I have been lucky. I had the opportunity to engage in periods of retirement in my 30s and 40s. The idea that this was possible radically changed my decision making about spending money. I’m very grateful.
If you have any excess money at all, then buy only what you value, not what you can afford.
Do you mind sharing a bit about how you were able to take a long break? I’m really interested in doing something like this before I turn 30; I’ve been working since 21
I don’t mind. I got very lucky. Your results will vary.
For the book length version, read Your Money or Your Life. Alternatively, You Need A Budget would also suffice.
I should also point out that when I took a long break, I still worked for money, but I got to choose what I did and I went periods of months doing almost nothing. I don’t want to oversell what retirement meant to me.
The ingredients were these:
- high-pay/low-time jobs (software development consultant and trainer)
- geographical flexibility: no fixed office, but instead I traveled to visit clients and conferences
- downsized living expenses: left Toronto and moved to the middle of nowhere, which was riskier when high-speed internet was just becoming available
- wife had compatible ideas and goals regarding money, so almost no big arguments about what to do
- few family ties to keep us in one place: we noticed that after we moved away, when we visited family, the visits meant much more than weekly Sunday dinner
- found high-leverage income streams (closer to “passive”) that fit our temperament and provided background profits to pay for essential living expenses
I got lucky along the way, finding a business partner with whom I worked for about five years and who found us a very lucrative contract that put the whole plan on fast-forward. Even so, I found him by attending conferences, talking to people, organizing my own, and mostly being open to whatever came my way. When we are consumed with day-to-day survival, it’s easy not to take those kinds of risks.
I don’t know how well this overall strategy works in today’s economic conditions. Some of the principles, I think, still apply, but I genuinely don’t know how lucky I really got to go as far as I did by age 35. (We left Toronto when I was 33 and that alone sped up the results a lot.)
Read the books, if you haven’t already. Good luck.
The key moment happened when we asked ourselves a key question: what are three things we absolutely want and are willing to be flexible about everything else? We spent about a month agreeing on that list. Once we had that, we had a clear plan for how to give ourselves the best chance at earlier retirement episodes more often.
If you are even lucky enough to live that long and still have decent health.
It’s the same scam as the middle ages, where serfs toil for the promise of Heaven after they die. That one still gets action.
Here in sweden you can totally live just fine off of 50% work hours and i have no plans of working more than that.
it boggles my mind that people choose to work longer hours and not save up the money to retire at like 45
I mean… sure?
With my job at the moment, I don’t need to go out and tend a garden or hunt for food for my family. I don’t need to carry water from a source and then find a way to clean it. I have light and warmth at a flick of a switch. I don’t need to wash my clothes by hand.
So at the moment, I’m ‘enjoying’ not having to do all of the above, by providing a single service that then opens up all of the above to me.
And I can also find time to type shit on the internet.
But if your not enjoying or can even tolerate whatever job you have to provide the above, then you can certainly go back to looking after your needs solo.
then you can certainly go back to looking after your needs solo.
The only certainty here is homelessness (or living in your car in a Walmart parking-lot).
Not like there’s a lot of free unclaimed land (especially with natural resources) and even if there were you’d still need to travel to get there (good luck with that with little money, and/or using your human legs in USA). You’d most likely be stealth-camping in empty sections of trees next to highways and hoping to not get hassled by somebody, eating gas-station food.
You might find something better with cooperation, but again good luck finding it and having a smooth experience especially as it will likely still require money for housing. But living without income today is most likely going to be a generally worse experience than many have had working for (the well-being of) their family/community in the past. Not saying it was perfect, but yeah I’d rather die to unpreventable hardship than living like this and likely dying to some preventable issue because of money. “In stage 4 we say maybe there’s something we could’ve done but… it’s too late now.”
