As any college student knows, using cliche based material in a drinking game is a great excuse to get drunk, and what better way to find cliches than reading about lifestyle design, since these days pretty much every lifestyle is a design except of course those icky conventional ones that we are all trying to avoid in the same unconventional way.

Disclaimer: You can use whatever type of liquid you prefer. If you live somewhere where the legal drinking age is more than just a suggestion, please follow all applicable laws, etc. “1 drink” typically means a swig or a gulp in the sense that the adams apple moves up and down once.

Various points of annoyance
Not to worry. Drinking will make it easier to cope.

• The post has a stock photo, take 3 drinks.

• Two different lifestyle blogs use the exact same photo to illustrate their unconventional lifestyle within days of each other, please feel free to drink as much as you need.

• If the blog has some form of popup that blankets out the screen urging you to subscribe to a newsletter or buy a product smack yourself on the forehead while making a stupid face and drink 10 times.

• The blogger has written a manifesto, like me, take 3 drinks.
  

Overused words.
Unless I am dreaming, lifestyle is all about using incredibly amazingly awesome words to describe regular things while loving it with a passion.

• The word “awesome” appears, so shout “awesome like a hotdog” and take 1 drink.

• The word “amazing” appears, so take 1 drink and look as if contemplating the taste of the beer and say “amazing” with a discerning look.

• The word “incredible” appears, so appear shocked and take 1 drink to calm yourself down.

• The word “remarkable” appears in the post. Whatever.

• The word “dream” or “dreams” appears, so take 1 drink and pinch your nose to see if you’re still awake.

• The word “passion” or “passionate” appears, so take 1 drink. You already know your passion is drinking.

• The word “love” or “loving” appears in the post, take 1 drink.

• The word “happy”, “happier”, “happiness” appears, take 1 drink.

• The words “lifestyle” and “design” appear in the same sentence, take 1 drink.

• Using the word “launch” about a product that will be “launched” at some point in the future or which has been “launched” by someone else. Take 3 drinks unless it is actually being “launched” today.
  

*Unconventional” spelling
Unconventional spelling is a great way to be unconventional. Have a drink for every manufactured novelty word that does not exist in the dictionary, in particular

• If “happyness” is misspelled, take 5 drinks.

• If anything is described and un-, non-something else, take 1 drink. (The first one to spot something like ununiform to describe their capris and purple tank top, please let me know.)

Comments
The comments are also a good source of general imbibing. The rules above still apply with a few extra rules thrown in

• If a profile photo in the comments is “clever” e.g. rather than a face it shows the face reflected in a mirror, a jumping person, a screaming person, … take 1 drink.

• If a comment says “Good post. I agree”, say “I too agree and therefore the post is good.” and take 1 drink.

• If a comment says “Bad post. I don’t agree”, take 2 drinks.

• If a comment claims that the post was timely, open another beer (in a timely manner of course).
  

Originally posted 2010-03-24 17:15:23.

My experiences with the challenges of early retirement may be atypical but then again, I am not aware of that many people who escaped employment before they were close to 50, so for what it is worth, I present to you the three biggest challenges following early retirement.

These have, perhaps surprisingly nothing to do with being bored or worrying about running out of money. They have mostly to do with explaining the hows and whys and dealing with other people’s prejudices; yes, I care. If you don’t, power to you!

Not having a job title
This is something I have discussed several times before. It is very easy to be a specialist in a culture of specialization. State your job title and everybody, including oneself, will have a mental image of what this means. It is a convenient sound-byte. Retiree even exists.
My father suggested rentier, which is pretty descriptive although I would put it in other and more flattering terms than the wiki-page, but I doubt many people know what the term means. Maybe I should just use capitalist. Problem solved: It is a job.

Perceived standard of living
Show me one person who is excited about extreme early retirement and I will show you five that thinks it is all about sacrifice and making your own toilet paper, something which they are not particularly excited about and even fairly judgmental about. To avoid this it is prudent to pick up something which is highly visible and desirable to Joe Average. Traveling is a sure hit.

Not contributing to society
There is this collectivist belief shared by many(*) that capable persons should contribute to society (Being a rentier capitalist, see above, I contribute my fortune to productive assets instead of suburban real estate and SUVs). An alternative belief is that as long as one can support oneself, that is good enough: This is the individualistic approach. The antidote would be to reflect on how much more participating in a system that pushes paper around between desks contributes compares to playing football all day(**).

(*) Which obviously does not make it correct.
(**) I understand that playing football is paid better than “paperwork”, so it must be more important, right?

Originally posted 2009-10-22 02:40:35.

If there is anything this country enjoys, it’s measuring things by numbers and then comparing numbers. We divide people into percentile according to net worth, credit score, GPA, GDP, IQ, etc. with the implicit assumption that it is possible to understand the entire scale simply by multiplying by a number. For instance, someone spending twice as much must live twice as well or someone with twice the IQ must be twice as smart.

However, all of these numbers are a function of something that is very complex and nonlinear. Therefore it makes no sense to compare two numbers which are very different. While it is possible to compare the expense level of persons A and B, say $40,000 and $39,000, respectively, and conclude that person B is slightly better with money than person A, it is impossible to compare A and B to person C who only spends $20,000. Here person C would live qualitatively different and make qualitatively different choices. For instance, A and B might have two cars each and here B would be driving a slightly more fuel efficient model, whereas C would not be driving a crappy car. More likely, he won’t be driving a car at all relying on other means of transportation. Hence it is impossible to make any conclusions merely based on comparing numbers.

So how do we compare?

When two things are scaled different, one usually builds ratios. Nobody but an absolute rookie would consider a stock priced at $30 to be twice as expensive as a stock priced at $15, say. No, the ticker price must be scaled by some value. Earnings per share is a very popular scaling factor. Suppose that the higher price stock has an EPS of $4, while the lower priced stock has an EPS of $1. Then the P/E ratios are 30/4=7.5 and 15/1=15 respectively. All other things being equal, the former is the least expensive. Stocks with high P/E values are called growth stocks and stocks with low P/E values are called value stocks.

If we go back to the car example, there are various ways to build a ratio (making up ratios seems to be a primary occupation of stock analysts by the way). We could divide by the number of cars. This would mean that person C would have a ratio of infinity. We could divide by the distance travelled giving some indications of mileage costs or we could divide by the time spent on transport. One or more of those ratios would show a substantial difference.

This is interesting, when one is comparing budgets like frugal vs frugal or when comparing food expenses. It is very likely possible to establish several classes of lifestyles. Comparisons should then be done within a class. For example, it does not require a genius to establish that all value stocks by definition are less expensive than growth stocks. But what about frugal lifestyles? Do some people exhibit a qualitatively different form of frugality. My answer is yes. I have a hard time using frugal tips and suggestions from most personal finance blogs, because they are out of my league. I simply can’t afford to follow their advice 😛

In a future post I will hopefully have been able to develop some ways of classifying the different personal finance setups. Until then any suggestion is welcome.

Originally posted 2008-09-05 07:33:12.