Basically if you buy the market you’re buying something of fixed intrinsic worth.

It then pays dividends, and 3% is quite realistic for a decent sized portfolio.

The problem I see with this logic isn’t the practical matter put to bed by the first sentence, it is the assumption that we should live our lives for the “greater good”. The problem with that philosophy is you are essentially enslaving me for whatever you or “society” deems to be the desirable product of my output/tax revenue. There are things on the federal ledger that almost anyone would disagree with (some more than others), so paying less towards that bill is a worthy goal.

There is absolutely, positively nothing wrong with enlightened self interest. In fact, it may be preferable to your system of servitude. As Jacob astutely points out, he pollutes less and wastes less than probably 99% of the population. As a blogger, he’s helped many achieve various levels of financial/philosophical thought. And he did all of this through enlightened self interest rather than some harebrained idea that he owes his live to his fellow people. This is the very essence of why free markets work – people will be compensated for providing something that people want.

I know Jacob didn’t go down this road because he tries to avoid being normative, but I’ve seen his reading list so I know he’s at least thought of these retorts.

You also got to figure in some return on investment which pushes you along.

Not sure I understand the math on this. If he saved 75% of his income, that means he lived on the remaining 25%. In other words, he saved three times more than he spent (75 divided 25). Doesn’t that mean after 5 years of working, he should have saved enough for 15 years (5 times 3)? Where does the 25 come from?

Also what you might think is but a footnote in history is still alive and well today. Sexism might not be as obvious as not being allowed to vote anymore but it’s still here. We still have many cultural notions of what women ‘should’ do (and men too, sexism can cut both ways). Even in your dismissal you start to probe at cultural bias. If we see wages as how much society values a job, then why do we value ‘women’s work’ so low? Surely educating children or being a nurse is more important than shuffling around some papers, yet if salaries are a thing to go by, then we certainly place less value on work that is traditionally associated with women.

So one one hand I’m glad you believe that sexism is gone, because certainly that means you treat or at least make a good attempt to treat people fairly (not being facetious here). But, I think it’s still around, but much less obvious, it’s less one big action and more many small ones. This makes it much harder for people to accept because the truth is more in statistics, and minds tend to not operate on that level. We may no longer shun unmarried women, but promiscuity is still looked down one (whereas it is encouraged or even expected for men). While we might have legalized divorce, and made marital rape illegal, even so there’s still the 1 in 4 statistic for women being sexually assaulted.

Though even without calling someone sexist, I can understand how just the idea that sexis, still exists might be threatening. After all if sexism is putting women down more than men, that means that someone who I might think my equal would actually be better than me. If it’s working in my favor, that means I didn’t really get where I am just through my own ability, but through an institution I object to. Like two runners, where one’s fighting against a headwind, while the other has a tailwind, their race times may be equal but the effort each put in can be quite different.

(In any case, it is completely irrelevant to early retirement and to this book review.)

Consider that there are now more females going to college today than males. Is this a problem? Not to me. Do I think it’s a problem for young males? No. Even though this will likely mean that females on average will have a higher income than males in the future. Whatever. It’s true that all women on average get paid less than all men on average. However, women also tend to go into fields which pay less on average than men. My answer. If this is a problem to you, don’t! I picked science when I could have picked nursing which pays more, but I’m not complaining that there’s some kind of science/nursing discrimination. Nurses are not paid more than scientists, who are mostly male, because they are mostly female. They are paid more because they are nurses. If I wanted more pay, I could have just become a nurse. Nobody would have said, sorry, you’re a guy, do not enter.

Women tend to take time off for babies while men don’t which means they don’t have the same experience/continuous career track. If a couple decides to have the dad stay at home instead of the mom, the dad will be earning less when he goes back. This is not a gender issue. This is a couple issue and most couples choose the mom. If we had a kid, the one to stay at home would be me. And if I go back to working having not worked for 2 years now, I’ll earn less than compared to if I had kept working. Thus I’ll drag the male income average down. This will look good for the income data in terms of equalization but my retirement really has nothing to do gender issues. Women who “behave like men” e.g. make the same choices as men in terms of career track and vocation make the same thus demonstrating that the difference is due to choices, not gender.

I guess this goes back to the main issue. since “businessman” etymologically means “human being who does business”, then if someone falsely reads businessman as “man who is doing business” and thus feels discriminated against, then that’s their problem. It’s a psychological problem. An individually perceived problem. It is seeing something that is not there. They may have to convince others like themselves who really do believe that businessman means “men only” but they do not have to convince me. I’m not stuck in history and I don’t see it as my job to help out explaining that men and women have equal opportunity to those who still don’t see it.

I’m now saving 50% or more of my net income, monthly. Hopefully I’ll be at 70% within a year. I just want to say that what Jacob is doing is definitely “extreme”, but it is robust and easily replicable. I’m replicating it myself, except on less income. I’m anxious to see how it turns out for me.

You can follow my journey on my blog or at ERE’s journal section under DividendGuy. I hope that Jacob inspires more readers to stop saving to spend and earning to buy.

Cheers!

So we assume (implicitly through language) that the ‘default’ sex is male. So there’s this whole concept of privelege and yada yada, I won’t bore you with the details because you’ve seemed to already dismissed that whole debacle. But the gist of my argument is: Just because it’s the way it is, doesn’t make it right (argument from tradition fallacy)

Personally I think there are better books that cover the subject better and are much better organized. I like YMYL, I also liked your book J.D. and I like Suzie Orman as well.

Their books are much better organized, there’s more information, sources, etc. I like a list of sources because it means there’s proof for what a writer claims and they’re not making things up.

I’m happy for the writer but honestly, I like other personal finance writers better.

http://old.theshtick.org/language/woman.html

To wit,

the word woman derives from wifman; wif means what we now understand as woman, that is, a female. The equivalent for a male was wap resulting in wapman. “Man” as it enter many words such as businessman, sportsman, salary man, working man, Renaissance man, means “human being”. Hence wifman means “female human being” and wapman means “male human being”. The wap has subsequently been lost and so wapmen are now just called men. This DOES NOT mean that the -man ending in all these other words now only refers to wapmen. They still refer to “human beings”, thus a businessman is “human being who does business”.

There is consequentially no need to insert gender specific qualifiers in words ending in -man unless there’s a specific interest in calling attention to gender issues by redefining perfectly gender neutral words. Also if you do a google search (compare hits for sportsman, sportswoman, and sportsperson), you can see that while it happens, it’s not common practice.

Okay?

Most science today is incremental with small improvements of existing things. The grant system ensures this since it is extremely hard to get proposals for original research funded. Funding is directed towards projects with a high probability of success which typically means projects that has already been done in some variation of the proposal.

One problem with “progress” is that we have no idea how far we are from an accurate assessment. For instance, Newtonian physics works well for practically all purposes. Quantum mechanics can be said to be more accurate but it’s a paradigm shift from Newtonian physics. Quantum field thoery is another discontinuous jump and string theory yet another one. The only progress is in the precision essentially because modern science is based on a form of pragmatic instrumentalism—we mainly care about what we can measure; if we can’t build an instrument that can measure something then for all practical purposes, it doesn’t scientifically exist.

What?! I’ve been a theoretical branch of science my whole life, and I’ve never heard this.

If you believe in scientific progress, then fields have only finite potential for these big paradigm shifts–if shifts of the same magnitude kept happening, it would probably mean we weren’t getting anywhere.

Professional norms aside, it’s completely messed up to use the masculine form as a default. Here, “person” would have been ridiculously easy. When the choice is between “he” and “she,” I usually alternate.

In any case, whether I say “he” or “she” is completely and utterly immaterial to the message in the book/blog. Feel free to substitute she for he and her for him and -person or -woman for -man. Maybe I’ll do it myself in the next edition. It doesn’t make one bit of difference to the overall point I’m trying to make.

One of the reasons so many pf bloggers suggest dollar cost averaging into index funds is because it’s an excellent CYA suggestion. My investment advice is “if you have to ask other people for what you should be investing in, you shouldn’t be investing”

On a more general note, I really prefer to focus on the principles and gloss over the details. This keeps the fraction of people who thinks they need to do an exact copy of my current life to a manageable minimum This is also why I really like the fact that there are more than 20 people journaling their journey towards extreme early retirement on the forums. From this it is obvious that there are many different ways to reach the destination.

I suspect it’s a generational thing. My generation (late X/early Y) has not had to deal with gender issues (although of course some of my generation are quite interested in them), so to me it is _implicit_ that whenever someone uses the pronoun he, it also applies equally well to women and vice versa. The fact that some want it written out explicitly suggests to me that sexist issues are still on their mind even as it’s completely gone from mine. And I do in a sense find that slightly offensive (I’m not easy to offend). I also understand where it’s coming from. If you go back and read some frugal books from the 60s or 70s, they will sometime say things like “this is a good tip for poor people and blacks” or “this works equally well for people of all colors”. If you used such language today you’d be labeled a racist. It would be absolutely offensive to everybody because it _is_ a racist way of thinking. I feel the same way when people insist on using terms like “he or she” or changing the word ending -man to -person. They are genderists or sexists (or simply expediently trying to please those who are) and that is not good!

So when you insist on me using “he or she”/”person” it’s a bit like insisting on me using “people of all colors” instead of just “people”. It’s offensive and archaic.

Now, I suspect some will say that gender issues is still a problem and in some parts of the world and for some people it is. However, I say the problem is in the way you think and for those specific countries or people. Not in the words we use today. Thus if I say “businessman” instead of “businessperson” and someone still thinks that businessman means that business is exclusive to men, then that indicates an outdated understanding of the word businessman and an outdated understanding of business, which should be revised. It is the 2010s now… not the 1950s and 60s.

Fun fact: It may interest you to know that the majority of my readers (about 60%) are women.