Comparing or Competing?

The jour­ney to Finan­cial Inde­pen­dence is very much a soli­tary one. Every­one has dif­fer­ent vari­ables that impact the jour­ney: in debt or debt free, with kids or kid free, with a spouse (on board with FI or no) or a sin­gle­ton, home own­ers or renters. The list is endless.

And yet.

We still com­pare ourselves.

I’m guilty of it. I bet you are too.

Look­ing at oth­er peo­ple’s jour­ney to FI can do one of two things: inspire a com­pet­i­tive fire (FIRE? ha) in you or give up, say­ing “I’ll nev­er be able to get there.”

On my trip to Oma­ha, I had sev­er­al great chats with Mr. 1500. We were both run­ning in the “Invest in Your­self” 5k that Sun­day, and were trash talk­ing each oth­er before the race. Me jok­ing about him being a slow old man, and him ask­ing me how my knee (in a sup­port­ing brace) was feel­ing and if I thought I was going to be able to fin­ish the race. I did­n’t get bummed out about the race. Instead, I used his teas­ing as fuel to run a bet­ter race. I had two goals- beat him and the pack of Girl Scouts I passed right at the start line. Hap­pi­ly, I accom­plished both.

But you know what we both did­n’t do? We both did­n’t com­pare our­selves to Mrs. PoP, who beat the pants off both of us. Mr. 1500 and I knew there was no use even try­ing to com­pete with her, because nei­ther of us love run­ning like she does, nor do we run as often as we should to be com­pet­i­tive in a 5k.

The les­son I took away from this race was “It’s ok to com­pare [to peo­ple in sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tions as you].”

It would be fool­ish to com­pare my finan­cial sit­u­a­tion with the big name blog­gers out there, who are either incred­i­bly close to FI or have been FI for a num­ber of years. They’re sig­nif­i­cant­ly old­er than me (sor­ry guys, it’s true) and have a decade or more than me to accu­mu­late their stash. I can, and do, con­grat­u­late them on big mile­stones or when they accom­plish their goals. I found this real­ly cool quote online that I real­ly like that I think was made for this situation:

Com­pared to the upper ech­e­lon of the FI world, I am a raw begin­ner. I am very much in my Chap­ter One. How­ev­er, com­pared to most of the rest of the world, I very much have my “shit” togeth­er and am doing very well for myself.

Although I should­n’t (and try not to) to com­pare myself to the old­er more estab­lished blog­gers, I can and do com­pare myself to peo­ple who are in a sim­i­lar stage as me. I have a bet with one of the sub­scribers to the finan­cial inde­pen­dence sub­red­dit on who will get to the $100k mile­stone first. That kind of friend­ly com­pe­ti­tion real­ly helps me when I might oth­er­wise slack off on my goals. I feel com­fort­able com­par­ing myself to him because we earn rough­ly the same amount and are in rough­ly the same stage in life.

Anoth­er real­ly great point of com­par­i­son is the Guinea Pig exper­i­ment run by Bran­don over at Mad Fien­tist. We “start­ed” our jour­neys at rough­ly the same point. While I had a few more months under my belt with a few more $$$ in the bank, the Guinea Pig earns a slight­ly high­er salary. I earn $5810 a month while he earns $6384. How­ev­er, I get bonus­es and rais­es more often than him, which accounts for some of the fluc­tu­a­tion in my net worth num­bers. It’s been a fun rule of thumb to look at every month. Cur­rent­ly, we’re in a race for $100k, but I think he might get there just before me at this rate (stu­pid trav­el spend­ing last month!!!)

Rock­star Finance has a list of blog­gers who’ve sub­mit­ted their net worth. There’s two sides to this coin: 1) holy crap, I’m 140^th on the list. That means there are at least 139 peo­ple out there doing bet­ter than me, how will I ever go up the list, I should give up right now. OR. 2) hey, look at that! I’m beat­ing 80ish peo­ple on the list AND I have a pos­i­tive net worth! I’m doing great!

I choose the lat­ter viewpoint.

At this point, I’m doing my best to jump as many spots on the list as pos­si­ble. I rec­og­nize the num­bers don’t get updat­ed fre­quent­ly, so I might be com­par­ing my new num­bers to some­one’s old num­bers, but it’s fun to cel­e­brate every time I “pass” some­one on the list 😀

 

How do you deal with com­par­ing? Do you have a com­pet­i­tive nature?