A persistent theme of the financial independence and retire early communities is that 9 to 5’s are a modern form of indentured servitude. A rat in a wheel kind of hopeless and purposeless existence designed to feed hedonic adaptation until said rat is no longer able to spin the wheel at a proper velocity and is replaced by a younger and more vigorous rodent, in a never-ending cycle.
I get that. I can’t imagine anyone who ever worked in corporate America or corporate Europe or Asia not identifying with that metaphor at times in their career. The usual alternatives to that melancholy life break down into a handful of alternative paths. One of the most common two of these is saving money like mad to minimize your time in the cage and trimming your lifestyle costs so that you can be free never to have to work again by the time you are 35-50 years old. There are a host of examples of people who have pulled this off like Mr. Money Moustache, Financial Samurai, Firecracker and way too many others to try to name. I admire and actively follow these as well as many others because they are incredibly inspiring humans. The other route is to combine aggressive side hustles and/or real estate to build passive and/or active income streams that eliminate the need for a full time job allowing you to transition into early retirement at a similarly early age. Paula Pant, Joe Saul-Sehy and dozens of others exemplify how this can be a successful route to freedom.
As a younger boomer (is that an oxymoron or what?) I never considered early retirement as an option because I didn’t know it existed. Honestly it wasn’t a thing as far as I knew, I only remember hearing of one guy in my entire industry that actually left the office and went to the beach in his forties because of a huge stock windfall. In fact, as I recall, that guy popped up again working for another company later so if he did in fact retire early he did not stay retired. But despite my lack of understanding of FIRE as a possibility I do not feel short changed. I’ve had a marvelous and thoroughly enjoyable life, in part due to the fact that I spent over 30 years at a corporate 9 to 5.
So today I am here to defend the 9 to 5 as a valid and possibly fulfilling path to early or even not so early retirement. I have already established my bona fides as a corporate drone, 30 years is a lifetime after all. But I can also claim to understand and have experience in the gig economy. For the last three years since I left the 9 to 5 I have earned 100 percent of my family’s expenses doing five paid side gigs as an independent contractor. So I’ve done life both ways.
So here are the things a 9 to 5 career gave me that may not be as easily gained through being self employed in the gig economy or by building a real estate empire.
Free Training: I had to obtain my college degree first but when I landed my job I was sent, on average, to at least one three day to week long high level training course per year. These cost the company about $3,000 per year for tuition and another $1,500 for travel and lodging. I was introduced to the leading experts in my field at these seminars as well as the up and comers at competitor corporations and these relationships served me well throughout my career and continue to bear fruit in my self employed pursuits.
Company Benefits: I had top notch health insurance, my kids got college grants from the company, I had access to profit sharing and 401K plans. I had a frequently replaced company car, free gasoline, free car insurance and free maintenance for most of my career as a work perk. That meant we only had to have one car at home which saved us a lot. Same thing for free laptops and cell phones with unlimited data plans and no restrictions on personal use. I was shielded from civil and criminal liability in most cases by my status as an employee. I was granted stock rights that were worth over six figures and bonuses of similar size. I have seen blogs on how rare 401k millionaires are, well, it was very easy for me to grow well past a million in my 401k without even feeling the automatic withdrawals from my paycheck.
Experience: As a contractor now my projects are generally fairly small but as a corporate employee I designed hundreds of millions of dollars of equipment and had responsibility for over 700 coworkers. With that came invaluable on the job training on human resources, leadership, budgeting, cost control, safety, environmental, investment management, insurance and risk management, accounting, financing and transportation. Those skills are the ones that helped me launch my profitable side gigs and rather than paying to learn, I was well paid to absorb the knowledge that would later make self employment feasible.
Network: The most valuable thing my career gave me was not the technical knowledge or the business acumen but my extensive network. From backwoods Arkansas to Washington DC to Australia and Germany I know people. When I decided to leave my job I contacted business leaders in industries totally different than mine but who I knew from business and political circles. I designed a dream retirement consultancy that I pitched to them and they agreed to fund it because they felt I could save their companies a lot of money. It has worked well for three years now and I may just keep doing it forever because it is fun and it helps me feel relevant while still only requiring part time effort. It gave me a base post retirement career that also lets me branch out into some other fun paid pursuits. I would have had a very hard time landing a flexible part time self employed specialty where I both add great value to others and am well compensated, without the network that my corporate job allowed me to build.
Flexible: There were times when work got in the way of life and I missed a vacation or two but generally, as a family owned company, my management made family life a priority. My morning commute was eight minutes tops. I could drive home for lunch and often did. I was never pressured to stay after 5 PM or to come in early even though I did quite often because I just got caught up in some project that I couldn’t put down. I rarely worked weekends unless we had some major problems and then my feeling of ownership made me want to be there to fix things. Nobody worried about people taking time to get a haircut or a to have a dentist appointment or to attend a day time school function. I did not miss seeing my kids grow up and I could take them into work anytime I wanted. All three of my kids worked there as summer interns just as I had and two of them became engineers, like their, dad partly because they saw that I loved what I did.
Fun: And this one might surprise you. For most of my career, right up to the very end, work was a terrific adventure! I really was that guy that looked forward to Monday morning because the projects I had waiting on me were exciting and the thrill of achievement was always close at hand. My management was complimentary and provided generous compensation along with the previously mentioned benefits. I had many friends at work and at business partner companies. I was in a position of teaching younger employees which was fulfilling and also spent a lot of time as the spokesman and face of the company in the press, on television and even in front of Congress a couple of times. The travel on commercial airlines and private jets, generous expense accounts and fine hotels were a lot of fun and meeting the occasional VIP was interesting as well. I would not have wanted to miss having done all those things, and they were things I would not have likely been afforded if I had been self employed for most of those years. And it was fairly stress free because at the end of each day, if things no longer felt right, I knew I could pick up the phone and have another job of my choosing. I never worried about being fired because my phone was always ringing with job offers, in fact it still is though I never intend to go back to a full time job.
Admittedly my experience is a little uncommon. Some of my coworkers did not like their jobs, their pay or their potential future with the company. I had a blessed path from summer intern to the top corporate position in our company with very few bumps in the road. My observation is that less than half of my coworkers really enjoyed work and I am not sure I ever met anyone that liked it quite as much as I did. I originally expected to work until 70 but because I was “exposed” to this community of younger FIRE brands I began to think differently in my fifties and pulled the plug much earlier than I had ever thought possible. And I’m glad I did. But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m very grateful for my career and if I had it all to do over again I would follow the very same path, of 30 plus years of corporate 9 to 5 life because it was so very good!
Am I alone here or are there others who enjoy their 9 to 5 and plan to stick with it for maybe 30 or more years?
Like you, both of my parents loved their 9 to 5’s. Not all of us are so lucky. You were!
I’ve thought a lot about why I enjoyed my job and I think it was because it took me, a high school and college wall flower, and in that job I became like the star quarterback at work. I was a demonstrably better engineer and manager than everyone else on the team and got a lot of affirmation on my ability. That is pretty heady stuff when you aren’t used to being a star at anything. I think it was why I stayed so long too, like it is hard for star pro players to walk away from the game. It takes so long to get to that level and the pay is so high it is hard to leave it behind even after the thrill of playing has faded. I wonder also if loving a job and being highly, perhaps psychotically, competitive are linked?
I certainly can identify directly with practically all of points and experience which includes the company car and expense accounts. Sales and sales management was a charmed career choice. No regrets with my chosen career and decision, not even getting forced out of one place to start over. Still working into my late fifties, and like you, I found the FIRE movement. Trying to figure out what to do which is just a meaningful as my 30 year career when the RE lever is pulled in a few months.
I know what you are going through. What I’m doing now, a handful of different consulting gigs, is fairly fun and pays extremely well though I don’t need the income, but the work is not what I call thrilling. It adds a structure I need and gets me out of the house and out of town regularly so it is more than adequate but I’m kind of looking for what’s next, like you are. I do a lot of volunteer work chairing a college board and a charity foundation board and they change lives which provides some satisfaction but volunteer work has always felt kind of dull and inefficient to me. My hobbies, most of which I share with my wife, are a lot of fun but I think they will only stay that way if I limit myself to three or four days a week of “play” Life is very good, but, I keep thinking there is something else out there that I haven’t quite put my finger on as my next area of focus.