It’s the weekend of enjoying your journey to financial independence!
A FIREstarter style enjoyable and inexpensive night in (jooooke!)
FI Fighter writes a guest post at Retire by 40 on Saving for a Better Future Doesn’t Mean Having to Sacrifice Today – Here we have some great tips on Travel hacking (getting free flights and hotels), making smart choices when eating out, and finding cheap yet rewarding hobbies.
Finding friends with similar goals
Whilst this is great advice, I have some great reservations about actually being able to find anyone within my area who is actually trying to acheive financial independence in the same way we are, and if there are then would we actually like them? I’ll use Mr Money Mustache’s seethestats.com statistics to do some rough estimation of the numbers. With around 30,000 UK readers of that site, let’s say that there are at least double and then some of 100,000 UK peoples that are interested in reaching Financial Independence mainly through the use of frugality, investing, and generally bossing all areas of your life through continuous self-improvement and learning. That works out at 0.15% of the population. So in my town of around 100,000 we are looking at a 150 people.
Woaaaah hang on a minute!
That’s actually pretty cool.
There are possibly 150 other FIREstarters running around my town, but the problem is I have no idea who they might be!
There are a few ways I can think of to find these people:
- Set up a Facebook group
- Post something on the MMM or similar forum to see if there is anyone out there
- Local ad in the paper or online classifieds
Now, I can’t do 1: If I started joining or creating Facebook groups about early retirement my work friends will surely have questions. theFIREstarter is purely an incognito project. I really doubt the efficacy of making a post on forums but I guess it’s worth a go, and I am almost certain classifieds would yield even less of a chance of response.
I guess the best I can hope for is that this website shoots into the upper echelons of blog rockstar-dom and I can just arrange my own meet-ups through here, in a similar fashion to which the great moustachioed one himself does?
Keeping friends with dissimilar goals
The obvious alternative is just to keep your existing friends.
This seems like just as good an option to me… I like my friends, this is probably the main reason why we are friends in the first place in fact.
I wrote a fairly lengthy comment at Root of Good post which pretty much sums up my thoughts about this, so here it is in a slightly edited form:
As many have pointed out it makes perfect sense to choose the cheaper of two options if they will both produce the same amount of enjoyment.
I have very close friends that have almost completely the opposite mind-set, i.e. they will deliberately pick the more expensive option due to it’s perceived greater value. It’s the definition of crazy to me. Sometimes the only perceived extra enjoyment I can tell they are getting out it is bragging to us about how much it cost.
It does make things awkward sometimes when we try to arrange things but we have taken the initiative to organise cheaper activities first and straight out spurning anything that is silly expensive that they organise. I think they perceive we are poor because of this but this is fine with me, I can almost assure you our net worth is greater (not that I’m getting into a d**k measuring competition!).
I agree that you have to pick your battles; even though I personally completely disagree with the majority of their lifestyle choices, and drop the odd comment (usually in a “gentle ribbing” jovial sense, they do the same to us about ours of course!) I respect their choices, I would not seriously challenge them on anything (it would be pointless anyway) and I genuinely think we’ll remain good friends for a long time because of this mutual respect.
So to summarize, my simple advice to keep your existing friends who may be a bit looser in the wallet department is:
- Be the initiators of social gatherings – Once a precedent of low cost socializing is set, you will often find that your example is followed!
- Politely avoid high cost events – It helps if you are generally busy people as we are, as you usually already have something potentially booked in. If not, you can always just use the old “we can’t afford it” line, which can annoy some people but there is no real come back (unless you are going out and buying a brand new Beemer the following week, which I am assuming you are not)
- Attend the odd medium cost event every so often – If you spurn every single event someone organises, they will quickly realise that your friendship is a bit of a one way street. People don’t like this (with good reason). Make a real effort that you attend every one of their low cost events (dinner round theirs) and also roll out the barrel and go to a “medium cost” event every so often. This should keep most reasonable people happy.
- Don’t ever question their way of life in a serious manner. In my experience this will only lead to an argument, which really is unnecessary and unproductive! If you want to “help them out” the best thing to do is to set the example, and occasionally drop a few hints ‘n’ tips – if the situation arises of course.
One final note: there is obviously a limit to this. I have plenty of friends who are still going out 3 times a week getting smashed up and these friendships have faded over time as my goal to FI has become a stronger desire. No bad terms or anything like that and I still see them every so often for the odd blow out, but to continue to see someone who is only ever seen down the pub regularly becomes untenable (for me at least) if I am trying not to p*ss all of my money up against the wall 🙂
Have I missed any obvious tips out?
How do you go about keeping your spendy friends?
Or have you just cut them out of your life and found new friends with similar goals?
_________
Further related reading:
Enjoying the process @ Simple Economist
Protecting your Money Mustache from Spendy Friends @ Mr Money Mustache
One thing that has led to friends that don’t spend a ton of money is living in a lower income area. I don’t mean the “hood” or a council estate (I think that is what you call low income public housing in the UK and it has a negative connotation??). Just a below median price area. The people tend to be a little less spendy than in an area where everyone has maxed out their mortgages or rent payments to get all the house they can.
We have met a number of friends in our neighborhood who don’t spend a ton of money and actually like free events. We have kids, too, so that means free events are even bigger money savers (instead of paying admission fees or buying food/drinks x5).
It isn’t that I shun spendy friends, just that I tend to hang out more when events are free.
Justin @ RootofGood recently posted…The Fun Part of Trying to Hit Financial Freedom
That makes total sense Justin! I love a good free event 🙂
We don’t live in a high income area but people simply don’t tend to socialise with people in their neighbourhoods by default, in the UK in my experience.
A sad state of affairs indeed, but people don’t tend to move much compared to the US in my opinion, and even if so the distances involved are obviously much much smaller so staying in touch with people in your “old area” is much easier so you have less incentive to get to know your neighbours.
Maybe this changes massively when kids are brought into the equation as you instantly have something in common to get chatting about and naturally have more “forced” social interaction (local school, play groups, etc).
Reading your site is slowly persuading me to have kids in fact as there seems to be far more benefits than I had ever imagined! 🙂
Anyway I digress, about council estates (good knowledge by the way 🙂 , although I wouldn’t really describe them as “the hood” by default, some of them definitely are though!). I have friends and family who live on council estates and some of them are the ones going out living it up every weekend (go figure).
Maybe the biggest difference between us is not living in different countries but hanging around with people who have compared to those who do not have kids?! (Funny enough, a few of the people I could have put in the “spendy” category as I described in the main article and comment on your site have recently had kids, and have noticeably changed some of the spending behaviour already).
We don’t really have friends with similar goals (early retirement). But one by-product of having a blog is that you do get to meet a lot of other people who do have the same goals. That’s been the most enjoyable part of creating my blog! Glad you stopped by, I’ll be checking in here now too.
Kay @ Green Money Stream recently posted…Getting Into the Spirit – Tips for a Festive and Frugal Holiday
Yea I am finding that, it’s great conversing with like minded souls I have to say!
Haven’t found any in the UK as of yet but the search continues… 🙂
One of my friend quit his engineering job a few years before I did. His income plunged, but his quality of life was markedly improved. I saw that it was possible and pulled the plug too. It’s good to have friends with similar goals.
Oh wow, MMM has just 50% more pageviews that I do. That’s surprising. We actually have more unique visitors. I guess his readers are more obsessive.
Thanks for linking to RB40!
No problems!
That’s good to hear about your friend! I really think I could survive… nay live a better life, with far less money, on the provision that I had far more free time. We shall see in about 5 years I suppose 🙂
That MMM stats page is interesting isn’t it!
Ooops. My bad. MMM has more pageviews per month than I do per day. Jeezz… I thought
Our cities can seem so big and full of people who don’t think like us. I have found lots of people with similar goals online with their sites, but nobody in my city (yet). I do seem a few likeminded souls out in this 10 degree weather with me on their bikes though!
Ahh that’s a good way of thinking about it. Plenty of cyclists about in my area even in December, I wonder if they are firestarters in the making!
I have tons of spendy friends… they know me as the cheap one… I make my goals clear and let them know that I’ll go with them places because I enjoy spending time with them, but I’m not going to hit up expensive dinners on a regular basis because it’s not in my budget. So they can hang out with me other times, grab coffee or come over for dinner. But if they need to do an activity that will cost me too much money they should plan on doing it without me – no hard feelings, just not on my priority list…