It’s about both.
Good talk. Thanks for coming by.
Alright, I’ll elaborate…
It’s a valid question. For anyone who is following along, you would be forgiven for asking. “This guy starts off talking about retiring early, then spends a bunch of time talking work and career… what gives?” Fair point.
Let me clarify: the ultimate goal for me of course is early retirement. In order to consider retiring, one needs enough savings on which to comfortably live. In order to accumulate savings, one needs to maximize income and/or minimize expenses. The only way to save is to spend less than you earn. Retiring early implies you need to save more, or put a different way, to accumulate savings faster. There are only two ways to save faster: make more, or spend less. Or both.
If you don’t have enough saved yet to retire, you still have to work a while longer. This is the boat in which I find myself. I have to continue working for a few years more at least, but of course the hope is to make “a few” as few as possible. So given that I have to work, now I have some choices to make. I could choose to focus on earning as much money as possible right now, so I can ramp up that savings rate. This is the approach employed by J.P. of The Money Habit and it’s how she managed to retire at 28 (she is much better at this early retirement thing than me… or most people even). The other option is to decide that since I have to keep working for now, why not spend all that time doing something I at least enjoy, or find engaging?
I have worked jobs (yes, plural) where I was miserable. I spent most of my working days bored. When I did have work to do, I often felt the work was menial, or tedious, and largely pointless. In short, I regularly felt like I was wasting my life. Not a nice feeling. Because I have spent a lot of my working years not liking my job (and once again, I know I’m not special; I realize how common this is), my tendency is to focus on the second option, finding enjoyable or interesting work.
Don’t get me wrong, option one is great. Make the most money possible? Who wouldn’t sign up for that? But of course if it were that simple everybody would be doing it. It’s not like they’re handing out super high paying jobs on the street corner to whoever wants one. There’s a reason why we don’t all have the same high paying jobs. We have different talents and different interests. Option two is about aligning our talents with our interests. Option two can be hard enough.
What is retirement anyway?
For anyone who is familiar with the growing number of FIRE (financial independence, retire early) blogs out there, you’ll understand that retiring early does not necessarily imply that we spend our days lounging on the beach, drink in hand, and never lifting a finger ever again. If this is how you plan to spend your retirement, then good for you! Sounds fantastic. I just hope you have enough saved to spend the rest of your days living like this, because it sounds like a good way to go through a lot of money fast. We should all be so lucky.
For those not familiar with the concept, who are new to the FIRE approach, let me break it down for you. There’s a great old Simpsons episode where Homer quits his job at the nuclear power plant so he can fulfill his dream of working at a bowling alley. You could make the argument that for all intents and purposes, Homer retired when he did this. (The analogy doesn’t quite fit because in this particular episode Homer was still dependent on the income he earned from the bowling alley, but it’s close enough for illustrative purposes and it lets me incorporate a Simpsons reference.) If you separate your life into your working years and your retirement years, then your working years are spent working because you have to. In our working years, our primary concern is paying the bills and supporting ourselves or our families. If you have enough money saved that you can live off your savings, but you’re doing some kind of work because you want to, then whether or not you’re earning a paycheque doing it, you are effectively retired. In this case, you’re working by choice, presumably because you enjoy the work.
Now, imagine that there is work you can do 1) that will pay well (or well enough), 2) that you find interesting and engaging, 3) that aligns with your values, and 4) that will give you good experience to do that thing you love during retirement. Sounds like a good idea, right? Maybe you can work toward a career today that could help you pursue a passion during retirement? Now that sounds a lot better than being miserable for 40 hours a week if you ask me.
I would love to be able to retire tomorrow, but it’s going to take me longer than that. In the meantime, I’d rather not dread going into work. I’m not an authority on careers by any stretch of the imagination. But over the years I’ve come across some good advice. And I’m happy to pass it along when I can. I also have made many mistakes, and I’ll tell you about some of those too, so hopefully you don’t have to make the same ones. Ultimately this is meant to be a space to chronicle my efforts in minimizing my remaining working years. Part of that involves making those remaining years bearable, or better yet, enjoyable. I’ll keep you up to speed on how that is working out for me.