

Can Money Set You Free? - mahipal
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/740d3986-0c63-11df-a941-00144feabdc0.html

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brc
This shows the author, his father and grandfather had the wrong end of the
stick. His grandfather, wanting security, had traded his time and independance
for security, and got neither. His father, wanting to ensure he had both
security and longevity, got neither. The author, apparently seeing this as a
failed experiment, walked away from it.

What he failed to realise that neither his father or grandfather ever got
control over their situation. The continually worked for money by trading
their precious time for security. It's that which made them unhappy, not the
actual money.

The author, to me, is making the fundamental mistake of thinking that you have
to work 40 hours a week for 40 years to have 'money', so the choice is between
working like a dog or having nothing, not realising that their is another way.
Can money set you free? Of course it can, but not if you're trading your free
time for your money.

For most people, it is a choice between security of income and freedom to
spend your time as you want. The most secure people on the planet are
prisoners, but they don't have the freedom to do what they want. If you're
prepared to accept a less-secure income (by being risky, ie, startups) then
you're going to gain the benefits of freedom when/if it does work out.

Bottom line : if this guy's Dad had cashed out at a younger age and spent the
last 20 years of his life doing things on his own terms, he wouldn't have died
an unhappy man in a short retirement.

~~~
chc
Your comment reads to me like an extremely long variant of "Let them eat
cake."

You really need to explain how working for a little while and then "cashing
out" was a viable option for these men that they simply chose not to exercise.

~~~
kragen
I would agree with you if you were talking about coal miners or supermarket
checkers, but the one guy was a dentist and the other guy was a banker. Even
80 years ago, dentists and bankers made more than three times as much money
per year as regular people. If they couldn't retire after one-third the normal
career length, maybe the fault was not in their stars, but in themselves:
perhaps a failure of frugality?

~~~
Tichy
Or the people who make just one third are just even poorer. I have an income
in the top 10% of my country, yet my feeling is it is only sufficient to
scrape by in a moderately convenient way. Certainly not enough to retire
early. Like to buy a house or apartment, I would probably still have to take a
30 year credit.

~~~
kragen
Pretty much everybody has the feeling that their income is "only sufficient to
scrape by in a moderately convenient way". In the end, of course, they're all
wrong: no income is enough to keep you alive. What good does homeownership do
you once you're dead?

You're comment points out very effectively that this is an illusion. I'm sure
you're aware that the other 90% of the people in your country are also at
least scraping by, even though many of them have an income that is a fraction
of yours. Do you suppose they spend all their time missing the conveniences
you take for granted? Unless those conveniences are things like access to
surgery and adequate food for their children (do you live in Zimbabwe?)
probably not.

So consider whether the conveniences that account for the discrepancy between
their scraping along and your scraping along are really worth the
inconveniences required to buy them.

If you're like 90% of people, you never _will_ consider this seriously —
because if it wasn't crazy, everybody would be doing it, right? — until it's
time for you to retire.

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wcarss
While reading, I hit upon this sentence:

"Dad’s example made me feel that, if I wanted to write for a living, I had an
obligation to try and do it, and I’ve been writing full-time since 1996, when
my first novel did well enough to let me quit my day job as an editor at the
London Review of Books."

particularly "my first novel did well enough to let me quit my day job"

... so, the money he made set him free from his day job so he could do what he
was interested in. :/

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rubidium
I'm having trouble seeing what the author's definition of freedom is.
Financial "security" is one definition I hear people use, and he brings up.
But that can be gone in a moment or you can die and it doesn't matter, as his
father did.

Freedom from what? Freedom to do what? I think that has to be defined first.

The freest people I have met are those who don't worry about what they can't
control, work hard at what they can, and are content with the ups and downs of
life. Money seems, to me, to be uncorrelated-- at least above a minimum
threshold.

~~~
gaius
Money for me is _physical_ freedom, the most literal kind. I work, work, work,
but I can jump on a plane and fly anywhere on a whim, and I do. Averaging ~1
new foreign country/month so far this year :-)

~~~
dunstad
Have you seen this guy? <http://www.chrisguillebeau.com/> He shares your
interest in travel; you might find it interesting.

------
fleaflicker
nice quote buried in there:

 _...the profound truth of Seamus Heaney’s elegy to Robert Lowell: “The way we
are living/ timorous or bold,/ will have been our life.”_

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thefool
This quote was interesting to me, "That would be the end of the world for
serious writers, who are not performers and who can’t earn a living giving
concerts and selling T-shirts. Nobody knows how this is going to play out."

There isn't an audience for successful writers to be speakers?

~~~
cperciva
I know plenty of academics who are highly engaging in writing but utterly
useless at speaking -- even in private conversations, never mind public
speaking.

I feel sorry for their students, but I'm glad for the books and research they
produce.

~~~
dwwoelfel
Do you know of any who were able to improve their speaking? If so, do you know
how?

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Supermighty
>On the one hand, I have no boss, so I can’t be sacked – everything about
every single aspect of my day and my work is entirely up to me. From that
point of view, I’m about as free as it is possible for a person to be. On the
other hand, I have no job security or protection of any kind. If people don’t
want to read what I write, I have no income .

We always have "boss". It doesn't matter if it's my manager at my day job, or
my customers at the startup I'm working on. We all serve a master. Even the
hobo on the street looks for food when his stomach directs him to do so.

I don't think money itself is freedom, or that it could buy it. Though it does
buy nice things. Freedom is being able to pro-actively direct your life, move
your life. Freedom is being the boss, freedom is being the hobo. They are
equal in my book.

~~~
alexro
You can ignore a incompetent customer who doesn't know what he wants. Try this
with a similar boss.

~~~
Supermighty
But you can't ignore customers as a whole. It similar to having a boss, but
not exactly the same.

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10ren
I very often enjoy theatantic, but it has a script somewhere that locks up my
browser. I've been trying to track it down, but no luck yet as it downloads a
lot of stuff from all over the place.

Anybody found it already?

oblig: I've noticed that people who attain financial freedom often end up
continuing to work in that field (after a year or two of feeling useless). We
need a purpose more than we need "financial freedom". So you might as well do
what you love in the first place; that passion is the best way to be
excellent, which is not a bad way to be financially successful as an incident.
The challenge is having the courage to _live_. Money isn't courage.

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known
No.

Social mobility != Economic mobility

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility> and
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs>

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ww8520
Yes. Money can at least set you free financially.

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zeynel1
"So Dad was a banker but he couldn’t bear talking about money..."

I think bankers deal more with "debt" than "money." I don't know if this has
any relevance to the article and what the author is saying.

~~~
sliverstorm
I interpreted it in a different way; as an example, my father has zero
interest and perhaps even scorn for discussing virtually any topic he's done
for a living. Doing it for a living can ruin it for you.

