This Chart Is Fake

But assuming it is real, what should a young man planning for the future do with it?

First of all, cost for cars, furniture, clothes looks flatish. Computers and entertainment, CHEAP. Hospital, college, childcare, GABILLIONS. Wages in general, growing slightly higher than food and housing.

(Hold on, why is this chart fake? Because, qua Moldbug, the entire CPI structure is built on layers of leaky abstractions and shitty assumptions. For example, if Ribeye steak goes up 300%, the bean counters assume a household will substitute a cheaper cut. So the price for ‘steak’ stays flat… even as all the average family can afford is half rotted cube steak on Manager’s Special. There are many more examples.)

BUT, pretending this is kinda sorta real, you would want to avoid/mitigate the high cost increase sectors and leverage the lower cost sectors.

In other words:

• DON’T go to the hospital
• DON’T go to college
• DON’T buy textbooks
• DON’T buy childcare
• DO buy a house (there are a ton of first time homebuyer programs out there, just don’t buy a house in any once or future Congo)
• DO grow/cook more food
• BUY SOME clothes, furniture, maybe used car
• BALANCE cheap toys with free time. You can buy 3 tvs and a levitating computer orb but when will you play with them? Easy to hit 100% of leisure time fun time with a console, phone, and mid-range PC. Or just go on a road trip every few months, gas is cheap right now.

Hitting these main points will avoid the most cost inflated sections. You can also save on the costs that are closest to the trendline for wage increases, and spoil yourself with cheap to free entertainment when you need to relax.

Basically, you can massively raise your standard of living relative to income if you’re smart about it. Then you can use that extra money to start building wealth… or just drown in your favorite flavor of porn, I don’t care.

DON’T GO TO THE HOSPITAL

This one is easy and hard at the same time. I have been doing some variation of Stronglifts 5×5 for something like 5 years now:

StrongLifts 5×5: Get Stronger Lifting Weights 3x/Week

The secret sauce of this routine is that no one does it. It’s so powerful, people hallucinate a different, more useless and less boring workout in its place:

“You want to bulk up? Do Stronglifts twice a week and eat dirty.”
“So you’re saying, do isolation exercises five times a week and don’t eat, right?”

“Look, strength training works for girls too. It even works with machines. Since you’re worried about your joints, do these machines light enough for 8 reps, then add more weight when you can do 10 reps. It’ll tone all your butts, 100%.”
“Okay, so I did those exercises for 15 reps and then jogged, and like, I didn’t see any change, even after two weeks! I guess the gym isn’t for me…”

Long story short. Do squats and deadlifts. Cook ground beef and veggies in a skillet. Unless you are a birth defect…If you have a gym, a stove, a multivitamin, and an hour a week to workout, you can avoid 90% of the hospital visits. 20 different pills, a knee replacement, triple heart bypass surgery? All really fucking pricey.

Long story short. Do squats and deadlifts. Cook ground beef and veggies in a skillet. Sleep. Unless you are a birth defect…If you have a gym, a stove, a multivitamin, and an hour a week to workout, you can avoid 90% of the hospital visits. 20 different pills, a knee replacement, triple heart bypass surgery? All really fucking pricey.

A surgery or accident will still knock you out, but that’s what The American Taxpayer is for. If you get shot, go to the ER and file for bankruptcy.

Basically, the secret to not consuming healthcare services is to be FIT and COOK MEALS. Don’t boof Mountain Dew and snort sucrose, kids!

DON’T GO TO COLLEGE

This one’s pretty simple. Don’t do it.

If you want education, get a subscription to the Great Courses. If you want skills, go watch how-to videos on YouTube. (This is not a joke. How do you think these 14 year olds are doing their faces better than the pros that fly in to do makeup for the Oscars? You can learn how to build a fucking deck in a week with Youtube, and that goes for most tasks.)

If you want a job, do student projects on YouTube until you accidentally build a small company. Suddenly you have “management experience”. If you absolutely have to have some degree for the position you’re looking for, go to a community college for 2 years and transfer for the other half to cut costs.

Getting a sales job and finding some way to get “manager” on your title has a good shot of outperforming most 4-year degrees right now unless you’re in a top school on full scholarship.

DON’T BUY CHILDCARE

Childcare is a fundamentally broken market that will always cost the better part of whatever money you make instead of raising your kid… unless you are rich. Single moms are fucked… but as a young man planning for the future, consider building a life structure that eliminates paid childcare.
If you have good parents, move closer to them and let Grandma babysit a couple days a week if possible. Try to get one parent part-time. Live in a smaller place for a while to keep the budget balanced.

Public school is shitty but free. At 10 years or so they can start staying home alone if absolutely necessary, but it’s not a good idea.

This is a place where planning long term, building trust with friends, that kinda stuff would be great. The earlier you can get it lined up, the better.

HOUSING

This is one place where you can obliterate costs in a few ways. They all take some kind of work or stress, but the payoff is YUGE and it’s still a relatively high cost area, I suspect more than the chart shows.

Live with parents and SAVE that money. Split rent with roommates. Buy a house and rent out the rooms. One of the Twitter guys I read spent 10 years living in the basement of his own house and renting out the bedrooms to make New York City mortgage payments.

If you live and/or move to anywhere sane, you can buy a 2-3 bedroom with some kind of First Time Homebuyers Program and then rent/airbnb the extra bedrooms. Again, if you have reliable friends/roommates, you’re already ahead.

Something like this: https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/house-hacking-landlord-housing-trend-260061

BALANCE

Saving all this money and raising quality of life is great and all, but you know what happens if you aren’t careful?

You blow all that money like a Women’s Studies major on Seeking Arrangement.

I’ve seen plenty of people with tons of stuff and no money. And then they keep buying stuff! Life hack: don’t put a new sectional sofa on a credit card when it doesn’t even fit in your living room.

If you don’t have a plan for where that money is going to go, it’s going to get spent. Ideally it’s in a separate bank account, or invested.

BUT, looking at that CPI chart again, looks like furniture, clothes, and especially electronics are much cheaper relative to the average wage.

This matches my experience. It’s not too hard to kit out a decent wardrobe, get a couple decent pieces of furniture, and keep a budget going for nights out. And of course, video games for dayZ. Half of them are free, and the other half are going to be 20$ or less in a month.

If you start doing one of these things, you’re going to magically have another few hunned dollahs to throw around here and there. If you do all of them, you will eventually find yourself not giving a shit how much beef jerky costs.

A barista living in an apartment with student loans is broke for a LONG ASS TIME. A barista in a house with 2 renters, a backyard garden, and ‘like a grand’ in the stock market is certainly going to be living like a broke ass for several years. But they’re also going to be learning sales, property management, and building wealth in the meantime.

Unless they live in the Congo district of Minneapolis. I hear that’s literally on fire right now.