I'm currently at a crossroads for how I want to spend my next few years. For context I'm 33 and considering whether or not to purchase a vehicle after being car free for 12 years. I rent a 600 sq...
I'm currently at a crossroads for how I want to spend my next few years. For context I'm 33 and considering whether or not to purchase a vehicle after being car free for 12 years.
I rent a 600 sq foot apartment downtown and walk, run or bike everywhere with the occasional trip on transit. I fill up my free time with low cost activities like gaming, magic (the gathering), disc golf, and usually one paid activity like karate or climbing. I enjoy getting out to the mountains to hike when I can get a ride with a friend or meetup group.
I'm pretty content day to day, I have a good friend group, and it feels great knowing I only have to work for 12-17 more years while I am still young enough to enjoy retirement (If I keep my 50% savings rate). I do still splurge occasionally with a few weeks of overseas vacation.
I am considering getting a car as I feel it would allow me to:
- Go hiking more often, and on my terms. Most of the hiking groups I join are 10-20 people going extremely slowly. I run in a 100 mile trail run relay every year and a vehicle would allow me to train more and see how much I can push my body. Running a 50km, 50 miler, 100km, and maybe 100 miles would be goals that I can see myself training towards.
- Provide rides for people out to the mountains. The most luck I have had in meeting new people is through hiking groups, and being on the provider end and being known as someone that regularly hosts I feel can generate a lot more clout, and is seen as more attractive for the purposes of asking people out for dates afterwards if we bonded during the hike.
- Visit family and work remotely more often. I live 500km away from family, but my work allows me to work from anywhere within 1 or 2 timezones, so I could make 1-3 week trips to visit family and work during the day.
However I have the following reservations:
- Getting a vehicle I feel is a dangerous slope of lifestyle creep. Likely at least $3-5k in yearly expenses on top of the purchase cost, pushing retirement at least a few years back
- Getting a vehicle purely for pleasure as I work from home goes against my current frugal nature. What if I don't feel like hiking every single weekend? Sometimes I like just staying in a playing some games or working on a side project. What if I get an injury or it ends up being too smoky?
- The opportunity cost. Is this the best way I would want to spend my money to enjoy life more if I was dedicated to spending it? I could instead spend months in South America doing a bunch of awesome hiking and traveling there.
Has anyone else that was on track for an early retirement give in and decide to start spending more 10+ years out? I currently don't know what I want my retirement to look like, and a house and family is a huge question mark that I feel is so far off as the longest I have dated someone is just 2 months.
I used to spend a lot of time looking through https://www.worldometers.info/.
It seems the site you gave has a bit more statistics on a per-country basis which is neat. It would be a lot easier to look through it with a few UI updates like adding commas to the population instead of 8217507421.
However https://rumkin.com/ just seems to be a passion project with a guy building whatever they want to which means you can't polish everything 100%, and this is a cool project!