Since I’ve been early retired, I’ve worked much more than I ever expected, but I also earned little to nothing from that work, by design. And separating work from the money — and hustling for reasons other than financial gain — have taught me several huge lessons. Let’s dig into them.
After taking a little time off from the blog to promote Work Optional, I’m back with a more detailed post on one of our biggest learnings thus far in early retirement: that you might spend more when you’re not working than you think you will. Let’s talk about why that is and what you should do about it.
It’s 2018, the world is upside-down, we’re retired and we’re… saving for retirement??! It’s true, friends. Despite already saving for retirement and feeling completely solid with what we’ve saved, this year we’re saving even more. Here’s why and how.
After we realized that we would work in early retirement, we also realized that we needed an easy way to decide if an opportunity that came along was actually work we wanted to do. And we created what we call the “high school rule.” Here’s what that is.
When we first formulated a real early retirement plan, it was based on the rigid belief that we’d never, ever work again. Or at least never *have* to work again. And while that’s still true — we haven’t expedited our plan by forcing ourselves to earn income in the future — we now expect to get a much more diversified set of income streams in early retirement. In part because life happens and we’ve made some different choices along the way. And in part because that recession hasn’t hit yet, health care is still up in the air, and it makes sense to keep hedging against sequence risk and health insurance uncertainty.
Monday’s post spurred so much great discussion around what constitutes “retirement,” so I thought we could take it a step further, and do some exercises around what actually constitutes retirement, and what that’s based on. There’s no right or wrong answer, so come weigh in!
Here’s a crazy thought: It feels great to be good at things. And if there are things you’re good at in your current work — even if it’s not obvious now that you get joy from them — you might miss out on future joy if you subtract those tasks from your life when you retire early. Today we’re honing in on the things we’re best at, that bring us the most joy, and figuring out how to magnify that joy in FIRE.
Our early retirement plan has gone through a lot of iterations, but one thing has remained constant: our insistence that we never want to have to work again. But we’re starting to realize that we’ve been thinking about this the wrong way. Come join us as we trace our journey to our recent epiphany that we will earn money in the future, even after we retire.
