
I didn’t wait for a grown-up job to finance the life I wanted - e15ctr0n
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/12/10/dont-stress-about-your-debt-go-ahead-and-go-broke-in-your-20s/
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carno
This has to be the most millennial article ever written. Self centered and
full of bad advices.

~~~
lwhalen
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.

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amatxn
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.

~~~
DrScump
"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.)

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acconrad
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.

~~~
marssaxman
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.

