Piracy
For me that was one of the worst financial moves ever made.
Plex server go brrrrr
How so?
Well, for the amount of money I spend on hard drives and other hardware I could subscribe to Netflix for about 30 years.
How much disk space do you need?
I have a simple 500GD HDD ($25) and a 230GB (?).
I also have $120 worth of DVD and CD for ~$60 thanks to Goodwill
Fits nicely.
My current raw capacity is at 160 TB.
Wild! I’ve got about 40 TB myself, and have never come across someone with more… let alone four times more.
I’m at 208RB raw, but actually only have 120TB in active use
40 TB was my previous capacity and based around a really cheap 2 bay NAS with a mess of external USB drives attached and no backup … and is now pretty much full.
So I ordered a 12 bay NAS (with, for now 6x 20TB disks) to bascially replace the entire old setup. I’m also planning to put the new setup in RAID 5 or 6, so it will only have an effective storage of 80-100 TB.
My only pain is destroying all those VCD/SVCDs and shitload of DVD-Rs full of .avi files.
All garbage when watching from modern high def TVs.
Not having kids.
Get that sweet DINK litestyle
I love the acronym dink. It sounds so insulting but people use it very casually and it’s funny hearing people calling each other dinks.
I’m a fan of dildo which is dual income, little/large dog owners.
What does it stand for?
Dual income no kids.
DINKWAD
Dual income no kids with a dog
Ty
Double Income No Kids
A literal move actually. 20 years ago I moved from America to a country with universal health care. That has saved my family probably close to a quarter million bucks in health care fees alone.
Not to mention the headache. It feels like every time I get treatment I have to argue with my insurance until they eventually cave (assuming it’s something they actually cover). I asked my mom if this is how healthcare is really like and she said “yeah it’s just the culture, it’s normal” acting as it having to beat the fuck out of a metaphorical piñata to pay for life saving treatment is ok or acceptable. Like why the fuck can’t you just pay for the treatment that I fucking pay you to cover?
Oh god, I hear ya. A long while back I needed some serious treatment and ended up in a hospital for two weeks. It was the first time I had ever gotten truly sick, so I was dreading the final bill. But when the docs said nah you’re good, it’s covered, just take your meds and come back in a week for your follow-up, I damn near died a second time :P
Did you move to Vietnam?
Close, it was Japan
Being born into a rich western country.
Yeah, me too. I pat myself on the back for this one nearly every day. Probably the best financial decision I ever made.
There’s still many nuances people get wrong all the time. Did you pick financially independent parents?
Fuck! No, I fucked that one up too and accidentally picked a crazy Haight-Ashbury 1967 hippie together with a seriously damaged Vietnam vet, the two of them getting involved in weird cultish shit long before I was born.
It was a poor decision on my part. No one to blame but myself.
No one to blame but myself.
Eh, live and learn. Next time!
You need to pull yourself up by your birthstraps.
Underrated answer. Meritocracy is a lie, folks, even within the West. If you do everything perfectly you will climb a little bit, and only on average. All the counterexamples you’re thinking of are people who won a lottery of some kind. And of course, birth is also a lottery.
- Not having a car (always living/renting in walking or biking distance of my work)
- Moving in with my partner straight out of college so we could split expenses
- Moving (with partner) to a low-cost-of-living city for the first 5 years after college
- Putting most of my medium-term and long-term savings into low-expense-ratio, passively managed index funds starting in my early 20s
- Buying almost exclusively second-hand clothes, furniture, and cookery
- Borrowing all desired books (and many desired movies and TV shows) from the library
- Only buying games when they are bundled or otherwise on steep discount years after release
- Pirating any other media in which I’m interested if its distributors make it even remotely difficult for me to buy it at a reasonable price
- Planning all dinners in advance every week before grocery shopping (leads to almost never eating at restaurants or ordering takeout, and almost no food waste because grocery list is based on actual meals)
Now, if I had to choose the best financial move out of that list? Probably the index funds. Though not having to pay for a car (or car insurance, or car registration, or car repair and maintenance, or parking, or fuel) is a close second.
I’m contemplating moving even further towards the lifestyle you have but I struggle with balancing “live for today” vs “live for tomorrow”. In some ways I think we live too much for today, we rarely wait more than a month or two with buying whatever we feel we “need”. We go on vacation abroad every other year at least and do activities monthly that most other families in our neighborhood do maybe yearly or quarterly. Partly because we have much higher income than our neighbors but we could of course save more and if we really buckled down we could likely by financially independent in less than 20 years.
How do you balance and how do you think regarding these matters, what’s your philosophy?
I’ve never felt I’m not living for today. Admittedly, most of what I want to do is consume a variety of media within the comfort of my home. But we also travel abroad every other year or so, and that’s probably the biggest ‘entertainment’ expense in our lives. If we need a car to visit someone or somewhere outside the range of public transit or biking, we just rent one for the weekend (probably happens about once a year). We don’t have to hesitate before choosing to do that because we know we’re living well within our means the rest of the time.
The thing is, once you’re in the habit of doing this stuff, it doesn’t feel like an imposition. It’s just the way your life works. It was actually a bit of a struggle to remember all of those points when I was writing up that list yesterday, because it’s all just natural to me now. There are probably a few more things we do along these lines that haven’t occurred to me.
And at that point, the savings are just a natural choice for what to do with all the surplus money. It’s not even ‘living for tomorrow.’ It ceases to be an either/or situation. It’s living for today in such a way that you can continue to live for today throughout your entire life.
Also, there are a huge number of non-financial benefits on offer here, too: walking and biking at times you’d otherwise be driving is excellent for your health; planning meals allows you to choose healthier options, cut down on red meat consumption, etc; meal planning, buying second-hand goods, and not driving reduces dependency on online mega-retailers, international sweatshop labor, and environmentally harmful practices; making use of the library system indirectly supports its continued existence for folks who have no other options; and on and on.
Anyway, I wouldn’t recommend trying to do all of this at once if it’s all a change for you. I’d recommend slowly introducing each of these practices over time so you have time to get used to each in isolation.
Most of the things mentioned in this thread are mostly dumb luck and not necessarily active financial decisions.
Kind of the point. A lot of financial “success” is nothing but dumb luck.
Yeah, half of these comments are just: I bought a house.
If there was an active financial decision you could make and reliably get rich, everyone would do it.
Not necessarily rich, but there are active financial decisions you can make that will set you on the path to longterm prosperity. Buying a house at what happened to be exactly the right time and making a $100,000 in 3 years in the process is not one of them. That’s just dumb luck.
I mean, “consistently save in a diversified portfolio” would be a pretty boring answer, but it would be an answer I guess. I’m not sure what the equivalent for the poor would be; stay away from substances, maybe?
I even specifically said as much in my comment.
damned Reddit immigrants
Leaving Sydney for a cheaper quieter life in Central West NSW!
Nice 4 bedroom home with views, 1200m² block with trees, quiet area, school almost across the road, close to everything else and best of all, a tiny manageable mortgage!
Yes! Particularly if your job is industrial, get a house somewhere else, but not on the city. Try to find a place with good public transport to the city, tho. Cities will be slowly quitting car infrastructure.
Bullshitting my way onto a high salary career track and just learning shit as i go.
I think I surprising amount of people are likely just “faking it”. I hope one day we can collectively cut the BS and all admit we don’t know what we’re doing.
I think the main problem is that requiring and checking if someone can learn a skill you need is a lot harder than just making the skill a requirement for the job right out of the bat.
I think it’s fair considering companies want 4 plus years for an entry position.
I honestly can’t deal with all the theatrics of securing a job (interview and first months/year included). This was a setback at first since when people asked me stuff I didn’t know I’d just say “I don’t know” or at most “I heard this and that but never worked with it”.
Thankfully I ended up at a place that appreciated that frankness and that gives me room (and incentive) to learn new stuff. Every year so far I end up in a new project with different technologies to use and learn. My ADHD brain is extremely satisfied.
Mined a Bitcoin in college.
Pretty much the same. Bought some Bitcoin in high school in the early 10’s. It was just a novelty and I was a kid, so I didn’t buy much, but if someone was kidnapped or something it would be worth it to go through my old drives.
BTC recently got approved to be traded as an ETF by the SEC, so now’s a good time to find that drive cause the price is only going to go up over the next 5+ years.
My buddy traded his for rent
Learning about long term index fund investing in my early 20s.
Are there any resources you’d like to recommend?
This is primarily a sailing channel but Clark has a series of finance videos that are excellent.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=9XK5ocXPhTg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Bogleheads is great. There’s also a book called “common sense on mutual funds”
Paying off my fucking car. New cars are a scam guys, don’t be stupid like me 6 years ago.
Doesn’t have to be if u keep it long enough. The problem is folks usually get upselled long before it sarts being a good deal.
In 2017 my landlord raised my rent from $1k to $1100 a month for the place I rented with my daughter because I finally broke down and got her a dog. I was annoyed because this wasn’t in the lease but I was month to month by this time and figured I could probably get a house around me for the same cost and at least I’d be building equity. I closed in 2018 on a $120k fixer upper on 12 acres. I got a $30k rehab loan and my mortgage/insurance/property tax payment ended up being just over $1100. I spent 7 months in major renovations.
Fast forward to today, I have a 2.875% mortgage rate with just over $1000 a month all in payment (early COVID refi saved me about $100/month), my house was just appraised for $415k, and I was able to sell 5 acres of the land for a total of about $160k.
A free shelter dog ended up turning $150k into $575k. 10/10 would recommend.
Life changing circumstances, but big props on you for having the confidence to go through with it! Life presented you with the opportunity and you seized it!
I was gonna say buying a house too. Mortgage payments are 1/3 what my rent was, and rents have doubled since then.
I’m in the process of buying right now, and my mortgage is similar to my high rent and the overall cost of ownership is higher, but it’ll be worth it just to get off of the uncertainty of ever increasing rent. At this point it feels like now or never with how batshit insane the housing market has become.
This is wholesome sorry. I am happy for you both anons and that you have doggo a great loving home <3
Choosing to be child-free.
Same here! Spent about $100 for my vasectomy after insurance. Best $100 I ever spent really, saved me hundreds of thousands.
Never buying into the crypto hype when several of my friends and coworkers told me to. (Maybe I would’ve made money, but probably not.)
Buying crypto is pretty much akin to buying a scratch off ticket. You might get lucky, you might not. Depends wholly on timing and aforementioned luck.
When you scratch the ticket, you get the result. But with bitcoin if you didnt sell it, chance is a few years later it got higher again.
It is still total gambling, but not like scratch tickets.
Working with my SO to start budgeting each month. We now have a system in place that works for us and a habit of getting out in front of expenses.
Budgeting helped us see that increasing your income is far more powerful than reducing spending, so we’re focused on spending to gain skills and increase our top line right now.
