This might be duh for some people, but if you’re like me and considering a mortgage; at today’s rates in the US at around 5-6%, over 30yr mortgage you will pay about same in interest as you will for your house price.
Your $500k house will cost you around $1M total over thirty years.
I was surprised.
Actually that does remind me of a chart I saw about income/cost of living and at a certain point it means you can retire very quickly. The less money you need, the faster you can retire.
Pretty sure a lot of my savings comes down to not driving, cars cost a lot and that is a large part of why I didn’t learn to drive. I didn’t have £1000s to spend when I was 17 so I used my bike instead. I am in my 30s now and the only difference is that I finally bought a new bike a couple of years ago. I could afford to now if I desperately wanted to, but I just feel indifferent towards it and I am not spending thousands on something I feel indifferent to.
Might it have been this one?
Setting aside critiques of Mr Money Mustache, this is grounded in hard math and is the result of “having enough”. In the developed world, “having enough” is easier than ever, yet the culture insists on trying to achieve even more, having more money, more house, more children, etc. Whereas the general notions of evaluating what brings value or happiness (see Marie Kondo: “ask yourself if it sparks joy”) is more in like with “working to live, rather than living to work”.
There’s an equivalent maxim in vehicle engineering to that chart, something along the lines of “lightness begats lightness”, and refers to how shaving off weight from an automobile allows reducing the engine power or the brake size, which further allows weight reductions, etc. The eventual result is having only the essentials in places that matter (eg unsprung weight, rotational mass) in an optimized harmony. Personal finance can follow the same maxim.
Yeah that looks like it. The largest expenses I have is housing and tax which are like 5x everything else combined. Housing would be gone if the mortgage is paid off, though a lot of the tax remains as only income tax would be reduced by working less and the other taxes all remain the same.