spend more on it. FTR, I'm not a vegetarian, I love meat and eat it outside of the house whenever I feel like it, I just don't cook it.

Money is just a mechanism for exchanging some of our time and energy for things and experiences. Having a very solid concept of the exchange rate is critical for making effective decisions.

My DH and I have spent a decade talking every single day about the exchange value of things. We've talked through literally every purchase we've made pretty daily to calibrate our understanding of trade off values. We've challenged and questioned them as well. We now spend entirely intuitively and get a lot of joy out of knowing our spending is really great value.

You are correct that as someone gets wealthier, they can become more comfortable with spending more, that's because the time/energy/money exchange changes over time.

Money saved in the past is worth a lot more than money saved in the future, and items bought in the past are generally worth less than they will be in the future, so the literal exchange value changes over time. Understanding that flux is critical for understanding value exchanges. A $10 beverage costs you A LOT more in your 20s if you have credit card debt than it does in your 50s when you're fatFI. It quite literally costs a different amount even when accounting for inflation.

So yes, your exchange system should change over time. My exchange system has altered radically since becoming disabled. My physical energy is so much more precious, so outsourcing is much more valuable than it used to be. Hence why I now outsource cooking, cleaning, and home repairs when doing it myself used to be a solid value.

When you've already made the huge purchase of buying your early retirement and you have extra money, spending that money no longer takes time away from your retirement.

But to me, it's still not deprivation. The cornerstone of my frugality is that I feel like every cent I spend is extremely high value. I thoroughly enjoy economizing where it makes most sense because no matter how much money I make, I know that that economizing frees up resources for something better.

Every single $10 beverage I don't buy opens the door to something better. Likewise, every time I *do* spend on a $10 beverage date with my DH instead of a $100+ restaurant date is also opening the door to something better.

We actually regularly spend money at very expensive cafes. We go with our dog, which helps socialize her, we have very fancy coffees and pastries, and read for a few hours. We get dressed nicely for the occasion, and it satisfies our "going out on a fancy date" desire without costing us a fortune. It's excellent value. But I would never just grab a $10 beverage for the sake of just having the beverage, I would go home and make one for myself. The value of paying someone else to make it just isn't there.

I'm happy to pay a small premium for the "fancy date" experience, especially when I can bring my dog, but I'm not willing to pay a premium just to have a barista make my beverage. That's a poor value trade for me. I'm thrilled to spend the money for a lovely date, especially if the weather is bad, but I am loathe to waste money just to consume a beverage made by someone else, despite it being for the exact same beverage.

I truly enjoy spending money. When I know I'm getting outsized value for what I'm spending, I really, really enjoy it because it's not taking away from the opportunity to buy something better. It IS the better thing.

Plenty of things, to me, are better than retiring early. That's the same for everyone, that's why Mustachians don't live in total deprivation until reaching FI. We all have lifestyle things that are more valuable than absolutely maximizing our time retired. Resenting spending on those things makes no sense.

I don't have babies who soil pullups, but I do have a dog that goes through multiple disposable pee pads every day, and never once have I tallied up what her pee pads are costing me individually (except to find the best deal on pee pads). I'm insanely grateful she's pre-pad trained because we travel with her and live in some really nasty climates, so having a dog that doesn't actually need to go outside is AMAZING. Well worth whatever the pee pads cost me.

Your children also aren't wasting pullups, they're using them as intended. Pull-ups are an amazing invention that filled the need for a diaper transition option that didn't exist before. Some of them being soiled at night and then tossed into the trash is a big part of their value. That's you paying $.30 to not have to deal with soiled night clothes and bedding every time your kid doesn't make it through the night. That sounds like AMAZING value to me.

Thanks for the response. Sooo this brings some interesting thoughts to mind. I've reread a few of my core MMM articles that I last read probably 10 years ago, and I think my takeaway then was "less is more," "don't indulge," and "be as minimal as possible with your spending bc your debt is an emergency and moreso your financial situation is an emergency until you have x amount saved." Now that's not really what MMM wrote, but that's how I remembered it bc I dropped all the nuanced bits. And I think that my interpreting it this way is bc finances have always created a certain level of stress for me. I remember waitressing at 14 and getting so anxious about my tips and how much I was making. When I was in high school, my mom would get so annoyed with me for being so cheap. My view of finances has changed as we've accumulated all this wealth, but I still find myself in that scarcity mindset at times. It's nothing extreme, just little blips such as " ah, we're wasting money on another pull-up." It doesn't keep me up at night, but it's a little tightness in the chest or a pang of anxiety with spending, sometimes even on something that should be enjoyable. It's annoying! It's definitely getting better though, bc I am actually calling myself out on this stuff and trying to rework my mindset rather than before, when I might get genuinely annoyed and a little sick to my stomach about all the money we're "wasting on pullups."  Another recent one I caught myself on was when my husband cleaned up a big spill with paper towels. I was all upset that he didn't use a dishtowel bc it was wasted money on paper towels. It actually still bothers me a little bit, but it really shouldn't. Like isn't that why we buy paper towels?

I agree with you wholeheartedly about money saved in the past having more value than money saved in the future. That's probably why I'm lightening up about spending and saving now. Before, every 1k seemed like it was making such a difference. Now, I save 10-20k in a month and our net worth goes up by 100k that same month thanks to a strong market. It makes me wonder why I'm bothering saving anything at all. When I shop clearance clothes for the kids at Target to save $5 on a $10 pair of pants, I wonder why the heck I'm bothering trying to save more, it's just a teensie blip and we're going to leave behind millions someday, I'd imagine.

I'm definitely in a period of transition with my financial mindset. DH is winding down his career, I'm thinking about downshifting again next year, it's all very strange but good. Just to go from an accumulation mindset to maintenance mode is a bit jarring!

Also, @Metalcat I was thinking about your examples of the things that bring you joy with spending and making the tradeoffs with spending in one area and not in another. I think I also enjoy spending on good food, convenience services, and so on. But the best part about approaching coastFI, as it were, is the time freedom. Getting to be home every morning and afternoon to be with the kids plus three full days, not being stressed about money and all the things that go with not having enough when I'm with them, it's pretty amazing. So I would cut back in multiple areas to have the time freedom with them. I also wouldn't call what we've done deprivation. There was some hard core mustachianism in the begining, but that ship has sailed. Now the only mustachian thing about our budget is our smaller home and the Prius.

Yeah, I assumed you had some scarcity mindset history because that shit comes from somewhere.

Have you ever done really good therapy yourself?

I grew up in poverty and was a homeless teen, so you can imagine the scarcity mindset I've had in the past. But I've also had enough therapy to recognize it as a trauma response, and if/when I notice it, I recognize it as a symptom of something being off with my overall mental health.

I mean, even your interpretation of the MMM content is suggestive of a fairly warped lense through which you absorbed the messaging. DH and I were in close to a half million dollars of debt when I read MMM, and even I didn't just absorb "save as much as possible!" I very strongly absorbed the "live your best life and spend what you need to to live it, just don't fool yourself that spending more equals living better."

I mean, how many times does MMM repeat that he lives a life of fairly extreme luxury and that by no means has he ever experienced deprivation.

It was so incredibly resonant to me when I read it that it was a how-to guide to being happy and healthy in a world that programs you to be spendy, unhealthy, and miserable.

So to me, that's very suggestive of some inner frameworks that could use some examination and rejigging.

When I found MMM, I also did not read it as being miserly. It sounded appealing because he talked about living an amazing luxurious life on very little money. Rather than frittering away money on little things that don’t matter, aligning spending on what we actually valued would help us to what we really wanted - early retirement.

Before that I had read Early Retirement Extreme - and that was all about frugality and how cheaply it was possible to live. That was fascinating but didn’t interest me.

We’ve always lived an incredibly luxurious life. Even during the accumulation years when I critically evaluated every last dollar (since each dollar saved was a dollar closer to our freedom). Our life after FIRE looked suspiciously like our life before FIRE.

Now I am way past our number and have much more than enough so I have relaxed more and am a bit more spendy as a result. I still don’t like waste though and get annoyed with myself when I am too wasteful. Now each dollar saved is a dollar that could go to other things I care about - making life more convenient, making memories, helping my kids, helping other people, etc etc


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Same, our life looks pretty much exactly the same as it did when we had "hair on fire" debt...except for the whole owning a second home thing...

That said, the combined cost of our 2 homes is less than what we sold our last home for, so there's that, and even that house was really inexpensive.

But yeah, from when we were making A LOT of money with my previous profession, to when we lost the vast majority of our income, to when I went back to work, our lifestyle really hasn't changed aside from the fact that we live in 2 locations now, living the same nature and community focused lifestyle in both.

Because we have our absolutely optimal lifestyle locked-in, I feel quite delighted by our spending because it produces such absurdly outsized benefits.

You're obviously perfectly qualified to assess whether you need therapy or not.

I was sharing my perspective that any kind of hyper vigilance behaviour, such as being bothered by small spending behaviours, prompts be to be aware of some internal issues around safety.

If you don't think you have any further trauma to process behind these behaviours, then that's awesome.

For *me* it would signal something is up because my "normal" is to feel at ease with spending decisions.

I think it's been my normal to agonize over money since I was a kid. I've definitely gotten way better, but there are these weird little holdover thoughts/impulses that strike me at random. If I were my own patient, I'd probably also tell myself to do some therapy work on it. So I'll think that suggestion over.

Yeah, that was my normal as well for a very long time, so I understand what it's like. I don't miss it.

Hi @Moonwaves, welcome!

To respond to your questions, I must first say that I kind of agree with you on the not having paper towels in the house. It does seem like such a waste for the environment. However, we still go through a bazillion baby wipes a month so I'll wait until that stream of waste has died down before even considering reducing the paper towels. Plus little kids spill so much. Paper towels are so handy.

We got a very rough estimate from a couple contractors (200-300k) but we never had plans drawn up or anything. If we do an addition, DH will do some of the work. He's very handy and good at watching YouTube videos to learn new skills. This might be a retirement project for him. He quits sometime next spring or summer, so perhaps after that.

We have not seriously considered raising our house up. It's two sections and the lower section that floods is much older, wobbly, and lopsided, so we might be better off just tearing down the lower part of our house and rebuilding it on a new raised foundation.

The sump pump did great for a few storms but couldn't keep up for bigger storms, so we still had flooding in the garage. This past June we cut a drainage channel through our yard so the water will flow out to the pond before it gets to the level of the house. DH and a buddy rented a mini excavator for a day and had quite the time. We haven't had any significant storms since then, so we haven't seen whether it works. DH and friend are very confident it has solved the water issue. I will believe it when I see it.

My parents do have a large paid off home and ski condo. Their property assets are over 1.5 million. They will have to keep working as long as they keep sailing and skiing and motorcycling, because social security alone isn't going to pay for those hobbies. However, once they're physically unable to do these active hobbies, perhaps they will sell the condo and boat, and downsize the home. That should help them take care of expenses for a while. I will step in to help them if they truly need it way down the line. DH's parents are all set. They have saved quite a bit over the years and have a solid retirement plan.

One thing that has come up recently is my brother is getting divorced. He'd like to buy his ex-wife out of the house, but it sounds like he'll either need $250k to keep the mortgage or he'll have to refinance at a much higher rate and still need a down payment. I don't know or understand the particulars and he hasn't figured it all out yet with the bank either, but I'm wondering if we should give him some money to help. I would say loan, but I know a loan to family might end up being a gift. Might as well refer to it as a gift between myself and DH, even if we couch it as a loan to brother. My brother seems to think my parents can help him out, but I don't think he realizes how little cash they actually have. I talked to my mom and she promised not to take money out of their retirement accounts to help him. I wouldn't be surprised if my dad overrides that.

Quote from: WorkingToUnwind on October 22, 2024, 06:57:54 PM

One thing that has come up recently is my brother is getting divorced. He'd like to buy his ex-wife out of the house, but it sounds like he'll either need $250k to keep the mortgage or he'll have to refinance at a much higher rate and still need a down payment. I don't know or understand the particulars and he hasn't figured it all out yet with the bank either, but I'm wondering if we should give him some money to help. I would say loan, but I know a loan to family might end up being a gift. Might as well refer to it as a gift between myself and DH, even if we couch it as a loan to brother. My brother seems to think my parents can help him out, but I don't think he realizes how little cash they actually have. I talked to my mom and she promised not to take money out of their retirement accounts to help him. I wouldn't be surprised if my dad overrides that.

Well, if your brother can't afford to buy her out or pay a downpayment and a higher rate for financing then maybe it's more house than he can afford.

This would be my concern as well.  I'm sure you have good reasons to give him the money and no concerns about his finances, but it definitely sounds like selling would be in his best interest, monetarily.

My daughter's preschool teacher reached out to the class asking for donations of glue sticks, tissues, art supplies, etc. It's pathetic how we underfund our school systems so the teachers making minimum wage have to beg for the tools to teach our kids. This is a preschool program run by the public school system. Anyways, old me would've picked one thing off the list and bought a regular sized package and maybe cringed a little at the unplanned expense. Instead, I bought bulk packs of expo markers, glue sticks, and construction paper. Brand stuff too, not the off-brand option. It's a small thing, but it felt good to enjoy giving and not worry about the $50.

I think I've heard teachers say before that for the (ab)use stuff gets in schools, the brand name quality can make a difference. However, I'm not sure if I heard this from a reliable source or just some random person on instagram with O.P.I.N.I.O.N.s so, you know, this comment is worth as much as you've paid for it. :-)

I do find it astonishing that schools in the US are like this. I see calls going out on instagram every year from teachers who have put lists on Amazon for what they need for the year, asking for people to buy them stuff. Mentioning it here in case there are people with no kids who may feel like donating to a local school.

That all makes sense!