If the goal of retirement is beach-sitting I don't want it. Money is energy of your experiments in life and if you spend bare minimum you are missing a lot in life. I would rather work on what I love for the entire life and create more possibilities to get rich. Spending $20,000/year sounds like going on hibernation mode for the rest of your life. Its a plan for people who are chronically lazy.
Unless you have a trust fund or came into money early, just saving $50,000 a year for the last 10 years was pretty tough. You'd need to go without health insurance and probably already own a home. Be in a high-pay, low schooling job. No kids, no un-employed spouse, no pets. No health problems. No job or startup failures. NO MISTAKES.
The people who have accomplished this exist but are few and far between. They are the extreme exception, definitely not even a corollary to the rule.
> Spending $20,000/year seems impossible in the US.
It's not impossible at all. Get rid of all your high reoccurring monthly expenses. Cell phone. Cable. Gym. etc. You absolutely don't need any of that junk. It's just keeping you at work. It can be inconvenient not to have a cell phone, but a lot less inconvenient than spending 38/hrs a week at work.
Also, it's important to keep reminding yourself you live in the consumption capital of the world. The entire US is geared towards spending money, and you will be encouraged to do so many times per day. Your friends, family, colleagues, dentist and the guy at the gym are all going to encourage you to spend money - it's just how the society works. You will have to develop a think skin, and remind yourself to resist spending money at every opportunity.
I'm in Canada, and I feel the pull to spend money here daily. ("Come grab a coffee with us". "checkout this new canoe you should buy". "I found a good deal on...". ""pfft. I get unlimited free texts for only $50/mo." ... etc. etc. etc.
At the end of the day, it's your choice if you want to keep spending money and going to work, or cut out the spending to limit the amount of time you need to go to work.
NOTE: I'm from Australia, lived and worked in the US for a year, now have lived and worked in Canada for 6 years and my family live and work in NYC, so I have some perspective on "consumerism"
"The entire US is geared towards spending money, and you will be encouraged to do so many times per day. Your friends, family, colleagues, dentist and the guy at the gym are all going to encourage you to spend money - it's just how the society works. You will have to develop a think skin, and remind yourself to resist spending money at every opportunity."
This is very true. I would like to think that I have for the past couple of years successfully tried to buck this trend. The idea of "improving credit score" means nothing to me anymore. Thats because I do not want to take loans. If I do have to make a purchase where debt is likely (like a house), I wouldnt let that debt be more than 3-4 years and so pay a lot of money upfront. At least in the US, its easier than one thinks to live a life with positive cash flow. Just have to have the mindset that a 3-4-bedroom-house, 2 or more cars, and owning a lot of stuff in general is not necessary.
The entire US is geared towards spending money, and you will be encouraged to do so many times per day.
This is true to some extent, but it also varies a lot by social groups. If your social group is all people making $100k+, there's a lot more of this casual spending, and more entertainment and socializing is oriented around money-costing activities. If your social group makes less money, the amount of money-spending peer pressure gets somewhat less.
An odd aspect of it is that people who make more money generally have nicer living places, yet seem less likely to use them. With people who make a lot of money, the default is always to meet up at a restaurant, a cocktail place, etc.; whereas among my friends who make less money, dinner parties, house parties, etc. are much more common, even though their housing is considerably more modest.
That $20'000 figure is when you've already bought your furniture, appliances, house, car, etc. And you live in an area where costs are significantly more reasonable, such as a small town in Colorado where the author lives vs. the bay area, one of the most expensive places in the USA to live.
In high school I had a sweet apartment and great food and I got by on a minimum wage part-time job which truth be told was mostly funding luxuries. Everyone should just stay do that, find some parents to live with and retire.
There seems to be an assumption that you can either be: 1) spending money; or 2) doing nothing but sitting around. Surely that choice, if it was ever true, is no longer true. If my living expenses are covered, it costs me $0 in additional spending to do a lot of the kind of productive stuff I would like to work on if I had more spare time.
For example, I have 4-5 open-source projects that I would love to contribute to, and several ideas for projects I'd like to start/maintain. That doesn't cost much. There's even quite a bit of research you can do without much money. Obviously some takes money (e.g. maintaining a chemistry lab or HPC cluster), but lots of math, CS, and humanities research takes little budget; just time, energy, and access to a university library.
If anything, I find it a lot easier to think of ways to spend money on leisure than on work. It might be cool to travel to a lot of places, stay at nice hotels, etc. But that isn't advancing the productive part of my life goals; that'd just be a nice-to-do vacation break. The productive parts for me aren't capital-constrained.
If you are into research you can become a professor and get a tenure. No need to live on $20k. However if you want to be/stay as an entrepreneur you better spend some cache on things you don't want to do yourself.
That's an option, but there are a lot of downsides to being a professor, in addition to upsides. It's not at all a clean alternative to being an independent researcher; you're an employee expected to play a certain kind of game (which involves things other than scientific merit, like status/PR, grant funding, publication-counting, etc.).
But in any case, my main point was that you're incorrect that not spending money means sitting around on a beach doing nothing.
I disagree 100%. I already posted it here, but it's worth noting I drove from Alaska to Argentina in 2 years for $27K ALL IN. It was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, the complete opposite of lazy. This is what I plan to do full time when I "retire" in a couple more years.
grecy, what sort of vehicle did you do your trip in? Did you sleep in your vehicle, a tent, or what?
I'm trying to figure out how I could do something similar. I may not like it so I want to start with a short trip.
I still can't figure a way around the health insurance aspect though. In the USA, life seems to get incredibly difficult without a permanent residence - health insurance is not possible without it, so far as I know. And a driver's license probably gets tricky as well. I don't want to take a nice trip and wind up either in jail or facing a huge debt burden due to some unexpected health problem.
I realize you don't have the health insurance issue since you've already mentioned that you live in a country (Canada?) where this is not an issue.
