I’d be interested in what the actual study says and what income levels were studied. Because the summary makes some universal claims that are obviously not true:
“No dollar level at which money stopped mattering…” implies that having a trillion dollars is less likely to make you happy than a trillion +1 dollar. They didn’t study this and intuitively it makes no sense. So what income brackets were actually studied?
They also make things sound like there was a huge sample size – 33,000 participants – but then trade on this large sample overall to make specific claims about smaller samples. For instance, they did not have 33,000 samples at <$50K, >100K, >1MM, etc, etc.
Also 1.7MM data points across 33,000 participants is about 51 data points per person. That doesn’t strike me as very much. I’d want more than 50 data points to assess my own happiness.
Finally, lol replication crisis. We should probably study the original study 10 more times and then this one 10 more times but nobody got time for that those grant applications.
You might appreciate the message of this video. This guy has been writing a blog about FIRE for a number of years and wrote a book called The Simple Path to Wealth which is one of those FIRE books people recommend. It was a good book, I listened to it through my library’s app but I think the content of it is just an edited and more organized version of his Stock Series which is solid content.
I’m not gonna give you weekly updates or anything but I posted on the 2 year anniversary of my “net worth zero” on May 24, 2021. I’ll give you the update since May 24, 2019 when I was worth nothing, I crossed $100k in Feb 2021 and $200k in Nov 2022. This is mostly through maxing my 401k and Roth IRA each of those years and I recently started being able to regularly contribute to a taxable brokerage. I’d have to revisit the exact data, but I remember reading or hearing that the time it takes to get from $0 → $300k is about the same time it takes to go from $300k → $1M. I’m a bit too lazy to do the math this morning, but if that’s true, it really is eye opening the power of compounding.
That’s probably assuming a constant income too. I would guess in reality most people go from 300k—>1M quite a bit faster than they go from 0–>300k, going from 0-100k was really hard at least for me, you take stupid gambles bc why the hell not I got nothing to lose anyways, by the time someone reaches the 300k mark they are likely making quite a bit more than when they started from 0, probably have developed better money habits, starting to see the compounding effect and therefore less likely to take stupid gambles etc
Yeah this guy is great. But he never was interested in retiring early, he was more interested in the freedom that his accumulated money brought with him. That’s how I see things as well. I don’t want to quit working, I want to be able to quit working.
Like right now I have a lot of anxiety in my job because I’m responsible for a lot of different things, including maintaining the structure of a 100 year old paper mill. The roof in one of the sections of the mill is in very bad shape. I found a picture of this section of the roof from the 1920s and I was like holy shit it’s the same trusses. The trusses are 100 years old and have been rusting for decades in the hot and humid environment. So I hired a structural engineer to do a survey of the roof and almost every single truss is either in active failure or in danger of active failure. Like of 24 trusses 16 need replaced, 5 need substantial repairs, and just 3 need to be sandblasted and repainted. I think that doing this was the right thing to do, both for the people who work here (a degrading roof is not safe and could hurt or kill someone eventually), and for the shareholders of the company (shareholders/upper management needs to have a good idea of what sort of capital expenditures. But I think that previous management didn’t do this sort of survey, not because they didn’t know there was a serious problem, but because they didn’t want to have in writing what the state of the structure is or have to deal with all the headaches of solving the issues. And because they know that the company isn’t going to be eager to spend several million dollars to come up with a comprehensive solution. So I’m kind of in the situation where I have to try to use a PE’s report as a weapon against corporate to get the urgently-needed repairs. They can ignore me but they can’t ignore a scary report with a PE’s stamp at the end of it. That’s how people end up in prison.
Of course I understand very well that this weapon is double edged and I could very well force corporate into closing our plant down. The last thing I want, obviously. But my job, which I largely enjoy, has many of these sorts of no-win decisions. The roof is just currently the most pressing and dramatic. I call this sort of thing monetizing stress. Corporate makes us reduce spare parts, delay repairs, doesn’t fill vacant positions. But that’s why I make the medium bucks. All that stuff I won’t miss and down the road would love a job at 60% of the salary that I can just leave at work when I go home. But for now I mostly like this job, even with the significant headaches.
When we met we were both around 60-70k with degrees
Im up a decent amount from that. She has 5x her salary since then. Makes it nice we can just do what we want and not stress too much oh need a new roof done. Oh going to all the concerts. Done.
