[ixacto]

Student loans are stupid unless taken for CS or Medicine. Otherwise the military or community college is just fine. Don't follow your passion unless you have a trustfund with >1mm and can pay for college.

It's not that hard, you put 23k/yr total in the roth IRA & Roth 401k in VFIAX. I do not work in the tech industry anymore and am still doing this, just stop eating out, live cheap.

Compound this over 40-45 years and you and I are multimillionares.

[Frondo]

The military is fine until you're sent to Afghanistan and you're assigned to missions where you end up killing people. They're dead, and you're messed up for a long, long time. Happened to a couple friends of mine. One of them is de facto permanently disabled (though refuses help from the system itself), bounces from one job to the next, spends every waking moment high, because of the things he did over there.

As for the rest, asking someone to live cheap until they're 65, as a way to compensate for systemic malfunction, ehh...nope, let's get political and fix the system.

[ap22213]

Many of my friends and some relatives joined the armed forces in the early 90s. The world seemed relatively safe then, trending upwards, and it seemed like a stable path to a middle class life.

Then the never-ending wars came. And, many of these people now have serious injuries and most have PTSD. They came back changed.

Now, I would never let a relative join the armed forces. Maybe it was a heroic thing to do at one point; I don't know. But, nowadays they're exploited and used carelessly for missions of dubious purpose.