Like I always say - find a job where you get paid to dick around on the internet all day and you will never have to retire.
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One of the biggest reasons for choosing my field of medicine was that I don’t have to maintain a practice. I can work 40 hours a week. I can work 40 hours per month. Doesn’t matter. Hopefully will be able to ease into retirement, because that’s my plan
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Most people’s key to happiness is not being unhappy which generally means not being bored.
To do that most people need a large portion of their day or week with significant uncertainty, and the easiest way of that is a not completely monotonous job.
This is why all the meditation/gym/go hiking/do a craft shit fails, you reach the end of the outcome rainbow quickly even if the proficiency level isn’t there.
I don’t think anyone is claiming it’s easy. I’m certainly not. I busted my ass to make money for other people for decades, while enabling my family to pursue their dreams and live a sweet upper middle class lifestyle. In the last 7 years, I clamped down, relatively, to get to the finish line. You don’t get to the finish line (early retirement) without hard work. Even for those single folks, retiring at 30 or whatever is way more difficult than 55 or 60. Median net worth is like $35k at that age in the U.S.
All fair and I personally don’t hold a grudge against anyone that gets fuck you money and proceeds to do what they want with it. Personally, I wouldn’t include “needs to work as a barista to make ends meet” in my definition of “independent”, that seems a bit weird. But I’m sure that there are some high paying jobs that are so stressful that working in retail would actually be preferable. I don’t have one of them, I have a job that is more pleasant and higher paying than a retail job so from my perspective that just seems nuts.
I mean for me I enjoy what I do, so “retiring” will just mean doing less of it and having even less pressure on myself as to when I do it and how long I do it. Like, no more 12-15 hour workdays on Saturdays. 6 or 7pm rolls around and that’s a wrap, if I’m even still working on Saturdays.
Seems pretty key to be working for yourself in some way, shape, or form to pull this off. But then you’ve gotta resist the temptations to scale or put more effort in to make more money, you’ve got to be willing to accept whatever the amount of hours you want to work gets you.
My Dad and some of his golf buddies get part-time golf jobs in retirement. Marshall, starter, pro shop, etc. They’ll do 2-3 shifts a week from like March through September, make $10-15 an hour, and get free or heavily discounted golf - pretty nice, especially if you can land a job at a private club. Plus they can usually bring someone with them for the rounds, so if my Dad gets me on free I can pick up food/drinks. Since it’s a pretty casual part-time job, getting a few weeks off to travel is no big deal.
Brings in maybe $5-10K a year, and saves them maybe $1,500 to $2,000 a year on greens fees. So if they’re retiring on a modest amount, adding this into the mix covers a couple of reasonable trips per year with the wife, and pays for their favorite hobby between the freebies and taking a thousand or two of the earnings for balls, gloves, clubs, etc.
It’s all in how you frame it, assuming you actually enjoy the activities. Maybe “go hiking” is boring if you go to the same place twice a week and that’s it, but perhaps if you pick 25 hikes within a 2 hour drive and aim to do them over the course of a year or two, it’s more interesting because there’s a progression and accomplishment.
If it’s the gym, you can chase new personal records and test every other week or something.
I have no intention of quitting my job but it is pretty liberating to know I don’t need the money. Brings the stress level way, way down.
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There’s a shocker!
I can’t even get to the point where I know I don’t need the money. An extended period of NOT STONKS would crush me.
So I’ve basically got the boglehead problem that you love to hate read. Do I need the money? Probably not. But maybe I will. I’m saying there is a chance.
I’ve always found the retire early crowd to be more than a little silly. If you have your cost of living that much lower than your earning power you should be shopping for a job you somewhat enjoy today not gritting your teeth and bearing it so that you can maybe retire and live rudderless for an extra 10-20 years.
I don’t think there’s a level of wealth where I wouldn’t want to have something to occupy my time and at least make me feel productive. Work for me is basically playing a guilt free video game a few hours a day in exchange for a large pile of cash. I can’t imagine why quitting would be a particularly interesting goal.
Feel like people say what you’re saying every time retirement comes up but I could easily quit my job right now and not need any kind of employment to keep me happy for the rest of my life. The work hard, long hours mentality we have as humans is sickening to me. My wife is guilty of it but I think I’ve done a decent job of showing her that work isn’t everything and she still makes obnoxious money so win win I guess.
If you have a sweet high paying gig that only requires 10-20 hours of work a week i can understand not feeling the need to retire early but 99% of people don’t and won’t ever have that.
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You just described exactly what I have lol.
I think the goal for me is less about retiring early and more about having the ability to retire early if I wanted to.
The mental freedom that must come from walking into the office every day because it’s a voluntary choice you make and not something you have to do must be incredible.
This is more or less how I ended up with my current job. I was working at a big firm and doing well, and then I looked around at all the partners and thought to myself, “Wow, these people all look incredibly haggard and miserable. Why on earth am I spending time here if that’s the best case scenario?”
So I made the incredibly uninformed decision to go to grad school, thinking “my professors in college seemed pretty happy”. Theoretically, my job should be super low stress, but that is not at all my lived experience. Maybe if I get to a point where I give no shits about research or admin, and just teach my assigned classes, I’ll attain the zen ideal of effectively retiring on the job.
I feel like my happiest professors were the ones who were in their 60s and gave zero fucks, some because they probably had tenure or whatever, and others because it was a part-time thing, they enjoyed teaching and interacting with students, and they didn’t worry about getting fired.
My favorite professor seemed to really enjoy shooting the shit with us during office hours, we’d go hang out and just talk about the broadcasting business, other classes/extracurriculars, life, sports, etc.
I would imagine if you’re in your 60s and in a position to teach a couple classes and hold court in your office to dispense solid life advice to intelligent kids about to enter one of the biggest transitions and inflection points of their life, knowing most will follow up with you now and then afterwards, it’s probably pretty cool.
He definitely gave zero fucks, he’d trash the chancellor all the time lol…
From what I can tell, the very best part about being an older professor is telling all your younger colleagues and graduate students how easy it was to get your tenure track job 40 years ago.
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It’s hard to give zero fucks though if you’re not wired that way. My dad was a college professor for about half of his career. Then he retired. He couldn’t stand sitting around the house, so he went back to doing it.
He has the exact problem spidercrab describes. He makes the job 10x harder than it has to be because he gives a shit about research, admin, funding, helping his grad students advance their careers, etc. If all he did was teach and sleepwalk through the rest, it would be an easy gig.
Can anyone think of any reason why I should buy Vanguard ETFs instead of Vanguard Mutual Funds. I thought Vanguard has some special structuring that allows them to be equally tax efficient. So, I have generally gone with the funds since I can just invest a nice round number of dollars. That’s admittedly a pretty weak reason. But if they’re otherwise equivalent, then it’s a good enough tiebreaker.
“I jumped through a lot of hoops in order to save money and get my expenses as low as possible,” Francis says. His cost-cutting measures ranged from not paying for any streaming services to making sure he used every single item of food item in his refrigerator to even a short-lived stint without a cell phone.
Going phoneless “turned out to not work very well, but I think it’s important to push a little bit too hard, get a little bit too uncomfortable,” he says. Eventually, with his house paid off, Francis was able to cut his annual spending down to less than $15,000.
Nice “retirement” he’s got going there.
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