[Jetrel]

Yeah, this is smart.

The most dangerous thing about debt is the tacit assumption you can keep making money as a functional adult. Full stop.

If you pay attention to the life stories of everybody who lives around you, that's actually a very dangerous assumption - it's about as dangerous and unreliable as a farmer assuming he'll never, ever, have crop failure. Some really informal guesstimation for me actually gives kinda comparable rates - 1/10 or 1/5 chances of it blowing up, every year. Just this very year, in fact, I've watched it blow up on half of my coworkers as they got laid off in the pandemic. They may have to default on their mortgages - loans that assumed the "working adult" party would just go on uninterrupted.

Yikes.

Debt can be useful, but man, people really need to only "sail out of sight of land" with a damn good reason. Don't just do it casually to pay for routine things like houses and cars.

[seem_2211]

Yeah that's 100% the truth. You also have to assume that multiple things happen at the same time - what happens if you buy a house two weeks before you get laid off at work and that's swiftly followed by your wife finding out that she's pregnant. Suddenly having 6 months worth of cash in the bank gives you a TON of breathing room.

The more we specialize, the more life becomes fragile, and the smaller the gains become. A Formula One car is incredibly fast, but the amount of attention and money each car requires is orders of magnitude higher than say a Ferrari road car, which is comparatively simple to manage.