I hate headlines like this.
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They also mention not putting on the heating in winter and using jumpers and hot water bottles instead, during which they presumably continued performing well enough in finance and life coaching. I'm guessing their house is high enough quality that it retained some heat and didn't immediately get covered in damp and black mould. Meanwhile during the really cold winter we had a couple of years back I was really worried about how exhausted one of the cleaners at work was getting, who admitted he couldn't afford to heat his house and it was too cold to sleep properly.
@afewbugs
Lived with wood heat 2 winters in Vermont. 55°F in the mornings was ok. I worked outside year round, landlady worked at a Head Start feeding kids. We couldn’t afford fuel oil. I had a truck, chainsaw and a permit for dead trees in state forests. Summer Sundays were spent cutting wood. -
@aegir "Fortunately we were able to save on rent by staying in one of the outbuildings on Papa's estate. We economised on meals by eating the pony"
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I hate headlines like this. You read the article and discover she works in finance, he runs a life coaching business whatever that is, and they retired once their savings hit £1 million which didn't come from making their own sandwiches.
Meanwhile out in the real world most of us have been bringing packed lunches to work since the 2010s at least and are still one unexpected vet bill away from a couple of months of home haircuts.
@afewbugs It's a big steaming pile of bullshit. For the reasons you say. But also because a million at 40 will probably run out before you are 70 assuming two people drawing minimum wage and 2% inflation.
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@aegir "Fortunately we were able to save on rent by staying in one of the outbuildings on Papa's estate. We economised on meals by eating the pony"
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@mewsleah @therivercrow this is a big problem in sustainability circles too, there's a bit difference between how buying secondhand hand clothes, not holidaying abroad and riding a bike are seen if you could afford them but are doing it for the planet vs if you can't afford new clothes, holidays or a car
@afewbugs @mewsleah @therivercrow
Also due to Charity shops putting up prices, it's cheaper to buy new from temu etc.Our shop has staged a mini rebellion and we now have a wired crate where all clothes are a £1 before we send them off for recycling if they don't sell.
When I started volunteering Oxfam specified the shops were to support the local community as well as making money, their policy has changed for the worst.
*Edited to remove the glaring typos
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I hate headlines like this. You read the article and discover she works in finance, he runs a life coaching business whatever that is, and they retired once their savings hit £1 million which didn't come from making their own sandwiches.
Meanwhile out in the real world most of us have been bringing packed lunches to work since the 2010s at least and are still one unexpected vet bill away from a couple of months of home haircuts.
@afewbugs
And they're so smug about it too. -
But I think the thing I really hate about these type of headlines is how they feed into victims blaming. People aren't poor because they don't have enough money for a decent life and it's really hard to claw your way over life's obstacles without money rather than having them knock you back further. They're poor because they spend too much money on sandwiches instead of making their own, the lazy idiots
@afewbugs What it doesn’t reflect is that what they describe as saving money to retire early is actually how most people live day to day, and are unable to save a single penny.
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@afewbugs
Lived with wood heat 2 winters in Vermont. 55°F in the mornings was ok. I worked outside year round, landlady worked at a Head Start feeding kids. We couldn’t afford fuel oil. I had a truck, chainsaw and a permit for dead trees in state forests. Summer Sundays were spent cutting wood.@stevewfolds @afewbugs hey, I’m sure you worked hard, but the couple in the article had to wear *jumpers* in the winter, real sacrifice there. (/s just in case you didn’t realise)
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@catch56 oh so the BBC article was basically free marketing for them
Pair of pillocks
@afewbugs forgot to mention - this article showed up in my (I think) Google news feed too. At least I'd definitely seen it before your toot. So the BBC may have explicitly pushed the button to put it in everyone's feeds.
Not that I would rage click and then Google them and then find a Reddit thread where someone had looked through their website or anything like that.
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@afewbugs What it doesn’t reflect is that what they describe as saving money to retire early is actually how most people live day to day, and are unable to save a single penny.
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@afewbugs
And they're so smug about it too.@tompearce49 @afewbugs I mean, do well for yourself and all but don’t tell us it was done on packed lunches like the rest of us are idiots and for the love of everything don’t look so darned *self satisfied*.
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@afewbugs @mewsleah @therivercrow
Also due to Charity shops putting up prices, it's cheaper to buy new from temu etc.Our shop has staged a mini rebellion and we now have a wired crate where all clothes are a £1 before we send them off for recycling if they don't sell.
When I started volunteering Oxfam specified the shops were to support the local community as well as making money, their policy has changed for the worst.
*Edited to remove the glaring typos
@debbie @afewbugs @mewsleah @therivercrow Oxfam has been the most expensive charity shop by miles for a long time. Also - in the branches local to me, anyway - about 50% of the floor space is Fairtrade chocolate/coffee or other branded goods, rather than second hand items.
I've been buying all my clothes from charity shops (give or take a few expensive, good quality items I bought for the sake of longevity when I had a bit of money). But I don't care what people think about it.
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I hate headlines like this. You read the article and discover she works in finance, he runs a life coaching business whatever that is, and they retired once their savings hit £1 million which didn't come from making their own sandwiches.
Meanwhile out in the real world most of us have been bringing packed lunches to work since the 2010s at least and are still one unexpected vet bill away from a couple of months of home haircuts.
@afewbugs
I had packed lunches for about 40 years and I didn't get to be a millionaire!
Perhaps it was all the smashed avocado sandwiches. -
@afewbugs It's a big steaming pile of bullshit. For the reasons you say. But also because a million at 40 will probably run out before you are 70 assuming two people drawing minimum wage and 2% inflation.
@keefeglise @afewbugs The classic calculation people tend to use for this comes from a study of market performance in the 1970s, which concluded that you could realistically expect 4% returns on average; if you pull less than that out of the pot, you can expect to still have cash left in 30 years.
Doesn't account for the coming ten-year economic depression, of course.
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@afewbugs "life coaching" — a totally unregulated area which is mainly a scam feeding off of vulnerably stressed out and anxious people... IDK, maybe some folks get something out of it. Mostly it's just confidence scam trickery IMO.
Stupid headline, stupid "news", generally ridiculous all round.
Paying for Tesco value meals is why other millenials don't own homes. Obviously. (And avodados, lattes, etc of course.)
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@afewbugs "life coaching" — a totally unregulated area which is mainly a scam feeding off of vulnerably stressed out and anxious people... IDK, maybe some folks get something out of it. Mostly it's just confidence scam trickery IMO.
Stupid headline, stupid "news", generally ridiculous all round.
Paying for Tesco value meals is why other millenials don't own homes. Obviously. (And avodados, lattes, etc of course.)
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@thebaywindowgirl yes in one of the branches of this thread someone dug a bit deeper and discovered the guy hasn't actually retired from his financial coaching business, this whole thing is just advertising for it
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To angrily overthink this further, it really does illustrate how people in the UK (and probably the wider Western World) are so completely isolated from one another by income bracket we don't really understand each other's lives. All of this couple's friends are presumably in finance or life coaching so to them making lunch instead of buying it sounds so outrageous they presumably approached the BBC and got themselves interviewed about it because they think they've done something so unusual. When really the unusual thing is that it worked.
We were just talking about this kind of thing a few minutes ago. My wife keeps detailed financial records and she looked at how much we spend per year on clothes. It turns out to be $263 per year for our family of three, or about $88/person/year, averaged over the past 26 years.
She looked up the national average, and it's around $1,500/person/year! We buy most of our clothes second-hand and wear them a long time.
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@thebaywindowgirl yes in one of the branches of this thread someone dug a bit deeper and discovered the guy hasn't actually retired from his financial coaching business, this whole thing is just advertising for it
You too could retire at 40, just buy my "How to make sandwiches course for 5 easy payments of £2599.
Life lessons include:
What is a supermarket?
Butter vs Margarine
How to get the stone out of the avocado
