2025Q2 Random Thoughts

Chasing Metrics, Gooroo Counter Signals, Social Security, Healthcare, College IRR, I Will Teach You To Be a Commie

The 2nd quarter of 2025 is coming to a close. Time to update your quarterly trackers and see the kind of progress you made towards your goals.

It was a volatile, choppy, and sometimes entertaining quarter, and solidly up over the last 3 months. Should be good for net worth updates.

This week’s post is a gathering of random thoughts and useful financial things.

To start this week, something that pops up fairly often is the idea of financial freedom and/or Financial independence. Great idea. Here is how the internet defines it:

Awesome. Everyone should strive for that goal.

And what do most people do? They go and find some site that sends them down the rabbit hole of learning about finances, setting your ‘number’ and tracking it. Also great.

So now our hypothetical person estimates off their 12-month look back that they need $50k a year to live. We will ignore why that is probably off (it almost certainly will be as show here), and say its a good estimate. So now by the 4% rule they take that by a 25x multiplier (again, ignore why the 4% rule is going to fail a lot more often than FIRE folks want to admit) and set a target net worth of $1.25 million.

All positive steps. This person is likely better off than the average person who is doing no planning and almost no saving.

But then a lot of these folks lose the story. Getting to $1.25mm net worth as soon as possible starts to become an obsession. You see a ton of posts that are along the lines of “Live in a tiny house, drive a 20 year old car, have 1-2 kids tops, never eat out, substitute staycations for vacations, don’t go out and find free hobbies, etc etc”.

Sure, all those things will help you get to your target FIRE number of $1.25mm sooner.

But what was your goal?

It didn’t start as a goal to get some arbitrary number. Re-read that definition I posted above - have enough savings and money to:

• Afford the lifestyle you want for yourself and YOUR FAMILY

• Live life on your OWN TERMS

Does either of those great goals align with “limit your kids because they are expensive”? (BTW…they are no where near as expensive as the headline number tells you, don’t fall for that psyops - sure it can be expensive if you want it to, but the number they use is full BS and the cost of each extra kid should go down)

Does ‘living in a tiny house driving an old unsafe car and never doing anything fun’ sound like the lifestyle someone would say they want? Outside the complete weirdo introvert that doesn’t sound fun.

Does ‘never go on any vacation or find a hobby you enjoy’ seem like the lifestyle anyone wants?

And since the 4% rule is based on your post retirement spending being aligned with your working year spending, it isn’t like you retire at 50 and live a lavish life. You need to still penny-pinch.

So what started as a great, admirable goal turned into chasing some target that was set to achieve the goal and losing track of why that target was set at first.

An example in my life right now is my oldest wanted to learn spanish. We got the language learning app and the other day my oldest comes and shows how far along they are in the app. Great. So I sit down to do a lesson with them, and this kid knows almost no spanish. Literally getting almost everything wrong.

Turns out the app gives you a certain amount of wrong answers before your attempts go to 0, but it refills every X minutes your ability to go to the next question. So the kid has been logging on religious like clockwork to use all those attempts and keep moving forward.

The goal that was set was to learn Spanish. The target to reach that goal was to get through the app. But along the way, getting through the app became the focus and the actual goal of learning a language got lost.

Now my oldest isn’t even 10, so it is understandable. But this is basically how a lot of the financial freedom people act as well.

Living like you are poor for your entire life in pursuit of hitting some number to then continue living poor is not what the goal is.

I continue to say that you need to automate behaviors that help you reach your goal, and then enjoy the hell out of life with what is left over. That way you are actually living the life you want, on your terms. So you need to work an extra couple of years…but I’d absolutely trade more good memories and times and another kid or 3 in my 30s and 40s to work a few years more in my 50s and 60s when the kids are grown and my energy for doing fun memorable things is lower.

Do not let your target metric prevent you from achieving the goal you set.

Or to put like a philosophizer - “In pursuit of financial freedom, don’t do life in financial prison.”

And before jumping into the post, here is a reminder of ‘be careful who you take advice from. Big selling financial advice author, showing a large amount of financial illiteracy.

One of the most surest things in life, is anytime the gov’t tells you that they are going to make something more ‘affordable’ it just means things will definitely become less affordable. Which is a great segue into some of the topics of the week….