Old 05-14-19, 08:51 AM
  #28  
base2 
I am potato.
 
base2's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jun 2015
Location: Pacific Northwest
Posts: 3,074

Bikes: Only precision built, custom high performance elitist machines of the highest caliber. 🍆

Mentioned: 28 Post(s)
Tagged: 0 Thread(s)
Quoted: 1765 Post(s)
Liked 1,579 Times in 911 Posts
I wonder how you came to save up so much money. Don't you have mortgages, bills and other expenses?

I don't tour, but I have been known to blow ridiculous amount of money on bicycles & related paraphanelia.

What @andrewclause said is spot on.
Ditch the subscription services. Pandora, Spotify, that MMORPG, that dinner box delivery service...etc. All of it.

Ditch the cable company that charges you 3 times for the same data connection (cable, internet, voice). You only need 1 data connection. Internet alone is pretty cheap.

Ditch the redundant land line telephone. If you still have copper wires. You can do like I did & literally cut them off your house & coil them up by the power pole. It might take a year or 2, but the phone company will come get them. It is YOUR house afterall. They have no right & you have no obligation to keep them attached.

Television is free with an antenna & has been so since the 1930-something Worlds Fair.

Ditch the gym membership.

Eliminate the car payment. That helps in a bunch of ways. 1 being the insurance cost of full coverage. Another being the interest. Another being on going monthly overhead. The best way to turn a sensible $12,000 car into an $18,000 car is getting it financed at 6.5% or that same car into a $40,000 obligation is to fold it into a home equity line at 5.5% for 20 years.

Pay mortgage principal in addition to regular monthly payments. A $240,000 home is easily $450,000 in obligation over 30 years. Paying principal payments in greater amount & earlier on really eff's with the interest portion of the payment scheme. How's that extra $200,000 dollars and decade & a half of being tied to "the man" avoided sound? It's the same compounding mathematics for credit cards.

Start thinking of things in terms of obligation & total cost.

Credit cards cut your purchasing power in half. I've found the best way to think about any purchase with a card is to mentally double the price. Would you still buy it? This has allowed me to put all the cards to rest.

I have a ridiculously gutted retirement, to make some investors & day traders happy with my employer. I've also placed no dollars in my employers Voluntary Investment Plan. The reasons are simple. I honestly do not believe my employer or the plans will exist when it comes time for me to retire. The other is the 2% "management fee" compounds & eats 2/3rd's of the potential gain. Puting money there amounts to just learning how to live with debt, obligation & makes for a ripe customer for other E-Z-Credit opportunist.

Also, it doesn't hurt to know that the rate of growth of my employers plan, over 20 years, even convienently discounting the fee's effect is half as strong as the saved obligation of getting the mortgage paid 20 years early. The end result is 8x the net spendable cash than otherwise so & zero of the obligation...all by living thin for just the next 4 years.

TBH: After all is accounted for the total amount I would end up with under my employers plan is really no different than that of a maxing out annual IRA contributions or buying a good IRA CD, so that's where my money goes. It's not fancy but it allows my other monies to go where it is most effective at freeing me of obligation.

Really, as a direct answer to your question: People manage to do things like have time & money to go on tour by making life long choices, looking at "the big picture" & having habits that avoid obligation.

Also, as a side note: I got tired of my debit card being skimmed at gas pumps, hotel congierges, etc...& being fraudulently used on the other side of the country for things like Uber/Lyft or Atm's. So when the bank offered to replace it, (again!) I opted to not. I am now 100% cash based in my personal economics. That choice alone saves about $30,000-$35,000 dollars per year of concenience spending that used to happen. Yeah, it means a weekly trip to the bank to talk to a human teller person. But if it saved you $35,000 a year, would you? Besides the teller at my credit union is a nice person, so it's a win.

I still live on $200 a week for coffee, burgers, movies, & beer, That's plenty to cover everything I need for recreational spending...Even in pricy Seattle.

Last edited by base2; 05-14-19 at 08:55 AM.
base2 is offline  
Likes For base2: