One of my hobbies is reading and writing on Reddit. Over the years, I have developed my own pet peeves. One is people writing on FIRE who are retiring at a traditional age or just showing off their high net worth accounts. Maybe it is just hearing the same things over and over that gets tiring. Maybe I just spend too much time online.

Another pet peeve of mine is people being way too conservative with the investment percentage returns they use, as if it is a virtue to be conservative rather than realistic. Using “high” historical returns has its own perils. How will you be a good steward of your money so it best benefits your family? Bill Perkins has a great book, Die With Zero, about giving early and often that should be widely read. We have our own plans about giving to our daughter when the time comes. Life should be easier for her, and that includes giving money or assisting with major purchases when she is an adult.

Many people have grandiose plans for their money to last and provide for generations. With money invested at median returns, this is very possible, but generally speaking, money does not last more than two or three generations. First there are the money earners and investors. The next generation generally manages it imperfectly, and the last generation fritters it away seeking luxuries the first generation prided itself on abstaining from.

What I’ve also noticed online, in my own thinking, and in some of Morgan Housel’s writing is that people often have arguments where the only thing separating them is semantics or a slightly different life experience. Give two diametrically opposed individuals more time to flesh out their histories, and they will come to an understanding and probably an agreement. Surely the current divisiveness of the political climate has made people quicker to anger as well. Politics has become personal for many people when it should involve boring discussions about tax policy.

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5 responses to “FIRE Pet Peeves and Other Thoughts.”

  1. paintermystic71100b51c9 Avatar
    paintermystic71100b51c9

    Very good observation about people arguing when below the surface they actually agree. Personally I think a lot of this is because we tend to jump ahead to the place where we disagree rather than appreciating what we do agree on before continuing to where our opinions differ. Perhaps people think that agreeing on stuff doesn’t make for good conversation. Please share any insights you got about psychology of money from Morgan Housel’s books

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    1. Millionaire Librarian Avatar

      Thanks for your observation. Housel is one of my favorites. I’ve read all three of his books, read his blog and listened to his associated podcast, and watched interviews so I’m not sure where I learned any specific ideas of his. I do like his idea that people mostly live in their own heads and when they see someone else in a nice car they imagine themselves in that car and don’t really think how about the person in that car being really cool.

      I also love his idea that many of the people who we admire have flaws or parts of their lives that we would absolutely not trade our lives for if we knew more about them. Realizing this, I think gratitude is a financial and character super power. I might write about that next.

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  2. pioneering5176f8a911 Avatar
    pioneering5176f8a911

    I definitely don’t think it’s a virtue to be conservative but I do tend to be very conservative in my forecasts. Yet I think that just represents my risk tolerance. I hope as my retirement advances past my early years I will get more free about my models and spending.

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  3. singvestor Avatar

    Totally share these pet peeves.

    I used to spend way too much time on Reddit for many years, especially on the financialindependence and leanfire subreddits. After a while, the financialindependence subreddit became so popular/mainstream that it drifted more and more away from its old-school roots to “people with multi-billion dollar portfolios working one more year to pay for private school” and the kind of shenanigans that had been reserved for the “fatfire” crowd.

    I then found myself more and more frustrated with the whole collective thinking that Reddit creates, each subreddit is driven by a very strong culture and mainstream opinion and people radicalize themselves around it somehow. This is driven by the relentless up and downvoting and scoring of the users. After a while the stories keep repeating, like you write “same things over and over”.

    One day, after spending yet another 5 hours on the site I decided “enough is enough” and uninstalled the app and blocked the site on my laptop. At the beginning I still tried to open Reddit whenever I opened a browser, a bit like muscle memory. After some time I stopped missing it. Strangely, my mood and general well-being improved almost immediately after I quit Reddit cold turkey. These days I can even read books again, after healing my frazzled attention span.

    Half a year later at the age of 40, I reached “lean FI” and quit my corporate job immediately to join a startup for a quarter of the salary and to have fun working 100% remote. Goal was to work from anywhere and never step into another office. I am 44 now and my portfolio has compounded from about USD 630k to USD 1.17m in about 4 years, so coasting seems to work. Instead of “leanfire” I am fully financially independent now and can quit anytime.

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    1. Millionaire Librarian Avatar

      Thanks for your comment. Much of it resonates within me. I am also more old school FIRE and it is where I learned much about financial independence at the start. It has changed.

      I have an interview for a remote position I have a decent shot at. So there might be a post about that sometime in the future.

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