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.
What is “work” anyway? It’s a question that plenty of folks will expend a great deal of oxygen on, and which we won’t answer here today. But we will talk about why it’s problematic when people decide to impose a particular definition of work on others, and what that tells us about our collective messed up relationship with work.
Happy new year, friends! After a bit of a blogging break, I’m back today with a big rundown on all the lessons we learned in the first year of early retirement. The series continues next week with everywhere we went last year, and the week after with everything we’re going to change in 2019.
I’ve had an odd realization the last few months in early retirement: I’d expected to catch up on sleep and exhale all the stress of work and find myself feeling perpetually well-rested and low stress. But in reality, I’m actually more aware of stress and more affected by sleepiness than I was before. But this isn’t a bad thing at all. Let’s talk about why.
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.
Back in 2015, with about two years of work to go, we decided to take a fairly radical step and ban all complaints about work. How did it go? What did we learn? Did it help? Read on to find out!
For a long time, I let myself go down the magical thinking rabbit hole, convincing myself that early retirement would cure everything in my life that needed fixing. And even after I recognized that magical thinking for what it was, I still assumed that early retirement would fix a lot for us, especially things related to work stress and limited time. So how has that actually turned out so far? Let’s take a look.
It may seem like an odd thing to say, but as focused as I was on retiring early for so many years, I’m actually glad that I didn’t retire even earlier than I did. “Why’s that, you crazy person?” you might be wondering. Well read on, because there are a bunch of reasons that just might help others feel better about the work you do en route to early retirement.
It’s easy to observe that a lot of people — not just bloggers — end up working more than they expect to in early retirement, in large part because work feels very different when it’s by choice than when it’s by necessity. So why not plan for that and make your first year of early retirement a side hustle year? The benefits of doing so are potentially huge.
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.
It’s actually here! The very last Monday of our working careers. We’re still feeling a lot, but it feels like something has changed in the last week. And while we have a lot of gratitude we want to express in this last week, we’ve surprised ourselves big time by actually feeling completely ready to make this leap.
We’re 10 work days from early retirement, and are now starting to consider new opportunities that look to the untrained eye a whole lot like work. The whole point of our early retirement was to be able to say yes more, and some of the things we really want to be able to say yes to, money aside. But there’s peril in that — taking on too much, and making it not really early retirement after all. Here’s how we’re thinking about setting new boundaries.
The question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” has never been far from my consciousness at any point in my life. I asked it of myself constantly as a kid, and I never really stopped even as an adult in a career. Which might partially explain how I got on an early retirement path. But answering that question — and separating “be” from “do” — is really what financial independence is all about.
It’s official. We’ve given notice at work, and now we’re starting to tell our teams and clients. We expected this to be an emotionally complicated time (no disappointment there), but we didn’t realize that the weight of keeping this all to ourselves had been quite so heavy. Click and I’ll tell you all about it.
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.
Those of us on the FI path who are still working have an incredible freedom that most of the working world doesn’t enjoy: the freedom to push for the change in our companies or industries that others might get penalized for pushing for. Better pay, more empowering conditions, parity, diversity, you name it. If we get labeled difficult or squeaky wheels, it doesn’t matter, because we’re on our way out. Here’s how — and why! — to use that power, both for the greater good and for your own legacy.
Today we’re tackling a question that I know a lot of people ponder before retiring early: whether or not to try to negotiate a layoff or severance on your way out, to soften the landing. We’ve given it tons of thought, and have decided that approach isn’t for us — but it very well might be for you. Let’s examine both sides.
I spend a lot of time talking about the nobler aspects of early retirement like how it will give us time to do more volunteering. But can we all be honest? We can do noble things in retirement, but the reason doesn’t have to be noble at all. For us, it’s all about what is most fun, and the answer is: not working. We want to retire early so that we can go back to being kids, but the paradox is that we’ve had to grow up big time to avoid growing up.
In the last several months of contemplating leaving work, while doing a better job of saying no and setting boundaries (woot!), I’ve come to realize something: I truly love what I do. Bad news for a soon-to-be early retiree, right? Not at all! You can definitely love your job and still want to retire early — no insanity required! Here’s why.
A question we ask ourselves all the time is: Do we just want to retire early because deep down we feel bad at working? Even though we’re nothing close to bad at our jobs — we’ve very good at them — we’ve never quite been able to muster the right attitude to do them with total commitment. Which makes us wonder: for those special few who are seriously incredible at their jobs, would early retirement even enter their minds? Come share your theories!
