The Lemon Fool

Well as one who hates talking about himself, I am happy to listen to others making what I regard as a fool of themselves by 'overtalking' if you have never met the person before. I have a grand daughter who is very good at sussing out this sort of bore and teenagers can be very good at this sort of thing.

I would just leave them alone. No need to get involved.

Dod

Or to summarise,

Dod101 wrote:Well as one who hates talking about himself, I, I, I, I, Dod

AleisterCrowley wrote:Just say you're a Private Investor - which is likely to be true in pretty much every case

Yes it is true, but IMO one of the worst things you can say. Because it sounds like they can copy your ideas, and they'll grill you endlessly for investment advice. You really don't want to be picking stocks for other people. Great way to lose friends. Much better to come up with something they can't copy.

I retired at 47. When asked, I tell them I was head hunted to a small tech startup, which was struggling for a period, and during that period it paid me with a load of shares. That's entirely true. (Though it isn't where my retirement funds came from)

People are happy with "you're lucky". Not so happy to be told they have to work like a dog because they waste their money on flashy new shinies.
"Oh, but I need a reliable car for work".
I am so sick of hearing that justification from people who are up to their eyeballs in debt (and jealous of my retirement).
"No you don't, you're a supermarket manager, not a brain surgeon."

Gryff

I think that people don't really care about what you mean by what you say about what you do.

You need to go a bit fight club and the first rule of FIRE club is you do not talk about FIRE club.

gryffron wrote:People are happy with "you're lucky". Not so happy to be told they have to work like a dog because they waste their money on flashy new shinies.

I think that people who are spenders perhaps have difficulty perceiving what life is like as a saver [AKA what as one sub-group we used to call 'a Foolish investor']. And then the next stride across that rubicon is people who have been life-long investors, and where it has got those people. So the decades long self-denial cannot be conceived, just the 'unjustified rewards' at the end of it.

It is something of a mystery to me Gryff how others might welcome one being wealthy via luck over sweat; the random vs the grafted for. Maybe it's peer pressure/natural selection, I don't know; with luck they might believe that they too might be lucky.