If you're new here, this blog will give you the tools to become financially independent in 5 years. Here is how I did it and here is how I currently do it. The method is robust and replicable (no need to win the lottery, start a blogging business, or win at real estate), but not easy; much in the same way that a diet results in weight loss but is hard to follow persistently unless you set your mind to it. The key is to save 75%+ of your net income and invest it in income producing assets (bonds and dividend stocks). There is a "step-by-step" plan for how to get to 75% in the right side bar. I try not to be too trite, so if I cover a topic, you will probably not see it again for a very long time, thus you may want to read the older posts here and here.

Question:
I am 34 years old and have about $250000 in investments that pay enough to pay for all my needs and most of my wants and keep up with inflation for the rest of my life. Lately, though, I have been wondering whether I am missing out by not having a career. Everybody I know seems to think that a career is important.

Answer:
I think many financially independent early retires have thought about returning to work at some point. A lot of people go to work everyday and at least some of them say they love it and that they are very passionate about it so I can see the attraction of spending your time taking on some exciting project. I am not afraid to admit that I too have thought of it. However, wisening up a bit, I think it is clear that passion is an internal quality rather than an external quality. If you are not a passionate person, it is unlikely that you will be passionate just by taking up some career. Furthermore, you have to realize that careers take an enormous amount of time, which means that your way of life will take a serious hit for the worse.

Currently you probably sleep very well without any stress and wake up without an alarm clock. You probably have somewhere around 16 hours a day to devote to doing what you want when you want and pursuing all sorts of interesting activities. With a career, other people will be telling you what to do and/or what to think about for at least 8 hours a day. These 8 hours will be preset which means that if you feel like doing something else, you won’t be able to do so. Employers will also expect you to think about work outside of work, so we are probably looking at 9-10 hours a day minimum. Add commute time and you may be left with only 3-6 hours a day most of which will be spent being tired in front of the TV. You can probably say goodbye to most of your activities. Most working people only have one hobby. They try to make up for it by buying a lot of stuff, but they almost never have time to use it. Could you live with that?

You also have to consider that most careers expect you to be at work about 50 weeks a year and be on call 52 weeks a year. This leaves you 10 days most of which will be used to create extended weekends around major holidays. However, in real life things happen. Maybe you get a good offer on a ticket to Aruba. Maybe you get invited by a friend to go hunting. If you have a career, you typically have to say no to these things.

Also, since you will be spending all your time at work, you will not have the time to do very much yourself. This means that your expenses will grow much higher. Expect them to double or even triple as you lose simple skills like cooking, gardening, and develop the need for a car, business clothes, and keeping up apperances. This in turn will lead to even higher costs should you ever decide to return to a life of leisure.

Aside from these issues, also consider whether a career would lead to a satisfying life. Most people climbing the corporate pyramid tend to neglect the rest of their life. It seems to be more the rule than the exception that the more successful they are at their career, the unhappier they seem. They barely know their spouse or their children and they certainly have no idea who their neighbors are. You would likely stay confined to your cubicle all day long following procedures and filling out forms and only get out to fetch coffee for the boss or run to the photocopier. Also, you will have to wear a suit, follow a dress code and probably a bunch of other codes as well. While listening to the mandatory motivation seminars can provide a brief sense of feeling good for a few hours, your job is not really to be creative or passionate. It is simply to make money for the company and sell as many products as possible.

If you are really serious about this, maybe try to arrange so that you can work for just a few hours a day. This can be hard to set up because employers prefer employees that need work to pay their bills as such a need is a great motivator. Thus they may not consider people who only want to work a limited amount of hours.

In conclusion, it is of course up to you. Know that if you do decide to give up a life of leisure and focus on a career instead, there is lots of stuff you can buy to briefly compensate for any unhappiness you may feel towards your choice. A new set of golf clubs or maybe a new suit, for instance. Psychotropic prescription drugs are also popular. Remember being unhappy about your corporate mission statement is a disorder that can be treated. Ask your doctor about it if it comes to that.

A middle class career is often presented as the only worthwhile lifestyle to strive for(*). Here the idea is to get an education and then work for a good 30 or 40 years while slowly saving a little bit every month for the day one can retire from the career and do something else and perhaps become what one always wanted to be—self-actualization. Of course, it is in the middle class’s interest that employees align their self-interest with the employers’ interest much like self-sacrificing worker ants align their interest with the hive. The way that education has been historically evolved is a great way to transform people into workers.

(*) This leaves me wondering: What does the upper class tell their children?

Now for those for share the dream of climbing the middle class pyramid in the hope of being the one reaching the top of queen bee rather than being the one pushed out the side and doing whatever it is one does while working a collared job, there are an abundance of material and good advice from how to get the jobs, where to train to be able to push paper all day, how to spend money, and so on.

However, there are also some for whom spending all their creative, physical, or mental powers on career advancement would feel like such a waste of life (and you really only get one) that even season football tickets, red meat, a luxury car, a nice title (marketing engineer, anyone?) or a nice plastic plaque for 25 years of loyal service could not make up for it. But maybe psychotropic prescription drugs could.

The way I understand it is that people who work regular jobs, especially those who spend all day writing reports or something that goes on paper—as I used to do—it is very hard to feel a sense of meaning of the work one does, unless you really believe in the “vision”—as I also used to do for the longest time.

You try to explain what you do to someone else and their eyes just glance over because they can not relate (which is a good indication that you are under the influence of the “vision”). “Yes, today I wrote up an analysis of … according to ISO no. … and checked the spreadsheet for … “. And thus the only way to “generate” this meaning is by spending the money one earns. “See, for some reason that escapes me my employer gives me 50000 each year, so I must be doing something important!”.

If this money is the sole means of determining the point of one’s work, then how well one works or how important or relevant one’s work is is then measured in terms of how expensive one dresses, how expensive one eats, how expensive one lives. Quality does not matter. What matters is simply that something is exclusive; hence the shoddy products that sell simply because they get a brand name slapped onto them.

There is an easy alternative. The corporate lifestyle of working for a lifetime is often referred to as comfortable, so I won’t use that word. No, there is an easy alternative, which involves working for 5 years and then saying: No, stop, buying the biggest house possible or the most expensive meals or the most expensive tickets to the most expensive sporting events or driving the most expensive car is not the way I want to self-actualize; it is not the standard I measure myself by. Also, hopefully, there will be mates out there that are not necessarily attracted exclusively by material things—although they probably live outside of L.A.

Our society is characterized by its worship of money. Now, don’t get me wrong, I like money, but only to the extent that it allows me to spend time developing other aspects—beyond that it is just a silly way of keeping score. With modern technology it is quite possible to only work 1-2 hours a day (for the average person, more efficient ones work less) and then spend the rest of the day developing other aspects of oneself.

Imagine if society instead of money valued, say, kindness or good parenting. Imagine it valued skill with the gun or the sword as it once did. Imagine the ultimate value was wisdom or enlightenment. Or imagine it valued science as it did during the enlightenment or religion as it did during the dark ages.

What kind of homes would people live in then? What kind of food would they eat? What would their attitude towards seasonal passes or luxury cars be?

Too often I see the lament that people don’t know what they would do with themselves if they could not go to work every day. I’m trying to be understanding, but I fail. Be imaginative! Here are some suggestions: Try to be the best parent you can be. Try to be the best swordsman you can be. Or lest I project my personal ideals of pursuing the status of “best”, go collect some exotic experiences or discover your inner self. There is much to do.

Verily, I know it’s not “productive”, but who cares? Productivity is but a fetish that whoever feeds off of the middle class have invented for their benefit. Productivity does not apply outside of profit-seeking endeavors of the middle class and those that live off of the system they have created. Do parents think about how they can increase the productivity of their parenting? Can you optimize the productivity of being kind? I don’t think so.

A scary thought just occurred to me. With stores being cleared out in the DC area for toast bread, milk, and eggs, presumably because the residents otherwise feed themselves with take-out food; and combined with the observation that one would actually be hard pressed to cook anything out of the ingredients found in a regular walmart (not a super walmart) and the fact that walmart are ubiquitous and thus representative of profit maximizing consumer patterns: Could it be that people—at least those partaking in this frenzy and it’s quite a lot—frankly have no idea how to cook and feed themselves beyond being able to fry an egg, toast a piece of bread, drink milk, and order out?

Apparently I am out of touch with your every day consumer. It leaves me wondering… what else should not surprise me?

What would they do if they were snowed in? Rained in? Flooded? Heated? Not heated? What if the power went out? Unemployed?

I kinda think of myself as a common sense guy in that I know to drive carefully if the roads are slippery; I know how to dig a trench to divert the water if it is rising; I have clothes for the wet and cold; and we have food for at least a week without even planning for it. Yet maybe compared to the average french toast hoarder, I must be some kind of an extreme survivalist.

This could easily lead to the conclusion, that maybe nobody knows anything?

Have we really as a society been so thoroughly insectisized that we can not do anything if we can not go out and pay someone else to do it for us? Is this an optimal situation for a society?

Magical thinking is the cognitive mistake of confusing correlation with causation. It is a very common mistake and is due to a lack of critical thinking. A person is particular prone to this mistake if he is incapable of thinking “statistically”. To think statistically one must be able to reason alternative scenarios leading to alternative explanations.

For instance, imagine that we have a digital clock. Now, thinking statistically, we realize that if we look at this clock, the first two digits can show 12 or 24 different values. The last two can show 60 different values. If, however, a mind does not have sufficient mental complexity(*) to “describe” this set of possibly outcomes (there are 12×60 or 720 of them), AND it attaches a special meaning to certain numbers, 11:11 is a popular one, it does not take much of a mental lapse to reach backwards and attach all sorts of meaning to events that coincided with 11:11 if one happened to see just that number instead of say 11:26, but otherwise had no causative connection at all.

(*) A good way to understand complexity is in terms of itself. A system is more complex if it can contain another system. For instance, if A can understand B, but B can not understand A, A is more complex than B.

“Sympathetic magic” is the kind of magic that says that “likes” attract. This can be cast into all sorts of pseudo-scientific language such as Vibrations, Cycles and Resonances, or even Quantum Resonances although they (of course) have absolutely nothing to do with physics. [Someday I would like to learn why such terms are always capitalized in magical thinking literature?!].

What this means effectively is the belief that if you, say, put a picture of a slim person on the fridge, you will lose weight; or if you put a picture of a car, you will get a car. “Attract” a car into your life so to speak.

Sympathetic magic can be materialistic as described above, but it can also be mental. A personal that believes in “mental sympathetic magic” believes that by thinking a lot about being a millionaire, one will attract money; by thinking about losing weight, one will lose weight, and by thinking “Positive” thoughts, one will lead a positive life.

This kind of belief would not be so popular if it was not epistemologically, that is, functionally true to some extent. However, I think we can reasonably say that merely thinking about something is going to obtain absolutely nothing. There is simply no reality-based causation.

What does cause results is a change of behavior; and it so often happens that thoughts result in such change. The magical thinker simply misses this causation though. This lack of observation may be acceptable, but a major problem with positive thinking or mental sympathetic magic in general is:

1) In statistical terms, very many explanations are simply discarded. This means that a positive thinker is simply mentally incapable of seeing negative events, like 9/11, the failure of Iraq, or the banking crisis: all things that were foreseen by many “negative” or should I rather than more realistic thinkers, but which the optimists were mentally blind to.

2) There is a lacking sense of realism. Magical thinking is not really thinking but more a kind of haphazard intuition. Never put an optimist in charge of critical machinery, never, ever, never!

The main problem I see though is the utterly close-minded and fundamentalist attitude that many believers of the church of positive thinking subscribe to: Specifically, the belief is very strong that attitude explains all. Hence, if you fail, it is simply because you failed to be sufficiently positive. You were not sufficiently righteous. The belief that negative or realistic people (nonbelievers?) must be shunned, avoided and ostracized from one’s life as if they were somehow dangerous to one’s faith. In fact, this very attitude suggests that the fundamentalists do realize there is a weakness in their position. They simply deal with it in the simplest possible way, namely, by sticking their fingers in their ears and chanting “happy”, “happy”, “happy”.

Oh the humanity!

There is no doubt in my mind that the better option is to acknowledge both positive thoughts and negative thoughts. They are, after all, simply thoughts. The same thing goes with feelings which are, after all, just another kind of thoughts [of a different part of the brain system]. Excluding some thoughts whether it happens through self-delusion or through medication [Americans love psychotropic drugs] is simply not the best way to proceed because it exclude parts of reality. Are positive thinking people simply unable to deal with reality and as a consequence they have voluntarily created this bubble world where all that matters are perceptions (illusions, delusions, schmolusions)? To some extent, I think this actually is the case. Or maybe it is indeed just an inability to think critically.

In either case it is a problem since the last thing a complex world needs are people who only see half of it or refuse to deal with it.

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You can read more about this in Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Bright-sided. I have always considered the concept of positive thinking somewhat fishy but I had not realized just how much it has in common with fundamentalist (here in the narrow-minded sense) religions until reading that book. The main reason for this is that “positive thinking” like “extrovertism” or “postmodernism” has become so prevailing so as to co-opt the language in an almost Orwellian sense so as to make any thinking about different positions sound negative in nature. Indeed I just demonstrated that very fact by my choice of the words positive and negative above.

Ingredients:
Tortillas, corn or flour, 6″, 8″, 10″, … it doesn’t matter.
Some kind of food grade oil, … it doesn’t matter.
Salt (sodium chloride, though, that matters) and other spices.

Use a pizza cutter or a knife or simply tear the tortillas into whatever forms you prefer. If you have a 2 pound bag, you can really make a lot! Put the pieces on a baking sheet, dutch oven, pan, … it doesn’t matter. Use a brush or a finger, … it doesn’t matter, to spread a thin layer of oil on the top side of the tortillas. Sprinkle salt or spices on top.

Bake or heat until reaching the desired color at 350F or high heat. It should take about 5-10 minutes.

There is no need to flip them over.

Serve with salsa, … it doesn’t matter. I find that making your own salsa is not worthwhile.

I like change. I like moving to a new place every once in a while just to change things up and learn new things. I don’t like fast change which “travel” is usually associated with. Travel is for the experiences, but I like learning things more than experiencing things and learning takes time.

One problem is that the world is divided into nation states which makes it a genuine hassle to live anywhere else than the place one was born in. Free market alright, but what about the movement of free people?

One solution may be the 5 flag theory of setting up semi-permanent living arrangements in 5 different countries. Most countries allow visitors to stay for 3 months on a tourist visa. With 5 places, you would simply move around between them on a permanent rotation. I imagine returning to a familiar place would not be that big a deal as there is little time wasted trying to find out where all the good venues are.

Now, having a semi-permanent residence in 5 countries presumably costs a lot of money to arrange, but I could imagine doing it by forming a partnership which could be facilitated by a website. This website would be similar to couchsurfing.org, but the deal would be that you got a whole residence rather than a couch. In other words, the website would focus on swaps that had a duration of about 10-11 weeks. This could be 2-way swaps, where A and B simply exchange places, or 3-way swaps, where A gets B’s, who gets C’s, who gets A’s, or even 4-way and 5-way swaps. It does not really matter(*). The important thing would be to keep the system going.

(*) Although finding a core group of 5 people and just rotate between each other would probably be ideal because that would allow one to return to exactly the same place.

Obviously, this would require one to be able to fund oneself without working as working is also regulated through visa’s etc., so it is only viable for location independent work or work which does not require one to be salaried and tied to a specific place. Various trades would work as would programming and writing. Heavily regulated vocations like law, medicine, and engineering would probably not work.

I could see myself doing something like this. Could you?

I just read The Coming Fury of an Angry America (via @mymoneyshrugged) and it explains the predicament of the middle class very well. This further strengthens my resolve not to join the middle class. In my opinion, the middle class has as its fundamental core problem the issue of willingly becoming a single cog in a machine it does not control, being heavily indebted from student loans (to become the cogs), car loans (to get to work and to feed oneself, and also to get laid, at least if you live in L.A.), and mortgages and credit cards (because what else could one possible spend one’s life on if not increasingly larger houses with increasingly more junk in them?!) and being farmed in the labor/consumer cycle.

Today thousands of voices will tell you to do just that and millions will listen. As a result we will get exactly what the majority deserves. This is perhaps a bit sad for the rest of us.

Some strategies for discovering things that go unnoticed would involve ignoring the “junk mail” and go to the (usually smaller) shops in the side streets. These often offer better deals because they do not sell low margin junk and compensate for it by volume and advertising like the mass stores. Yesterday I alluded to the fact that search engines may have begun to suffer from the same problem by ranking according to popularity or by being gamed by specific writing styles (aka “marketing” in the real world). In other words, search engines show the main streets, first and foremost, and not so much the side streets. To wit, a search engine would show a main street shop if it had just one item of what you were asking for instead of showing a side street shop with more selections. New shops in particular have a huge problem since they are judged by the network rather than their inherent quality.

One way of discovering new blogs is to use other blogs as a reference. This, I think, does not work nearly as well as it could.

I do not think a blog roll is any substitute for that. Blogroll often turn into a mutual link exchanges (I thought of a different word for it, but it wasn’t fit for publication ), consequently grow huge, etc. They are often not reflective of what the bloggers actually read.

Maybe it is time to return to the roots: A blog is really short for weblog and in a blog one is supposed to write about what one did on the web on that particular day. It may be as simple as a rough edit of one’s browser history.

If it was not already clear, watching the Grammys showed that whoever is famous or the most popular is not necessarily the best or the most creative(*). Thus often it would seem that the only conclusive best metric of “the best” is that they have the best connections, that is, the best network either presently or historically. They are famous because they are famous and often they restrain themselves to their own little circle of famous people and give each other rewards for being the “best”.

Best out of … ?

I get the strong impression that search engines measure quality in the same way, that is, not being smarter than a bunch of algorithms, it is easy to confuse popularity with quality. This may even be intentional when viewed from a consumer perspective as people prefer to consume that which they are familiar with. For instance, I just learned how to make coffee which is better than what is sold in cafes. Read the previous post for details; yet, how many will give up on the familiar right now and pick the better option?

(*) One might begin to doubt that half of these people can even sing or sound good without modern sound engineering; today you mainly need to look attractive and be able to dance to make it as a “singer”.

The traditional option is entrenched.

I see the same thing with blogging. To be honest, I feel more stale than fresh and there are blogs which cover what I do and do it with more spirit than I do; or at least so it seems to me. I also realize that I am actually one of the bigger early retirement blogs, very likely in the top 5. What really worries me is that search engines will take my current popularity and entrench it solidly thus hiding more interesting writing from view. Forsooth, I suspect many of the popular blogs are even counting on this staking out claims in the virtual dataspace of the search engines by not necessairly focusing on increasing the quality of the information but rather optimizing for what search engines reward, namely crosslinking and quantity.

Unlike many, I do not believe that google will rule the world forever. I am old, so I remember what was before google. The great thing about google was that it could find everything (or rather it could find more than anything else). This ability is also its weakness. If you google something you often get a million hits arranged by popularity. However, as we know, popular often means a mediocre product optimized for a profit that isn’t yours. If the mighty google falls and fails to optimize its algorithms, a lot of “ground” could suddenly be lost.

I would see this as a good thing. Conversely, there are many vested interests who would see this as a bad thing. And these are just two examples of the world we live in.

I just came home from a great day of racing on the bay. In the past few races I have been responsible for trimming the jib. Jib trimming seems to be the position which requires the greatest strength on the boat and the first couple of times I was clearly weak. Subsequently, I have, therefore, been doing some kettlebell rowing(*) in the backyard with my 70 pounders and that really helped. All tacks and gybes today were good, one was perfect (right into a great trim) and one required some grinding. I think to someone with my kind of personality, there is practically nothing better than to learn a subject, master it, and then execute it.

(*) You take two KBs and put your hands on the handles and form a plank/push up position. The KBs are then lifted alternately to the hip.

Actually, there may be only one thing better, namely reaching the state of mushin, which I discussed to some degree in this post. In that regard I have been reading a lot of books lately (possibly the explanation of the sparsity of posts recently) on this concept. This book describes mushin particularly well. The “Way” to mushin may be from perfecting specific “ways” by repeating them over and over—training them into the mind so the mind becomes one with nature, maybe? I am trying to understand this better and so I am currently reading this book.

I note that the Western World’s focus on productivity and stuff is rather poor in that regard. For example, I usually drink instant coffee, because it is easy and presumably productive. The Japanese have a tea ceremony. I can’t really say I have a coffee ceremony as such but I have started brewing my own coffee.

You start with some green beans. They are kind of hard to get but you can buy them in bulk for $3–4 on the internet.

You then roast them for 6-7 minutes much like popping popcorn. Keep the lid on and monitor the color (yes, that’s tricky with a cast iron lid! ). As you can see what I have here is more like an index roast than the dark-brown I was aiming for. Clearly I need to work on my technique.

Immediately after roasting, I put them into a colander and shook them to get the chaff off and prevent them from further roasting from their internal heat. Pouring them back and forth between a bowl and the colander would have been more effective. The wind would have borne the chaff away, much like how you do it when threshing wheat.

I then used a grinder which I had acquired on freecycle. If you don’t have a grinder, I’d just put the beans between two pieces of paper and smack them with a hammer; actually any heavy object will do. I make ice cubes by putting water in a plastic container, freezing in, then wrapping the chunk of ice in a towel and hitting it with a meat hammer—although I once used the backside of a bowie knife. (You could use a blender too if you don’t mind all your food subsequently tasting of coffee.) Anyway, …

Here you see the grinder, my improvised filter holder (a rubber band) and my Einstein coffee cup.

I would say, my first cup of home brew was drinkable. Maybe a little bit better than the instant coffee (fresh makes a big difference). It was not very productive though; it took at least half an hour. Then again, would it have been better to have spent half an hour at a job to earn money to buy a cup of coffee at starbucks or a new grinder/coffee machine at the mall.

Only you know your answer to that one.

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After reading the comments, I brought out the meat thermometer and aimed for 195F (90.6C) water (using 10 and 20 second bursts in the microwave) and tried it out on a new and darker roast (more uniform this time thanks to lots of shaking). I also found a better way to arrange the filter (taller cup). And I just gotta say … Wow! This is as good as or better than what you pay $$$ for in stores.