Must be nice to be financially comfortable enough to give that up.
I’m glad that they’re addressing the issue, but how many people are stuck with the mortgage and the student debt and the family that needs almost every penny of their income to make ends meet for every person that has the resources to do drop out of the tech industry in less than half a year?
Agreeing with some of the comments here: I feel like I'm stuck in my current high paying job; we have a mortgage, nice car, lots of "stuff".
Through conversations with therapist and my spouse I've been slowly realizing how much this stuff owns me, rather than me owning stuff. I never have time to play with my synths or flight-sim setup or even photography anymore. The only time I'm truly relaxed is when we go somewhere far and without connectivity - I don't have a 1000-item household todolist, I don't get work emails, I don't have 100 entertainment options that paralyze me. I'm trying to convince myself and make the step and actually start getting rid of stuff and considering a less stressful/paying job... I may not be as "stuck with mortgage" as I feel -- we'll see how it goes :|
This is definitely true for me. I went from a digital nomad lifestyle living abroad for over a decade, to moving back to North America and "settling down".
In the last three years I've bought a house, fancy car, and accumulated a bunch of "stuff".
By most people's standards, what I have accumulated is not that much, but to me it's a huge weight on my shoulders. Not only the physical items, but subscriptions to services, utilities, property taxes, home maintenance fees, etc. It's all extremely stressful and draining.
I also used to have a ton of hobbies (photography and electronic music as well, interestingly enough). I haven't touched either in over a year, and I don't even have a valid excuse for this paralysis. My job has a hard stop at 5pm. Yet at the end of the day, the only thing I mentally have energy to do is cook with my wife, and then zone out in front of Netflix, read reddit, or occasionally have a few beers.
Even though I make more money now and am in a much more stable job than ever before, for the first time in nearly a decade I find myself depressed and filled with anxiety. I yearn for the simpler lifestyle with less to worry about that I lived before. I'm at - over to be truthful - the age where all my peers have kids, but I'm honestly terrified of the additional responsibility and commitment needed when even just supporting myself with a 'normal' lifestyle is this stressful.
>By most people's standards, what I have accumulated is not that much, but to me it's a huge weight on my shoulders. Not only the physical items, but subscriptions to services, utilities, property taxes, home maintenance fees, etc. It's all extremely stressful and draining.
You're not alone, I feel the same way. I think it's the never-ending recurrence of these costs in both time and money that causes the anxiety. I took a break from work last fall and even though I have plenty of savings it wasn't hard to see how fast these recurring costs would drain them. At some point it all just feels like a yoke on your back.
Lately I've been dreaming about buying a sailboat and cruising without a fixed home address. I realize on a logical level that it isn't as glamorous as my fantasy of it but it calls to me nonetheless.
>and then zone out in front of Netflix, read reddit,
You're not allowing yourself to be bored. You can't do creative hobbies if you're just going on autopilot and spending your time doing the absolute lowest common denominator timesinks like Reddit and Netflix.
You didn't ask for advice but that's never stopped me before!
Do a fiscal budget and forecast it out a few years. It is so helpful in seeing where you can cut, where you're spending money that you don't need etc.
Do a time budget. I know, it sounds boring and like life planning but it can help show how you're going to spend your time. If you don't like it and it is overwhelming, look for areas to change. Time management is a zero sum game (outside of paying more for lawn mowing but still, you've just freed up that time).
Sorry for the rambling thoughts, budgeting was something very hard for us to start because it doesn't lie and can be hard to acknowledge all of the little things we were ignoring.
I like how this rule sounds, but am wondering whether you live in a high-cost area or not. Having two incomes at the level of the fast-food industry seems somewhat limiting, but this depends on where you live and how frugal you are.
In other comments I'm also noticing that having a mortgage is part of the need to stay in a high-paying job, so maybe renting can alleviate some of that pressure and be more flexible to adjust to live below your means?
Sure, I'm in WNY right now, planning to move to Knoxville or Memphis this year. Not super frugal in general, but I save about half my paycheck, wife invests most of hers. We have a house, two cars (only one of them is "nice"), and no kids. We own a house in the suburbs, bought it almost a year ago and have been fixing it up since.
Renting is pound-for-pound far more expensive than owning. We couldn't find an apartment we liked within our budget, so we bought a starter home instead. Owning also lets us recoup value when we sell. Buying an expensive house isn't something we want to do, so there's no need for us to pay $2500 a month for a McMansion with a quarter acre of golf course outside.
> Renting is pound-for-pound far more expensive than owning
This may very well be true for your scenario, so I'm not addressing that. I just want to poke at the myth that owning is always cheaper than renting. The real answer is: it depends on a lot of things.
There are costs associated with achieving a purchase (and later, a sale), there are costs associated with paying rent for extra cash (ie the mortgage), there are property taxes, and there are both time and money costs in maintenance work (that is obligatory for owners, a savings if you are renting).
If you move more often than once every 5 years, the math probably works out for it being cheaper to rent than to own. Committing to 5+ years decreases your flexibility to do things like: take higher-paying work, let go of real maintenance needs, move out of a bad neighborhood, etc.
That is a great perspective and sounds like Ben Graham's concept of margin of safety in chapter 20 of the Intelligent Investor. Apply that to your investments and find businesses that have a margin of safety and have considerably more earning power than the going rate of debt and you will do well.
Genuinely asking: how do you plan to rent/own property? Where I live working in fast food would only get you a shared bedroom or a small studio, which would be cramped for a couple.
Not the op, but it all depends on location in a few different ways.
First, there's cultural difference around the world about owning property - or if not cultural, than at least pragmatic: FWIW, vast majority of my European friends and family don't plan/anticipate to own a property - ever. Huge percentage of my North American friends and family wouldn't even settle for a condo - it's house or fail. These friends and family are in comparable positions.
Second, location location location. Maybe your high tech jobs leads you to live in downtown of a metropolis, but a low-paying job "forces" you to a small town of boonies or boonies of small town or both. You may or may not find that lifestyle better for mental health.
Finally, size, size, size. I was born and lived HAPPILY as middle-class family in a 3-room apartment as a five-people nuclear family (parents, one grandmother, two kids [ourselves]). It was fine. It was great.
I am now in a house, same family config but a generation down, we have four rooms on top level alone, plus main floor and basement, and we are CRAMPED. We rented a locker until last year when we did a purge. There's stuff everywhere. Not even because we are well to do (though we are), when you have kids in north america the amount of stuff friends and relatives and facebook groups share is awesome but overwhelming. And the household work... GAWD the household work... I don't find peace in it and it overwhelms me just to think of the time and expense owning property entails.
Hey, these aren't even first world problems, these are privileged well-to-do first-world-plus problems, I recognize and address that. But owning sizeable house is by far not the only way to happiness.
Edit: Let's not forget kids vs no kids. That is a huge differentiator as to options, and I think more of us commenting or advising here should be explicit about current state and plans. I didn't think kids were as "life changing" from economics/lifestyle perspective as I'm now aware :P. This is not to say I didn't think they were a huge deal... just didn't realize intuitively internally just how much it is YourLife:Part2. I went through civil war, change of continents and countries, passage of parent, broken heart and ending up with The One... and ALL of that was a relatively similar "Phase 1" compared to the radically different life after we got kids :D
The Bay Area is ridiculous in terms of home pricing. We could likely move there and do ok financially, but I'd rather get a nice plot of land in Appalachia and have some farm animals, spend my evenings working on marksmanship and whatever car I'm wrenching on at the moment.
Yeah - and WNY is really great in terms of housing costs (I grew up outside of Buffalo).
There are trade-offs to that cheaper cost too though.
Mostly in terms of job availability (though maybe that's changing with remote work), stuff availability (foods, people), and centralization of knowledgable people in software (not many). Weather.
Schools and variety of public opinion was also not great, but that's a problem most places and only really matters if you have kids. I wouldn't want to raise my kids there though.
Congrats, you found the reason why we're leaving. It's a combination of that, tax rates, and gun laws. Upstate NY doesn't need to suffer for the problems of NYC.
> Mostly in terms of job availability (though maybe that's changing with remote work)
It is. I'm starting a new job in Orlando on Monday.
Those things you mention aren’t really the chains you make them out to be. You can sell your house and move somewhere affordable. Poor people have kids all the time, a lot of times they are even smart! What you feel chained to is your ritzy lifestyle. Your wife and kids won’t resent you for not providing all that fancy shit, but they will resent you for working yourself until there’s nothing left for them.
Not for nothing, but what you're saying is both classist and doesn't take into account the reality of friendships and roots that can take hold in a place after you've settled in.
Things may be expensive, and you may feel trapped on the hedonic treadmill, but moving to a new city or a lower COL area may not be a realistic option for many people.
"Poor people have kids all the time, a lot of times they are even smart!" is extraordinarily classist. It makes a joke that based on the assumption that the majority of the time poor people are stupid.
I think there is a charitable interpretation of that sentence where they were being tongue-in-cheek with the understanding that readers would all agree that obviously being born to a poor family does not determine your intelligence.
Though in theory I agree, I think this is simplistic. I know a lot of people who don't live a "ritzy" lifecyle but are still stuck where they are. And yes, in theory, they could move somewhere affordable, but they may not have enough of a cushion, or they may have roots where they live now (for instance, their kids might have friends, or they may have family that are either helping them with their kids or require being helped).
It’s also unfortunately the case that there are wives (and husbands) and kids that WILL resent someone for giving up the ritzy (or materially comfortably) life for somewhere calmer and better for someone’s mental health. It happens.
And when it happens, the side effects can be downright crushing - Google ‘child support imputed income’ for an example of the legal framework that can be brought to bear against someone.
I do empathise with people in that bind - it's hard to know if a job paying much less will actually be significantly less stressful - big gamble to make with lots at stake. Affordable areas generally have fewer jobs - just moving somewhere more affordable isn't a trivial thing to do and there are overhead costs in moving house so you need to downsize considerably.
These are all choices you make. I chose not to have children, own a house, etc because I didn't want to feel like I was buried by these things. Many people don't feel that way and the decision to take on those responsibilities makes sense.
The tech industry is a major driver for gentrification as a result of ludicrously high pay rates, especially after the pandemic when tech workers have started to move into cheaper areas as a result of the adoption of remote work. If dropping out of the industry is what you want, an adjustment of expectations is likely required and I'd argue tech workers have plenty of room to adapt there.
He didn't just say "fuck it I'm rich later" but I don't know why anyone would hold it against him if he had. He started a business and does a job that he manage in a healthy way. This is good.
It sure helps. Are you saying that only people who are in the worst possible situation (unemployed, in a civil war, with cancer, raped daily, low IQ, blind, …) can talk about having problems?
> Are you saying that only people who are in the worst possible situation (unemployed, in a civil war, with cancer, raped daily, low IQ, blind, …) can talk about having problems?
No. I'm glad that they're tackling their burnout issues by changing professions, but I'm trying to have a conversation about how social and financial issues may keep other people in not as advantageous a position from doing the same. That's all.
I’m glad that they’re addressing the issue, but how many people are stuck with the mortgage and the student debt and the family that needs almost every penny of their income to make ends meet for every person that has the resources to do drop out of the tech industry in less than half a year?