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Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

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 :|

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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.

This dev did just that! http://disengage.ca

>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.

Hey I can kind of empathize!

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 feel that. My wife and I have a rule: if our expenses go over what we could make working in fast food, we sell some stuff.

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.

Our mortgage is ~$1000 a month. If you can make the down payment and get approved, owning is almost always cheaper than renting.

edit: $400 of that $1k is property taxes. Live outside of town. It's better. I promise.

The Bay Area is a relevant outlier here - $1k/month would not cover the monthly property tax on a mortgage for a crappy place.

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.

> 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.

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

Would you mind sharing a bit more about that?

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.

Come to Toronto and say that to my face. I'm going to laugh, and laugh, and...

I'm speaking as an American. Owning also lets you build equity and get it back someday.

NYC? San Francisco? Boston? DC? Not every city is Houston, bro.

> 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.

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