Achieving a big financial goal like early retirement is made possible by committing to saving aggressively. But when I look back at our years when we were so focused on saving, the things I regret aren’t the times when we didn’t save enough, they’re times when we didn’t spend on once-in-a-lifetime experiences. Today I’m sharing one such instances, and the lesson I learned from it that it’s a mistake to let life pass you by just because you’re saving for a big goal.
Even though we’re not in the savings phase of our early retirement journey, we often talk about what we’d do differently if we were just now starting to save at this point in time. Here’s a rundown on what we’d change about our approach, and what we’d do the same.
We’re about to go through a life and financial transition as big as graduating from college or getting married — and that’s switching from earning plenty while working to earning very little in early retirement. Which means that we need a new set of systems to ensure our financial success, especially given our status as anti-budgeters. But it also means that we’re bringing back a tool we gave up years ago: the personal allowance.
Reaching financial independence is, more than anything, a waiting game. Especially for those who follow a passive investment strategy like indexing, there’s very little thinking to do once you set your plan in motion. But, the journey still takes years, often many years. Here’s why it’s so critical to pace yourself on that journey.
