Early-retirement wannabe

Anonymous101 wrote: »

I often find that working with money pays decent money... and usually the bigger the numbers you deal with the more you get paid.

Very true in my experience. I knew a couple of guys who epitomised that.

One was a senior Merchant Banker (no snide comments about the Minder use of that phrase please ). He was good at his job and earnt a small fortune, spending his days putting together multi hundred-million deals to finance fleets of 747s and the like.

The second was an accountant and ended up as the FD for a national Building Society and the likely next CEO until they merged a few years ago, again extremely well paid as you would expect.

Unfortunately they both struggled with numbers that only had 3/4/ 5 or 6 digits, so the stuff in their personal lives, as expenditure / deals at those levels never got near their desks.

The banker used to "con" himself and add 3 or 4 zeroes to anything he was thinking about buying so he could do a cost / benefit analysis against numbers that his "trained" brain could cope with.


They are both well off still but small purchases just don't register on their comprehension, so easy to fritter away £10/20K.

AlanP wrote: »

Very true in my experience. I knew a couple of guys who epitomised that.

One was a senior Merchant Banker (no snide comments about the Minder use of that phrase please ). He was good at his job and earnt a small fortune, spending his days putting together multi hundred-million deals to finance fleets of 747s and the like.

The second was an accountant and ended up as the FD for a national Building Society and the likely next CEO until they merged a few years ago, again extremely well paid as you would expect.

Unfortunately they both struggled with numbers that only had 3/4/ 5 or 6 digits, so the stuff in their personal lives, as expenditure / deals at those levels never got near their desks.

The banker used to "con" himself and add 3 or 4 zeroes to anything he was thinking about buying so he could do a cost / benefit analysis against numbers that his "trained" brain could cope with.


They are both well off still but small purchases just don't register on their comprehension, so easy to fritter away £10/20K.

Not on that scale but I am familiar with those types of people.
I should have added that just because someone works with money and is able to manage other peoples to the scale of millions it doesn't at all mean that they have any of the skills required to manage their own.

I'm going to look into robo vacs too.

Gary1984 wrote: »

There's also the time as money aspect. If you make 6 figures but are perhaps working 50+ hours a week then your time becomes very valuable. You're going to be less inclined to spend an hour shopping around for the best car insurance or drive to Aldi when Waitrose can deliver and so on.


So it might appear from the outside that the person is bad with money. But it may just be that they value convenience and perhaps some more expensive luxuries in their limited non-working time over the additional money.


All of this is compatible with retiring early if you're making good money, as long as you can scale back again once retired.

Absolutely. Its about being mindful. I always remember my father refusing to do any decorating at home because he could work overtime. He would earn sufficient within a few hours to pay a professional to do the painting which would have taken him 2 or 3 days had he done it himself.
That is totally different from someone deciding to spend all of their salary on ridiculously over the top cars, watches and handbags etc when they aren't investing into a pension.

MallyGirl wrote: »

never going to happen in this house - there are already far too many videos on the internet of people who mix dogs and robo vacs and poop. Dogs are housetrained but there is always that chance ...
I'll stick to the old fashioned way.

Unless robovacs can move furniture to vacuum the room properly then they seem like a pointless expense.