I remain baffled as to how a single, youngish dude in Austin can spend almost $8k a month.
Well, sure, yeah. But that doesn't seem super obviously to have been part of it.
I agree that the last blog post comes off as somewhat likeable and at least modestly self-aware, but I did boggle at the juxtaposition of these two items:
while my achievement might seem remarkable at first blush, I'd say the recipe, while not necessarily easy to follow, is fairly straightforward and likely adaptable to many other people's situations.
[Monthly] Income: $26,094
Right. "Many other people's situations" -- especially provided those people make $313,000 a year.
I should probably not snark without going back and reading his other interim posts. Maybe he did look at Census or IRS tables and realize how genuinely much of an outlier he is.
What are housing prices like there? Here in NYC it wouldn't be difficult at all - get a really nice 1BR in a high end Manhattan neighbourhood and you're already more than halfway there. After that, going out to nice restaurants, a couple expensive vacations and random stuff.
But that doesn't seem super obviously to have been part of it.
Dude went to business school, yo.
His mortgage is $1400/mo for a (3 bedroom?) house.
Maybe he has a pet shark. It would cost a lot of money to keep a shark fed.
8 ?! Damn that's cheap. A crappy 3BR walkup apartment in Providence cost me and my roommates $900 twenty years ago, 1400 is about what you would have paid for a generic middle class 3BR in Geneva thirty years ago. Prices not adjusted for inflation.
I also never understand why someone living alone would want that much space.
It would cost a lot of money to keep a shark fed.
Especially if the shark is also a coke addict.
Saving $1M by the time he's fifty isn't exactly a high bar to clear on $300K a year over a twenty year period.
I also never understand why someone living alone would want that much space.
Shark tanks are really big. I think we're starting to make real progress on understanding him.
"No, see, you've got it all wrong, officer. This cocaine isn't for me, it's for my shark."
You can't really expect Lily Bart to live like Gerty Farish.
Speaking of cocaine, has this guy been discussed here? Because, um, I shouldn't.
There are various additional expenses when it comes to shark tanks, of course, and all that adds up.
16 is a Daily Mail link, it should be noted. I wouldn't believe that source if it said the sun rose in the east.
That said, if the general outlines of the case are as reported (university professor caught with suitcase full of drugs; claims his foreign girlfriend asked him to carry the suitcase back with him) I'd have to put my money on "Lust makes idiots of us all."
16 His story sounds so plausible. 68 year old dude flies to Argentina to meet a hot model he met online, she asks him to take a suitcase back for him and he had no idea?
I can believe that lust might make him take the risk, not that it didn't occur to him that he was going to be smuggling something.
21: Eh, my experience of people who have done similarly idiotic things is that it's not that they are seeing the risk and consciously deciding to run it, but rather not seeing the risk at all.
Vaguely akin to how as a kid I was taught never to eat food from strangers, and it was several innings after the nice man at the baseball game gave me a blueberry muffin that I realized he was A Stranger and I shouldn't have taken his food.
Why are we talking about this No More Harvard Debt guy? He apparently makes $300k per year. He is not normal, and has nothing to teach us.
There should be some kind of "nabbed Paul to play Peter" joke in there somewhere, but I think it's a stretch too far.
Section 3 of this talk, in which the guy explains just how much smarter than Isaac Newton he is, sheds light on his personality if not his drug habits. Though I am now somewhat sympathetic to "baffled particle theorist accused of breaking the law in unfamiliar nation" stories.
Also, 22 comments deep and no one has commended that Shearer is being unusually insightful in his thoughts for the OP?
He is not normal, and has nothing to teach us.
If there's one word I think of to describe the 'tariat, it's "normal".
27: Strike "us" and substitute "me", then.
I love the box at the top of the DuckDuckGo results.
If the Daily Mail isn't good enough for you, then here's an article from the Raleigh News Observer.
1: Where I live one could easily drink $100 in a night. (I don't do this, but if I weren't keeping track of my money, and had my nights free, I might.) That's without a date to pay for. And there are typically around 30 nights in a month.
It can't be that much cheaper to drink in Austin.
Can we have the violin-kid people back instead of this guy?
I actually can't remember where to find the violin-kid people. Obviously it's in tfa, but those are just for show.
I suppose it is easier to mock people when no one involved is a minor.
The violin-kid thread. Found by Googling "Internet mean girls". Made only slightly more difficult by my tendency to repeat that phrase all the time now.
"Bhutan Tourism Mean Penis Art" is something new, to me at least.
If she comes and yells at us again, it is completely essear's fault.
I like their comment there: "The phallus has long story and to cut the long story short." Ouch!
No More Harvard Debt guy can come and yell at us.
Once again, I cannot stop reading violin-kid's mother's blog.
If I had that kind of money to spend, I'd hire somebody to yell at people on the internet.
35: I looked them up the other day when you posted about the travels of the Given and Free family. They seem to have come to roost in a place not too far to the north of Narnia, I almost posted about the Penis Art, but decided I was above that.
Maybe they'll meet each other and travel together.
"He rode in on a camel and bought for 60 Berber kids that have no running water and have never seen Bolivian's finest."
42: Maybe ask about her opinion of Crossfit.
48: Center-of-gravity-wise, sure.
42: Am I a bad person if I spent time searching the background picture on their twitter feed for the violin? Pathetic I'll own to.
Hi everybody, NMHD here. Saw some references from this site on my Wordpress stats and I was highly entertained by the commentary last time my blog was discussed on Unfogged, so I thought I'd swing by to see the latest.
Couple of comments:
#2 got it wrong, #33 got it right (nights out + travel)
RE the statement that I make $300k/year: In the About section I explain that my 12-month base salary is less than my loans ($90k) after tax. You can assume my bonus is typically 10-20% of my base. I'm barely in the top 15% of earners and nowhere near $300k, so I wouldn't consider myself an outlier.
If you haven't taken a violin to the Sahara, you're the 1%.
OMFG, No More Harvard Debt guy concludes the post linked in the OP with references to Zen Buddhism?
Well. He's doing his best with what he has to work with.
Ok, went back and re-read it. #5 saw that I had an income of $26k in March and assumed that was my monthly rate to get $300k/yr income.
I wish.
That's three paychecks, annual bonus, roomates' rent checks, and tax return, escrow rebate, and $16 in scratch-off winnings. It's all detailed here: http://nomoreharvarddebt.com/2012/03/29/final-progress-report-month-7/
Ok, went back and re-read it. #5 saw that I had an income of $26k in March and assumed that was my monthly rate to get $300k/yr income.
I wish.
That's three paychecks, annual bonus, roomates' rent checks, and tax return, escrow rebate, and $16 in scratch-off winnings. It's all detailed here: http://nomoreharvarddebt.com/2012/03/29/final-progress-report-month-7/
I go back and forth between thinking "nice work, Harvard Debt guy" and thinking "I hope this guy doesn't think his experiences generalize much beyond HBS grads."
58: I'm a bit the same, but keep landing on the latter: there's still $46k in the 401k, and an expectation of putting together $1 million by age 50. That doesn't generalize to anyone below, oh, what, the top 20%? 15%? 10%?
Congratulations to NMHD for having accomplished the debt payoff, and apparently you learned some things. Realize that the salary + bonus you outline actually does make you an outlier.
I guess I could spend over $100/night on food and drinks if I had the money to spend, but... it seems like it would take effort to maintain it for long. Don't you sometimes just want to relax at home? Cook? Grab some cheap Mexican food instead of going to a nice restaurant?
The trick to travel is to get your employer to pay for so much of it that you can't stand it anymore and no longer have the will to do any on your own. Wait, I'm not selling this very well.
I'm barely in the top 15% of earners and nowhere near $300k, so I wouldn't consider myself an outlier.
I guess we have different views of bell curves, then.
Median household income in the US: $51,914.
Median number of people per household: 2.59
Source: Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year averaged data, 2006-10.
(Correction to my comment #5 duly noted; my apologies for the assumption on your salary.)
Income distribution is decidedly not a bell curve.
You can get some funny shaped bells if you look around.
62: What are you talking about? If you plot the number of people (households) on one axis and the amount of money on another, unless I'm crazy you certainly will get a (rough) bell curve.
Anyway, I think "outlier" is clearly the wrong word here; the guy is not a statistical anomaly, even if he's way above the median. The message is muddied by the abused jargon.
Oh, that explains it. I was using the common colloquial definition of outlier, not a pure statistical one.
Yes, I get that he's not literally an outlier in the statistical sense. But he certainly IS in the everyday sense, and any ordinary person the street would get that, I think.
64: There's no tail on the left, so you get a distribution that peaks not so far above zero. The median is way bigger than the mode. And I doubt the tail falls off nearly as fast as a normal distribution.
Here's one histogram, found by Googling. Looks roughly like half a bell curve, by eye, I guess.
Income is certainly not a bell curve, but I don't know where NMHD guy is coming up with 15th percentile. Less than 7% of individuals make 100K pretax in a year. Perhaps you're confusing individuals with households?
Anyway, we're talking about something like the richest 2%-5% of the country. Which means it's certainly not that relevant to the vast vast majority of the country, on the other hand 2% is a lot of people.
I'm in a household with income of 100K with 50K of student debt, and I bet there are other people here in who are or were not so far off. The mineshaft median isn't the country's median.
In particular, 100K is the median for an individual with a professional degree. So in the context of professional degree debt, we're not talking about an unusual situation at all. (Relevance to undergrad debt or health care debt, not so much.)
The mineshaft median isn't the country's median.
So?
If people think NMHD's tale has something to teach, great, learn to do without the two cars plus motorcycle plus mortgage plus 401k plus travel and entertainment that adds up to nearly $8000/month in expenses -- for a single individual. Awesome. It's good to figure that out.
I actually think "Well you can just pull back and live like someone in the 75th percentile" is a useful moral. For example, I think it's a good lesson that comes up in the context of whether people can afford college tuition.
Yes you'd hope that people are clueful enough that they wouldn't need to learn that lesson. But in my experience, there are plenty of people who could stand to have it pointed out to them.
Apparently they do need it pointed out.
I'm not going to carry on with this much longer, but "Well you can just pull back and live like someone in the 75th percentile" registers as a little painful and/or obnoxious to those actually in the 75th percentile. Listen to yourself for a minute.
It's supposed to sound a little obnoxious, part of the point is that by framing it that way you see that it's not something you should really complain about.
Personally I've been below median income from birth through age 29, so it's not a lesson I find hard to understand. (With the caveat that it really is harder to live cheaply in NYC than anywhere else I've lived.)
76 - New York was bumped from the top of the list when Upetgi started his TT job at Everything Is Made of Gold and Kobe Beef University.
I can't imagine how a single person in a not so expensive city has $8k in expenses. We spend less than that with 3 kids, one in full time daycare.
Relatedly, I found a piece of the tax code that's total bullshit when filing today- I thought deductions, credits, etc all phase out but there's one that falls off a cliff. If your AGI is up to a certain amount, you can claim $4k of higher ed deduction. One dollar over that amount an it's only $2k of deduction, so a marginal tax rate on that dollar of 56000% (and we were fairly close, just a couple thousand over the threshold.) Does the same thing at the higher threshold where you lose the deduction entirely. What's the thinking in designing it that way?
(Form 8917 line 6 for reference)
That said, if the general outlines of the case are as reported (university professor caught with suitcase full of drugs; claims his foreign girlfriend asked him to carry the suitcase back with him) I'd have to put my money on "Lust makes idiots of us all."
And can really ruin Christmas.
It would cost a lot of money to keep a shark fed.
Not if you live in a neighbourhood with plenty of homeless people. The housing would likely be cheaper too, so it's win-win.
71
I'm in a household with income of 100K with 50K of student debt, and I bet there are other people here in who are or were not so far off ...
... I'm spending $60,000 per year paying back loans that my husband and I took out getting our law degrees, ...
Honestly the only way I can make sense of Essear's reported travel schedule is to figure that "particle physicist" is just a cover for "international cocaine smuggler.". It is a pretty great cover story.
22
Eh, my experience of people who have done similarly idiotic things is that it's not that they are seeing the risk and consciously deciding to run it, but rather not seeing the risk at all.
A comment of Witt's that I agree with.
69: For a single adult, is it incorrect to describe his income as a household income? I'd think that would be a legitimate way to describe it.
79: Have you actually tried to imagine it?
86: The average household has more than one member, so his standard of living is going to be higher.
Sure, he's much further above the median for a single-person household. I'm just quibbling that he's not really wrong to be comparing himself to household figures, because he is a household.
Which numbers you should look at depend on what questions you're asking. In this case personal income seems a pretty clear choice. If anything it overestimates how rich he is, because most people have dependents. What's the argument against personal income? (I'm willing to grant that it was a good faith mistake on his part.)
If people think NMHD's tale has something to teach, great, learn to do without the two cars plus motorcycle plus mortgage plus 401k plus travel and entertainment that adds up to nearly $8000/month in expenses -- for a single individual. Awesome. It's good to figure that out.
I haven't read the blog, but I'm inclined to be somewhat sympathetic to him -- if only because he's been surprisingly polite and engaged when he's showed up in the threads here.
I would think that the interest in the story wouldn't be to take it as financial advice, but just as a log of somebody deliberately trying to change their habits -- similar to somebody writing about taking up a new exercise regimen. If I'm correct that it falls into that category then, of course, it's going to be somewhat non-representative, because it's somebody choosing to make one specific aspect of their life the central focus of their attention, but it's also interesting to know the ways in which old habits assert themselves, or what's most difficult about making the changes.
90: I don't think there is an argument against using personal income, or at least not a good one. It's clearly a more informative metric. I'm really quibbling about your word choice: where someone had a couple of accurate ways to present information, even if one seems clearly preferable, calling a choice to use an accurate but less useful metric a mistake, or something they could only do if confused, seems overstated to me. Looking at the household numbers really isn't wrong, it's just not as informative as the personal income numbers.
As it turns out, household income doesn't get you to 15th percentile anyway. Only 10% of households make over 100K. The only way I can get to 15% is that his *after tax* income is at roughly 15th percentile of *pre-tax* income for *households*.
But I do stand by claiming that using household numbers is wrong. We need to call out inaccuracies based on using the wrong measurements as what they are: actually wrong. He's the one who brought up percentiles in the context of arguing that he's not unusually rich.
If the 15% number is wrong household or not, then that's just straight up wrong.
If using household numbers made it work though, what's your standard for calling it inaccurate, or actually wrong? He lives in a household, right? Everyone does. And the income of that household is his personal income. It's a misleading comparison, if made deliberately I might regard it as a dishonest comparison, but I can't get comfortable with calling it inaccurate or erroneous.
I think 91.last is a good point.
Like all things "wrong" comes on a scale, and there's no precise way to say how wrong you have to be to count as wrong. I do think as a society we're too willing to let people slide on using bad statistics (due to innumeracy mostly), and so I'd prefer to err on the side of calling more situations like this wrong.
However, I don't think this case is a particularly close call. The context we're discussing is how much discretionary spending money he has. Being in a household with the same income would drastically decrease his discretionary spending money. Household numbers clearly are measuring the wrong thing.
What we actually want here is post-tax income per person (with children counted as some appropriate fraction of an adult, and I'm not sure what fraction that is). I wouldn't want to call someone wrong for making do with the best available numbers, or for quibbling over what fraction of a person a kid is, etc. But using household numbers is clearly misleading as having more people in the household substantially decreases available money without an additional source of income.
Finally, I could tell without looking at any numbers that his claim to be in the 15th percentile was ridiculous. If you have any sense of the actual income distribution in this country, it's clear that there's some book-cooking going on here. In this case it looks like a lot of book-cooking, rather than a little. But when you get conclusions that are obviously wrong, you should call out whatever quantitative process that got you there as wrong.
Fuck I'm an idiot and was looking at the wrong column! Household numbers do get you his conclusion. So just a little book cooking, not a ton.
Or rather, 15th percentile household might be right within the margin of what I can find out (that is, I don't know his actual income, and I don't know exactly how things play out between 100K and 150K).
A million in savings won't pay for the private retirement community/assisted living and then nursing home by the time we get there.
By the time I get there, I'm thinking private retirement communities will be relatively cheap, as the baby boomers will be finally be dying off, leaving a glut of open spots.
By the time I get there, I'm thinking private retirement communities tenure-track jobs will be relatively cheap plentiful, as the baby boomers will be finally be retiring, leaving a glut of open spots.
The whole inherit-good-stuff-from-the-baby-boomers thing has worked so well in the past!
91's point is taken, and indeed, once I actually read the OP's linked post, I was more sympathetic, if that's the right word.
79: I can't imagine how a single person in a not so expensive city has $8k in expenses
Depends on what you count as expenses, I imagine. For example, I believe NMHD said he puts 10% of his income toward his 401k: if that sort of thing counts as an expense (rather than a discretionary choice), monthly expenses could add up. cf. LizSpigot's remarks as quoted by Shearer in 82: she's "spending" $60k per year to pay off student loans (at an accelerated rate). She doesn't have to pony up so much annually, of course, but she registers it as a burden imposed on her from without.
Its possible the benefits of Baby Boomers going away won't be realized until the Millennials come around. I could see how things would work out that way, just to piss me off.
104: That's one way to construe it, though I would argue it's a little misleading to count that.
I don't think it's terribly unreasonable to imagine someone actually spending that much in a month. There are plenty of institutions designed as pumps to extract money from young, single, sociable, somewhat-high-income people. Places where the default outcome - if you don't think about it - is to go through a terrific amount of money in a short time without trying.
106.1: Right, it's a little misleading to count that. Dunno if NMHD is counting it.
How can anyone be complaining about one guy getting off the hedonic treadmill and realizing that what he makes is more than enough to make him happy? Sure, his income makes it relatively easy to do what he does, but if it's so easy, why doesn't the rest of the top 10% do it?
autoadmit has a lot of examples of BigLaw attorneys spending ridiculous amounts of money. For example, leasing a parking space in large cities costs hundreds a month, many people have huge clothing budgets, drinking budgets, lease a fancy car, etc.
Autoadmit is still around? Cesspool of the world.
Autoadmit is still around? Cesspool of the world.
Huh. I'd assumed that it faded away after the lawsuit exposed it to daylight.