Millionaire Librarian

Is Frugality Nature or Nurture?

July 21, 2026

Is frugality something you’re born with, or something life teaches you? I think the honest answer is both — but the way each one works is more interesting than the debate usually gives it credit for.

The Marshmallow Study

The infamous “marshmallow” study tested young children on their ability to delay gratification for a bigger prize later. This is a skill integral to investing at a later age. Children who successfully delayed their gratification were studied later and did unusually well financially. This hints that frugality and the ability to invest might partly be nature.

But here’s the interesting point: many of the kids who succeeded in this experiment still wanted instant gratification. They didn’t out-will the marshmallow. They found other ways to occupy themselves — playing games, singing, looking away, pretending it wasn’t there.

This matters a lot for how we think about frugality in adulthood. Trying to stoically abstain from spending might be more difficult than abstaining by entertaining yourself in a more frugal way. The kids who succeeded weren’t fighting the urge head-on. They were distracting themselves from it. If that’s the actual mechanism, then “just have more willpower” is bad advice. The better advice is: find something else to occupy yourself with — the budgeting spreadsheet, the DIY project, the game of seeing how low you can get the grocery bill — instead of white-knuckling your way past every purchase.

A single white marshmallow sitting on a clean white surface

The Great Depression, the Great Financial Crisis, and Me

As a contrasting point, people who lived through the Great Depression were changed, or scarred, forever. Everyone’s heard of the grandparent who hoarded food or other goods for the rest of their life because of what they went through.

To a lesser degree, I wonder if something similar happened with the Great Financial Crisis. I graduated college in 2009 and couldn’t find a job for new graduates. I ended up going back to school. That was also the year I lived in poverty. Since then, I’ve saved around 50% of my income and am now financially independent.

I wonder if I would have turned out the same without the GFC, and without that lean year. My guess is some of it is biological — the raw material was probably there — and it just needed the right conditions to bring it out.

I should add an important detail, though. I was hungry that year, but I had a family safety net. I had people I could return to a state over, and eventually I did. That’s a very different experience than true poverty, where there’s no floor under you at all. I think that safety net is part of why the lesson I took away was “save and build something secure” rather than something more desperate. Knowing the fall had a bottom probably let me treat that year as motivation instead of trauma.

Instability Doesn’t Always Teach the Same Lesson

Here’s the part that keeps the story from being too tidy: instability doesn’t always cause frugality. In some people, it produces the opposite — compensatory overspending once resources are finally available.

When I worked for the military, it wasn’t unusual for a young Airman with a rough childhood to spend an entire paycheck and bonus on a flashy vehicle with a predatory interest rate. Same starting ingredient — a hard upbringing — completely different result.

So scarcity by itself isn’t the lesson. Something about how the scarcity was experienced determines whether it teaches “delay pays off” or “grab it while you can.” My 2009 didn’t just install a general fear of poverty — it seems to have installed a specific habit, a savings discipline, more than a permanent anxiety. And I think the safety net mattered here. I knew the fall had a bottom. That Airman’s childhood, by contrast, may have had no floor at all — no family to return to, no version of the story where things were guaranteed to get better. Maybe that’s part of why the same rough patch can teach one person “save for the bottom that’s coming” and teach another person “there is no bottom, so take what you can get now.”

Nature probably loads the gun. But whether a hard season in life makes someone frugal or makes them overcompensate later seems to come down to what that hard season actually taught them about whether patience gets rewarded or punished.

A classic Dodge Charger R/T drives through a busy city street lined with shops and pedestrians
Frugal is Inconveniencing Yourself, Cheap is Inconveniencing Others. Spending More With Guardrails.

July 15, 2026

Someone online was writing about a date they went on. The guy was hesitant to pick up the check. They drank only water. He wanted to split the entree even though it was just a cheeseburger and she didn’t like cheeseburgers. When it was time to leave he wanted all the leftover fries for later. He wasn’t starving or poor. Actually, he was an aerospace engineer who bragged about his hundreds of thousands portfolio.

He was cheap, and the reason he was cheap is because his frugality greatly limited the relationships in his life. On a date, he had an obligation to pay for the meal. It seems he didn’t like this obligation. If he was just frugal, then he would have turned down the date and stayed home to eat, or he could have fixed a good meal for the both of them.

This isn’t an absolute rule, but more of a spectrum. I think as your net worth increases and your money begins making real money, it’s important to use this easily obtained invested money to spend a little more, especially on relationships. If you’ve saved up considerable wealth to where your investments are bringing in real income, or you’re financially independent, then you’re probably at least a little frugal compared to your peers and should start exercising this muscle. Maybe buy your friends lunch or pick up dinner. It doesn’t have to be extravagant. I don’t enjoy traveling, but my wife does, so she went to a destination wedding in Greece to visit old friends. After you have your nest egg, don’t spend it down, but see how it feels to spend more of what it makes. Remember, though: it’s first the nest egg, then the life.

There’s actually a name for this idea, and it’s more rigorous than just eyeballing recent market returns: the guardrails withdrawal method (Guyton-Klinger). Instead of locking in a fixed 4% or 4.7% forever, you set an initial withdrawal rate, then adjust it up or down based on how your portfolio is actually doing relative to where it started. If a hot stretch pushes your withdrawal rate below your lower guardrail — meaning your portfolio grew faster than your spending — you give yourself a raise. If a downturn pushes it above your upper guardrail, you pull back for a while. It’s a withdrawal rate with shock absorbers, built to flex with the market instead of ignoring it. That’s a better anchor for “spend more” than citing a hot decade of returns, because it’s a claim about your specific position relative to your specific number, not a bet that recent market performance repeats. If you’re financially independent and durably ahead of where your original plan needed you to be, that’s the system telling you it’s fine to buy the lunch, book the trip, pick up the check.
Financial Independence is the Important Part of FIRE

July 14, 2026

Financial Independence is the Important Part of FIRE

Financial independence is when the money your assets make replaces your income, meaning you no longer need to work.

I think the most important thing about financial independence is that it’s a progressive concept — you get more and more benefits the further you go on the spectrum. Someone with $10k has more independence than someone in debt. They can afford to take a couple of unpaid days off or go a month without work if they need to. A person in debt needs every cent they can make.

Expenses matter too. It’s the other side of the balloon. Someone with lower expenses and the same amount of money has more independence than someone with higher expenses. For example, if two people each have $100k, the one who spends less can make it last longer.

Things get messier with the RE part — is it really RE if you work a part-time job, or rent out a couple of houses? It’s not technically fully retired, and some people love to point that out. Maybe you have a hobby that brings in a little money. Some would say you’re still “working” even if it’s just a couple hours a week.

But that argument misses the point. RE is a label — a yes/no switch people like to argue about. FI is the thing that’s actually real. It’s the spectrum you’re moving along every time you pay down debt, cut an expense, or add to your net worth. You don’t need someone to certify you as “retired” for that progress to count. You just need to keep sliding down the spectrum toward more freedom.
The Expat Cost Advantage

July 11, 2026

The Expat Cost Advantage

The 4% rule says if you can live off 4% of your portfolio, you’re financially independent. For $100k/year in expenses, that means a $2.5 million portfolio. But if you can lower your expenses, you can retire much sooner — and the easiest lever I’ve found for that is moving somewhere cheaper.

Case in point: our family of three spends around $40k a year in Ecuador. At 4%, that’s a $1 million portfolio instead of $2.5 million. The same lifestyle in a medium cost-of-living US city would run well over $100k. And that $40k isn’t a bare-bones budget — it includes trips to Greece, family trips back to the US, a weekly cleaner, a gardener, and eating out and meeting friends for drinks regularly. We’ve actually expanded our lifestyle here because it’s so much cheaper to do so. If a market drawdown hit, these are also the easiest expenses to cut, which adds a nice buffer that a lot of US-based FIRE budgets don’t have.

If your number is more like $500k, part-time work can close the gap. Earn $20k and draw $20k from the portfolio (2% instead of 4%), and the math works well before you hit “full” FI.

Worth remembering too: 4% is a worst-case-scenario withdrawal rate. Median market returns run closer to 10%, so there’s a good chance that after 10 years of living partly or fully off your portfolio, you’ll have twice as much (or more) than when you started.

How Much Sooner Is $500k Than $2.5 Million?

The math on this is striking. Say you make $100k and save half of it — $50k a year — invested at a 10% average nominal return (about 7% real after inflation). Reaching $500k takes about 7.3 years. Reaching $2.5 million, by contrast, takes about 18.8 years. That’s an 11.5-year head start on freedom, just by aiming for the number that lets you work part-time instead of the number that lets you never work again.

Of course, the $500k path means you’re still earning $20k a year through part-time work, while the $2.5M path means you never have to work again. But if the goal is more time, more flexibility, and less dependence on any one job — 7.3 years beats 18.8 years every time.
Talking to Loved Ones about FIREing Abroad

July 7, 2026
I retired to Ecuador about a year ago. I was 39. My brother, ten years older and still working, was convinced I’d end up “sleeping under a bridge in the third world.” I told him that wasn’t going to happen. He wasn’t fully convinced, but he let it go, the way brothers do.

That conversation — and the dozens of smaller ones that followed it, with friends, coworkers, and total strangers — taught me more about talking to people about early retirement than any FIRE forum ever did. So here’s what I learned about who pushes back, who doesn’t, and why.

My brother never really listened, and I stopped trying to make him

My brother and I have never talked money the way I talk money with, say, an internet stranger in a FIRE subreddit. Partly that’s just how we are. Partly it’s because I never forced the subject on him.

A decade earlier, I bought him a John Bogle book. I’m a librarian — recommending the right book at the right time is basically my love language. He never read it. Looking back, that was probably a steep ask. You don’t hand someone The Little Book of Common Sense Investing and expect it to land the same way you’d want it to. He didn’t ask for a syllabus. He asked why I was retiring in Ecuador.

Here’s the thing, though: my brother and his family are doing great. They make good money and they spend it — on the house, the vacations, the stuff that makes their day-to-day better. We made good money too, and we spent it on getting free. Two different families, two different lifestyles, and both of us are living successful lives, just by our own definitions of the word.

I used to think that gap needed closing. It doesn’t. He was never going to read Bogle, and I was never going to want what he wants. Once I stopped treating that as a problem to solve, our conversations got a lot easier.

The friends who got it — for reasons that had nothing to do with me

The people who supported the move fastest weren’t always the ones I expected. Some had military pensions and had already retired in their thirties or early forties, so the shape of what we were doing wasn’t foreign to them at all — it was just a version of something they’d already lived. Some had spent years vacationing all over Latin America and had zero anxiety about the “developing country” part, because they’d actually been to one.

And a lot of people, honestly, were just tired. The political climate in the US had been getting worse every year, and for some friends, watching us leave wasn’t alarming — it was almost aspirational.

None of these people needed convincing. They’d already done the work of imagining a different life for themselves, or they’d seen enough of the world to know Ecuador wasn’t going to be a disaster movie. I didn’t have to sell them on FIRE. I just had to confirm the plan was real.

The hardest conversations came from people I barely knew

Here’s the part that surprised me: the sharpest pushback rarely came from family or close friends. It came from strangers.

In the last few months before we left, we were selling off everything that wasn’t coming with us — furniture, tools, a lawnmower, whatever. And almost every time, the buyer would ask some version of, “So why are you selling this?”

I’d answer honestly. Moving to Ecuador. Early retirement. And then I’d watch a total stranger, standing in my driveway on my old lawnmower, decide they had questions. Real questions. Skeptical questions. What was I going to do all day. Wasn’t that risky. Did I have kids. What about healthcare. What was I running from.

These weren’t people who knew our finances, our plan, or us. They had no stake in the outcome and no context for the decision, and somehow that made them the most confident critics of all. I’d be stuck in a fifteen-minute conversation with a stranger about a decision they’d learned about ninety seconds earlier, over a lawnmower.

People close to you have some idea of who you are and what you’re capable of handling, even if they don’t agree with your choices. Strangers don’t have that context, so all they have is the headline — quit your job, moved to South America — and the headline sounds reckless if you don’t know the person behind it.

What I’d tell someone about to do this

If you’re planning something like this yourself, here’s the short version of what a year of these conversations taught me:
- Don’t hand people a syllabus. If someone hasn’t asked to understand your financial philosophy, a book recommendation often isn’t the answer.
- Your real support network probably already exists. Look for the friends who’ve already lived some version of your plan, or who’ve seen enough of the world that “developing country” doesn’t sound like a threat.
- Expect the strangers to be the tough audience, not the family. They’ve got the least information and the most opinions, and that’s just how it goes.
- You don’t need everyone to agree with your version of a good life. My brother and I are proof that two very different definitions of success can both be right, for the people living them.
We’re not sleeping under any bridges. We’re a year in, still married, still parenting, dog now included, and still convinced this was the right call for us — even if it took a while to convince the guy who bought our lawnmower.
The Decisions That Actually Mattered

July 4, 2026

I’ve been thinking lately about which choices actually got me here — not the spreadsheet-optimized version of my financial life, but the real one, messy timeline and all. Some decisions I got right for the right reasons. Some I got right for reasons I’m not proud of. And at least one thing I got wrong, and I’m still not totally sure I’ve learned the lesson.

The Corolla, Not the Tacoma

My first car was an almost-new Toyota Tacoma. Solid truck. It lasted a decade before it was totaled. When it was time to replace it, the obvious move — the move my younger self clearly wanted to make — was another Tacoma. $34,000 and years of payments.

I bought a used Corolla instead. Thirteen grand. A small Japanese econo shitbox, if I’m honest about how it felt at the time.

There was no dopamine hit in that decision. Nobody’s impressed by a Corolla. But the $21,000 gap between those two options, left alone in an index fund, is worth more today than either truck ever was. This is the least emotionally satisfying and most financially important car decision most people will ever make, and most people make it wrong.

The Years I Was Broke on Purpose (Sort Of)

There was a year I lived in real poverty, working part-time at Best Buy. My wife has a theory about that year: I didn’t actually want a full-time job, I wanted to keep living like I was still in college. She’s probably right, or at least half-right. It doesn’t fit neatly into my “good decision” pile, and I’m not going to force it to.

What I’ll say is this: the instinct that kept me living small during that year didn’t go away once I started making real money. When I finally had extra income, I didn’t inflate my lifestyle to match it — I kept living the same simple way and put the extra into a Roth IRA. Whatever the origin story of that instinct, delayed gratification, low materialism, whatever you want to call it, it’s the actual engine under almost every good financial decision I’ve made. The Best Buy year might have been avoidance. The investing years after were the same trait doing something useful.

The House I Sold When I Should Have Rented It

I bought cheap and small instead of trying to match the house my parents had. That part I got right. Where I got it wrong: I sold that house later instead of keeping it as a rental. Low mortgage rate, appreciating asset, built-in tenant demand — it looks like free money from where I’m standing now.

I try not to be too hard on myself about this one. Hindsight is 20/20, and low rates always look obvious in the rearview mirror. In real time, a rental property is tenant calls and maintenance emergencies and vacancy risk, and I was not in a financial position back then to absorb a bad year of that. It’s fine to let this one go as a reasonable call given what I knew, rather than a mistake I should still be kicking myself over.

Marrying Well

I married someone who genuinely enjoys a simpler life. This is not something I engineered — it’s closer to the biggest single input into everything else on this list. Expensive tastes, or a divorce, would have been financially catastrophic and emotionally worse. I don’t take full credit for this one. I got lucky, and I recognized the luck, which is maybe the only skill involved.

Debt-Free by Luck and a Little Planning

I worked at a university that paid for my master’s degree. Mostly luck. Some planning. But graduating debt-free gave me flexibility that compounded for years afterward — flexibility to move for jobs, flexibility to take career risks, flexibility to eventually walk away entirely. Debt doesn’t just cost you interest. It costs you options.

Money as a Mental Health Tool

Part of what good financial decisions bought me was the ability to make good decisions for my mental health. I moved across the country for a job once, and that move cost real money — thousands of dollars most people in a similar spot simply don’t have sitting around. Financial slack isn’t just about retirement projections. It’s the ability to leave a bad situation, or move toward a better one, without the decision being made for you by your bank account.

The One I’m Still Not Sure About

Here’s the one that actually nags at me. I had a great position. Genuinely good. I left it anyway, chasing more money and a better place to live, moving one state over. The new job turned out to be a mess, and that mess is a big part of why I ended up retiring early.

I love how it turned out. I want to be clear about that — I’m not writing this as regret. But I can hold two things at once: I love the outcome, and I’m not convinced I needed to blow up a good situation to get there. If I’d had the wisdom to just be happy where I was, a few more years at that other job would have been perfectly fine too.

I think the actual lesson isn’t “always take the leap” or “always stay put.” It’s narrower and harder than that: have the wisdom to recognize a really good thing while you’re still standing in it. That’s a skill I’m not sure I have yet. It might be the kind of thing you only learn by blowing up a good situation a couple of times first.

What This Adds Up To

None of these decisions look impressive individually. A cheap car. A small house. A boring index fund. Staying married to someone low-maintenance. None of it is a hot tip. But laid end to end, it’s the entire mechanism — every dollar not spent on a bigger truck or a bigger house became a dollar that could buy freedom later. The math is simple. The hard part was never the math. The hard part was wanting the freedom more than I wanted the Tacoma.
The Light Physical Asset Approach to Ecuador

July 4, 2026

Part of moving to Ecuador was selling everything we owned in the States. We sold both our cars and all our furniture. We sold extra clothes and other household goods, and what we couldn’t sell we ended up donating or throwing away. Before we boarded planes to an entirely new country with only a few suitcases of belongings, we placed a few sentimental items with family to hold onto for later.

When we arrived in Ecuador we stayed at Airbnbs, then in a furnished apartment for a few months, before finding our current unfurnished house. Some items we had to repurchase, like beds, an oven, a washing machine, and a refrigerator. But we’ve been slow to repurchase almost everything else. It’s been nice to have less clutter in the house. It takes less time to pick up and clean. Fewer things for a toddler to throw on the floor.

The two big items we have not bought, and probably won’t buy for a long time, are a house and a car.

Renting Beats Buying, By a Lot

Renting is much less expensive in Ecuador than buying. In the U.S. there’s a rough guideline for rentals: if you can get 1% of a house’s value in rent each month, that’s considered a good return. That rule doesn’t hold up here. The house we live in is worth more than $100,000 to buy, but rents for $450 a month. That’s a 0.45% return, not even close to 1%.

Run the numbers over a year and it’s even more obvious. $450 a month comes out to $5,400 a year in rent. If we’d put that same $100,000 into an index fund instead and earned something like a 10% average return, that’s roughly $10,000 a year, and the money stays liquid and working for us the whole time. Buying the house would tie up six figures in an asset that, at least at these rent numbers, isn’t pricing in much of a return at all.

There are probably a few reasons rentals are priced so far below what buying would suggest: cheap property taxes, no A/C units to replace, and generally low maintenance costs compared to what we’re used to in the States. Real estate here is also viewed as more durable than money sitting in the bank. Ecuador’s move to the U.S. dollar, after the collapse of the sucre, is a recent enough history lesson. People woke up one day to find their life savings had vanished overnight. That kind of memory sticks, and it explains why locals lean toward property over cash even when the rental yields don’t make obvious financial sense to an outsider like me.

Skipping the Car

The other big item we don’t have is a car. Cars depreciate quickly in most countries. Here in Ecuador they hold their value better and stay relatively expensive to buy, but ownership still comes with taxes, insurance, depreciation, maintenance, and repairs, all extra costs on top of the purchase price.

There are also good, cheap substitutes to owning a car here: a solid bus system, walkable roads, and inexpensive taxis. A bus ride costs $0.30. Most moderate taxi rides run around $1.50, and crossing town might cost $2, maybe a little more. Even taking a taxi almost daily, we’d be hard-pressed to spend $100 a month getting around. A car, once you add up insurance, maintenance, and the taxes that come with owning one here, could easily run two or three times that before you’ve driven a single mile for fun. The math just doesn’t favor ownership when the alternative is this cheap and this convenient.

Staying Light on Purpose

None of this is really about furniture, or cars, or houses. It’s about optionality. Every dollar we don’t sink into a car sitting in a garage or a house’s down payment is a dollar that stays liquid, stays invested, and stays flexible if our plans change. That’s the same philosophy behind the index fund investing we lean on: don’t tie up money in things that feel secure but quietly underperform, when there’s a simpler and more flexible option sitting right there.
1 JAN – 1 JUL 2026 Budget, Family of Three in Cuenca, Ecuador.

June 28, 2026

Health 2947

Rent 2700

Culture 2505

Transport 2448

Restaurant 1946

Food 1794

Preschool 1790

Household 1634

Alcohol 931

Utilities and Phone 584

Housecleaner 500

Apparel 485

Beauty 480

Other 458

Pets 188

Social Life 182

Education 40

Total 21,617

3602/month

So looking at the last 6 months, a couple of things stand out. First, our average costs were higher than expected. I was expecting to be around $2,500–$3,000 and we ended up at $3,602.

One area that was higher than expected is health and medical. The gym cost was in there for three months for both of us, and medications — around $600 each for 6 months — were more expensive than we anticipated. We buy medications 3–6 months at a time, which means one big bill that wasn’t reflected in the other budgets I posted. Insurance was also a constant at around $100/month. We didn’t have any major hospital stays or surgeries. We may look into the public healthcare system, which should be a lot cheaper for medications but probably less English-friendly.

There were also some flights in the culture and transport sections that added some cost. Lauren visited friends in Europe, and we have a family trip to the States in December that we prepaid.

Restaurants were probably a little more than usual because we had our water heater repaired in June, which left us without gas for our stove for just over a week, meaning we were eating out a lot.

Food at $1,794 is lower than I might have expected given how much fresh fruit, vegetables, and meat we eat.

Though we are spending a little more than expected, I plugged the new numbers into ProjectionLab and we still have an excellent chance of success on our Monte Carlo. It didn’t even move the needle. No reason to worry.
Endurance is Why I Invest in Index Funds.

June 27, 2026

I want to mentally withstand the urge to take my money out if the market drops 30%. I’m 100% stocks, but that means I’m entirely in index funds because I trust the future of the world — or things are so bad that I don’t care.

It is easy to invest in single stocks or tech when everyone is making money. The real challenge is staying invested in Bitcoin or something similarly speculative when it’s down 60% and looks to be going to zero. Imagine you’re in a speculative investment and it drops 60% over a year. That would be terrible. You have anchored on an amount twice as high, and there is no end in sight. There is no promise it will return to where it was. Index funds have always regained what they lost and reached new heights.

Index funds will not 100x in a couple of weeks, but they will slowly grow your money by roughly 10% a year until you have enough that that 10% is considerable and replaces your income.

Also, because index funds hold thousands of companies, your portfolio is dependent not on a single sector or company, but on the United States or the world. If the world economy fails, then I have bigger problems than my portfolio.
First the Nest Egg, Then the Life

June 27, 2026

Cut early in your life and invest to build your nest egg.

When you retire with, say, $750k invested, in median market years you’ll earn around 10%, or $75k, from your investments. If your base needs cost $30k, you have plenty of room. In good years, spend more — $40k or so — and set a milestone, perhaps $1 million, where you give yourself permission to spend abundantly. Don’t push frugality further down the road than necessary.

The habits that made you wealthy need to be largely set aside once you arrive. New rules apply. You have to relearn how to spend on the small things that deliver outsized value — housecleaners, gardeners, eating out. These add enormously to daily life for a relatively modest cost.

That said, avoid locking in permanently higher expenses through debt payments on cars or a more expensive house. When the market pulls back sharply — and it will — you may need to return to your base spending until your portfolio recovers to all-time highs. Once it does, you can spend freely again.

You can’t take it with you, and to paraphrase Ramit Sethi, the real tragedy is living a smaller life than you have to. But the sequence matters: build the nest egg first. Without it, you’re simply trading your time for an inflated lifestyle — a poor trade. It calls to mind The Richest Man in Babylon, where the narrator describes a purse that never empties because his money makes money. You need that money machine in place first. Only then does the purse overflow on its own.

A rustic leather pouch spilling gold coins onto a wooden table in a cozy room

So what have you actually purchased? Freedom and autonomy. The freedom to walk away from a bad boss, a toxic workplace, or a draining staff member — for a month, a year, or forever. The freedom to pursue work that pays less but means more, or simply to work fewer hours. That is what the money machine quietly buys you.

But you have to build it first.