Sitting on the Straight Dope all day on the other hand…
That’s different!
Bolding mine. That seems like something of an oxymoron. If you’re retiring in your 30s you didn’t spend half your life scrimping.
I don’t know about that - it seems to me if you are saving enough money from a job in your 20s and 30s to retire by 40 , you will probably be scrimping your whole life. When I read stories of people who have done this either they aren’t really retired ( they are working , although at a different sort of job) or they are living on $25K a year for 2 or more people which still involve scrimping.
Or making money blogging about how they retired early.
I’ve always been skeptical that this is realistic for most people.
Sure, but I was trying to make the argument that people in general need to be productive in order to be happy, but I didn’t want to limit the definition of productivity to paid labor.
I am the kind of person that is happier the more busy I am. My default state is standing still, it takes a lot of effort for me to get rolling, but once I’m moving, I can get a lot done. The idea of retirement scares me a bit because it feels like I would start every day standing still.
I dunno. My brother retired at 41. He did this by earning 100k to 250k per year from 1996 to 2013 (after serving four years in the military) and saving 40% to 60% of his earnings. He owned a house that was quite nice in a nice suburb of Washington DC. He had a car and a motorcycle, he took vacations that were decent but not lavish. He was only “scrimping” from the POV that he could have been spending at 95th percentile as opposed to 75% percentile most of that time.
He did end up with two rental properties as part of his portfolio, which takes some effort to manage.
He spends most of his time traveling internationally spending many months at a time in medium income countries (Chile, Indonesia, Turkey, Colombia). The rest of the time he’s working on his social/political/charitable projects. Most of which I don’t approve of.
He’s “unretired” a couple of times for 6-12 months to take on a consulting gig. These are worth hundreds of thousands each, but he insists he doesn’t need the money.
He has been able to spend four months with my parents when they had health issues, which was a godsend.
Every time he’s going to be away from home for an extended period, he turns it into an air bnb, with professional management. It doesn’t yield much as a result.
That’s kind of what I meant by “didn’t really retire.” I don’t know how much work your brother puts into managing these properties but usually when you read the stories of people who “retired” early they really haven’t. They may have left the high paying job where they only spent 30-40% of their income for 20 years. But they didn’t invest the other 60-70% in stocks/bonds/bank accounts and live off the earnings without scrimping for the rest of their life. They started a business - maybe they bought rental properties and spend time managing them or they started a blog or write books or give seminars and make money from those activities. That’s not being retired any more than working in a hardware store that you own is being retired.
The best solution I’ve found for getting moving is to set up a routine in the morning. We read the Times in our pjs, and when we get dressed we start to do things. Also, setting deadlines for yourself helps, and even getting involved in something with deadlines, like volunteering, gets you moving.
I agree about being productive. The very worst times I ever spent at work were the first weeks of a job, where I didn’t have a log in and so couldn’t do anything. (This was pre-laptop and pre-smartphone.) I got paid, but it was very frustrating.
I’ve heard that a lot of small businesses in small towns (in the US) have trouble finding and keeping employees - often complaining that young folks just don’t have the work ethic for a full time job.
I haven’t seen much discussion in this thread about how it is that these young folks can feed, clothe and house themselves. I get the impression that “failure to launch” is more widespread than in the past, and I know quite a few parents who support under-motivated adult children.
I listened to an interview with a young woman in a small midwestern town who said she was exceptional among her peers for being fully employed and that most of her cohorts spent their days playing video games and doing drugs.
I get that entry level jobs are crap, but is part of the problem that parents have a hard time letting their children endure them?
Everyone everywhere has always complained about kids today and their lousy hair/music/sloth/intoxicants/work ethic.
This thread isn’t about that. This thread is about establishing whether or not these “young folks who don’t have a work ethic” actually exist through personal anecdotes only. This thread is for trying to come up with an answer to “where have all the workers gone?”
4-house neighbor assessment:
- Two adults: both retired professionals, one doing art, one looking for volunteer work.
- Two adults, one child: both working, one professional, the other not and part-time doing kid-care.
- Retired professional, grandparenting.
- Three adults, one working who speaks English, one older retired? parent, one who doesn’t appear to be working but for all I know is running an online empire in Hindi.
So we still haven’t hit upon the cache of lazy young people who refuse to work. “These days”.
As to small towns specifically they have a brain drain and a motivation drain.
If 10 kids graduate from Bumfuque County High School, the 4 with any brains or gumption leave immediately for the military, college, or a bigger city in pursuit of a better job & better life. Even if that “big” city is just the county seat or the seat of an adjacent bigger county.
The other 6 aren’t worth much.
As to my anecdotes, wife & I are retired comfortably at the standard age. All the adults I know of are retired due to age or wealth, or are bustin’ ass to get there.
One fried has 3 kids aged 20, 22, 24. They’re all out of the house, and in or back out of college.
Two will be failures, one will kick ass. The manner of failure is TBD, but it’s obvious. Inability to hold a job, convinced the world owes then 6 figs for showing up & being cute, etc.
I suggest we look in their parents’ basements.
Some of this can be explained through changing incentives.
When I was a kid, the average household had 2-5 children. And houses were much smaller. So there was no way 5 kids were going to stay home until they were 30. There was great pressure to move out as soon as you could. If someone was living at home at age 25 and not in school, it was considered strange. Almost unheard of. Not a single friend of mine was still living at home after age 23. If they didn’t go to college, they were out by 20.
People are also wealthier now and have more free time, which also reduces the incentive to kick the kids out.
Having fewer kids like we do now means it’s easier to tolerate having them around longer. Plus, a lot of young people today were helicopter-parented and never learned the independence skills they should have, making it scarier and harder to leave the neat. And parents have become more protective, and many are probably happy to keep their kids home.
People are having children later in life. That means by the time the kids are grown up the parents may be retired or close to retired, and don’t necessarily mind the kid sticking around to help. Peoole in the past tended to have their kids in their twenties, and be in their 40’s when their 5 kids become adults. Of course they want them to start their own lives and move out, and the culture expected it.
Always look to changing incentives when you see changing human behaviour.
The family across the street from us had 5 kids. Every one of them moved out shortly after they hit 18. They are still a close family, but they understood part of the deal was to be prepared to leave home as soon as you were able.
There was great pressure to move out as soon as you could. If someone was living at home at age 25 and not in school, it was considered strange. Almost unheard of. Not a single friend of mine was still living at home after age 23. If they didn’t go to college, they were out by 20.
A gentle amendment–I have female friends from religious families who weren’t allowed to leave the house except for marriage. One of my good friends moved herself out to an apartment after college and her father didn’t speak to her for years.
I dunno if you’re trying to be funny or obtuse, but that’s exactly why I started this thread. As I explained in the OP, I was in a store and the cashier declared “no one wants to work anymore” and then the people in line brought up the same question as you, wondering how people are living. Eventually ascribing it all to lazy young people.
I’m on the hunt for actual real stories of these layabout young people. I provided one, the 40yo I know who has some stock money and yes you can currently find him in a basement. I think a couple others had examples of their own where people they know who should be working but are being “lazy” and not doing so.
But for the most part, Dopers seem to be or to know people who aren’t working because they retired early or retired on time. How do they live? They can afford it, that’s why they retired.
Really I’m trying to move us past this “young people are lazy and don’t want to work” narrative that “small business owners” are pushing. I’m asking Dopers to give me examples of such people, if they exist. And so far, these mythical lazy young people don’t seem to exist in large numbers in Doperland.