Things to Do Before the Mortgage
- Enjoy the Zen state brought on by a single-digit bank account balance.
- Renounce your college vegetarianism.
- Live somewhere that drinking in public parks isn’t just legal but a primary form of social life.
- Travel: When you get older, it is generally NOT OK to sleep out in a city park, chase a Spanish bull with a rolled up newspaper, go home with drunk foreigners wearing wigs, eat lamb’s brain in a Bedouin tent, pay a small child to clean your ears in public, get kidnapped in Morocco, get scabies in Ireland, etc.
- Get into some form of cult-entertainment (e.g. Evil Dead, Tolkien, Battlestar Galactica).
- Get renter’s insurance.
- Develop a giving plan to consistently give to charity, rather the consistent donation to the unused gym-membership.
- Don’t go to grad school.
- Wake up in places where you have no idea how you got there, with people you don’t know (e.g., on the #49 bus, traveling down Mission Street).
- Buy the one thing that anyone with any sense would never let you buy, so you’ll already have it should you meet that person.
- At least once, get rid of most of what you own, and be surprised how easy it is.
- Live in New York City for at least a year.
- Date someone for a long time (to see what you do and don’t want in a relationship) and when you break up with them, be slutty for a short time.
- Visit all 50 states.
- Freak out, quit your job, and move to Montana. Wait, no, I don’t really recommend that.
- Live out of your car.
- Call it like you see it.
- Work on being at peace with the fact that there may never be a mortgage.
