u/Empty_Phrase9214

I'm struggling with the tradeoff between investing a lot now vs. being able to spend on experiences while I still can (Die With Zero, etc.), and I'm hoping to get some outside perspectives from the community. This is where I currently stand:

Personal: 30, unmarried (not planning to), no kids (not planning to), currently renting and living alone, HCOL area

Income: 96k from main job, about 8k from irregular side hustle. I basically operate as though my income is only 96k and treat the side income as a surprise bonus that all gets invested after accounting for self-employment tax.

Expenses: About 35k

Debt: None (no mortgage, no car, no student loans, always pay off credit cards)

Assets: 332k in investments, all intended for FI/retirement. Additional 16k emergency fund (working on building this up slightly higher; it's lower than usual because I recently moved across states). So, total net worth = 348k.

Inputs to assets:

• Maxing out 401k (24.5k)
• Maxing out Roth IRA (7.5k)
• Maxing out HSA (I contribute 3.1k, employer contributes 1.3k)
• Employer contributes 10% of my salary (9.6k) to my 401k. This is a contribution, not a match, so it's independent of what I put in.
• I contribute whatever is leftover at the end of each month to a taxable brokerage account. This varies, especially because my side hustle is lumpy, but it comes out to around 10k for the year.
• Total annual inputs to assets: 46k guaranteed, plus maybe an additional 10k-ish (see above)

Here's what this means for a typical month, if I ignore my side hustle income which is hard to plan for:

• Gross pay: 7.4k (I have 26 paychecks a year instead of 24, and it's easier to budget for the amount I actually receive most months rather than treating this as the 8k it technically averages out to over the year)
• 1.4k in tax including state/local (I try to adjust my withholding throughout the year to account for my total tax burden including side income, and this is the best average that I can currently guess)
• 2.9k in expenses
• 2.9k to my 401k, Roth IRA, and HSA
• This leaves essentially $200/month that I can reliably count on for anything "extra" I might want to add to my budget, like eating out or saving for a vacation. The exception would be if it happens to be a lumpy side hustle month or a magical 3-paycheck month, but I usually try to plan large irregular expenses for those months anyway, so I'm never seeing huge sums of money leftover.

With around 9x my expenses invested at age 30, I've been feeling like maybe I can afford to invest slightly less, in order to allow myself to spend just a little more - not a ton, just like a few thousand more each year going to discretionary spending instead of savings/investments. I haven't really been on a proper vacation since I was a kid, and I'd like to be able to do that, but that doesn't feel very within reach given how much I'm currently investing. It would also be nice to occasionally go out to eat (instead of pretty much never), or to replace some of the clothes I've had in my closet for an embarrassingly long time. Would it be a stupid financial decision to pull back given my momentum, or is that a reasonable thing for someone in my position to do?

Do we have any traditional consignment stores around here? When I was a kid (in a different state), we had a store chain that would accept gently used, “like-new” clothing to resell for very cheap prices (like as low as $3 for a pair of jeans). That was 20 years ago and not in the DMV, so I’m not expecting to find jeans for $3 anymore, but I’m looking for whatever the closest equivalent thing would be. Doesn’t need to be in Silver Spring necessarily. Anybody know of a store like this?

I’m new to the world of systems thinking, although my work is somewhat adjacent to it. “Thinking in Systems” by Donella Meadows seemed to be a common recommendation for getting started in this space, so I started there and just finished reading.

I’m having trouble understanding the hype about this book, or perhaps this entire field in general. It was well written and fine to read, but the concepts feel incredibly obvious to me - to the point where I don’t understand how people haven’t already been thinking this way their whole lives. From what I took away from it, the book essentially has these main points:

- Things affect other things. When a system’s components work together, they can become more than they were on their own. Systems depend on their inputs, outputs, and rates of change, not just their individual components.

- Big societal problems have more than one cause. Many problems are interdisciplinary. Making a change to one part of a system can have delayed or unexpected effects.

- Systems can fail in many ways. People have a lot of cognitive biases and behavioral tendencies that make group dynamics and effective governance challenging.

The whole time I was reading, my main thought was “Yes, obviously.” Are these concepts really not obvious to other people? Am I unusual in that these things seem very intuitive? I’m wondering if I’m missing some underlying meaning or if this really is the main crux of systems thinking as a field.