No. of Recommendations: 14
Long term old school LBYM poster, new in this incarnation.
Young people at work would (yes, past tense, I'm a month into retirement now) joke about my Franco American. I ate that every day, about 95% of the time, for many many years. When I would lay out that their trips to the lunch room cost them probably $10+, and multiply that by 5 days a week, etc, that they gave up a new car or a down payment on a house, they would take pause. My food (including snacks and sodas) was usually about $3-4 a day, that I brought to work.
The more significant matter is that I would tell the ones whose curiosity I piqued that when one transcends spending ~100% of what comes in, one gets to a point where one has many more options. 100% (and then some, sadly, in too many cases) out of what comes in equates to never having any options but to work.
A coworker really illustrated this when she hit FIRE status in her early '40s, about 3 years ago. Yes, no dependents and that matters and I get it (I'm not in that camp, but am a quasi-empty nester). But, she deployed as a civilian 5x during the OEF/OIF era and saved her big deployment loot in spades. Bought a house for cash with this. Maxed out her TSP (the government's 401(k) equivalent). Lived a simple lifestyle. And unplugged without a care in the world in her early '40s.
I think of this as essentially buying a coupler extra decades of life. She does whatever she wants now. She took her mom home to Japan for a long trip - that wouldn't have happened if she was still in the rat race. She RVed all over the country for 6 months last year.
Great playbook. I'll do some variant of that. I think I bought an extra decade, having taken about another ten years to hit this status.
What is the ultimate life hack? It is not in box zero, it isn't from Tony Robbins, it's not Marie Kondo. It's FIRE. And the accelerant to pour on FIRE is LBYM.
