Downsizing? Leave it to Hollywood

I thought this might add some levity to the retire early community. If you haven’t seen the trailer for Downsizing the movie you can check it out here.

The premise of the movie is simple.  Allow modern science to shrink you down to about 5 inches tall, hence requiring a much smaller amount of resources for your continued survival.

The couple is told that their $100K of savings will translate to the equivalent of 6.3 Million in “Leisure world”,  where everything is dollhouse sized.

The second I checked out the trailer 2 weeks ago on AppleTV, I called my wife in to check it out and we both had a hearty laugh.

Basically, that’s what we’re doing, right?  Scaling everything down in our life, so we can extend our resources.

In fact, that’s always been my basic “back of the envelope” calculation.  Multiply my total monthly expenses and then multiply that by 12, and then divide that number into my total assets, less any liabilities.

I would in turn get the number of years, and then guesstimate if I think I might live longer than that.   That’s pretty much what we do, right?  It’s not brain surgery.

Incredible shrinking wages

But there must be something out of kilter for this to hit main stream media, in a way that specifically deals with resources.  Conspicuous consumption? Irrational exuberance?

It has me wondering what is behind this “tiny” movement.   Tiny houses, tiny kitchen, how much can you really shrink down in the physical world?  I mean, somethings up, right?

While me and my wife enjoy watching some of that stuff on TV, we just laugh and remember how we sacrificed to build our nest egg and equity that is allowing us to drive our own direction currently.  You can only reduce so far before you hit a pain point.

Personally, I think that wage stagnation is creating a burden on people and frankly warping their thoughts toward radical ideas about consumption reduction.  I don’t think it needs to be that difficult, but you should always be working on TWO things.  Reducing your expenses and increasing your wages.  It’s easy for the media to tell people to become a “Data analyst”, it’s quite another to have the right aptitude and put in the hard re-tooling work that is necessary. That’s what I’m working toward now, and if I didn’t put in the planning earlier I wouldn’t have it as an option.

I’m sure this will lead to some type of new Disney ride and I see this movie as a “Honey I shrunk the kids” but for adults.  It looks funny, with a possible “feel good outcome”, but it also illustrates how two people can differ in their goals, since the wife ends up bailing on the husband and doesn’t get shrunk.

Shrink for good

I don’t usually go to the movies, so I’ll probably wait until this comes out on Redbox

In theater cost: $15
Streaming: $4.99
Redbox: $1.10

Those are the kind of shrinking numbers that I like.