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Comment by aerovistae | Hacker News Reader

I'll be honest this is a stupid story.

He's sharing a three bedroom apartment with two roommates. There isn't some beautiful moral to be taken here. what about when you have a family? What about when you have children? What about when you have a medical expense come up? Insurance is very expensive.

I hate these anecdotes that imply that you can just live simply in the United States and be happy. So much is left unsaid. Maybe this guy wants to live an ascetic life, but most people don't.

I understand that the idea of spending less can apply on varying scales, but this implication that you can just give up the material world and be a musician making minimum wage and be happy is silly.

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Well, son, it was 1932. The depth of the Great Depression. I was down to my last nickel. I invested that nickel in an apple. I spent the entire day polishing the apple and, at the end of the day, I sold the apple for ten cents. The next morning, I invested those ten cents in two apples. I spent the entire day polishing them and sold them at 5 pm for 20 cents. I continued this system for a month, by the end of which I'd accumulated a fortune of $1.37. Then my wife's father died and left us two million dollars.

Haha did you just come up with this?

No, it's a famous copypasta/quote.

Nope, it is making circles from at least 1990s and possibly earlier.

> I'll be honest this is a stupid story.

Stupid in that it's incredibly reductive.

It is blissfully unaware of the explosive costs of items needed for life and its continuation (AKA children) like healthcare, housing, and education (the last last two especially explode in cost together in unison).

Yeah I get it. Frugality is useful. When coupled with creativity it even sometimes results in amazing workarounds that sometimes turn into novel solutions that more people benefit from.

But people who aren't rich don't need to be lectured on frugality by someone who is rich. For every disparaging anecdote you hear about a non-rich person with a 65" TV, there are multiple families working 3 jobs to feed, house and educate their members. They also lend their spare time/effort to their neighbors, and there are entire communities that keep going on such efforts, sharing childcare and other essential needs. It takes a village after all.

Those people are engaged in a kind of community frugality the author can likely not comprehend with his peanut-butter sandwich anecdote. They don't write guru-style blog posts about these things, though, because it's so blindingly obvious to them that they need to watch their spending very carefully.

Yes it's really stupid. All the poor people who barely get by are on the brink of becoming rich if only they shared an apartment with others and started to eat peanut butter sandwiches every meal ? What if you barely have enough to live already, starve yourself ? A guy who got rich at 22 by selling some unspecified company telling others that they could get rich too if only they spent less is frankly very offensive to read.

The part he bolds is:

> It’s the difference between what you have and what you spend

I think I hear a lot of people rewriting that as

> It’s the difference between what you CAN MAKE and what you NEED

Depending on the 'YOU' in question, the 'CAN MAKE' and 'NEED' vary dramatically. So many debates on both a personal and societal level are trying to fit everyone into a single 'YOU', and telling everyone else that their calculations must be wrong.

> He's sharing a three bedroom apartment with two roommates.

that was before he made a company and then sold it for $22m.

.... Which the story implies had nothing to do with his later happiness.

yes. the point is that fuck you money is a lifestyle, not a number.

What? Good for Derek that he never had any kind of unexpected expense that exceeded his savings.

Homelessness can be a lifestyle too, but most don't choose it. He could have saved more money in the same amount of time by sleeping on a park bench. We all have our limits.

it's funny to me how worked up people on this website are getting about a mundane platitude.

I think people worried about how much they feel they need to spend, are upset when "just spend less money" is presented as sage advice from millionaires on how to be happy. It's hard not to feel offended when the obvious implication from the advice seems to be that you are being frivolous and that's why you feel anxious and poor.

the point of the article is that he started spending less money -before- becoming a millionaire; that he became a millionaire -as a direct consequence- of spending less money, not the other way around.

Not sure if this is what you meant, but the point of the article is that he achieved the feeling of financial freedom that millionaires have by spending less money - "what it was like to get rich". I think there are pretty big differences between feeling like a millionaire and being one. And presumably the author does as well, because they kept many of the millions he got from selling his company.

Heaven forbid you or people you care about ever contract a serious health condition, a major car accident, or want to have children.

If that happens, then even being relatively rich won’t help you.

Let’s say I have 2 million dollars, but my three kids are born with genetic heart defects requiring 1.5 million in surgery each. Well, since I have the money, I will eventually be forced to spend it as insurance is limited, and government assistance prioritizes those with less resources.

Being rich won’t save you from disaster leading to poverty, it only makes things easier in normal life.

There is always the possibility of a wipeout event, but being relatively poor means than much smaller problems can have the same effect. For a recent personal example, I had a relative reach out to me, unable to make their mortgage because of a few thousands of dollars in unexpected hardship. I never lost sleep over it, but if I was fixated on my burn rate like this article suggests, that could have ballooned into a much larger problem of bankruptcy and/or homelessness quickly.

It's a matter of degree. This advice forces you to treat potentially minor unplanned hardships on the order of thousands of dollars the same way as 1.5 million dollar wipeout problems. My point is, if you have a great safety net and nobody else is depending on you, sure, fixate on your burn rate. But if not, this advice seems bad.

Ah, disagree, poor argument. That would only apply to the absolute far end of medical circumstances. The vast majority of medical needs cannot bankrupt a millionaire with insurance and using those rare cases to imply that having money doesn't make much difference is disingenuous.

The vast majority of normal circumstances are covered by having a job with medical insurance. And those normal circumstances can ruin people without insurance (e.g. a diabetic without insulin.)

As you say, the vast majority of normal circumstances won’t bankrupt normal people either.

It’s only an out of scope disaster that brings suffering.

Forgive me on the insurance bit, I was speaking from the context of a country which provides some healthcare to its citizens, regardless of income. Not many people, millionaires included think to have insurance that would pay out millions for rare circumstances.

> this implication that you can just give up the material world and be a musician making minimum wage and be happy is silly

I’m sorry you feel this way. The outlook above seems perhaps jaded though.

I can easily imagine being extremely happy focusing on what I love while taking on the minimal set of responsibilities necessary to pay the bills, especially at age 22. Hard to do for sure once you have a family etc.

It's relative. You obviously can live on peanuts and be happy if your expenses are low.

At a different stage of life with more responsibilities and a family, you need more to be happy but it's still within reach of a household income in the low six figures if you're smart about where you live and not upgrading your lifestyle beyond what's easily sustainable. The moral of the story is don't live beyond your means. That takes a little discipline, but it's worth it.

The point is that if you desire to live a simple existence you are one small catastrophe away from total financial ruin. I have a child who developed an autoimmune disorder. The medicine is $5000/month (insurance won't cover it, I have involved attorneys.). How many people living a simple life would be able to soak up that expense? How quickly would they draw down a savings account?

Exactly.

I don't see how that's an argument against living beneath your means. If you're doing that you'll have some savings. But you'd have to have insane savings to soak up $5000/month without serious lifestyle changes.

> in the United States

Interesting political undertone to your comment. I always get the feeling Americans don't know how much most of the rest of the world struggles to live.

> but this implication that you can just give up the material world and be a musician making minimum wage and be happy is silly.

Equally naive implication that somehow living a complex life in a jetski or having a comfortable suburban existence will make you "happy" either

Much to learn young grasshoppah

I specified my country to head off anyone replying that the healthcare problems I mention aren't an issue where they live.

I was not implying that a complex life in a jet ski or comfortable suburban existence would make you happy, I was implying that giving up your education or watching your children die for lack of medicine would make you unhappy.

Read between the lines old grasshoppah

Americans aren’t watching their children die due to a lack of medicine

Having children is an essential part of the human experience. Not everyone does, but it’s a strong biological imperative for most. Good luck sending your kids to a decent school, where they won’t learn to be criminals, on a shitty income. Public school is “free”, but housing in a good neighborhood isn’t.

My kids are now in a bad public school.

The good news is that the public school is very instructive - my kids are 'rebeling' against the seven deadly sins they are seeing there.

It's too late once your older, which is perhaps the travesty of the USA - under sufficiently intense competition, your success was determined, not by you, but by your lineage. To a certain point. Hard work is necessary, but not sufficient, therefore meritocracy is not real.

It meant he was free to be a musician and maybe that freed up time to learn to program and through serendipity to start cd baby.

I think he is really talking about a mindset here. Also a lot of monks and nuns give up things and are happy.

> you can just give up the material world and be....

You are correct. The vast majority of people cannot pursue their dream life because they cannot give up their iPhone and other material things; we are a consumeristic society.

Frankly this is an ignorant comment, no offense.

This isn't about giving up your iPhone. It's about giving up your insulin, giving up your car that you need to get to your job, giving up birth control, giving up the daycare that takes care of your children so that you can go to your job, giving up dentistry, giving up repairing the hole in your roof that causes a leak into your bathroom, giving up your college classes, or giving up your children's college classes.

Think twice. Just because you have it easy doesn't mean everyone does.

There's iPhone and there's insulin. I talked about iPhone not insulin.

I am not the one making ignorant comment or logical fallacies.

https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/...

Speaking as one of the few people who has no difficulty saving (to the extent I bought my first home without needing a mortgage), I have observed that there is a lot more going on than the occasional expensive item like an iPhone. Normal people buy a lot more of everything — eating out, holidays, films, clothes, subscriptions, everything — and do so continuously, not just on special occasions. I don’t know why I’m different in this regard, only that I am.

Still, if everyone engaged with the economy the way I do, the economy as we know it would collapse. I feel that my luck is simply in being different rather than anything else.

Like you, I am not "normal".

Today's economy not only is based on people buying thing they don't need, with money they don't have, to impress people they don't like; but also it is rooted to the core of the ID and Ego, it's a quasi-spiritual experience, and, like all belief-system, when challenged, it would bring out its ugly side.

Did you read the book: The Millionaire Next Door? You'd enjoy that. I bet your local library has it.

Indeed the story implies it’s just you. The moral of the story is sound but unrealistic in today’s economy.

Especially since most people end up with a significant medical expense. Being poor doesn't cover even mediocre care in large parts of the US.

Or want a family or just have kids then the lower end of independent finances is much higher.

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