Rice & Beans

They’re actually pretty good.

A weird thing happened last week. I got a book in the mail, opened it, and saw six pages that I’d written.

Surreal.

Of course I’m talking about the latest JL Collins book:

I suppose mine is one of them extraordinary stories. You may remember over a year ago I posted that I was sending in a submission for this book. That old post has the original text I sent them, which was fun to read alongside the book version, because man… those editor people sure know what they’re doing. They trimmed and shaped my barely coherent ramblings into something readable. Cool. Makes me want to write a book or something.

Why did I submit my story, why am I talking about this now, and why is this post about rice and beans? Well, if you’ll recall, the point of this blog is to play the long game as I slowly reel you into my marketing funnel, and eventually push you to buy my course on how to leverage a Rice and Beans diet to quickly achieve Financial Independence. For only $3141 (or 59 easy payments of $265 ), I will show you how to cut your food budget down to $40/month/person WHILE avoiding scurvy. This small investment in my course will set you on the path to be a millionaire most ricky-tick, give you never ending happiness, and all the lentils you can eat.

Hopefully me getting in this book will drive more traffic to this site, I’ll start pushing my course, and I’ll finally be able to buy that submarine.

Just kidding. Mostly I thought it was a cool project, and hubris or whatever.

Back to the Rice and Beans…

Reading my submission made me realize how much my perspective of my FI journey has changed in the past year, and I felt I needed to extoll the merits of some good ole’ fashioned hardcore saving during accumulation stage. Especially as everyone else seems to be writing about how you should spend more. That’s fine and dandy when you’ve way overshot your FI number, but you gotta get there first. And one way to do that is cut that spending to the bone.

Back in the day, there were many FI blogs that talked about how to cut spending AND still be happy. Turns out there’s loads of research that suggests buying lots of crap doesn’t always make everyone happy, and if you chop a bunch of superfluous spending, it won’t make you miserable. It may have the opposite effect; you may get happier as your life becomes simpler and you focus on what legit matters to you. This is where we’d start talking about hedonic adaptation, but there’s this other little known blogger that already wrote a good piece about it. Go there if you want to learn more. But this post is about me, how I went hardcore frugal, enjoyed it, and am now glad for it.

When reading my submission for that Pathfinders, I came across this which I previously wrote:

Do I still think I was wrong to go so hardcore frugal that I dipped into deprivation?

Yes.

But do I regret that phase of life where I was harcore frugal before I turned it up to 11 and crossed into deprivation?

Fuck no.

I could have probably chilled out a little, and everything would have been fine. But today I wanted to dive a bit deeper into the time of my life before I went uberhardcore and was just hardcore. Before I pushed my frugality beyond reason, I was actually living an enjoyable spartan lifestyle. And I don’t want to discourage anyone from doing the same. It was actually pretty fun, and I’m super thankful I did it. Because it’s 1030 on a Wednesday right now, and I get to do whatever the hell I want.

Fucking amazing.

Sure, I suppose some of my recollection is colored by graduation goggles, but when I’m honest with myself, I still think I enjoyed that period of my life quite a bit. And back then I was spending less than $1000 a month.

How the hell did I do that?

Well first, I didn’t have any kids. That kind of makes a difference.

I also lived in a 1100 square foot house, in a not so nice neighborhood. Living in that area didn’t bother me, because I didn’t have kids. It was just me and occasionally my girlfriend/now wife. Most times she was there, I was there. And at the time I was on the SWAT team, which meant I had a trunk full of weapons, armor, and explosives sitting in my garage. So I felt like I could deal with any shenanigans with minimal drama, and I only had to protect one person.

I also didn’t own a car for much of that period. Again, since I was on the SWAT team, I was required to be able to respond at any time, which meant that I got to keep my issued police car at my house and use it for running errands in the city. The rare times I went drinking I’d just uber, and if I went out of town I’d rent a car.

Then there was food. I was working, alot. So I meal prepped and brought Rice and Beans every day, along with snacks. I’d always go with my coworkers to wherever they went out for food, but most times I would bring my Rice and Beans and just buy a coffee. Once every week or two, I’d buy a meal with them. When I was home, I cooked omelets and occasionally some sort of pasta meal. A few times a month my girlfriend and I would go out to eat. This all kept my food budget down to about $50 a week.

Part of the reason why this was so enjoyable was that back then I enjoyed my job. The level of enjoyment of working followed a not atypical pattern:

I hated my job when I first started it. I needed a job to pay the bills after college, and being an infantryman with a liberal arts degree in the middle of the great recession left few options beyond public service or Starbucks (maybe I should have been a barista?). So I applied to a bunch of fire and police departments and went with the one that hired me first.

I did not enjoy the job at first, for a bunch of reasons. But then I got good at it, and was able to get into a speciality I liked. It then became lots of fun. There were annoying things about the job, but they were outweighed by the fun stuff. For years it was mostly good, but slowly the ratio of good:bad got worse. Then I got into management, and enjoyment nosedived. At the same time I got promoted we started having kids; shift work immediately stopped being fun as I got bukkaked by sleep deprivation.

The time period when I was going harcore frugal was after I started liking the job, and before my descent into the pit of hating work. Through watching my peers, I knew that my enjoyment would eventually wane, which motivated me to pursue FI. But I also really liked my job most of that time. There were stupid things I had to put up with at work, which were good reminders of why I was on the FI path. But mostly I liked my job.

This is why it was fun and easy to go hardcore frugal for those good working years. My job was all encompassing. If I wasn’t working 80 hour weeks, I was working 60 hour weeks and going to grad school (which was free, thanks to the GI bill) and gaining a deeper understanding of the whole criminal justice system. And there were plenty of weeks where I worked way more. I clocked some crazy 140 hour weeks, where I grabbed a few hours of sleep under my desk or in my car between non-stop insanity. Even that was enjoyable because my job was interesting, I felt like we were doing something worthwhile, and the people I worked with were pretty awesome.

Would I go back to that now? Hell no. But fun at the time.

Since I was working so much, I didn’t have time to spend money on anything else. If I had some time off, I spent it recovering from whatever crazy shit we had just done by reading a book or watching TV. I barely saw my family those years, so any time off I prioritized visiting them, which was a hell of a lot cheaper than trying to squeeze in some extravagant vacation.

Back then my life depending on staying in shape, but I didn’t have the time to drive back and forth to the gym. I got some used weights; lifted in my garage and ran around my neighborhood. The simplicity and freedom of this became addicting, and I still haven’t gone back to a gym membership.

And then there was the Rice and Beans.

Rice and Beans has become the butt of FI community jokes, used to poke fun at people on the Lean FI track. Something like “ugghh, no way am I eating rice and beans, I’ll just make more money or whatever” . Rice and Beans have become synonymous in the FI world with deprivation. And that’s fucking bullshit.

Because they’re actually really good.

You know what nobody is talking about? How tasty Rice and Beans actually are. Go to chipotle, and you’re essentially getting a bunch of fancy shit mixed in with Rice and Beans, maybe wrapped in a tortilla.

For fucking real, people. Go make some Rice and Beans and judge for yourself. Don’t eat that canned shit. Get the dry ones (I prefer black ), soak and cook them. It’s cheaper, but more importantly, it tastes way better. It doesn’t take much to make beans taste amazing, some salt and a few other basic spices are plenty. See this article for further recipe inspiration.

Back when I was going harcore saving, I would bring cooked rice and beans to work every day in a cooler. On top I’d throw some cheese and siracha, and would add half an avocado after I nuked the rest. I’d love to tell you that I gritted my teeth and forced down this basic sustenance in the name of saving money, but truth be told I never tired of this meal. I genuinely looked forward to it every shift.

I only stopped eating rice and beans every day because I left the SWAT team and took a more sedentary admin gig. The carbs were a bit much once my job became less physical, so I swapped the rice for spinach and kept the beans. Not quite as good, but still pretty awesome and cheap.

To this day, Rice and Beans is still on the dinner rotation for the family. Looking at the menu I drew up for this week, we’ve got Jambalaya, Spicy Thai Noodles, Tacos (for taco Tuesday!) and some other random meals that I’ll cook. Also up there is Rice and Beans, and guess what? It’s one of the few meals I know my kids will actually want to eat. I spend oodles of time making fancy and complicated meals that my kids barely touch, but they’ll clean they’re plate when it’s Rice and Beans times.

Wrap it up.

Yeah, Rice and Beans are great. But they’re only one way saving lots of money can actually be pretty fucking enjoyable, and I’m sad to see that this has been downplayed as of late within the FI space. Like I said, I’ve been guilty of this too. Consider this post my penance.

Part of achieving FI is questioning accepted narratives, like “spend as much money as you make” and “rice and beans are only for people in the third world”. If you want to live a badass life where you get to do what you want, you got to question some of this bullshit. And if you can figure out a way to cut the crap out of your spending in ways that still makes you happy, you can get to that point a hell of a lot faster.

I’m grateful to past-me who leaned into his job when he actually liked it, cut everything else out, and saved like crazy. Not only do I get to enjoy the fruits of his labor, but I have a lot of great memories from that time in my life. Everything back then wasn’t sunshine and rainbows, and there was plenty of darkness between the light. But the nice thing is that the less awesome memories balance out the good ones, and allow me to move forward with gratitude that I don’t have to work that job anymore.

I hope that if you’re on this path to FI, you can say the same some day. Please don’t listen to the saver haters. Cut the superfluous shit out, right down to what is required to live your version of an enjoyable life. Do this long enough, and hopefully you too will have the freedom to do whatever the hell you want on some random Wednesday at 1030.

It’s pretty fucking awesome.

Do you like rice and beans, or are you a freedom hating communist that supports ritualistic human sacrifice? Those are the only two choices. Discuss below!