This post was inspired by this over at FI for the People. Thank you Bitches Get Riches for bringing it to my attention.
Perhaps my most popular post is the one where I wrote about my death march to financial independence. It describes how I went a little nuts to get to FI. I worked very hard and in doing so, forgot to live. The whole point of FI is better living, so I totally missed the point. I now advocate taking it slow and enjoying/embracing/loving every bit of the journey.
Goals are temporary and fleeting. The journey is what life is all about.
FI for the People (FftP) wrote about my silly march and had this to say:
As for Mr. 1500, yes, his “death march”
sounds like it was miserabledoesn’t sound like it was fun. And given that he and his family have a net worth that’s multiples higher than his original stated FIRE number and that, at some point along the journey, he probably realized that his family would have income streams on top of their investments coming in post-FIRE (blog income and Mrs. 1500’s job to name two), thus meaning that he could withdraw from his investments at a less than 4% safe-withdrawal rate, he could have slowed way down and been no worse off (and maybe even better off) than he aimed to be when he set his goal.But, first, how could he have known that when he set his goal he was in the heart of an epic bull market that’d not only last until the time he FIREd, but for years after? For all he knew, his investments were going to take an immediate hammering. And, while he might’ve suspected that Mrs. 1500 would be working after he called it a day, nothing’s a certainty. Also, as Mr. 1500 has often noted, he was in a bad place at work when he set his goal. He was constantly stressed and, I think, unhappy with his work life. Getting out of that toxic place must’ve, understandably, seemed pretty darned appealing.
FftP’s words made me think a bit. I worked really hard to get to FI and even when I met my goal, I worked for another year. The reason can be summed up in one word. It’s 4 letters long and starts with an F. Not that F-word; get your mind out of the gutter people. The word I’m thinking of is:
Fear.
FftP was partly correct, but it wasn’t all about money. Some of my coworkers were great friends and I knew I’d miss them. I didn’t want to be bored. I didn’t want to drastically change my life, even if knew it was an improvement. It was a lot to digest. I was afraid.
Humans are held back by negativity bias. For any situation, we can find many more excuses for why we shouldn’t do something. Quitting work is a great one. I can come up with infinite excuses.
Great things don’t happen when you’re sitting around with a bad case of the “What ifs?” Normal effort yields normal results. Everything great happens when you push your a$$ out of your comfort zone.
Less Is More
When I hear most folks talk about FIRE, they talk about making less money and all of the danger that comes with it. I don’t hear much talk about the potential upsides when you expand your time considerably. If you sleep 8 hours per day, you have 112 waking hours. A normal 40 hour workweek consumes more than 1/3 of that precious time. Then, you have to commute, prepare meals, mow the lawn, cut your hair, take care of kids, pay bills, clean the toilets, chase squirrels, blah, blah, blah. Not much time left for yourself.
Instead of focusing on lost income, what if you focused on what you’ll do with all the time you have?
- Work on relationships
- Get healthy
- Take long walks
- Learn a new language
- Go to Home Depot at 1pm on a Tuesday instead of Saturday morning when every other human from your town is there
- Learn a new language
- Read (I love to hang out at the library)
- Volunteer
- Prepare great meals at home
- Listen
- Spend more time farting around in the garage or your workshop
I’m not advocating that you be silly or dangerous. Build up margins. Have backup plans for backup plans. Be frugal. And if bad stuff happens, use the same resourcefulness and brains that got you to FIRE to make it through the rough patch.
Looking back on my journey, the most important piece of advice I can give you is this:
Live boldly.
Don’t be afraid. Stop wasting time debating whether or not you should live by the 4% or 3.5% or 2.8888% rule. Most likely, it won’t make much of a difference long term.
Use your newfound time to become the best version of yourself. It will be much easier to work on whatever plagues you when you have time to think.
Live with intention. Find deep purpose. Take chances. Have confidence*. Life is too short to do anything else.
Know that there is no permanent security.
You will die and you don’t know when. To make matters worse, if you live to an old age, your last decade or so may not be so great. Knowing this, your primary goal should be to do what you want for as much time as you can when you still can do it.
*This is a fine line. Too much confidence is a recipe for disaster.
The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
-Charles Bukowski
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Love it. Great post. Also happy to have made a reader (you) think. Typical (and quite reasonable) reader reaction to my half-witted ramblings is a facepalm.
Your ramblings are pretty amusing! Keep it up!
Great post and a reminder. I have heard you saying how fast you went to Fi. But never heard you saying you regretted it. That’s the key.
My father always says : people make excuses for outside validation.
I went little nuts in 2020. 2021 was a great year but I needed a 2022 reset. 2022 reset made see things clearly. I know what I want from my job now. I know exactly what to do with my money invested. I heard Nick Maggiulli in couple of podcasts (BPMONEY and CHOOSEFI) on his new book “Just Keep buying”.
It’s true that most of the people would run short of money when they retire. It’s also true that most of us are going to die with lot of money in the bank account.
All I want to have x amount of money than myself 10
Years back. I am competing against myself. When I told this to myself, a lot of things changed. I don’t want to die working at 9-5. Also I need not die with ton of money in my 401k. I have found my right balance. I wish all the best so everyone get theirs.
I find it interesting that you mention Nick Maggiulli. I’ve been FIRE-ish for a couple of years now (enough to semi-retire, which I found suits me better than full retirement). So my expenses are generally low and I still earn income from part-time consulting. This year I made some changes that resulted in substantially higher expenses for a few months (long distance move). For reasons that I cannot explain rationally I did what Nick describes as “income matching” in the ChooseFI episode I heard. It was weird because I knew I what I was doing (in my mind I was working a bit more to increase cash flow so as to avoid drawing down the portfolio). However, because of my circumstances I am very likely to be one of those people who dies with a a good chunk of change in the bank. I knew that I was adding stress to my life (in terms of working more than I would have liked in semi-retirement) for the peace of mind of not having dip into the portfolio. However, after listening to the discussion that Nick and Brad had I realized how utterly irrational that approach was. The whole point of FIRE is to have control over time, and when I had a temporary blip of higher expenses I promptly traded it away so I wouldn’t have to touch the big pile of money I had accumulated. It’s not as though the I was going from withdrawing at 4% to withdrawing at 6% (which would be not much to worry about over a short time span), but I was simply scared of the prospect of going from withdrawing at 0% (not at all) to anything other than 0%.
That was definitely a face-palm moment. I’ve resolved to wind down over the next couple of months the extra work I took on, and over the course of the next year to make myself draw from the portfolio for those occasional months when my expenses come in a little high. I’ve learned a lot by reading Carl’s blog and I find myself wishing I had found him at the beginning and even that he had started writing years earlier. I made many of the same mistakes that he made and I’m trying to settle on a better trajectory. “Live boldly” is definitely a good way to think of it.
The idea of income matching is interesting. We are approaching FI and have baked in a casual amount of PT income, not only to get to FI faster, but as part of our best-life plan. I just read Maggiulli’s book Just Keep Buying, which got me thinking about lifestyle inflation. He advocates that it is a natural thing (I agree) and good (not sure about that). In any case, the forces of the universe push us in the direction of lifestyle inflation so I don’t want to be in denial about it. I’ve been thinking that I would deal with it by, you guessed it, income matching. Seems natural. If I want more, I have to offset the expense. To be sure, we are talking about the icing or gravy of life. Robert, I can see your point that income matching to maintain a 0% withdrawal rate doesn’t make sense, but to maintain 4% could be just the trick.
I believe in making bold choices, but in our sixties we also believe in honoring risk in areas you can’t recover from. If I kept skiing the extreme terrain I used to I would probably never see seventy. One of my similarly aged friends found that out a year ago. I realize marathons are in my past because I’d rather keep my knees for tennis and pickleball. We are not doing bushwhacking that requires technical climbing. We don’t go on wilderness hikes without a satellite beacon and a GPS. So we still do things that we are competent at even if they pose some risk, but we aren’t taking as much risk as younger more elastic us did in the past. So in some ways we are less bold, or maybe just age adjusted bold?
Now I’m stoked to read “just keep buying,” as we try to find balance approaching FI. Nice thoughts Carl, as usual.
It took losing a coworker just a few years older than myself to realize how precious time is. Two of my children are adults, and three of them work full time jobs, so I don’t get to see them like I would like. I’m trying to take every chance to tuck in my younger ones. We’ll be taking some more chances to go out and vacation a little. It doesn’t have to be outrageous, but it’s the time spent together that matters, I think.
There is nothing like death to remind us all just how important life is.
Kids: Yep, all they really want is your time. We love family walks, games, and cooking together.
Long time reader, first comment. I really liked this post. Thank you
Thank you, this is very kind! Happy New Year!