If money is power, then the point of mastering frugality and personal finance is to accumulate the power required to engineer one’s escape from that power system, without being corrupted by the medium of power itself.
On my birthday in the spring of this year I got The Call, ending a dozen years at the one company I've ever worked for. Only a few years ago, I'd be scrambling for a new full-time position at a similar firm, keen to keep the paychecks coming in before my meager emergency fund ran out.
Now, though, there is no emergency. I'm not scrambling for a job, or “cutting back” my standard of living (which costs less than the FPL so there’s not much further down it can go). I have no sense of urgency to start bringing in cash again, although I’ll need to eventually. In fact, I took two months to just wander around the West Coast with my girlfriend. The reason I was able to react so nonchalantly to job loss is because I’ve spent the past two years building an FU Lifestyle.
Let's establish some definitions.
An emergency fund is three to twelve months of lifestyle expenses that you keep on hand. The point of an emergency fund is to float you from an unanticipated job loss to securing a new one. But if you have to use the fund you are by definition in an emergency. It's going to be stressful, just not as catastrophic as if you were living paycheck to paycheck (or, god forbid, in the red). Often, an emergency fund covers bills and necessary living expenses, but any luxuries will have to be cut until a new income source is secured.
FU Money is when you have enough money that you don't have any reservations about saying “no” to anything you don’t want to do, and a cessation of income for even several years wouldn't trigger a dip in your standard of living. It's not full financial independence, but it's enough that you could comfortably weather even a long gap in income flow with no impact to your standard of living. The idea is that if your boss or a client asks you to do something you don't want to do, and you demur, and they say "do it or you're fired", then you have enough cash laying around to be entirely comfortable saying "FU, buddy, I'm outta here."
FU Money is accessible to very few people: successful businessfolk, lucky crytpo traders, inheritors, and the like. It tends to take an obsessive level of hustle to build up FU levels of money. Also, the emphasis with FU Money types tends to be saying FU to people, while there is an implicit acceptance of the way the system of power functions (the System, after all, pays for the yacht).
An FU Lifestyle is similar to FU Money, but with the twist of frugality. It’s where your normal cost of living is so low that even a very modest stash of cash is perfectly adequate to cover several years of no income generation with no change in standard of living. Whereas you have to be lucky or gifted to get FU Money, building an FU Lifestyle is accessible to many more people[1]. Also, the emphasis with an FU Lifestyle tends to be saying FU to the system of power dominance, while there is an implicit acceptance and compassion for people, even the ones caught up in the system of power dominance (relationships, after all, are the only true source of wealth in the world).
Charming.
The outcome of both approaches are the same—the ability to casually tell unattractive circumstances to go piss up a rope with no change to your desired standard of living—but the FU Lifestyle obviously requires far less money to achieve. All it takes is a bit of effort to get your comfortable, enjoyable, sustainable lifestyle cost down to some low level, and then wait until your war chest equals a handful of years. It's just a matter of savings rate.
Now, I’m early in this process of FU Lifestyle design. I’ve got myself some space to maneuver, and now that I have an abundance of free time on my hands, I’m turning my attention to what I want those maneuvers to actually specifically be. For someone in my circumstances, job loss isn’t a scramble so much as it is life blowing the doors of opportunity wide open. I can do anything. I intend to work through the process of figuring out what that’s going to be in the next few posts.
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[1] I hope it can go without saying that I’m not implying that building an FU Lifestyle is accessible or easy to anyone. People who are underwater, who have great financial obligations, who have no way to even create a pocket of breathing space for themselves, and/or who are exposed to systemic oppression and lack of opportunities, will find the process either enormously difficult or impossible. I am not qualified to speak to people who have the knee of the system on their neck. I am qualified to speak to people who currently benefit just enough from the system to have a little maneuvering room, who have a realistic shot at changing their circumstances such that they can stop contributing so much to the system that has its knee on other people’s necks, and maybe even scrape together enough freedom and power to Do Something about that system of neck-kneeling power. “I got bills to pay” and “I’m super busy” are excuses for passivity in the face of a dysfunctional and oppressive system. An FU Lifestyle serves to remove that excuse.[2]
[2] The not so well hidden subtext of all of this frugality stuff, of course, is that the point isn’t actually about building a fun-filled and self-centered carefree life. Anyone who pulls off being fun-filled and self-centeredly carefree all the time in 2021 is probably kind of an asshole, or hasn’t checked the news since 1995. The point of all this stuff is to 1) stop being part of the problem and 2) start being part of the solution, whatever that is.[3]
[3] I happen to think that step 1 is in fact step 1, meaning, with this sort of thing at least, you have to unfuck yourself before you can unfuck anything else. I’ve seen too many people trying to change the system before they’d managed to change themselves adequately, and the results were dysfunctional to say the least. I suppose a nicer way of saying it is that you must first be the change you want to see in the world[4], but I’m a bit fatigued from being nice all the time, and since I’ve leveraged my privilege to build an FU Lifestyle for myself I don’t have to be nice to the system if I don’t want to. (See what I did there?)
[4] That’s Ghandi, of course.