What Everyone Should Know About Early Retirement // An ONL Clip Show

After nearly four years of blogging here, and 363 posts (this makes 364), many of which tally 2000 words or more, I’ve written a lot. But thanks to that volume, much of what I most wish people knew is buried deep under hundreds of posts, or isn’t especially well optimized for SEO and doesn’t pop up on Google searches. (Mostly because I don’t care one bit about SEO and so do zero of it.)

But when I step back and think about it all, I can pull out several big principles that I want everyone to know, whether you’re just beginning to consider embarking on an early retirement journey, or you’re well into it.

But rather than rewrite old posts to bring some of those most important principles to the top of the queue, today I’m doing something I’ve never done before and giving a full run-down of what I believe everyone should know about early retirement in clip show form, with links to prior posts that will let you go deeper on the ideas that feel most relevant to you.

And let me know at the end: what do you want to know but haven’t seen addressed anywhere? (There’s a good chance I have an old post that speaks to it, just based on playing the odds, and I can share that link.) Or what have you learned that you don’t see people talking about here or elsewhere?

Early Retirement Can Happen Quickly — But It Can Feel Slow

One of the things that still feels most surreal about our early retirement is how quickly it happened. We obviously had benefits that not everyone has of more pay than we needed, no kids and good luck in that nothing bad or expensive happened to derail our savings plan. But while most people work 40 years or more, we peaced out after fewer than 20 years, only about six years after getting serious about saving for early retirement. Of course, that’s fast in the big picture, but day to day, the journey can feel like it’s taking forever. In those years when it feels slow, here’s some fodder to urge you on, from how to head off impatience and get through the slog, to a reminder of where I was financially only a decade before retiring.

• Don’t Get Discouraged by Slow Initial Progress // A Blast from My Financial Past
• Getting Through the Middle Saving Years Slog
• Conquering Impatience on the Road to Financial Independence
• The Importance of Pacing Yourself on the Road to Financial Independence

You Don’t Have to Be Frugal About Everything To Do It

It is absolutely not true that you need to eschew driving a car and subsist on rice and beans to retire early, and much of what this community sometimes calls “extreme” is really just normal frugality or everyday life to most people in the country and around the world. If you make intentional spending choices, you truly don’t have to be frugal about every little thing to save at a high rate. (But it certainly helps to continually find ways to earn more!)

• The Simple Math of Lifestyle Stagnation, the Biggest Secret of Our Success
• A Love Letter to the Atypical, Unfrugal Early Retirees
• Financial Independence, Fight Club and the Mindless Consumer Zombie Narrative
• Quitting the Hustle for Good // Plus Why It’s Okay Not to Side Hustle

But You Should Be Frugal About Some Things

But despite being against most things in the extreme, I do think there’s something important about being frugal — or selectively hardcore — about a few things in your life. Doing so will certainly save money, but it may teach you much more.

• What’s Your “Selectively Hardcore”? The Non-Financial Benefits of Strict, Strategic Frugality
• What Keeping Our House Cold Has Taught Us

Don’t Take Conventional Wisdom at Face Value — Even the Unconventional FIRE Conventional Wisdom

It can be easy to treat certain ideas like dogma, like that the 4% rule is gospel, or that HSAs are the undisputed best thing since slice bread. Or that you should choose where to retire on the basis of who has an income tax, without considering things like health care and actual early retirement tax liability. But there’s good reason to investigate every seemingly great idea thrown out there in discussions of financial independence and early retirement and to see if it actually fits in your situation. Here are a few examples.

• The Fundamental Problem with the 4% Rule for Early Retirement Isn’t the 4% Rule
• The Problem with the HSA (Health Savings Account) Isn’t the HSA
• Don’t Write Off High-Cost States for Early Retirement // Why We’ll Never Leave California

A Good Early Retirement Plan Is Multi-Faceted

When you’re planning for decades and decades of your life, filled with more unknown unknowns than known knowns, it’s essential that you build out not just a financial plan, but a life plan, and that the financial plan that supports it has room to adapt to new interests and to compensate for bad money outcomes. Your plan should have multiple types of investments, several contingencies, a plan for heading off risk (especially sequence of returns risk) and perhaps even two phases: early retirement and traditional retirement.

• Our Full Financial Plan and Philosophy
• The Income Streams Our Early Retirement Is (Now) Built On
• How We Calculated Our “Enough” Number for Early Retirement
• Don’t Forget About Your Later Years // Planning for Early AND Traditional Retirement
• Protect Your Early Retirement From Sequence of Returns Risk
• When the Crash Comes // Recession-Proofing Our Retirement Plans

Health Care Should Be Top of Mind

Recently I spoke at Camp FI Midwest, and I did a popup Q&A session on health care. Nearly everyone attended, affirming that it’s a high level concern for most of us eyeing early retirement, but it was also clear that a high percentage of people do not have an especially deep understanding of the health care options out there for retirees, how to go about researching the best options for themselves or what’s included in a standard health insurance plan. This stuff is super important and it doesn’t have to be scary or intimidating if you make it your mission to understand it all. Here are some posts to get you started.

• Signing Up for ACA/Obamacare Health Insurance for Early Retirement
• Planning for Health Care in Early Retirement
• Optimizing Our Retirement Income // ACA and Taxes Vs Actual Cashflow

You Can Earn Money And Still Be Retired

In fact, if you’re smart and focused enough to save for early retirement, you will probably find it impossible not to earn some money after you cease needing money. Weird how that happens.

• Our Big Epiphany: We Will Earn Money in Retirement
• Our “High School Rule” for Work in Early Retirement
• A Thought Experiment for the Retirement Police // Where’s the Line on Retirement?
• Retirement Needs a Rebrand

Pursuing Early Retirement Can Make Work Better (Or You Can Already Love Your Job and Still Want to Retire Early)

The wish to escape work is often a big motivator to pursue early retirement, but focusing on that wish only makes the journey slower and the slog harder. Instead, if you can change your mindset about work — aided in large part by the confidence that comes from becoming increasingly financially independent — it’s amazing how much work can change, and how much good you can do on your way out.

• The Power of a Complaint Ban
• To Care or Not To Care // The Work Mindset As Retirement Nears
• How to Use Your FI Freedom to Agitate for Others at Work
• You Can Love Your Job and Still Want to Retire Early

It’s All About Living a Purposeful, Meaningful Life

Of course none of this is really about escaping work. It’s about living big, meaningful lives that we can look back on and feel proud of. So make sure you do some real thinking about your purpose, how you’ll define yourself post-career and how you’ll use your power to leave a legacy of good.

• What Do You Want Your Tombstone to Say? // Defining Our Purpose
• How to Define Ourselves in Retirement // Creating a New Vision of Self Worth
• The Social Good of Quitting Your Job
• Our Early Retirement Charitable Mission and Donor Advised Funds
• Choosing People Over Money // The Story of Our Rental Property

That’s a Wrap!

If you can account for these principles in your early retirement planning, and in your life in general, I think you’ll be in pretty good shape. If you want even more, you can find many of my favorite posts ever near the bottom of the start here page. (Including this one, probably my favorite ever.)

So your turn! What topics would you like to see discussed or researched more? What questions do you have for early retirees (or for us specifically) that you haven’t seen addressed? What have you learned that you don’t think is common knowledge? Let’s discuss it all in the comments!