I hate headlines like this.
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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 -
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@social.coop this headline lacks punch
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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@Workshopshed @afewbugs @thebaywindowgirl
Be aware, your students might first need to be told the stone gets removed from the avocado before eating... this could be a 500 quid add on of course
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@afewbugs extra bonus.
They're not retired. They run a YouTube channel and free (for your contact details which they are amassing) course, which is currently running at a small annual loss but which they clearly expect to gradually turn into money via YouTube earnings and a book deal.
https://rebeldonegans.com/does-rebel-finance-school-make-money/
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@raccoon normally no, I'm really bad at it
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@afewbugs to reiterate, saving £40k over 10 years is over £75 *a week*. Just on sandwiches between the two of them.
Edit: they *saved* over £75 a week, so the initial lunches were higher
@SquirrelwithaninvisibleW @afewbugs
£40k is the median salary in the UK. To save £20k each they both need to be in the top 10%.
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@afewbugs “The two rarely had takeaways and always took packed lunches to work. ‘We were £40,000 better off over 10 years from just that one lunch habit," says Alan.’”
Works out that between them they were spending over £75 *a week* on lunches before going DIY.
‘Aside from their good incomes, their extreme saving habits meant they were able to retire early.’ Though the article doesn’t mention their salaries outside of ‘good’ so it kinda renders the whole piece redundant.
@SquirrelwithaninvisibleW @afewbugs 75 a week isn't _that_ hard to achieve if you go out and buy lunch every day at some deli or lunch counter or even the petrol station. That's 15 a day for two people, that's certainly not nothing but it's not millionaire territory either.
So fine, that saves you 40 grand over a decade. That's significant.
But 40 grand isn't going to get anyone from age 40 to retirement age, so the lunch thing is far from the whole story and just a stupid clickbait headline.
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@afewbugs Grrrrr. This exactly. Without recognizing the privilege they started with.
@afewbugs oh and a further thought, in the US, you can’t easily retire early even with $1M in savings as health care is tied to employment. Some jobs, if you work there long enough, you get to keep health care when you retire. Otherwise, for healthy folks, can’t get state Medicare until 65.
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@amenonsen @catch56 I'm now wondering if it really is that big, if it's foreshortening or if the whole picture is AI
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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.
These two undoubtedly came from privilege to begin with. They absolutely reek of it.
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@amenonsen @catch56 I'm now wondering if it really is that big, if it's foreshortening or if the whole picture is AI
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@afewbugs Grrrrr. This exactly. Without recognizing the privilege they started with.
