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lightreadsMeet the Frugal Woods
3/5. Brief memoir from the blogger who realized she was unhappy in her career and life, cut her spending to the bone, achieved financial independence, and moved to the middle of nowhere for . . . some . . . reason? As you can tell, I'm with her until that last bit. Random thoughts:
-The best part of this book is the beginning, which is a lively and oh-so-accurate description of the hard comedown some of us overachievers experience in our 20's when no one is giving us A's anymore and we start looking around going, "….this is it? This can't be it." My solution was to go to law school and trip sideways into a truly incredible career. Hers was to short-circuit the entire question by opting out.
-She's super into frugality as a philosophy, in addition to a tool. I mostly agree with her overarching points, but it's the sort of agreement where I go "yeah, but," a lot while reading. E.g. her contention that used and secondhand stuff can make you happier because it frees you of the paradox of choice where having a zillion product options makes us less happy about the one we ultimately pick. I mean, yeah, but. But I replaced all our shitty old secondhand kitchen stuff over the course of a couple years with carefully-researched, thoughtfully-chosen new products, and my god am I happy about it. You just have to be thoughtful about what money is good for in improving your life and what it's not. I mean, I believe in secondhand, too – it's ecologically and economically sound, and you wouldn't believe the amazing stuff you can get off craigslist for pennies around here. But she says in one breath that it's so much easier to get secondhand because you don't have to do all the work of figuring out the exact thing to buy, and then explains in the next breath how much research she did to verify the safety of the secondhand crib they got, complete with sourcing replacement parts. Hm. I think what is really going on here is that she doesn't see that part as work, for some reason, even though it obviously is.
-What I'm getting at here is that this is not a person who understands moderation. Her frugality is as compulsive as the spending of a lot of people I know. It makes me uncomfortable in the way watching people be compulsive is uncomfortable, which was hard to tease out because I kept being like, "why is this weird? I believe in frugality too." Case in point: she believes in a zero dollar budget. As in, once you account for core living expenses, she treats her budget as zero and every dollar spent as a failure. Which strikes me as a terrible way to frame it. But it seems to make her happy? So okay then. And yeah, if you put them on a spectrum, I'm definitely less horrified by her than I am by most of my colleagues, many of whom are vocal about the fact that they spend every dollar of the $400k-$800k their households bring in every year (why?! On what?!?!). But that just means I'm closer to her end of things, not that I'm totally with her.
-Okay, real talk. I read this book because I found her blog, and I found her blog because we, too, are socking away gobs of money in order to, in a few years, quit the rat race and do whatever the fuck we want. (Shh, don't tell my boss). And we, too, believe in frugality as an ethic: it's good for the environment, it's psychologically useful because it makes it harder to fall into the hedonic adaptation must-buy-more-bigger-better-stuff trap, etc. etc. (Though our version of frugality involves a lot more money than hers does). But I still found this book kind of irritating. And I think the fundamental problem is that she, like everyone else in the world, is not very good at explaining happiness. It's not her fault. No one can do this. I genuinely believe in the value of designing your life for happiness, and this is a solid, short book explaining how someone went about it. But it can't explain the alchemy of it. It can just say that they did x and y and z and then . . . happiness, or something a lot more like it. So it's not particularly useful in the project of designing my own life, which is still in progress.
3/5. Brief memoir from the blogger who realized she was unhappy in her career and life, cut her spending to the bone, achieved financial independence, and moved to the middle of nowhere for . . . some . . . reason? As you can tell, I'm with her until that last bit. Random thoughts:
-The best part of this book is the beginning, which is a lively and oh-so-accurate description of the hard comedown some of us overachievers experience in our 20's when no one is giving us A's anymore and we start looking around going, "….this is it? This can't be it." My solution was to go to law school and trip sideways into a truly incredible career. Hers was to short-circuit the entire question by opting out.
-She's super into frugality as a philosophy, in addition to a tool. I mostly agree with her overarching points, but it's the sort of agreement where I go "yeah, but," a lot while reading. E.g. her contention that used and secondhand stuff can make you happier because it frees you of the paradox of choice where having a zillion product options makes us less happy about the one we ultimately pick. I mean, yeah, but. But I replaced all our shitty old secondhand kitchen stuff over the course of a couple years with carefully-researched, thoughtfully-chosen new products, and my god am I happy about it. You just have to be thoughtful about what money is good for in improving your life and what it's not. I mean, I believe in secondhand, too – it's ecologically and economically sound, and you wouldn't believe the amazing stuff you can get off craigslist for pennies around here. But she says in one breath that it's so much easier to get secondhand because you don't have to do all the work of figuring out the exact thing to buy, and then explains in the next breath how much research she did to verify the safety of the secondhand crib they got, complete with sourcing replacement parts. Hm. I think what is really going on here is that she doesn't see that part as work, for some reason, even though it obviously is.
-What I'm getting at here is that this is not a person who understands moderation. Her frugality is as compulsive as the spending of a lot of people I know. It makes me uncomfortable in the way watching people be compulsive is uncomfortable, which was hard to tease out because I kept being like, "why is this weird? I believe in frugality too." Case in point: she believes in a zero dollar budget. As in, once you account for core living expenses, she treats her budget as zero and every dollar spent as a failure. Which strikes me as a terrible way to frame it. But it seems to make her happy? So okay then. And yeah, if you put them on a spectrum, I'm definitely less horrified by her than I am by most of my colleagues, many of whom are vocal about the fact that they spend every dollar of the $400k-$800k their households bring in every year (why?! On what?!?!). But that just means I'm closer to her end of things, not that I'm totally with her.
-Okay, real talk. I read this book because I found her blog, and I found her blog because we, too, are socking away gobs of money in order to, in a few years, quit the rat race and do whatever the fuck we want. (Shh, don't tell my boss). And we, too, believe in frugality as an ethic: it's good for the environment, it's psychologically useful because it makes it harder to fall into the hedonic adaptation must-buy-more-bigger-better-stuff trap, etc. etc. (Though our version of frugality involves a lot more money than hers does). But I still found this book kind of irritating. And I think the fundamental problem is that she, like everyone else in the world, is not very good at explaining happiness. It's not her fault. No one can do this. I genuinely believe in the value of designing your life for happiness, and this is a solid, short book explaining how someone went about it. But it can't explain the alchemy of it. It can just say that they did x and y and z and then . . . happiness, or something a lot more like it. So it's not particularly useful in the project of designing my own life, which is still in progress.
no subject
Date: 2018-04-30 06:46 am (UTC)Also, I hope that the book includes photos of their dog. The dog pictures are the best part of their blog.
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Date: 2018-04-30 11:58 pm (UTC)Your comment made me realize that this book is a concentration of the parts of the blog I generally gloss over -- life philosophy -- and none of the parts I like -- the homesteading adventures. In her defense, I think she finished writing it when they had barely just moved up there. But yes, she does touch on the privilege issues. Which, tangentially -- I assume you've heard of Mr. Money Mustache. A friendly warning on that one -- I noped out of him hardcore when he wrote an incredibly snide post about how he doesn't believe in privilege. There's a sad amount of that in this particular subculture. I suspect it is related to the concentration of people who identify as libertarian and who are really proud of having figured out how to "gamify" (blech) the system unlike the rest of the sheeple. Not that I have developed strong opinions about this internet subculture or anything. So yeah. Her privilege opinions are refreshing.
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Date: 2018-05-09 04:43 pm (UTC)"many of whom are vocal about the fact that they spend every dollar of the $400k-$800k their households bring in every year (why?! On what?!?!)."
...this is my husband. I am FINALLY making him sit down this year and work out a budget so he can explain to me WHERE IT GOES, because really?! I put away almost as much as he does for retirement and I make 1/10 as much. He keeps telling me we have sky-high expenses but I'm pretty sure that "we" is mostly him. What I could have done with that salary by now, I can't even.
no subject
Date: 2018-05-10 01:52 am (UTC)Yeah....I'm your husband in this scenario in the sense that I make most of the money. Except I don't spend it and my spouse is occasionally like, "wait, we're invested in what? Our net worth is what? When did that happen?" Bless.
But yes, really incredibly amazing things can happen very quickly when you spend only a small fraction of your gross. I find the overspending of colleagues particularly puzzling because there's only so much convenience spending in the world, and I could definitely spend a significant five figure amount more on travel per year, but oh wait I don't have the time. So what can they be burning it on if they're just as busy as me?
Anyway. Happiness. It's a project and the subject of a lot of my thinking in the past couple years. Money doesn't buy it, but it sure can free up time and mental space to make it a lot easier to achieve. Or that's the theory that I'm working under.
no subject
Date: 2018-05-10 07:37 pm (UTC)Re: happiness - when "positivity studies" (blergh) was first becoming a Thing I read a lot of books about the study of happiness that have totally influenced my decision-making (and my spending!). So much of what makes us happy (in general; everyone's specifics are different!) is not intuitive. And "happiness" is a weirdly culturally coded thing anyway, I think? But, like, maximizing purpose & connection and minimizing strife & pain seem to be at the core of it. Love people, do things, be well?
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Date: 2018-05-12 01:37 am (UTC)I haven't read that book, but I recently heard an interview with one of the authors that was fascinating. She's had a really unusual, interesting life. I follow a few blogs in the broader financial independence community, and unsurprisingly a lot of them spend time talking about happiness. Most of them don't manage it as concisely as you just did. And yet all the reading about it has only helped me so much. I have a plan, I'm executing the plan. And I like my life right now plenty. And I know -- oh God, I know, I know, I know -- that I cannot do this job for the rest of my life. It is killing me slowly. I think I age two years for every one I spend doing it.
But I think longingly of the day when I will not have to do it anymore, and I know it will be so good for me to have time for creativity and more physical exercise and for intellectual curiosity and to really enjoy my marriage. But that freedom is also scary? Because at that point it will all be on me to fill my days with things that nourish me. And oh god will I miss this job: the adrenaline and the sense of consequence and all the secret things. What do you do when the thing which fulfills your need for engagement and industry is also sapping your ability to meet your other needs? Ugh. Why so needy, these animal brains.
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Date: 2018-05-12 01:19 pm (UTC)What my mother has done (and my mother is a fucking dynamo, though maybe not quite at your crazy adrenaline-rush level) is to take on only work that she loves. She doesn't have to - their savings and assets and rentals and retirement bring in more than they spend each month - but she loves it. And then what she does is to be in town for that work, and show up for it, and maintain those relationships, and then she has scheduled her travel around it. She works from our local library and every day she is home she wakes up at 5:30 and goes for a 3-mile hike and then comes back and bakes for charity (she has a cottage kitchen license) until 9 or goes for a 20-mile bike ride with friends, and then walks to the library to work until mid-afternoon or evening, and then my father picks her up on his way back from his day maintaining their rental properties and they spend the evenings together unless she has a board meeting.
And then they travel around the world - mostly for Habitat for Humanity, but my Dad also does sustainable-biology research scuba diving, and she goes along on those, and sometimes they travel just for fun, and sometimes they travel separately (more diving for him, more remote places for her) and I want to be *just like her* when I grow up. If you want to meet her and pick her brain about this (happiness research says that actually asking people who are doing/have done things is the best way to gauge whether that thing leads to happiness) she will be in DC at the same time I am (long story) and I bet would love to meet you. If not, also fine, but she's amazing and a great example of how a workaholic has really managed to make retirement ("retirement") work in a sustainable way.
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Date: 2018-05-13 05:20 pm (UTC)Wow, she does sound amazing. And yes, that is very much the sort of life I would like in broad thematic outline, if not in the particulars. (Relatedly, I've heard a lot of people say that work you do when you don't need the income is qualitatively different than work you do at least in part for the money, even when it's the same work, substantively speaking. That makes a lot of sense to me. Though as I said to C the other day, it's pretty ironic that in pursuit of my goal of opting out of a lot of capitalism, I have to be really really good at capitalism first).
Anyway, I'd love to meet her someday, but perhaps not next week. I'm honestly not ready to start thinking too specifically about what life will be like when I can design my own happiness. We're 5-6ish years out, and I'd sort of . . . rather not know yet? If that makes sense.
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Date: 2018-05-14 01:07 pm (UTC)I work for structure, sense of purpose, butter-n-egg money (including retirement nest egg!), security, independence, to model working women for the offspring, and to balance out the other end of the work-life teeter-totter. And (current project somewhat excepted) I like being good at what I do and having skills that are valuable to other people.
Though I think one thing my mother could tell you about how she did it was that she didn’t really know ahead of time either. Happiness evolves organically (particularly for those who are self-motivated and have strong self-management skills; the rest of us need outside help) as you go, as you feel out what fits you, as you see what the people in your life need. Pretty sure whatever you end up with, you’ll rock it as only you can.