[exergy]

There is most certainly a category of people who cannot save at all because some combination of life factors lead them up shit creek, but there are plenty of low income people who could do with a lesson or two from Mr. Money Mustache. He has various case studies involving low income people and there are legions of journal entries on his forums where people earning pittances have nevertheless saved enough to be secure. Many have saved enough to retire early.

Nothing is one-size-fits-all of course, but I'd much rather be surrounded by those kinds of 'can-do' types who don't sit around waiting for life to come to them.

[falcolas]

Mr. Money Moustache is a terrible example. He (and his wife) had a $200k+ job within a year or two out of college. He is still working. He is making money off his website and as a motivational speaker. He has to spend a significant amount of time managing his investments to ensure that they keep an average of over 4% return.

MMM's lifestyle works well for MMM, because of his circumstances. Those circumstances don't easily carry over to the general populace.

[shantly]

Where I fell off the MMM train, within hours of discovering it, was a post about healthcare costs on the individual market where he wrote about how cheap they could actually be...

- If you had enough money in the bank to cover an extremely high family deductible for a year without it causing serious pain, if something bad happened, AND ALSO

- Two adults either of whom could, in months if not weeks, land a job with decent to excellent pay and a much better family insurance coverage, so there's almost no risk of having to pay that high deductible more than once, worst-case scenario is one of you has to work for a while.

Like yeah, no shit buddy, if you have in demand skills and are already rich health care can be cheap. Stuff's cheaper for the rich, news at 11. Thanks for the advice.

Then what really got me were the people in his comments section (can't recall if he was down there too, but he certainly didn't discourage it) shitting on anyone who even ever so timidly pointed out that this advice was entirely useless—no part of it actionable—for people who were still trying to become FIRE-tier rich, despite its being presented as generally useful advice and a tone of "I don't get why people complain about health care costs, what dummies!" throughout the post.

[journalctl]

“Coming up at 11, rich people don’t understand why poor people don’t just stop being poor.”