This is impressive. This should also not be necessary to discharge a student loan debt obligation. While I respect this dude's discipline, I worry the takeaway might be "millennials should spend more than half a decade saying no to all happiness to have a chance at an economically viable life" -- as opposed to "you should have a debt payoff plan and also advocate for structural changes that make colossal student debt unlikely if not impossible"
I mean, it’s not strictly necessary. Some people are just into hyper optimization or being extremely frugal, it’s like a hobby. For example I’ve heard a lot of the old (almost all Chinese) ladies who pick up depositable recyclables in the Bay Area are pretty wealthy or solidly middle class. They just do it because it gives them something to do and is cash flow positive.
There are also people making >$200k/yr who live in cars and get all their food/showers at their tech employer. Sure you could write an article about them regarding how they’re doing it to save up enough for a down payment. But it’s really just a way to save slightly more money; they could live in a studio and buy their own food, it would just maybe reduce their saving rate by $3k/mo
I feel like this is hard to explain, but to demonstrate that some people (also me, but I’m not that hardcore) are just into this, there are tons of video games where a main part of the gameplay is “min maxing” like this. For example people will spend dozens of hours figuring out how to increase xp or money per hour, then hundreds of hours grinding out their new method, just for fun. The people like the guy from the article doing this are just doing the real-life version of min maxing.
Edit: I had a totally different response before, but this felt more important to say:
I don't get the outrage over this. Like 'this' is indicative of a horrible society somehow. That someone finding an awesome loophole in a business model using it to their advantage, helping them make a financial investment in themselves, is somehow a horrible thing.
Comments
This is impressive. This should also not be necessary to discharge a student loan debt obligation. While I respect this dude's discipline, I worry the takeaway might be "millennials should spend more than half a decade saying no to all happiness to have a chance at an economically viable life" -- as opposed to "you should have a debt payoff plan and also advocate for structural changes that make colossal student debt unlikely if not impossible"
I mean, it’s not strictly necessary. Some people are just into hyper optimization or being extremely frugal, it’s like a hobby. For example I’ve heard a lot of the old (almost all Chinese) ladies who pick up depositable recyclables in the Bay Area are pretty wealthy or solidly middle class. They just do it because it gives them something to do and is cash flow positive.
There are also people making >$200k/yr who live in cars and get all their food/showers at their tech employer. Sure you could write an article about them regarding how they’re doing it to save up enough for a down payment. But it’s really just a way to save slightly more money; they could live in a studio and buy their own food, it would just maybe reduce their saving rate by $3k/mo
I feel like this is hard to explain, but to demonstrate that some people (also me, but I’m not that hardcore) are just into this, there are tons of video games where a main part of the gameplay is “min maxing” like this. For example people will spend dozens of hours figuring out how to increase xp or money per hour, then hundreds of hours grinding out their new method, just for fun. The people like the guy from the article doing this are just doing the real-life version of min maxing.
Edit: I had a totally different response before, but this felt more important to say:
I don't get the outrage over this. Like 'this' is indicative of a horrible society somehow. That someone finding an awesome loophole in a business model using it to their advantage, helping them make a financial investment in themselves, is somehow a horrible thing.
Its the circumstances that drives someone to NEED to do these things, THAT is what is bad
If I climb onto my roof and knock down my ladder, then I'm not a victim when I NEED to jump down.
Yes he had student loans, but I doubt that that was his primary driver for finding a food hack.