I didn’t wait for a grown-up job to finance the life I wanted | Hacker News Reader

I didn’t wait for a grown-up job to finance the life I wanted

washingtonpost.com

4 pointse15ctr0n7 comments

This has to be the most millennial article ever written. Self centered and full of bad advices.

Yup.

Agreed. This could also be titled "I got damn lucky, and you should count on the same amount of luck too!" There's a reason 'good advice' is labeled as such - following it tends to improve your chances of success more often than not. This article is terrible, and full of terrible advice.

I don't advocate any of her financial mistakes, but having reached my mid 30's, I realize

1) Old age and life aren't guaranteed.

2) If you wait until retirement to start 'living', you may be unable or unwilling to take risks, travel and have adventures.

Saving all the money in the world means nothing if you are dead or too old to enjoy it. I've found there is a delicate balance of saving and exploring the world and life will I'm young enough to be able to.

"If you wait until retirement to start 'living', you may be unable or unwilling to take risks, travel and have adventures."

Adventures? Is this the modern definition of an adventurous life?

It would be one thing if she was traveling to world to do something (learn and teach languages, volunteering with MSF in Africa or Living Water in the Americas, etc.)

Maybe I'm just bitter about having missed out on the backpack-around-the-world-on-debt thing when I was younger, while I was working and putting myself through a B.S. in C.S. and building a career. But I never had the luxury of someplace to fall back to. So, meanwhile, you punks better keep the heck off my lawn. (I don't really have a lawn; I'd suffer too much green guilt.)

How did this make Hacker News? And more importantly, how did this make the Washington Post? This is at best bad advice and at worse horribly irresponsible. She seems like she's on a fast track to eating cat food in her retirement age - your 20s are the best time to save, and she blew them on selfish BS, with no real clear effort to actually take care of herself in her retirement years.

Your 20s may be the best time to save, but then again they may not. It's a good time for having fun and pursuing adventures, and it's great if you can get compound interest going, but your 20s are generally not a good time for earning money, since income will be limited by lack of experience.

Personally, I struggled and worried through my 20s trying and failing to follow the "responsible" path. I struggled to get out of debt and to save money, but I just wasn't earning enough that it made any difference. By my late 20s, with still effectively nothing in the bank, having heard too many comments like yours, I thought I was a failure doomed to lifelong poverty.

And then I started making real money, my debts vanished, and my savings account just seemed to plump up rapidly of its own accord, whether I paid any attention to my finances or not. Life got a whole lot easier. But it had nothing to do with "responsibility" - it had to do with being lucky enough to have gone into a booming industry, and with the higher salaries I was able to pull after having worked in that industry for years.

And then I got divorced and lost it all again. Oops! Back to square one, piles of debt, net worth zero. Except... a couple years went by and real estate prices shot up, so - through no action of my own - my net worth is now several times larger than it was before the divorce. Yay! But we'll see what happens in a few years; I'm not counting these chickens just yet.

My life experience therefore inclines me to agree with the author's advice. Financial responsibility has counted for little. I would have done better to enjoy my 20s more, take advantage of my opportunities for adventure and exploration, and to worry a whole lot less about paying off debts which seemed imposing at the time but which would now be small enough to clear up with ease.

Am I on track to eat cat food in retirement age? Well, I don't know. That's years away. Maybe I'll continue to have a steady career and good luck in my choice of real estate, or maybe the market will crash and I'll lose everything once again. Maybe I'll continue to find interesting work and make good money at it, or maybe the fabled Silicon Valley ageism (of which I have yet to see or experience any trace) will finally strike and my income will disappear. I don't know, and I can't know. What I do know is that I'm alive now, I have opportunities to do fun and interesting things now, and it would be foolish to sacrifice all of those opportunities on the altar of some imagined future security which can never be guaranteed.

In any case, so what if I spend my last handful of years in poverty? Those are going to be the most limited years of my life anyway, as my body wears out. If that's the price I pay for decades of fun now, while I'm young enough to enjoy myself, well, that doesn't seem so bad.

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