
If You’re Not Getting Rich in Your 20s, You’re Doing It Wrong - randlet
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2015/09/29/if-youre-not-getting-rich-in-your-20s-youre-doing-it-wrong/
======
serge2k
> Because here’s the thing about your 20s. They are the time to work. The
> very, very best time in your life to work your ass off and create an
> exponential snowball of money, skills, and friendships. Your brain will
> never be more sponge-like and inexhaustible. You will never feel more
> motivated and less cynical than you do now. And you will never have another
> decade of pre-childraising freedom in your life.

Exactly, so waste it working yourself to the bone instead of actually living.

> There’s plenty of room at the edges for laughs over fine tequila and winks
> over surreptitious servings of weed.

When, you just advocated staying up until 2:30am or 6:00am working.

> All the hard workers already run their own company.

Arrogant dick.

> Luckily, this is a happy situation and something to celebrate rather than
> dread. Doing your ultimate work is the core of human satisfaction

If you want to be a workaholic or are defined by your job, sure.

------
kafkaesq
Nothing against working one's ass off, or earning money. But considering the
tuple of:

    
    
      (money,skills,love/sex/friendships,experience,awareness)
    

if you're placing money ahead of any of the other 4 -- or defining being
"rich" in strictly monetary terms, at _any_ age -- you're doing it very wrong,
indeed.

------
dragonwriter
> Your brain will never be more sponge-like and inexhaustible. You will never
> feel more motivated and less cynical than you do now. And you will never
> have another decade of pre-childraising freedom in your life.

Except, well, this is all either not true or overgeneralized.

1) Your brain was more sponge-like an inexhaustible in your teens than your
twenties, and more in the decade before that than in your teens.

2) I'm 42. I was more motivated and less cynical in my 30s than my 20s. I'm
more motivated and less cynical now than in my 30s.

3) I'm 42. My first child will (if all goes well) be born sometime around the
end of this year. I'm pretty sure that means I had "another decade of pre-
childraising freedom" after my 20s. (OTOH, lots of people don't have a decade
of pre-childraising freedom _in_ their 20s.)

------
Mz
If you are woman and want kids, biologically speaking, your twenties are the
best time to make that happen.

He talks about "These days, kids tend to happen in your thirties." That tends
to work fine if you are male. If you are female, it gets vastly more
complicated to put off kids until after age thirty. I have to wonder how old
his wife was when they started having kids. Most hetero relationships tend to
be older man, younger woman. Men can easily put off becoming a parent until
their thirties, in part by marrying a younger woman. That works less well if
you are female.

~~~
CmonDev
It's actually sadly even worse for women for another reason - they cannot date
"down" for natural psychological reasons and the pool of "marriageable" men is
shrinking due to less men getting education (which is perceived as "high-
status" regardless of income, unless the latter is unusually high):

[http://www.vice.com/read/youre-single-because-there-arent-
en...](http://www.vice.com/read/youre-single-because-there-arent-enough-
men-253)

~~~
Mz
Eh, I don't really have time at the moment to get into why I disagree that
women "can't" date down, but I saw that article and this was what I said:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10299641](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10299641)

Women do face actual challenges different from men in trying to figure out how
to balance work and personal life and so on, but ...it's complicated and ....I
have something else I really need to work on right now.

Ciao.

~~~
CmonDev
As you said in your post:

> Most women still want men who are their equal or superior in terms of career
> success and income, as the article makes clear.

~~~
Mz
Sure. But there is substantial difference between "most women want" and "woman
_cannot_...."

I don't disagree that most women _will not_ marry down. That doesn't mean they
_cannot_ marry down.

:-)

------
randlet
>> "Because here’s the thing about your 20s. They are the time to work. The
very, very best time in your life to work your ass off and create an
exponential snowball of money, skills, and friendships. Your brain will never
be more sponge-like and inexhaustible. You will never feel more motivated and
less cynical than you do now. And you will never have another decade of pre-
childraising freedom in your life."

Reminds me a lot of:

>> "Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole
working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty
years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four." [1]

[1][http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html](http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html)

------
snowwrestler
Mr. Money Mustache's blog tells the story of how to live a life free from
worry about earning money, by obsessively worrying about the money
implications of every decision in your life. So, this post is par for the
course.

The author of the referenced article makes the point that there is more to
being young than saving money. Mr. Money Mustache counters that if you don't
worry about saving money when you're young, you'll have less of it when you're
older. These two opinions are in violent agreement! It's almost a tautology.

------
jscott2
Lotta hate in here, but try not to focus on that. Remember that HN is an
unrepresentative group of the entire audience that article addresses. I'd
guess most HN readers are probably doing a-ok salary-wise in the frugality
world (but if you _must_ live in {SF,NYC} forever, then probably not).

Spending-wise? No idea. But I'd recommend trying not to be too put off on the
"work hard" advice, you probably already work hard and will get more out of
the "spend carefully" side of the savings equation.

Life isn't a code review. Even if you think something is 99% wrong, it might
still be 1% right. And if that 1% can get you retired a decade earlier, I'd
give it some serious thought and just ignore what you think is wrong.

