There is no shortage of articles about people in exactly this sort of situation, people giving up on FIRE, people leaving the workforce and then going back. Lots of disillusionment.
For my part, we can’t afford to retire early because of the high cost of our basic expenses. We are saving for retirement, indeed I recently stepped up retirement savings for myself, but between that and medical expenses and saving for the boy’s college, we have to live a fairly modest lifestyle. Every time I review our household budget to find more money, there’s only a very small amount going toward discretionary things like streaming services and video games and date nights, it’s almost negligible and keeps life tolerable, so those things stay in.
My FIL had a very high income, I don’t know his exact salary but thanks to nepotism it was very high. He owned a 1.4m home in a nice area. At one point he made a big investment into a vaccine stock and bragged of passive income of over $1m per year. He retired around age 60 and started traveling the world non-stop, mostly to major tourist destinations so he could go scuba diving. His stock tanked. Next thing I know he’s having to sell his house so he can keep traveling. He’s about 65 years old now and already appears to be running out of money.
And we can’t help him and my husband wouldn’t help him even if we could afford it. But I think we all know his Mom is going to pick up the bill eventually. She’s furious.
Sixteen year olds are not invalids, but they also are not adults. In any case I live in an affluent suburban area, not a rural one. (Not that being in a rural area is any excuse.) The principal gave no indication that these kids were in any way troublemakers.
My son-in-law worked for his state’s child protective services agency, so based in the general tenor of his experiences I’m tending to the “parents were scum” hypothesis.
To be clear, I agree with you. I think it’s wrong to throw your kids out when they’re eighteen. In my experience, when that happens, it’s because of major conflict at home. Parents don’t want to do the work necessary to improve the relationship, so they just boot the kid.
Since the thread’s focused on anecdotes: I started FIRE at 27 and hit the FI part by 36 - my investments were making as much as my job (~$50k/year). I didn’t (and I don’t think many people) immediately retire. I was fairly young, in good health, and most any FIRE-adherent will tell you it’s risky to rely on your nest egg is pretty vulnerable. It’s “Retire Early not Retire Immediately” is the admonishment.
What I did do is move to a bigger place with off-street parking and buy a Porsche. I’d moved into my peak earning years and was moving up at my job, and could basically add as much to my portfolio as the early years without scrimping as much, so I did. When I hit the RE part of the acronym in my mid-40s, my investments were over 2X what I needed for the “4% rule” and pretty much immune to market vagaries, even thought it was just after 2008. So it was just about a decade of serious minimalism.
Though there are some people that go hardcore all the way, and some people that retire with a shaky foundation, it’s not everyone or even most. But those stories go viral for the same reason you always hear about how the guy that popularized jogging (Jim Fixx) died of a heart attack at 52.
Actually I was thinking you might be able to shed some professional knowledge on this one. I picked a “colorful” way to page you though. Not too colorful I hope.
That conflict can happen in households with any income level. They’ve taken in a bunch of foster kids, to fill gaps in their housing, and for a fair number the conflict is that the kids are gay. They live in a red state.
Many if not most working class jobs are nights or overnight (think food and hospitality, warehouses, etc). Not to mention other shift work including more white collar and healthcare, where 1pm tuesday might be right after someone wakes up and/or before they start a shift. Or someone with a 4 day or non-standard workweek (ie some jobs are Thurs- Sat or Sun-Weds 10-12 hrs, etc) might have Tuesday as a regular. I’ve worked 60 hours a week most of the past 6-7 years, not counting various businesses and side gigs, and I’ve never once been in a workplace at 1pm on a Tuesday. When I worked in restaurants or retail I either worked dinner/nights (shift starts around 3pm) or days (shift ends around 1).
As far as people not working - I observe more larger households where grown children and/or parents and their extended families/spouses/GF/BF live and fewer people working. I’ve been in a situation where I and my FIL basically supported 5-6 other adults and children, with my FIL actually working 3 jobs, my SIL medically retired, my niece doing black market activity, my grown stepson living off his mom and GF, and my wife homeschooling my daughter for socially/medically necessary reasons. We had neighbors who must’ve had 10 or 12 family members and I think the Dad was supporting all of them until he reached a breaking point and moved out. And I don’t mean 10 kids, I mean all the kids are grown and have partners and grandkids there. Then you will have some households where multiple members work part-time or whatever.
Well, according to the memo that went out at work, the US head of our company just suddenly “retired”. Not sure if it was by choice.
I’m curious what sort of investments you made that provided those sort of returns. I feel like the trick is to develop multiple sources of income so you aren’t relying on chipping away at a big lump sum nest egg.
I was just reading an article about some couple in San Francisco that retired at 35 or so after 13 years working as investment bankers. But they also had a child and seven years after retirement they are realizing that their passive income isn’t enough to maintain the style they’ve become accustomed to (which would require like $350,000 in San Francisco).
LOL yeah I’s have moved out (or most likely tossed everyone else out on their ass) a long time ago.
My wife’s cousin works, so I don’t know if it counts for this thread, but barely. He has one child from his first marriage. He’s currently in the middle of a messy divorce from his second wife (who is insane) because he cheated on her with a barmaid where he works. He works in a bar because he’s too lazy or inept to get his so-called insurance / financial advisor business off the ground or work a professional job apparently. And his elderly parents have supported these two idiots with paying for their house and other financial stuff that they are all mixed up in this divorce as well.
I think this is a significant factor in the “why aren’t people working?” question. Yes, supporting yourself is crazy expensive and most jobs are awful, but when an individual adult says “I’m not doing that shit” it’s usually because there’s someone who “loves them” taking up the slack.
They are a weird couple. He was apparently a halfway decent high school basketball star in Shortwhitemanburg, PA and treated like a big deal up through graduating from whatever mediocre college he went to.
She grew up with a family of white trash so suffers from what I call “poor girl syndrome” which is this weird effect I’ve observed with ambitious women who grow up in dysfunctional economically struggling families. They become very hard working and get very focused on achievement, but there’s a lot of resentment and anger, which is understandable. They don’t have family to really fall back on for support since they are at best useless and indifferent to her success or at worst leeches who want to glom off it. They often have few female friends because women in their aspired peer group will often look down on them as being of “lower class”. They often develop deep resentment because it’s constantly them against the world and they can’t rely on anyone else. Anyhow, it’s a working theory I’ve been mulling over.
Our neighbors (he’s a doctor and she’s a pharma sales rep) are also having trouble with their kids figuring out their first “right out of college” job. They’re good kids, but it’s kind of like stop cherry picking your perfect job and just “do something”.
I would say, even a “shit” job, if you have a college degree and are halfway smart and ambitious, there may be opportunities to turn it into something over time. Look for management positions. Learn about the business and find opportunities to leverage your skills.
I was reading a story about some guy who spent his entire career working at McDonalds. He started off working there in the 70s or whenever and liked it so much he ended up running a whole region of restaurants. He briefly considered following after his dad in a lucrative Wall Street job, but his dad’s advice was “I don’t really like my job all that much. If you like what you do and make money at it, keep it up.”
One of my brother’s best friends never graduated college and started working retail at a department store. He eventually got into operations, running the store, and 20 years later he does business consulting.
Point is your first job isn’t usually your last one.
Yeah, this is exactly what we told our kids, adding on top of that that they had no idea from the outside whether a job was even shit or not. Just get a job out of the door, put two or three years in, and then see what happens. Which they both did.
My grandparents were a fairly traditional middle class family, but my grandmother’s extreme enabling of her kids and grandkids really screwed a lot of things up. Both kids had children in their teens, and it was learned helplessness from that point on. At one point my grandfather was supporting eight people. My uncle ended up dying from a heroin overdose at age 30, leaving behind two kids aged ten and five, one of which my grandparents took in (he died at age 19. I’m not sure why.) I look at my cousins and they’re barely functional. They can’t make a single decision or solve a single problem without calling my grandmother and having a twenty minute conversation.
I was much older so I missed the gravy train I guess. I almost went to live with my grandparents when I left home in my teens, but my Aunt warned me, she said, “You will only grow weaker and more dependent if you move in with them. Come stay with me and I’ll make sure you get your shit sorted.” And I did, and she did. It helped that she was too poor to pay my bills for me.
Absolutely. My SIL worked retail after she graduated from college because that’s what she could get. She later got a job as a secretary for some exec at a multinational bank, which she was able to parlay into a job in HR. 20-25 years after graduating, she’s been head of HR for a succession of biotech startups. If she’d been “too good” for retail, she’d still be living in the basement.
We used to - a generation or more ago - have a vibrant volunteer community that would both help out at schools making teachers jobs easier and help out at non-profits. They were mostly women, often with kids old enough to no longer need full time care at home. Women could do these no-pay jobs, and they came with a low level of commitment as well. That meant the jobs of non-profit employees and teachers were a lot easier - when the classroom mom for the day read the story and cut out all the leaves for the art project - you had time in your day. When a volunteer showed up at the non-profit to address mail and answer phones, you had more time and money.
And then, well, turns out you should get paid for your work. And women started realizing that. And society hasn’t yet adapted to “there isn’t a classroom mom to assist the teacher every day, and someone needs to do that work” and “there isn’t a volunteer who answers phones and stuffs envelopes, so those calls go directly to staff and don’t get screened and we need to pay a mailing service for our fundraising mailings.”
The other thing that happened with non-profits in particular is the death of the “trust fund non-profit” worker. Forty years ago I worked for the American Lung Association, and most of the staff could afford starvation wages, because that wasn’t their only source of income. This was them “giving back” while they lived off a trust fund Grandpa’s investments in railroads or steel had provided. The Lung Association knew that, and gave them fairly low stress and highly flexible jobs in exchange - but they had the other volunteers to fill in. The professional non-profit world was filled with young adults with trust funds - particularly in the arts and museums. We haven’t adapted to that either.
I’d also like to point out that even when you want to get a job, its a disheartening process. A young friend of mine, with five years of experience and a college degree, found the job she had untenable due to actions of management (who wanted them to work through a fire in the building - “it wasn’t on our floor, you shouldn’t have evacuated!”) It took her six months and she said “about three hundred applications.” For most of the applications she was simply ghosted. Another job was four interviews - and then she was ghosted. For all of the “no one wants to work” when you are looking for a job it really feels like “no one wants to hire.”
We have two young women we recently hired in our department, and both of them said getting hired was difficult. Both filled out hundreds of applications and interviewed for multiple jobs at a variety of employers but had to take temp work in the meantime. Ghosting is common. My guess is the software HR departments use to weed out applicants tosses many qualified candidates. One interviewed multiple times for a position at a company but was told they wanted “more experience” for an entry-level job.
Their loss–they are both intelligent, hardworking young people and we’re lucky to have them.