Congrats. $50 is highway robbery for the consistent quality content Freddie puts up. Pay up people!
Also, I made a goal to read more books this year. I've only been a part of the book club for 1 book but it's been a great way to keep motivated (the discussions are usually better than the readings). I also never would've picked the last book myself, which is nice. I expect I'll be crossing off my "read more books" goal at the end of the year thanks in large part to FdB.
Hey Kathleen, do you know if public libraries can get you access to journal articles? The place where I'm most consistently blocked by paywalls is in trying to access primary scientific research.
The guy who called TV a “vast wasteland” couldn’t have imagined in his most dystopian dreams what cultural production online has become. FdB, Taibbi, Wesley Yang are lights in a thickening darkness. It’s we who should be saying thanks.
Also, when you do “Confederacy” — and speaking of Wokeness — I hope you’ll take on the facepalm-inducing New Yorker essay calling the protagonist a “neckbeard” avant la lettre. 🤦♂️
Thus Spake Wokathustra: "Ignatius J. Reilly—the godfather of the Internet troll, the Abraham of neckbeards, the 4chan edgelord to rule them all—was no anachronism."
Well, that quote is the last sentence of the article, and reads entirely differently in context, IMO. The article is also filled with historical detail of Toole's life. Piffle? No way.
Eh, you know — maybe I screwed up. But that the New Yorker (among many others!) on a general level has been intellectually hollowed out by Wokeness is a hill I’m quite happy to die on.
It’s hard for me to follow the threading here on my phone. But if by “that review” you mean the New Yorker review, I’m all ears. I try to be open to all points of view, and if I screwed up, then that’s an opportunity to learn something. At least that’s what I think on my best days, which admittedly are few and far between.
While I hate to overuse the term, in a sense wokeness is related to a childish state of mind. Namely judging everything in relation to the set of ideal outcomes represented by the term “social justice.” That drives out nuance in multiple ways. One of them is that art for art’s sake becomes impossible. What business does art have existing for its own sake, when it should be acting as an instruction manual to help people “do the work”?
Without moral complexity why would we traffic with complex, unlikable characters? It’s a bit like heroic factory workers in socialist realist literature.
I saw a good example of this recently. A woman who worked (believe it or not) for the Paris Review was doing that tired thing of evaluating dates by what she saw in their bookshelves. She complained that a lot of guys had a copy of Slaughterhouse Five. And said something about not wanting to get involved with dudes who “take their cues” from Kurt Vonnegut. As if literature were a self-help manual!
YUCK! I finally got to read it and I hate it, thanks. I did like to read about him, and will probably read the bio I didn't know existed, but this reviewer doesn't get it. He doesn't get the subtlety and he doesn't even get the really funny bits. He doesn't get it and complains that it's missing something that would have ruined it, which is obvious to anyone.
It takes a lot of clever to make a vast wasteland. It's like: you go to Harvard, you claw your way up the Lampoon masthead, SNL hires you to write fart jokes. It's the Harvard-to-fart-joke pipeline.
I didn't much like Gilligan's Island, but I've been watching Beverly Hillbillies, and that is actually much better than I remembered it as a child and I liked it as a child. NOT A WASTELAND!
It feels a bit weird I pay $10/year for the washington post, $52 a year for the NY Times, $50 per year for one blogger, and $80 per year for another. but I have no intention of unsubscribing...
For some reason I distinctly remember reading a newspaper online for the first time in 1995 (probably the Washington Post) and thinking "why are they giving this to me for free?". It never made sense to me and I don't know why it made sense to them. They conditioned everyone into thinking that the newspapers online should be free and dug their own graves.
I noticed today that it was folded into Amazon Pay until I stopped it...one of those clicks you don't think abt and then it mounts up.Prob because amazon guy owns the WaPo/
I swear I've read about like 5 different a la carte/micropayment platforms in the last ten years that sounded useful and intriguing. As far as I know, none of them ever made it out of beta. Does anybody know more about these things? Is there some vested interest, market force, or technical hurdle that makes this harder than it looks?
The trouble with Substacks is they aren’t really worth the money. Freddie’s is an exception for the reasons he gives. Quality and volume. I’ll be resubscribing. (Though why really when he continues to ignore the Siege of Krishnapur as a book club choice?)
Disregarding the $200 lump sum category, do you prefer subscribers to take a monthly or annual subscription? Logically a higher amount more evenly distributed is better, but maybe the peace of mind of having the money banked from long term subscriptions is preferred?
I pay monthly. Happy to keep doing so or go annual if it reduces any concerns about maintaining numbers or gives you more confidence in making any hires you're considering.
That's one of the reasons why I love it so much. It brought a city foreign to me - in every single sense but language, and even then it was a close-run thing - to vivid, sweating, valve-blocking, hot-dog-cart-pushing life.
For the love of God man, move out of NYC to a low cost of living area and put half of your income into savings. The future of this place can’t be predicted. Move to Tennessee, or move in with Glenn Greenwald in Brazil. Just get out of NYC and build that nest egg!
If what you say is true low cost of living places would have large amounts of savings, high 401k balances, high IRA balances, significant real estate holdings, etc. - they don’t.
Well, let's leave aside the actual rich for a moment. The vast amount of wealth accretion for normal people in the US is in their homes, and homeownership is definitely higher outside the big metros:
"The San Jose, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego metros fell to the bottom largely because the estimated housing costs took a large bite out of families’ incomes." And, "Memphis, followed by Cincinnati and Cleveland, topped the list as the best metros for savers.... Households could put about a quarter of their pretax income ($50,194 to $59,478) toward their homes if they earned the median income and maintained typical expenses for the area, the data shows."
So I think the data suggest that Buster House Party is right -- if you are not in the actually rich tier (or the "working rich," like biglaw attorneys and commercial investing guys, who have to live near the financial capitals), people often do better leveraging the low cost of living in smaller and less expensive places, and socking away the rest.
I would be careful with those estimates. They are probably heavily skewed towards high earners. Connecticut is near the top of the list and it is a notorious haven for financial district types who want to live someplace rich outside of the city.
Those other states are also disproportionately in the NE and Eastern seaboard. close to cities like NY or Boston that have a disproportionately high share of elite salaries.
The question is which specific part of the population are you talking about? ED's at the firm that I contract at start out at $400k a year. Even living in Manhattan that kind of money will allow somebody to bank a respectable amount of money into retirement accounts. On the other hand, what about that guy working at Starbuck's or Potbelly? His cost of living is through the roof.
If you are poor or middle class you are far better off living outside of NY/SF/Bos/etc. For anybody who's not rich home ownership is, as Chesteron points out, a far better measure of retirement wealth because that's where most people who can afford it point their excess income.
The homeownership numbers are from the Census; "estimates" in some sense, but I think a reasonable proxy for reality. And the fundamental point about homeownership/mortgages is that if you live in NYC, LA, San Francisco, etc. it's very hard to get into the class of people who have the enforced savings. Yes, if you own a $4 million brownstone in Manhattan, you will accrue more wealth than if you have a $300,000 house in Charleston. The point is that the brownstone is completely out of reach for the vast majority of people living in NYC ( https://ny.curbed.com/2016/8/5/12388486/new-york-home-buying-study-affordable-housing ), who would be better off moving somewhere where they can actually get into a mortgage.
As for savings -- the source at your link is not particularly helpful, since it is data scraped from one financial advisor's dashboard. We have no idea how that company's user base skews geographically, which makes it tricky to use it as a baseline for comparison. Also, statewide numbers don't let you easily compare the advantages of living in a big, expensive city vs. a smaller city or suburb. But even in these asserted statewide averages we see a number of states with essentially no large cities (Vermont, New Hampshire, Alaska) or at most second-tier cities (Minnesota). As for Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Connecticut -- there certainly can be advantages to living in the orbit of a big city, but living further out. NY money goes farther in Jersey, DC money goes farther in Rockville, etc.
Also, there's another element lurking in here, which is that your retirement savings go farther in a low-COL environment. So even if you didn't save as much in raw numbers, you can still come out ahead in terms of savings-to-expense ratios.
There is much more opportunity in big cities, especially for educate ambitious people. Could Freddie still get the quality of daily interactions from another, less expensive place? Perhaps. Could he have the same quality of life? Obviously he doesn't think so.
As an aside, does anyone know Freddie's neighborhood? I imagine he is an East Village person, hanging out at Think or The Bean.
As an educated, ambitious person who's lived in big, expensive cities most of my adult life, that hasn't been my experience. The money is really good, but you spend it all. At one point I actually mapped salaries in my field in various areas (fortunately, the salary info is easier to come by than in many fields) to cost of living estimates and found that I was definitively better off in a second-tier city. And if you can manage a SUBURB of a second tier city? Fuhgeddaboutit. "Gold, Jerry!"
I was able to save 10% of my salary right off the bat living in expensive San Francisco. It was cheaper in 1993 but not really that much cheaper, compared to incomes.
I just continued to live like a college student, with roommates. I was even able to sell my car and save even more that way. Transit in big cities is good enough to not have to spend the many thousands of dollars even a modest car costs. There are always plenty of free things to do on the weekends. I did end up having roommates until I was 38, when I finally bought a house. That was a major drag at the end, but being frugal has paid off for me.
And I always put half of my considerable raises into savings. So I was able to save quite well, in spite of the many expensive temptations the city had to offer. There are lots of downsides to being thrifty, but that is true no matter where you live.
I ended up going into tech, which of course turned out to be fortuitous. But my first job was for $30k/yr, so I didn't really expect for things to turn out that way and saved for the future. My career would not have turned out this well anywhere but Silicon Valley or San Francisco, or another technology hub.
As for quality of life, it really depends on what matters to you. I value very highly living in a walkable, bikeable city that I can get across via transit. I don't like sitting in traffic. The suburbs would not really work for me, unless maybe I could find a way to live near a train station and not drive to work. Also being bisexual means that big cities have a strong draw, San Francisco in particular. I know things are better now, but I don't need to find out.
I know lots of people move to the suburbs for their children, to put them in a "good" (e.g. White majority) school, but I don't want that.
They are mixed race anyway. My kids are getting an unparalleled chance to participate in a vast array of cultural enriching opportunities. My oldest is in a public School of The Arts and my youngest is performing in a free Park and Rec musical theatre performance.
Freddie is starting to run into the "I like it here but I will never be able to buy a place here" dilemma that many professionals come across. If he had been making good money his whole life, not just now, he could probably buy somewhere.
Salaries in the Valley are driving up tech salaries everywhere. I live in flyover country and I pull in $200k a year. And out here in the boondocks that stretches pretty far.
I was talking to a vendor who lives in SF and I mentioned that I read somewhere that it's not uncommon for people to keep their washer in the back yard and run a hose to it to fill it up. He replied "As a matter of fact, that's what I do." All I could think is that sounds like a third world country where indoor plumbing isn't universal yet.
All valid considerations, for sure. I liked big cities a lot when I was young. They certainly offer community that may be hard to find if you are part of a minority sexuality or an unusual religion, for example. And there are smaller things -- shops and nonprofits catering to obscure hobbies, institutional support for fine arts like opera and museums.
For me, smaller cities and suburbs offer more than just the "good" schools. Part of it is the sheer amount of space. I like my neighbors, and I like them even better 50 or 100 yards away. :-) And there's an abundance of undeveloped land. Screwing around unsupervised in the woods was an important part of my childhood, and I'm trying to provide that to my own offspring.
Anyway, I'm sure all this is individual to a high degree. I can definitely say that in my individual circumstance, not paying big-city rent anymore has been a huge wealth-builder. And I'm not even super-frugal!
Exactly - people aren’t using the saving from their move from Silicon Valley to Memphis to invest in a diversified set of mutual funds and some investment properties - it looks like they are just pissing it away.
If you want to make an argument they they find value in pissing it all away, that’s certainly valid. But the end result is they don’t have a lot to show for it. Which, obviously, complicates the narrative
Because in TN with coast money you can buy a 60 acre compound with German Shepherds with machine guns to guard it. Why wouldn't you put out the money to get a mansion?
And if we're going to segregate real estate from retirement investments like IRA's, stocks, etc. then it's worth noting that as people flee the coasts buying a house in the middle of the country is increasingly a solid investment decision.
That’s likely true. People aren’t taking their coastal money and buying something 1/3 the cost and investing the difference. They are buying a mansion. And they are buying a mansion in a place where it’s easy to build additional housing if demand rises. This puts a long term limit on housing appreciating faster than inflation.
I got an email last week saying my subscription would automatically renew. Though I’m not sure if that’s true for everyone or if you can change it in settings.
This is my favorite substack, and I lean right. The variety of topics, the freshness of perspectives, the beautiful writing, and the quality of commenters here are top notch. Here's to another great year. May your subscriptions be fruitful and multiply!
Same! I'm glad Freddie started to pander to the right wing mob instead of staying true to the muddled mores of neo-socialistic post-capitalist laptop bourgeoise focused marxism like the true thinking blue checks posting for dollars on twitter....
Congratulations. And keep up the great work.
Congratulations on one year. I'm certainly hoping we get many more.
Thx. Good story selection
Congrats. $50 is highway robbery for the consistent quality content Freddie puts up. Pay up people!
Also, I made a goal to read more books this year. I've only been a part of the book club for 1 book but it's been a great way to keep motivated (the discussions are usually better than the readings). I also never would've picked the last book myself, which is nice. I expect I'll be crossing off my "read more books" goal at the end of the year thanks in large part to FdB.
I know I continue to subscribe because it feeds my lifelong fantasy of being a highway robber. Can't get that with any other substack.
True! At best you can be a quiet lane robber or a cul-de-sac robber.
Congratulations FdB.
PLEASE SAVE YOUR WORK OFFLINE!
Pay walls. Two ways to avoid:
1) use your local PL (you'd be surprised how much they have!) or community college or university library's e-collection.
2) if you edit Wikipedia you can gain access to a lot of resources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Library
Hey Kathleen, do you know if public libraries can get you access to journal articles? The place where I'm most consistently blocked by paywalls is in trying to access primary scientific research.
The guy who called TV a “vast wasteland” couldn’t have imagined in his most dystopian dreams what cultural production online has become. FdB, Taibbi, Wesley Yang are lights in a thickening darkness. It’s we who should be saying thanks.
Also, when you do “Confederacy” — and speaking of Wokeness — I hope you’ll take on the facepalm-inducing New Yorker essay calling the protagonist a “neckbeard” avant la lettre. 🤦♂️
pleeeeease link
Thus Spake Wokathustra: "Ignatius J. Reilly—the godfather of the Internet troll, the Abraham of neckbeards, the 4chan edgelord to rule them all—was no anachronism."
If you really want to spend time w/ this piffle: https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/the-uneasy-afterlife-of-a-confederacy-of-dunces
Woke ppl are always "uneasy," they're always "troubled," b/c everything is "problematic."
Well, that quote is the last sentence of the article, and reads entirely differently in context, IMO. The article is also filled with historical detail of Toole's life. Piffle? No way.
Eh, you know — maybe I screwed up. But that the New Yorker (among many others!) on a general level has been intellectually hollowed out by Wokeness is a hill I’m quite happy to die on.
Won't argue with that general conclusion.
That review is trash and I will happily go into why when the actual book club launches.
It’s hard for me to follow the threading here on my phone. But if by “that review” you mean the New Yorker review, I’m all ears. I try to be open to all points of view, and if I screwed up, then that’s an opportunity to learn something. At least that’s what I think on my best days, which admittedly are few and far between.
I've read my last complimentary article, the popup tells me. But/and that sounds totally yikes.
Also, I don't know the context of "anachronism" used here, but it sounds as though it was used incorrectly since c.o.d. wasn't period fiction.
Interesting. I may have to join the club. Although if it will have me as a member…
I feel very old to write:
Do people not understand anything? Like, why people write about complicated subjects or unlikable characters? Is everyone 4 years old?
While I hate to overuse the term, in a sense wokeness is related to a childish state of mind. Namely judging everything in relation to the set of ideal outcomes represented by the term “social justice.” That drives out nuance in multiple ways. One of them is that art for art’s sake becomes impossible. What business does art have existing for its own sake, when it should be acting as an instruction manual to help people “do the work”?
Without moral complexity why would we traffic with complex, unlikable characters? It’s a bit like heroic factory workers in socialist realist literature.
I saw a good example of this recently. A woman who worked (believe it or not) for the Paris Review was doing that tired thing of evaluating dates by what she saw in their bookshelves. She complained that a lot of guys had a copy of Slaughterhouse Five. And said something about not wanting to get involved with dudes who “take their cues” from Kurt Vonnegut. As if literature were a self-help manual!
YUCK! I finally got to read it and I hate it, thanks. I did like to read about him, and will probably read the bio I didn't know existed, but this reviewer doesn't get it. He doesn't get the subtlety and he doesn't even get the really funny bits. He doesn't get it and complains that it's missing something that would have ruined it, which is obvious to anyone.
Thank you for doing the dirty work for me.
That was Newton Minnow. Why Gillian’s island boat named Minnow.
Right, I always forget the guy’s name, thx.
I think I block it out b/c it’s such a ridiculous name.
I remember because Gilligan's Island writers thought it was clever to have an homage to him to prove him right.
It takes a lot of clever to make a vast wasteland. It's like: you go to Harvard, you claw your way up the Lampoon masthead, SNL hires you to write fart jokes. It's the Harvard-to-fart-joke pipeline.
I didn't much like Gilligan's Island, but I've been watching Beverly Hillbillies, and that is actually much better than I remembered it as a child and I liked it as a child. NOT A WASTELAND!
I skipped Harvard and went straight to fart jokes. It’s landed me a lucrative career as an at-home parent.
That's totally amazing, I never knew that!
And now I've got the theme song in my head ...
The mate was a mighty sailin' man,
The Skipper brave and sure.
Five passengers set sail that day
For a three hour tour,
A three hour tour ...
It feels a bit weird I pay $10/year for the washington post, $52 a year for the NY Times, $50 per year for one blogger, and $80 per year for another. but I have no intention of unsubscribing...
How do you get WaPo for $10/year?
subscribe for a bit, try to cancel, then they'll pretty much give it away to keep you from cancelling
That's my MO too, but I don't think I'm getting anything like $10/year ...
Happy Anniversary, Freddie! It’s a pleasure reading you!
For some reason I distinctly remember reading a newspaper online for the first time in 1995 (probably the Washington Post) and thinking "why are they giving this to me for free?". It never made sense to me and I don't know why it made sense to them. They conditioned everyone into thinking that the newspapers online should be free and dug their own graves.
I noticed today that it was folded into Amazon Pay until I stopped it...one of those clicks you don't think abt and then it mounts up.Prob because amazon guy owns the WaPo/
I swear I've read about like 5 different a la carte/micropayment platforms in the last ten years that sounded useful and intriguing. As far as I know, none of them ever made it out of beta. Does anybody know more about these things? Is there some vested interest, market force, or technical hurdle that makes this harder than it looks?
The trouble with Substacks is they aren’t really worth the money. Freddie’s is an exception for the reasons he gives. Quality and volume. I’ll be resubscribing. (Though why really when he continues to ignore the Siege of Krishnapur as a book club choice?)
I agree. FDB's joint is notable for both quantity and quality of the work.
Most others aren't really worth paying for.
Disregarding the $200 lump sum category, do you prefer subscribers to take a monthly or annual subscription? Logically a higher amount more evenly distributed is better, but maybe the peace of mind of having the money banked from long term subscriptions is preferred?
I pay monthly. Happy to keep doing so or go annual if it reduces any concerns about maintaining numbers or gives you more confidence in making any hires you're considering.
Congratulations on the first year! Hopefully the first of many.
I can't wait to hear everyone's thoughts on Confederacy - my favorite novel.
I taught in Louisiana and one Mardi Gras there was a float of Ignatius. A local hero.
It's really a New Orleans sort of lost in time now.
That's one of the reasons why I love it so much. It brought a city foreign to me - in every single sense but language, and even then it was a close-run thing - to vivid, sweating, valve-blocking, hot-dog-cart-pushing life.
And then his mother and the LSU press and Walker Percy...
For the love of God man, move out of NYC to a low cost of living area and put half of your income into savings. The future of this place can’t be predicted. Move to Tennessee, or move in with Glenn Greenwald in Brazil. Just get out of NYC and build that nest egg!
If what you say is true low cost of living places would have large amounts of savings, high 401k balances, high IRA balances, significant real estate holdings, etc. - they don’t.
Why do you think that is?
Well, let's leave aside the actual rich for a moment. The vast amount of wealth accretion for normal people in the US is in their homes, and homeownership is definitely higher outside the big metros:
https://tulsaworld.com/lifestyles/the-us-cities-with-the-highest-and-lowest-homeownership-rates/collection_c02408f6-dd7c-5853-8aed-81be9a50c6fe.html#4
"States with the highest homeownership rates include West Virginia, Delaware, Maine, and Alabama."
What about savings? Well, the worst areas for savings are the big expensive metros, by and large:
https://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/best-metros-for-savers-2019/
"The San Jose, San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego metros fell to the bottom largely because the estimated housing costs took a large bite out of families’ incomes." And, "Memphis, followed by Cincinnati and Cleveland, topped the list as the best metros for savers.... Households could put about a quarter of their pretax income ($50,194 to $59,478) toward their homes if they earned the median income and maintained typical expenses for the area, the data shows."
So I think the data suggest that Buster House Party is right -- if you are not in the actually rich tier (or the "working rich," like biglaw attorneys and commercial investing guys, who have to live near the financial capitals), people often do better leveraging the low cost of living in smaller and less expensive places, and socking away the rest.
Yeh those are all estimates and predictions of what people should or would be expected to do. If you look at actual numbers the situation changes.
https://www.benefitspro.com/2021/04/28/10-states-with-highest-average-retirement-savings-412-115336/
Your own point about the forced savings aspect of a mortgage is doubly true in places with high housing prices.
I would be careful with those estimates. They are probably heavily skewed towards high earners. Connecticut is near the top of the list and it is a notorious haven for financial district types who want to live someplace rich outside of the city.
And all the other states?
It’s certainly plausible that folks moving to lower cost states don’t responsibly save and invest the difference. This is America after all.
Those other states are also disproportionately in the NE and Eastern seaboard. close to cities like NY or Boston that have a disproportionately high share of elite salaries.
The question is which specific part of the population are you talking about? ED's at the firm that I contract at start out at $400k a year. Even living in Manhattan that kind of money will allow somebody to bank a respectable amount of money into retirement accounts. On the other hand, what about that guy working at Starbuck's or Potbelly? His cost of living is through the roof.
If you are poor or middle class you are far better off living outside of NY/SF/Bos/etc. For anybody who's not rich home ownership is, as Chesteron points out, a far better measure of retirement wealth because that's where most people who can afford it point their excess income.
The homeownership numbers are from the Census; "estimates" in some sense, but I think a reasonable proxy for reality. And the fundamental point about homeownership/mortgages is that if you live in NYC, LA, San Francisco, etc. it's very hard to get into the class of people who have the enforced savings. Yes, if you own a $4 million brownstone in Manhattan, you will accrue more wealth than if you have a $300,000 house in Charleston. The point is that the brownstone is completely out of reach for the vast majority of people living in NYC ( https://ny.curbed.com/2016/8/5/12388486/new-york-home-buying-study-affordable-housing ), who would be better off moving somewhere where they can actually get into a mortgage.
As for savings -- the source at your link is not particularly helpful, since it is data scraped from one financial advisor's dashboard. We have no idea how that company's user base skews geographically, which makes it tricky to use it as a baseline for comparison. Also, statewide numbers don't let you easily compare the advantages of living in a big, expensive city vs. a smaller city or suburb. But even in these asserted statewide averages we see a number of states with essentially no large cities (Vermont, New Hampshire, Alaska) or at most second-tier cities (Minnesota). As for Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Connecticut -- there certainly can be advantages to living in the orbit of a big city, but living further out. NY money goes farther in Jersey, DC money goes farther in Rockville, etc.
Also, there's another element lurking in here, which is that your retirement savings go farther in a low-COL environment. So even if you didn't save as much in raw numbers, you can still come out ahead in terms of savings-to-expense ratios.
There is much more opportunity in big cities, especially for educate ambitious people. Could Freddie still get the quality of daily interactions from another, less expensive place? Perhaps. Could he have the same quality of life? Obviously he doesn't think so.
As an aside, does anyone know Freddie's neighborhood? I imagine he is an East Village person, hanging out at Think or The Bean.
The Bean is an abomination. And he's in Park Slope from what I recall.
As an educated, ambitious person who's lived in big, expensive cities most of my adult life, that hasn't been my experience. The money is really good, but you spend it all. At one point I actually mapped salaries in my field in various areas (fortunately, the salary info is easier to come by than in many fields) to cost of living estimates and found that I was definitively better off in a second-tier city. And if you can manage a SUBURB of a second tier city? Fuhgeddaboutit. "Gold, Jerry!"
As for quality of life.... https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/im-not-sure-i-want-to-run-the-new
I was able to save 10% of my salary right off the bat living in expensive San Francisco. It was cheaper in 1993 but not really that much cheaper, compared to incomes.
I just continued to live like a college student, with roommates. I was even able to sell my car and save even more that way. Transit in big cities is good enough to not have to spend the many thousands of dollars even a modest car costs. There are always plenty of free things to do on the weekends. I did end up having roommates until I was 38, when I finally bought a house. That was a major drag at the end, but being frugal has paid off for me.
And I always put half of my considerable raises into savings. So I was able to save quite well, in spite of the many expensive temptations the city had to offer. There are lots of downsides to being thrifty, but that is true no matter where you live.
I ended up going into tech, which of course turned out to be fortuitous. But my first job was for $30k/yr, so I didn't really expect for things to turn out that way and saved for the future. My career would not have turned out this well anywhere but Silicon Valley or San Francisco, or another technology hub.
As for quality of life, it really depends on what matters to you. I value very highly living in a walkable, bikeable city that I can get across via transit. I don't like sitting in traffic. The suburbs would not really work for me, unless maybe I could find a way to live near a train station and not drive to work. Also being bisexual means that big cities have a strong draw, San Francisco in particular. I know things are better now, but I don't need to find out.
I know lots of people move to the suburbs for their children, to put them in a "good" (e.g. White majority) school, but I don't want that.
They are mixed race anyway. My kids are getting an unparalleled chance to participate in a vast array of cultural enriching opportunities. My oldest is in a public School of The Arts and my youngest is performing in a free Park and Rec musical theatre performance.
Freddie is starting to run into the "I like it here but I will never be able to buy a place here" dilemma that many professionals come across. If he had been making good money his whole life, not just now, he could probably buy somewhere.
Salaries in the Valley are driving up tech salaries everywhere. I live in flyover country and I pull in $200k a year. And out here in the boondocks that stretches pretty far.
I was talking to a vendor who lives in SF and I mentioned that I read somewhere that it's not uncommon for people to keep their washer in the back yard and run a hose to it to fill it up. He replied "As a matter of fact, that's what I do." All I could think is that sounds like a third world country where indoor plumbing isn't universal yet.
All valid considerations, for sure. I liked big cities a lot when I was young. They certainly offer community that may be hard to find if you are part of a minority sexuality or an unusual religion, for example. And there are smaller things -- shops and nonprofits catering to obscure hobbies, institutional support for fine arts like opera and museums.
For me, smaller cities and suburbs offer more than just the "good" schools. Part of it is the sheer amount of space. I like my neighbors, and I like them even better 50 or 100 yards away. :-) And there's an abundance of undeveloped land. Screwing around unsupervised in the woods was an important part of my childhood, and I'm trying to provide that to my own offspring.
Anyway, I'm sure all this is individual to a high degree. I can definitely say that in my individual circumstance, not paying big-city rent anymore has been a huge wealth-builder. And I'm not even super-frugal!
Because most people heavily discount the future, and spend it if they got it?
Exactly - people aren’t using the saving from their move from Silicon Valley to Memphis to invest in a diversified set of mutual funds and some investment properties - it looks like they are just pissing it away.
If you want to make an argument they they find value in pissing it all away, that’s certainly valid. But the end result is they don’t have a lot to show for it. Which, obviously, complicates the narrative
Because in TN with coast money you can buy a 60 acre compound with German Shepherds with machine guns to guard it. Why wouldn't you put out the money to get a mansion?
And if we're going to segregate real estate from retirement investments like IRA's, stocks, etc. then it's worth noting that as people flee the coasts buying a house in the middle of the country is increasingly a solid investment decision.
That’s likely true. People aren’t taking their coastal money and buying something 1/3 the cost and investing the difference. They are buying a mansion. And they are buying a mansion in a place where it’s easy to build additional housing if demand rises. This puts a long term limit on housing appreciating faster than inflation.
Stupid question — do I actually need to do anything, or does my subscription automatically roll over?
I got an email last week saying my subscription would automatically renew. Though I’m not sure if that’s true for everyone or if you can change it in settings.
This is my favorite substack, and I lean right. The variety of topics, the freshness of perspectives, the beautiful writing, and the quality of commenters here are top notch. Here's to another great year. May your subscriptions be fruitful and multiply!
Same! I'm glad Freddie started to pander to the right wing mob instead of staying true to the muddled mores of neo-socialistic post-capitalist laptop bourgeoise focused marxism like the true thinking blue checks posting for dollars on twitter....