Comment by nlawalker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nlawalker | Hacker News Reader

I always recommend the following two posts to anyone who has discovered MMM, as I think they best sum up his context, history, mindset, goals and living situation - all of which are good to understand before you start taking what he writes as guidance:

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/09/15/a-brief-history-of...

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/06/01/raising-a-family-o...

It's important to keep in mind that his goal was to end his reliance on a full time job for income as quickly as possible, full stop. He did pretty much everything in his power to reach that goal, and it's clear that he's very dedicated.

For anyone who glances at this interview or at his blog and thinks, "I'd like to do that," make sure you read the two posts above first. If your idea of retirement is fuck-you money, a yacht and a summer home in the Hamptons, his advice isn't going to work for you - although his blog provides a good opportunity to gain some perspective on how people not like yourself treat money and what they consider the ideal retirement to be.

Good posts. But for the other side, read these posts:

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/07/27/youll-never-be-nor...

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/07/22/protecting-your-mo...

It seems as if the lifestyle has colored their ability to enjoy things like going out for ice cream, or dinner with friends.

I can see where you're coming from - but I think they would say they don't need to be spending money to enjoy the company of their friends or family. The end goal should be to spend quality time with people you care about, and unfortunately in our culture, that almost always revolves around spending lots of money and doing wasteful things. They acknowledge that they don't mind going out and spending money once in a while for a good night out, but overall, they've developed a sort of gag reflex to it since it's not necessary for them to be happy.

This happened to me back in California where my 'friends' would stop inviting me out or contacting me because I am frugal and they're not. Even somewhat new (to the country) immigrant friends adopted this behavior.

Then I moved to Brazil where there's plenty of cheap or free things to do and I went from going out almost never to going out up to 4x per week. Now I'm living in Portugal and, strangely, it's the same as Brazil. Plenty of ways to go out and spend $15 or under. On the flip side, of course, there are plenty of ways to spend way more per night out.

They actually made a big point about the fact that they had fun going out to dinner so it didn't ruin their enjoyment of the night. They juts also (not unreasonably) noted that $30 for a beer and a salad is sort of ludicrous unless there's something really special about it.

Iirc, MMM's savings were buoyed significantly by being a part of the boom years of both the stock market and real estate market. Whether his financial standing can be replicated by someone following his exact footsteps today remains to be seen.

The returns on your investments may certainly vary under lots of circumstances. But if you're able to living on under 50% of your income, then we're simply talking about how good the outcome will be — not whether it'll be good or not.

He's also willing to move far from family to have his dream life. He did choose wisely in moving to Longmont, CO, the much cheaper suburb of Boulder, CO. Were I looking for a place to live with no family or other external considerations in the selection, the Boulder valley/Front Range of Colorado would be #1. To get a reasonably priced home you can't be directly in Boulder, but there's lots of land in the Front Range plains, and thus, plenty of homes.

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