Changing Seasons
Different events for different chapters and “life structuring”
If you live on the east coast of the United States like I do, you’re not going to go skiing in May. Similarly, you are not going to go for a beach day in January (unless you’re on your Wim Hof cold exposure grind).
I recently read Bill Perkins’ Die With Zero which provided the useful insight that, like nature, our lives also have seasons. Some events are time agnostic: going to a sporting event or going out to dinner are a few that come to mind. Other events, however, are likely to return maximum enjoyment in certain life periods, such as skydiving when you’re relatively young, spending time with your children when they are little, and backpacking on a relatively low budget in your 20s. These events have a finite clock.
Delayed gratification and investing for the future are essential tools for growing wealth and achieving the “FI” part of “FIRE” (AKA Financial Independence, Retire Early. I’m supportive of FI, less so on FIRE, a topic for another time).
But if skydiving costs $1,000, the cost benefit analysis can’t be “well if I assume 8% annual returns compounded with dividends reinvested, then by 45 the $1,000 will be worth x and as a result the $1,000 will be a far lesser expense relative to my net worth…”
…Rather…
“…Oh [profanity] I’m 25 and if I don’t skydive at some point in the next 10ish years I probably never will since my risk tolerance will be severely deteriorated and I’ll probably be concerned about having a heart attack on the way down and I’ll have others potentially depending on me to support them and it’s something I really want to do while I have this current, infrequent opportunity in front of me.”
As I always say, it would be EXTREMELY chill to have 7 figures in the bank (in multiple FDIC-insured accounts of course) before 30, but where does this leave your “memory bank?”
As we transition into life’s different seasons, our dollars are inflated away in two ways: real inflation (generally, in economies, stuff gets more expensive over time) and age inflation. Age inflation is sneaky because we think that we are saving all this money for a future self, however this future self (past a certain age, say 50) will receive less value from each dollar. This is due to increased age-related constraints on what we can do with each dollar.
In summary of the above:
Travel far and wide, go to difficult to visit places while you’re young
Many things get harder to do when you have children and as you age
Don’t deplete your memory bank for your piggy bank, make sure you’re depositing into both. The optimal weighting is up to you to figure out
No, I haven’t gone skydiving… yet. But I know the clock is ticking.
Have a fantastic day.