46M. I have a below average engineers salary because I didn’t job hop enough or chase FAANG in my age. But have roughly 3M net worth (4M assets - 1M low interest mortgage).
I’m pretty sure I will get downvoted to oblivion(remake) since obviously there are plenty of people who have also gamified investing and are basically degenerate gamblers. But I know deep down I treat finances, taxes, and investing like a min max game in hardcore mode (I.e. if you die you die no respawn or reload as a risk reward assessment).
I really can’t help it I’ve been a PC gamer since young exposed to text based Drug wars or Hamurabi, the Sim games(pre-dating), Civ games and x4, XCom, rogue likes and RPGs etc you name it.
I know people out there obviously gamify investing to their detriment. My question is there anyone out there that gamifies it in a somewhat “healthy” and beneficial manner? Meaning you still acknowledge investing is not a video game, you know you have mouths to feed and livelihoods to protect and there are life changing consequences at stake. But at the same time the optimization of your finances and taxes and investments grinds through well traveled routes of your brain that is just plain used to min maxing?
The way I can read through tax laws or articles and optimize for things happens very effortlessly for me. I don’t treat investment like a Russian roulette or trivia game but an insurance game weighing risk rewards and probabilities. At first I was financially illiterate and even had high APR cc balances when younger, but quickly read up and smashed those balances down like a boss hp bar. I quickly figured out I should max out my ESPP to levels coworkers would have considered insane. I like applying for business credit cards that give me fat cash back, paying them off, and looking for new ones. I was usually Boglehead for many of my investments but make more aggressive plays as well with appropriate risk tolerance when exceptional circumstances occur.
So is there anyone out there that also admits to gamifying investments, finances, taxes, but is *not* a degenerate gambler, and did not blow up their life savings but is still living the good life? I know I might be an outlier because I talk to extremely smart folks in STEM careers that also love to min max in video games but they seem to run their finances or investments sometimes in a completely unoptimized way.
Also this latest investing monthly game update is pretty terrible thanks to current admin, and the first time in my investing career that makes me not want to play the game much anymore and I’m beating the market by fair margin.