You are learning, but you haven't learned.

You didn't build a nest egg, you saved for a down payment.

You didn't rebuild your nest egg, you created a sinking fund for your home.

You praise yourself for not treating your home as a credit card, but your left hand is still borrowing money from yourself.

You've recognized there's an issue, but don't fool yourself into thinking you've done anything about it

This was my take too.

GP built an emergency fund, which is important, but then drained it twice for non emergencies.

A nest egg is a much larger tax advantaged holding that you don’t want to withdrawal from because you’ll have a massive tax hit. It’s also far more than a down payment, hopefully. GP had some low interest “savings” account at his bank. Poor wife, no pun intended :(

Thanks for your opinion and for your concern for my wife. She is quite happy, actually!

I have a 401(k) that I contribute to. I intend on contributing the yearly max starting next year.

Should I have contributed the annual max when I started working? Yes. I chose instead to pay off our student loans instead and enjoy life. I'm not a frugal person.

Thanks for your opinion.

Yes, I have a ways to go.

You're also right that these aren't nest eggs. I spent them on what I saved for!

Regardless, it's a start, especially for someone who never had a habit of saving before.

>>>EDIT: Sorry it was a really clever joke.

I sincerely hope that was your attempt at sarcasm.

exactly my thought.

So a random poster makes an assertion and rather than Google it and verify it yourself you throw out a request for another random poster to concur? And that concurrence you will take at face value and then believe the original assertion?

I did google it and couldn’t find anything backing up the claim.

I think it's reasonable to request the person making the assertion to back it up. It's not on the audience to either only debunk or accept the assertion. It can just be rejected.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Why is an anodyne factual claim an “extraordinary claim”? What makes that particular claim extraordinary? They didn’t claim to have discovered perpetual motion or something you can’t prove or disprove yourself, just shared a historical fact you can easily just check up on if you choose not to believe them.

>Why is an anodyne factual claim an “extraordinary claim”? What makes that particular claim extraordinary?

FWIW I tried to get AI to substantiate it and came up empty. Maybe it's not as "extraordinary" as "Obama was a reptilian alien" or whatever, but for everything else what counts as "extraordinary" depends on your prejudices, I suppose. Regardless of whether it's "extraordinary" or not, it's definitely not common knowledge and needs to be substantiated rather than asserted without evidence.

>>>Spending 18x to 20x more on something that looks exactly the same and serves the same purpose just wasn’t logical to me.

That's up there with people who brag about only smoking when they drink and vegetarians for moral reasons who eat fish.

You framed a feelings based, adherence to tradition, no basis of actual functionality as a rational, logical decision, just because there was a worse decision to be made.

Agree. Further, not sure if 'black and white' is an idiom about clarity or an attempt to inject race into it.

Disagree. Like financial independence, physical fitness in later years is something you can work towards and is well within nearly everyone's reach.

Granted, both take focus and long term discipline which people who lack both chalk up to luck.

Directly? I do not think it means what you think it means.

Hate the guy all you want, even for this, but don't try and juice it another 20% with emotional words that are ultimately incorrect.

In the 80's and 90's I was be inspired by every NASA plan they announced--new celestial body being explored, new type of craft, new rocket, new telescope. In the naughts and early 10's I still had a sense of hope and aww but was becoming jaded. Now when I see announcements like these I actually get mad.

Layoff everyone on the PR team and just do shit. When you are 95% of the way there and actually have some sort of prototype, announce a hard plan and details. No interviews, no artist renditions of shit that's never going to happen, no congratulating yourself for ideas and hopes, just get shit done--that's the best PR. James Webb and was a constant massive let down because of its continuously slipping deadlines. Years and years late and billions over budget....but then...it actually happened and it was amazing.

NASA, quit setting our expectations if you never meet them. Just do shit and let us be amazed when it happens.

Isn't the PR team really the "fundraising" team? E.g. this PR is all so that politicians continue to fund NASA and without all of this NASA would be in a much worse budget position.

I love that we ruined our escape character in language.

We now need a new way to convey to listeners that our words need to be taken literally. Perhaps the VBA method and just double the 'literally's:

I took a flaming shot of tequila and my mouth is literally literally on fire

The escape term is "actually". "My mouth is actually on fire".

I caught on but was more offended by referring to it as 'maple syrup'