It wasn't written "for a general audience". I and my regular readers are regularly judged negatively for not choosing to consume and go into debt like everybody else so the blog is more of a support group for those who are willing to go against the stream and actually save money so they can avoid the typical middle class problems above.

I admit, there's a bit of "I told you so"-attitude, although one quickly learns that nobody really wants to take responsibility for the poor choices they've made or for that matter are going to make. Whereas everybody is willing to attribute their good decisions to their personal genius. The general zeitgeist of the housing boom and subsequent bust illustrates this well.

You're still working against a straw man.

> "for not choosing to consume and go into debt like everybody else"

What everybody else? There's a certain contingent of people out there who have spent wildly beyond their means thanks to cheap credit, have poor fiscal responsibility, and suffer justly for it. You seem to grasp onto this and extrapolate it across all the "normals" you see.

I know a great number of people who are fiscally responsible, have no debt, are fiscally prudent, and yet do not take their frugality so far as $7000 in an RV. Many of these people have suffered through this recession, and yet you seem so glad to lump them into the "irresponsible debtors" group and just dismiss this nation's problems as entirely self-inflicted.

How utterly presumptuous. Your moralizing is not helpful, and from the blog post and your posts in this thread, you come off as smug and judgmental as those who would judge you negatively for being frugal and living your lifestyle the way you choose.

There's a gigantic swathe of middle ground between the indentured debt servant and the completely liberated, ultra-frugal. You seem to just completely ignore this and try to push as many people as you can, in your mind, towards the former extreme.

What I'm trying to say is that people who are ultra-frugal are sometimes told (insofar they don't keep it secret) that their life sucks and they're not having fun or various things about their stuff. (See examples above.) This is followed by comments about building credit and some moralizing(?) that we should be cool and spend like everybody else.

The millionaire next door [there or to be] types---the silent majority?---may get caught in the crossfire.

However, having seen this recession coming from two years away and having tried to warn people about it only to be told by some/many that there's no problem and everything is fine, etc. I can't really sympathize that much, sorry. While it may not be someone's fault for being laid off or not being able to find a job, it certainly is their fault for not having the savings to cover two years of unemployment given the known 20% risk of it. I don't feel smug about it. I feel exasperated having told people who proceeded to do nothing. And now they want my sympathy?

The Cassandra complex comes to mind. Given how I come across to you, it indicates that I'm just a poor salesman when it comes to getting my point across to your demographic.

especially when your lifestyle was enabled (albeit, in this specific instance), apparently, by public spending (grad school, postdoc, and subsidized higher education in his country of origin)

you're effectively a net neutral on the system, however, when you factor in all that society has invested in you, you're very much a net negative.

I think you can make that argument for my country of origin. They can add negative for the brain drain as far as I'm concerned. I guess the same holds for a lot of Indian or Chinese students who came to the US. As for grad school and postdocing, the way it works is that this has very little to do with training or investing. I feel I earned every cent they paid me for doing research.

Grad school and the postdoc system pretty much a cheap way for universities to get labor at 50-70% of the private market rates. Universities call grad students "students" so they can get around various labor laws and not paying for things like health insurance. The use postdocs because it's easier to lay off people compared to staff scientists.

So they hire persons with masters degrees to do grunt work for 25k/year and call them grad students. Then they hire the smart ones with PhDs for 40k/year and call them postdocs.

Basically you're put in front of a computer or in a lab and told to work on this task much like private industry except maybe your work is a bit more interesting(?) You write reports about your work called "papers" and after 4 years you write a giant progress report and call it a "PhD Dissertation". There's very little actual training or education involved in this process. Or at least not more than you find in the private sector.

It's pretty much labor like it is in private industry. I guarantee you that without grad students and postdocs, very few scientific papers would be published, because grads and postdocs are the ones doing the actual research.

When you see news of some professor discovering something, you can pretty much be sure that it was discovered at 11 in the evening by some grad student or postdoc of his. He was just the manager and subsequently in charge of public relations. That's fine BTW ... it's not like Steve Jobs single handedly built the iphone, but he still gets all the credit for it.

I myself published over 30 papers in my career, many of them first authored putting in 100 hours week a lot of the time, so I think I earned the money I made.

You can argue whether those papers are the equivalent of an $800 toilet seat, but that's a different discussion altogether. I put in the sweat equity "on the bench". I earned that money.

Professors mostly spend their time teaching, managing their workers, excuse me, "teaching" their grad students and postdocs, and writing grant proposals. Academia has the same typical structure as anywhere else. The only time you spend any meaningful effort being "educated" without giving back is as an undergraduate.

"you're very much a net negative"

Not at all. I can vouch that he's certainly has had a positive impact on my life and on the lives of those I have recommended read and follow his advice.

The nice thing about retirement is you can engage in "charitable" endeavors (which really is what his blog is basically, I see no way he can make a lot of money off of it and that's not his intention).

> ...you're very much a net negative.

Not he spends his life inspiring and educating people about how to control their finances, and make money serve them instead of the other way around. That would be a very valuable social contribution.

And yes his lifestyle is extreme, but people don't have to follow him that far to get benefit from what he says.