[charlespwd]

Hi, I've been a lurker here for some time now. I rarely ever comment on stories because, well, I have better things to do. But now, I really need to broaden my perspective. I just don't get it.

*Disclaimer : I am young (23), broke but happy.

This past year, I spent four months in Asia travelling. I rock-climbed for a while, tried bungee, canyon swing, diving, trekking and the motorcycle. I was able to afford all that on my student's salary working and studying for my degree. I met amazing people and I'm just excited about everything since.

There's been a lot of discussion lately about the 80 hours work weeks and quite frankly, I just don't get it! I did work 66 hours work weeks this past fall for my honours thesis. I started getting anxiety attacks. It wasn't healthy.

I don't mean to make a point. I want to hear some. I want to understand how some of you do it, and, more importantly why. I keep thinking that "Hey I was able to have this experience with less than 20k a year. Imagine what I could do with the salary of a `real` job! (Or freelancing)"

Why do you do it?

[jakejake]

People with children are of course telling you that you are naive but I think your point of view is just as valid as anybody else's. If you have a very low overhead, and don't develop a taste for expensive things then you can live comfortably on a tiny income. I had a similar phase after college for about one year where I had dirt-cheap rent. I did odd-jobs such as house-painting, did about whatever I wanted and was actually saving money. It was a leisurely, comfortable year but of course I did not have many luxuries.

Then I moved to a big city and my entire savings was depleted almost instantly. I had to work two jobs to pay my bills with barely any time or money to do anything but work. It sucked really bad for about two years until I started moving up and earning a salary that allowed me to quit my second job.

Basically, though, everybody talking about their bills, mortgage, tuitions, etc. These are lifestyle choices and they require a certain amount of income to maintain. There's all kinds of reasons for making these choices. Because you genuinely want that life, because your spouse wants that life, because your friends are doing it, because that's what "normal" people do, etc. Some people want a lifestyle that they can only afford by working insane hours. Some people are able to afford all of that stuff with a 40 hour work week.

Society does tend to pressure you into doing these things in order to feel like you have "grown up" which I know all too well. But, there's many ways to live life and they don't all require 80 hours of work per week.

[chris_mahan]

Because I have a 8 year-old boy, and a wife who takes care of him well.

I want him to have a great education, wide knowledge and experience, and be ready to face life well, be kind to others, be equipped to work hard and make good money, be a good husband and a good father.

That takes lots of time and money, and is completely worth it.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

So you work 80 hours a week, meaning that you have almost no time to enjoy life with your kid... so that he can grow up to be like you and do the same thing, and presumably educate their children to do the same as well.

So your ideal of how things should be is to have a saga of people working their asses off, in theory for the good of the next generation, but in practice for nothing because the next generation will work their asses off for the good of the next one, etc.

Maybe it's culture shock (I'm a European) but honestly, how can anyone think that is "worth it"?

[chris_mahan]

Well, I don't "work" 80 hours a week.

I work 40 hours a week.

I commute 8 hours a week.

I volunteer (he comes with me sometimes) 2 hours a week.

Lunch breaks: 5 hours.

(so far 50 hours)

Then I do all the routine stuff that needs to be done: Grocery shopping, hardware store, car maintenance, etc.

Then I spend another 15 hours a week working on extra stuff (learning, following the news, doing stuff for clients, coding).

Then there is the social events, the school events, church on Sunday, basketball practice on Tuesday at 7 and games on Saturday at 1 or 2.

Then there is sleep, and making dinner, cleaning the house, etc.

In the end, there is about 10 hours a week for just me and him time (watch movie, play games, go out and explore the world, park, read together, etc)

For me? I'm lucky if I get 2 hours a week for me. I'm even more lucky if they're contiguous.

(No time for TV, you notice, and precious little for computer games.)

[enjo]

I commute 8 hours a week.

There's an easy way to get a bunch of hours a week back.

[chris_mahan]

Except my boss isn't happy with that concept.

[ryan_123]

Its just that, he wants his son to have a better life than him. Thats why the toil. He wants to provide him better means, hence the 80 hr weeks.

Yes it'd depend on what you want from your life. Priorities are different for all.

[jvanloov]

The intention is noble.

However, chances are that the son looks up to his father, thinks his father's life is normal and how it should be, and will (unconsciously) copy it.

If that happens, will he really have the better life that his father worked for and wanted him to have?

[Infinitesimus]

Perhaps that ventures into the topic of parenting. Ideally, the parent would/should communicate to the child that the sacrifice is not idea and explain the tradeoffs, cautioning on the dangers of the parent's chosen lifestyle

[ryan_123]

When you provide him with great education, there is high probability that he realizes his father's wishes and aspires to fulfill them. Im just guessing he would be smart enough to understand his father.

[Im_Talking]

I certainly understand why you say these things as I have 2 kids.

But do you also want your boy to dream, and try something noble and possibly fail but get back up, to experience as much as the world as he can, and to understand that limitations are self-made? Of course, you do.

So you tell him all this, but he may look at you and say "Well Dad, if you want me to do all these things, why didn't you do them?".

[charlespwd]

Noble, makes lots of sense.

Thanks

[dwd]

Having a family.

Some numbers:

- The average annual mortgage repayment is over $20,000/yr.

- Private/Independent school tuition for one child will also cost you more than $20,000/yr by year 12 and continue through University for degrees in Medicine, Law and Engineering. Multiply that by the average 2.x children.

Add in living expenses, utilities, rates, sports, entertainment and trips, a tax rate that has you working for the Government for almost half the year and the required family income quickly jumps to six figures which is where the extra hours come in. Paid overtime, side projects, freelancing, second jobs; whatever it takes to give the kids the best start in life you can stretch to afford.

I do sometimes wonder whether home schooling them might have worked out better.

[lastres0rt]

"Home Schooling" is code for "parent who doesn't work outside the house (and the income that provides)".

Public Schooling is the only way to not burn yourself up, and to get that you have to live in the right districts.

[dwd]

My partner works mostly from home, does the school runs and grosses double I get working for a corporate. The kids are largely where they are (top of their year level in one of the best Independent schools in the state) because of the effort (home schooling) she put in when they were toddlers.

Public schools in Australia generally lack the culture for kids to achieve academically without it being an uphill battle against their peers. It's that environment and being around like-minded families that you pay for.

[russgray]

I don't work 80 hours a week, but my expenses are way above $20k a year. Why? Because the things I want and value cost a lot more than that. I don't want to spend 4 months in Asia travelling, I want to live in a house I love, near to all my family and friends, and bring up my children here. Travel will never be anything more to me than a brief distraction, not a lifestyle.

[jvanloov]

We have 2 toddlers; double-income household. We live at the edge of a small city center in Belgium.

Originally, we both worked full time, lived in a small house, and had income to spare to save some and do some small-scale travelling within Europe. With no kids, there was not really a lot of stress and "busyness" for us; the household chores had to be done in the evenings and weekends, but other than that we didn't feel overwhelmed. (Although it sometimes did feel that way anyway.)

After the first kid was born, my girlfriend started working 80% instead of 100%, to cope better with the additional tasks imposed by caring for the child. The second kid added to the child care burden, leading us to delegate some of the cleaning chores to a household helper (4hrs every 2 weeks), which is not for free. The situation stabilized, but we do feel overwhelmed by the tight planning of each day, and chores left to do in the evenings and weekends.

Weekends are not always relaxing any more: even family visits have a tendency to start feeling like a burden if they displace other things that you have to do, and if several of them queue up in the same weekend or if several consecutive weekends become fully booked this way. Also, we try to build in "down"time in the weekend to let the kids play or to do something with the 4 of us, but this becomes more difficult with all the other engagements competing for time.

I too have requested a contract change to work 90% instead of 100%, so that I can move some of the chores from the evening and weekend to a weekday. This will hopefully leave us with more relaxed evenings and weekends.

I realize that in some sense we're lucky that our finances permit us to trade some income for more time off work. I think (hope) we're approaching a OK balance between work, child care, "obligatory" off-work stuff, and "voluntary" off-work stuff.

(Note: 100% means 40hrs/wk here)

[lukego]

> Why do you do it?

Not everybody does. You sound like you might enjoy Mustachianism. That's the idea of keeping a lifestyle much like yours and using the low costs to work less, even while "growing up" and raising a family. http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/

[ryan_123]

but this money mustache was working to retire ealry right ?Though,he most probably will live the same way even after retirement.

[wpietri]

Broke gets old. Being thrifty is hard. It's easy to judge yourself by comparison with your peers' improving lives. Loss aversion means that any improvement you make in your material circumstances tends to stick. And once you start paying more attention to your circumstances, it's surprisingly hard to always choose not to improve them.

It's certainly possible to keep a minimalist, low-burn lifestyle. But it's hard. At 23, you're at the easy end of it. I don't think it's that most people really say, "Hey, I'd like a busy, harried lifestyle in exchange for nice material circumstances." It's that they don't have a guiding passion or enormous discipline helping them say no to every single physical comfort or material pleasure that society offers them.

[ovulator]

How were you able to do it? I don't condone the 60-80 work week, and myself will never go over 40. (I do have side project of my own though). If I were to take 4 months off to travel to Asia I would have a $0 income when I came back, because I would have been let go. When I was in school I had to work to pay for my tuition and books which meant I wasn't traveling anywhere. I took out loans and had aid, but if I took out more, that would mean that I was just mortgaging my future leisure time that I would have to make up earning that money back at interest.

[da02]

Pardon the random questions: Did you stay in hostels or family-run hotels? Have you written about this somewhere? What jobs did you do for the money for the trip?

[charlespwd]

Both, and guesthouses and homestay (one of the best experience of my life).

I maintained a travel diary but travel blogging isn't something that interested me much. And I worked as an intern turned into a web developer before leaving.

[da02]

Thanks. Good luck on your next adventure(s).

[sliverstorm]

It's easy to get by for cheap if you are not picky about where you live.

I don't work 80 hours a week, but I also would have trouble getting by on less than $20k/year, largely thanks to cost of living. I am bound to a limited set of locations by the career I want to have.

[erobbins]

Well, I have expensive hobbies. However, I only work enough to be able to afford them. 40 hours a week is plenty... but I do have to work those 40 hours.

[icelancer]

I see you don't have kids. If you never have them, you can live like that forever. If you have them, I hope you save your post and look back on it and laugh.

[charlespwd]

I don't know... Obviously you do. As to whether I should laugh about it or not: That's a different discussion.

During that trip I have met lots of different types of people. Relevant to this discussion would be the ones travelling with their kids, and a grown up kid who was raised for a couple years on a sail boat (turned out to become the youngest surgical clinic manager in his home country, was also a lobbyist before that and now refused an even more prestigious job for the sakes of travelling for a while)

This is anecdotal evidence. True. But it is/was enough for me to question how we live, raise children, and the norms.

Obviously, I don't intend to keep going with only 20k a year. I'm finishing my degree soon. What I'm actually really questioning is anything beyond 40 hours a week. Maybe I'm young and hopeful, but I'm sure there are ways. Different ways. And they may even have better returns than what we are used to. I'm going to try at least.

[Marcus316]

I tend to agree with you about 40h/week for work. I have been pretty lucky in life and have never had to work more than 40 regular hours in a week (barring some reasonable on-call time, of course; nothing too exceptional). I have advanced to a point where my compensation is enough to pay for a decent lifestyle for myself, my wife and my two children. Now, my hope is that I can (over time) scale back my work hours rather than increase my compensation.

I don't travel much (I don't have much of an urge to), but I tend to live pretty leisurely, even with two young children, a house to pay for, a number of bills, etc. I don't have every luxury my friends have, but I tend to not need those things (and I do have the luxuries I want to have).

That all being said, I live in Canada and not the US, and some of the descriptions I hear about work-life south of the border gives me chills. I suppose we're not much better up here, really, but I'm happy to say I can personally get by without over-stressing my workload (and, of course, that's probably just because of my personal circumstances and whatever luck has befallen me).

[Dewie]

> If you have them, I hope you save your post and look back on it and laugh.

And maybe he can experience feeling this fantastic smugness.