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If you are saving towards financial independence you have the luxury of choosing if you'd like to be your own boss, or indeed if you'd like a job that pays less.

Most people are living paycheck to paycheck, but those are not the people who are saving for FI.

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I think you assume people who are living paycheck to paycheck to be people that are just don't know how to manage their finances. If so, you would be massively wrong. Most people living paycheck to paycheck are people that usually got a horrible start at life with some bad luck thrown in. Maybe raised by a single parent who couldn't give the extra attention, so they fell behind in school. Maybe people who sickly as kids. Maybe people just born into poor families with bad habits. The list is endless. Yes this sometimes create people that were never given or taught the tools of proper finance but most just got the shit end of the stick. Or they made 1 bad choice and then couldn't get out of that hole.

Yes, but we aren't talking about poor people in this article. We are talking about people who earn a lot of money. In the parent comment I start by talking about a guy who's earning $1.2m a year.

Right it's in the title: "America’s Professional Elite: Wealthy, Successful and Miserable"

Or, maybe they have a high time preference that was inherited in their genes.

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