If You’re Not Getting Rich in Your 20s, You’re Doing It Wrong | Hacker News Reader

If You’re Not Getting Rich in Your 20s, You’re Doing It Wrong

mrmoneymustache.com

16 pointsrandlet14 comments

> Because here’s the thing about your 20s. They are the time to work. The very, very best time in your life to work your ass off and create an exponential snowball of money, skills, and friendships. Your brain will never be more sponge-like and inexhaustible. You will never feel more motivated and less cynical than you do now. And you will never have another decade of pre-childraising freedom in your life.

Exactly, so waste it working yourself to the bone instead of actually living.

> There’s plenty of room at the edges for laughs over fine tequila and winks over surreptitious servings of weed.

When, you just advocated staying up until 2:30am or 6:00am working.

> All the hard workers already run their own company.

Arrogant dick.

> Luckily, this is a happy situation and something to celebrate rather than dread. Doing your ultimate work is the core of human satisfaction

If you want to be a workaholic or are defined by your job, sure.

Nothing against working one's ass off, or earning money. But considering the tuple of:

  (money,skills,love/sex/friendships,experience,awareness)

if you're placing money ahead of any of the other 4 -- or defining being "rich" in strictly monetary terms, at any age -- you're doing it very wrong, indeed.

> Your brain will never be more sponge-like and inexhaustible. You will never feel more motivated and less cynical than you do now. And you will never have another decade of pre-childraising freedom in your life.

Except, well, this is all either not true or overgeneralized.

1) Your brain was more sponge-like an inexhaustible in your teens than your twenties, and more in the decade before that than in your teens.

2) I'm 42. I was more motivated and less cynical in my 30s than my 20s. I'm more motivated and less cynical now than in my 30s.

3) I'm 42. My first child will (if all goes well) be born sometime around the end of this year. I'm pretty sure that means I had "another decade of pre-childraising freedom" after my 20s. (OTOH, lots of people don't have a decade of pre-childraising freedom in their 20s.)

If you are woman and want kids, biologically speaking, your twenties are the best time to make that happen.

He talks about "These days, kids tend to happen in your thirties." That tends to work fine if you are male. If you are female, it gets vastly more complicated to put off kids until after age thirty. I have to wonder how old his wife was when they started having kids. Most hetero relationships tend to be older man, younger woman. Men can easily put off becoming a parent until their thirties, in part by marrying a younger woman. That works less well if you are female.

Doesn't the rate of birth defects start to rise quickly as the man ages into their 30s?

My understanding: Yes, older men do see some increase in things like that. But it is a much bigger problem in women, for a long list of reasons. For example, women are born with all the eggs they will ever have. Sperm is produced "fresh." Also, the woman is the incubator.

I've often thought about freezing some eggs, but I heard egg damage can still occur, not to mention physical issues like a freezer failing or costs. Also not much research exists on the possible hidden later stage development errors, that babies born from frozen eggs could have.

It's actually sadly even worse for women for another reason - they cannot date "down" for natural psychological reasons and the pool of "marriageable" men is shrinking due to less men getting education (which is perceived as "high-status" regardless of income, unless the latter is unusually high):

http://www.vice.com/read/youre-single-because-there-arent-en...

Eh, I don't really have time at the moment to get into why I disagree that women "can't" date down, but I saw that article and this was what I said: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10299641

Women do face actual challenges different from men in trying to figure out how to balance work and personal life and so on, but ...it's complicated and ....I have something else I really need to work on right now.

Ciao.

As you said in your post:

> Most women still want men who are their equal or superior in terms of career success and income, as the article makes clear.

Sure. But there is substantial difference between "most women want" and "woman cannot...."

I don't disagree that most women will not marry down. That doesn't mean they cannot marry down.

:-)

>> "Because here’s the thing about your 20s. They are the time to work. The very, very best time in your life to work your ass off and create an exponential snowball of money, skills, and friendships. Your brain will never be more sponge-like and inexhaustible. You will never feel more motivated and less cynical than you do now. And you will never have another decade of pre-childraising freedom in your life."

Reminds me a lot of:

>> "Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four." [1]

[1]http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

Mr. Money Mustache's blog tells the story of how to live a life free from worry about earning money, by obsessively worrying about the money implications of every decision in your life. So, this post is par for the course.

The author of the referenced article makes the point that there is more to being young than saving money. Mr. Money Mustache counters that if you don't worry about saving money when you're young, you'll have less of it when you're older. These two opinions are in violent agreement! It's almost a tautology.

Lotta hate in here, but try not to focus on that. Remember that HN is an unrepresentative group of the entire audience that article addresses. I'd guess most HN readers are probably doing a-ok salary-wise in the frugality world (but if you _must_ live in {SF,NYC} forever, then probably not).

Spending-wise? No idea. But I'd recommend trying not to be too put off on the "work hard" advice, you probably already work hard and will get more out of the "spend carefully" side of the savings equation.

Life isn't a code review. Even if you think something is 99% wrong, it might still be 1% right. And if that 1% can get you retired a decade earlier, I'd give it some serious thought and just ignore what you think is wrong.

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