kcowan wrote:Davis
I think it is a desire to keep this forum open to various people of all earnings classes. While everyone can relate to someone who lives on $30k/year, some people here express disdain for people for people that decide to live on more, even though they LBYM. (If I was earning $400k and now live on $150K, as long as it is below my SWR earnings in retirement, I am good!
Ken, the point that I was making is that not every thread has to appeal to every reader. If a thread doesn't interest someone, he or she should skip over it instead of trying to stop other people from discussing it (unless it is inappropriate like something pornographic, racist, antisemitic, etc.) Shutting down a thread seems to be contrary to the spirit of keeping the forum open to different groups.
I do get your point. I see in this forum and in early-retirement.org a knee-jerk reaction from some contributors that if you have a higher income than they do then you'll be fine and don't have to worry about money.
Last year a coulple of retired friends gave us tremendous perspective on retirement by telling us what their after-tax income is each year. This was instructive not because it helps us to know how much we'll need when we retire next year, but because it made us realize that what other people spend to achieve the standard of living they want to have us largely irrelevant to what we will need to spend.
The other couple, for example, spends a lot more on housing at home than we spend, but their style if travel is very different from ours, so our spending patterns are going to be very different. After that conversation, I began to focus more on working up a detailed annual budget for our spending, and less on what the Joneses are spending.