It sounds crazy to you because you have apparently had success handed to you through no work or special virtue of your own. Maybe get out of your comfy bubble a bit

Live below my means, invest the rest.

I don’t dress or act like people in my pay range. My house is small and in a quiet neighborhood and cost less than my salary. Car is older but paid off and I know all the quirks and have the toolbox in the back to fix it. It is probably one of the top 5 most reliable cars in history. My work dress shoes are 10 years old and my around the house shoes were new in 2019.

I spend my money where I spend my time. So I have a nice phone, a very nice monitor and mechanical keyboard, and a good computer. And all with the right to repair philosophy. Same for my wife and kids. And also good running shoes, good exercise equipment.

The plan is to get to a point where I can just not work at all and maintain my lifestyle. Three percent rule and all that. And also help launch my kids.

Something about a 25 year roof and a Japanese shit box car in my fortress of solitude.

FWIW I grew up really really really poor like you wouldn’t believe so I’m okay with this.

I have $15.

Not just that I can spend. Not “until sometime in the future.” Just $15.

Since I left college and started out into the “adult world”, I’ve always spent less than I made, the rest going to savings or investments toward retirement. I accomplish this by “paying myself first”. If I have already saved the money as my first priority, I can’t spend it on things like rent or groceries. So my financial choices are forced to be more conservative by design.

Example: I forget what the max limit to IRAs were at the time (say $5k/yr) but for my first job I set up auto contributions each month and mentally took a $5k/yr salary “cut” for that job. Every time I got a raise, I made sure that at least a portion of that raise went to increasing my savings rate and attempted to avoid lifestyle creep.

Thanks to my savings, I’ve been able to handle some emergencies in cash vs having to utilize debt to cover the expenses. It really is a snowball. I started out small, now my savings is significant compared to my income.

I attribute a lot of my “pay yourself first” approach to reading The Automatic Millionaire, Expanded and Updated: A Powerful One-Step Plan to Live and Finish Rich early on.

What’s your relationship or philosophy with money?

A life-changing shift to my approach has been to worry about absolute amounts rather than percentages. Saving $10 on a $20 item feels great but ultimately is the same thing as saving $10 on a $500 item (which feels like nothing).

I grew up lower middle class: never had to worry about not having a roof over my head, but there were times we were somewhat food insecure, and spending money on leisure/entertainment or anything unnecessary for survival was a foreign concept until I got to high school and some my parents’ career moves paid off and put us in upper middle class. It took them a good 10+ years before they could relax a little bit and feel secure with their money, though, and that was as much driven by the fact that their kids were adults who had moved out.

So life has been about deciding which of my parents’ frugal attitudes and approaches to money to keep and which to discard.

Things I decided not to adopt:

• I slowly learned to stop caring as much about wasted food. Food is just cheaper now compared to when I was growing up (even if the last 5 years has shown an uptick), and as a society we have more issues with obesity than hunger, so cleaning off a plate seems like it doesn’t actually do that much good.
• My time is worth something to me. I will gladly pay the few dollars here and there for convenience.
• I’m glad I ignored my parents advice to buy a home as soon as I could and build equity or whatever. I rented and it worked out great for me, giving me the flexibility to make changes at different stages of my life.

Things I kept:

• Life is uncertain. Always be prepared with whatever you can accumulate for financial resilience: cash, other property, lines of credit, marketable job skills, literal insurance policies, etc. Don’t underestimate the importance of personal relationships, whether it’s “credit” from friends and family who can help you out of a bind, colleagues who can refer work to you, bosses who will fight for your career, etc.
• Develop your career. Education and credentials are important early on, and up-to-date skills and a good understanding of the landscape in your field (both in the type of job and the type of industry you work in), plus solid relationships with people, can help you know when switching jobs is right for you.

Things I had to learn on my own:

• Life is unfair. Many types of unfairness are systematic. So why not position yourself to where the unfairness works in your favor, if available?
• Higher income makes it easier to survive mistakes on the spending side. To flip around Ben Franklin’s quote, a penny earned is a penny saved.
• Know yourself and your own laziness. Set up automatic functions wherever possible: automatic bill pay, automatic savings, automatic investments, etc. Steer away from any strategy that requires active management, and towards strategies that tend towards a set it and forget it philosophy.

I’ve also made a shitload of mistakes, some of them pretty costly, especially back in my 20’s:

• Paid probably thousands in credit card interest in my early 20’s chasing lifestyle bullshit.
• Paid thousands in unnecessary car loan interest in my mid 20’s by getting suckered by a dealer.
• Paid hundreds, maybe thousands, in late fees and interest from forgetting deadlines to pay shit I actually already had the money on hand for.

I’m rich now, most of it from luck (especially timing), much of it from personal relationships (good family, good marriage, good friends), some of it from actual effort (good grades from a good law school), and some of it from conscious decisions to steer towards my strengths and away from my weaknesses (lazy but smart, prototypical “gifted” slacker with undiagnosed ADHD).

It took a while to get here, though, and I was financially insecure well into my 30’s. Sorta figured shit out then, and then married someone who complements me pretty well on these things, and covers my blind spots.

For the extra brave ones: how much savings do you have, and what are you planning to do with them?

I have some savings, and it’s an emergency fund. It’s representing 1-2 months of typical spending, that could be stretched to 3-4 months if I needed to stop the frivolous spending. But I have credit beyond that, and less liquid assets I’d be able to tap into if I were facing a longer term issue.

But I’m not saving for any particular thing other than retirement. If things accumulate and grow, great. I’ll make a judgment call on when to retire based on how I feel and how much I have and what I want to do. I anticipate my wife and I will probably want to retire in our early 60’s, based on our anticipated career trajectories and the ages of our children.

I have a job. It’s technical, requires a fair amount of skills and abilities, yet I cannot cover a $200 emergency after bills and rent. Rent has jumped from $600 a month to $950 in less than four years, and the internet I need for my job has doubled in two years. Of the rent increases? Most of them were in the past year.

I credit my success to some hard work but mostly luck. At the end of the day my first job was from a recommendation. I believe interviewed well, sure, but I don’t think they would’ve taken my resume otherwise. I’m extremely fortunate to be where I am financially.

Shit still happens though. I lost my job about a year ago and was unemployed for like 6ish months. I had enough money in savings that it didn’t really matter but it still sucked. One thing that has been difficult for me is watching what I say. As an example, some stupid shit happened and I feel like a company owes us ~$800 and another one ~$200. (Not going into details because they’re irrelevant and I want to move on from the stress.) These things royally pissed me off. I still get upset when little things happen and I lose money. I hate it. It sucks. As much as I want to get comfort from my friends by venting about it, sometimes it’s better to shut up. Because some of them mostly just hear how I’m able to withstand losses like that and that in turn makes them feel upset that they aren’t. It’s a tricky thing.

As for my philosophy, for the most part my wife and I have been able to spend within our means without much aggressive or intentional budgeting. It’s only been since the job loss and her being unemployed to pursue writing a novel that things have gotten tight. (And by right I just mean our savings aren’t noticably increasing.)

Failures? Well, let’s ignore stuff like crypto and stock picks because that’s just gambling. I wish I had started maxing out my 401k in my 20s. I started on my early 30s. Also, we used to have a truly stupid amount of money in a checking account. We should’ve put it into stocks (as in total market ETFs) earlier.

OH. THIS IS IMPORTANT. I WISH SOMEONE WOULD’VE TOLD ME HIGH YIELD CHECKING ACCOUNTS EXIST. Like, holy hell. I should’ve done that ages ago. I don’t even wanna think about how much money I’ve lost on, especially because we kept a stupidly high amount of cash in our checking account… I still haven’t moved it because it’s hard and I’m lazy but wow wow wow. This is stupidly important. The reason savings accounts are annoying so because it’s a little harder to get to your cash. But a checking account with interest? Hot damn.

Lastly, I’ve never had a credit card. It’s been fine but it would’ve been nice to get the tiny marginal benefits of cash back and stuff.

It’s not remotely crazy, and I have lived there. I had times where I foraged for berries and plants for food, and was lucky enough to know how and where to do so. That was a long time ago, before wages stagnated and inflation went bananas. I’m surprised more people aren’t starving to death today, just looking at the numbers.

It comes down to if you rent.

If you have a fixed mortgage, shit gets easier fast. If you rent, any wage increases is often offset by rent increases.

Less people are able to save, because they never get out of those “tough first years” of a mortgage

I fall between the government won’t give me SSI because I’m not disabled enough in there fucking eyes. And being disabled and can’t work.

So financially I’m fucked and nothing I can do about it.

Even if I had said It would only be iirc around 800 a month.

It’s part of Amerikkka hidden eugenic programs. (Not verified but living with a disability it sure fuckin feels like it)

I have 1k euro left. No job, 35 years old. I wanna kill myself sometimes.

I made a few bad moves in my 20s because I had no basis of understanding when it came to money (parents are bad with money too and never taught me anything useful), have spent my 30s desperately treading water trying to get ahead, but it seems impossible with rent going through the roof, food going crazy, plus now I have medical debt on top of my school debt… my really big mistake was wanting to help people by becoming a social worker.

What pisses me off the most is that if you’re a plumber you get to walk in and demand whatever price you feel like, but if you’re someone who helps society, society gets to cram it up your ass and tell you to smile about it. Same goes for anyone who works for society: teachers, cops, firefighters, EMTs, social workers, librarians, nurses, etc… I don’t get why we don’t all just join together and let society fucking die until they agree to pay us what we’re really worth.

Edit: to clarify, I’m not saying plumbers aren’t helping society. I’m saying when inflation goes up, plumber’s prices go up to match… If you’re being paid by tax money, you don’t get to do that. Nothing against plumbers, it was just an example.

Everyone is getting fucked in our capitalist nightmare, but if you work for Walmart, WALMART investors are fucking you over… If you work for any of those jobs I listed above, SOCIETY is fucking you over (yes, I get that at the end of the day it’s still those Walmart investors fucking us over because the same 1% own everything and stop society from paying us what we’re worth by refusing to pay their fair share of taxes)

I read that half of Americans couldn’t cover an unexpected $1,000 expense.

Without borrowing or selling property, yeah. Not a lot of people have that much liquid cash laying around.

But I wouldn’t assume that this would be some kind of economic devastation. Our whole system revolves around easy credit.

If the unexpected expense is something that can be paid for on a credit card, that 20% interest isn’t exactly ideal but for many people it can be a simple task of buying now and paying it off over 2 or 3 months. For them, $1000 isn’t a lifestyle changing expense.

For others, $1000 might be devastating. It might be the difference between making rent or not, and ultimately lead to eviction and maybe even homelessness.

So liquidity is a different question from financial health or resilience, even if they’re somewhat correlated. There are other metrics out there more directly measuring financial stability or vulnerability.