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Anne Miller wrote:Last night when I reheated a pork chop that had beeen cooked out on the grill, I was looking for the reheated temperature which was suggested between 140 and 165'F.
I read to add 2 tablespoons of water so the meat would stay moist.
I also saw a YouTube that suggests moistening the top of day old biscuits to make them as good as the day they were baked.
Early Retirement Extreme (“ERE”) by Jacob Lund Fisker might have been called “How To Be Extremely Cheap”, as it is a rather in-depth exploration of the ways and virtues of hardcore cheapness. I listened to the audiobook, which makes it harder to recall exact passages, but know that I veritably inhaled it, completing it during every spare moment I had over a few days.
After setting the stage with what I consider a compelling and effective takedown of the mainstream American way of life during which I kept finding myself nodding and mumbling “oh yeah, he gets it”, the book lays out a strategy for how to exit the rat race. It encourages readers to save most of their income by drastically reducing their expenses, with the goal of soon reaching financial independence and retiring early.
(Besides reducing expenses, the strategy also includes a second component, maximizing investment income, but although this receives a decent amount of attention I found it to be less prominent. At least, Fisker is less prescriptive about how to go about it, and for good reason since investment advice is its own convoluted topic that is hard to detail in a way that isn’t outdated as soon as it’s written down.)
What I appreciate most about this book is the attitude it inspires the reader to cultivate, which in a sense boils down to opposition to consumer culture and wastefulness. ERE could also be represented by the same motto that financial-advice-personality Dave Ramsey uses: “if you will live like no one else, later you can live like no one else”, though Fisker goes deeper. While Ramsey tells you to cheap out now so you can safely ball out when you retire, Fisker calls for top-to-bottom reassessment of one’s material needs and desires, and the questioning of received wisdom about what success looks like.
Constitutionally I find myself very much aligned with this approach. During my first three decades, and especially during my teens and early 20s, I lived inexpensively out of necessity and got kind of a taste for it. Often I wish I could go back to biking everywhere, owning very little, and so on: generally being able and willing to “rough it”. If I could combine that lifestyle with my current ability to earn money I probably could indeed retire soon…(some other time, I will have to describe my fantasy of what that looks like.) Daydreams aside, I still feel I’d be able to rough it if I had to, and I find value in keeping that sense alive, in feeling fit and scrappy.
My criticism of the book is thus soft. I find little to take strong exception to, and numerous times Fisker includes sentiments along the lines of “this is an extreme example, you can do your own moderate version” which prevents my having outright disagreements with almost anything in the book.
I find my reactions to most of the ideas Fisker puts forward in ERE fall into one of four categories:
1. Full agreement (“that’s what I’m already doing” or “that’s what I will do”)
2. Moderate agreement (“I basically agree but something less extreme would suit me better”)
3. Personal misalignment (“In another life maybe; Fisker doesn’t account for my particular situation”)
4. Nitpick (“No Jacob, that’s not how that works”)
If I were to sort my reactions to each concept in the book, most would belong in categories 1 and 2, most of the rest in category 3, and only a small handful in category 4 (for example, he proposes eating roadkill to save money on meat, but this is not legal in most jurisdictions).
Category 3 contained my most emotional reactions of course, since these brought into relief the differences between A) what my future might have been had I discovered this book at, say, the very beginning of adulthood, and B) what my future is likely to be, given the path my adulthood has taken so far.
In fact, I think ERE is probably most useful for people who haven’t already started down any particular path and are trying to figure out what to do. By contrast, I came upon it 42 years into my life, 21 years into my relationship with my wife, 13 years into being a parent, 7 years into my third mortgage, 2 years into my third career, and so on.
To be clear, I feel that this book is fundamentally harmonious with my spirit. Many of the things it recommends I already have done or am doing. Most of the way it looks at the world is already the way I look at the world. But a few things here and there just don’t fit me (which I bet Fisker would say is just fine) and I want to try and describe some of them below.
The first most basic one is that I don’t feel bad about the prospect of working into my mid- or late-60s (though I think it’s understandable that many people do; I am very lucky to have consistently found deep satisfaction in how I make my money). I expect that as my electrical trades career advances my day-to-day tasks will become more mental and less physical, though I am maintaining my body in a way that I also expect (hope!) to be able to still do most of the physical aspects of the job, most of which I enjoy anyway. As for the mental aspects, I expect I will either be given new problems to solve that are challenging and fun based on my increased skills and knowledge, or, if I find a cushy job as an industrial electrician in a factory, then I may find myself with paid downtime in which to pursue such problems on my own. Maybe both.
For me, tradeswork is not drudgery, including while working for a boss (my current boss, anyway), and I wonder what Fisker would say if he knew how much I love being an electrician and how much it means to me. (Actually I do know: the book contains a sentence like “If you like your job, keep it!”)
That said, I still am inclined to decrease my expenses over time. One large source of them should resolve on its own, as my kids matriculate out from under my roof. As this happens, simply by following my existing instincts of frugality and self-sufficiency I think there is a good chance I may end up with the option to retire early anyway.
The question is whether I can prevent my expenses from going substantially upward first, or lower them as much as I’d like to in the short term. This is where I find myself relating to two “what about” questions, specifically “what about marriage” and “what about kids”, that Fisker addresses toward the end of the book. Unfortunately, he addresses them only very briefly, and in my opinion rather inadequately—especially the latter one.
In the decade and a half since ERE was published a whole online community of ERE enthusiasts has grown up in which Fisker is or was an active participant, so it’s likely he has responded to what I’m about to say numerous times already, but I haven’t dived into that material. I have only read the book and that is what I’m writing about now.
Fisker has no children (or at least didn’t when he wrote ERE) and it shows, because he answers “what about kids” in a way that assumes a blank slate and a much simpler, parent-dominated paradigm of how kids are raised and acculturated. He doesn’t seem to take into account things like peer pressure, the unpredictability of kids, their being showered in unnecessary Stuff by in-laws, their natural eagerness to fit into the broader society around them, or the possibility that neither parent is interested in being the kids’ full-time daycare worker and schoolteacher.
On that last point, I must reflect that much of the literature I've come across on the topic of self-sufficiency and financial independence posits homeschooling as a free or cost-saving alternative to standard education, promising the ability to more fully indoctrinate one’s kids into the culture of thrift and self-reliance while avoiding expenses like back-to-school shopping lists, school fees, school commutes, and so on. I am struck by how these authors simply assume that mothers would be willing and/or able to take on the teacher role, and how readily they downplay the fulfillment, not to mention the income, that other kinds of jobs may provide to women. I don’t relate closely to feminism, but that kind of assumption gets my hackles up.
Fisker’s advice would probably work great if both parents start out 100% on the same page of “we want our household to be a very insular pod that homeschools and goes all-in on frugal self-sufficient living” and then bring kids into that environment. He offers the advice of quietly leading by example, but aside from that, as far as particulars go, I found very little of use for those he is reaching in medias res.
I do think quietly leading by example, at least in a few areas where one can, is probably the best advice one could hope for when it comes to attempting something like the strategy he prescribes while in the midst of a full family life that has otherwise been (relatively) conventional in terms of consumer choices and personal finance.
My options are thus more limited than he imagines. For example, he proposes moving close to a grocery store to eliminate having to drive to one, or even to eliminate the need for a fridge at home (though he does advocate multiple times for chest freezers). There’s no way to quietly lead by example in this regard; either I must ignore that piece of advice or else force my family to switch to a raw food diet or all pack up our things and move to a new house (ignoring the opportunity cost of such an ordeal, of course).
As far as what I could actually do to further reduce my expenses right now, without imposing on others it’s hard to think of much more that I’m not already doing. (If you want particulars, ask me in the comments.) Probably there are some things but they’d require tumultuous rearrangement of other parts of my life. As I said, retiring early is not a foremost ambition of mine anyway, so I’m content to do little things like hang my washed clothes up to dry, eat out less, and walk more, to the extent it’s feasible. Use what I’ve got instead of buying more stuff, etc. Not very extreme, but it’s where I’m at.
Fisker includes some autobiographical details in ERE, but he does not indicate whether he ever had the experience of being poor—as in, not having enough money for most wants and at least some needs despite trying his best to find work—either as a child or as an adult.
I did, and those experiences contributed to my knowledge of how to live on less. But the episode that stands out most in this regard is not the hunger-laden childhood during which my brothers and I were raised by a single mom, or the late adolescence where I struggled after I moved out on my own at age 18, or during my early adulthood as a broke and under-skilled newlywed constantly unsure how I was going to pay my rent.
It’s the year at the very end of my 30s when I was laid off from a six-figure job as a human factors researcher and subsequently changed careers, starting out at the bottom rung as an electrical apprentice, my income cut roughly in third. During that year, my wife and I were forced to go through and rethink how we budgeted our household, what were actually needs vs. wants, and really the way we arranged our daily lives.
At that time we already had our house, two cars, three kids, etc.—each representing considerable financial obligations we hadn’t been saddled with when we were younger, or when the “credits” column in our checking account had been much more robust. Yet this experience was far from the most stressful financial hardship of my life, and that is a testament to a piece of wisdom the ERE philosophy reveals only in negative space, but which I feel I discovered positively on its own:
Try to find little moments of enjoyment and fulfillment every day, even if you are not retired, even if you are not trying to retire early. Fisker derides soul-sucking corporate work, mind-numbing and life-shortening sedentary activity, the unnecessary spending of money, the waste of consumer goods, and the mindset and culture that leads to these things, and rightly so. But suffering is to some degree a choice, and desire (in the Buddhist sense of being dissatisfied) is to some degree a thing we can control.
Given healthy brain chemistry, without too much effort you can develop a love and fascination with all things, and the ability to feel joy or at least peace in just about any moment. If you aren’t able to go to extremes, and even if you are, this is a critical step that will take you far along the road to happiness, no matter how you live, how you spend your money, how hard you work for it, or how much you depend on it. Enjoy your time, whether you are on someone else’s or your own. And what is the point of retirement otherwise?
Joao Winckler wrote:Not sure roast would make much difference once it's in the pile honestly. By the time it breaks down it's just nitrogen anyway. The free-from-a-cafe argument is hard to beat.
John C Daley wrote:Ned, remember the difference between good debt and bad debt, if you wait until you save the money, the land will get away from you.