ALWAYS put life/family/friends/experiences before work. The old adage that no one on their death bed ever wishes they worked more, is 100% true.
https://books.google.com/books?id=e7OYYKACSiIC&pg=PA43&lpg=P...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla#Relationships
The advice to work hard is aimed at 20 somethings. As you age, your focus should shift. That's the part we often seem to forget.
My mum always said kids were her priority and that she focused on us and so on. As a result 3 of us lived in a tiny 2-bedroom apartment, she missed many promotions and was basically trapped in a just-above-foodstamps situation until I moved out.
Her dream of publishing poetry and art in general never even had a chance to get started. 2 jobs, no time. Now she's in her 50's and has both more time and disposable income with me and my sister out of the picture. But the spark for poetry and art is gone, she didn't nurture it.
Me, I don't want to repeat that.
I do see many of my peers, though, sort of trapped in trying to maintain the same lifestyle. I traded down to a modest house, drive old cars, etc.
Not saying I'm somehow smarter. I did struggle a bit with my pride at first...giving up the nice house, cars, job titles and so forth.
That's a key element right there.
Way too many people that I know live well above their actual means without realizing it. They somehow seem to think that as long as the bank is willing to finance it they should take the lifestyle as belonging to their status. It's an easy trap to fall in to, especially because all their other colleagues and siblings do the exact same thing.
Little do they realize that they are effectively taking a mortgage on their future and that when the final bill is presented it won't be pretty.
The only situation in which that has a 'happy ending' is when you die young and leave a pile of debt behind which can't be collected on.
But if you have any dependents or a significant other then this is a surefire way to leave them to clean up your mess.
If you don't absolutely have to borrow then don't, you don't need the fancy house and you don't need the fancy car. They'll end up becoming millstones around your neck if you are not careful.
I didn't really improve my debt level or financial position any. Just made more time for "not work".
It also depends a lot on your other expenses. If you have two kids and a mountain of student loan debt, "modest" might be pretty low even if your income is way above average.
At the same time, it's not like people don't have things going for them. A house, growing retirement plans, some savings, a vacation here and there... Judging from the tone the last 10 years in this country, this qualifies you as "affluent". Which, in a cosmological sense, it is. But it isn't like it is unusual, or only something the very fastidious achieve. It's normal-ish.
So it's not that I'm disagreeing, people can dig themselves in a hole by overspending. I just don't think this is particularly common, or some sort of national sickness.
> So it's not that I'm disagreeing, people can dig themselves in a hole by overspending. I just don't think this is particularly common, or some sort of national sickness.
Based on the published debt and savings stats, it seems like it is pretty common. I know a lot of people with almost no savings, and not always because their income is too low to save.
Worldwide they aren't. In the USA they are, but it has rather unique problems.
I appreciate you sharing this, since I too continue to experience this from time to time, and I feel that too many of us are held back by this private fear and self-consciousness.
I think that the more we are exposed to the fact that this is a completely normal thing to feel, the more readily we may be able to make tradeoffs that make sense for us but may look peculiar from the eyes of the public.
Working in tech gave me the opportunity to do that while minimizing time spent working.
I think before we can share cautionary tales of other people, we have to acknowledge the freedom most of us have in this industry.
Our biological condition where we need to have kids in our 20s or at the latest 30s is simply incompatible with our other goals in modern society: building a prosperous career for a good nest egg, doing great work (science, research, art, etc.), working your way out of the lower classes into higher classes, etc. There just isn't enough time for it all. So as a result, we're seeing only really well-off people and really poor people having kids. The well-off people can afford nannies, while the poor people live on welfare and food stamps or have crappy jobs and struggle like you experienced. The poor breed more poor people who end up being a drain on society, plus a few who manage to break out of it, but then grow up scarred by the experience and don't have any kids themselves. This isn't a recipe for a healthy, stable society.
What we really need to do is figure out how to greatly increase human lifespans so that people can wait until they're 50-100 before they have kids (and feel youthful enough at that age to do so).
Yeah, it helps a ton if you have a spouse/partner without or willing to give up career goals. That fact is in support of Arizhel's claim. Someone opted out of career success completely in your scenario.
Finally, what kind of woman has no career goals? Usually one with little or no education. Educated men usually aren't interested in such women, unless they're both highly conservative and religious.
Absolutely true, but also absolutely the traditional and current norm.
> The whole setup is fraught with peril.
Yup, but that's why it's a commitment, it's risky for both parties but hugely beneficial if it works.
> Finally, what kind of woman has no career goals? Usually one with little or no education. Educated men usually aren't interested in such women, unless they're both highly conservative and religious.
Well about half the population is conservative, and about 80% of the population is religious, so that means the majority of men are interested in such women. This is hardly surprising as housewife is actually traditionally the norm, the notion of educated women earning money is rather new historically and isn't something society has really fully accepted yet.
Traditional? Yes. Current? No.
https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2011/women/
In 2009, 59 percent of working-age women in the United States were in the labor force.
Well over half of working-age women are employed. That means the percentage of women who would qualify as stay at home moms is less than 41%. Likely well under, between 23 an 29 from a quick look.
http://washington.cbslocal.com/2014/04/10/percentage-of-stay...
You're mixing two different statements. Look at what I said was current norm, being dependent when married and trying to have kids.
So your stats don't disprove anything I said.
> Well over half of working-age women are employed. That means the percentage of women who would qualify as stay at home moms is less than 41%. Likely well under, between 23 an 29 from a quick look.
Not relevant to what I said, at all. I didn't say the majority of women are stay at home moms, I said they're financially dependent on their husbands. You can be a working women and still be uneducated and financially dependent. These are not mutually exclusive things.
If by "norm" you mean this still happens a lot, sure, but that's not what's actually the norm. The norm is to be part of the labor force.
And my point is largely, women's equality has a long way to go; it's really not the norm yet.
For the record, I'm not sure how common that actually is vs stay-at-home mom. If you have kids, it becomes glaringly obvious how expensive it is to put kids into daycare. For low-earning mothers with a better-earning husband, it can be really hard to justify working vs staying home to raise the kids. It costs more than minimum wage to put a single kid into daycare.
If you have some stats indicating that most women earn so little as to be financially dependent on their husbands, I'd like to see it.
You seem to really want to make the point that more than half of women work; ok great, but it's a non-sequitur, we weren't talking about jobs, but educated women with careers and more to the point about how many men care about being with educated women with careers. The OP said who but religious and conservative men want an uneducated women, but religious and conservative men account for the majority of men so it's an odd thing to say.
Bluntly, I think you made a claim you realize is incorrect and you're trying to walk it back to something noncontroversial. The whole thread from imesh down was about women staying at home with the kids so their husbands could have high-earning careers. Arizhel commented that this was a dangerous arrangement and you stated that this was the current norm. After I disputed your claim, you walked it back to just being "financially dependent on their husbands". Now you've walked it back further to couples being mutually dependent.
From high-earning husbands with stay-at-homes wives to couples that can't make ends meet without two incomes. These are vastly different topics and if you were really intending to jump from one to the other, it seems odd to accuse me of dropping a non-sequitur for bringing in some data.
I also think your notions of womens' employment are antiquated. You seem to think that women don't have "real careers that require education" and they "work when they can", but women:
* have 43% of their population working full time (for comparison, 56% of men work full time)
* earn more degrees than men
* are 47% of the workforce
* have lower unemployment than men
* hold 51.5% of professional and management jobs (aka careers)
https://www.dol.gov/wb/factsheets/Qf-laborforce-10.htm
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/pdf/women_workforce_slides.p...
I'll happily admit that the 51% number is slightly higher than I expected, hooray, you're made an irrelevant off topic point completely unrelated to why I responded to him in the first place. Do you feel better now? You can return to your safe space and look for the next post where there's one word you disagree with and high-jack another thread to rage on about something completely off topic to the thread.
Your 40% stat is made up and you're trying to assert it as a fact and argue semantics instead. No. You don't get to descend into pedantry about the definition of "normal" when your underlying premise is based on imaginary data.
You're also making a false equivalency between what many men (supposedly) want and what actually happens. Even if 40% of men want stay-at-home wives, that doesn't mean stay-at-home wives (or financially dependent wives, or whatever your current slightly-changed claim is) are the norm. I bet far greater than 40% of men want to win the lottery and yet winning the lottery is decidedly not the norm.
I know, you're going to come in and say this is still not your point. I don't think you actually know what your point is. You've made claims ranging from most men wanting stay-at-home wives to "the majority of women" being "financially dependent on their husbands". You've stated that in "most marriages" wives don't have careers and just "work when they can" and you've claimed that "religious and conservative men account for the majority of men". My point is you have a bunch of preconceived ideas that are not based on fact and in many cases are provably wrong.
>Finally, what kind of woman has no career goals? Usually one with little or no education. Educated men usually aren't interested in such women, unless they're both highly conservative and religious.
Holy cow this is the most judgemental attitude I've heard in a long time. You make being interested in raising a family full time sound like a relic of some ignorant past. Yeah it's a career killer, but the rest of that is just being disrespectful. It's not about having no career goals, it's about prioritizing other things above them.
I do not know whether the author of the comment is women or men, but described reality of it quite accurately - including what the women goes through and thinks about herself as she has to give up everything except the family. It is also incredibly lonely, you can hang around friends if they made similar choice, but just hanging around chatting is not satisfying for most people.
It is not just about prioritizing other things then career - plenty of working parents including fathers do that. It is giving up chance to be competitive in pretty much anything and giving up chance for any personal achievement. All those experiences that goes with having meaningful job, successes, failures, feeling like you are getting better, felling like you do something not everyone can do, all that things that gives people confidence are out. Just about the only possible achievement is when your kids are successful, but it is better for them if you don't live your live through them. You have to have special kind of personality to like that and only some women are like that.
As to education: staying home is more attractive proposition for women without education, because low education jobs are shitty and employers treat you badly.
There are plenty of people like that alive today and to say that nobody respects them is not true. People are different.
For example, one thing to try would be (reverting to) a society where grandparents raise the kids. Then people can invest resources in kids when they're 40–70 instead of 20–35.
It just hammers home for the that being ultra-frugal now so that you can live it up when you retire misses the fact that, well, you might just die one day and never have those experiences you put off in the name of saving money. You should live life as you go, not by putting it all off and saving it up
I know way too many people in their 50s and 60s with no retirement savings. They are starting to be unable to continue working, but have YEARS left to support themselves. It is beyond sad.
It changes your whole outlook on life. When there is a reasonable amount of financial security, one can truly focus on the important things without considering money in the decisions. Many caveats apply of course, such as still maintaining good "financial hygiene".
I'd strongly suggest at least trying one's best at getting up to $100k in investments plus a cash buffer and see how life is different!
> You should live life as you go, not by
Everybody has a different way to live life, but phrasing things this way makes it sound like you've already closed off listening to potential benefits of others' point of view.
They're so focused on work that they can't take the time to realize they have tunnel vision.